Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Antisemitism, or the Denial of Nothingness

    The previous Chronicle on Sartre and Nishida gave us reason to praise the discovery of nothingness—the free space of the human scene—in the two hemispheres of the civilized Northern world, in contrast to the densifying resentment of the South. But it is far from clear that the signpost provided by Sartre’s paradoxical reversal of the polarity of Being and Nothingness can serve us to orient ourselves in the Ressentimentstreif of today’s world before it becomes too violent to tolerate a dialectic of mere ideas.

    Lee Smith’s article, “The Global Empire of Palestine,” which appeared in Tablet last December 19, is a revelatory description of this “Empire,” which Smith understands as an enterprise wholly dedicated—always implicitly, and now explicitly—to the downfall of Western civilization via that of the Jews. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

    To the literal-minded, and others who do not yet recognize the character of the pathologies ushered in with the age of the Empire of Palestine, it may seem bewildering, for instance, to see LGBTQ+ organizations demonstrating on behalf of a Hamas triumph. But Queers for Palestine don’t need to be told how Hamas actually deals with queers in Gaza and the West Bank. That’s irrelevant. In the Empire of Palestine all difference is transcended. It’s not a place, it’s a spiritual principle guided by the inversion of reality and governed by the equation 2+2=5.

    Few in the climate change movement could have been surprised to hear Greta Thunberg [whose photograph heads the article] express her desire to “crush Zionism.” In her strident warnings of catastrophic global climate change and the end of humanity, the Empire of Palestine has always been the subtext, a land of chaos and confusion, an inverted Eden in the desert presided over by an unforgiving earth goddess.

    The Empire of Palestine is an aesthetic convention. It’s an “open-air prison” and “the Riviera of the Levant.” It’s a forgery. A postcard from the continent of unreason.

    Climate millenarianism, the mass replacement of native populations, the government-sanctioned sterilization of children—everywhere you look the mark of civilizational suicide is on the horizon as Western elites assemble under the imperial banner [i.e., the Palestinian flag]. Flown in European capitals and university campuses, it represents the longings of a powerful faction within the West of those exhausted by life and wanting one last time to feel something like life coursing through their veins as they await the cleansing fire, redemption culminating in the coup de grace.

    It was inevitable they, too, would stand against the Jews, who have chosen life over death.

    Is it not really (almost) as simple as this? What Smith calls “Third World Man,” representing the “South” of post-colonial resentment, is the embodiment of the West’s death wish.

    Smith’s article translates the abstraction of “nothingness” into a terminology less benign than that of the Eastern or Western ontologies of Sartre and Nishida, one inflected by the suicidal influence of the “Southern” post-colonial realm of cultural negation. The Orwellian 2+2=5 reflects an ironic “Northern” view of the West’s descent into irrationality as, by letting itself get sucked into the “Empire of Palestine,” it distracts itself from its real-world conflicts with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, who have no desire to inhabit the nihilistic fairyland of the “Empire of Palestine” but are happy to profit from it—while leaving the bulk of its financing to the West’s inner demons, which, as always in times of civilizational crisis, fall back on the sacrifice of its Urvolk, the Jews.

    Qualifying the latter simply as having “chosen life over death” is the ritual gesture of understatement that inevitably accompanies Jewish discussions of Jew-hatred. For it would seem of no benefit to the Jews to characterize themselves as, for better or worse, “the sacred/cursed people of Western civilization.” This is the originary sin of anti-antisemitism, as antisemitism is the originary sin of the West.

    Should we not then be thankful that, with all its own cruelty and poverty, the East has at least been spared this curse; that the absence in the great Eastern cultures of a marked sacred/scapegoat people suggests that the search for Nirvana is ultimately a more humanistic goal than the West’s for individual salvation?

    As Nishida’s paradoxical language demonstrated, nothingness is not a void, a realm of absence, but a self-contesting space in which the self survives only through constant auto-negation. Reconceiving this space as the scene of human language and culture allows us to bring the abstraction back to Earth—and anthropology—as the locus of the freedom accorded humans by their possession of the primary intuition that makes language possible: that of the awareness of necessary but voluntary interdiction that we call the sacred. The power of Smith’s description of this new “Evil Empire” lies in the clarity with which he poses its antithetical relationship to the sacred as conceived by both Eastern and Western thinkers.

    Yet we cannot leave this discussion without a return visit to an age-old question, the question that is not “Why the bicyclists?” but “Why the Jews?”

    Perhaps, as a propitiatory gesture on introducing this topic, the first thing one must say is that the role of a “sacred”—or “chosen”—people is not one that the Jews could reasonably be said to have asked for. And the second thing we must remark on is that the current renewal of this role three generations after the Shoah is the greatest of “post-historical” ironies, one that the satiric tone of Smith’s article reflects better than any other—for righteous indignation is not a stance that post-exilic Jews, as opposed to their prophetic ancestors, comfortably espouse.

    Thus if Smith shares the universal reluctance to explicitly name the anti-Jewish source of the potency of his imaginary Empire, it is surely not because he is unaware of it. Why then must I insist on naming it as Judenhass, hatred of the Jews—the real meaning behind the euphemistic “anti-Semitism,” which, as it used to be painfully common to point out, should make the very idea of Arab hostility to the Jews an absurdity?

    Could my insistence be for the pleasure of violating a taboo of a more profound and subtle nature than all those which are so uncourageously violated in our day? That it is still felt to be inappropriate to seek to explain, not just “the world’s oldest hatred,” but the world’s unique enduring civilizational hatred, should oblige us to think a bit more deeply about why this is so, why the “bicyclists” are as good or bad a point of comparison as any.

    For the uniqueness of antisemitism, universally recognized if only by the uniqueness of the word, is always pooh-poohed when it comes to really facing up to it. This was amply demonstrated by the Congressional testimony last December of university presidents, and more recently and egregiously by the pusillanimous responses of the vast majority of campuses to the current wave of lawlessness, including expressions of crude and explicit Jew-hatred of a kind that would be simply unthinkable to voice against any other group of people—and certainly not against Islamic terrorists shamelessly boasting of perpetrating barbarous and sadistic acts of violence on defenseless victims—or should I say, Jews.

    But it is very unlikely that the Empire of Palestine is going to rebuild the death camps, certainly not in Europe or the US. Smith’s article makes clear that the tacit recognition of the necessity of Jew-hatred to Western civilization suffices; a few dozen or hundred Jews may get killed, but outside the Near-Eastern killing fields, the phenomenon has entered the realm of Orwellian black comedy. If Mel Brooks could only sing “Springtime for Hitler in Germany” after the Allied victory, Smith can joke about the Empire of Palestine while it still exists and builds its arsenal with funds from Iran and Qatar and the blessing of progressive billionaires.

    “Jew-hatred” is not “hatred” in the normal sense of personal or group hostility. The current rash of demonstrations on campuses and in the streets, supposedly to express sympathy for the Palestinians, only make us realize that, however artificial may be the term “antisemitism,” no other does any better.

    Were it not for the Jews, there would be no such thing as “Palestinians.” Indeed, it was the genius of Arafat to have grasped the epoch-making idea so cleverly expressed in Smith’s article, as significant in its day as Hitler’s “Big Lie” in the 1930s, that the Palestinians are the anti-Jews, whose role in the age of Wokeness is to occupy the summit of the hierarchy of accredited “intersectional” victims as the propitiatory substitutes for the members of our societies who could with whatever credibility be seen as the victims of the Jews in the past.

    For the 12th-century English, Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln was a helpless innocent of our society that the Jews drained of his blood; for the Europeans of 1348, the Great Plague spread by the Jews made our people its victims. Whereas it is all too clear that, given the suffering inflicted on innocents throughout the world, a fair share of which is wrought by the Palestinians themselves, the only reason we take their part is that we can view them as the victims of the Jews.

    And given that such vicarious passion had never previously entered into antisemitism, its arrival forces us to consider to what extent the latter might be said to have been from the outset the hidden root and the unconscious goal of the vicarious victimism to which we have given the name of Wokism.

    For the self-abasement required by the virtue-signaling recognition of White Guilt is not without leaving a residue of dissatisfaction. No doubt the white person rebuking his co-racialists for not recognizing their “inherent” racism is at the same time advertising his courage in proclaiming his own failings, but the effect is to deny his own society’s legitimacy. Whereas focusing on the Palestinians allows the entire American population to unite in righteous indignation. Although antisemitism continues to be ritually condemned, there is no taint of antisemitism implicit in the humanitarian defense of a third-world people suffering a “genocidal” attack from a well-armed industrial power. And claims to the effect that the Chinese do a lot worse to the Uighurs or the Russians to the Chechens can simply be dismissed as Whataboutism. Or as Greta would put it, “How dare you!”

    To explain all this more simply: if the Jews are indeed the sacred people of Western civilization, those to whom its One God first revealed himself, then they are indeed the Whitest of all Whites; “Semitism” is merely a euphemism for Ur-Whiteness.

    And this in turn makes us realize that We are all Palestinians! The opposition is not racial but cultural. Hence Western Jews too can identify in good faith as defenders of those whom the Israelis, cheered on by the Zionists in the Diaspora, seek to deprive, in their lust to occupy a territory on the basis of millennia-old pretensions, of their right to their own peoplehood—a genocide.

    If we seek signs of the coming Apocalypse, this is as good a one as any. For eighty years or so, antisemitism had been a minor and atavistic sentiment, presumably restricted to backwoods MAGA-voting neo-Nazi deplorables. Indeed, although Trump has never manifested the least sign of antisemitism (let us please not cite the “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville), immediately after his election in 2016, a non-Jewish liberal wrote me expressing his sympathy for the sufferings I as a Jew was about to endure.

    I would hope that at least by now we have gotten the message: if antisemitism was absent from the New Left in the 1960s, it is front and center in the Woke Left of the 2020s. The point is not at all that the old SDS was unconsciously antisemitic; it is simply that the progression of the epistemology of resentment along what MLK might have called the “arc of injustice” has returned it to its point of departure: Western self-hatred means hating the Jews so we do not have to hate ourselves.

    This is the true meaning of “scapegoating” in the Girardian sense of “emissary murder,” as described, not in Leviticus, but in the Gospel of Matthew 20:16:

                                    So the last shall be first, and the first last…

  • GA and Western/Eastern civilization — Part II: Nishida, Sartre, and Nothingness

    In our conference in Nagoya in 2017 (see Chronicles 515–516) I compared the paradoxes of the Greek Eleatic philosopher Zeno, the best known of which is that of Achilles and the Tortoise, with the paradoxes of Nagarjuna: the traveler who doesn’t travel, etc. It is easy to see from a modern perspective that Zeno’s paradoxes of motion could be “solved” by a more advanced mathematical system in which the infinite number of “steps” required for Achilles to catch up with the Tortoise could be reduced to the sum of an infinite series. In contrast, Nagarjuna’s critique did not concern the accurate description of motion or of anything else but what he grasped as the necessarily paradoxical relationship of language to reality: that no sentence or series of sentences could fully “reproduce” or “embody” the traveler’s action.

    I concluded from this example that “Western” thought was ultimately concerned with reducing the world to an efficient system of notation, one that would permit such things as distances and the area under curves to be calculated, whereas the “Eastern” point was rather that no act such as the traveler’s could ever be fully captured by one or any number of sentences; what primarily mattered was not to improve our techniques of representing reality, but to realize that it was the scene of representation on which we observed and spoke about these phenomena that was the fundamental, necessary element. That is, language was not unimportant, but its practical function in telling us about the world was less significant than the fact that as humans we possessed a scene of representation on which we could share our experiences through language and other representational forms, however incapable we would always be of “reproducing” the reality it represented.

    As befits a student of René Girard, I have always been rather skeptical of the pretensions of Western philosophy. My work on generative anthropology attempts to deal with language or semiotic representation and the cultural worlds derived from it in a way that avoids what I consider the fundamental error of metaphysics—that is, of classical Western philosophy: that of tacitly accepting Plato’s Myth of the Cave and viewing the “Ideas” of language as transcendent guarantees of ontology rather than simply a system of signs that permit us to communicate with our fellows—a system, as I described in Chronicle 802, initiated in order to avoid what Girard understood as the potential for violence inherent in mimetic desire.

    The attempt to draw a contrast between Nishida and Western philosophy is obviously complicated by the fact that he was the Japanese philosopher most preoccupied with Western philosophy. But between his 1911 Inquiry into the Good  and his final work, Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, published after his death in 1945, there is an obvious return from his interest in Western thought to a more characteristically Eastern perspective. Interestingly enough, this change is above all evident in his constant references to nothingness as achieved by self-negation.

    Rather than attempt to explicate these “Eastern” uses of the notion of nothingness immediately, I think it will be more useful in the context of my own “Western” doctrine of generative anthropology to return to them, following a discussion of the best-known use of the term “nothingness” in Western philosophy—that of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose most significant philosophical work was entitled L’être et le néant, translated as Being and Nothingness—a work that Nishida presumably did not have a chance to read. We should note in passing that the French word néant is a much more natural term than “nothingness,” which exists only in philosophical discourse, whereas néant is often used as a an emphatic synonym for “nothing.”

    There is a fascinating and little-known “Japanese connection” relative to Sartre’s use of “néant.” In “The Problem of the Self in the Later Nishida and in Sartre,” Philosophy East and West, 44, 2 (Apr 1994): 303-316, Brian Elwood pointed out that in 1928, the 23-year-old Sartre had weekly discussions in Paris with the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo. Quoting Elwood,

    Apparently Kuki and the young Sartre engaged in conversations on the topic of modern French philosophy. Although it is not clear that Sartre exerted any special influence on Kuki, it is now evident that it was Kuki who played the crucial role of introducing Sartre to the thought of both Husserl and Heidegger. (303)

    This last detail is certainly ironic: this celebrated European existentialist first learned about existentialism’s major sources from a Japanese philosopher! Thus it is far from impossible that Sartre’s adoption of the term néant was an effect of Kuki’s influence.

    Ellwood’s focus on Sartre’s use of néant is entirely “existential,” referring either to the self’s lack of a preconstituted essence or its ultimate death. Yet most readers of L’être et le néant would agree that Sartre’s most significant use of this term, significant in what I would call an anthropological sense, is not related to abstractions like our mortality or lack of an “originary essence.” It is Sartre’s use of it, early in the book, in his description of human self-consciousness or pour-soi, “for-itself,” the French translation of Hegel’s für-sich. The néant, the “free space” in the human self, is what permits it to contemplate its objects, cut off from the urges of appetite. This separation from our “instincts” is precisely what distinguishes human language from animal communications. It is on this self-conscious basis that we have built around our use of signs the rest of human scientific, esthetic, and religious culture. All this derives from what was at its origin the scene of language on which the human self, Sartre’s pour-soi, contemplates its objects, separated from them by a néant which is a space of freedom.

    Whether or not conceived under Japanese influence, the spatial metaphor of the néant referring to the free space between the self-conscious human pour-soi and its object is the root of Sartre’s “existentialist” philosophy—one that distinguishes him from Heidegger and all the others, none of whom provide a simple physical analogue of what we can call the scene of consciousness.

    Clearly when Sartre described the human self “geometrically” by distinguishing it as pour-soi by means of a spatial néant that separates the self from its object, he did not have in mind GA’s hunting scene and even less a scenario of the origin of language. Indeed, one striking feature of Being and Nothingness is that language as such is barely mentioned in the book. Sartre makes a categorical distinction between the human self/mind and those of animals that reprises Descartes’ idea that animals were “soulless” like machines, yet he never refers to our use of signs, but attributes this distinction entirely to the nothingness within the pour-soi or human consciousness that by separating the self from its objects makes it completely free in its relationship to them.

    For Sartre, the human pour-soi is contrasted to the in-itself or en-soi, a parallel Hegelian term that describes being that has no “for”-itself, that simply is, like that of a rock—a category within which, following the example of Descartes, Sartre includes all other living beings, even the higher animals.

    Thus in contrast to the néant inside the pour-soi, Sartre conceives the entire world of the en-soi, from the stars and planets to grains of sand, as lacking in free space, as objects so to speak shoved up against each other. The idea of le néant being embodied by, for example, interstellar space, is just the opposite of Sartre’s idea; for Sartre the néant is solely the metaphorical mental space between the subject and the object that embodies human freedom.

    Let us now return to the East and try to understand what relationship Sartre’s néant has with nothingness in Nishida and in the Buddhist tradition.

    In this tradition, rather than one thinker’s neologism, nothingness is a central conception at the intersection of religion and philosophy—indeed, one that makes the need for this Western distinction all but unnecessary. I hope to persuade you that, if we can justify this rapprochement, our understanding of Eastern thought will be shown to confirm and enrich my earlier point in describing Nagarjuna’s paradoxes as not so much critiques of language as reminders that the specific correspondence between language and “reality” is a less fundamental component of language than its demonstration of the néant that characterizes the scene of representation. And this is true not merely of the scene of language, but of the cultural scene in general, whether taking place within an individual mind, in a ritual or theatrical setting—or in a simple conversation, an exchange among humans where all freely emit, receive, and interpret the signs, or words, exchanged among the parties, each of whom embodies Sartre’s conception of the pour-soi inhabited by a néant.

    As I mentioned in my 2017 talk, the very idea of “mindfulness” that Westerners associate with Eastern thinking makes clear that these exercises that turn the mind’s attention on its own activity, for example by making you focus on some trivial object or repeat a mantra, are in the first place demonstrations of the néant within the pour-soi, all the more convincing for dispensing with philosophical vocabulary.

    What is “freeing” about focusing on a candle-flame or repeating a nonsense-word? It is superficially just the opposite of a “free” activity. But its point is to exemplify your own power over your attention, which implies your power to direct it elsewhere: the point of the exercise is to make you aware of this non-reflexive, conscious freedom to focus your attention, which is the real sense of the néant.

    It is in this context that the entire structure of Eastern thought centered on “nothingness” must be understood. Nothingness is the stuff of freedom. Just as samsara is meant to progress through a series of incarnations to the nothingness of Nirvana, so our specific intentionalities are, like the sentences whose incomplete grasp of reality Nagarjuna rejected, merely steps on the way to the universal freedom of the pour-soi, the human consciousness, as embodied in the néant from within whose protection we contemplate the world.

    To demonstrate these points, let us examine a few selections from Nishida’s final work, The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (emphases mine):

    (69) Because God, or the absolute, stands to itself in the form of a contradictory identity—namely as its own absolute self-negation, or as possessing absolute self-negation within itself—it exists and expresses itself through itself. Because it is absolute nothingness, it is absolute being.

    (70) A God merely transcendent and self-sufficient would not be a true God. God must always, in St. Paul’s words, empty himself.

    (78) To know of one’s own death is already to exist while being nothing. To exist while being absolutely nothing is the ultimate self-contradiction.

    (87) The true absolute does not merely transcend the relative . . . It must absolutely negate, and thereby express, itself within itself.

    My position is … that eternal life is gained at the point where birth and death (samsara) and no-birth and no-death (nirvana) are realized as one. Samsara and nirvana, the self and the absolute God, are for me expressed in that verse of Daito Kokushi which refers to the paradoxical relation of simultaneous presence and absence of the self and the absolute.

    Buddha and I, distinct through a billion kalpas [1 kalpa=4.32 billion years] of time,
    Yet not separate for a single instant;
    Facing each other the whole day through,
    Yet not facing each other for an instant.

    (96) The true individual arises as a unique, momentary self-determination of the absolute present. . . . I interpret “having No Place wherein it abides, this Mind arises” in this light.

    I think the comparison between the néants of Sartre and Nishida allows us to understand why, despite all Eastern accomplishments in mathematics (zero, the “Arabic” numbers) and in science, as detailed in Joseph Needham’s series on Science and Civilization in China, it was the West with its conception of individual liberty, the freedom of the individual scene of representation, that opened up the world to modernity. Eastern nothingness is impersonal; it is not my nothingness inside my mind, as in Sartre, but nothingness as the limitless fecundity of what is in fact the mind, but a mind de-personalized—Sartre’s pour-soi extended to the enormous womb of the universe.

    I cannot claim that this brief analysis of the parallels between Eastern and Western marks a new step toward the global peace that remains the goal of all our hopes. But we can hope that at a moment when the entire West is agitated by the renewal of antisemitism—stimulated by the return of an atavistic version of Islam that would destroy Christianity (“whiteness”) along with Judaism, that in a word is the cry of pain of those who cannot reconcile themselves to secondarity—this confluence that transcends the quarrels among the three Abrahamic religions can lead us to realize that the real lesson of the dialectic of history is that our common humanity must and hopefully will always override the remnants of the local distinctions of which it is the permanent synthesis. This modest reminder of our humanity’s common basis in nothingness, which is to say, ultimately, in the sacred freedom that precedes our desire for any object, can only help both East and West to put their “original sins” behind them and to progress along the path of universal fraternity.

  • The Paradox of Antisemitism

    Ever since Adam Katz and I made an agreement with ISGAP (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy) to publish a book on antisemitism, I have not ceased to point out that shunning all reference to the unique specificity of antisemitism has been fundamental to the approach to the subject by both Jews and their sympathizers. Admittedly, our scholarship in Rethinking Antisemitism: The First Shall Be The Last (Brill, 2015) made no attempt to compete with that of the acknowledged specialists of the question. But our basic point, which is more fundamental than a matter of scholarly references, was one that, as I have said many times since, remains simply taboo to those who attempt, never quite successfully, to discuss the subject of antisemitism.

    Details aside, the central Jewish argument against antisemitism has been simply that it is based on false allegations: the Jews didn’t “kill Christ,” or spread the plague, or bleed little Christian boys to make matzoth (why, there isn’t any blood at all in matzoth!). And since antisemitism isn’t based on any form of evidence, it’s simply irrational. It’s a “disease,” a “virus,” a mental disorder. Etc., etc. Best illustrated by the famous joke about the Great War (as quoted by Hannah Arendt):

    An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.’

    Antisemitism is so profoundly rooted in Western civilization that it might well be called its “original sin.” The fact that, with whatever ridicule it may be received, the Jews’ claim to be the “chosen people”—the inaugurators of its monotheistic faith—is unanswerable within the cultural confines of this civilization is the one-line explanation of all the Jews’ suffering—and their glory as well. And that accepting this “sacrificial” truth is so painful that it is virtually impossible for self-conscious Jews to do so is all the more a demonstration that it is the truth indeed.

    In modern, secular society one has sometimes imagined that one can ignore this truth, particularly in the privileged era of my own “silent” generation, too young to fight in the war, too old to be a product of it like the “baby-boomers,” and which nurtured arguably the least persecuted generation of Jews in modern history. Thus I was able to live my entire professional life in a world completely free of the active force of antisemitism, and with only the most trivial first-hand experience of it. That is in itself a rare and wonderful thing, but it provides no understanding of a phenomenon that has been an at least implicit element of Western culture from the outset and that began to assume its characteristic form with the beginnings of medieval society around 1000 AD. The point of our book was not to trace the historical development of antisemitism but to understand its roots in Western civilization, roots that the Holocaust had shown to be deep indeed, and which, as we have recently seen, were by no means deracinated with the defeat of Nazism.

    That generative anthropology seeks to understand the human, its language, and its sense of the sacred “from the ground up” on the basis of a minimal hypothesis should not be misunderstood as claiming that, once this point of departure is supplied, all history can be “derived” from it. Human history is the progress of human self-understanding. By adding through semiotic communication a whole new category of degrees of freedom to life on Earth, humanity has evolved in a process by definition unpredictable from its minimal point of departure.

    Thus when I speak of Jewish “firstness” in the world of Abrahamic religion, the mere fact of being the oldest of the three religions that comprise it does not allow us to “derive” the current role of Judaism in the world, nor indeed to predict the ancient splitting off of its two very different derivatives: Christianity, viewing itself as the fulfillment of the prophetic promises aroused by Judaism, and Islam, seeking to impose itself as the one true religion of whose revelation in the Koran the Bible of Judaism and Christianity was merely a collection of preliminary drafts.

    Nor could it have been predicted from the first that, as appears today to be occurring, on the one hand the Judeo-Christian Bible would increasingly be understood as a dialectical unity, with the Jews accepted as the “elder brothers” of the followers of Christ, while on the other, a militant “jihadi” form of Islam would not only deny the validity of the Biblical religions but, reviving its originary drive toward world conquest, interpret the decline of Western sacrality, as reflected in the waning of the West’s religiosity as well as its political power and self-confidence, as a sign that the ultimate goal of a world caliphate was now within its sights.

    To discuss antisemitism as though it were a “prejudice,” a “disease,” a “virus” is to refuse to understand the history of Western civilization itself. In today’s world only a fearlessly lucid understanding of the unique hostility aroused by the Jews can be of help in formulating strategies for the future.

    As an example of how today’s educated Jewish mind understands the Jews’ current dilemma, I first refer the reader to Jonathan Tobin’s April 12 article (before the Iran attack on Israel) for the Jewish News Service, of which he is Editor-in-Chief: https://www.jns.org/why-the-left-united-around-hatred-of-israel/ .

    After outlining what seemed to be the world’s surprisingly unsympathetic reaction to the sufferings of the Jews in the October 7 pogrom, Tobin tries to explain the strikingly unique negative response in the US to the Jews’ use of military force in response:

    What makes this conflict so special is not the scale of the warfare or the especially dire plight of its victims. It’s the fact that the one Jewish state on the planet is one of the combatants. No war involving any European, Arab, Muslim, African or Asian antagonist with no direct American participant has prompted such a response from the American left, including those in which the United States was backing one of the parties, as is frequently the case.

    That’s why it is clear that the reason so many Americans who identify with the political left have adopted the Palestinian cause—and forced Biden to abandon Israel—has to do with something other than the objective facts of the conflict. (my emphasis)

    Indeed, the “objective facts” taken independently of the role of the “one Jewish state” cannot begin to explain the vehemence of the Left’s reaction. Tobin goes on to explain the phenomenon of Wokeness and its “intersectional” hostility to “white supremacy,” but not why the latter is for some reason embodied in exemplary fashion by the Jews, many of whom in Israel are in fact part of the same Semitic population as the Arabs who wish to eradicate them.

    Tobin’s analysis ends thus:

    But all the leftist money in the world could not have purchased the impact that came from the conquest of American education by progressives whose long march through its institutions has taken critical race theory from the political fever swamps of the far left to a position where it is the reigning orthodoxy in universities, corporations, journalism, popular culture and the fine arts. Without it, the political phenomena that cowed Biden into trying to rescue Hamas by threatening Israel would have been impossible.

    All very true, but before October 7, although the growing problem of antisemitism on American campuses had already been noted, nothing had occurred comparable to the displays of open Jew-hatred that followed, and this, as Tobin remarks, began even before the Israeli Gaza offensive. And as to why the Jews should be the particular target of all this hatred, Tobin can only offer this:

    The stubborn refusal of Jews to bend to others’ will or simply disappear contradicts the Marxist belief that the homogenization of mankind is part of achieving the dubious goals of its ideology.

    I will let the reader decide whether this characterization of the Jews in relation to a 19th century ideology is a sufficient answer to the question.

    My point here is not at all to accuse Tobin, one of Israel’s and Judaism’s most stalwart defenders, of any sort of failing, moral or intellectual, but rather to demonstrate how even the most eloquent voices for the Jewish community in the US and Israel are loath to confront the foundational relationship of the Western epistemology of resentment to its Jewish “remnant.” Tobin mentions the sinister influence of George Soros, but without pointing out how such embodiments of Jewish self-betrayal have been the inevitable products of centuries of Jew-hatred. Not that historical subtlety would necessarily be of great use in the current situation, but even in the absence of a more militant response, helping the Jews and their allies to better understand antisemitism’s historical underpinnings would hopefully embolden them to take a less purely defensive stance in the future against the updated versions of the age-old blood libels that are eternally dragged out of storage to be used against them. Are the Palestinian “women and children” indiscriminately slaughtered by the IAF after all so different from the little Christian boys cruelly butchered by the bloodthirsty Jews to prepare the bread of their Passover communion?

    In a word, antisemitism is not a variety of “racism” save in the least precise sense of the term. It is not comparable either to anti-black racism in the US or to the hatred of the Hutus for the Tutsis. It is neither a form of “arbitrary” scapegoating nor a reaction to any well-defined set of historical facts, but a permanent temptation of Western culture.

    None of this is meant to imply that “if only” Jews/Israelis had understood… or “if only” they were better prepared to publicly counter the antisemitic arguments (as Melanie Philips has recently argued concerning Israel’s failure to make its case against those who use Hamas statistics to demonstrate the modern version of blood libels) the results would have been these arguments’ utter discrediting. What is far more important is that the Jews and their supporters must realize that the roots of these arguments lie, not in their factual basis, but deep in the spiritual makeup of the West.

    For there is evidently a limit as to what the Jews can do to dispute the forces of antisemitism. The most positive element of the current situation owes relatively little to the Jews’ ability to publicize their position. It is rather that, given the primacy of militant Shia-sponsored Islam as the driving force of the current wave of antisemitism, the Jewish-Christian alliance as well as the “Abrahamic” Jewish-Sunni alliance have been willy-nilly fortified. All those who in any way consider themselves Christians or who would resist Iran’s meddling in the Middle East cannot hesitate to take Israel’s side in what we must insist on calling this religious war.

    After the April 13 Iran attack

    Following this first ever direct Iranian attack on Israel (more symbolic than truly dangerous), another piece by the JNS calls for “A new approach to antisemitism.”

    Not since the 1960’s, when bigots tried to prevent racial integration, has America seen such raw hatred.

    But this time, elite institutions and civic leadership have responded with moral confusion, indecency and ignorance of the nature and history of Jew-hatred.

    And what is proposed is, in a word, to start opposing antisemitism with the same severity as racism:

    Perhaps nothing encourages antisemitism more than the impunity enjoyed by today’s antisemites. This is the result of a pervasive and systemic failure to enforce laws, prosecute violations and punish the Jew-haters for their crimes. For example, out of 118 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City brought to trial between 2018 and 2022, the perpetrator was convicted and sentenced to significant prison time only once. In this context, is it any wonder that during the same period, there was a huge jump in antisemitic hate crimes in the city?

    This is unacceptable. Consequences matter. We need to change the calculus for the antisemites. We must impose painful social consequences on those who engage in hate crimes and violence. We must identify and restrain those who promote an ideology of Jew-hatred—including in universities and the media. Many might not want to hear it, but punishment is far more effective at curbing bad behavior than education.

    We propose a new approach to fighting antisemitism that draws on strategies that have effectively curbed hatred of other minority groups, such as the black and LGBT communities.

    Almost anyone who explicitly speaks or acts in a racist or anti-LGBT manner quickly faces punishment in the form of social and cultural ostracization as well as legal sanctions. Society has come to recognize that unless these haters are punished, they rarely stop. Similarly, society must enforce existing laws—especially civil rights laws—and arrest, prosecute and severely punish antisemitism and antisemites. Antisemites must also face social and cultural ostracization.

    In the educational system, the U.S. government must adopt the same approach it uses to protect blacks and sexual minorities. Jewish students must receive equal protection. Institutions and especially their leaders that fail to give them equal protection must face severe consequences.

    An initial step would be requiring the educational system—including K-12—to cleanse itself of hateful ideologies. Additionally, high school and college curricula must include an honest examination of our tribal nature, recognizing that we are not exempt from evolution and identifying how we can restrain its negative impulses.

    My point in citing this long passage is not to debate its potential effectiveness, but to point out that nowhere is it even hinted at why antisemitism is treated differently than “transphobia” et al, let alone straight anti-black racism. Why is expressing hatred of Jews given less consideration than—not even insulting or mistreating the transgendered, but merely refusing to speak about them using “their” pronouns? Is this somehow suggested by the term “hateful ideologies”? And why do the references to our “tribal nature,” which creates the potential of hostility, e.g., of non-Jews toward Jews, not apply in anything like the same degree to any other group, ethnic, sexual, economic…? Why, in moments of “tribal” tension, do the Jews arouse more hatred and at the same time receive less protection than any other group?

    Clearly the failure to provide an explanation for this difference reflects less simple ignorance than the traditional Jewish prudence that, on the one hand, would prefer the Jews to be considered like any other ethnic minority, but on the other hand, precisely for that reason, cannot attempt to explain why, even in our “enlightened” modern society, outside of exceptional historical moments such as the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jews are not treated like any other minority, and have not been for a couple of millennia.

    Clearly an article of this kind is not the place for such explanations. But it is this prudent refusal to avoid emphasizing the uniqueness of their situation that in fact prevents the Jews, even when they study in detail the effects of antisemitism throughout the ages, from denouncing and seeking actively to modify the specific forms taken by this specific hatred.

    On this point, it should be mentioned that both Trump’s mustering of conservative Christian support and his opening to the Sunni Arabs through the Abraham accords reflected an intuitive grasp of the strategic necessity of bringing the Abrahamic religions together to prevent atavistic elements of Islam from profiting from the post-colonial South-North dichotomy via the “red-green alliance.”

    And an only slightly more aggressive stance would not fear to point out in the context of these examples of antisemitism that, in our age of aggressive victimhood and cry-bullying, the Jews remain the sole minority group who are automatically suspected of deserving their persecution, following a pattern that can be traced back to the New Testament’s blaming them for the Crucifixion.

    It is today more urgent than ever to point this out and to put an end to it. If indeed the West is to maintain its role as the world’s dominant civilization on the still-lengthy path toward a global culture, it will have to face up to this problem and correct it, following the lead of the Catholic Church on the one hand and the Abraham Accords on the other.

  • Wokeness and the Epistemology of Resentment

    Some concepts are worth belaboring more than others, and my reason for returning to the epistemology of resentment is that it is constantly evolving. I’m sure one can find examples of this epistemology in earlier times, since resentment is our gut reaction to what strikes us as unequal treatment, but the fact is that the late 18th century was the first time when a revolutionary movement powerful enough to topple a legitimate ruler was able to express its motivation as a simple critique of inequality. That this had not been the case in the English revolutions of the previous century is not, I think, a matter of controversy.

    The term itself has a pejorative flavor, and indeed, the motivators of the phenomena it describes would not use the term “resentment” to define their views. But in the gesture of liberating the social order from hierarchical castes, the basic source of the intuition that such systems are immoral is best described as resentment; it is resentment that we feel when we consider ourselves to have been treated unfairly, subject to criteria less favorable than those applied to others. I do not mean for us to understand this term as the equivalent of a slogan; it is indeed an epistemological principle—indeed, one might well say, the most fundamental such principle for understanding justice, such as little children, for example, use in determining that “if mommy/big brother/cousin Julie can do x, why can’t I?” Thus the American Declaration of Independence proclaims that “all men are created equal,” meaning that caste distinctions in the broadest sense are not justifiable, even if at the time slavery was still tolerated, not to speak of inequality between the sexes.

    Victimary thinking, now formalized in the dogma of Wokeness, is a powerful distortion of this epistemology that fosters many absurdities that violate basic common sense, one of the most outlandish of which is the “fair” treatment of transgenderism that allows biological males into women’s sports, locker rooms, and toilets. The president’s recent proclamation of Trans Visibility Day on Easter Sunday is an unambiguous demonstration of the degree to which such virtue-signaling has come to be accepted as the new moral norm. But given that such phenomena demonstrate the immense power of victimary ideology, at the extreme point of which are the demonstrations accusing Israel of “genocide,” it behooves us to reflect more deeply on this epistemology and its ramifications.

    Speaking as one whom retirement has relieved of formerly enjoyable academic duties which I would undoubtedly find today painful at best, I have the advantage of a freedom of thought not substantially in conflict with my personal interests. As a member of what has surely been history’s most favored generation of American Jews, and no doubt of Western Jews as a whole, one for whom this identification was far more an advantage than a handicap, I was struck by this recent quote from a Jewish mother helping her child with her college applications (https://www.jns.org/difficult-choices/): “We took Columbia off the list as well as UCLA,” citing my college Alma Mater and my longtime workplace as exemplary Jew-unfriendly institutions! Yet my reaction is at least slightly tempered by the “it’s an ill wind…” point that it’s not such bad medicine for Jews today, given that in the worst of cases we risk neither gas chambers or slaughter by “militants,” to gain a feel for what Jewish life has been over the centuries almost everywhere else. My Russian Jewish friends don’t need such lessons; they have all at least been called the equivalent of “dirty Jew” in the streets of their native land. Antisemitism isn’t just about someone’s not letting you into their country club.

    I have insisted on the necessary connection between antisemitism and Wokism because the notion of “white guilt,” which in itself sounds innocent of prejudice against anyone other than “ourselves,” is not merely obnoxious to “poor whites,” a.k.a. deplorables whom one’s virtue-signaling aims to show up as insufficiently sensitive to the sufferings of “victims,” but has at least one historically significant corollary that expresses its hatred/guilt for Western civilization, as it has frequently over the past millennium or so: by singling out the people whose religious intuition is at its root. In this form of white guilt—which cannot of course be called by that name—the (white?) antisemite avoids the stigma by concentrating “whiteness” in this one place. The so-called Red-Green alliance allows even KKK-style “white supremacists” to join the alliance so long as they are willing to concentrate their fire on Israel’s “genocide” of innocent Palestinians.

    But it does no good to limit oneself to railing at the evil nature of such collective actions without seeking in the depths of this nature a revelation that can ultimately provide a weapon against it, for example by undermining the “intersectional” solidarity that holds it together.

    Why indeed have women’s sports organizations been so passive in face of policies that are not just offensive to common sense but potentially physically injurious to female athletes? Why is there no campaign for the latter to simply boycott competitions in which “trans-men” are entered? How many times would such actions have to occur before the practice is ended?

    Clearly the consensus of feminist movements and their leaders is that intersectional solidarity with the transgendered even in this not only discriminatory but physically dangerous practice is of greater moral weight than commitment to what would normally be considered “women’s issues.” Those women who reject this viewpoint are stigmatized as TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists—”radical” in a bad sense, for putting loyalty to one’s own group ahead of the intersectional agenda. The idea that such a stigma has a real practical effect and that nearly all feminist leaders are intimidated by it is one of the most shocking truths about Wokism. Refusing to let men with penises into woman’s toilets is a crime against the rights of victims to self-gendering. (One might compare, for example, “Queers for Palestine,” knowing the fate of homosexuals in Islamic societies.) And the same value system reigns throughout school systems that encourage even early graders to declare their “real” gender and forbid teachers to reveal these declarations to their parents.

    The fundamental principle of victimary thinking is that a victim, whatever his powers of thought and action, has in principle no “agency.” The oppression of the society that denies the equal standing of his particular identity, whether of race, sex/gender, physical ability/functionality… “brackets” his personal will, cutting it off from the judgment of the “dominant society.” If one wonders how a district attorney or prosecutor can possibly refuse to punish perpetrators of openly criminal acts, the source of this justification, which is really to say, this conception of the sacred, lies in this denial of agency—a perversion, if one will, of Jesus’ line in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (One can well imagine how Jesus himself would have reacted to the updated interpretation!) This new sacred deliberately incriminates the social order by freeing the petty criminals who exploit it by shoplifting, pickpocketing, etc.; presumably when we create the truly just society, there would be no more criminals, their misdeeds being merely reflections of the evil to which their crimes are coerced responses, and constituting as such an involuntary moral critique.

    The old Bolsheviks, one might say, had at least the excuse that they were creating a new social model, whose growing pains could be seen as reasons for indulgence. But notable of Wokeness is that while it imposes such new norms as DEI, it has no vision of the Millennium where “the International Soviet shall be the human race.” On the contrary, even as the famous Gramscian march through the institutions seems nearly complete, it presumably requires no “final conflict” a la the Internationale. Wokeness seeks no final destination other than the undermining of all institutions as the corrupt children of patriarchy and white supremacy—and why not Jewish supremacy? As Ibram Kendi says in his wisdom, the only solution to racism is antiracism, and we can be assured that there will be no “final conflict” after which the latter will lay down its arms.

    Wokeness has certainly marched a good long way without so far encountering much resistance. Whatever the moral indignation such practices arouse in some people of my generation—not all by any means—it has now become a natural social reflex: for example, in choosing to proclaim Transgender Visibility Day over Easter.

    The original rise of the epistemology of resentment reflected the modernization of society at the outset of the industrial age; the old caste system was obviously no longer an effective form of social organization and la carrière ouverte aux talents required its abolition. In other words, the resentment of the sans-culottes was not simply an selfish reaction; it corresponded to a need of modern society, as the slogans of both the American and French Revolutions made explicit—whence the mob’s tacit support by the less violent members of the tiers-état.

    It is not equally obvious what useful function is played by Wokism in the contemporary Western world. The only necessity it appears to reflect would be that of assuaging the post-colonial resentments of the “South,” whose nations at their most productive emulate the West’s drive to industrialization and technical progress and, in the case of China in particular, seek to outperform the West by organizing a more rigorous meritocracy. But that authoritarian rigor is capable of outweighing the residual advantage of Western freedom of thought is far from certain; dictatorship is not a flexible system, and it inevitably gives more weight to the members of its apparatus than to creative thinkers. The fall of Jack Ma and the reabsorption of Hong Kong into the mainland stand as cautions in this respect. On the other hand, the growing disorder of civil society in the West is one problem that China, Russia, and North Korea do not have; petty crime surely does not flourish unpunished on the streets of Shanghai and Pyongyang.

    To affirm “white guilt” as the basis of Wokism is a partial but not altogether satisfactory explanation. Woke morality of the DEI sort is nourished by the American racial past, but it may well be that of ultimately greater significance is the growing European awareness of their continent’s increasing demographic domination by formerly colonized peoples, and above all the rise within it of militant Islam, which has been from its origin the religion of the “outsiders” of Western culture, and which has now begun to have an effect in the US as well, notably in Michigan, as Democrats are well aware.

    And so once more it is useful to consider the impact of Wokism on antisemitism. The “old” antisemitism, which reached its apogee with Nazism, was founded on the Christian understanding of Judaism as a reactionary formation that resisted the divinely sanctioned transformation of Hebraic into Christian religion, the “new Israel.” No doubt the Nazis were hostile to Christianity as well, tracing the strength of Western culture to its “Aryan” roots, but their focus on the Jews allowed Christians who did not disobey Nazi race policy to avoid any kind of stigma. The “Final Solution” implied that eliminating the Jews would allow the full integration of the Christian elements of Western society into the Volk, whose triumph would inaugurate the glorious future of the “thousand-year Reich.”

    Today’s antisemitism, in contrast, is implicitly if not explicitly anti-Christian. It is notable that most believing Christians support Israel against its enemies, whereas those who join the red-green alliance and demonstrate in favor of the Palestinians are, if not “Marxists” as everyone likes to call them, either atheistic or explicitly pro-Muslim. Thus today’s antisemitism is clearly anti-biblical; even if its sympathy for Islam does not fully extend to the religion itself, it is understood as the creed of those oppressed by the West—which is in effect what Islam was from the beginning, substituting “oppressed by” for “resentful of.”

    Does this suffice to explain the passions released in the recent anti-Zionist mob actions? Perhaps the clearest point in this conflict is that the Palestinians are seen as simply the victims of the Jews; the lack of repugnance inspired by the horrors of the 10/7 massacre among the demonstrators who accuse the IDF of “genocide” reflects their conviction of the perpetrators’ utter lack of agency. Far more than the petty criminals freed by “progressive” DAs, they were powerless victims viscerally striking out against inhuman oppression. That attendees at the Oscars were seen wearing pins that, hopefully unknown to them, commemorated the vicious slaughter of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah in October 2000, involuntarily confirms the “naturalness” of this moral inversion.

    To implement the traditional American ideal that “all men are created equal,” the obvious solution to racial discrimination is simply to end it, and when possible to offer extra help to those handicapped by it to allow them to prepare for entry into a race-indifferent polity that will no longer be the “white world.” Yet obvious as this seems both from the standpoint of fairness and that of social harmony, it is anything but obvious to a large segment of the population. If DEI is indeed the ultimate destiny of democratic systems as opposed to authoritarian ones, what it implies is the subordination of concern for the good of the community to that of assuaging the potential resentments of its members. But eliminating objective tests for admission to selective programs is not comparable to building ramps for wheelchair-users to access buildings.

    Although no one wants to fly in an airplane piloted by an “Affirmative Action” pilot, such sentiments are best kept private, whereas Harvard was proud to pay a near-million-dollar salary to a black woman as president on the strength of a few articles. (That they contained plagiarized texts is really not the point; no white man would have been offered tenure at Harvard with such a record, let alone the presidency.) Yet the widespread public application of Woke morality confirms that today the “disparate impact” criterion overrides any other consideration, including allowing criminal activities to proceed with minimal constraint in black neighborhoods, even if almost entirely at the expense of the black population.

    The democratic process permits these populations to choose their own representatives, and not just blacks but Jews as well tend to vote for Democrats; is this an argument for or against democracy? Given the manipulations possible now that elections seem to have become permanently decided by mail ballot over lengthy periods, my impression is that we have already become something of a démocrature; after all, Russia holds elections too. Whatever one thinks of the “insurrection” on January 6, whose perpetrators have been punished far more severely than any comparable group of trespassers in American history, the idea that the 2020 presidential election was straightforwardly legitimate is far from established, and indeed cannot be established so long as the handling of ballots remains as arbitrary as it has become, subject not merely to manipulations of political information but simply straightforward lack of strict controls, with a considerable differential in the two parties’ ability to manipulate the internet and other modes of communication.

    Hopefully the D-R balance in the manipulation process can be improved by greater awareness and surveillance among Republican operatives, but the universal mail ballot over a period of several weeks is clearly a highly unreliable means of insuring a fair and tamper-proof voting process, and one that favors the media-driven manipulation of the least-informed voters. Limiting voting to in-person balloting on Election Day, with strict limitations on exceptions, as was universally done before 2020, would at a minimum remove a wholly unnecessary source of public distrust in the election process—which is precisely why there is so little pressure for it to take place.

    Despite increasing reaction against Wokeness, the latter clearly remains the unmarked position among those who consider themselves other than “deplorable.” Even the crudely humorous language of the conservative opposition tacitly admits this; horrible as it is to face, Woke absurdities have largely taken the place of what was once called “common sense” as the default position in polite society, and are transmitted without irony to the next generation. I find it somewhere between insulting and amusing to be asked my “pronouns” on official forms.

    And rebelling against such practices in the spirit of youthful irreverence is made particularly difficult by the posture of Wokeness as itself a rebellion against traditional Western values. The secret of the success of the “long march through the institutions” is its own persistent application of the epistemology of resentment. And if you don’t yourself experience this resentment, you have only to curse—or to thank—your unconscious conformity to the white patriarchy. A sincere Christian or Jewish faith may suffice to let us resist Wokeness, but the latter’s continued success among the pseudo-non-conformist minds of what were once known as the “chattering classes” demonstrates that the West’s overall faith in its civilization, which once included but did not wholly rely on explicit faith in Biblical religion, is no longer the dominant position.

    This is not to deny that the traditional order has not left residues that justify “intersectional” criticism, for example, using drugs previously tested on groups that included only men, or only whites… And one frequently reads articles in science magazines that sympathetically describe, e.g., transsexuals’ sufferings whose reality is independent of their exploitation by those who have joined forces with the “intersectional” Left. But the sufferings and their exploitation are virtually never discussed at the same time; one side charitably bewails society’s failure to solve them, while to the other falls the less pleasant task of unmasking their exploitation. The therapists who write sympathetically of the transgendered would be much more convincing if they did not repress their undoubted awareness of this exploitative element. The cruel absurdity of letting “trans-men” with penises into women’s sports and locker rooms—let alone women’s prisons!—is simply  beyond discussion.

    And more generally, it seems obvious that while continuing to ferret out residual inequities, our society should focus the bulk of its political energies on shoring up the meritocracy in an atmosphere of social solidarity, as in M L King’s dream of the little black children going to school together with the little white children—where presumably they would all be graded on the same scale.

    At this stage, one wonders if even the threat of military defeat would right the ship. The fundamental moral principle that the common basis of morality and the sacred is the survival of the human community has little traction in contemporary American or European society.

    It is no doubt our good fortune that the post-Maoist China conceived by Deng could not withstand the one-party system’s intrinsic drive to concentrate hegemony. But even in the absence of catastrophe, one would hate to have to choose between Xi and Biden, and even trusting Trump with our future is far from ideal. Since the dangerous “post-colonial” charisma of Obama, the absence of political leadership capable of uniting the American nation increasingly appears to reflect a fundamental defect in our governmental system. It cannot be accidental that the current administration is led by what may well be the least intellectually and morally distinguished duumvirate in American history.

    Our hope must be that if human institutions are indeed in the first place responses to necessity, and if what we perceive as sacred is the will to carry out such responses in preference to our selfish desires, our society will be driven to overcome its narcissistic virtue-signaling and resume what is still its rightful role of world leadership. At the moment, the American politician who would seem best to embody this promise is the governor of Florida, but there are surely others capable of following his example.

    But it is not through reading these Chronicles that the West’s leaders will find the solutions to the world’s political problems. I can only hope that my readers find in them a useful source of anthropological understanding.

    Coda added on April 13:

    Back in 2016, there were something like 16 candidates for the Republican nomination. Those who have followed these Chronicles will remember that my first impressions of Trump were not very positive; in Chronicle 508 I even called him “Our Duce”—and indeed there has always been something Mussolinesque in his way of addressing the public. And I was also unhappy to hear him denounce a judge who had ruled against him as a “Mexican.”

    But I always knew that Trump was not a “racist”; even his denouncing an opponent as “Mexican” was rather a demonstration of his willingness to brawl with every weapon at his disposal than a mark of “racism,” which in its traditional sense of assuming the superiority of the White race to others was never in Trump’s character. As a fellow New-Yorker I learned from birth the necessity of recognizing ethnic differences as significant, which is not the same thing as “white supremacy.”

    And what I found particularly admirable about Trump, which conservative never-Trumpers such as the National Review and Commentary crowds could never accept as a virtue, was his total lack of respect for what I called at the time “victimocracy” or “victimary thinking,” which has since morphed into Wokeness: the sinister postmodern faux-Christian twist of turning the epistemology of resentment against “ourselves” as Whites, ostensibly taking the side of “our” victims against “our” racial (and of course, patriarchal) hegemony.

    In the debates among the potential Republican nominees, I was struck by the fact that the only two participants who showed themselves to be alive to the capacity for evil of this new wrinkle of the Left were Trump and Ben Carson—who was later happy to join Trump’s cabinet in proof of their ideological compatibility.

    What I have found particularly shocking about Commentary‘s never-Trumpism was that it seemed intuitively obvious to me from the outset that Trump would be a strong supporter of Israel, a fact that as we know was borne out in a wholly unambiguous fashion. Some will say that this was the fortuitous result of the influence of Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, but I need only repeat in this connection a quip I heard from my esteemed friend J. Bragmardo:

    Q: “What is the difference between Trump and a Jewish liberal?”

    A: “Trump has Jewish grandchildren.”

    The current series of betrayals of Israel by Democrats and those farther Left strongly confirms my analysis that antisemitism is far more central to Wokism than appears on the surface. Certainly the Left’s striking indifference to the 10/7 atrocities while railing against Israel’s “genocidal” response confirms this point. Why are all these American late-adolescents, unmoved by the proudly self-documented graphic horrors perpetrated on Israeli civilians, weeping over the “genocide” of Palestinians based on body counts broadcast by Hamas? As though one could even dream of applying the term “genocide” to collateral war deaths among a small segment of the Middle-Eastern Arab population of over a quarter-billion.

    The “respectable” New York Times and even George Soros are surely not inherently antisemitic. But in times of raging antisemitism, it is always more prudent to assure the powers that be that one is not among those grasping Jews who look out only for their own kind. When such paragons as Elizabeth Warren are accusing the Jews of genocide, it’s best to show one’s good faith by expressing horror at the loss of “innocent” life—using Hamas statistics—caused by the Israeli bombardments. Dresden and Hiroshima were different, you see, because we were saving “Western civilization,” whereas the Jews of Israel are cruelly exterminating the “native” population for resisting their “occupation.”

  • Bear Theory IV

    For Henri, Percy, Penny, and Trikey (and Stacey)

    My previous Bear Theory essays, Chronicles 470, 654, and 679, appeared between September 2014 and December 2020. Since then, having turned 80 and become a bit more aware of my mortality, I thought I could add something to these musings as more than just a pretext for turning my attention away from the growing ugliness of today’s world, here in the USA and in so many far less attractive places.

    For one thing, in my previous essays I hadn’t bothered to point out the most striking difference between bears in the sense of “stuffed animals” and the dolls that children had traditionally made their companions: their softness and even furriness, in sharp contrast not only to classic china dolls but even to cloth dolls such as Raggedy Ann and Andy (remember them?). Cuddling with a doll had previously lacked the warmth and fuzziness one can find with a dog or cat or the other mammalian companions one encounters on a farm. One wonders how all this would have developed in the absence of the famous 1902 hunting incident that led to the creation of the “Teddy Bear.”

    Which is by no means to deny that the most essential feature of a bear remains its eyes. Our senses oblige us to attend to the “look” of other creatures, and I think we are always disappointed with bears whose eyes are not clearly visible. But the fuzziness that assimilates the teddy bear and other plush animals to our furry domestic favorites—that is, not human representations but living creatures, is very much a factor in the modern transformation of these companions into more credible bearers of personhood.

    One bear attribute that has become more salient as the coming years diminish is their non-mortality. One notices at funerals that many old people, especially women, take bears with them in their coffins. And without so anticipating my own demise (I would prefer to leave my bears in the world for those who could still appreciate them), I do find it a particular pleasure to think that, unlike me and my contemporaries, the bears will always remain the same age—for the most part, eternally young, for it is difficult to think of most bears as old, although a few are quite compatible with an image of maturity.

    This vision of an immortal object of affection is hardly comparable to the love of God, but I could see having a conversation with Ste Thérèse de Lisieux on the subject. As I suggested in Chronicle 654, I felt that she conceived her relationship with God/Christ as the equivalent of a bear’s relationship to its human partner: a gentle playfulness in which she could act with total confidence simply by following her intuition of His will—never having to doubt her intuitions because she could have confidence that this will had programmed, not her decisions themselves, but her moral compass, in advance.

    That Chronicle contains several citations from Thérèse’s poetry. What is most striking in these writings is her sentiment of being fully trusted, that God needs no persuasion of the utter unlikelihood that she will disobey his will and like Eve listen to Satan in disguise. Her freedom is intact, yet it contains no element of mimetic perversity, of desire to affirm her own Difference. I guess that is what we mean by sainthood. We should remember that Thérèse wrote all this before her canonization; she had no advance pretension of being elected to serve others as an example; her confidence in God’s love was sufficient unto itself.

    How is Thérèse’s relationship to God relevant to my experience of bears? I surely have no sense of God-like power, no sense that my will controls, rather than discovers, that of our bears. I experience them as Others, as friends and companions, not as slaves or robots. But as with God and Thérèse, there is no element of opacity; whatever they think or do, it cannot offend me, and even when I imagine them playing tricks (our band of small armadillos are the tricksters in the family) they are acts of teasing, not hostility. As when, for example, I can’t find something I just put down—and then realize that the armadillos must have taken advantage of a moment of distraction to move it somewhere else.

    Now that the post-WWII era is coming to a close, and the epochal sense of security that was first perturbed by the attack on 9/11 is gradually being replaced by that of awaiting impending catastrophe, one appreciates all the more the imaginary security provided by one’s bears as exemplifying the joys of a peaceful life. One would indeed have little time for such amusements if one lived in constant fear of danger. Thus I would imagine, for example, that celebrities and billionaires who live surrounded by security staff would be less likely to find pleasure in befriending “stuffed animals.” This practice reflects a desire to prolong the careless freedom of childhood, a sentiment not yet unreasonable in the America of a generation or two ago, but that can only be simulated in today’s less than tranquil environment.

    Thus having had the good fortune to have lived in peace for all these decades, I don’t feel I am wasting valuable time by patting a bear’s head when I pass. As I grow older, they remain my grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, and even those like my hedgehog mentor and mascot Henri Kipod who assists me in thinking through the problems of GA, and whom I have always considered senior to myself, will always remain as they are—never slowing down, losing their memories, or revising downward their speculative count of remaining years.

    Whether or not the bear phenomenon is related to our “mirror neurons,” it is so to speak an inverse mimesis; we relate to bears as to others to whom we are completely transparent, inasmuch as we take for granted that they understand our intentions. This transparency is one of their most delightful aspects; bears always remain themselves, are never mere imitators or emulators. They inspire no feeling of superiority; we wouldn’t think of attributing to them an inability to understand whatever we wish to convey to them. Some people have real conversations with their bears; I rarely say more than a word or two, but what I appreciate is the sense of mutual affection that their presence generates; never indifferent, they always enjoy one’s company. With bears we are always old friends who know each other so well that neither ever imagines the possibility of offending the other.

    Percy, a small hedgehog who wears glasses, assists me in doing crosswords and other puzzles. I often find his presence an inspiration to fortitude if, say, I am having trouble completing a grid and wonder whether to look up a clue on the internet. His sister Penny, on the other hand, is very conscious of her looks and enjoys wearing adornments of all kinds; she sometimes quarrels with Stacey, accusing her of not according her the respect her beauty deserves.

    I myself have no such conflictive relationships—although on one occasion long ago, one that they never let me forget, I gave a spanking to one of our rambunctious armadillos. This sort of thing never happens when I’m alone with the bears. Stacey and I together have a slightly different relationship with them; for example, she sometimes takes on the role of one of them, which I don’t feel comfortable doing.

    Bears can be a real consolation for loneliness and a source of reassurance that human love is real and accessible to each of us. But, more pertinently from the perspective of this list, they provide a valuable insight into the whole question of “supernatural” beings and the role of faith in the life of our species.

    The difference between bears and the various sorts of divinities and semi-divinities found throughout human culture is that we accept that their status as other than plush artifacts is a fiction, something we can, not so much “pretend to believe in,” as act as though we believe in, never having to conceal the “as though” from either ourselves nor others—but of course not from the bears themselves. Such relations are clearly not possible with pets, and all the less with other humans. But it is clear from our interaction with bears that the question of their “reality” as “other minds” can never arise, being taken for granted from the outset by all who are involved in such interactions, with the exception of small children who, not yet fully aware of the limits of human consciousness, can be excused for “believing in Santa Claus.” (As to whether they really believe in the personhood of their bears, I’m not sure how easily we can answer that question.)

    If we then consider in what sense a religious believer would find the assimilation of his objects of belief to the category of “bear” inadequate, it is notable that we cannot cite objective evidence for this distinction without alleging the facticity of miraculous revelations—whence the vanity of disputes between believers and atheists, given that neither can cite uncontestable evidence on their behalf, the sole advantage of the latter being their ostensibly more comfortable fit with Ockham’s razor. To which the obvious anthropological rejoinder would be that, just as we invented language because we needed it to prevent mimetic conflict so that our species could be perpetuated, so religious faith would not have existed all these millennia without a similarly useful function.**

    But then the question arises as to whether, given the current decline of religion in the West—and bracketing for the moment the question of Islam in particular and of quasi-creedal belief systems such as we find in today’s China—this does not demonstrate that the usefulness of religion is undermined by modernity, so that even if it would indeed be better for us all to accept the incarnation of the sacred in a Being capable of exercising moral suasion over the real world, the credibility of this belief is not sustained by the most advanced forms of human self-consciousness—now rivaled by our technical expertise that is rapidly becoming capable of programming cybernetic devices to carry out tasks previously inaccessible to any worldly beings other than ourselves, with need neither for deferral nor the sacred it protects.

    Bear experiences are of particular interest in developing human self-understanding because, in contrast with the experiences of the transcendental that we may classify among “acts of faith,” they avoid any confusion between subjective and objective reality. Not only can my conversation with a bear not possibly throw doubt on the distinction between subjective and objective realities, but it is difficult to imagine that any such interaction could give rise to divergent interpretations as to the nature of the mental attitudes involved.

    In this context it seemed useful to conclude my discussion of “bear theory” with a report of an incident illustrating the intersubjective interplay that the adoption of bears makes possible.

    We have had for a number of years in Santa Monica a triceratops named Trikey whose coat is a mottled light blue color. Since we often read lying on our living room couch, Stacey bought and gave to me in Missouri a blanket we could use on the couch in winter months, decorated with a hedgehog motif.

    When I first spread the blanket on the couch, I could not help noticing the striking color harmony between the blanket and Trikey; it was almost as if we had purchased the blanket to match. When I showed Stacey how well they paired up, we both were struck by the pleasurable idea that Trikey, as a quadrupedal dinosaur, would be thrilled to think of himself as a distant ancestor of the hedgehog—a relationship that surely has no basis in biological fact, but does not lack all plausibility, as it would for example had Trikey been a tyrannosaurus. Thus when I use the blanket on the couch, I almost always share it with Trikey so that he can experience his kinship to the family of hedgehogs, and thereby to GA.

    It was not as though Stacey felt proud or lucky to have chosen a color that went well with one of our bears; our pleasure cannot be understood in the absence of its mediation by Trikey. It is his happiness that we both continue to vicariously celebrate. I will leave it to the reader to extricate the structure of real and imaginary relationships among the three participants that this anecdote reveals.

    **On March 30, in preparation for Easter Sunday, an online article appeared entitled “The Single Most Important Fact in All History,” referring to the miracle of the Resurrection. A Christian believer may call this a “fact,” but surely it is significant that, like all miracles, its facticity is hardly beyond doubt. I can only respond in the quasi-heretical terms of Tertullian, credibile est, quia ineptum est, usually simplified to credo quia absurdum.

  • GA and Western/Eastern civilization — Part I

    This is a draft version of the first part of my GASC talk this June in Tokyo; the second part will deal with the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida

    As the Western-centered world order established after WWII appears to be losing its grip, most significantly in the West itself, considerations of “scholarship” and “theory” can no longer be pursued as if in the context of a civilization confident of self-perpetuation. As GA makes clear, the underlying purpose of language, religion, and all the other trappings of human culture is simply to perpetuate humanity itself. What we may consider the nobility of this quest is that of a simple response to necessity, as a result of which our ancestors invented language, religion, and the rest, not out of some transcendental drive toward perfection, but in order to preserve their species’ existence. We may define our species’ “transcendental” nature by the fact that, being driven by necessity to create language, it has likewise been driven at every stage to perfect its cultural functioning by the need to preserve itself, in what the French call a fuite en avant, a flight from the past toward the future. In past eras, this self-preservation was sought separately by communities, tribes, confederations, empires, and nations, but today, to an increasing extent, we feel the need to preserve humanity as a whole from self-destruction. Thus we combat, for example, the dangers of “climate change,” whose dangers we substitute for the far greater dangers posed to us by humanity itself, fearing to face the latter directly—as we have always done.

    That since October 7 of last year the Jewish people have been intimately involved in the current rising tension is merely par for the course, since whether we like it or not, Western civilization depends on the Hebrews’ originary monotheistic intuition, and the hate they still engender on the least pretext is the quintessential example of the scapegoating mechanism that Girard considered to be the origin of humanity. But the arbitrary choice of an “emissary victim” is just the opposite of the role of the Jews, whose scapegoat role—of which we are now witnessing an exemplary demonstration—will presumably last as long as Western civilization itself. If this “arbitrary” mechanism could indeed resolve our problems, we wouldn’t have to keep scapegoating the same group. No, it’s precisely the lack of arbitrariness, the unforgettable historical Firstness of the Jews, which can only be “resolved” by exterminating their descendants and obliterating their writings, until even the fear of their revival has been forgotten. But is it not more likely that in its lust to destroy the Jews, humanity will simply destroy itself?

    The human was born in the deferral of its appetites as a prelude to their communal satisfaction. But the boundaries of the human community are not predefined, and it becomes ever more evident that the West in its aspiration to become the “boundless” or “global” community can become so only through its own self-abolition. The Jews are the Western archetype, and their annihilation figures the sacrifice of the “white” world and ultimately of humanity as a whole.

    For in the modern era there is one single world civilization, and its core is Western; the remaining differences of cultures are no more than costumes at a festival. China, the most “Eastern” of cultures, is governed today by principles elaborated by that old ex-Jew Karl Marx, and, in contrast with the traditional Muslim civilization that resists the temptation of the “red-green” alliance, the world of today’s jihadist Islamism is a resentful inversion of Jewish firstness that hates the Jews all the more, while seeking to persuade the non-Jewish “whites,” not long ago called “Aryans,” that the Jihadi crocodile will devour them last.

    If world civilization is to survive, it must indeed transcend the curse of antisemitism. Christianity has largely done this; the Pope now speaks of the Jews as his “elder brothers.” And there is good reason to hope that, as in the “Abraham accords,” the Islamic world will do so as well. If the remains of antisemitism in the West would only be firmly rejected, instead, as we are seeing today, of being coddled and even encouraged, there is every reason to believe that the problems of the Middle East, and of the rest of the world as well, could be peacefully settled rather than leading humanity to self-destruction.

    From our “Western” perspective, in order to understand the point of GA as the solution to the quintessentially modern disillusion with metaphysics, we must ask ourselves how a minimalist understanding of language, and by extension, of the human itself as a cultural phenomenon, can be of service in allowing us a clearer chance than otherwise of diagnosing our present state of incipient crisis, and hopefully, of helping to increase our species’ chances of survival.

    The danger faced by the West in the cybernetic age is that the vast proliferation of the quintessentially human characteristic of “scenicity,” as embodied most visibly in our ubiquitous cellphones, facilitates the intensification of what I have called the epistemology of resentment, which since the French Revolution has generated ideologies that, on the one hand, deny legitimacy to hierarchical differences, while on the other facilitating the accumulation of vast divergences in wealth and status, as the billionaire class, all the while denying any justification of privilege, contents itself with profiting from allowing the public to blanket the world with expressions of this same poisonous epistemology. The coexistence of multi-billionaires with the “anti-racist” doctrine of diversity-equity-inclusion or DEI is a modernized version of Tory paternalism, but unlike its 19th century prototype, it is deliberately hostile to the traditional values of civil society that maintain what increasingly seem the final remnants of what we can still call “liberal democracy.”

    I have often spoken of the dominant tendency in post-Hegelian philosophy to seek to escape the prison-house of language—a phrase become famous when Fred Jameson made a book title of Erich Heller’s fanciful translation of what Nietzsche had simply called “linguistic constraint” (sprachlichen Zwang: see Emily Apter, “The Prison-House of Translation?” Diacritics 47.4 2019, p. 54). What strikes me on reflection is that, as in one of those hippie drawings where the protagonist starts out enclosed in a cardboard box situated in a lovely landscape that he knows nothing of, this is a condition based on what I have defined as “the metaphysical” and which is common to all of Western philosophy, even including its “existential” post-metaphysical stage. Which is to say that metaphysics is, very simply, the refusal to see that whenever we speak of thinking, we are speaking of language.

    The only exception is the sort of reasoning that we can attribute to Kohler’s apes, who are capable of picking up a pole or building a pile of boxes in order to reach a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling. Humans too engage in such thinking; when we want to put salt on our food, we look for the salt shaker, and on finding it, satisfy our need, presumably without the use of even “internal” language. But when it comes to the kind of thinking that goes into philosophy books, or even newspapers, as soon as “thinking” means performing an act of reasoning or affirming a “truth,” which really means a true proposition, we are talking about the use of words. Without words, without signs whose meaning is in principle shared by our community, we cannot communicate our thoughts to others, and the fact that we can think without such communication overlooks the fact that the words we use “privately” connect us willy-nilly to the community formed by their users, however broadly or narrowly defined.

    However surprising it may seem, the simple idea that the human may be defined by the communication of signs on a scene seems never to have been thought of as sufficient unto itself. Yet it neatly and unambiguously distinguishes homo sapiens from all other species. And although we all recognize that language in the human sense, even including pointing, is unique to our species, the idea that the scene is as well never seems to arise. (The bee-dance famously analyzed by Karl von Frisch is no exception: see Chronicle 724.) But all that is characteristically human is dependent on the cultural phenomenon of language, communication via non-instinctive signs, which can more specifically be described as gestures/sounds/inscriptions emitted deliberately, and whose utterance can be traced to a uniquely human act of what Jacques Derrida called différance. Derrida understood the deferral of an utterance as permitting the speaker to choose within a paradigm of words, but the most fundamental relationship of language to deferral is that language—think again of pointing—begins with an at least half-conscious substitution of reference for appropriation. Thus I believe that we can say with some degree of confidence that the first sign may be defined as an aborted gesture of appropriation: instead of grasping for something we point at it—something which, surprisingly, animals, even chimps with hands, do not do as an act of communication.

    The scene of human interaction is not, as some of my early formulations of the originary hypothesis may have suggested, entirely defined by its “interdicted” center. But this configuration is indeed the source of the sharp gradient of attention, or meaningfulness, between objects of interest and the empty space that surrounds them. I think Sartre well captured this aspect of the human scene in L’Etre et le Néant by speaking of a néant or nothingness (a term we shall encounter in Nishida) separating the human Self or pour-soi from its objects, a space which is so to speak an invisible barrier and consequently an enhancement to desire. But more broadly, the human scene is a space of cultural interaction. A degree of potential scenicity exists between any two human beings; in the normal circumstances of “civil society,” their interaction will take place through the mediation of signs.

    The theatrical scene, which gave its name to this phenomenon, offers its audience a passive spectacle, but on the “scene” of normal human interaction, there need be no predesignated participants and/or spectators. Indeed, making this distinction explicit defines, outside the norms of everyday human activity, the world of art, a basic definition which is not modified in its essence by the postmodern violations found in spectator interactions with “installations” and the like.

    What does permit such delimitation is what we call the sacred. The deferral of appropriative action that came to be interpreted as a sign reflected a sense of sacred interdiction surrounding the desired object, which we must only designate because we feel the attempt to possess it is impossible. The simplest example of this experience—the simplest way for us to re-experience the originary event of human language—is when we hesitate to take the last cookie on the serving dish at a party, particularly if two people reach for it at the same time. This aborted gesture feels “instinctive,” but it is not a reflex action like pulling your hand back from a hot surface. For generative anthropology, this may be considered the minimal human experience, the germ of both language on the one hand (designating the cookie rather than grabbing it) and religion on the other (treating the cookie as an interdicted or sacred object, one that its “worshipers” must admire from a distance without attempting to possess it).

    When I sometimes claim that there are no rival theories to GA, I do not mean that no one else has ever sought to provide an explanation for the origin of language. As I discussed in Chronicle 614, primatologist Richard Wrangham in The Goodness Paradox (Pantheon, 2019) emphasizes the human need to contain violence, and at one point suggests that the first use of language would have been to organize coalitions for the purpose of eliminating any member of the proto-human group found to be particularly prone to violence. Another explanation I have seen recently is that, having learned to use tools, proto-humans became able to inflict greater damage on each other than species fighting with bodily weapons alone, leading to the need for language to permit conscious negotiations that would defer conflict.

    But such superficially attractive hypotheses are anything but minimalistic, and above all, they fail to take seriously the fundamental difference, which Terrence Deacon traces back to their control by different parts of the brain, between reflexive signals and conscious (and “arbitrary”) signs, which depend precisely on what I have been calling, after Derrida, deferral. Thus most recent writing about language origin deals either with the potential correlation with language of empirical details of primate interaction such as sociality or brain function, or seeks, in popular-science terms, to demonstrate that crossing the “Rubicon” of language wasn’t really all that great a problem.

    The intellectual-historical reason for disinterest in a humanistic theory of language origin such as the originary hypothesis can be explained by the “Woke” turning-away within what can broadly be called the humanities from the ambition to understand the human at its root—to create what Girard called fundamental and I have called generative anthropology. This ambition, which was prevalent in the literary fields when I began my studies in the 50s and 60s, was greatly stimulated in the US by the 1966 conference on the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, organized at Johns Hopkins University by Girard himself, which brought Derrida and a number of postmodern French thinkers to the US for the first time.

    Unlike the hard sciences, the fields of the “humanities” were not conceived as laboratory-based endeavors. Since the late 19th century, the study of literature or art had been seen as a privileged avenue toward understanding the human-in-general; 20th-century developments in this direction included Anglo-American “new criticism” and Russian formalism. Arguably the later French version of this movement, post-WWII nouvelle critique, sometimes spoken of as “post-structuralism,” and often referred to in the US as French Theory, was its last and most ambitious stage. Jacques Derrida’s rock-star status in the 1980s and 90s, scarcely believable today, along with the comparable stardom of several other critics (Foucault, Lacan, even Girard himself), reflected this intuition of broad intellectual importance.

    Today, this tendency has all but vanished, and its aging survivors can only spout post-Marxist varieties of Wokism. As a consequence, GA is dismissed as a “last gasp” of French Theory, as simply passé. Yet we should recall that fashion is a poor indicator of what really matters in the course of humanity’s ongoing attempt to understand itself.

  • Benoît Chantre’s “René Girard: Biographie”(Grasset, 2023) — Part II

    1 – Pour Benoît

    Benoît Chantre’s narrative of René Girard’s life after he had made his reputation with Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque, while necessarily of somewhat less human interest than that of his beginnings, will be of great value not only to readers of Girard but to students of French intellectual life in the second half of the last century, which the detailed descriptions of Girard’s activities illuminate. In Girard’s later writings, including his astute readings of Shakespeare’s plays and his analyses of Job and other biblical texts, the most striking difference with the era of Mensonge is a growing historical pessimism that is never quite transcended by the increased focus on prophetic texts and perspectives.

    For me the most significant breakthrough in Girard’s later career occurred not with his turn to the biblical in Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978), but in his preceding volume, La violence et le sacré (1971). This work, focused for the first time not on literary analysis but on a theory of the sacred based on the study of classical and ethnological myths that is at the same time a theory of human origin, was for me and others in literary fields an opening to the human sciences of a very different nature from the structuralist and post-structuralist developments of “French theory” that Girard had ironically been instrumental in bringing to the US.

    In La violence, Girard develops the hypothesis that the watershed event of emergent humanity was that of “emissary murder,” in which a tribe in a state of generalized mimetic conflict would regain its unity by focusing the members’ hostility on a single member of the group, singled out by some distinguishing trait like Oedipus’ “sore feet,” and discharge their aggressive impulses by collectively lynching him, as the pharmakos was later killed in Athens. Although I was never fully comfortable with this theory, it reoriented our thinking about mimetic desire from the modern-literary to the preliterate-anthropological domain, and it was under its inspiration that I wrote The Origin of Language.

    This is in no way to deny that Girard’s best and most satisfying work remains Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque. It is clearly the most pleasurable to read, containing none of the often repetitive rhetoric I referred to in the previous Chronicle, and the exposition of his simple yet enlightening typology of internal and external mediation avoids the rhetorical inversions that occasionally cloud Girard’s later works (see the previous Chronicle for examples). The novels of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky record a historical transformation that Girard’s description of the passage from external to internal mediation describes quite effectively. And although there is no attempt at a discussion of religious texts or theory of the origin of human society, if one goes back to Mensonge after having read his later works, one can see with little difficulty how they were all so to speak contained in germ in this masterpiece.

    Above all, in contrast to the gloomy and/or apocalyptic perspectives that permeate his later writings, this first book, as I tried to bring out in Chronicle 507, is a work of spiritual uplift, a “conversion manual” that encourages us to turn away from the modern world’s tangle of “internal mediations” toward the “vertical transcendence” of the Christian message enunciated by Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. This message of personal salvation addresses the reader directly, offering the example of Christ’s mediation as a liberating alternative to the earthly mediators who enslave us—and thereby inspiring psychotherapeutic applications such as the work of Michel Oughourlian. It is this applicability of its brilliant literary analyses to the lives of its readers that has made Mensonge the most popular and enduring of Girard’s books.

    Not that Girard’s personal charisma was ever absent from his writing; he remained throughout his career a thinker accessible to the educated non-specialist. In that sense he was faithful to the religious roots of his scholarship, writing for his reader not as an academic scholar but as a moral being, tempted by sin and desire and seeking the path of salvation.

    Girard’s apocalyptic strain became dominant at the end of his life in his Achever Clausewitz (2007), written as a dialogue with Benoît Chantre, and inspired in part by the West’s brutal awakening on 9/11/2001 from the complacent illusion of the “end of history.” In the ominous tone of this work, Girard returned to the original Christian conception of secular history, within which Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection were understood as signaling the demise of worldliness in the terms of the original conception of the “end of history,” the Last Judgment. But as Girard was well aware, this vision can do little for a human community that hopes to survive into the future. This helps us to understand the decline of Christianity’s influence in the modern world, in contrast with the disquieting success of the openly resentful strains of Islam and “post-colonial” ideologies.

    The very existence of Chantre’s monumental biography (865 pages of text, 1148 in all) is a tribute that could only be paid to a larger than life cultural figure. Chantre’s dedication to Girard in his later years is made clear in the final chapters of his text, culminating in their collaboration on Girard’s last major publication—an expanded edition of which appeared in 2022. Few thinkers have had the strength to inspire such intelligent devotion. Even the longueurs in some of Chantre’s later chapters must be appreciated as spirited defenses of Girard’s ideas against his detractors. This is a volume of which its author can be deservedly proud.

    2 – Pour René

    It goes without saying that René Girard taught me a great deal, and I cannot imagine my intellectual life independently from his guidance and influence. Thus although I cannot help but regret the increasing distance of his later years, these negative moments cannot make me forget my gratitude for his mentorship and encouragement throughout my career.

    Had my visiting professorship at Hopkins in 1978 been successful, our relationship might well have been much richer. I have always attributed the real cause of this failure to an instinct that told me—as a similar instinct had told Girard to leave France and make his career in the US—to avoid the mimetic intensity of the Eastern university world and pursue my interests in the relative isolation of UCLA.

    My comments above and the preceding Chronicle have made clear my admiration for the devoted and intelligent effort that Benoît Chantre put into this biography, which not only reveals in considerable depth the important facts of Girard’s vie et oeuvre but provides objective evidence of why his work is historically and intellectual significant.

    But it seemed to me appropriate to conclude this second Chronicle with a gesture of tribute to my directeur de thèse by dedicating to him some reflections on the originary anthropology that I began to conceive in 1978 during the semester spent in Baltimore at his invitation.

    On returning to Los Angeles, I began developing the thesis I had previewed (with Girard’s encouragement) in a short presentation just before my departure from Baltimore. The result was published by the UC Press in 1981 as The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation.

    This volume was followed over the years by a number of others, but since publishing a shortened and updated version of the original book in 2019, my theoretical insights have been expressed chiefly in these Chronicles, and while my brain is still more or less functional, it seems to me that it is time, over forty years after the original publication, for me to provide a synthesis of generative anthropology/GA (a term that I began to use in 1985 with the publication, also at UC Press, of The End of Culture) to serve as a point of departure for anyone interested in understanding the theory in as mature a form that I have been able to give it. GA has certainly become broader in scope than a theory of language origin, although I would still insist that in order truly to understand what is specifically human, one must begin with a minimal hypothesis that provides a criterion for the necessity of language, on the principle that in matters of evolution, necessity is the mother of invention.

    This requires, in particular, setting aside or “bracketing” the philosophical and psychological doctrines about human thought and consciousness that have emerged over the centuries. In so doing, I feel I have been more loyal to Girard’s originary intuition of the centrality of mimetic desire than he was himself. For the point of departure I provide for the originary hypothesis is simply that proto-humans, having reached a certain level of intelligence driven by their increasing mimetic ability, were forced to find a solution to the problem of mimetic rivalry, to which Girard gave its name.

    If Girard refused to understand my hypothesis of language origin, it was at least in part because I did not think to explain it to him in his own intellectual vocabulary. It is important to make clear that my rejection of his hypothesis of an “emissary murder” at the origin of the human in no way implied a rejection of the significance of his fundamental intuition concerning mimetic desire. On the contrary, I believe that by making the “Derridean” element of deferral (différance), which is in effect already present in the néant within the Sartrean pour-soi, the means of converting the potentially conflictive appropriation of the object of contention into its designation, which can be shared unproblematically by all, the pointing gesture that was no doubt the originary sign—a gesture which as I have noted is not used even by chimpanzees as a sign in this sense—allows the original mimetic conflict to reach a successful resolution in what Homer would call an “equal feast” among the participants.

    Where inhibition in the Pavlovian sense provides the individual with an automatic safety valve for a potentially dangerous stimulus, deferral includes a recognition of the “interdividual” conflict implicit in shared desires. If I have often referred in this context to the model dilemma of whether to take “the last canapé,” it is because, however quasi-automatically we pull back before reaching it, this deferral of action is very different from the mindless reflex that pulls our hand back from a hot surface. And its very minimality as an act of judgment suggests the liminal character of the first sign as an emergent mode of behavior.

    Although it is self-evident that human language as the “solution” to mimetic desire is not an individual trait like the opposable thumb, throughout its history, philosophy’s point of departure has always been the individual mind, as though its dependence on the human community were a mere epiphenomenon.

    Discussions of human consciousness that begin with an isolated individual always remain solipsistic at their core. Girard rejected the originary hypothesis as a “social contract” without realizing that by neglecting the originary grounding of the human community in semiotic language, he made it impossible to offer a minimal theory of the human as such—including the phenomenon of the sacred, with regard to which I have often cited Roy Rappaport’s statement in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999; see in particular Chronicle 282) that language and religion were “coeval,” born in the same moment.

    I need not repeat here my critiques of the often absurdly solipsistic scenarios of the birth of human consciousness. Nor does it suffice to emphasize that the human child learns language in human society rather than “instinctually.” The fact that thinking in the human sense requires language, which is to say, virtual dialogue with the human community, for any more elaborate intuitions than that of Kohler’s ape using a pole to knock down the bananas, is simply taken for granted and then forgotten. And with it, we lose the sense of language as a human invention in the context of solving a crucial problem, and come to see it rather as a beneficial discovery, as though, like mathematics, language were a self-contained system independent of human thought that at a certain point came to be “downloaded” for use by human brains.

    No doubt the manipulation of numbers implies constraints that are not self-evident consequences of the act of counting, but that must be discovered—which even then is far from justifying the typical scientistic attitude that the universe is in itself “constructed from” mathematical entities. But in any case, language is very different; its rules and laws are by no means inherent features that humans “discover,” but patterns derived from their exercise of speech and writing. That the human individual is able to think, that is, use internal language to develop arguments that can be used to manipulate all aspects of external reality, does not make this individual a self-substantive creation.

    And just as the originary function of language (and, I would add, in the spirit of Rappaport, that of the sacred) was to defer the conflicts arising from mimetic desire, so this remains the central function of all the cultural institutions that human communities have built on their basis over the millennia. Unlike inhibition, deferral is conscious, an act of judgment—with the unsettling consequence that, as emerged in Eden, its sacred demands may come to be disobeyed. Language and the sacred as means of deferring conflict do not abolish conflict; on the contrary, the success of each deferral allows the potential danger of mimetic desire to increase.

    Thus Girard was well advised to remind us in his final writings that we are perpetually under the apocalyptic threat of self-destruction that we have created for ourselves. But humanity’s only possible response to the threat of nuclear apocalypse, as it had been in the beginning from that of community breakdown and starvation, remains that realized by the first human word pronounced in response to a “sacred” intuition: deferral of conflict.

    Our celebrations of communal unity, however welcome, are always fragile, and the resentments they defer return in ever new guises. In times of peace we grow soft and unable to conceive of the horrors that war would make us bear. We bewail the decline of Christianity while witnessing the (hopefully temporary) triumph of its caricature in the victim-worship of Wokism—even when the “victims” perpetrate the barbarities of October 7. For a great moral idea is no more invulnerable to such travesty than the community that gave birth to it. The postwar era’s relative stability increasingly appears to us as the prelude to a new “time of troubles” with the potential of unimaginable destruction from which “starting over” can only be conceived in science fiction.

    As Girard’s final work made clear, la montée aux extrêmes in the age of ultimate weaponry gives renewed force to our eternal hope that, in the belief that we inaugurated our species with violence, we will always find a way to turn violence to our own ends.

    Would that it sufficed to maintain the West’s self-confidence to believe, however irrationally, in an originary victime émissaire… But Genesis offers us the model of a more realistic perspective. The sacred, by deferring violence, makes future violence inevitable. But given that God allowed human society to start over after the Flood, and then let it survive the Tower of Babel, we can only act in the faith that humanity will be permitted to defer once more the fatal montée aux extrêmes and allow our human world still another reprieve.

  • Benoît Chantre’s “René Girard: Biographie”(Grasset, 2023) — Part I

    In memoriam René Girard

    As sometimes happens with foreign books sent as “free samples” to avoid paying customs fees, Grasset was obliged to send more than one copy of this volume before one finally reached me at the beginning of February. Given its significance, I promised Benoît that I would reserve Chronicle 800 for my discussion of it. This first Chronicle will discuss what amounts to the part of Girard’s life until a little after 1966, when I obtained my PhD and ended my student days, leaving the later years for another Chronicle or two.

    And 1966 was coincidentally the year when in October, Girard organized and directed, along with a couple of colleagues, the historically significant colloquium at Johns Hopkins, “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which led to the institution in the US of what came to be known as “French theory”—as an ironic result of which Girard’s work was largely neglected to the profit of deconstruction. For it was at this conference that Jacques Derrida became for a few decades an academic rock star whose influence went far beyond Comp Lit and language departments—and rather suddenly went into decline in the mid-1990s, more or less at the time of the “end of history.” Today, Derrida’s name is seldom mentioned in academic circles, whereas Girard’s often shows up in the press in reference to scapegoating, and a year or two ago even appeared in a New York Times crossword puzzle as the answer to “Theoretician of mimetic desire.” Girard passed away in 2015, but well-funded associations of Girardians continue to exist in France, the US, and elsewhere.

    Among many other details of Girard’s life, Chantre’s narrative revealed to me what began as a strangely “mediated” relationship between Girard and Derrida—the major and minor inspirers of Generative Anthropology. Chantre analyzes at length the course of this quasi-master-slave relationship, which at first inspired Derrida to write a near-Girardian analysis in his 1968 essay “La Pharmacie de Platon” dealing with the pharmakos or scapegoat figure in Plato’s Phaedrus; but as Derrida’s celebrity grew in the US, his interest in Girard did not endure. Learning this, I better understood why, when in 1998, Anthropoetics ran a special issue on Deconstruction while Derrida was visiting at UC Irvine, he politely declined to participate or speak with us.

    At the time of obtaining my PhD I cannot say that I had evolved a personal system of criticism, nor would I have called myself a disciple of Girard. Yet I had much appreciated his Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (in English, Deceit, Desire and the Novel), which remains in many ways his masterpiece. My dissertation, reflecting Girard’s characteristic opposition between mensonge and vérité, discussed, in largely Freudian terms, Flaubert’s teen-aged romantic writings, indicating the trajectory of disillusionment that would characterize his post-romantic maturity. Thus its substance, as well as its title, Discovery of Illusion (UC Press, 1970), had a distinctly Girardian flavor.

    Even later when I wrote The Origin of Language (UCP: 1981) I had not yet conceived the intellectual program that would become Generative Anthropology. The book was focused on presenting the simplest conceivable origin of language in syntactic terms, so that the original ostensive sign was hypothesized to give rise first to the imperative, and then to the declarative/interrogative as the result of a “failed imperative.” As for the occasion on which the first sign would be produced, I assumed that, in terms of Girard’s idea, expressed in his La violence et le sacré (Grasset, 1971), the human began with the “emissary murder” of a member of the group, but that in any case, this first event of human language would occur on the occasion of dividing up the body of a sacrificed victim (whether human or not), the key point being that, in order to preclude mimetic violence, the “animal” act of appropriation would be aborted or deferred, and the original gesture of appropriation become a pointing or ostensive gesture: the first linguistic sign.

    As my article “Differences” (MLN 96, Spring 1981) already made clear, GA’s core idea was “the deferral of violence through representation,” combining the watchwords of both thinkers. I recruited Derrida’s idea of deferral (différance, a creative misspelling of the normal différence that, as he pointed out, could not be heard but only seen in writing) from its original point that by deferring (différer) one’s choice of a word, one has thereby the possibility of choosing among different words in a paradigm, e.g., of colors, shapes, etc. That may well be true, but his metaphysical vocabulary prevented Derrida from noting that the primary deferring act is the sign itself as an aborted act of appropriation, that is, renouncing the attempt to possess the object with its inevitable threat of igniting mimetic violence, and thus merely designating or representing the object, along with one’s renunciation, to the others in the group.

    Benoît Chantre’s masterful biography, published in Girard’s centenary year of 2023, touches in great detail on every aspect of Girard’s personal and intellectual development. It is grounded in years of painstaking research, which included conversations with many of Girard’s colleagues and students, travel through the American countryside in search of material at the various universities where Girard taught, as well as to his home town of Avignon, where Jean Girard, René’s father, had been a distinguished medieval scholar, the director of the library at the Palais des Papes (as well as a ghost-writer of René’s early thesis on medieval marriage).

    The care and tenacity with which Chantre defends Girard’s memory and his intellectual contributions—against the Derrideans in particular—is a magnificent and well-deserved tribute to a truly significant thinker whose work has still not received the attention it deserves. The book analyzes in great detail the intellectual atmosphere of the years it discusses, with many exhaustive reports of conversations and exchanges that shed light on Girard’s writings. We witness the density of his intellectual relations in Paris and at the same time his preference for making his career abroad. I may have been Girard’s “first serious student,” but I learned much from Chantre about his career and his relationships with other thinkers. This product of his intelligent devotion makes Girard truly come alive, both as a personality and as a thinker, and I can imagine how much pleasure this biography will bring to his widow and children, as well as his many friends and admirers.

    Born on Christmas day in 1923 (whence his middle name Noël), Girard was a youth during the German occupation, but as a member of a respectable Catholic family in Avignon, which was part of the at first non-occupied Etat français a k a Vichy, he does not appear to have had any significant dealings with the Nazis. After the war, he and some friends put on an art show in Avignon in 1947 that included many of the major artists of the period, including Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall, and during this period he even had a fairly serious liaison with a well-known actress, Sylvie Monfort.

    But after having renounced his arty ambitions and gone through the program at L’école des Chartes in Paris, René declined to follow in his father’s footsteps as a medieval philologist, and in 1947 he went off to Bloomington, Indiana to study at Indiana University, where he received a PhD in 1950 with a doctoral dissertation on “American Opinion of France, 1940-1943.” (When I was later appointed as Assistant Professor at IU in 1967, the chairman, Samuel Will, told me semi-proudly that he had been the only person ever to “fire” Girard, who had not obtained a regular teaching position there.) It was also at Indiana University that he met his wife Martha, at the time a student librarian.

    Chantre makes clear why Girard, without ever renouncing his French roots, and not always appreciative of what he saw of American political conflicts, was nevertheless ultimately more at home in the US than in France—and would become perhaps the only member of the Académie Française to make his entire career in a non-French-speaking country.

    Chantre’s book also clarifies for me why I parted company with Girard, as an American who could never quite become comfortable with the language of metaphysics even in the unpretentious and evangelical mode in which Girard employed it. Although Derrida was deliberately arch and paradoxical, to the point where I stopped reading his writings after Glas in 1974, whereas Girard was always readable and even eloquent, Chantre’s many quotations remind us of the curious similarity of their rhetoric. Hence although I would in principle take Girard’s side in their dispute, and certainly find less than noble Derrida’s refusal, noted by Chantre, to cite Girard’s name in his writings despite the early expressions of his debt to him, I take their obvious rhetorical similarity as a sign that in order truly to leave the metaphysical domain behind for a humanistic anthropology, a radical simplification was necessary, such as could be accomplished only by putting aside both philosophical/metaphysical and Biblical/prophetic rhetoric and starting over from the beginning with a pragmatic hypothesis trimmed down by Ockham’s razor. Although at first expressing encouragement, Girard never really made an effort to understand my hypothesis, interpreting its refusal to begin with “originary violence” as proof that it was merely an update of “social contract theory.”

    To provide a typical sample of Girard’s quasi-evangelical rhetoric, I have selected a passage from “Symétrie et dissymétrie dans le mythe d’OEdipe” Critique n°249 (Feb. 1968), cited on p. 480 of the Biographie:

    La vérité et le mensonge surgissent ensemble, également partagés entre les adversaires. Plus on avance dans le mythe, plus la symétrie est éclatante, plus le besoin de la nier se fait irrésistible. Tous les lecteurs du mythe, tous ses interprètes éprouvent ce besoin. Tôt ou tard, le bien et le mal, le vrai et le faux doivent s’incarner en d’infaillibles champions. La tentation d’éliminer la symétrie en expulsant l’émissaire est irrésistible.

    Truth and lie emerge together, equally divided between the adversaries. The further one advances in the myth, the more the symmetry is striking, the more the need to deny it becomes irresistible. All the readers of the myth, all its interpreters feel this need. Sooner or later, good and evil, truth and falsity must become embodied in unfailing champions. The temptation to eliminate this symmetry by expelling the emissary/scapegoat is irresistible. (my translation)

    Such conflations of opposites, which claim to clarify a false opposition by converting it into a true one, can be convincing only so many times, before one realizes that in describing the problem, they are also describing themselves. I see this as proof that the real problem in the overcoming of metaphysics which all these post-Hegelian thinkers are seeking must be traced to the sublime fideistic gesture on which Western civilization has been based since Constantine: the Christian revelation. Girard’s own “conversion” in 1959 to his childhood faith was, as Chantre makes clear, the decisive event of his intellectual as well as his personal life. Already married in a Protestant ceremony, René and Martha remarried in a Catholic church. (And I well remember a conversation in 1995 with Martha, who would call me her “fils adoptif,” in which she expressed a gentle impatience with René’s religiosity.)

    GA’s minimal conception of the sacred by no means implies that the fideism that defines Christianity is “false,” let alone “wrong.” But it does remind us that we must start from a minimal point of departure; and Christianity is anything but minimal. Girard’s conception was that humanity as such (without any need for language, which when pressed he actually considered a secondary development) is born from the breakdown of a given hominin community into a condition of reciprocal hostility, a war of all against all, which is finally resolved by the quasi-arbitrary choice of an “emissary victim”—someone marginal, perhaps with a limp (or “sore feet” like Oedipus)—who by a simple process of contagion is chosen as the collective scapegoat and lynched by the others, bringing peace by discharging the violent potential of the entire community. Girard claimed to have found evidence for this theory of origin in his study of the myths of elementary as well as Classical societies, although his only evidence for it was in the myths themselves and in practices such as the Pharmakeia in Athens mentioned above, brushing aside the fact that such practices could only be attested in hierarchical societies, and was never illustrated in Paleolithic cave paintings, in which only animals are hunted.

    Certainly GA’s minimal hypothesis has nothing of the sexiness of a communal lynching. Its minimality makes it almost invisible; in lieu of discharging all their mimetic aggression on a member of the group, the members of the community defer their appropriative behavior around the central victim of the hunt and thereby avoid conflict, allowing the community to celebrate what Homer called “an equal feast.” And clearly, even if after the murder they divided the scapegoat up and ate him, this would hardly be a sustainable procedure for a prehistoric tribe. No doubt Derrida’s notion of différance had a very different point of departure from my own, but both exemplify in language the same phenomenon of not acting on instinct, of experiencing not, like an animal, an inhibition but an interdiction, which in Sartre’s terms adds the open space of the néant to the unfree, “cramped” en-soi and converts it into the free pour-soi—in other words, humanity.

    I very much regret that Girard never let me try to convince him of this minimal origin, which would certainly not have required him to reject the basic thrust of his anthropology—but would no doubt have obliged him to situate it not in prehistory but in history, as the New Testament explicitly does. John wrote, “In the beginning was the logos,” but that for John, Jesus embodied the logos from the beginning of time is secondary to the central truth of Christianity: that, unlike the God of the Torah, Jesus appeared on Earth in historical time as a living and dying individual in a mature, literate society. Christianity is dependent, as Judaism is not, on belief in a set of events of which some were inconceivable in worldly terms—virgin birth, Resurrection—while others were situated in concrete historical reality. Whether or not resurrected, Jesus was indubitably a real person who suffered a real crucifixion.

    Deferral is not annihilation, and mimetic passions that are deferred remain as potential sources of violence whose destructiveness grows with the evolution of society. And indeed, Girard’s Christian interpretation of novels and tragedies as myths of transcended violence is very much apposite to the societies in and for which these works were created. But none of this requires that we derive the emergence of the human from an originary experience of collective murder. This indeed strikes me as contrary to the very spirit of Judeo-Christian religion, which interprets Jesus’ “coming” in the middle of history as inspiring a New Testament commemorating this late solution to the human curse of mimetic desire, one following which the (presumably brief) remainder of human history will be experienced in the awaiting of Jesus’ “second Coming” at the biblical equivalent of Hegel’s “end of history.”

    To be continued…

  • The Evolutionary Emergence of the Human

    For Michael Caplan

    Over my thirty years or so of Internet postings of these Chronicles, I have acquired a couple of pen pals among fellow Jews slightly younger than myself able to relate to what I have called my “Bronx romantic” persona.

    Michael Caplan is a writer interested in Jungian thought, whose particular concern is with the work of Wolfgang Giegerich and James Hillman, who have sought to develop Jung’s system of “depth psychology” in rigorous terms. Given the therapeutic origins of such conceptualizations of the human psyche, I think they are best judged on their effectiveness in dealing with their patients’ mental problems, but of course any such theories also have broader theoretical implications.

    Without getting into the specific issues raised by Jungian theory, I was struck by a passage in a text by Philip Kime that Michael sent me; this is a preparatory draft for his article in Essays on “The Soul’s Logical Life” in the Work of Wolfgang Giegerich: Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority, Routledge, 2023, which also includes an essay by Caplan himself. Unfortunately the excerpts below are not from a “quotable” published text; I refer to it solely for the basic idea it contains.

    First, this statement excluding evolutionary thinking from what Kime calls “psychology proper,” which is more specifically depth psychology in the Jungian sense; I am sure that Kime has no desire to quibble about the pre-linguistic aspects of what is studied in psychology departments:

    My intention is to elucidate as best I can the element(s) of psychology proper which establish a domain outside of the evolutionary model. (my emphasis)

    The heart of his argument is found in the following paragraph:

    The reason that we must have a structural approach is that the battle over content and origins has already been lost. It would be a brave, perhaps simply foolish man who would challenge the evolutionary model on its home territory. To perhaps try to tell a story of the genesis of the psychological which progresses entirely outside of modern evolutionary theory is a hopeless task. There is simply too much evidence that much of what we call psychological (even properly psychological in the Giegerich sense) is intimately related by successive stages to phenomena which have credible, well researched and often genetically supported models. Evolutionary theory has a monopoly–a rapidly growing monopoly–on genesis stories of all aspects of human life; and I really do mean all aspects. It is a mistake, in my opinion, to try to reserve in principle a space for genesis stories of aspects of human life which one would like to protect from evolutionary explanation for perhaps sentimental or half-formed theoretical reasons. Give it all up, the genesis stories are a lost cause, they were always already won by empirical, data-driven science since its inception and it has simply been just a matter of the calculations catching up with the idea, since at least the time of Leibniz and Newton. (my emphasis)

    Being only superficially familiar with this domain of psychological reflection, I can only speak of it from the standpoint of Generative Anthropology, whose humanistic position with respect to evolution it flatly contradicts. But to read between the lines, this denial seems to me based not so much on the substance of the question as on what the author sees as empirical science’s conviction, right or wrong, but above all, unanimously held within the scientific community, that it alone has the right to talk about evolutionary phenomena. “Give it all up, the genesis stories are a lost cause” is not the way one presents a rational argument, but a reaction to an overwhelming preponderance of opinion that it would be a waste of time to challenge—for example, if one wants to publish in the standard professional organs. I take into account here that this text is still a draft and that in writing for publication the author might well either avoid such claims or express them in more “academic” terms.

    Now as readers of these Chronicles must be aware, the whole point of GA is to deal directly with the question of evolution, of “genesis stories,” as what I believe is the only way to understand the core of human “psychology” in the sense in which the term is used here, that is, as a psychology that takes into account the human use of language and all that it implies. No doubt to read the literature on language origin, which I have done over the years, (see e.g. Chronicles 175 and 627) is a frustrating task precisely because empirical science cannot propose “genesis stories” of the sort capable of providing understanding of the phenomenon of human language and its implications, including notably the intuition of the sacred.

    Although the appearance of language and the sacred must be described as revelatory, the full consciousness of its implications cannot be assumed to have accompanied it from the beginning, and some of my early statements of the hypothesis that suggested it corresponded to a singular historical event are not sustainable. But once the sign has been discovered, a fuller consciousness of it, which could not be present at the outset, would be bound to develop, precisely because of the element of deferral/différance that must be present from the outset in order that the sign have its peace-bringing effect. Whence not merely the heuristic usefulness but the necessity that the originary hypothesis present itself in terms that in the actual historical sequence of events cannot all have occurred simultaneously. For the important thing, what will select this behavior as against others, is its success in permitting an orderly system of distribution that does away with the difficulties of the old serial one; and whatever the degree of improvement realized by the first use of the sign, it will necessarily lead to a consciousness of signing (as opposed to signaling), and subsequently to something like the sequence of syntactical evolution proposed in my 1981 The Origin of Language.

    I have every sympathy for Professor Kime’s position, having read a good number of the articles on the subject of the same sort that he has. I attempted around the turn of the century to correspond with Terrence Deacon, the author of The Symbolic Species, and was struck by what amounted to his disavowal of the chapter in which he speculated that language may have originated in the context of a marriage-like coupling, which would become necessary on the one hand as neotenous children became more dependent on maternal care, and on the other, as the improvement of weaponry would result in longer hunting expeditions, keeping couples separated and making increasingly necessary a formal mark of their union. Obviously the originary hypothesis is “more minimal” than this, but what struck me in Deacon’s reply was that when pressed he viewed this chapter—although the longest in the book—as an unserious speculation rather than a hypothesis, and by implication was not interested in learning of any attempts to sharpen it.

    Nor, to my knowledge, has anyone in the field done so since. No one has challenged my hypothesis, but all have tacitly agreed to ignore it. And reading Kime’s text makes it clear that the slot of “evolutionary” approaches to language origin has indeed been fully occupied by these empirical studies that take no position on the great cultural issues raised by language that define “the human” in its uniqueness and vast difference from other living creatures. Whence the necessity invoked by Kime of separating psychology as the study of human (self)-consciousness from any question of natural selection.

    But from my standpoint, au contraire, what is essential about human language is indeed the kernel revealed in the hypothetical originary event, however messily this “event” may have been exemplified in reality. For once the collective emission of the sign permitted a more or less “equal” and peaceful division of the desired object, it would be “selected,” by not a genetic, but a behavioral process. And this original selection having taken place, the process of natural selection would continue to operate, as it still does (or would in the absence of DEI) to favor those whose use of signs is most skillful.

    What is more, the scenic nature of language and its coevality with the sacred are phenomena that only a minimal hypothesis can grasp in their emergent state. I freely admit that I am far from having developed the full implications of the scenic element of human culture, but GA provides a minimal basis for a new perspective on sociology focused on the phenomenon alluded to by such terms as “frame” or “scenario,” but never grasped at its origin in the scenic nature of all “cultural” interactions among humans, from formal ceremonies and rituals to casual conversations.

    As I pointed out in an essay a few years ago (“The Screenic” in Mimetic Theory and Film, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) the extraordinary impact of the introduction of smartphones on social relations can only be understood as a demonstration of the effortless passage from the scenic to what I called the screenic, beginning with the Lumière brothers’ first cinema showings in 1895 and now available to nearly every individual at nearly every moment of his existence. People are glued to their cell phones because the screen shows them a pocket-sized version of the scene of human culture.

    It goes without saying that I have not sought to draw from the originary hypothesis the foundations of what could be called a “depth psychology.” The problems of individual self-consciousness of the sort that gave rise to the psychoanalytic movement cannot reasonably be addressed in the absence of a personal, therapeutic familiarity with these pathologies that mere reading can hardly provide. Thus I would not venture to speculate as to whether GA would suggest a new focus for such explorations, although the idea that depth psychology might find inspiration in the originary hypothesis is one that I certainly have no desire to dismiss. As I see it, GA is indeed a “new way of thinking,” and I can only welcome scholars and thinkers who attempt to apply it in new domains.

    In the therapeutic domain, Girard’s focus on the mimetic basis of desire has certainly had some success, of which Michel Oughourlian’s psychiatric practice and writings (see in particular his The Puppet of Desire, The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession and Hypnosis, tr. Eugene Webb, Stanford UP, 1991) provide a good example. When dealing with a problematic desire, the watchword cherchez le médiateur is definitely a useful starting point.

    Both René Girard and myself began our careers as professors of literature because, as I have explained elsewhere, for a generation or two in the postwar era the study of literary texts became a if not the privileged domain in which what we may call the foundations of the human soul could best be observed. Thus the anthropological doctrines that we subsequently derived from our literary studies were by no means external to their original object; in the era of “French theory,” as previously to a lesser extent in those of the “New Criticism” or “Russian Formalism,” the study of literary texts sought to grasp the relationship between the human individual, community, and world, often along with the sense of the sacred that unites them, through the explication of works judged to possess enduring anthropological value.

    The decline of this enterprise with the end of the Cold War and the illusory history-ending triumph of Western civilization cannot be explained as a mere matter of fashion. No doubt the problems of Western culture have reached a stage of crisis at which we no longer have the time to seek for their solutions in textual exegesis. But as a consequence, I would maintain all the more emphatically that our originary anthropology grounded on Girard’s insight into the key human problematic of mimetic desire offers our civilization, and humanity in general, the best chance of escaping the nightmare of the “end of history.”

  • Delphine Horvilleur’s Ánti-Semitism Revisited’

    For Gabriel

    My step-grandson Gabriel Danon recently recommended to me Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur’s Réflexions sur la question antisémite (Grasset & Fasquelle, 2019), translated into English as Anti-Semitism Revisited: How the Rabbis Made Sense of Hatred (MacLehose Press, 2022). The book’s chapters discuss a number of varieties of antisemitism:

    1. Family rivalry as in Esau vs Jacob; the author avoids the touchier enmity between the descendants of Ishmael and Isaac.
    2. Civilizational rivalry, centered on a rabbinical tale that contrasts two figures: a judeophilic Roman emperor and a counselor of the previous reign who, condemned to death by fire, is saved by a matron who advises him to circumcise himself—his name, Ketya Bar Shalom means literally “cut, son of peace,” a paradoxical rapprochement between the “cut” of circumcision and Shalom which means “peace” but also connotes totality.
    3. Sexual rivalry/identity, where the “femininity” of the Jew is linked to the “castration” of circumcision, as well as to the Jew’s generally passive role in Christian (and Muslim) society before 1948.
    4. The Jew’s “chosenness” or election, which the author puns on by referring to antisemitism as an “electoral contest.”
    5. And finally, the effect of Israel, which contains a section headed “The White Jew and the Dirty Jew”; it would be interesting to see how the author would update this part with respect to the experience of October 7.

    As a non-specialist, I found Rabbi Horvilleur’s probing and often witty references to Talmudic sources of great interest, and although her vision of antisemitism has a different focus from mine, it provided a welcome occasion for further reflection on the subject, in particular in emphasizing the paradoxical element of Hebrew “firstness” without which it could not have come into being.

    Since unlike this learned rabbi I have no pretensions of being a Talmudic scholar, one might say that I had no business collaborating on a book claiming to offer a new perspective on it (Adam Katz and Eric Gans. The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism. Leiden: Brill, 2015). I would say in my defense that humanistic anthropology is characterized by the fact that it is indeed open to “amateurs”; ideally, amateurs should collaborate with real scholars—and although Adam is not a rabbinical scholar, he is a teacher and scholar of Hebrew. Unlike the hard sciences, GA deals with materials that are never “technical” because they concern matters that in principle every human being can judge. For they should be considered matters of the soul, matters that concern the sacred: the sense of moral rightness that we experience as an external will, not simply the collective will of the community, but a transcendent one—whence the Hebrew intuition of the One God. The human sciences must indeed make use of mathematical techniques and technical knowledge; moral judgments depend on facts, and facts are anchored in measurable reality. But as we have seen with respect to the origin of language, for which professional linguists have never produced a credible theory of origin, only a humanistic approach that seeks to understand language as an emergent behavior, one whose first appearance must have occurred as the solution to a problem rather than as a gratuitous addition to our intellectual capacities, can offer a plausible hypothesis of language origin.

    The similarity of antisemitism to language is not evident; the latter is a universal and necessary element of any definition of the human, the former, a historical phenomenon which, however widespread and long-lived, can hardly be called a human universal. Yet there too, our understanding is stymied by the difficulty of finding a global explanation for the variety of often self-contradictory manifestations of this “oldest hatred.” And I believe that there too, the solution—which must deal, if not with the emergence of the fundamental components of the human, nonetheless with a longstanding and apparently endemic social pathology of what still remains the world’s dominant culture—can be found only by adopting a perspective that seeks the minimal core of this behavior rather than attempting to encompass the great variety of its manifestations. Rabbi Horvilleur’s approach is exploratory rather than minimalistic, but her book points to a richer core conception of antisemitism that can be seen as usefully fleshing out the bare-bones approach taken in Adam’s and my book.

    Rabbi Horvilleur’s primary point is that in the world of Western/Abrahamic civilization, expulsion of “the Jew” has often been judged necessary to permit the rest of a given subset of this civilization to live as a unified totality (with the reminder that the Hebrew word Shalom that means “peace” has as its core meaning the notion of completeness). The presence of the Jew is symptomatically experienced in Western society as a mortal threat to this completeness, whence the logic of the Final Solution and its Islamist equivalents.

    This and the other important themes of antisemitism: the “femininity” of the Jew, his “secret” power, his ambiguous hiddenness and egregious visibility—and in today’s simplified cast of characters, his “whiteness,” which is both more primordial and at the same time less pure (given its Semitic element) than that of “ordinary” Caucasians—must all be subordinated to the main theme of antisemitism, the subject of the book’s penultimate chapter, which is the Jew’s chosenness.

    On the one hand the “cut” Jew is defined as deficient, supposedly needing to bleed Christian children to compensate for his deficit of blood/life force, but on the other, he claims to be a member of a people uniquely chosen by God. And whereas many other peoples—ultimately, each in its way—have made this claim, the Jew’s is the only one that troubles us, given that no one in the Abrahamic religious tradition can deny either Judaism’s founding antiquity with respect to the other members of this trinity or its ancestral continuity with the Jews of the present.

    Genocide was not born—nor did it die—with the Holocaust. But what was unique to the “Final Solution” was the sense that alone among all the world’s peoples, the Jews are felt to prevent the rest of human society from living in harmony. Whether that harmony be described in egalitarian terms, as it would be today, or in those privileging the Master Race, is a secondary aspect of the vision of a harmonious totality, a Shalom, that somehow the sole presence of Jews obstructs—a totality that cannot in fact be conceived as a reality, but only as the Promised Land of the Endlösung.

    As I pointed out in Chronicles 405 and 406, monotheism is on the surface perfectly egalitarian. Doing away with rivalries among various gods, it postulates the One God, the same sacred, for all. But at the same time, it is an idea that, however many times it may have been conceived, has only once in the West taken root and spread beyond its original source. And if the Hebrew conception of God provides the model of the sacred for other peoples, then accepting the One God of the Hebrews means accepting a secondary role in the transmission of the sacred: there is only one God, but it was the Hebrews to whom he was first revealed. This is the paradox of firstness applied to the very core of humanity’s spiritual reality.

    The hostility of the Romans, or that of Haman in the Book of Esther, can be understood as a desire to eliminate those who believe not merely that their God is more powerful than all other gods, but that He is uniquely real and the others, mere idols. And even this “pagan” variety of antisemitism, however violent, is benign in comparison to the hatred that has often been generated in Christian society with respect to its Jewish “elder brothers,” who even as they reject the Christian Trinity cannot be denied their originary role in the One God’s revelation. And if it may be said that the Holocaust to a large extent put an end—or at any rate, a long pause—to traditional Christian antisemitism, the founding of Israel gave birth to a newly virulent form of Islamist antisemitism, spawned by the first modern Jewish settlements in Palestine, and emerging in full flower in the October 7 massacre.

    In contrast with Christianity, which accepts the Hebrew Tanakh as its “Old Testament,” the Muslim solution of denying the priority of either Testament, claiming that they were partially inspired drafts of Allah’s true revelation that would be given only in the Koran, could be effective only in the context of the Arabs’ marginality with respect to the great classical cultures of the Middle East. But as we learned with the shock of 9/11 and similar incidents elsewhere, the “post-colonial” revolt against the West has found in Islam its most powerful spiritual source. What we viewed on 10/7 as shameless barbarism was experienced by its perpetrators as a supreme act of faith, and it cannot be denied that most of them would not hesitate to give their own lives in its affirmation.

    Similar are the Islamists’ shameless denials of the historical priority of what are undeniably their own religion’s primary sources, as in the focus on the “defilement” of the Temple Mount or El Aqsa by the presence of the Jews whose ancestral temple stood on that very spot. No historical evidence can withstand the power of the sacred; as with Muslim Holocaust denial, such acts of faith are invulnerable to any attempt at “dialectic.”

    As the exemplary Old-Testament tale of antisemitism, the point of the Book of Esther is that hatred of the Jews is not inescapable, that the Queen’s influence with the King can effectively counter Haman’s. It is rather Haman who becomes the scapegoat in the story, and provides a demonstration of Jew-hatred’s ultimate impotence—the theme of Purim, the most joyous of Jewish holidays. But the Persian religion was precisely not derived from Judaism; tolerance of the Jews involved no acceptation of implicit secondarity. The phenomenon of antisemitism cannot be understood independently of the post-Jewish Abrahamic religions that have promoted it, and the hegemony of Judeo-Christian Western civilization is incomprehensible without it.

    The analogies examined by Rabbi Horvilleur of primogeniture, civilizational conflict, sexual rivalry, and the stumbling block of the election of the “chosen people,” are all metaphoric expressions of a historic priority that from its origin, humanity has had to surround with sacred différance to prevent its becoming a source of conflict. What is condemned as the Jews’ scandalously arrogant claim to election is always already an election in the minds of those who condemn it.

    Thus the Jew occupies a “mental space” uncomfortably analogous to that of the sacred, a space implicit in the Christian’s and Muslim’s beliefs and, to the extent that Western culture dominates the world, in the sacred itself. (And it is curious that with all the passion that has gone into post-colonialism over several generations, Islam, the religion that has become its privileged expression is, despite its radical form’s hostility to its Abrahamic ancestors, nonetheless a religion of what we may call the Abrahamic civilization that dominates the civilized world. For once the idea of monotheism takes root, as it did only with the advent of Hebrew religion, it conquers all in its path.)

    Buddhism, as we have seen, does not contradict this monotheism so much as turn away from its premise in desire; to use the vocabulary of GA, Buddhism treats its notion of différance not simply as a deferral to insure peaceful sharing, but as an implicitly permanent state. The Buddhist Adam may taste of the apple, but he learns to put away desire for its savor. And Buddhist spiritual exercises do not contradict the fundamental ontology of the Abrahamic sacred so much as modify its emphasis; the human self, the creature of language and the sacred, obliges itself to recall on every occasion what Westerners tend to forget—desire’s ever-present threat of violence.

    Reading Rabbi Horvilleur’s book has allowed me to enrich my previous expositions of Jewish “firstness,” which neglected to explore its paradoxical relationship to what can in the most general sense be called self-identity: what Rabbi Horvilleur calls in her book’s first chapter “la non-identité juive.” As she points out, whereas the Hellenic hero Ulysses’ adventures are framed by his desire for nostos, returning to his home in Ithaca, Abraham’s are defined by leaving his original home in Ur never to return, and of course the “Promised Land” of the Torah too is the object of a quest rather than a homeland.

    Similarly, the other national trait to which circumcision—defining the “supplement” of masculinity by a “cut”—provides the paradoxical key, may be seen as the source both of the Jews’ cultural creativity and at the same time of their disquieting refusal to “play by the rules,” as Jacob tricks Esau out of his primogeniture, or to return to the very beginning, as Abel’s sacrifice becomes favored over his elder brother Cain’s. (This point is also raised in David Goldman’s essay discussed in Chronicle 774.) However Christianity may be said to problematize and even “paradoxicalize” our understanding of the Hebrew One God, the disquieting “non-identity” of the wandering Jew in Christian society was present in Hebrew culture from the beginning; the very word Hebrew or ivri is a verb meaning to traverse rather than a reference to any fixed place.

    And what this unique non-identity reveals to us is the paradoxical element inherent in the sacred root of language itself, not merely in our attempts to define its revelations in logical terms. Even the notion of a single revelation of the sacred to a single community already abstracts away from the fact that a community is never a single unit with a single mind, but necessarily a collection of individuals who by the very nature of this revelation will become free to go off in separate groups to form communities of their own, none of which can hope to abolish the rivalries of desire. The contrast between the uniqueness of the sacred/God and the plurality of the human community—without which, needless to say, the very idea of the sacred/God is inconceivable—can be bridged on the ritual scene by the common focus of the sign on its center, but cannot function as a worldly ontology. Language may begin with a single “word,” but its inevitable vocation is to become the plurality that all modern languages illustrate.

    Forsaking the animal world of Pavlovian conditioning means making explicit the necessary possibility of rival sacralities, of convictions that are not in harmony. The sacred will provokes unanimity in privileged situations, which we can call revelatory, but the very possibility of this unanimity requires the possibility not merely of its absence, but of its absence reinforced by contesting convictions of its content.

    The transcultural phenomenon that brought this paradox to human attention in the Axial age was the awareness of the plurality of cultures and religions that had begun to interact in the Eastern Mediterranean as well as in East Asia, catalyzed by the invention of writing. An emerging literate and multicultural world could no longer naively accept any local singularity as the “center of the world,” the geographic counterpart of the sacred. Thus it was the ever-“traversing” Hebrews—not coincidentally characterized by an unusually high degree of literacy—to whom was revealed the unnamable uniqueness of the sacred.

    Whence the ultimate success of the Hebrews in persuading what would become Western civilization of the unanimity of the sacred and the uniqueness of its revelation. The worldly values of stability, of identity, must be grounded in a transcendental unity that cannot be exemplified in the diversity of the real world.

    And only once we grasp this paradox do we begin to understand that the “election” of the Jews is no arbitrary boast. The uniqueness of the Torah and the Old Testament is so much taken for granted that we have to force ourselves to realize its significance in the context of the Axial Age. Any people can claim to be “chosen,” but no other people has produced a “testament” of comparable anthropological depth and richness.

    Perhaps the most powerful paradox of all is the fact that more than anything else, it is antisemitism, Jew-hatred, resentment of the Hebrews’ unique spiritual achievement, that forces the awareness of this obvious fact upon us.

    But just as we cannot deny the unique civilizational power of the Torah and its associated books, neither can we deny that of the Greek literary and philosophical culture that begins with the Iliad. Yet there is not, nor has there ever been, a Greek equivalent to antisemitism. The Iliad inaugurates classical Greek literature with the “rage” of Achilles’ resentment, but this resentment, conceived in a world of conflicting gods, has never been turned against the society from which it emerged. For the sacred in literature is fictive; that in the world of human conflict is real.

    This most profound anthropological truth of all—may we say that the centuries of Jewish persecution have been, if surely not justified, yet compensated by it? This is the final question that comes to mind on putting down Rabbi Horvilleur’s provocative study.