Prophetic and timely
Alain Badiou, June 1982
I don't much like to speak about the jewish question', as did Marx and Sartre, because the absolute atrocities the Nazis committed in the name of the 'final solution' have adversely rebounded on the very notion that there is a 'question' to which it would be appropriate to give a response. I might add that, on this issue, one ought to speak, absolutely, in one's own name, with one's own voice. As regards questions, I start from this: there are Jews. I do not ask why there are, nor where they come from, because such stories of origin and provenance are in themselves dubious. ‘Jews' is the name of our real, a glorious name of our history – especially of our philosophical, scientific, artistic and our revolutionary history. And I say this: Hitler proposed to eliminate Jews in their physicality. His will was completely criminal, including what of such a crime must remain hidden, clandestine. The Nazi administration officiated over regulatory extermination under false pretences, wanting, purely and simply, to cut out an essential part of Europe, until such point as the only thing remaining would be to observe the fait accompli: the Jews have disappeared.
To do this, Hitler glorified, multiplied, the name ‘Jews'. He everywhere ascribed things to the hand of the Jews. He made the incessantly named Jew into an emblem – the black emblem of his politics of universal conquest. Once the Nazis were defeated, the name ‘Jew' became, like every name of the victim of a frightful sacrifice, a sacred name. And with good reason. Whether they had fought for and alongside the Jews for liberation from the Nazis, or whether they had to atone for the shame of tolerating the genocide, people developed an entirely new relationship with the Jews, not an inverted anti-Semitism, nor a simple tolerant friendship, but a conviction as to the very pronouncement of the word ‘Jew', and as to what had been taken away with it of the essentials of history.
Hence, horrifically affected in its physicality, sometimes, like the Jewish communities of Poland, to the point of having its ancient reality exterminated, the Jewish identity has triumphed through a historical glorification of its name, and through a new strength of belonging and interiority. That this name has a major link to our thought and our history is something that has become clearer to all, since everyone can clearly see that it was no accident that the most barbarous imperialism, the most radical anti-thought, set out, in order to secure its reign, by corporeally exterminating Jews and by spreading their name around as a kind of evil signifier.
In my view, no greater threat weighs upon the name of Jews today than the politics of conquest, of physical liquidation of Palestinians, of massacring Arab schoolchildren, of dynamiting houses, and of torture, currently pursued by the State of Israel. Today, in accordance with what created its sacred renaissance after the Second World War, this name can have no meaning unless it is radically extricated from the State of Israel, and unless it is proclaimed that, in its current form, this state is incapable of tolerating, or meriting in any way, the label jew'. Moreover, if more and moreJews let themselves take the direction of this state, we must conclude that Israel is a country where there are ever fewer Jews, a country in the process of de-Judaization, an anti-Semitic country – in the sense, that is, that we readily say that the Parti communiste français is an anti-communist party.
It is little wonder that the principal threat to the name of Jews comes from a state calling itself Jewish. The external enemy, like the anti-Semitic Nazis, can tie up and kill your physical being. That is the law of war and terror. But the loss of a name and of meaning always comes from the inside. For it has to do with giving up on [céder sur] one's own essence, and every de-essentialization [désentification] follows an immanent process. The sacralization of the name of Jews has taken on the external form, colonial in nature, of the State of Israel. Of course, in some conceptions the sacred remains incomplete when it has no crown, sceptre, or empire. But this means that the sacred is in need of slaves, and that the Arabs and Palestinians are those slaves. Not only is that way of thinking wrong; it is foreign to everything that has been brought forth in our history under the name of Jews; it is foreign to everything that, with their communities, which were so irreducibly strong in being minoritarian, has appeared in the richness of its singularity.
Yes, the name of Jews is threatened by the Jewish state, but dramatic crises of meaning do not come about in any other way. The idea of Marxism and Communism was also most gravely thrown into crisis by the 'Socialist' state in the USSR and Poland. Further, the debate here is not one about anti-Semitism or
philo-Semitism; instead it is about engaging in the creation and the power of a new stage of Jewish identity, one where a radical critique will be brought to bear on all assertions of Jewish identity that only produce its opposite: militarism, invasion, massacre.
The most recent sequence of Israeli state politics takes this threat to its extreme. For what lurks here is the realization of this inversion of meaning, which would be the project of a genocide of the Palestinians. Already, the will to disperse them at all costs, to drive them further and further away, to wipe them out on every occasion, to shoot at their children, is declared and undertaken with systematicity. A Palestinian Diaspora – terrible recommencement! - is being formed in the world today. Ought the name of the Jews, in straying furthest from its historical meaning, become the place from where the creation, in the abandoned former place, of a new 'wandering' begins? Ought 'Palestinian' become the new name of the true Jews?
I know that many, including those in Israel (they are judged and imprisoned), do not accept that one day they will have to desert their own historic name. That is what grounds my conviction that the basic link between the thought to which I am heir and Jews will not be severed – which would be disastrous for this very thought.
On such issues, geopolitics is of little use. The West's undue leniency, [the French president] Mitterrand's included, for Israeli barbarism proves to my mind the little respect they have for Jews: for these politicians, Jews are only voters, or Middle Eastern oil police. Likewise, the paralysis of the Arab states shows the little respect they have for the Palestinians, who for them are already the Jews of the Arab world. The basic anti-Semitism of all states consists of hostility to wandering, to minorities, to the universal, to revolutions. As for the Russians, we know what the story is there: anti-Semites at home, arms' dealers abroad.
However, the major call to denounce the anti-Semitism of the State of Israel comes from a totally different position. A 'goy' [non Jew] says it passionately: to him, saving the name of the Jews is essential, since it has to do with his own conceptual and active determination.
I've never thought that one must be an immigrant to speak about immigrants, a peasant to speak about peasants, a woman to speak about women, or a Jew to speak about Jews. My intention is not to defend a Jewish identity. Indeed, [the Israeli Prime Minister] Begin is organizing a general catastrophe: we must attack it at the root. If [the Israeli Prime Minister] Begin and his mercenaries are Jews, if Brezhnev is a communist, then there has been a total destruction of sense. The truth is simpler and stronger: just as [the Russian leader] Brezhnev is an empire brigand, Begin is a state gangster. Communists and Jews, often the same individuals, deny them absolutely all use of their names.
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*This text was published under this title in June 1982, the time of the Israeli assault on Beirut. It appeared in number 11 of Le Perroquet, a journal founded by Natacha Michel and myself [Alain Badiou] in 1981 and which continued until 1988. Complete collections of it are still available. It is a collection that in my opinion contains invaluable documents about the combat led by those of us who saw right away the quagmire Mitterrand and the Socialist Party would get us into. The article was illustrated by a photo of the bombing of Beirut captioned: 'Can a warplane be Jewish?'
Alain Badiou, Polemics, Verso, paperback ed. 2011, pp. 167-71
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