Jean-Luc Nancy and the Jews

Sometimes the reference to the allegorized Jew is implicit or made in passing; in other recent works it is an explicit and central trope. An example of the former is contained in Jean-Luc Nancy's recent The Inoperative Community. As Jonathan Boyarin has recently shown, Lyotard's allegorizing move on the signifier “Jew” is repeated at other moments as well in post-Nazi, post-structuralist appropriations of the signifier Jew (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993). Nancy's central problem in that work is to formulate a notion of community which will not violate the standard of non-coercion. That standard holds that community is “the com-pearance [comparution] of singular beings.” For Nancy, such singularity and the simultaneity which is a condition of it appear to imply an evacuation of history and memory. So many brutalities, so many violations of any notion of humanly responsible community have been carried out in the name of solidary collectives supposed to have obtained in the past, that Nancy seems to have renounced any possible recourse to memory in his attempt to think through the possibility of there ever being community without coercion. Of there ever being: the only community which does not betray the hope invested in that word, Nancy argues, is one that resists any kind of stable existence (Nancy 1991, 58).

The problem is that Nancy has in fact attempted a generalized model of community as non-being. Hence any already existing “community” is out of consideration by its very existence, relegated through philosophical necessity to a world we have lost or which never existed. Following Nancy's rhetoric, the only possible residues of that lost world are false community appearing as either a serial, undifferentiated collective in the same analytic category as the Fascist mass or, alternatively, an assemblage of unrelated individuals. The individual in turn “is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community” (3), and furthermore, “the true consciousness of the loss of community is Christian” (10).

Although Nancy is silent on the relations among history, memory, and community, he considers at some length the apparently tortured relation between “myth” and community. For Nancy myth—that necessary fiction which grounds the insistent specialness of the existent communal group—is an irreducible component of community and at the same time necessarily pernicious in its effects. Therefore Nancy asserts a search, not for the eradication of myth but rather for its “interruption”: “interruption of myth is therefore also, necessarily, the interruption of community” (57). In a footnote Nancy elaborates on an earlier comment by Maurice Blanchot:

Blanchot…writes: “The Jews incarnate…the refusal of myths, the abandonment of idols, the recognition of an ethical order that manifests itself in respect for the law. What Hitler wants to annihilate in the Jew, in the ‘myth of the Jew,’ is precisely man freed from myth.” This is another way of showing where and when myth was definitively interrupted. I would add this: “man freed from myth” belongs henceforth to a community that it is incumbent upon us to let come, to let write itself. (Nancy, 162 n. 40, citing Blanchot, “Les Intellectuels en Question,” Le Débat, May 1984)

I want to press, in a sense by literalizing, the opening offered here. The quote from Blanchot seems ambiguous if not contradictory: Do the Jews literally “incarnate…the refusal of myths,” or is that one of Hitler's myths? Let me first pursue the first reading, which is both the more flattering and the more dangerous. This reading would tell us that community without myth was once the special possession of the Jews. Nancy's “addition” would then explore the consequences of the release of that secret to “us,” as a result of the genocide. What else, after all, can “henceforth” mean? Now I deeply respect that this and other work of Nancy's is explicitly motivated by the desire to understand and unwork the complicity between philosophy and twentieth-century violence (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990). Nancy would doubtless be horrified at the suggestion that his rhetoric is complicit in perpetuating the annihilation of the Jew, yet it seems clear that this is one potential accomplishment of his further allegorization of Blanchot. That which the Jew represented before “he” was annihilated is that which “we” must let come, must let write itself. The word “henceforth” indeed implies that the secret of freedom from myth has passed from the Jews to a community which does not exist, which is only imaginable in and by theory. The secret becomes potentially available to all who await a second coming of this sacrificed Jew. I insist: This plausible yet “uncharitable” reading cannot be stretched to an accusation of anti-Judaism. On the contrary, it is clear that Nancy and thinkers like him are committed to a sympathetic philosophical comprehension of the existence and annihilation of the Jews. My claim is rather that within the thought of philosophers such as Nancy lies a blindness to the particularity of Jewish difference which is itself part of a relentless penchant for allegorizing all “difference” into a monovocal discourse.