Arendt and Adorno by Rensmann Lars Gandesha Samir

Author:Rensmann, Lars, Gandesha, Samir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Arendt’s Conceptual Jew

This brief sketch I have given of The Origins of Totalitarianism helps us to appreciate Arendt’s general narrative in the section on “Anti-Semitism.” Let us now pause to consider how Arendt’s story, which ascribes to Jews an equivocal causal function, rather than systematically destroying the antisemitic system of thought that she assesses, actually reinscribes Jews within prevalent Judeophobic typologies. I shall offer three brief examples. In the section “Between Vice and Crime” just considered, Arendt posits what seems an uncritically digested parallelism between homosexuality and Judaism that verges on reiterating nineteenth-century images of “the Jew” as perverted, promiscuous, debauched, lecherous, and feminized: in short, as the inversion of the norm. Arendt’s point is surely to emphasize how the fin-de-siècle constituted mass identities and that queers, whether Jews or inverts, were accepted only because they were fascinating, exotic types. But the conflation of the stereotypes of these two queers is reiterated by Arendt rather than problematized: “it is true that to the recording onlooker the behavior of the Jewish clique showed the same obsession as the behavior patterns followed by inverts,” she notes, as if this were a natural fact.40

In addition to reiterating rather than evaluating the discursive construction of the queerness of Jewishness, she does not adequately undermine the notion that Jews were inherently a queer nation—the alien-nation, outsiders, foreigners, the nation within the nation—since she constantly identifies Jews as the paradigm of the supernational group. For her, Jews, “remained an international element whose importance and usefulness lay precisely in their not being bound to any national cause.”41 Arendt’s position stems in part from her insistence that political antisemitism was not essentially a nationalist but rather an imperialist, supranational “pan-movement.”42 Not only does Arendt underemphasize the importance of nationalist antisemitism, but Jewish assimilation appears as always already foreclosed, not only as a result of the historical processes of nation-state formation, but because of Arendt’s positing of the inherent character of Jewish internationalism and cosmopolitanism. She also significantly underplays the importance of Zionism in all its permutations, a topic that was a significant preoccupation of her thought in the period preceding the Origins.43

Finally and most problematically, in her account of the Jewish role in fostering the economic activity of the state, Arendt suggests that financial alliances are the only bond that “ever tied a Jewish group to another stratum in society.”44 Pierre Birnbaum contends that “by adopting—strangely—the analyses of the French antisemitic writer Édouard Drumont which, as far as the role of the Jews is concerned, are akin in some respects to those of a Marx, Arendt postulates a purely economic interpretation of the Jews’ place in the state,” which he rightly calls a “flawed hunch,” only partly valid with respect to Germany and questionable as a description of French history.45 Like Marx’s Sur Judenfrage, Arendt places the Jewish Question at the center of her early critique of modernity, too closely identifying Jews with financial capitalism and financial capitalism with the dissolution of politics, the nation-state, and individuality. This

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