In Praise Of Stubborn Attachment

In an article from the New Republic on Slavoj Zizek, Adam Kirsch hurls a j'accuse! at Slovenia's "deadly jester" for his views on Judaism:

Invoking Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Zizek asserts that Judaism harbors a "'stubborn attachment' ... to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement." Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, "the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost." This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its "natural" death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the "fatal unholy void" of this "most reprobate and abandoned" religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism that created the figure of the Wandering Jew, who also "refused to give up the ghost."

If the ghost is God, and "stubborn attachment" is fealty to one's ancestors, I don't find anything objectionable about Zizek's view. According to Christians, Christ also lived past the date of his "natural death": does that make him a zombie?

It makes sense, then, that Zizek should finally cast his anti-Judaism in explicitly theological terms. Why is it that so many of the chief foes of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century were Jews--Arendt, Berlin, Levinas? One might think it is because the Jews were the greatest victims of Nazi totalitarianism, and so had the greatest stake in ensuring that its evil was recognized. But Zizek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ. "No wonder," he writes in the introduction to In Defense of Lost Causes, "that those who demand fidelity to the name 'Jews' are also those who warn us against the 'totalitarian' dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror."

Stalinism, in this reading, is the heir to Christianity, and yet another attempt to overcome law with love. Here Zizek is explicating the views of Badiou, to whom the book is dedicated, but it is safe to say that Zizek endorses those views, since precisely the same logic is at work in The Fragile Absolute, where he writes of "the Jewish refusal to assert love for the neighbor outside the confines of the Law," as against the Christian "endeavor to break the very vicious cycle of Law/sin." "No wonder," Zizek says, "that, for those fully identified with the Jewish 'national substance' ... the appearance of Christ was a ridiculous and/or traumatic scandal."

Roughly then, the secularized equivalent to Judaism is nationalism and the secularized equivalent to Christianity is communism. That sounds about right to me. (If overly simplistic, as all secularizations are.) I would also add that the secularized equivalent to Islam is imperialism.

I agree that "all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror." Given a choice between communism, imperialism and nationalism, I would choose nationalism. Zizek would choose communism. That's his theopolitical choice to make.

Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Zizek writes: "To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution' of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility." I hasten to add that Zizek dissents from Badiou's vision to this extent: he believes that Jews "resisting identification with the State of Israel," "the Jews of the Jews themselves," the "worthy successors to Spinoza," deserve to be exempted on account of their "fidelity to the Messianic impulse."

Zizek's view of Judaism's historical role agrees with mine, except I view that role in a positive light. The particularity and exceptionalism of the Jew stands for the particularity and exceptionalism of the individual who resists homogenizing creeds. The "final solution" of History has been aptly described by the likes of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. If the "stubborn attachment" of the Jews is the ultimate obstacle to totalitarian dystopia or the reign of Nietzsche's Last Man, we should accept the role of katechon with pride. It is up to God to end history, not Stalin or St. Paul or Francis Fukuyama. Until then, exile, even in Zion.