States of Exile

We impute to the 'Jew' an impossible, unfathomable enjoyment, allegedly stolen from us. - Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do Believers in the myth of the happy Jew, high off of life-energy stolen from Gentiles, need to read more Kafka. "There is infinite hope, but not for us." Sabbatai Zevi, the "false" messiah, was bipolar (according to Gershom Scholem). Otto Weininger, king of the misogynists, committed suicide (although that may have been his Germanic genes kicking in). Nietzsche complained that Jesus "only knew the tears and the melancholy of the Hebrew." Finally I will quote Leo Strauss's statement on the Jewish mission in history: "The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption."

Zizek makes a valuable point in the article Let's be Realists, Demand the Impossible! : Many political theorists, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant to Joseph de Maistre, have elaborated on the ways in which nation-states have manufactured heroic national mythologies to replace and ultimately erase their "foundational crimes," i.e. the illegitimate political violence necessary for their creation. With regard to this notion, it is true what has often been said: The misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century too late, in conditions when such "founding crimes" are no longer acceptable (and-ultimate irony-it was the intellectual influence of Jews that contributed to the rise of this unacceptability!). The foundational crime of the establishment of a nation-state is an act beyond good and evil - but given enough time, the amoral interlopers become the rightful natives. The Turks may have once been migrant hordes, but they've sett...

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 ...