Maurice Blanchot

Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Reading May '68 through a Levinasian Lens: Alain Finkielkraut, Maurice Blanchot, and the
Politics of Identity
Author(s): Sarah Hammerschlag
Source: The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Fall, 2008), pp. 522-551
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Fall 2008) 522-551
Reading May '68 through a Levinasian

Lens: Alain Finkielkraut, Maurice
Blanchot, and the Politics of Identity
SARAH HAMMERSCHLAG
Amid the French student protests of May 1968, there was a
moment when the of the Jew made an appearance

figure unforgettable
on the public scene. In the third week ofMay, during a lull in unrest,
radio broadcasts reported that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the young German
Jewish strike leader, had been denied reentry into France after a brief
to The decision, meant to diffuse the
trip Germany. government clearly
protest, had the effect. Crowds into the streets without

opposite poured
directive, or and united in the chant:
organization, planning following
"Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands."1
On one level, the function of this call amid the student riots was
itwas a a statement of with the

straightforward: rallying cry, solidarity
movement's boisterous leader. on the act of deportation,
By capitalizing
this slogan allowed for the easy (although obviously unfair) analogy be
tween the French and Nazi Thus, the phrase un
government Germany.
derscored the of the students as victims of an and
position oppressive
authoritative regime while simultaneously reenacting the ideal o?fraternit?
illustrated here by the students' insistence that nothing separated their
status from that of their foreign-born Jewish leader. Given this interpre
tation, the students' of solidarity could be read as a demonstra
expression
tion of the French republican spirit, evoking the stance of the
some earlier when refused to allow one
Dreyfusards eighty years they
man to be ? of for one remarkable
condemned unjustly except, course,
1. For a see Mark Existential

history of the slogans ofMay-June 1968, Poster,
Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre toAlthuser (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 382?83.
For further on the incident, see Andrew and Jim Freed
background Feenberg
man, When Poetry Ruled the Streets (Albany, N.Y., 2001), 50, and Patrick Seale and
Maureen McConville, French Revolution, 1968 (London, 1968), 160.
The JewishQuarterlyReview (Fall 2008)

? 2008 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
Copyright
All rights reserved.

READING MAY '68- HAMMERSCHLAG 523
difference:2 During the Dreyfus affair, those who rallied for the Jewish
captain's cause did so in the name of the Enlightenment ideal of human
ity,an ideal uniting men above and beyond their differences.3 They pro
tested the suspicion directed at Dreyfus as a Jew and established their
with him as a man and as a French citizen. As Emile Zola so
solidarity
wrote to President Faure, "I have but one that of the
famously passion,
Enlightenment, in the name of the humanity that has suffered so much

and that has a right to happiness."4 Dreyfus's Jewish identitywas nearly
beside the The student protestors of May '68, in contrast, allied
point.
themselves with Cohn-Bendit by adopting his identity, not by asserting
that he shared in theirs. They did not protest in the name of an idea of
humanity but in the name of "the Jew"; instead of claiming the status of
the universal for Cohn-Bendit, claimed the status of of
they exception,
Jewish for themselves.5
particularity,
follows I will be considering two interpretations of this event
In what
and its significance for thinking about the status of the Jew and Judaism
in France, one by the contemporary philosopher and cultural critic Alain
Finkielkraut (b. 1949) and the other by the writer and criticMaurice
Blanchot (1907-2003).6 Despite the differences in these two interpreta
2. On the role of memory inMay '68, see Raymond Aron, The Eludive Revolu
a
tion: Anatomy of Student Revolt, trans. G. Clough (New York, 1969).
3. The response of Bernard-Lazare and Charles P?guy is an exception to this
statement. In response to the affair Bernard-Lazare comes to question and reana
lyze the rhetoric of French universalism and the position of the Jewish commu
in relation to it. Job's Dungheap: on Jewish Nationalism and Social
nity Essays
Revolution, trans. H. Lorin Binsse (New York, 1948). P?guy's recollections of the
affair inNotre Jeunesse (Paris, 1933) narrate the affair and the politics surrounding
the event so as to the categories of Jewish and Christian front
place mystique
and center.
4. "Je n'ai qu'une passion, celle de la lumi?re, au nom de l'humanit? qui
a tant
souffert et qui a droit au bonheur." "J'accuse," LAurore, 13, 1898.
January
5. On the Jewish element of May 1968, see Jonathan Judaken's Jean-Paul
Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln, Neb., 2006), 208-91. Jean-Michel Chau
mont argues that one can date the moment that Jewish difference entered on the
scene as a value to a 1967 conference in New York on Jewish
political positive
cultural values after the Holocaust see La Concurrence des
by the journal Judaism;
victims: Genocide, Identit?, reconnaisdance (Paris, 1997), 101?5. For the proceedings
of the conference, see "Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future: A Sympo
sium," Judaidm 16.3 (1967): 266-99.
6. I will be the term "the Jew" to refer to a
using figure whose importance
lies not in its of a particular as a trope with
but a
designation ethnicity long
history in France. the eighteenth century, the Jew was as a
During portrayed
tribal remnant of an outmoded culture, a
figure trenchantly attached to backward
customs and See Voltaire's Dictionaire Of the 118 arti
superstition. philosophique.

524 JQR 98.4 (2008)
tions, both come to their conclusion, I will of Emmanuel

argue, by way
Levinas's (1906?95) representation of Judaism inwhat have come to be
called his Jewish writings. My argument is that these two interpretations,
certain commonalities, reveal in the starkness of their a
despite opposition
tension at the heart of Levinas's of Judaism. For Finkielkraut,
conception
Levinas a means to the actions of the student
provides reject protestors
and yet simultaneously to defend Judaism as a teacher of moral auton
omy in line with the tradition of the Enlightenment, a true centerworthy
of defending from the onslaught of multiculturalism. For Blanchot, on
the contrary, the protestors' actions enact the political inherent
principles
in Judaism. In the very of their actions an act
impropriety they perform
of uprooting, the inspiration forwhich Blanchot discovers in Levinas's
philosophy. Inwhat follows, Iwill first trace the architecture of Finkielk
raut's and Blanchot's their reactions to the slo
position, contextualizing
gan within the larger framework of their thought. I will then turn to
Levinas in order to illustrate how their positions on '68 derive from two
of Levinas's thought.
divergent readings
FINKIELKRAUT: JUDAISM AS UNASSUMABLE HERITAGE
In Finkielkraut s 1980 work The Imaginary Jew (Le Juif imaginaire), he

identifies the student protest as the moment of his political awakening.
Finkielkraut, a French intellectual of the postwar was
public generation,
the child of two Jewish war and an member of Le Cercle
refugees early
Gaston Cr?mieux, Richard Marienstras's to understand and de
project
a of Jews as a national
velop conception constituting Diaspora minority.
In The Imaginary Jew Finkielkraut describes his steps away from a politics
founded on identity as beginning with the '68 protests (though he did not
break with Marienstras's group until 1980).7 At first Finkielkraut felt
over in
c?es in the Dictionare philosophique, thirty attack Jews. Of all the entries
the Dictionaire, the entry entitled "Juifs" is the the centennial of the
longest. By
to communicate its resistance
French Revolution, when the Catholic right wanted
to the Third its vocal leaders identified the cosmopolitan Jew as the
republic,
secret victor of the 1789 Revolution. Edouard Drumont referred to the centenary
of the 1789 revolution as the centenary of the Jew in La France Juive. By 1890,
Maurice was
Barres the term figuratively, writing, "?/?/{Z is only
already treating
an usurers, monopolizers, stockbrokers, all those that abuse
adjective
designating
money" ("La formule antijuive," Le Figaro, February 22, 1890). For an overview
of the shifts in valence of Jewishness in the nineteenth century, see Jacob Katz,
Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723?1939, trans. L Oshry (Cambridge, Mass.,
1970); The Shaping

Berkovitz, of Jewish Identity inNineteenth-Century France
Jay
(Detroit, 1989); E. Paula The Jews of France (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
Hyman,
7. Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968
(New Haven, Conn., 1990), 92-93.

READING MAY '68-HAMMERSCHLAG 525
violated by the student protestors' chant, by their identification with Ju

daism:
The role of the Just now belonged towhoever wished to assume it; the
crowd felt in its exceptional status ... As a Jew,
justified proclaiming
I joined in the clamor. I chanted the slogan in unison, but with mixed
emotions, no doubt as much irritated as thankful. I was stirred
feeling
the refusal and its unvarnished denial of due process,
by encouraging
as itdid the latent anti-Semitism of the public, but I found the protest
ors' generosity too facile and flashy. Itwas as ifdeep down the formula
"we are all German Jews" me and sullied treasure, as if
despoiled my
the demonstrators, while me of their had
assuring complete support,
picked my pocket of my special status.8
For Finkielkraut, as a French Jew born after the war, the Sartrean defi
nition of the authentic Jew inJew and Anti-Semite (R?flexions sur la question
juive) had at first represented a concrete possibility for conceptualizing
Jewish identity. "With an unimpeachable rigor, he [Sartre] told me Iwas
an authentic Jew, that I assumed my condition, and that even
courage,
heroism were for me to claim so and so ties
required loudly strongly my
to a people in disgrace."9 By way of this understanding, Finkielkraut s
Jewish identity came to function for him as a badge not of shame but of
honor, indeed, as a
gift:
Think about it:with Judaism, I had received themost beautiful gift of

which a child after thewar could have dreamed. I inherited a suffering
that I had not suffered; I kept the character of persecution but I had
not endured the I was able to in an excep
oppression. enjoy serenity
tional destiny.10
Thus inMay '68 when the students took up the slogan "Nous sommes
tous des Juifs allemands," Finkielkraut s reception of this phenomenon
was ambivalent. He had at once a sincere sense of pride and
oddly victory
that the identity of the Jew had developed a signification worthy of iden
tification and yet also a sense of infraction at the realization thatwith this
identification the Jew lost the position of exceptionality.
But as is clear from the tone of irony that Finkielkraut employs in
8. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. K. O'Neill and D. Suchoff
(Lincoln, Neb., 1994), 17-18.

9. Ibid., 9.
10. Ibid., 7. Translation altered. Le Juif (Paris, 1980), 13.
slightly imaginaire

526 JQR 98.4 (2008)
describing both his adolescent pride in his identity and his sense of injury
when it is occupied by others (i.e., non-Jews), his critique of the protest
ors is accompanied a For what this moment revealed to

by self-critique.
Finkielkraut is that the identity of the Jew was functioning not only as a
symbol of the oppressed for the protesters, but that itwas functioning in
exactly the same way for him. By claiming the role of the authentic Jew,
Finkielkraut discovered that he was, despite his sense of himself as "au
thentic," in fact in "bad-faith," for he had used his identity as a source of
pride and as a way to separate and distinguish himself from others who
could not claim the same sense of exception. Not the
having experienced
suffering of the Holocaust, he was just as much an imposter as the other

protestors.
For Finkielkraut, the solution to this problem, which he identifies in
The Jew as a crisis of identity for an entire of postwar
Imaginary generation
French Jews, was to recognize his distance from the heritage intowhich
he was born, to acknowledge his own inadequacy before its complex his
tory and way of life: "I had been Jewish to be noticed," he writes in the
closing lines of the text, "now I learned loyalty, and began the imperfect
construction of a memory that would retain and transmit as much truth
as about those who me that Judaism was some

possible beings taught
to love."11 The Jew concludes with a call to reject the very
thing Imaginary
terms of minority identity politics in exchange for a vision of Judaism
that does not on the level of because it exceeds that
operate identity,
He advocates a vision of Judaism as a cultural to
category. heritage
which Jews to claim their attachment, not as a form of property
ought
and but as an unassumable to which owe a debt. As
privilege past they
Finkielkraut says, recounting the shift in himself from one understanding
of Judaism to another:
Today I love Judaism because I receive it from without, because it
brings me more than I contain within. Iwas full of my own character,

a
steeped in this Jewish me, so moving and marvelous that I adored it
little like an idol; and then I experienced this strange event: the disman
no longer forme so
tling of thisMe and its idolatrous cult. Judaism is
much an as a form of transcendence. Not that de
identity, something
fines me, but a culture that can't be embraced, a grace I cannot claim
as mine.12
11. Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, 179.

Le Juif Imaginaire, 212.
12. Ibid., 176. Translation slightly altered.

Finkielkraut thus asserts his rejection of a definition of Judaism as an
identity that one could take up. He is not critiquing allegiance as such
but allegiance that takes the form of easy identification. This dynamic
assumes a difference between Judaism as a and as set terms of
heritage
that are It depends, moreover, on a
identity merely descriptive. particular
claim about the nature of Judaism. Finkielkraut defines Judaism as a
tradition that calls into Insofar as it disallows the

question self-mastery.
sense of pride that comes from possession, itwould appear to be at odds
with the demand for recognition that founds a politics of identity. Itwas
this demand that was so at the center of Finkielkraut's resentment
clearly
of the protestors.
This new definition the arrogance of self-assertion but does not

upsets
call into Jewish difference. Rather, it reformulates and rein
question
forces it by centering it on the relationship between the Jew and his
s self-critique
relationship to his heritage. Itmay appear that Finkielkraut
imposes upon himself the same status of usurper that he had imposed on
those students who were up a that was not theirs to oc
taking position
cupy. By Finkielkraut s reasoning, neither would be entitled to claim Ju

daism as a The difference between the two, however, is
possession.
crucial: Finkielkraut's new sense of dispossession is now a of his
product
allegiance to Judaism. His inability to possess it is a product of his own

his own lack of and his sense of
inadequacy, knowledge, estrangement.
This feeling of estrangement does not involve a critique of Jewish exclu
but rather an accusation himself and his for their
sivity against generation
disconnection from what Judaism demands. Even if understood as unas
sumable, his remains one that the students themselves could

allegiance
not claim, nor, he would would want to claim it. Thus, in
suggest, they
the end, Finkielkraut's at the students but he has added
disgust persists,
to it a at his own easy of Jewish which must
disgust assumption identity,
be a but relation to Judaism as unassum
replaced by complex respectful
able In its Finkielkraut advocates a relation to
heritage. place, respectful
Judaism as a to be remembered and honored. This relation involves
past
the acknowledgment of lack, to be sure, but it is not the lack of the
usurper who has claimed to be able to tread where he has no right but
rather the lack of a delinquent son who acknowledges that he has not
cultivated the tools within himself to pass down what has been passed
down to him.
Finkielkraut comes closest to honoring his relationship to the Jewish

tradition in The Wisdom ofLove (La Sagesse de l'amour) (1984). This work
is devoted to offering a politicized reading of Emmanuel Levinas's philos
ophy. Finkielkraut treats it primarily as a philosophy of individuation,

528 JQR 98.4 (2008)
one that can be harnessed against the fanaticism of every sort of dogma
that subordinates the other to a larger category of social or political iden
tity.13Here Judaism, in accordance with Finkielkraut's claims in The
Jew, is represented as a rather than an Its
Imaginary teaching identity.
fundamental principle, for Finkielkraut, is that of desacralization. It is
read as a source for a teaching of moral responsibility, by offering a God
who has in fact "deserted the earth." revelation," Finkielkraut
"Through
writes, "God entrusts man with his own destiny, with all the risks and
perils this entails."14
In The Defeat of theMind (La D?faite de la pens?e) (1987) Finkielkraut

returns to the other issue raised in The Imaginary Jew: the politics of iden
tity. In thiswork, however, the attack is levied from a different vantage

point. The Defeat of theMind is a condemnation of multiculturalism and
as movements that the transcendent
postmodernism bankrupt reject
power of reason. Finkielkraut traces multiculturalism here back to

Herder and German Romanticism and opposes a of particularism
politics
to the Universalism of the French thinkers, "those masters
Enlightenment
of truth and justice"15whose enduring faith in the transcendent nature of
reason derives from the Platonic court of "fixed value."16 The modern
antiheroes of this are Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and

story
Franz Fanon. to Finkielkraut, these critics of humanism con
According
tributed to a culture of relativism. They made it possible for postcolonial
cultures to revive deterministic accounts of identical in their
identity,
to those that characterized French and German nationalism, but
logic
without the threat of judgment or critique from Europe. Europe of the
late twentieth century, he argues, is so chastened its own crimes that
by
it refuses even to the of civilization over barba
acknowledge superiority
rism. "In their attempt to make the Old World welcoming at last, the
apostles ofmulticulturalism have quite consciously destroyed the spirit of

the only attraction Europe has left."17
Europe, making prosperity
13. The critique of uniformity that appears in this book becomes the backbone
of Finkielkraut's in subsequent works. See L'Humanit? perdue:
political philosophy
Essai sur leXXe si?cle (Paris, 1996) and La D?faite de la pens?e (Paris, 1987). In
as In theName ofHumanity, trans. J. Friedlander (New York, 2000), and
English
Defeat of theMind, trans. J. Friedlander (New York, 1995).
14. Alain, Finkielkraut, The Wisdom of Love, trans. K. O'Neill and D. Suchoff
(Lincoln, Neb., 1997), 72-73.
Mind, 10.
15. Finkielkraut, TheDefeat of the
16. Ibid., 9.
17. In the fall of 2005, Finkielkraut this claim when he attributed the
repeated
causes of riots in the Paris suburbs to the fact that immigrant in
populations
these areas were not the French cultural tradition and thus had
being taught

While itmight seem that the work of The Defeat of the Mind develops
out of the critique of identity inThe Imaginary Jew and would thus express
a further position of distance from Finkielkraut's early defense of his own
Jewishness,18 it is ironically theworking out of the critique of multicul
turalism in this text that brings him back towriting and thinking in de
fense not only of Judaism as a teaching but also of the Jewish
Judaism is not, for Finkielkraut, one of the in
community.19 competitors
as in The Wisdom
the multicultural marketplace, he makes clear of Love.
Judaism has already been defined in this text as a tradition at odds with
the politics of identity and multiculturalism. Judaism, according to this
logic, can be allied with the tradition of the French Enlightenment.20 For
Judaism, Finkielkraut avers, is itself the of desacralization, the
religion
teacher of moral autonomy.
Rather than treated as one the minority communities in
being among
Europe claims for recognition. Judaism is, according

making competing
to Finkielkraut, one of the most victims of what he refers to as
prominent
multiculturalism's of equivalence": the refusal on the part of the
"regime
left to make value distinctions between Western culture and the cultures
not a sense of identification with their host culture. These comments,

developed
in Le Monde on November 28, 2005 and under the headline
published running
"J'assume" in a play on Finkielkraut's consistent advocacy of the Dreyfusard's
vision of France, were themselves a response to accusations of racism for state
ments he made in an interview with two reporters of the Israeli daily Haaretz.
The interview was then summarized in Le Monde on November 24, 2005, with the
headline, "La voix ?tr?s d?viante? d'Alain Finkielkraut au ?Haaretz?."
quotidian
to Haaretz, Finkielkraut had blamed the riots not on unemployment
According
but on an ethnic-religious revolt. Finkielkraut responded by arguing that the
Haaretz reporters had misquoted him, and in subsequent weeks and months "l'af
faire Finkielkraut" continued to resurface with voices in on both the
weighing
left and the "La voix ?tr?s d?viante? d'Alain Finkielkraut au
right. quotidian
?Haaretz?," Le Monde, November 24, 2005, and "J'assume," Le Monde, November
24, 2005.
18. Finkielkraut has been since the 1989 "affaire de foulard" a supporter of
the state's enforcements of standards of secularism. See E. Badinter, R. Debray,
A. Finkielkraut, E. de Fontenay, C. Kintzler, "Profs, ne Le
capitulons pas!"
Nouvel Observateur, November 2, 1989.
19. Finkielkrautwas accused of communitarianism by Tariq Ramadan for his
stance de l'autre: R?flexions sur l'antis?mitisme
inAu Nom qui vient. Ramadan's article
was refused by Le Monde and Lib?ration, and subsequently on the web
published
site www.Oumma.com. des intellectuals Communautaire," www
"Critiques
.Oumma.com, October 3, 2003.
20. In In theName alters his posi
ofHumanity (L'Humanit? perdue) Finkielkraut
tion on the Enlightenment tradition, associating the tradition with a universalist
stance that disregards the importance of cultural ties.

530 JQR 98.4 (2008)
of the colonized.In fact, it is clear that for Finkielkraut, multiculturalism

and anti-Semitism are in fact linked.
Finkielkraut makes this claim most clearly inAu Nom de l'Autre-. Reflexi
ons sur l'antis?mitisme qui vient.Finkielkraut's slim 2003 volume on "the
anti-Semitism of the left" argues that the obsessive desire of the apostles
of multiculturalism to atone for past crimes has led to their unconditional
support of every newcomer, every This view, in turn,
"oppressed people."
has fostered the new association of Judaism, by way of Zionism, with
the forces of colonialization, an association that culminates in claims of
equivalence between the Palestinian plight and the plight of the Jews
under Hitler's Finkielkraut argues elsewhere that
regime.21 Consequently
this "regime of equivalence" should be combated in the name of Juda
ism.22 Multiculturalism, Finkielkraut claims, "sets a for Jews."23 For
trap
the upshot of this regime of equivalence is thatMuslims can themselves
identifywith or claim to take the place of the Jews:
What is interesting ... is that the extremists of the U.O.I. F (Union

des Organisations Islamiques de France) said that the ban on the head
scarf was to the wearing of the yellow star, that it was a
equivalent
bad law against which itwas necessary to fight. Universal? Particular.
Something in us is profoundly wounded by such a comparison. Of
course, it is anti-Semitic.24
While Finkielkraut is certainly right to indicate that this comparison is

distorted, it is striking that he is once again protecting the experience of
the Jews from usurpation, as he had done in his initial reaction to the
'68 chant "Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands." At the conclu
May
sion of Au Nom de l'Autre, Finkielkraut returns again to the identification
of theMay '68 protestors with the Jews, comparing this alliance to the
French Left's identification with the cause of the immigrant. Again he
both laments the "regime of equivalence" and explicitly ties it to anti
Semitism. to Finkielkraut, the Left's acceptance of
According subsequent
"violence [toward the Jews] of an Arab-Muslim origin" is a product of
its insistent desire to identifywith the Other, whoever that Other might
be.25More recently Finkielkraut noted with disgust the famous statement
21. Finkielkraut, Au Nom de lAutre (Paris, 2003), 21.

22. Alain Finkielkraut, "Le Juif, l'universel, et la la?cit?," Cahiers d'Etudes L?vi
nassiennes 3 (2004): 251.
23. Ibid., 252.
24. Ibid., 253.
25. Finkielkraut, Au Nom de l'Autre, 35.

of Exlward Said, quoted by Tzvetan Todorov in a eulogy, that he was the

last of the Jews. The claim to be the new Jews, "the ethical Jews," is for
Finkielkraut the latest frontier, the latest battle to deprive "the ethnic
Jews" even of their identity.
despite Finkielkraut s own self-indictment in response to the

Thus
chant ofMay '68, it is clear that his critique of multiculturalism does not
exclude a certain attachment to Judaism, one he has been
fully particu
in recent ?
vocal about years his mission of the
larly namely, rescuing
Jews from the latest spate of anti-Semitism.26 As he remarks in a debate
with Benny Levy, he recognizes, despite his own secular identity, a debt
to Judaism, as well as a debt to France.27 In both cases what he advocates
is the of Jews' own as inheritors of a tradition. "We

recognition position
are not the innovators; we are the inheritors," Finkielkraut to
says Levy
in their 2003 debate.28 While such a statement clearly distinguishes Fin
kielkraut's position from those he calls the "prophets of post-modernism"
in The Defeat of the

Mind, itwould seem to realign him with Herder and
Barres, both of whom he condemns as a belief in roots that
advocating
calls into the transcendent power of reason.29 The difference
question
between his position and that of Herder's and Barres' is in the warrant
Finkielkraut marshals for his allegiance to Judaism and to the legacy of

France.
In The Defeat of the

Mind, Finkielkraut argues that his allegiance to the
tradition is an to reason over cul
Enlightenment/Dreyfusard allegiance
ture, but this amounts in fact to to a culture that valorizes
allegiance
reason. In The Wisdom as a
of Love Finkielkraut praises Judaism teacher
26. Finkielkraut, "Face ? la religion de l'humanit?," 18.

27.Benny Levy, after May '68, transformed himself from Maoist into
agitator
Orthodox Jew. For more on this transformation, see Friedlander, Vilna on the
Seine, and Ronald Aronson's introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre, Hope Now: The 1980
Interviews, trans. A. van den Hoven 1996).
(Chicago,
28. Finkielkraut, "Le Juif, l'universel, et la la?cit?," 249.
29. Finkielkraut uses this term
in The Defeat of theMind to refer to those think
ers who the search for cultural roots in the first
"challenge place, maintaining
instead the dizzying fluidity of all peoples" (111). It seems clear that the
primary
target of Finkielkraut s of this mode are Deleuze and Guattari,
critique though
not mentioned name. Finkielkraut does however a passage from Kafka:
by quote
Toward aMinor Literature as of this position. Finkielkraut, The Defeat
representative
of theMind, 113. Finkielkraut works out further the contours of this position in In
theName ofHumanity, which can be read as a revision of his critique of romanti
cism in The Defeat of" the Mind. Here he quotes and supports Hannah
implicitly
Arendt 's claim that 'the pragmatic force' of the romantic to the En
challenge
lightenment takes on an 'irrefutable character' the dark times of persecu
during
tion and exile." Finkielkraut, In theName ofHumanity, 101.

532 JQR 98.4 (2008)
ofmoral autonomy. Finkielkraut ostensibly owes his loyalty to both Jew

ish and French traditions as a consequence of the superiority of their
messages, rather than from the accident of his belonging to either.Where
Judaism is concerned, however, that accident nonetheless determines
one's as inheritor, as Finkielkraut makes clear in his recent bat

position
tles to defend over the "ethical" Jew.30 Despite
the "ethnic" Jew his
avowed respect for pluralism when properly contextualized, Finkielkraut
is ultimately arguing for allegiance to the vision of France and the vision
of Judaism based on the exemplarity of these two traditions. Both offer
a court of fixed value, by which the rest of theworld can and should be
judged.31
To return to his reaction toMay '68, inThe Imaginary Jew, Finkielkraut
faults the protestors for assuming that the mantle of the Jew is one that
can take later in Au Nom de l'Autre, he
anyone up. Twenty-three years
criticizes the act of the students inMay for the fact that they are identify
ingwith the Jews only as a symbol of the outsider, and thus making the
act one that could be repeated with any Other playing the part of Other.
In the intervening years Finkielkraut crafted a position that aligns Juda
ism and the Enlightenment in such a way that they represent the inside,
or better the center, to the world a cum standard
yet by offering heritage
by which the periphery can be judged.
MAURICE BLANCHOT: JUDAISM WITHOUT HERITAGE
If Finkielkraut's to '68 can be read as a

response May reconceptualization
of Judaism as heritage rather than identity, Blanchot's is marked by a
of the very value of heritage. In contrast to Finkielkraut, Mau
suspicion
rice Blanchot not lauded the students' chant as one of the most pow
only
erful of political acts inmodern France; he seemed to do so for the very
reason that Finkielkraut used to criticize the act: the students were
taking
up the position of the outsider rather than defending their own French
ness.
As a member of the Comit? d'action ?tudiants-?crivains or CAER

(Student-Writers Action Committee), Blanchot was deeply involved in
30. Alain Finkielkraut, "Les Juifs face ? la religion de l'humanit?," Le D?bat

131 (September-October 2004): 15.
31. Finkielkraut develops and defends the logic of this position by arguing
that the universalism of this position offers the freedom of emancipation and
equality
to members of any and every culture: "The alternative, then, is simple:
either people have rights or they have uniforms; either can free
they legitimately
themselves from oppression ... or else their culture has the last word." The Defeat
Mind, 104-5.
of the

the events of '68.32By this point in his career, Blanchot had already solidi
fied his position of importance in French letterswith numerous novels,
including Thomas I'obdcur (1941), Aminadab (1942), and L'Arr?t de mort
(1948) as well as works of literary theory and criticism including Comment
la literatureedt-ellepoddible? (1942), La Part dufeu (1949) and L'Espace litt?r
aire (1955). Blanchot's involvement in the CAER clearly arose out of the
positions he had in his postwar work.33 In numerous essays on
developed
literature as an antiphilosophy that eschews productivity, Blanchot began
to an interest in the of literature as an as a
develop possibility exteriority,
force of resistance outside of theHegelian dialectical relation that reduces
all resistance to a Translated into a
productive negativity. political posi
tion, as a of worklessness and a of the value of produc
lauding critique
tion, this amounts to a refusal of the very realm of
thinking organized
In the texts that he in response to the student riot, one
politics.34 penned
sees, in fact, a of the set of concepts that dominated his
repetition literary
work. to the that he saw as out of the
Referring political project arising
'68 protests, he wrote:
This theoretical undertaking obviously does not entail drawing up a

or a but rather, of any
program platform, independent programmatic
project, indeed of any project, maintaining a refusal that is an affirmation,

out or an affirmation that does not come to any
bringing maintaining
arrangements (d'arranger), but rather undoes arrangements (derange),

including its own, since it is in relation with ment (le disar
dis-arrange
or or else the non-structurable.35
rangement) disarray (le d?sarroi)
32. The CAER was one of a number of anti-authoritarian action committees

that formed in the spring of '68. A group of students and writers which met
between May and October of 1968, a that commented on
they produced journal
the events entitled only Comit?. Dionys Masc?lo, with whom Blanchot collabo
rated politically from the late 1950s through the 1960s, attributed half of the
articles in the journal to Blanchot, were Leslie
published though they unsigned.
Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London, 1997), 229.
33. For an account of Blanchot's activities in the 1950s and 1960s,
political
see Hill, Blanchot: Extreme 15?17.
Contemporary,
34. For Blanchot's on these themes, see Blanchot, litt?r
literary essays L'espace
aire (Paris, 1955). an For
of the between Blanchot's
analysis relationship literary
criticism and his political stance in this era, see Hill, Blanchot, Extreme
Contempo
rary, and Georges Pr?li, La Force du dehors: Ext?riorit?, limite et non-pouvoir ? partir
deMaurice Blanchot (Paris, 1977).
35. Maurice Blanchot, Words (1968)," in The Blanchot Reader, ed.
"Disorderly
M. Holland (Oxford, 1995), 200. The essay was originally published anony
as "Affirmer la rupture" in Comit? 1 (October
mously 1968): 4?5. Most recently

534 JQR 98.4 (2008)
In another short text from the period, "Tracts, Posters, Bulletins," Blan
chot makes the connection between literature and a of

explicit politics
resistance, that "refusal is one of the points where and the
writing writing
decision to break coincide: each of them always imminent and always
"36
unpredictable.
Both of these essays and others thatwill be discussed below were pub
lished anonymously as a collective representation of the position of the
CAER in the group's publication, Comae, in October 1968.37 In these
documents, Blanchot, as the voice of the committee, insisted
acting upon
the of citizens to resist a that was force.
right government governing by
In the name of the committee, he called on the students to maintain "a
power of refusal of bursting open the future."38

capable
For Blanchot, the chant "Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands" was
the best actualization of this power, a power whose force lies in its
very
resistance to structures of domination. It was a moment, he said, of infi
nite violence, a moment which was also nonviolent: "Never

paradoxically
had this been said never at any moment, an
anywhere, inaugural speech
event, and borders, and the
opening overturning opening overthrowing
future." This moment was, Blanchot insisted, in a reference to Walter
Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," "messianic" in its di

mensions.39 vision of the messianic dimension of time as a
Benjamin's
kind of rupture clearly informed Blanchot's reading of the event. In "A
Break in Time: Revolution," another essay from Comit?, Blanchot quotes
from the fifteenth of "The Theses" on the idea of revolution as "a desire
to break the of history."
continuity
Finkielkraut also read the protestors' chant as a at which
marking point
borders were For Finkielkraut, however, this was what
opened. exactly
made this moment so for it seemed to open the position of
problematic,
Other, of "the victim," to those who, according to him, did not deserve
to claim this status. InAu nom de l'Autre,Finkielkraut laments the effacing
of distinctions in the realm of political discourse, such that theworld is
divided intoNazi or victim [Jew], "We are confronted here with a fever
of hypermnesia that depopulates theworld and only allows to subsist, in
Blanchot's writings from this period were republished in French in Maurice
Blanchot, ?crits politiques, Guerre d'Alg?rie, Mai 68, etc., 1958-1993 (Paris, 2003).
36. Blanchot, Blanchot Reader, 204.
37. Seen. 32.
39. "Les actions first published in Comit? 1 (October 1968).
exemplaires,"
Maurice Blanchot, ?crits Politiques (1958-1993), 125. Blanchot, Blanchot Reader,
205.

a world simplified to the extreme, those two archetypes of Nazi and vic
tim."40Does Blanchot's response then participate in this logic? Is he blind
to the fact that when the protestors took up the call "Nous sommes tous
des Juifs allemands," they were perpetuating this repetition and thereby
usurping the identity of those Jews who had suffered through the Holo
caust? Is he this moment as one of or is
merely celebrating solidarity,
there more to his claim that itwas an event,
something inaugural speech
opening and overturning the borders to the future?

Underlying Finkielkraut's and Blanchot's opposing responses to the
chant ofMay '68 is not any discord over the unique status of the Shoah
but a difference in their understanding ofwhat is at stake in identifying
with the Jew as symbol of theOther. It is not that Blanchot does not see
the inherent in the students; rather, for him, the transgres
transgression
sion was a
part of the demonstration's force. The students' action gained
its political importance not only because French youth were identifying
with Jews as a but also because their claim was so
minority population
one that could not make, their own cir
obviously they legitimately given
cumstances as of the bourgeois It was messianic
part postwar generation.
for Blanchot not because it a
rupture in historical time ?
only represented
for Blanchot to the moment to which makes refer
equivalent Benjamin
ence in Thesis 15, when, during the July Revolution, the clocks were
stopped by simultaneous and independent gunfire?but also because it
a moment inwhich the
represented students, through the impropriety of
their action, were able to expose the gap between the world as it is and
as it to be. To understand how and this was
ought why impropriety sig
nificant for Blanchot, and how its significance was tied particularly to
the modality of we must consider another that
"being-Jewish," concept
appears in Blanchot's from this "communism without

writings period:
Blanchot understood communism as an that "excludes
heritage." ideology
(and is itself excluded from) any already constituted community," as that
which cannot play the part of heir.41 The formulation of this definition is
to its importance. Communism, to Blanchot, resists tradi
key according
tional forms of
community:
Marx said with tranquil force: the end of alienation begins only ifman
iswilling to go out of himself (out of all that constitutes him as interior
ity): to go out of religion, of the family, of the state. The call of the
outside, an outside which would be neither another world or a world
40. Finkielkraut, Au nom de l'Autre, 26.


536 JQR 98.4 (2008)
beyond: there is no other movement to oppose to all forms of patrio
tism, whatever they might be.42
Patriotism, Blanchot writes, following Marx, is a force of alienation. For

Blanchot, however, the emphasis here is not on the way in which nation
alism and patriotism divert us from recognizing our state of subjugation

but on the he sees in a communitarianism that has fusion or imma
danger
nence as its ideal.43 The danger of such political modes is their penchant
for self-satisfaction and the aggressive drive toward and cul
replication
tural imperialism that, for Blanchot, is the inevitable consequence of cul
tural self-affirmation, the claim to instantiate the ideal, to possess the
truth.
For Blanchot what marks the proletariat is that it is a class unified only
lack; it is "a with no other common denominator other
by community
than penury, lack of satisfaction, lack in every sense."44 The power of
communism in the political sphere for Blanchot had less to do with eco
nomic than with what he as its resistance to
justice recognized allegiances
of every sort, its rejection of roots, its rejection of the values that create
boundaries of exclusion and assert the of one culture over

superiority
another.
It is necessary to repeat
simple that are always patrio
things forgotten:
tism, chauvinism, nationalism, these movements
nothing distinguishes
from one another that nationalism is the coherent of
except ideology
thatwhich patriotism is the sentimental affirmation. Everything which
roots men values, sentiment, in one time, in one in one
by by history,
is the principle of alienation that constitutes man so that he
language,
sees himself as privileged (French, the precious French blood), such
that he encloses himself in satisfaction with his reality and is thus
driven to propose it as or to it as a af
exemplary impose conquering
firmation.45
42. Ibid., 202.

43. Finkielkraut will fault communism for itself representing a "fu
Ironically,
sional" model of community. Hannah Arendt, he identifies commu
Following
nism in In theName ofHumanity with totalitarianism, describing it as an ideology
that elevates communal fusion over the rights and needs of the individual. The
difference between Blanchot and Finkielkraut on this point arises from Blan
chot's definition of communism, one that would read Marx's idea as serv
quirky
as a check on the instantiation of any present communist community.
ing
Finkielkraut, In theName ofHumanity, 37-61.
45. Ibid.

Communism thus represented the possibility of a community that never

coincides with itself because it is defined as a resistance to identification,
to unification, to the ties that bind. It is a messianic community to the
extent that the rests in the appearance of its nonappearance.
importance
Communism represents the form of community that articulates itself only
by asserting that its time is indeed not now.

Blanchot's position here might seem close to Finkielkraut 's in that it
implies a distrust of multiculturalism and identity politics as a return to
tribalism, but the reasons behind his distrust stand in contrast to Finkiel
kraut s.What Finkielkraut laments about his own of Jews is
generation
their dearth of culture, their desire to assume an identity fromwhich their
own circumstances have severed them. What he in multicultur
rejects
alism is its absence of judgment. Blanchot's critique of identity politics
derives from a critique of any valorization of the proper; it derives from
a critique of the political act of allegiance as such.
To return then to Blanchot's response to the "Nous sommes
slogan
tous des Juifs allemands," we must consider how the chanting of this
slogan can be read as the instantiation of a politics of disidentification.

For Blanchot, the power of thismoment lay in the fact that the students
were to what he refers to as "the call of the outside," that is
responding
to say, were an act of
they committing disappropriation by identifying
with the Jews rather than with their own national group. By identifying
themselves with Cohn-Bendit, theywere not usurping the identity of the
Jews but rather themselves from their own easy identification
separating
with Frenchness; indeed, were to the call of the Other.
they responding
What distinguishes this act from usurpation is in fact its transgressive
quality. What looks to Finkielkraut like an act of easy identification was
but such an act, to Blanchot. The students were
anything according
to be what could never be. What became clear to
clearly claiming they
Blanchot in this moment was the gap between what the students were
and their own situation.

claiming
This gap is made clear when we that the
particularly recognize slogan
was a When read this way, the chant would reveal
articulating metaphor.
itself to be the moment when literature and politics collide, the moment
when literature performs in the political field. Jacques Ranci?re explains
this collision in his own commentary on the student chant ofMay '68:
When demonstrators in the Paris of 1968 declared against all police

evidence, "We are all German Jews," for all to see the
they exposed
gap between political subjectification?defined in the nexus of a logical
utterance and an aesthetic manifestation ?and kind of identifica
any

538 JQR 98.4 (2008)
tion. Politics' penchant for dialogue has much more to do with literary
heterology, with its utterances stolen and tossed back at their authors
and itsplay on the first and third persons, thanwith the allegedly ideal
situation of dialogue between a first and a second person. Political in
vention in acts that are at once and
operates argumentative poetic.46
What Blanchot and Ranci?re see in the student chant ofMay '68 is that
does not aim for that can ap
political speech always transparency, irony
pear as well in a moment of that the very

public dialogue, performance
of the chant "Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands" was not an
expres
sion of identification; rather, itmade visible a gap not only between the
students and the situation of the German Jews but also a gap between
themselves and what as the hegemonic culture. It was a
they recognized
moment inwhich disidentification was the goal of the utterance.
For Blanchot, exposing the gap between language and its referent is
the function of whatever the context. Literature is a
literary speech
speech that can speak of difference without grasping it or capturing it.

Even when it represents its relation toward a referent, it is characterized
the or the turn. For Blanchot, the turn is what marks

by trope literary
as is evident in the word "verse" The
language, already (vers). significance
here is the way in which literary language complicates the movement of
reference. In the for example,

literary image,
The image is image by means of this duplicity, being not the object's
double, but the initial division that then permits the thing to be figured;
still further back than this doubling it is a folding, a turn of the turning,
the "version" that is in the process of inverting itself and that
always
in itself bears the back and forth of a divergence.47
Thus even in the what is announced is a likeness or a

literary image,
but one that a In this
comparison, emphasizes divergence. literary play,
"To err is to turn and to return, to
language proceeds by erring. give
oneself to the of the detour."48 Even when it appears to grasp
up magic
through the act of representation, the procedure of troping twists lan

from its object, not a better vision of the intended
guage away creating
but a difference between the and the referent.
object, image
46. Ranci?re, Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose

Jacques Dis-agreement:
(Minneapolis, Minn., 1999), 59.
47. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapo
lis,Minn., 1993), 30.
48. Ibid., 26.

When we return to the student chant with Blanchot's of

conception
figurative language in mind, what becomes apparent is that the disso

nance between the students' circumstance and their words was indeed
of what made this chant so to Blanchot,

part revolutionary. According
then, Finkielkraut's discomfort would in fact be a good part of the demon
stration's point.
This is not to suggest that the divide between Finkielkraut's and Blan
chot's reactions is merely reducible to the fact that Blanchot saw the dem
onstrators as difference and Finkielkraut saw them as it.

marking eliding
For we must consider as well that the of the event for Blan
importance
chot was redoubled by the fact that the students were identifyingwith
Jews.
As was made clear from our consideration of Blanchot's notion

already
of a communism without what made the student protest
so im
heritage,
portant is that it exemplified the value of deracination, the experience of

being uprooted from the security of belonging, the discomfort of respond
to For Blanchot, Judaism is at core a of deraci
ing exteriority. teaching
nation. As he writes in "The Indestructible,"
There is a truth of exile and there is a vocation of exile; and being

Jewish is being destined to dispersion?just as it is call to a sojourn
without as it ruins fixed relation of force with one
place, just every
one or one state ? it is because
individual, group, dispersion faced with
the exigency of the whole, also clears the way for a different exigency
and finally forbids the temptation Unity-Identity.49
Thus, the of the chant, "Nous sommes tous des Juifs allem
significance
ands," is not only that the dissonance that resonates in this moment acti
vates a movement of deracination but that in fact the association of the
students with Judaism redoubles the of the gesture. For the mode
impact
of Jewish" for Blanchot is one that, as a movement out of oneself,
"being-
must also resist the of belonging. Thus, claim to
language any "being
Jewish" is already an "improper claim," for it is a claim to be what by its
very definition resists the language of belonging. It is thus the perform
ance of this impropriety as political act that gave the students' chant its
force, whether or not were aware of the
they dynamic.
There is no doubt that this vision of Judaism can
certainly be read as
an essentialization on Blanchot's and have read him this
part, many
49. Ibid., 126.

540 JQR 98.4 (2008)
way.50 He has been condemned in his later work for a philo-Semitism

that is not much better than anti-Semitism.51 But what such a
reading
misses is that this earlier essay is in fact an interpretation of Emmanuel
Levinas's on Judaism, and to be read as such.
writings ought
Blanchot is not romanticizing the figure of the Jew; he is repeating and
Emmanuel Levinas's own essentializations of Judaism in order
skewing
to the fixation on that in Levinas's
emphasize uprooting appears philo
sophical and Jewish writings. Both Finkielkraut's and Blanchot's re

sponses to the May '68 event arise from of Levinas. In
interpretations
fact, arise from the claim in Levinas that Judaism unseats
they similarly
self-possession.
The question is how Finkielkraut s reading of Levinas can lead to a
discourse that protects Judaism's historical and political territory,while
for Blanchot, Levinas's description of Judaism produces a politics of de
racination and disidentification. These opposing routes follow from a
con
slight differentiation in interpretation, a differentiation in how they
ceive of the implications of the claim that Judaism is a discourse that
thwarts This difference reveals, however, an
self-possession. slight impor
tant tension in Levinas's own formulation of Judaism: the tension be
tween his on Judaism as a discourse of deracination and his

emphasis
insistence on the role of Jews and Judaism as the necessary exemplars
of the culture of the West. The iswhether these two elements of
question
Levinas's can work in tandem, or whether are at cross
philosophy they
purposes.
50. Maurice Blanchot has not been the primary target of this argument,
he has been in with the "French as of
though grouped postmodernists" guilty
essentializing Judaism. The primary
" target of this attack has been Jean-Fran?ois
and "the Jews. For more on this argument, see Michael Wein
Lyotard's Heidegger
"Jews (in Theory): of Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and the
grad, Representations
Holocaust in Postmodern French Judaism 45.1 (1996): 79-97; Susan
Thought,"
"Ecriture judaique: Where Are All the Jews inWestern Discourse?",
Shapiro's
in Displacements: Cultural identities in Question, ed. A. Banner (Bloomington, Ind.,
1994) 182?201; Daniel and Jonathan Boyar?n, "Diaspora: Generation

Boyar?n
and theGround of Jewish Identity,"CriticalInquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 693-725.
For a discussion of this accusation it specifically as to Jean-Fran?ois
applies Lyo
tard, see Sarah the Jew: Jean-Fran?ois Hei
Hammerschlag, "Troping Lyotard's
371-98.
degger and 'theJews,'" Jewish Studies Quarterly\2.4 (2005):
51. For the case Blanchot's see
against Jeffrey Mehlman,
early writings, Legs:
De l'antis?mitisme en France (Paris, 1984), Steven
17?44, and Ungar, Scandal and
Minn., For a of the attacks and an ex

Aftereffect (Minneapolis, 1995). summary
and defense of Blanchot's activities in the thirties, see Leslie Hill's com
planation
mentary on Blanchot, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 36?46 and "La Pens?e
politique," inMagazine Utt?raircL'?nigme Blanchot (October 2003): 35?38.

LEVINAS: JUDAISM AS THE SUMMIT?
As iswell known, Emmanuel Levinas played a significant role in the life

and thought of both Alain Finkielkraut and Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot
and Levinas shared a which when both were
sixty-year friendship, began
students at the University of Strasbourg in 1926 and continued until Lev
inas s death. Each saw the other as a source of immense influence. Levi
nas credited Blanchot as the source for his

understanding of the II y a,
and Blanchot credited Levinas with teaching him the nature of the ethical
relation and forming his conception of Judaism.52 In 1968, Blanchot went
so far as to describe their friendship as being "in an invisible relation with
Judaism."
Alain Finkielkraut, on the other hand, identifies himself as something

of a disciple of Levinas, a translator of his ideas into the public sphere
and a of his a that assumed institutional form in
guardian legacy, project
2000 with the founding of the Institut d'?tudes l?vinassienne by Finkielk
raut, Benny Levy, and Bernard Henri-Levy.53
As for Levinas s own in the demonstrations of May '68, he
engagement
remained distant from the protests, to teach when
continuing possible,
and remaining loyal toDe Gaulle, who continued to be a heroic figure to
him ?even in 1967, when De Gaulle referred to the Jews as an
arrogant
and dominating people.54 That said, despite his impatience and disgust
with the violence of the demonstrations, Levinas seems to have shared
Blanchot's sense that May '68 provided of a confirmation of

something
his In a moment when that could be overturned
philosophy. everything
52. In Existence and Existents Levinas credits Blanchot as a source for his no
tion of being as "the presence of absence, the night, the dissolution of the subject
in the night, the horror of being, the return of being
to the heart of every
negative
moment, the reality of irreality." Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans.
A. Lingis (Dordrecht, 1995), 63. He retrieved this characterization, he reports,
from Blanchot's description of the dissolution of objects in the night in Thomas
the Obscure, inwhich Blanchot describes the pressing in of existence as the
feeling
of being suffocated own In "Literature
by one's body. and the Right to Death"
Blanchot then proceeds to borrow the concept back from Levinas and reassoci
ates itwith literature. Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death," in The Work
of Fire, trans. C. Mandel (Stanford, Calif., 1995). Finally in "The Poet's Vision"
Levinas contrasts Blanchot's of being with Heidegger's,
description describing
Blanchot's work as with "an invitation to leave the
supplying philosophy Heideg
gerian world." Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. M. B. Smith (Stanford,
Calif, 1996), 136.
53. For more on Finkielkraut s connection to Levinas, see Friedlander, Vilna
on the Seine, 80-104.
54. Anne Marie Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas (Paris, 1994), 170.

542 JQR 98.4 (2008)
was overturned, the to the other person showed itself to be

obligation
beyond destruction. "In 1968 I had the sense that all values were con
tested as It was for one: Autrui," Levinas
bourgeois. quite striking. Except
said in an interview with Salomon Malka.65
Neither Finkielkraut nor Blanchot are explicit about the role of Levi
nas's philosophy in framing their responses to the event of '68. Yet in
both cases, the Levinasian source is not difficult to detect. In the case of
Finkielkraut, his definition of Judaism as thatwhich calls his self-mastery
into him to an that exceeds him,
question, delivering exteriority clearly
recalls the structure of ethical subjectivity in the thought of Emmanuel
Levinas. He reveals the source for thismodel only in the epigraph to the
chapter of The Imaginary Jew inwhich the definition appears. The epi
an
graph is a quote from Levinas: "The self-supportingsubject is unseated by
accusation without wordd."56 Levinas makes no reference to Juda
Although
ism in these lines and is clearly describing the structure of ethical subjec
tivity, there ismuch in his writings thatwould allow Finkielkraut to apply

these words to the structure of Judaism, Levinas s insis
notwithstanding
tence on separating his Jewish writings from his philosophy.57 The face
and Judaism function in Levinas to a certain structure
according parallel
as revelation and as the demand for Justice.
rupture,
In the preface of Totality and Infinity Levinas introduces the parallel
between and the encounter with the Other:
prophetic eschatology
Without substituting eschatology for philosophy, without philosophi

"truths," we can from the
cally "demonstrating" eschatological proceed
of back to a situation where breaks a
experience totality totality up,
situation that conditions the totality itself. Such a situation is the gleam
of exteriority or of transcendence in the face of the Other.58
In the foreword to Beyond the Verse, Levinas describes Judaism in pro

a rupture of the natural and the historical:
phetic terms as
As a moment of human reason where every man?and all of

prophetic
man?end one another, Judaism would not mean
up refinding simply
55. Interview with Salomon Malka in L'Arche, November 1981. Quoted in
Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas, 242.

56. Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, 171.
57. See "Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney: Dialogue with Emman
uel Levinas," in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. R. A. Cohen (Albany, N.Y., 1986),
18-19.
58. Levinas, and Infinity, trans. A. Pa., 1969), 24.
Totality Lingis (Pittsburgh,

a a in a type and a of History. Juda

nationality, species contingency
ism, rather, is a rupture of the natural and historical that are constantly
reconstituted and thus a Revelation is always forgotten. It is which
written and itbecomes Bible, but the revelation is also continued; it is
produced by way of Israel: the destiny of a people that is jostled and
jostles through its daily life thatwhich, in this life, is content with its
natural or "historical" meaning.59
This link between Judaism and the face,which appears only obliquely in
Levinas's strictly philosophical writings through references to the Bible,
monotheism, and Abraham, is worked out in Levinas's "confes
explicitly
sional" writings.60 These writings span from the 1930s up until the
1980s.61 They do not depart from the philosophical project which Levinas
begins developing in the 1930s, but they develop along overtly Jewish
lines certain notions that appear in the texts.
philosophical
Thus Levinas offers Finkielkraut a way to conceive of Judaism as a
that exceeds the of He offers him a means to

heritage category identity.
reclaim Judaism in such a way that Judaism neither a movement
requires
toward or a mere cultural identification. Finkielkraut's
religious worship
position is thus often strongly contrasted (by himself and by others) with
that of Benny Levy (1945?2003), who credited Levinas with his transi
tion fromMaoist to Orthodox Jew. Finkielkraut makes it clear that nei
59. Beyond the Verse, trans. G D. Mole

Levinas, (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 4.
60. is an ongoing
There and seemingly never-ending debate about the role of
Judaism in Levinas's phenomenological A few texts the
writings. representing
conflict: Adriaan Peperzack, "Emmanuel Levinas: Jewish Experience and Phi
"
losophy, Philosophy Today 27 (1983); Catherine Chalier, "Singularit? juive et phi
in Emmanuel Levinas: Les Cahiers de la nuit surveill?e (Lagrasse, 1984),
losophie,"
78?98; Shmuel "Levinas et le projet de la Rue Des
Trigano, philosophie-juive,"
cartes 19: Emmanuel Levinas 1998), 141-64. Jill Robins, Altered
(February Readings
(Chicago, 1999). Levinas himself insists in keeping his confessional dis
writings
tinct from his phenomenology, not at bottom
though he does deny that they may
have a common source. What differentiates these discourses is their language and
method. See "Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney: with Emman
Dialogue
uel Levinas," in Face to Face with Levinas, 18-19.
61. One of this corpus is made of the talmudic
segment up readings which
Levinas offered at each of the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue
Fran?aise; the other writings are a diverse set of essays for various
composed
often for journals or books in theme, such as L'arche,
occasions, explicitly Jewish
and Les Cahiers de l'Alliance Isra?lite Universelle. are collected in
They primarily
Difficile libert?:Essais sur le Juda?sme (Difficult
Freedom) and as collections of his
Talmud such as L'au-del? du verset: Lectures et discours
readings talmudiques (Beyond
the Verse).

544 JQR 98.4 (2008)
ther Talmud study nor belief inGod follows for him from his interest in
Levinas. That said, as Finkielkraut develops his reading of Levinas inThe
Wisdom ofLove, it is clear that Levinas provides him a path toward the
advocacy of Judaism as a philosophy of responsibility. This philosophy
can a lesson to modern secular humanism, which, to
provide according
Finkielkraut, is too willing to account for human foibles by recourse to
the historical situation. Judaism, on the other hand, teaches the principle
of individuation: "Thus it is not the theme of the single God that consti
tutes the essential message of Judaism," Finkielkraut writes, "but the
interval between God and his creatures."62
Levinas, Finkielkraut characterizes Judaism as a tradition

Following
that "disenchants and desacralizes the world,"63 a force that can divest
modern humanism of its temptation toward a certain determinism. All the

same, Finkielkraut is clear that what he wants to is a
recuperate only
"version of Judaism,"64 one that does away with the principle of provi
dence, which would reinsert determinism into our of his

understanding
tory.65
Given this acknowledgment that Levinas's Judaism is not all there is
to the tradition, we might actually see Finkielkraut as less of an essential
ist than Levinas, who, in his own sense of the faith, is
communicating
almost never willing to admit that he is picking and choosing but rather
of Judaism as "a essence," its considerable
speaks having special despite
historical variation:66 "The Jewish conscience, in spite of its different
forms and levels, its and in moments of great crisis,
regains unity unicity
when the combination of texts and men, who often cannot
strange speak
the of these texts, is renewed in sacrifice and
language persecution."67
62. Finkielkraut, Wisdom of Love, 72.

63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 76.
65. Ibid., 77.
66. Samuel and Leora both develop helpful and fresh read
Moyn Batnizky
that reveal the self-conscious and
ings of Levinas political philosophical project
Levinas's to Jewish sources. Moyn reads Levinas as "re
undergirding approach
for the postwar an ethical view of the reli
inventing Judaism" era, constructing
gion that makes it a resource for an antirevolutionary "moral realism." Samuel

the Other N.Y, 2005), 226. reads Levinas not
Moyn, Origins of (Ithaca, Batnizky
as
contrasting Judaism with philosophy but rather as conflating religion and phi
entrance into politi
losophy, remaking Judaism in philosophy's image. Levinas's
cal debates, such as those over the relationship between Zionism and Judaism,
she shows, are
deeply troubling for this reason.
Batnizky, and
Leora Leo Strausd
Emmanuel Levinas: Philodophy and the Politics of Revelation (New York, 2006).
on Judaism, trans. S. Hand
67. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays
(Baltimore, Md., 1990), 25.

Finkielkraut shares with Levinas the claim that Judaism has something
to teach the Western world. In his of Judaism as a
advocacy teaching
that can return man to an atheism that a
produces responsible subject,
Finkielkraut echoes the call that Levinas made in 1961 at a conference
on the rights of man and education at the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle.
In this Levinas, as an educator, called for Judaism to
speech, speaking
a new and role in the world as a fundamental civilization
play prominent
whose cannot and not be reduced a of
importance ought by teaching
cultural relativism.68 As Levinas himself put it in 1961: "The point where
Hebraism enters the world is a summit."69
Finkielkraut sees in his reading of Levinas, despite the frequent catego

rization of him as a thinker, a much at odds with
postmodern figure very
any to validate the culture of "Others."70 Levinas

postmodern tendency
signals in his denunciations of "paganism" and his frequent stabs at

Christianity the belief that the Jews instantiate as a people a universal
ideal, and that are, indeed, in the of Isaiah, "the
they language suffering
servant" whose very makes of them "a to the nations."
suffering light
As Levinas writes in Difficult Freedom, "The humanism of the suffering
servant?the History
of Israel ? invites us to create a new
anthropology,
a new
historiography, and perhaps by bringing about the end ofWestern
a new
triumphalism, history."71
In Finkielkraut's response to
May '68 we see one consequence of what
itmight mean for Judaism to take up its special position, what itmight
mean for us to understand Judaism as a summit. The of the
position
of the particularity that instantiates a universal ideal, is, at least
exemplar,
in
military terms, a precarious one. It requires border control and fortifi
cation. It requires, as Derrida has out in his work on the

Jacques pointed
of exemplarity, the need to oneself the other who
politics guard against
indeed make the same claim.72 The of equivalence" is so
might "regime
threatening for the very fact that itwould indeed level the playing field,
68. Levinas was director at the time of the ?cole Normale Isra?lite Orientale.
69. Levinas, "L'Ecole Normale Isra?lite Orientale: d'avenir," in
Perspectives
Les Droits et l'?ducation, actes du Congr?s
de l'homme 1961), 75. du centenaire (Paris,
70. To give but one example of the association of Levinas with this category,
see Edith Saints and Postmodernism:
Wyschogrod, Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chi
cago, 1990).
71. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 171.
72. "As soon as there is One,
there is murder, wounding traumatism. The one
guards itselffrom the other" Derrida writes inArchive Fever (Chicago, 1996), 78. See
also Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin (Stan
ford, Calif., 1998), and of National Humanism to
"Onto-Theology (Prolegomena
a Review 14.1-2 3-23.
Hypothesis)," Oxford Literary (1992):

546 JQR 98.4 (2008)
and in doing so eliminate the possibility that any culture could claim for
itself the summit.
Ironically, what we find in Blanchot's interpretation of Levinas is a
reading thatwould suggest that the great universal teaching of Judaism
is in fact a repudiation of the summit. For Blanchot, the very claim that
Judaism offers theworld a discourse of deracination indicates that it is a
discourse that must disavow its own claim to be the proprietor of this
message.
Blanchot's discussions of Judaism, similar to Finkelkraut's, almost al
ways of Levinas. The connection between Blanchot's

proceed by way
position on the student chants ofMay of '68 and Levinas's philosophy is

evident in the definition of "being-Jewish" that I quoted above: "Being
Jewish is being destined to Dispersion." This description of "being
Jewish" comes from the section of the 1962 essay "The Indestructible"
thatwas entitled "Being-Jewish." While this essay claims to be a direct
to Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew," it is also a summary of Levi
response
nas's Jewish writings (published as a collection in 1963, but given and
published as occasional pieces in previous years).73 More specifically, it

follows the schema that Levinas uses in many of the essays inDifficult
Freedom in which he contrasts Judaism as a tradition of
uprootedness
with pagan as a tradition of enrootedness. Blanchot, however,
thought
will take this schema one further than Levinas.
step
In Levinas's to a
philosophical expositions, paganism corresponds
of immanence and presence that he associates with Nietzsche
thinking
and Heidegger, while Judaism appears as a teaching of justice founded
on the relation to the face, a relation where God in his absence,
signifies
in the trace. "For Judaism, the world becomes intelligible in front of a
human face and not, as for a great who sums
contemporary philosopher
up an important aspect of theWest, through houses, temples, and brid
73. Levinas himself an essay in 1947 entitled "Being-Jewish," com

published
to Sartre's R?flexions dur la question juive, in which
as a response he contests
posed
the claim that "Jewishness" is a product merely of situation. In this essay, Levi
nas describes Jewish election as the of being," the facticity of
"irremissibility
createdness. Emmanuel Levinas, "Etre juif," Confluences 7.15-17 (1947): 253?64.
These are not the characteristics that will come to dominate Levinas's descrip
tions of Judaism in the 1950s and 1960s, nor are these the characteristics that
Blanchot will call up in his essay of the same
title. As Annabel Herzog has argued,
there is an
inconsistency between this early position and the universalization of
the category of Jewishness that appears A T heure des nations (1988). Blanchot is
Levinas's notion of "Being-Jewish" in universalized terms in
already reading
"The Indestructible." Annabel versus Emmanuel Levinas
Herzog, "Benny Levy
on Judaism 26.1 (2006): 15-30.
'Being-Jewish,'"Modern

ges," Levinas writes in "A Religion forAdults."74 Here Levinas crafts this
contrast on the basis of a relation to land such that Jewish rootlessness
is contrasted with Heidegger's thematization of "dwelling," as it is devel
oped in texts such as "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" and "The Origin of
theWork of Art."75
This opposition also involves Levinas's reclamation of the figure of the
or "rootless" Jew. In his of Levinas
"wandering" critiques Heidegger,
uses this trope to develop a reading of Heidegger that affiliates him with
One of the best of this maneuver is Levinas's 1961
paganism. examples
and Us," written on the occasion of the first
essay "Heidegger, Gagarin
manned space flight.76
Here the metaphorical notions of enrootedness and rootlessness are
literalized as the possibility of departure from the earth, which is actual

ized by Gagarin's flight. Heidegger's critique of technology is subtly fig
ured here as a form of nostalgia to which the movement of progress is
compared. Levinas takes up here the stereotype that the Jew is associated
with technology, with the destruction of an existence that is characterized

"the fascination of nature . . . the of of a of the
by mystery things, jug,
worn-down shoes of a peasant girl."77 He suggests in the process that
these images, drawn from Heidegger's "Origin of theWork of Art"

(1935?36) and "The Thing" (1950), are images that reveal "the eternal
"78
seductiveness of paganism. In Judaism with he
associating technology,
also defines Judaism as 'the of all that."79 The claim that under
negation
scores the shift in value is that "the mystery of ?a
things" phrase clearly
meant to characterize the relation to that en
Being Heidegger's thought
from the 1930s ? is "the source of cruelty
dorses through the 1950s
towards men."80 The attachment to that this nostalgia Levi
place signifies,
74. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 23. I altered this translation slightly, translating
"devant" as "in front" rather than Hand's "before" to indicate that this was a
description that is spatial rather than temporal.

75. Martin Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstader (New
Heidegger,
York, 1971).
77. Ibid., 232.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Most Levinas seems to be lecture "Das
precisely referencing Heidegger's
which a
Ding," begins with critique of the way that technology is shrinking time
and space, naming flight first among inventions such as the radio and the camera,
and moves on to contrast the way in which these inventions obliterate distance
with the way in which the jug reveals nearness in a way that preserves farness.
Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought.

548 JQR 98.4 (2008)
nas "is the very of humanity into natives and

argues, splitting strangers."81
Thus, Levinas suggests, the critique of technology that is ever present in
Heidegger's works during this period ismisguided, for itnames as a mod
ern menace the relation to theworld that technology embodies. Heideg
ger's critique fails to see that the far greater danger to humanity is the
relation to time and that that it. The consequence of
place undergirds
Heidegger's approach is that it prioritizes the relationship of man to

and thus to time, space, and over the of one
Being, things relationship
human to another. Thus, groups the atomic
being Heidegger together
bomb with the airplane and the radio, each of these diagnosed as prob
lematic insofar as each annihilates the mode of being-in-the-world that
Heidegger calls "dwelling."

In opposition to the vision of technology thatHeidegger offers in "Das
Ding" where technology is defined as thatwhich obliterates the distinc

tion between nearness and farness, Levinas that Gagarin offers
suggests
us the possibility of a perspective of true distance, for he "wrenches us
out of the world and the surrounding place,"

Heideggerian superstitions
an of the human as free of place.82 Here Judaism makes
providing image
an entrance as that way of that has been "free with re
thinking always
to Judaism's rootlessness sets it outside of the way of being
gard place."83
that differentiates native from stranger, for the Bible "knows only a Holy
Land, a fabulous land that spews forth the unjust, a land inwhich one
does not put down roots without certain conditions."84
In "The of an written in the same as

Conquest Space," essay year
Levinas's and Us," Blanchot a subtle com
"Heidegger, Gagarin provides
on Levinas's essay, it in places almost word for word,
mentary repeating
though the only mention of Levinas is in the footnote where Blanchot

credits Levinas as a source for his reflections.85 In Blanchot's text,
major
Levinas s subtle references to are further defaced and trans
Heidegger
posed so thatwhat Levinas references as a Heideggerian/pagan thinking

now more as human
appears generally thought:
Man does not want to leave his own He says that is

place. technology
dangerous, that it detracts from our relationship with the world, that
true civilizations are those of a stable nature, that the nomad is incapa

82. Ibid., 233.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Though dated in 1961, the essay was originally published in Italian in //
Menabb 7 (1964): 10-13.

ble of acquisition. Who is this man? It is each one of us, at the times
we give in to lethargy.86
The mode that is attributed to the Jew in Levinas's text is here called
"nomadic." In using this term, Blanchot not the
merely only displaces
of the Jew with a more term; he further disassociates
category general
the from Jewishness the term "nomad" rather than
category by using
"exile," the later of which had a historically Jewish resonance and that
still emphasizes ties to land. It is nevertheless clear that the relationship
between "man" and the "nomad" mirrors the relation of the anti-Semite
to the Jew, as the "nomad" is as ties to and

presented having technology
thus as a threat to "man." At the same time that it Levinas's
generalizes
text, the opening of Blanchot's essay nonetheless manages to the
parallel
first paragraph of Levinas's, even alluding obliquely to Heidegger's cri
tique of flight in "Das Ding." Within the body of the essay, Blanchot
does take up specifically the category of the pagan (and the Christian),
declaring that Gagarin's space flight is a threat to the pagan in all of us:
he who is tied to enrootedness, to tradition, to his biological race, he who
(like Heidegger) consoles himself among the trees over the evil of man
kind. The Jew, however, is not mentioned. Even when Levinas is para
phrased in the essay, he is paraphrased without specific citation and is

referred to not as someone who in the name of Judaism but as
speaks
"the man with no fixed abode," as a of the nomads. In
representative
repeating Levinas's text, Blanchot has resisted the move back to the
proper, which Levinas's essay in its on Judaism's

performs emphasis
message. Levinas uses to lead back to the truth of Juda
Gagarin's flight
ism, concluding his own essay with the claim that, like Juda
technology,
ism "has the universe" and, moreover, "has discovered man
demystified
in the of the face."87 Blanchot uses Levinas's text to
nudity emphasize
that Gagarin tears us away from the proper in every sense. His omission of
both Levinas's name and of Judaism underscores the claim that deracina
tion as a moral concept would prohibit reappropriation of any kind. The

of Gagarin's from is for no one to claim and for no
message speech space
one to own, "for in the word, which,
unceasing accompanied by hissing
and conflicting with all the harmony of the spheres, says, towhoever is
unable to understand it, only some but also
insignificant commonplace,
says this to him who listens more that truth is nomadic."88
carefully:


550 JQR 98.4 (2008)
In "The Indestructible" Blanchot again raises the issue of a "nomadic

truth." In this essay, however, he reinstates Levinas's association of Juda
ism with deracination. Here Judaism is that message which must

clearly
repudiate all claims of ownership, the message which demands of every

one, Jew and alike, a movement to the outside:
gentile
If Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by show

at whatever time, one must be to set out, because to go
ing that, ready
out (to step outside) is the exigency fromwhich one cannot escape if
one wants tomaintain the possibility of a just relation. The exigency of
the affirmation of nomadic truth.89
uprooting;
The notion of "nomadic truth" that Blanchot identifies as the exigency of

Judaism also refers in his thought to the operation of literature, to the
function of figurai of the as it "turns," distance
language, trope creating
within the of reference. Thus, for Blanchot, the re
operation linguistic
sponse of the students in '68 as a movement toward exteriority

instanti
ates the of as the students do not so much as

operation "uprooting,"
"identify" with German Jews but perform an act of figuration or troping

essence is indeed itself
through an association with Jewishness, whose
"nomadic."
The action of the students inMay '68 would thus perfectly actualize
the claim that for Blanchot is at the heart of Levinas's philosophy: the
call to For Blanchot, the response to that call would also have
exteriority.
to resist the toward Thus, the students' like
impulse repatriation. slogan,
reminds us of the demand that Judaism makes on every
Gagarin's flight,
a demand that Blanchot would reaches its apogee not
person, suggest
in the resistance to understood, but in its resistance
only place, properly
even to the of summit.
position
Ultimately the difference between Blanchot's reading of Levinas and

Finkielkraut's comes down to a matter of emphasis. Both read Judaism
as a call to exteriority, but for Finkielkraut this elevates the position of
Judaism in the world, whereas for Blanchot it serves as a of any
critique
and claim to The of this difference are
every exemplarity. consequences
when we consider that it is exactly the identifica
far-reaching, especially
tion of Jewishness with "cosmopolitanism" and "exile" that Finkielkraut
so resents. For Finkielkraut, this is the source of the "new anti
openly
Semitism," because it allows for the assertion that Jews can no in
longer
fact claim to be truly "Jews," that Zionism is a betrayal of this "nomadic
89. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 125.

truth." Describing the current relationship of Europe to the Jews, Fin

kielkraut laments inAu nom de l'Autre, "One doesn't denounce their cos
vocation one exalts it, to the and with a
mopolitan [any more], contrary
vehemence one of being traitors to it."90
disturbing reproaches [the Jews]
Finkielkraut here seems blind to the fact that Levinas is one of the
primary philosophical sources for the revalorization of the notion of exile
and thus the inherent tension in Levinas's work. Finkiel
ignores Despite
kraut's own citation of Levinas as his source for the that Juda
teaching
ism unseats he resents the of
self-possession, clearly representation
Judaism as a category divorced not only from identity politics but from
identity.While there is no doubt that Levinas as a Jewish educator en
couraged a movement back to textual study, back to the rabbis, and thus,
for many Jews, a return to observance, there is also much in Levinas that
would point to a universalization of the modality of "being- Jewish" such

that itwould represent something like a philosophical position. "As a
reason man ? ?
prophetic
moment of human where every and all of man
end up one another, Judaism would not mean a nation

re-finding simply
a
species in a type and
a of History," Levinas writes in
ality, contingency
Beyond the Verse.91This is clearly the Levinas that Blanchot is reading

when he writes in "Being-Jewish:" "There is a Jewish thought and a
Jewish truth: that is, for each of us, there is an obligation to try to find
whether in and through this thought and this truth there is at stake a
certain relation of man with man that we can a
sidestep only by refusing
yz
necessary inquiry.
In identifying the tension at the heart of Levinas's thought, Blanchot
seeks to make it productive. He seeks to make it a check on the impulse
toward Judaism calls to each of us, Blanchot as the
exemplarity. suggests,
call to the outside, a call that uproots claim to to nation, to
any allegiance,
Blanchot argues, Levinas's own
place. Ironically, harnessing logic against
Levinas, the call of Judaism even the claim that this call
upsets belongs
to Judaism. Whether or not Levinas himself this re
recognized irony
mains an Finkielkraut does not. In the end, Blan
open question. clearly
chot would agree with Finkielkraut in The Imaginary Jew that Judaism
unseats me in my claim to Jewish identity, but he would also add the
reminder that the very same logic undergirding Finkielkraut s claim
serves to rebuke the who take at Judaism's
guards up watch border.
90. Finkielkraut, Au Nom de l'Autre, 21.

91. Levinas, Beyond the Verde, 4.
92. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 125.


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Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:53:03 PM

Reading May '68 through a Levinasian

Amid the French student protests of May 1968, there was a

moment when the of the Jew made an appearance

protest, had the effect. Crowds into the streets without

itwas a a statement of with the

1. For a see Mark Existential

The JewishQuarterlyReview (Fall 2008)

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:53:03 PM

Enlightenment, in the name of the humanity that has suffered so much

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:53:03 PM

tions, both come to their conclusion, I will of Emmanuel

FINKIELKRAUT: JUDAISM AS UNASSUMABLE HERITAGE

In Finkielkraut s 1980 work The Imaginary Jew (Le Juif imaginaire), he

1970); The Shaping

(New Haven, Conn., 1990), 92-93.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:53:03 PM

violated by the student protestors' chant, by their identification with Ju

picked my pocket of my special status.8

Think about it:with Judaism, I had received themost beautiful gift of

8. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. K. O'Neill and D. Suchoff

(Lincoln, Neb., 1994), 17-18.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:53:03 PM

ors is accompanied a For what this moment revealed to

suffering of the Holocaust, he was just as much an imposter as the other

as about those who me that Judaism was some

Today I love Judaism because I receive it from without, because it

brings me more than I contain within. Iwas full of my own character,

11. Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, 179.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:53:03 PM

Finkielkraut thus asserts his rejection of a definition of Judaism as an

tradition that calls into Insofar as it disallows the

This new definition the arrogance of self-assertion but does not

cupy. By Finkielkraut s reasoning, neither would be entitled to claim Ju

allegiance to Judaism. His inability to possess it is a product of his own

sumable, his remains one that the students themselves could

Finkielkraut comes closest to honoring his relationship to the Jewish

ophy. Finkielkraut treats it primarily as a philosophy of individuation,

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perils this entails."14

In The Defeat of theMind (La D?faite de la pens?e) (1987) Finkielkraut

tity. In thiswork, however, the attack is levied from a different vantage

power of reason. Finkielkraut traces multiculturalism here back to

antiheroes of this are Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and

apostles ofmulticulturalism have quite consciously destroyed the spirit of

(Lincoln, Neb., 1997), 72-73.

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Europe claims for recognition. Judaism is, according

not a sense of identification with their host culture. These comments,

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of the colonized.In fact, it is clear that for Finkielkraut, multiculturalism

identifywith or claim to take the place of the Jews:

What is interesting ... is that the extremists of the U.O.I. F (Union

While Finkielkraut is certainly right to indicate that this comparison is

21. Finkielkraut, Au Nom de lAutre (Paris, 2003), 21.

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of Exlward Said, quoted by Tzvetan Todorov in a eulogy, that he was the

despite Finkielkraut s own self-indictment in response to the

is the of Jews' own as inheritors of a tradition. "We

in The Defeat of the

Finkielkraut marshals for his allegiance to Judaism and to the legacy of

In The Defeat of the