Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question" , livre ebook

Indiana University Press - Eric Marty ,
traduit par Alan Astro

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108 pages

English

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For English-speaking readers, this book serves as an introduction to an important French intellectual whose work, especially on the issues of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, runs counter to the hostility shown toward Jews by some representatives of contemporary critical theory. It presents for the first time in English five essays by Éric Marty, previously published in France, with a new preface by the author addressed to his American readers. The focus of these essays is the debate in France and elsewhere in Europe concerning the "Jew." The first essay on Jean Genet, one of postwar France's most important literary figures, investigates the nature of Genet's virulent antisemitism and hatred of Israel and its significance for an understanding of contemporary phenomena. The curious reappearance of St. Paul in theological and political discourse is discussed in another essay, which describes and analyses the interest that secular writers of the far left have shown in Paul's "universalism" placed over and against Jewish or Israeli particularism. The remaining essays are more polemical in nature and confront the anti-Israeli attacks by Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze.

Foreword by Bruno Chaouat
To My American Readers
1. Jean Genet's Anxiety in the Face of the Good
2. Alain Badiou: The Future of a Denial
3. Saint Paul among the Moderns
4. On Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception
5. Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews and Israel
Index

Sujets

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophie et théologie

Criticism

Discrimination

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	22 mai 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253016843
Langue	English

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Extrait

RADICAL FRENCH THOUGHT AND THE RETURN OF THE JEWISH QUESTION
STUDIES IN ANTISEMITISM
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor
RADICAL FRENCH THOUGHT AND THE RETURN OF THE JEWISH QUESTION
ric Marty
Translated by Alan Astro
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 E. 10th Street Bloomington, IN 47405-3907
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone 800-842-6796 Fax 812-855-7931
Sources of the translated texts:
Chapter 1 : Jean Genet s Anxiety in the Face of the Good: Jean Genet Chatila in Bref s jour J rusalem ( 2003 Gallimard), pp. 89-193.
Chapter 2 : Alain Badiou: The Future of a Denial: Alain Badiou: L avenir d une n gation in Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe ( 2007 Gallimard), pp. 41-94.
Chapter 3 : Saint Paul among the Moderns: Symbolic Universal or Mimetic Universal? History and Metahistory: Saint Paul et les modernes: universel symbolique, universel mim tique, Cit s , vol. 1, no. 53 (2013), pp. 167-86.
Chapter 4 : On Giorgio Agamben s State of Exception : propos d tat d exception de Giorgio Agamben in Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe ( 2007 Gallimard), pp. 131-55.
Chapter 5 : Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel: Foucault, Deleuze, les juifs et Isra l in Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe ( 2007 Gallimard), pp. 156-84.
Used with permission of the copyright holders.
Compilation and translation 2015 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01672-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01678-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-01684-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15
mes amis am ricains
J avais trouv dans le Trait th ologico-politique [de Spinoza] l exemple le plus clatant mais aussi le plus m connu de la connaissance du troisi me genre , la plus haute, qui fournit l intelligence d un objet la fois singulier et universel: celle de l individualit historique et singuli re d un peuple (je pense que Spinoza visait dans le troisi me genre la connaissance de toute individualit singuli re et en son genre universelle), celle du peuple juif.
[Above all, what I found in the Tractatus Theologico-politicus was the most striking and, at the same time, the least known example of knowledge of the third order. . . . The understanding achieved was that of the unique historical individuality of a people, that of the Jewish people (I believe that in his third order Spinoza was aiming at knowledge of all unique and, in its way, universal individuality).]
Louis Althusser, L avenir dure longtemps ( The Future Lasts Forever )
Contents
Foreword by Bruno Chaouat
To My American Readers
1 Jean Genet s Anxiety in the Face of the Good
2 Alain Badiou: The Future of a Denial
3 Saint Paul among the Moderns: Symbolic Universal or Mimetic Universal? History and Metahistory
4 On Giorgio Agamben s State of Exception: Guant namo and Auschwitz
5 Foucault, Deleuze, the Jews, and Israel
Index
Foreword
I T WAS IN 1986 that I first heard of ric Marty. I was a young student at the Universit de Lille in search of a good introduction to the works of Andr Gide. My mentor, the late Philippe Bonnefis, suggested ric Marty s recently published book, L criture du jour (The day s writing) on Gide s journals, 1 which proved to be less an introduction to Gide s life and work than an empathic and elegant meditation on writing, death, and the fleetingness of time. I realized I had just been exposed to one of the most talented voices in French literary scholarship of that generation.
As the author of sixteen well-regarded books, critical editions, and innumerable essays, Marty has since become an internationally renowned literary scholar, a public intellectual, and novelist. He is also a friend, and I am grateful for the privilege of introducing him to an English-speaking audience.
Before proceeding, however, I wish to thank Alan Astro for an accomplishment that goes far beyond the task of the translator. A rare connoisseur of French style, an expert on Samuel Beckett and French literary modernity, as well as an accomplished scholar of Yiddish literature, Astro has truly turned Marty s superb, yet so French, prose, into a book easily accessible to the American readership.

In the mid-1970s, a then young student of literature in Paris, ric Marty was riveted by the teaching of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Faithful to his first youthful passion, he would dedicate a book to Althusser in the late 1990s. Marty then turned away from formalist dogmatism and encountered other postwar theoreticians and writers who shook up the French academic establishment, especially the humanities or what came to be known as sciences humaines . Those writers, among whom American readers will readily recognize the names of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes, embodied the cultural shocks known as structuralism and deconstruction. Waves of these shocks reached this side of the Atlantic as early as the 1960s and, in various forms, came to be known as French thought or literary theory. To Barthes, who became a mentor and friend in the mid- to late-1970s, Marty devoted a poignant homage, a book that is both a synthesis of his thought and a literary memoir. 2 Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Barthes, and, before them, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski-those are the thinkers and writers who have shaped Marty s mind and whom he calls, with a touch of deference, the Moderns. Marty ascribes chronological bookends to this moment in French intellectual history, a period of extreme adventurousness in the realm of thought. He sees this moment as spreading over three decades, from 1950 to 1980. That historical sequence, as he masterfully shows in his recent book on the legacy of the Marquis de Sade in twentieth-century thought, is the French intellectual and literary response to World War II, fascism, collaboration with the Nazi regime, and the unassimilable event of the Holocaust. 3
The present volume presents to English readers translations of five of Marty s seminal essays on contemporary antisemitism and its connections to radical thought, especially as it has developed in recent decades in France and, from there, has had a sizable impact abroad. Informed people in the United States are aware of the rise of anti-Jewish hostility at the street level, within France and other European countries today. They may be less aware of the presence of such animosity on the intellectual level, where, as this book demonstrates, it has penetrated the thinking of some major literary figures, philosophers, and theoreticians. Marty s revealing essays, here collected and translated for the first time, clarify just how pervasive and corrosive antisemitic bias has been in the work of some of the most prominent and influential practitioners of radical European thought. In some of their key texts, as readers of this volume will learn, antisemitism takes on a metaphysical dimension.

How, some may ask, can the study of literature prepare anyone for a political and philosophical analysis of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the Middle East conflict? Can one justify the foray of literary scholarship into the study of antisemitism, a field once dominated by historians and social scientists? To these queries and possible objections, I remind readers that genuine literary scholarship demands that one pay heed to the signifier, that is, to the materiality and the ambiguity of language and the figurative nature of words. Careful consideration of language is key to the understanding of antisemitism. As Marty s work shows, a genuine literary scholar attends to the singularity of a text and is attuned to listening, as Barthes would have it, to the very grain of the voice-the different levels of meaning, which contribute to defining the ethos of writing. The best scholars of literature are more concerned with differences, otherness, strangeness, than with sameness and familiarity. They are exquisitely attentive to the particular, from which arises the universal-a shared, human experience. Such is what happens when we encounter great literary works. Moreover, writers are not interchangeable, and styles are irreducible. As a result, the advantage that the literary scholar enjoys over the philosopher is that he or she does not subsume the materiality of the signifier under the abstraction of the general concept. Emmanuel Levinas, in his critique of Hegelian totality, expressed this notion by making a distinction between the Saying and the Said. The former opens onto singularity-the infinite singularity of the other-while the latter concerns concepts and totality. This insight is what Marty has learned from the Moderns, and also from his profound acquaintance with such poets and writers as Ren Char, Andr Gide, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet, and the Marquis de Sade. It is what differentiates Marty from practitioners of what I would call, for lack of a better word, the new radical thought.
That new radical philosophy, represented in Marty