Žižek For Jews

Slavoj Žižek declares in his latest opus, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso), that while postmodernism has caused (or allowed) every other kind of racial, social, and cultural identity to be in flux, Jewish identity appears to have become fixed in a simple equation in which Jews=Zionists=racists (thank you, UN). Jews are expected, he says (in his usual difficult prose) to “yield with regard to their name”—that is, “in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity – except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism.”

Žižek, an internationally reknowned intellectual, has been at the cutting edge of social and political theory for almost two decades, and apparently strives to be an outsider. It is therefore no surprise that he has developed an interest in Jews, as such. Žižek cares so much about Jewish identity because he identifies as Jewish. Not literally. He is no more a Jew than Joe Lieberman is a liberal. Rather, Žižek, a product of Slovenia, a country torn by the last century’s wars, sees in the Jewish experience a representation of contemporary experience that is far more subtle than a chaotic and relativistic mash-up of identity politics. Was it not, as Žižek says, that “in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud?

The irony is that throughout the history of anti-Semitism, Jews stand for both of these poles. They're either too insistent on being 'Jewish', so much so that they never integrate fully in the societies in which they live; or, conversely, reveling in a stereotypically homeless cosmopolitanism indifferent, if not hostile, to religion and ethnicity. The first thing to recall is thus that this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity. And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (…) “politics of fear” which focuses on preserving one’s particular identity. Today, this struggle plays itself out through community conflicts over Israel. According to Žižek, this has been the case since 1948:

… with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this state, and who includes the State of Israel among the states toward which he insists on maintaining a distance, living in their interstices.

For Žižek, Jews who place themselves at the interstices of nation-state and no-state, are the “worthy” successors to 17th century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who, despite forced to the margins of Amsterdam’s Jewish community for his beliefs, is widely considered to be one of the intellectual architects of modernity. The problem with this analogy is that it assumes that the divide between insider and outsiders within the Jewish community is a tidy one, and that there are no areas of possible overlap. You’re either religious or you’re American. You’re either Zionist or your anti-Zionist. One is never both.

What about those Jews for whom, for example, being devout and being multicultural are synonymous? What do we do with Jews who identify as Israelis but are neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist? Where are do we put them? If we accept that the struggle facing world Jewry today is this crisis of identity, and that this is the same struggle all peoples are facing today, how do we account for it?

The experience of being a leftist Jew in the West is often an exercise in paradox. As leftists and Jews, we hold positions that are apparently always in contradiction with each other. Keats called this phenomenon “negative capability” or the ability to hold two simultaneously contradictory things in our heads and not explode. The most obvious possible ways this plays out today would look something like this: Being able to both love and criticize the state of Israel; the possibility of being both a religious person and a person who believes in science and evolution; or even the possibility of being both religious and modern.

I’ll hold off on Israel for the moment, but address the other two points here.
Žižek ends the book’s “Radical Intellectuals” section by asking the question: “Which was the beginning, the word or the act?” His answer leads to the assertion that creation is not a sign of God’s omnipotence, but rather “his debilitating limitations.”

While some religious Jews might take exception to this, others might not. Creation, and its position in Jewish cosmology, has been debated in commentaries for as long as there are written commentaries. Rashi asks the question of the creation story thusly: why is it here? Doesn’t it make more sense for the story of the Bible to begin in Exodus with the first time the months of the year are introduced? One of his answers it that the creation story exists in order to establish the Jewish claim to the state of Israel. The Ramban -- the 13th century Spanish halahkist whose commentaries tend toward the mystical – takes the position that the creation story is one of the mysteries that we must struggle with, but not necessarily ever understand. An intellectual attempt to understand the bible’s opening section is a very Jewish thing from where I sit.

G.K Chesterton said, “When will you understand that it is useless for a man to read his bible unless he also reads everybody else’s bible?” This might be the quote that best describes the impulse to comparative religion and cultural relativity, one of which Žižek addresses, but the other which he does not. How we each understand what we read and see, as he demonstrates using cultural texts, varies for each of us. Rick and Ilsa slept together (or they did not), the Mossad agents were conflicted about their jobs (or they were not), also applies to how we read and understand the Bible. For instance, for one group of people (the Jews) the laws of Leviticus are still in effect; for another (Christians) they are not. And of course, among Jews, how those laws are read, interpreted, and applied, differs as well. Why does it matter if we understand why we each read and understand as we do? Because that’s how we share the world - with curiosity and understanding of how we each live in the world, even using the same pieces of information.

What does it mean to be at the locus, at the point of contestation culturally? In a rather encyclopedic section of In Search of Lost Causes, Žižek attempts to discover an answer to this question. For instance, did Rick and Ilsa have sex in that moment between the cells of Casablanca, where the wind blew the curtains outward before the scene shifted? There is finally no definitive answer to that question (interviews with the director don’t even answer the question fully!), but ultimately the fact that there is no answer to the question isn’t the point, because the point is the pleasure we take in the conversation itself, i.e. how does the film grow, change, mutate, given the considerations of either possible answer to the question?

Was Cressida false? Potentially, the answer to this question changes the course of the Trojan war, but culturally, it creates the interstices in which at least three major works of literature outside of the history itself exist, including Chaucer’s long poem and Shakespeare’s great, if difficult, play.

Žižek grabs culture by the throat and analyses it for those very points in which dissention can be found. Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic outbursts and the ADL’s response to them are no less important than the music of Shostakovich and the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Steven Spielberg. In fact, it is with an analysis of Spielberg’s Munich that the Slovenian philosopher opens the body of the book.

Munich, Žižek says, “wants to be ‘objective’, presenting moral complexity and ambiguity, psychological doubts, etc.” but that this very attempt at objectivity redeems its protagonists, a Europe-based Mossad cell, even further by presenting their very subjectivity, a subjectivity which the film pretty much denies to the Palestinian “others”. The fact that the actual Mossad agents involved adamantly claimed that they weren’t conflicted but “just did what we had to do” only furthers the point. Humanising the other, the actual other, i.e the Palestinians, may be one of the best ways to understand the basis for conflicts. As Žižek puts it, “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”

And thus we have the paradox of the cultural: while it’s a valuable tool for understanding the basis for conflicts, the very humanness of a person isn’t enough of a tool for understanding some of the major actors in history. Hitler liked dogs is a commonplace these days, but it does illustrate this point quite aptly. Does the Führer’s care for animals in any way justify his behavior towards people? Of course not. So perhaps humanizing the subject isn’t the most valuable way to understand it? And yet how else do we even make the attempt? This is one of those paradoxes that underlie Žižek’s book.

If Jews are located in the interstices of larger political movements in general (with the tension being located at the point where religious orthodoxy and political radicalism meet), what does this mean for a reading of the politics of the current nation state (to use Žižek’s terminology), of Israel? Where, for instance, do the Diaspora and Israel meet and how can they fruitfully communicate with one another? In other words, are all Jews either members of and complicit with the nation state or no-state? Or, for people like me, is there a place in the middle of these two points where discussion of the larger issues can occur without any kind of forced divisions between its members?

For instance, one of the ways in which Israel and the Diaspora communicate is with capital. Rather than explore the ways in which this relationship and Marx coexist (as tempting as that is) I’m more interested in the ways in which that contingent relationship plays out in discourse on Israeli politics. If, as Žižek says, “all relationships are contingent” what does this mean in practical terms? One of the ways in which I think it’s important to think about this is using the Jewish custom of Mahkloket as a guideline. If, for instance, Diaspora Jewish agencies want my kesef, doesn’t it make sense that these same agencies be willing to argue their positions with me rather than simply stating them as a given and expecting me to jump at their command? If, as Žižek says, the “subversion of rebellion into ‘order’” is an act of terror, how is my insistence that that order be questioned and interrogated problematic?

Using Mahkloket as a starting point, we have a model for a way to have the conversation about difficult issues without having to sacrifice either our own minds or positions, or our own personal safety. Mahkloket is the method of argumentation used in Gemara, which provides not only positive, but negative examples of how to converse, in detail and across the spectrum of text and experience, without causing major damage to the infrastructure of society. The Rabbis had pages and pages of argument, sometimes coming to a legal decision on the matter, but more often than not, simply agreeing at the close of the sugyah to agree to have a number of possible answers to the question. While this might not provide a sound method of deciding on the grander political scale, it can and should provide a way to argue strongly about important issues while taking the time to hear the other person’s position on the same issue.

Žižek would say this is about recognizing the value of “reason” as somehow superior to dogma. Given that we’re talking about a model from Talmud, I’m not sure it’s that simple, but it’s a fine place to start because this paradox, or attempt to live at the interstices of two major ideas, is one of the points of major contestation that proves to us that we are alive. As humans, we love to argue. The current unwillingness to discuss our issues limits us as a society.

The Rabbis would argue, as would I, and apparently Žižek, that it is important to find those interstices and untangle them because that’s how we discover what is most valuable to us. Why should we continue to care about hopeless causes? Because they are how we know we’re alive in the world we share with each other.

OraSimcha, aka Cynthia Hoffman, is a Jewish educator and teacher of literature in the San Francisco Bay Area. She's lucky her better half Jane earns a real living so she doesn't have to.