Prologue: A Farewell to Theory

Summary

Israël est la croix même sur laquelle Jésus est éternellement cloué; il est donc le peuple porte-salut, le peuple sacré dans la lumière et sacré dans l'abjection, tel que l'ignominieux et resplendissant gibet du Calvaire.

[Israel is the very cross on which Jesus is eternally crucified; Israel is the people bearing salvation, sacred in light and sacred in abjection, similar to the infamous and glowing gallows of Calvary.]

Rémy de Gourmont

In the early years of the third millennium, journalist and essayist Nicolas Weill published a little-noticed personal history of antisemitism. Weill wrote this intriguing intellectual memoir in the midst of the second intifada and during the resurgence of antisemitic incidents in France. And his memoir was at once candid and lucid. A journalist for Le Monde, Weill understood the stakes of the current situation, the new challenges for French Jewry, and he bore witness to the impact of the resurgence of antisemitism on his own identity as a French Jew. Because I value personal engagement with intellectual and literary history I will attempt, in this prologue, to sketch a history of my own engagement, my own love affair, and my own fatigue, with French thought and its engagement with the Jews and the new antisemitism.

When I was a graduate student, I had the privilege of being mentored by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard had become well known after the publication of La condition postmodernein the late 1970s, a book in which he heralded, perhaps not without a touch of melancholia, the end of the grand narratives of emancipation, namely the Enlightenment, the narrative of modern science, and Marxism. He subsequently became a beacon of postmodern thought, at least in its French avatar. Postmodernism, in Lyotard's understanding, was characterized by a rejection of totality and teleology, and by a celebration of the fragment or micro-narrative, as well as by its critique of modern emancipation and subjectivity. Opposed to those, in Lyotard's view, stood such notions as “infancy,” the “inarticulate,” the différend, and, indeed, “the jews”—all terms for resistance to a complete emancipation, i.e., to total autonomy.