“Aggressive dwarves,” alas, do overshadow by sheer number their lack of stature individually. Today, as though they concerted a vain response to dissimulate theirs, cavorting on the world-stages, here and there, is what observers might fitting call a politics of the greater haplessness. Lately, as a main illustration, such eminences signalise themselves by offering formal recognition of a factitious “state” on behalf of those which really still exist, whose helms they guide mainly, so it looks, to steer them aground, to the audible applause of many of the passengers. Thus does the dumb farce of it all, sad to say, display itself as perverse, strikingly perverse, to the eyes and ears of that sector of the public which preserves an impartial modicum of judgement regarding current affairs. Then, whether their acts reveal mere gross ineptitude, or else betray sinister premeditation and design, witnesses, and in these matters who is or should not be one, might hesitate to ascertain. – Or, while they tarry at the point of so signalising themselves, the ne’er-do-wells underscore their stance and self-importance by indulging in threats that they soon shall.
How officiously is the spectacle delivered; what coquetry of intimidation does it intend! Not only some European and Islamic capitals are its scenes, but also the United Nations generally, and the General Assembly in particular. No longer can one properly call these locales international, so entirely have they become venues where one single nation all or many of the others are set against. Thus has real comity long been absent there. Instead cohesion and its semblances depend upon the artifice of a “common enemy,” maintained assiduously by a low art these actors have gone far towards mastering. Amidst the sorrows of today and the moments of elation whenever they happen briefly to abate, one ought not to overlook the decades of practice such figures have had at it. Upon their enemy, already half a century ago (one further disastrous anniversary), a formidable calumny was launched in that very hall. Member-states, some actively, others acquiescently or in covert assent, stigmatised the national endeavours of the Jewish people with what were then as they are now potent terms of abuse in the political lexicon: the majority approved Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975.*
* Concerning its passage, and the aftermath, consult the eyewitness account by Evelyn Sommer, “Fighting Delegitimization.”
It was a notorious day – though many adherents of the death cult par excellence of today, “Palestine,” are I suspect unaware of the infamy as they are of much of the history they so loudly cry does concern them. No commemoration should it elicit; rather may it yield reflection on a serious matter. Namely, how the international organisation already by that date, thirty years into its existence, had gone awry.
Fifty years further on, the query remains no less salient. Though the declaration of 1975 was revoked formally long afterwards, the animosity which allowed it to pass does remain a force in those environs. Even a glance at the stream of accusation and condemnation Israel receives nearly unbroken from the United Nations and its agencies, or the disparagement accorded the Israeli delegations at the annual gatherings of the General Assembly, shows that the national aspirations of which the Jewish state stands as the guarantor do receive a singular treatment there.
Today it remains the case that the Jewish people’s nationhood is the negative focal point which the alliances of states and interests as embodied in the United Nations and other larger conglomerates cohere against, and which they do therefore have need of. Some duplicity in their positions flows from this unspoken requirement, while against such inconsistencies as may be manifest in actual practice, which in part are consequences of the efforts they involve themselves in, it often happens that a special rhetoric, vehement one moment and insinuative the next, is sent into the field, in order to distract the public, at home and in the world at large, from examining any of it too closely. Sustained attention paid to these realities could arouse a historical memory, amongst readers who actively do study works of history. To take one main example at present of the treatment meted out in these fora to the state of Israel de facto and de jure, namely, the proceeding mounted in the Hague at the International Criminal Court, which redounds mainly to shrink the small store of credibility that institution and its fellows had preserved: this juridical abuse seems to be designed, if one delves into its real function and purpose, to isolate the Jewish state and construct a set of walls around it, an implicit enclosure that calls back to mind the sequestration in the Judengasse or the Ghetto, or even in the shtetl. Somewhat more subtle in this reprise on another scale, which does ring with the tones of an unwitting terrible farce, once again the basic arrangement assigns a unique status to Israel, separating it out legibly from the rest, somewhat as the Jews in European countries were, before the era of their civic emancipation. (Their ill-treatment in most Islamic regions must also be taken note of, though its forms differed, but that history cannot be my main focus now.)
Whether or not the United Nations and comparable organisations could sustain themselves for long without implementing such an exclusion, is a theoretical question which may be handed over to some varieties of social scientist to pursue, they who delight in fitting the subject-matters into structural models of their own or others’ devising. Of greater urgency is an avowal: that the expedient has been, is being, and perhaps will be deployed, constitutes (just inadvertently?) the most devastating reproach issued against itself by the “international system.” This does remain, after all, a practical topic that should concern any citizen. (L’iniquité envers un seul, c’est l’iniquité envers tous. – L’affaire d’un seul est l’affaire de tous.) Prospects of a polity’s future, often less than bright, will dim even further when alongside states also their publics do adopt or submit to the fatal adage of “all against one.”
According to the vote of the majority of the General Assembly fifty years ago, Zionism was castigated as being close kin to racism. The great malice in this libel should not be difficult to ascertain, if one actually is interested in the two concepts at issue: namely, people and race. They remain distinct and inconvertible terms, thankfully, despite the best efforts of those who would efface beyond recognition their great difference (as they themselves might be brought to admit, after a bit of skilled Socratic questioning, assuming that they, which is unlikely, would come to participate in it without deceit). If only virtually, the words themselves rebel when an oppressed people’s restoration – to speak properly, a self-restoration, since its own efforts achieved it – in its ancestral homeland is likened to the incursion into an area not its own of a race. In order, so went the charge, to occupy that territory and rule over the natives: for with the same polemical gusto the General Assembly also fired off accusations of “imperialism” and “colonialism.” Loud in the attack was a reference to the expansion of the main European powers especially during the nineteenth century and up until the First World War; undergirding it, though not exactly kept muffled, allusions to immemorial episodes in the continent’s past, invasions of Vandals, Ostrogoths, Franks, afterwards, Normans, millennia earlier and legendarily, with a profile probably more fictive than factual, the Dorians.* On the whole this suggestive messaging conveyed to an audience whose horizons the experience not of serious, scholarly history but rather of sensational cinema had demarcated, images or associations of a military occupation, the violent work of young men joined in an armed unity, forming an enterprise answering to the concept of race around which the polemical accusation in 1975 did seem to centre (if indeed its usage denoted a definite meaning at all). But the Jewish populations of the state of Israel never took on that profile: not before independence nor in the wars thrust upon it then and later. Always they remained that multifarious type of group, a people. No metamorphosis under the pressure of their new circumstances after the end of the Second World War reduced them into a collective body whose existence, as per the condemnation passed by the General Assembly, was racial.
* With regard to them, one brief account for the general reading public, provided a bit later in the decade by the classicist Carol Thomas, “Found: The Dorians,” sketched out the continuum going from what is known to what then is surmised.
Resolution 3379 put a brand on Israel for offences with which those who advanced the measure should themselves have been charged: this point, taken impartially, looks obvious to me. Thus the idea need not be pursued here.* All the less shall I do so, since at present, fifty years later, substantive evidence that Israel’s foremost enemies of the period, the Arab nations, were already embarked on an imperialist and colonialist project, exporting their surplus capital and populace to European states with the connivance or worse of the latter, may be found in serious works of political history; while any perspicuous glance at conditions in Western Europe today, and likewise in locales elsewhere in the West, notes large numbers of fanatic men of military age devoting themselves to the cause of Islamic supremacy, more and more intent on what they themselves conceive to be utter hostility, in other words, war waged with a variety of means by an implacable, ascendent race.** – But this rhetorical stratagem of November 1975, quite purposively aiming to divert attention from what its proponents themselves were doing, should not distract me, fifty years afterwards. For, peering back at Resolution 3379, considered under the aspect of speech, it resounds as an act having multiple addressees, and with each of them it did something different. Now, to my mind, most striking is what the words achieved and in effect continue to do with the recipients in Western Europe who even then had travelled quite far from being mere third-party bystanders towards arranging themselves on the side of Israel’s enemies. On them the utterance could exert a special illocutionary force,*** and the interval of years since, especially all the accelerations during these last two after the pogrom, affords enough distance that its effects can appear with some clarity. Firstly it acted on them as castigation; it berated them for the imperialism, colonialism, racism in their national pasts, doing so in an instrumental way. Its aim: to arouse in them a sentiment of guilt, or a semblance thereof, which it would canalise into the ire (extant yet latent) against the Israel accused of the same complex of offences, therewith drawing them over to the Arab side. Yet because the contrition it summoned up was less than genuine, circa 1975, pervaded by the feigning and theatricality of which the contrite were themselves aware (or could have been), the speech-act never merely acted on them from the outside. Quite differently, beforehand an astute understanding of them and their motives had ensured it was indeed acting with them: devised so as tacitly to offer them a cue for play-acting and for flaunting how virtuous they had gotten. This was a chance of which its framers could foresee they would avail themselves eagerly, sooner or later. – In retrospect after half a century the success of such low canny arts seems rather predictable, given the dramatis personæ of this piece.
* I’ve touched on it more than once, and traced it out in one essay in particular.
** The legal system, in some jurisdictions, has become one of the war-theatres. There it happens that reprisals may come if one states matters as I just have done.
*** This concept, which as a non-specialist I draw loosely from the liber classicus, How to Do Things with Words by J. L. Austin, without heeding any call to delve into the peculiar rigours of the Foundations of Illocutionary Logic of John Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, grammatically speaking singular though it is, probably always “refers” to more than one force. But be that as it may: in 1975 and later, the effects of the speech-act in the General Assembly were many.
Beyond the castigation, yet another chord was struck by the rhetoric in which Resolution 3379 had been framed. On first hearing at odds with the former, these notes yet add something to it, by a sort of counterpoint. So well attuned to what these European recipients of the message would want, were those who worked up its illocutionary force – skilful propaganda! To flatter them in a light overtone, was something this speech-act “did.” The accusations of “imperialism,” “colonialism,” even “racism,” insofar as they also referred to the period when the capitals of Europe divided most of Asia and Africa amongst themselves, were tinted with respect, even admiration. Of course the acknowledgment was deniable, should a denial have been required, but audible is the idea that those European powers expanded with grandeur (thus to a degree their might made it right) and in the end it’s worked to our benefit – hence a little calculated flattery was sent back softly in Europe’s direction! (Flattery with retracted claws, such a speech-act may be called.) So, too, some honour survived the sheer fact of having been conquered by them: entirely dishonourable the subordination to such masters could not have been. Whereas, to come now to the equally implicit corollary, nothing of the kind held good with regard to the failure of the Arab armies following the new state’s declaration of independence in 1948. The quick victory they had reckoned with eluded them, while no excuse stood ready to explain away or to lessen the defeat by that most despised of peoples, as they thought it to be, the one which in their view could least of all lay rightful claim to martial prowess. An utter humiliation that seemed inexplicable, both then and in later rounds of the hostilities: wounded vanity such as theirs, who deemed belligerent excellence their prerogative, might well clarify why they later opted to wield the most cutting terms in the political lexicon against their enemy. The despised people which they had not conquered, they accused of acting as a race: and with the advantage of fifty years of hindsight, it is not hard to notice how this charge was weighted to work upon older attitudes in European countries regarding the Jews, emboldening those idées fixes that they might subsequently be uttered and again parade openly through the public realm.
A stratagem of a speech-act, Resolution 3379 fought the war on the Jewish people by other means.* Immediately it hastened the ripening of fruits that already were almost ready, amongst the milieux this force of its illocution addressed primarily.
* Today’s notion that “speech is violence” should be eschewed on various grounds; hopefully I’m agile enough to avoid relying on it or its fringes, even tangentially.
Locales whose resistance to the old idées fixes was proved to be more delusory than real, witnessed the return of phantasmata wherewith the Jewish people was misprised as a race though manifestly it did not take itself for such. Granted, there the idea’s nimbus differed from the most literal sense of the calumny approved by the General Assembly; but just this difference such artful propagandists would have factored in. For, in the European context, what else would the charge that the Jewish people comported itself as a race have brought back to mind, but imagery of the “Wandering Jew,” the “Elders of Zion,” and like hallucinations? Amongst those recipients of the message, the accusation’s propaganda-value also stemmed from that set of images. So it was not solely the initiation of the life of such a group, in armed encounters that virtually by definition would involve much violence, but rather more weightily the other pole of its collective existence, marked by uncanny longevity and præternatural cunning, which did exert a phantasmagoric influence. That inimical race begins to intrude into realms of martial virtue where essentially it does not belong – such roughly was the undertone of an idea suggested by the words in the General Assembly, and in Europe this strewing found a ready soil. (Bitter yet not without warrant is the remark that European countries prefer to honour dead Jews while disdaining to take action on the side of those now alive.)
If only all that could be dispelled in retrospect, as with the traces of a dream which plagued one during the night! Alas, from that point onwards the effects of the lie burgeoned rapidly; the outbreak of the oldest hatred witnessed over the last years, one now must realise, has transpired on grounds prepared much earlier. Here I almost want to admit: to speak about this matter is quite difficult for me (il m’est très difficile d’en parler).* Because, for one thing, in recapitulating the history, even if only a few of its pieces are recounted as minimally as possible, as I’ve sought to do, somehow its solidity may firm up though the aim was to smash it. Even were my eyes keen to observe how much I can endure (wieviel ich aushalten kann),** which they (so it looks to me) are not really, this prospect would be hard to bear. And, for another, since eminent amongst this batch of addressees of the illocutionary force of Resolution 3379 were large sectors of the left-wing intelligentsia in Paris, then still quite prestigious and a dispensary of opinions adopted throughout the West and beyond, the accusation against the Jewish people, that it thought of itself as a race and generally acted in accord with that belief, laced now once more by the old antipathy, envy, ressentiment as these affects or sad passions were emboldened at an uneven and yet accelerant tempo, tended to infiltrate or to infect various of that milieu’s intellectual export products, being disseminated thus (perhaps not only by inadvertence) along with the voluminous works of “French Theory,” as a more quizzical public now calls it, since its vogue is long past, but which, during the nineteen-eighties, in and around universities in English-speaking countries, was imbibed eagerly in large draughts by curious readers, myself amongst them – so, for a personal reason too this is a matter of which I’m quite reluctant to speak and in which holding my silence might simply prove a better, more vital alternative.
* Michel Foucault, « Il faut défendre la société », March 17, 1976
** Max Weber, quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, ch. 20, ii
Speaking at once semi-personally and semi-impersonally, at issue is the matter of one’s own insouciance or irresponsibility in those years gone by. Images, echoes, aromas slipped as though deliberately into a text one was studying, whose traces were distinct enough to warrant remarking on in seminars by way of contestation and critique, if only at times one had resolved, surmising into what a mass they some day would gel, not to prolong the discussions with ellipses, question marks, semicolons, etc., verbal or written, but to punctuate the flow of discourse with an exclamation mark and as needed even that gaucherie, an emphatic full stop – oh, had a pointed humour been wielded more often back then on associations of ideas ensconced in the subtext, wit rendering a small tithe to action in concert, would conditions today have become so bleak, especially since the pogrom of October 7, so reminiscent of totalitarian formations on the march for those who actually have read their history? Possibly they would not; and then, along the way to some such other present, one’s reflections would have been more auspicious, whether or not they bear being uttered.* (On this point no illusions of grandeur need be attributed to me, for aboard roughly the same boat as mine back then there were quite a few others too, and so I’m veering around more than an idea of my or anyone’s unique negligence.) – Similarly: on those scenes of action the streets, during that span of years on which memory by now bestows an aura, if only greater care had been shown about what was said, done, not said, not done, particularly in avoidance of injudicious words that equated unlike things, perhaps one could at least deny on one’s own behalf having furthered even marginally the long process of cheapening the most potent terms in the political lexicon, to the point today where the public hardly blinks when they are used wrongly. (Granted, were it to do so now, its eyes would flutter nearly without pause – strange sight!) But here too a small mea culpa is in order, though this I find especially difficult to broach, even if my amends for it have not or not yet included a most curt repudiation (eine schroffste Ablehnung).**
* Henry James, letter to Howard Sturgis, August 4-5, 1914
** Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans, Vorwort (July 1962)
Slightly closer to the present, I cannot say that the first attack on the Twin Towers in New York, in February 1993, in retrospect a trial-run for what was done in 2001, pushed me towards taking with due seriousness the large question of terror and the war in which it serves as a foremost means to bring about submission. In all candour, since the bombing did occur in my vicinity at the time, this is a failing I do personally regret. But, apart from the more personal aspect, here too it strikes me how different our circumstances now might be, had some larger number of citizens, there and elsewhere, heeded the event properly as an alarm-signal. – Its sequel, of course, everyone knows and yet ever fewer know it well, or, nearly a quarter-century later, even seem to care much about such things, as one gathers from reports that the question plays next to no role in the thinking of much of the electorate in New York, and especially not amongst those born after September 11, poised as many of them seem to be to cast their votes for a mayoral candidate who, let me not mince words, stands on the side of the perpetrators. What will happen to the memory of their victims, if he does slither into office and set his programme in motion, is terrible to envision. Very soon one may witness how even the dead, should the enemy triumph, shall not go unscathed (auch die Toten werden vor dem Feind, wenn er siegt, nicht sicher sein).* And that this time words of such weight as these do extract themselves from their context and enter into ours, as though they were made just for it – that under today’s pressure they seem to utter a prescient warning in earnest, for this I also contend with myself, since the awareness is not easily eluded that one’s own negligence at several junctures along the way cannot but be reckoned a factor in bringing everything to such a pass. The thought proves troubling, to say the least. Queries one puts to oneself may express it, phrased in a number of keys, quite often framed in the negative, focused on minima. Amongst the sort, for instance, this not simply rhetorical question: how far the progression towards the travails of the present might have slowed down, had only one shown oneself less careless then?
* Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” vi
Such matters indeed prove hard to speak of; even to allude to them fittingly poses a challenge. Thinking them over also is done haltingly. Stumbles are frequent. The difficulty is not assuaged but increased by the fact that one’s move against distant failings occurs by virtue of the consequences one attributes to them. Summoning these derivations into the present in order to take their measure, then appears as much a dubious pastime as it represents a serious effort. This suspicion too pipes up and asks to be pondered; some dexterity would perhaps turn it inside out and discern significance where at first a mere semblance of negation had been found.
Self-defeating though the attempt to imagine worthier alternatives to one’s own and others’ bygone carelessness may seem, still there could be some point to it. Like everything else, memory must be cultivated (le mémoire est comme le reste : elle se cultive). If one wants, one can have it (on en a si l’on veut).* – Such things neared again as if they were transpiring in an ample present, imagination might take note of its own predilection for arranging the relations they comprise under the aspect of chronological symmetry. Put into this shape, with the sequence of historical time converted into synchronous structures, they approximate well-composed music, which when memory rehearses it might even be touched up further; played thus its articulations would resound more clearly, the mind hearkening quicker to grasp what it means to say, while, in more felicitous cases, mnemonic capacity too may acquire better tone, through the exercise. So, à propos the chronology at issue, with September 11, 2001 become in effect a scrap of an irrelevant era for large numbers of the young to whose votes as seems probable the smirking visage of governance in New York will be owed, and not a living memory for most nor even much of a memory at all for some; while now distanced further off in the past by roughly the same interval of years, November 10, 1975 remains a date most likely not signifying anything particular and hence not manifesting the “citability” (Zitierbarkeit)** that might engage the interest of those who really are curious to know more about the historical dimension: what else then could exert an appeal, but that chronological symmetry itself in the imminence of its approach? Granted, a fluke of the calendar is not much to count on, at this moment of peril (im Augenblick der Gefahr),*** and yet one finds stranger portals to the better libraries of history than a mere fleeting alignment of anniversaries.
* Marcel Proust, quoted in Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, ch. xviii
** Benjamin, “Neue Thesen B”
*** “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” vi
Revisiting now my share in actions taken after September 11, I admit that without amounting to nothing it hardly did half-suffice nor even tick very long. How small, how careless my effort seems in retrospect, a quarter-century later, when racial hatred religiously pursued runs unhindered about the house in Western Europe, continental and insular, and for the moment a bit but not very less boldly around its beachheads elsewhere. Submission takes hold since many would be victims, by this point to which we’ve come, horrid inclinations the perpetrators observe and reckon with. A progression dire in itself, its volatility both actual and potential has been overdetermined by the concurrence of another development separable only relatively in analysis, since not in the last instance (en dernière instance), whatever that might be which one supposes such a principle to explain, but already decades ago the two began inextricably to cohere and to abet one another. This other factor is the ideology that the main totalitarianisms of the twentieth century substituted for the principles of action known from the older forms of government: ideology whose terrifying function was the preparation of individuals under totalitarian rule to accept the relations amongst themselves of perpetrators and victims and to play either of those roles as circumstances might require.* The emergence of such ideology does itself need to be prepared, and this phase has been retraced in some Western countries over the last decades, as elements began to solidify from whose later crystallisation a new totalitarianism might result; with the hindsight of today all this can be itemised rather distinctly in the signal case of the Netherlands, sadly. During the late nineteen-nineties, massive immigration from Islamic regions was already becoming a main political issue in the country, while supporters of the cause, much the same bunch who now openly avow just why they have come to the West,** already were practiced in donning the victim’s and the perpetrator’s roles by turns in snatches of theatre that aimed duplicitously to provoke. Then political opposition did arise, challenging their programme and the bulwarks of the ruling order – properly speaking: the Dutch oligarchy. For an oligarchy it was which approved and approved of their importation, comprising the party-cartel system on the electoral side and the squads of paid and unpaid sycophants in the media. Conjointly these sprang into action. Campaigns of public vilification were set into motion; the opposition’s most prominent representative in the parliament was targeted. None of the low tactics used against him need be specified; for my purposes here it is enough to note that his positions were said to expose Muslims to victimisation and mortal danger, and that this charge, repeated untold numbers of times, soon pushed some of their supporters towards the utmost: actually then it happened to be his life which was put at risk. Not a year after September 11, one of them perpetrated the deed which more than a few had, in a word, forethought. In May 2002 he was slain. Alibis, excuses, obfuscations immediately were heard from the sort whose work the shots which killed him did finalise; quickly they inscribed themselves into a hallowed tradition of hypocrisy. Public anger quite reasonably directed at them, they twisted in order to profile themselves as the victims in the piece. With this – to recur to the main point – these culprits showed how both roles might be played in that relation for which individuals were prepared by ideology under totalitarian rule. A harbinger it all proved; two years later much the same script was run through once more, without farce and with a like consequence, in an Amsterdam street, in November 2004: the aftermath was similar too. How the ideology might operate in practice, was adumbrated further. And once again with another interval of two years, though this time only a character assassination was the result; the intended victim departed the country, while they whose efforts had gone not quite as they may have wanted, did at least attempt to foist their role onto her, and insist she was the real perpetrator. But thus perhaps they miscalculated; since the three similar cases had occurred at such regular and short intervals, their common feature did furnish a topic for reflection on the part of many amongst the Dutch public at the time.*** Periodic resort to stratagems of terror, so one intuited, was tied to a significant change in the concepts perpetrator and victim themselves, paired with a metamorphosis in their relationship; one asked if what we really are dealing with is a new relation between new terms (réellement nous avons affaire à un nouveau rapport entre des termes nouveaux).**** Whether this was the case, and were it so, how the alteration might interconnect with others, and how closely, in what surfeit of intricacy: these questions were pondered. Forecasts abounded only in dim light. One discerned the state, that monstrous apparatus, fastening on this transformation to supercharge its tempo, overdetermining that which it heralds, the ominous preparations for ideology. – Such awareness, too, I have to admit, soon became routine. Not even the beginnings of action did it foster, back then.
* Ideology in this sense of the term I’ve invoked so often over the last years that it may become wearisome. Another item for a mea culpa; also since I should not like to discourage anyone from consulting the works, and especially the crucial essay “Ideology and Terror,” of the author from whom it stems, Hannah Arendt.
** Calculating perhaps that at this point dissimulation no longer is needed, they admit to the imperialism, colonialism, and racism of their project, especially in Western Europe; while in response to the disclosure of intent, one hears nothing from the Westerners who denounce those -isms where in fact they are irrelevant.
*** Anyone who knows of this chapter will recognise the cases I’ve mentioned as those of Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, respectively.
**** Louis Althusser, “Contradiction et surdétermination”
Wistful as may be the tones of mnemonic rehearsals where opportunities missed are again sought out, their very sound could do something else as well. (Why does one note the illocutionary force of speech but neglect the sounds?) Memory has ears, and with them it can listen to itself too. Its own delight in symmetries of number, it might affix to the round interval between two chronological dates, inscribing into things as accidental and abstract as those a second character so unlike theirs, some sensuous quality to hearken to outside itself, not least during the stretches when its own mood otherwise would monopolise it. By a movement of mind those items of chronology are likened to a chord! Just enough an element of music to contain an entire appealing air; so, its ears attuned, memory might also recall how its own operations elicited the concordance to begin with. Concurrently it may even listen to itself listening. What, if anything at all, is conveyed from afar by that virtual likeness to sound? Perhaps a clue about his indecision, as a person who never really can endure the locale in which just now he finds himself, though nor proves quite able to keep out of it (der niemals dort recht aushalten kann, wo er sich gerade befindet). That ambiguous existential impression (Eindruck),* he might however memorialise later, were he a poet, composer, or author, when he devotes some further writing to the theme. While in the case he were not, still the chances are high that through another type of effort he would dwell subsequently on the troubling matter of “time lost,” the difficult question posed amidst unease that flows (with some self-contradiction) from granting today how negligent one once was. And for both sorts, lost time (le temps perdu) remains neither lost nor forlorn, if only it encourages listening. Though far away from the present, the distance can lessen and be borne whenever one hears it, because then someone could wager that it or something like it another’s attentive ears will also span, somewhere. – Such a gamble has its risks, which my tentative reflections do not seek to ignore.
* Robert Musil, Rede zur Rilke-Feier
Lost time, considered as a dimension of earlier negligence whose later results one is brought to confront, troublesome or difficult though the self-assumed task then may seem, especially when the scale of the error as one defines it does not pertain to one’s life as an individual merely, but to the common inheritance whose history now sounds ready to be studied and told, was moved back into range as a topic of thought for the day’s critical minds by the war-stratagem that was Resolution 3379.
Michel Foucault war Israel sehr verbunden. Man hat das heute vergessen. Er empfand die Resolution der Vereinten Nationen, die Rassismus und Zionismus auf eine Stufe stellte, als unerträglich. Das war einer der Gründe, der zum Bruch zwischen ihm und Gilles Deleuze, dem anderen großen Philosophen dieser Epoche, führte. Die Linksintellektuellen um Deleuze fingen damals gerade an, über die legitime Kritik an der israelischen Politik hinaus den Staat Israel zu verteufeln. Mir stieß das genauso auf wie Foucault.
— Alain Finkielkraut, quoted in Georg Blume,
“‘Antisemitismus ist keine Sache der Vergangenheit’”
Michel Foucault was one whom the event in New York dismayed. And all the more as in Paris the milieux of the left-wing often did succumb to this iteration of an old message. Pleased by its inversions, antipathy towards the Jewish people was again uttered, just where he expected one would have known better. Thus their common history began to seem ever more like lost time.
Disappointment at their failings may have prompted him to turn his attention to the concept of race. If in Paris and elsewhere many on the left showed at the very latest by their response to Resolution 3379 that they approved when the concept was misapplied to besmirch an old people, did this not amount to a later effect of an intellectual predilection at an earlier stage in the history of left-wing thought which afterwards it had generally not handled nor overcome as it might have done? Well, in 1975, there was cause for genealogical inquiry into the matter, not omitting also to reflect somewhat on the relative tardiness of its own undertaking. What they neglected to know, if not also why, he did illuminate in the course of the lectures he delivered that year and the next. Those were lacks he made good with alacrity, and insofar as analyses, even the most acute, ever do anything, this series is very prominent amongst his lectures. Memorably it amplifies and augments the texts on race-thinking and racism published decades before by Hannah Arendt.
For my purposes it is enough briefly to recall one of the lectures’ main findings. In France after 1815 the more critical accounts of the nascent industrial economy and its main constituent groups did not devise their notion of class ex nihilo; they had instead worked it up from the extant idea of race, which was then well-known: for around a century already the subdivisions of the country’s body politic, the estates, were each traced back to a different racial source. But this metamorphosis in the concept leapt ahead of a change in the reality, though the programmatic aim had been that the latter should not lag behind for all too much longer. Classes might confront one another differently than had the estates which took themselves for races: conflict between them should be more amenable to rational resolution, less needful of a decision on some field of battle. However, if that were the aim of those who framed the concept, their efforts did not solve the problem; as was observed when class-struggle flared up into war later in the century, the classes’ adversarial relation once more burning with a racial hostility, becoming again an encounter of conquerers and conquered. Subsequently, while some of the best moments in the movement’s entire history did occur in the aftermath of those outbreaks and as though in response to them, towards the end of the nineteenth century and until the First World War, the whole problem never was surpassed. Whether it could have been, if handled less negligently, remains a live question – the very question which, called back to mind by Resolution 3379 and the welcome given it in Paris, threads through the course of lectures and marks them as research into lost time.*
* Such inquiry may guide the inquirer around like errors, though a programme of abolishing them in advance could run risks; think of his misstep as regards Iran.
In 2025, fifty years further on, all the unlearning during the interval has begun to manifest even more virulently. Where are the delusions of regress not spreading? Yet if today’s bleakness stems from the negligence that has forgotten or never knew of such moments as Resolution 3379, at least it could prompt one to reflect on the features that do separate a people from a race. Espousing violence far sooner than in some last instance in order to secure the dominance of an ascendant race, or to help to engender a new one (“by any means necessary”) – all that can be queried better when one remembers what a people could be. And, whatever the libels may say or unsay, the peoplehood of the Jews is indeed an exemplary aide-mémoire.
The great longevity of this people could remind polities that they too move best on a plane high above mere nature. A polity may sustain itself there more readily and for longer, if by its skill it encourages better political traits to rise over the merely natural level on which they first grew (naturwüchsigerweise), and amongst them especially that capacity for initiating action in concert which probably can be the most fully self-determining of all public activities. That encouragement is put at grave risk when, as happened earlier in the Netherlands and quite recently in the United States, violence is used as a means very deliberately to kill those to whom the assassins are opposed – a point which one presumes is grasped even by the aggressive dwarves who carry out or applaud the attacks. Nihilists, they also strike the very survival of the polity, not least by the likelihood of reprisals which quickly increases explosively. The citizenry’s capacity for self-determining action, already tenuous, could in worse cases drain away. Anything left over of the earlier political skill then falls under the sway of mere nature (cadit sub natura),* vanishing amidst an overgrowth of brute facts where initiative dares or deigns not to show its face.
* John Duns Scotus, Quæstiones super libros
Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, bk. ix, qu. 15, art. 2, 2, 36
If a polity’s first challenge is to hover over mere nature, how to assess the wealth of terms stemming from organic life that enliven the vocabulary of political thought? What are they doing in such a context, singly and together? Well, may these words not abide there half-ironically; might they not convey some awareness that nature will seldom fail to contribute something to politics, suggesting thus that the task is to cultivate its share with care, especially since any polity’s élan vital always tends to wear down. Perhaps that is one reason why they were transported from their own terrain and applied as metaphors elsewhere – by this change de place leaving notes of incongruence in their meaning, to elicit thought amongst the citizens, that they not take the political arrangements too much for granted. However, as with irony generally, here also these suggestions are apt to be misunderstood, and in more than one way. Egregiously they might do mischief to the polity, hastening the evaporation of its inherent force they were brought over to uphold, when their basic sense recurs and fosters an idea of political life as not its own raison d’être but rather a means to an end, indeed, in a worse case, not now unfamiliar, a route to paradise many seek to traverse as rapidly as they can. But in so doing, words drawn from the realm of organic life could do something further, just because they signify metaphorically: while they abet the damage, they may also emphasise the fact that it is being done, setting such a decay-process into the italics that might draw attention of the sort that would embolden the publicly-minded to apply what brakes they can to the decline. Action, that potentially self-determining activity and resourceful mainstay of politics, could then witness a restoration of its former tone.
Suggestions issued on the topic of “politics and nature” by the terms themselves, however, will fall on deaf ears in the case of those who subscribe to racism though they prefix an anti- to their advocacy. Often this sort has become so absurd and yet so facile that language written or verbal is made quite meaningless.* – Aggressive dwarves whom the physicality in the notion of race does captivate, leading them to accept voluntary servitude, barbarism, and even total war, may believe they have an answer to the dissolution of political life today; but, recollecting some items of history, such as the left-wing too once did, during an as it now seems time gone by, demands from mouths like theirs I for one find it hard to credit, much less to heed.
* A sentence such as I wrote just above in which there figured the word “witness,” they will mishear and denounce as the covert expression of an irate “whiteness.” – How will a tongue speak against discrimination amongst the colours of its vowels?
Political murders, recently in the United States much as earlier in the Netherlands, are like armed robbery carried out from within the polity itself, aiming to snatch the term of life it may yet have, leaving behind more than one corpse on the scene, to mark the victory of mere nature. And then hostilities to come can also be heard. Such acts could prove to be harbingers, much as with that extraordinary period of haphazard violence which anticipated the war* – the unrelated incidents as they then seemed from around 1900 onwards which presaged the First World War, though the observer’s retrospect will not speak where the history is unknown. Hence one difficult lesson of the last century, that the espousal of race does propel not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death,** lours less behind than ahead.
* Graham Greene, “Henry James”
** Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Two, ch. 5, iii