Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification 9780823255085

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Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification

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Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification Neil Levi

Fordham University Press New York 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levi, Neil Jonathan, 1967– Modernist form and the myth of Jewification / Neil Levi. — First edition. pages cm Summary: “This book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernism’s hostile reception, and its self-conception” — Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-5506-1 (hardback) 1. Modernism (Art) 2. Art criticism. 3. Antisemitism. I. Title. NX456.5.M64L48 2014 700'.4112—dc23 2013016311 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 First edition

5 4 3 2 1

For Beth

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Contents

Acknowledg ments

ix

Introduction: Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite

1

pa rt i: moder n is t for m a s j u da i z at ion 1.

Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

23

2.

Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of “Degenerate Art” as Historicopolitical Spectacle

50

Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man

90

3.

pa rt i i: moder n is t for m a n d t h e a n tisemitic im agination 4. 5. 6.

Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses

121

Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism

139

The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Céline

170

Notes

201

Bibliography

235

Index

247

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Acknowledgments

First thanks must go to my invaluable mentors, Franco Moretti and Andreas Huyssen: this book would not have come into existence without them. For their crucial encouragement and support for this project in its earliest incarnation, I would also like to thank David J. Levin, Ursula Heise, Benjamin Buchloh, and Martin Puchner. David Damrosch, Colleen Lye, and Kelly Barry made helpful suggestions at important stages of my research. Dominick LaCapra, Jim Shapiro, and Rebecca Walkowitz gave me valuable advice and encouragement when I most needed it. I am especially grateful to Andreas and Dominick for their continued support of my work in recent years. Early research on this book was made possible by the support of the German Academic Exchange Ser vice (DAAD). I would also like to thank the archives of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for allowing me access to its newspaper and image files on the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. A Sesqui Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney gave me time to rethink this project from the ground up; I am also grateful to Sydney’s English department for providing me with an institutional home for that period. Support from Drew University, including a research grant and periods of leave, gave me time to turn this into the book I wanted it to be. Many thanks in particular to my colleagues in the English department for all their encouragement and moral support over the period of this book’s development. I would like to thank Helen Tartar of Fordham University Press for her patient support of this project, as well as the authors of the two anonymous reports I received on an earlier version of the book’s manuscript. ix

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Acknowledgments

Both reports made a significant difference to the book’s final shape. Portions of Chapter 2 appeared in the journal October, and portions of Chapter 4 appeared in Modernism/Modernity. Both have been significantly revised. A number of friends and colleagues have contributed in important ways to this book. I am particularly grateful to Michael Rothberg, who has been a valued interlocutor and collaborator, a thoughtful and generous reader, and an endless source of references and suggestions, from the days of this project’s inception to its conclusion. Chris Hill’s friendship, wisdom, and insight were important at the book’s beginning but absolutely invaluable at the end. Yasemin Yildiz advised me on matters structural and editorial. I am very happy to have the opportunity to express my gratitude to friends and colleagues from my various lives in Australia: Tim Dolin, Humphrey McQueen, Dirk Moses, Paul Sheehan, Gil Straker, and Elizabeth Wilson. I am particularly indebted to Elizabeth for a series of conversations that helped me clarify my arguments about Adorno and Beckett. In New York, Moustafa Bayoumi, Chris Mertz, Mark Sanders, Matthew Sharpe, Martin Walker, and Jenny Weisberg were all there for me when it mattered most. Thank you. I am pleased to be able to acknowledge the love and support of my family: my mother, Melanie; my brother, Jeremy; my sister, Meredith; and my father, Mashie Levi, who died a little more than a year before this book was finished, after a long battle with cancer. I regret that he did not live to see it in print. My greatest debt is to Beth Drenning, for reading and challenging and thinking deeply about every sentence on every page of every draft of every chapter, for living through the time and labor of the writing of this book with me, for inspiration, and so much more. I dedicate the book to her.

I n t roduc t ion

Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite

Dresden, 1850. Richard Wagner denounces what he calls the Verjüdung der modernen Kunst—the Jewification or Judaization of modern art, in which “Hebraic art taste” has come to dominate all of German culture. Munich, 1919. Protesters disrupt the final performance of Frank Wedekind’s play Castle Wetterstein, decrying it as “Jewish garbage,” and beating up those in the audience who “look Jewish.” It does not matter to the protesters that Wedekind is not Jewish and that his play is not about Jews.1 Tenerife, 1935. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s second film, L’Age d’Or (“The Golden Age”), is banned by the civil governor in response to the demands of the local Catholic bishop and press. In the ensuing debate, the newspaper Gaceta de Tenerife denounces L’Age d’Or as “a film made expressly to induce heresy, to poison souls, to debase them” and “spread degeneration”—in short, it represents “the new poison which judaism, masonry, and rabid, revolutionary sectarianism want to use in order to corrupt the people.”2 1

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Introduction

Munich, 1937. The city plays host to the best-attended exhibition of modern art in history. The works on display as Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) appear under headings including “Jewish, all-too-Jewish,” “Revelation of the Jewish racial soul,” “German farmers seen yiddishly,” and “Jewish longings for the desert are vented.” Yet very few of the paintings and sculptures on display are by people who could be identified, even by the Nazis’ inclusive measures, as Jews. Indeed, the artist with the most work in the exhibition is the German Expressionist painter Emil Nolde, himself a longstanding member of the Nazi Party. Melbourne, 1942. In his book Addled Art, the critic Lionel Lindsay, brother of the renowned Australian painter Norman Lindsay, claims that works of the “School of Paris”—in which he includes Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, and Surrealism— are all the product of a Jewish conspiracy.3 Munich, 1990. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, one-time follower of Brecht and the director of the epic film Hitler, declares that the postwar era has submitted itself to “the Jewish interpretation of the world. . . . We live in the Jewish epoch of cultural history.” 4 As a consequence, he says, art has turned away from all traditional values of depth, elevation, pathos, and passion and turned to an aesthetics of “the small, the dirty, the sick . . .”5 How can so many different kinds of art— the music of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, the drama of Wedekind, the paintings of Kirchner and Picasso, the films of Buñuel and Dali, each displaying markedly different “symptoms”—lead such a geograph ically, historically, and ideologically diverse range of interpreters to the same diagnosis? How can works of art—particularly modernist and avant-garde works—that are neither by nor about Jews be interpreted as Jewish? How, in short, to interpret such interpretations? Historically, scholars have tended not to interpret them, have tended, rather, to assume that we already know what these interpretations mean, or at least to assume that we understand them well enough to know that we do not need to know any more. Often these interpretations are treated as selfevident proof of the complicity between antisemitism and antimodernism, even as foreshadowing the Nazi genocide, in which the modernist work of art is interpreted eugenically, as a figure for the Jewish body (think, for example, of the work of Sander Gilman and his followers or of the perspective of philosophers of biopolitics such as Roberto Esposito).6 Or they are re-

Introduction

3

garded as not worth interpreting, whether because their meanings practically go without saying, or because it is thought that to accord them such attention would be to give them a kind of recognition that they do not deserve (rather than the moral condemnation that they clearly call for), or  because to engage with them is to risk contaminating oneself with the views they promulgate (a view I will discuss in more detail later in this introduction). In this study, on the contrary, I will show that what I call the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form should be regarded as integral to the history of European modernism. It proceeds from the premise that the antisemitic interpretation of modernism is itself worth interpreting and that doing so need not mean that we are either according undue recognition to the worldview of the antisemite nor exposing ourselves to ideological contamination by it. Nor, for that matter, will interpreting such interpretations mean accepting the validity of their claims about modernist form: rather, I inquire into why it is modernist form in par ticular onto which such concerns, anxieties, and identifications are projected, and what such projections reveal about the fears, desires, and contradictions of the antisemitic imagination. This book examines the ways in which the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, pervasive, contagious Jewish spirit—the myth of Jewification or Judaization (the terms are semantically equivalent)— shaped both the interpretation and creation of modernist form. If, as the historian Gavin Langmuir argues, antisemitism is historically distinguished by the hostile attribution to Jews of unreal characteristics and actions that no one has ever observed (conspiring to poison wells, desecrate the host, and ritually murder Christian children) and particularly, as Moishe Postone points out, characteristics and actions that involve the exercise of a tremendous degree of power (spreading the Bubonic plague, introducing capitalism and socialism), then the fantasy of Judaization (the term that I will use throughout this book) provides the lens through which that invisible power and those unseen actions become visible and manifest.7 The first half of this book explores the critique of works of modernist art and literature that were derided as Jewish but that were neither by nor about Jews; the second half demonstrates how certain canonical modernist writers articulated their own formal innovations as negations of the fantasy of Judaization. By focusing on the role of Judaization I seek to show how we might understand

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Introduction

the question of form (rather than, say, the representation of Jewish people) as central to the relationship between modernism in the arts and modern antisemitism. I argue that both aesthetic modernism and modern antisemitism seek formal solutions to the problem of how to render intelligible the experience of modernity, and that the figure of the Jew is made to personify otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that enter a condition of chronic crisis in modernity. It is only by addressing the centrality of this personification to the antisemitic imagination that we can understand why modernist works of art and literature that were neither by nor about Jews come to be interpreted as Jewish or, more precisely, Judaized. Such an approach enables us to move discussions of modernism and antisemitism away from moral evaluations of any individual author’s complicity with or opposition to antisemitism, and toward a study of relations of mimesis and disavowal. To be clear: in emphasizing the abstract notion of Judaization, my point is not to deny the importance of connections between certain ideas about Jewish bodies and these antisemitic interpretations of modernist form, but to show that what importance the Jewish body does have in these wild, suspicious readings of modernism is less as their ground or telos than in the role that it plays in fantasies about the transmission of putatively Jewish properties to the work of art. The antisemite does not interpret the modernist work of art as analogous to the Jewish body but as a symptom of his (the antisemite’s) own subjection to Jewish spiritual domination. I begin with the emergence of the notion of Judaization of the arts in the mid-nineteenth century and follow the antisemitic interpretation of modernism through to its late modernist negation. The fi rst half of this book seeks to undo the teleological narrative in which all antisemitic interpretations of modernism (and those antimodernist writings like Max Nordau’s that might be understood to unintentionally feed into antisemitism) prefigure the Nazi genocide; the second half undoes the widespread habit of identifying certain modernist writers with one or another form of fetishized Judaism, be it formal or ethical, by demonstrating that these modernists all reject such identitarian thinking. Most of the first half of this book constitutes, then, a kind of counternarrative, a series of studies— of Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” and Max Nordau’s Degeneration, of the Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” and of Wyndham Lewis’s Time

Introduction

5

and Western Man—that show that these interpretations of modernist form do not constitute a homogeneous unity that leads inexorably to the camps, that there are more productive ways to approach them than by considering the moral question of whether or not they are complicit with the Nazi genocide, and that each interpretation links modernist form to the Jews for different reasons and in different ways. In place of the narrative in which these interpretations anticipate a future catastrophe, I show how these antisemitic interpretations seek to document and fight against a catastrophe that they think has already happened and for which they hold the Jews responsible: a radical loss of social, cultural, and subjective integrity, coherence, autonomy, and self-possession that extends in quite specific ways to the realm of aesthetic value, to how works of art are made, the material they draw from, the forms and shapes they take, the traditions they build upon or break with, and the modes of their recognition, interpretation, and consecration. This catastrophe, so described, might sound like a picture of the experience of modernity rendered in broad brushstrokes. But the antisemitic interpretations I examine consistently take modernist form to be Jewish because it belongs to, draws upon, or reverts to an inert past, one either moribund or dead, and refuses to recognize the needs of the present and the demands of the future. For the antisemitic interpreter, the artistic and literary works and forms that we identify with European modernism are distinguished precisely by their failure to be properly modern. This preoccupation with the putative obsolescence of modernism shows that the antisemitic interpretations I consider seek to contest the terrain of modernism itself, in terms that are themselves strikingly resonant with modernism’s own language and ideology. But it also reveals how, in construing modernism itself as that blind, inert dispensation that must be superseded, these antisemitic interpreters have recourse to a discourse that is decidedly Christian. In the second half of this book I argue that the antisemitic interpretation of modernism (and, more broadly, of modernity) constitutes a crucial element within the works of figures more conventionally recognized as modernist: James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett. Each seeks to legitimize his modernist aesthetics by staging the negation of what we might call an antisemitic poetics: each critiques certain styles as belonging to the antisemite’s toolbox, as modes by which the antisemite makes

6

Introduction

sense of the world. I argue, in other words, against the narrative in which the abject, outcast figure of the Jew is redeemed by the embrace of canonical high modernism. That view, I suggest, posits too conceptual and too clean a departure from the antisemitic past. The modernists themselves, we will see, are far less sanguine. While Joyce does seem to present the second half of Ulysses as a radical break with a certain antisemitic poetics, for both Adorno and Beckett the problems presented by antisemitic modes of interpreting the world are not to be resolved by a simple conceptual reversal implicit in embracing the previously abjected figure of the Jew but by long and difficult labor understood along the lines of a psychoanalytic working through. I am, then, as much concerned with the poetics as with the ideology of antisemitism and its critique. I focus on how the texts I consider exhibit, imitate, and negate the forms and poetics against which they define themselves and the ways in which those disavowed forms are connected to one or another abjected figure—be it the Jew (Part I) or the antisemite (Part II). In the antisemitic interpretation, modernist form is identified with the figure of the Jew insofar as both modernism and the Jews are regarded as matter out of place—to cite the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt—meaning, in this instance, that which does not belong within the aesthetic sphere, the nation-state, or the realm of human culture.8 I examine both the negative permutation of this idea, manifest in the antisemitic interpretation of modernism, and its positive form, which is on display in the postwar conflation of modernism and the Jews as the sublime others of a homogenizing, genocidal modernity. But I am also at least as concerned to critique and offer an alternative to certain dominant interpretations linking modernism and the Jews, particularly those predicated on unmediated analogies and identifications between modernist works of art and Jewish bodies, identities, and religious tenets and practices, whether this be the polysemy that somehow makes Joyce Judaic or Adorno’s invocation of the Second Commandment self-evidently proving the Jewishness of his thought. I argue that the analogies and identifications that dominate our thinking about the relationship between modernist form and the Jews frequently obscure from sight more complex, less predictable connections. In short, in this study I employ the notion of dirt both as a kind of methodological lens for examining the disavowal of certain kinds of aesthetics and

Introduction

7

as a way of thinking about the limits and problems of the conventional associations we make between modernism and the Jews. Underlying much of what I have to say about the antisemite—both how he relates to modernism and to the Jews and how he appears in modernism and in critical theory—is a further, crucial way of thinking about what is in and out of place: the psychoanalytic concept of projection. In psychoanalytic terms, projection is the “operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes or even ‘objects,’ which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself, are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing.”9 The expulsive structure of projection deserves emphasis: because I project onto you what I expel from within myself, I must in turn expel you from the space I control, since I cannot stand to see the rejected quality in you any more than I can stand to see it in myself. The concept of projection is useful because it asks us to refocus our attention on the interpreting subject—the one doing the projecting—rather than upon the projected-upon object. But while such a focus is necessary, it is not always sufficient. The focus on the projecting subject alone does not explain why certain groups or objects are subject to the particular projections they are. I propose that we can do so, however, by thinking about psychoanalytic projection in terms of the analogy of an actual projection screen, which is not literally a blank surface but a material object with specific properties that make visible images that we would not be able to see if they were projected into thin air or, for that matter, onto a less amenable surface. This model, I suggest, helps us explain why some groups (whether classified by race, gender, religion, class, or sexual orientation) and objects (modernist works of art and literature) are the surfaces for the kinds of projections I discuss in these pages, without having us lapse into holding the objects of those projections responsible for causing them. (I elaborate this theory further in my discussion of Adorno.) Antisemitic projection reveals a dialectic of disavowal and desire that we can understand through the concept of mimesis, a notion central to the accounts of modern European and specifically Nazi antisemitism offered by the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno and the French poststructuralist philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy.10 In several of the chapters that follow I make particular use of the suggestion found in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of

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Introduction

Enlightenment that antisemites “detest the Jews and [yet] imitate them constantly. There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness.”11 Note that this does not mean that the antisemite imitates the Jew; rather, he imitates an externalized image of his own repressed impulses, that is, he imitates a disavowed part of himself. Adorno and Horkheimer’s aperçu seems to capture quite precisely the dialectic of disavowal and desire on display in all the cases of antisemitic projection discussed in Part I, and I will make much of the ways Wagner and the Nazis in particular imitate the forms that they interpret and disavow as Jewish.

Political Formalism versus Political Phobia I seek, then, to contribute to the study of the racial, religious, and political meanings attributed to modernist forms. In a sense, the argument of this book resides not only in a specific hypothesis about the relationship or, better, relationships between various modernisms and antisemitisms but also in this book’s own form, in seeing what comes to light when we read these texts alongside one another. While such a methodological gambit might allow the present work to be classified as a distant relative of a cultural studies inspired by Ernesto Laclau’s concept of articulation, a number of features more obviously align it with what has recently (usually pejoratively) been called “political formalism” or “activist formalism.”12 Political formalists are charged with seeking to determine the political valence of texts in themselves (rather than in their empirical reception histories) and with doing so through close or “hypervigilant” attention to the strategies and formal procedures those texts display (rather than, say, through broad historical narrative or sociological inquiry). In short, political formalists tend, as Rita Felski puts it, to “see the world in a grain of sand.”13 In what follows I do, like many political formalists, incline toward detailed attention to individual texts. I examine the implications of specific names and word choices and extract political significance from close readings of distinctive sentence structures, unusual textual citations, arresting collages, and dense cultural and philosophical meditations. Building on the work of theorists such as Moishe Postone, Slavoj Žižek, and Eric Santner,

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in much of this book I explore the premise that there is an intrinsically formal component to antisemitic ideology, insofar as the figure of the Jew provides both a personification and an explanation of otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that, in modernity, are associated with a kind of crisis, whether subject formation, transformations in economic, political, and aesthetic value, or the experience of change itself. This terrain is crucial to the modernist imagination’s engagement with antisemitism. Moreover, to lay all my formalist cards on the table, I am inclined to believe that if one is going to study aesthetic modernism and not attend to the question of form, it is hard to explain why one is studying aesthetic modernism at all. I am not talking about subjecting oneself to a hegemonic modernist ideology but about recognizing what is historically distinctive about the object of inquiry. That said, the present work differs from the picture that critics such as Rita Felski and Marjorie Levinson draw of political formalism in several crucial respects. First, apart from the broad premises I have just sketched, in this book the relationship between aesthetic form and politics is less a premise than a question. I’m less inclined to see the world in a grain of sand than to ask just what a grain of sand is, what it looks like, and how it is constituted, in order to understand what it is we are looking at when we look at and talk about . . . whatever it is that grains of sand are meant to add up to. And rather than assuming that these texts possess an inherent political value or “critical agency,”14 I show that the texts and figures I examine themselves attribute ideological and political meaning to aesthetic form, that they themselves explicitly present artistic form as an immediately political matter, one of giving shape, coherence, and embodiment to the world and to the experience of modernity. I am interested, in other words, in showing how the various relationships between ideas about modernist form and ideas about Jews and Judaization show modernism itself to be from its origins already politically formalist. Second, I reject the idea that to read texts attentively or, as we so often say, closely is necessarily to consecrate or overvalue them. Such claims reveal a rather restricted understanding of what it means to interpret something and why one might do so. I interpret some texts that I admire and others that I wish had never existed. I do so because they trouble me and because they present questions and puzzles to which extant commentary has not

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Introduction

provided solutions I find satisfactory. I write about all of them not in the belief that I will thereby change the way that they are valued but in the hope of changing the way that they are understood. Antisemitic interpretations and figures in particular require close attention, but they have historically tended not to receive this, perhaps because they are associated with dirt and pollution. Interpreting antisemitic texts and fantasies requires, it turns out, working through particular kinds of resistance and disavowal. I argue that just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that we might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism, and that we have elaborated a series of pollution rituals and behaviors around the ways we talk about antisemitism to defend ourselves against that spirit.15 One of the ways we defend ourselves against that contamination, I suggest, is by a reactive attachment to the idea of Jewishness and to the figure of the Jew, one manifestation of which is the philosemitic idea of modernism as Jewish that lauds certain writers— such as Joyce or Beckett— as nonJewish Jews, or Judaic authors. My response to this tendency and, more broadly, to the treatment of the figure of the antisemite as himself a kind of dirt, subject to pollution rituals and interpretive foreclosure, shapes the kinds of questions I ask in this book. One of the more obvious examples of what I call the phobic approach to antisemitism in contemporary culture can be found in the spectacle that ensued following Lars von Trier’s May 2011 press conference at the Cannes Film Festival to accompany the screening of his film Melancholia. Von Trier announced, “I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out I was really a Nazi because my family was German [with the name] Hartman, which also gave me some pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler.”16 He repeatedly said that he did not approve of Hitler, did not think he was a “good guy,” but that he felt some sympathy for him, sitting in his bunker. Von Trier said he was not against Jews but was in fact for the Jews (but found Israel “a pain in the ass”). It was a fascinating performance, which of course led to the filmmaker being roundly condemned by the festival and certain Jewish groups and then banned and ejected from Cannes. We take such gestures of repudiation for granted today. As with certain responses to the events of September 11, 2001, the attempt to understand— or, more precisely in von Trier’s case, a complicated, awkward attempt to work through

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his personal relationship to the legacy of Nazism in Europe—was immediately treated as an inexcusable attempt to exonerate.17 Are scholars in literary and cultural studies not more sophisticated than that? Some years ago at a conference at one of the more well-known American universities I presented a paper on the ways in which the Dada slogan “Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!” was refunctioned by the Nazis in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in a way that raised the possibility that the Nazis’ own imitation of Dada might itself have to be taken seriously as an instance of Dadaism (some of these ideas appear here, in Chapter 2). At my panel’s conclusion a graduate student approached me and demanded, “You talk about taking the Nazis seriously! What about taking the Jews seriously?” Another said she thought it obvious from my interpretation of what the Nazis did that I must approve of their actions. At the time, I was naïve enough to be bewildered by these responses. Despite having read and been impressed by aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s work, I was still many years from grasping the extent to which, in literary studies in general and in the study of modernism in particular, we tend to conflate categorization with evaluation, interpretation with consecration, tend to assume that we write about these texts because we think they are good. Moreover, I had assumed that everyone in literary studies in the English-speaking world already agreed that the Nazis had committed one of the great crimes in human history and that one did not need to restate this fact every time one spoke about them, particularly (essentialist that I was) when one bore a recognizably Jewish surname. But it seems I had not only overestimated what my name permitted me not to say but also how unequivocal its meaning would be to others. Later in the conference I discovered that a handful of the people at my panel— including my interlocutors—had decided after my talk that I must be German. Not a German Jew, but a German. As it happens, I am neither a German Jew nor a German and have neither German nor German Jewish ancestry. I am an Australian Jew and had, at the time, just a couple of years of Germanlanguage study under my belt. It was not, then, how I pronounced perhaps a dozen words in German amid two thousand in English that led some of my audience to their theories of my national identity but rather, I suspect, how I spoke about the Nazis. By failing to observe the proper rituals of intellectual hygiene in speaking about the Hitler regime I had apparently become

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Introduction

inhabited or, rather, contaminated by the German—which is apparently also the antisemitic—spirit. Of course, paranoia sometimes seems endemic to the condition of being a graduate student. But as many scholars have argued, paranoia in individuals can also help us grasp underlying social pathologies. Fears of contamination by antisemitism continue to structure and shape how even some of the best scholars talk about modernism and the Jews. For example, in “Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument,” a 2006 essay that reflects brilliantly on the difficulties presented by thinking about the Jewish contribution to modernism, the intellectual historian Scott Spector takes Steven Beller to task for arguing that Viennese modernism was/is Jewish, whether it was/is visible or not (and mostly, it seems, it was). The awkward similarity of this central thesis to the central thesis of the modernists’ contemporary antisemitic critics is not lost on Beller, but he does nothing to suggest what we are to do with this similarity, or to account for the recurrence of this pattern in any way.18

I agree with Spector that Beller’s claim is problematic and that it is strange to remark upon but make nothing of the similarity between his argument and that of the antisemites. But I think he applies pressure in the wrong place or, better, in the wrong way. For Spector, the sheer fact of an “awkward similarity” between the antisemitic thesis and Beller’s is itself the problem whose “recurrence” demands explanation. Is this so because to resemble the antisemite is to violate a kind of academic social taboo? Is the argument to be given up because it’s embarrassing? On the contrary, I would argue that the problem with Beller’s argument is not its simple structural similarity with those of modernism’s antisemitic critics. It is weak for the same reason as theirs is, makes the same fallacious logical leap, rests on the same fantasy that because a number of the contributors to Viennese modernism came from backgrounds that he regards as Jewish it is legitimate to describe Viennese modernism as being in some essential way Jewish, as if there existed a kind of Jewish spirit that informed the whole. We might well be more aware of the problems such an argument presents because of the history of antisemitism, but—and this is my point—it would be problematic even if antisemites had never made it. Now it could be that I’m not reading Spector sufficiently charitably here and that his reference to an “awkward similarity” between Beller’s argu-

Introduction

13

ment and that of the antisemites is shorthand for the kinds of objections I have spelled out, but it seems to me that such rhetorical gestures—pointing to awkward, uncomfortable, disquieting similarities—are endemic to the way many of us write about this topic. Spector is unusually well-attuned to the different ways in which arguments both for the idea of modernism as Jewish (Beller) and against it (E. H. Gombrich) echo antisemitic arguments even as they self-consciously try to defi ne themselves against them. He thus shows both intentionally and inadvertently the enormous extent to which, when we think we are thinking about modernism and Jews, we are really thinking about, fending off, the figure of the antisemite. We can’t think clearly about Jews, and certainly not Jews and modernism, without worrying about the ways in which our thinking might be contaminated by ideas and structures of thought that belong to or are signs and symptoms of the antisemite. What does this mean for my own argument? While I fi nd the idea that modernism is Jewish strange in both its antisemitic and its postwar philosemitic variants, I do not seek to condemn it outright. Similarities are not proofs but occasions for questions. I reject notions of modernism as Jewish not because they have an antisemitic genealogy nor because they repeat a pattern but because of the way they repeat a pattern, posit Jewishness as a kind of abstract essence that can somehow inform a wide range of works of art and literature. I do not reject out of hand the very possibility of speaking of a certain Jewish modernism. Amir Eshel and Todd Presner show one plausible way to think of certain strands of modernism as Jewish when they ask, “Can Mahler or Schönberg’s music, for example, be considered as operating within the conventions of post-Wagnerian European music and within the traditions of Rabbinic liturgy? Did Mahler’s integration of nonclassical, Jewish motifs into his symphonies result in opening up new vistas to contemporary modern composers?”19 But that is a very different kind of idea from the one that has dominated the way scholars have written about the purportedly Jewish modernism of Joyce and Beckett and even Adorno. Rather, analogies with one or another fetishized idea of Judaism—Talmudlike commentary, diasporic dispersal of meaning, a complex engagement with the biblical Second Commandment—have historically constituted the dominant manner of demonstrating these modernists’ textual, formal, ethical, and philosophical “Jewishness.” Despite the manifest preoccupation in so much postwar critical thought with the figure of the Jew, the latent but central figure for the thought of

14

Introduction

the postwar period is, I want to suggest, the antisemite. In theorizing the figure of the Jew as embodying the possibility of a nonidentitarian, nonexclusionary community— a dominant motif of French postwar thought that, as Sarah Hammerschlag has shown, runs from Sartre through Blanchot and Levinas to Derrida—what we are really trying to think through is how to distinguish ourselves from the antisemite.20 As Carl Schmitt writes, the enemy is a figure for our own question.21 The Jew, I argue, is a figure for the question the antisemite cannot bear to pose to himself. But the antisemite is a question for many of us. In describing him as a figure for our question, my point is not that the antisemite is a fantasy or that we are wrong to try to explain or understand this figure—far from it, as this is just what most of this book sets out to do—but that this figure is both real and a kind of container, a way for us to justify our own concerns, ideas, aesthetics, and politics. In this book I do not try to think beyond such a figure so much as show some of the ways in which he appears in and shapes the postwar critical modernist dispensation. At the broadest level, we might say that for much of postwar thought, the antisemite is the one who fails the test of modernity: who can’t handle the truth about how subjects are formed and how value is created under capitalism; who refuses to recognize the dependence of all art on the consensus of an interpretive community and the irreducibly mimetic nature of all artistic and linguistic production; who succumbs to the need for embodied representation when there is none to be had; who believes that dispossession is contingent, not structural; who desires the coherence and intelligibility that we understand is illusory (as Žižek has it); who projects falsely and does not reflect upon himself (Adorno); who fears change and difference themselves (Zygmunt Bauman); who embodies untrammeled aggression and self-deception, exclusion, violence, homogeneity, and the refusal to recognize the other and to celebrate heteroglossia and polyphony. All of which may be true. The ways we talk about this figure are also, however, how we justify our modernity to ourselves and perhaps also how we disavow our own discomfort in modernity or, more generously, seek to convince ourselves that there must be better ways to live with it. This book begins to work through these ideas by trying to read the antisemitic interpretation of modernism, as it were, nonphobically. If there is a historiographical manifestation of phobic interpretation, it might be what the literary scholar Michael André Bernstein critiques as

Introduction

15

backshadowing.22 Bernstein rejects both historical and literary narratives that represent the Holocaust as inevitable because they diminish the everyday concerns and behavior of European Jews who did not foresee it. To backshadow is to insist that the catastrophic future was predictable to those to whom it had not yet happened and to condemn those who did not foresee the future as epistemologically and morally inadequate. (One might note a link between Bernstein’s notion of backshadowing and a certain criticism of the Jews for failing to recognize the event of Christ’s coming.) Bernstein prefers narratives that sideshadow, that display an awareness of the contingency of history, of the possibility of events turning out otherwise, because these recognize that the past was once somebody else’s unforeseen future and thus recognize and mourn (rather than condemn) the situated agency of its subjects. We can apply Bernstein’s thoughts in a different context.23 As I have indicated, there is a strong tendency to read a certain strand of the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as prefiguring the Nazi genocide: modernist works of art as symbols for Jewish bodies. While such interpretations do not condemn those contemporary actors who did not foresee the Holocaust, they too assume that the future was already visible, that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form is a clearly legible symptom of the conditions that would produce the genocide. The interpretations I argue against—most obviously in the interpretation of the antisemitic reading of modernist form as fundamentally eugenic— emerge from an understandable desire to recognize and describe the etiology of the Holocaust so as to prevent its like from ever occurring again. Thus I contest such interpretations not because I think they are politically or morally objectionable, nor because I wish to question the importance of eugenics to the Nazi worldview, but because I think they do not adequately explain their object. They fail to explain properly the place of modernist aesthetics in the story they claim to tell. As I have argued, the key to understanding the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form lies in the concept of Judaization (also rendered as Jewification). The story I have to tell starts there. I begin by underlining Judaization’s predictable associations with usury, money, and capitalism and then point to its origins in notions of religious interpretive difference to suggest its importance in helping us understand the role of the figure of the

16

Introduction

Jew in interpreting and representing the experience of modernity. In the rest of Chapter 1 I consider two texts commonly regarded as forming the origins of the Nazi antisemitic interpretation of modernism: Richard Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism in Music,” which brings the term Verjüdung (Judaization) into the German language, and Max Nordau’s 1892 bestseller Entartung (Degeneration), which is generally understood to have introduced the medicalized notion of degeneracy into the cultural sphere. I read both texts antiteleologically, acknowledging the violence of their rhetoric and racism of their assumptions, while also showing the distance between their conceptions of modernism and those espoused by Nazi ideology. Wagner’s concept of the Judaization of modern art is inextricable from a sense of historical crisis in the creation of artistic value that is itself distinctly modernist. Nordau’s notion of Entartung, often regarded as providing the point of origin for the Nazi notion of degenerate art (entartete Kunst), might more plausibly be interpreted as a vain attempt to wrest the concept of degeneration from an extant antisemitic context and to do so, no less, by rewriting antisemitic conceptions of the cultural realm such as those found in Wagner. Interestingly, both Wagner and Nordau make their own claims to aesthetic modernity by declaring the art against which they define themselves moribund, obsolete, and dead, and both do so in language that ultimately lapses into a decidedly Christian vocabulary. I then turn in Chapter 2 to the most notorious and spectacular example of the antisemitic interpretation of modernist art in history: the 1937 Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art.” Against the scholarly tendency to treat this exhibition as fundamentally eugenic, a prefiguration of the extermination camps in which modernist works of art stand in for Jews, I argue that “Degenerate Art” needs to be understood not (only) as pointing forward to the genocidal policies of the 1940s but back to the period of history—Weimar Republic Germany—from which the Nazis claim to have saved the German people. The works on display in “Degenerate Art” are not meant to present the Germans with the face of a Jewish alien other but to teach them to fi nd abject their own past Judaized selves. But “Degenerate Art” is also a profoundly ambivalent exhibition. The art that is most heavily represented in the exhibition— German Expressionism—was once considered as a candidate for National Socialist revolutionary art; the art that is most thoroughly mocked—Dadaism—is also the art that is most thoroughly and perhaps pleas-

Introduction

17

urably emulated. And the figure whose abject representation is shown by the Nazis as the first and most decisive proof of the outrageousness of modernist art is one about whom they themselves were profoundly confl icted: Jesus Christ. In the last chapter of Part I, my attention shifts to the notion of Judaization in English-language modernism. In his 1927 magnum opus Time and Western Man the English modernist writer and painter Wyndham Lewis insinuates that the modernism disseminated by such figures as Bergson, Freud, Proust, and Stein bears significantly Jewish traits, and that the modernism of James Joyce, because it reflects the influence of these figures, should be regarded as a Judaized modernism. Lewis’s argument builds upon a revision of Nietzsche’s account of the putatively Jewish roots of modern populist and democratic political movements. As I show, Lewis reads Nietzsche through the lens of what Gil Anidjar calls the Semitic hypothesis, in which what could be said about Jews could also be said about Arabs and vice versa.24 For Lewis, the truth about the Jews—and the culture they impose upon the West— stands revealed in the figure of the Muslim fanatic. Lewis regards the modernist form he critiques not simply as a symptom of a cultural change that leads to fanat icism but as itself the means of the production of the fanatical subject. In Part II, I turn from how antisemites interpret and imagine modernist form as the work of the Jews to how certain modernists present and distance themselves from the kinds of aesthetic forms they identify with the antisemite. I begin with James Joyce and Ulysses. Many of the formal features of Ulysses that Lewis sees as evidence of Judaization—abstraction, excess, repetition, imitation— are already presented in Joyce’s novel in relation to his critique of the antisemitic interpretation of modernism and modernity. Joyce stages the homeopathic mimesis of modernity that his own formal innovations enact as the emancipatory alternative to the paranoid personifications of the antisemitic imagination. Building on Marxist literary criticism and social theory, I suggest that modern antisemitism and Joycean modernism share a crucial representational “problematic”: how to render the apparently unrepresentable, increasingly abstract processes of the modern world. Joyce’s text stages similarities between the way its putatively Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom is perceived and talked about by (antisemitic) others and the distinctive formal procedures of Ulysses itself; both, I argue,

18

Introduction

might be seen to represent the abstract realm of social relations under industrial capitalism. The last two chapters of the book set out to revise radically our picture of how late modernism responds to the Holocaust. My discussion of the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor W. Adorno reevaluates a central motif of his postwar, post-Holocaust modernism: his commitment to the biblical Second Commandment’s prohibition of images. Against the received idea that Adorno’s commitment to the prohibition represents his identification with some kind of Jewish identity—whether philosophical or personal—I recall that Adorno invokes the prohibition precisely to prevent such identitarian thinking. The prohibition might connect the Jews and modernism, but it neither makes modernism Jewish nor Jews modernists. What it does clearly make them, in Adorno’s eyes, is subject to unintended, unwanted, but predictable forms of projection and misinterpretation. In the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno argues that the prohibition functions as a catalyst for the abject fantasies and violent actions of the antisemite. Yet he also declares that the appropriate response to Auschwitz requires that prohibition’s reiteration in certain spheres, particularly the arts. So why, if Adorno thinks the Jewish observance of the prohibition is systematically misrecognized by antisemites, does he nevertheless maintain that observing the ban is an appropriate response to the Nazi genocide? Won’t these postwar iterations be subject to the same projection and aggression that he argues led to the camps in the first place? In espousing a modernism that observes the prohibition of images as a fitting response to Auschwitz, Adorno should be able to explain the political value of what he would seem least to wish for: a revival of those affects and fantasies that see modernism and Jews alike as forms of cultural pollution. I argue that where much of French postwar thought wants simply to reverse the valences and fantasies of the recent past, Adorno’s reflections on the projective reaction to the Second Commandment show that he seeks instead, via an inoculatory repetition of those valences and fantasies, to confront and work through them. I conclude the book with an examination of the place of an individual character’s name in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and its significance for understanding the distinctive formal features of his postwar prose. That name, Youdi, is generally acknowledged in Beckett criticism to be an antisemitic

Introduction

19

slang name for a Jew. Yet as a rule, that meaning is no sooner acknowledged than disavowed. I ask a simple question: what if we take that antisemitic meaning seriously? Beckett writes Molloy immediately after the Second World War and in the wake of a deep engagement with the work of the French novelist and notorious antisemite Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose anti-Jewish writings explicitly invoke and elaborate upon the paranoid fantasy of Judaization. I argue that we can read the narrative function of the antisemitic slang name in Molloy as a way for Beckett to present his own poetics as a negation and working through of the antisemitic mode of interpreting the subject’s place in the world: the birth of Beckett’s style, that is, out of the negation of the spirit of antisemitism. My aim in this book is to provide a genealogy of one of the stranger ideas in the history of cultural modernism and to do so without recourse to either a moralizing discourse of complicity or phobic concerns with pollution and contamination, in order to take a more accurate measurement of the place of modernist form in the antisemitic imagination and vice versa. I have chosen to do so by exploring the ways in which modernist texts and antisemitic fantasies are entangled with each other just where they seem most opposed, seeing in this entanglement a way to pose the question of the nexus between modernism and antisemitism just where it has been thought that there is no such question. The notion of Judaization allows us to think about some of the more distinctive features that the antisemitic imagination attributes to the Jew—immense actual power that works invisibly and through others—in relation to what is most distinctive about European aesthetic modernism, namely, the preoccupation with the question of form and its relationship to history. For too long we have avoided examining the role of the antisemitic fantasy of Judaization in the interpretation and creation of modernist form: it is time for us to start.

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Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

At the heart of the story of how modernist form comes to be regarded as Jewish is the myth of Judaization. Discussions of modernism and antisemitism often acknowledge this myth in passing, but it is seldom the subject of extended reflection. (Indeed, if there is another book on aesthetic modernism and Judaization, I have not been able to fi nd it.) It might be useful, then, to sketch briefly the structure of the notion of Judaization as it appears in the modern Eu ropean context.1 In what follows, I turn to what is widely regarded as the concept of Judaization’s most historically consequential iteration: the composer Richard Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism in Music.” It is “Judaism in Music” that introduces the term Verjüdung ( Judaization) into the German language. Wagner’s essay offers a plausible point of origin for the critique of works of art as Jewish despite their being neither by nor about Jews. In the twentieth century, “Judaism in Music” becomes a source text for many antisemitic opponents of modernism in the arts, particularly the Nazis, who repeatedly 23

24

Modernist Form as Judaization

recycle its arguments and language. It is almost impossible to read the essay without these later appropriations in mind. But what did Wagner understand by what he called the Verjüdung of modern art? As I show, at the core of “Judaism in Music” is an obsession with what Wagner perceives to be a historical crisis in the production of artistic value, an obsession that animates both his antisemitism and his protomodernism. Tracing the points of their convergence permits us both to measure the distance between “Judaism in Music” and the racial antisemitism of the twentieth century and to see why Wagner’s account of what he calls “modern art” so uncannily anticipates the distinguishing features of aesthetic modernism proper. Alongside “Judaism in Music,” the text most often invoked in discussions of the antisemitic (and particularly Nazi) interpretation of modernism in the arts is Max Nordau’s bestselling 1892 Entartung (Degeneration). Nordau’s book is generally understood to have introduced the medicalized notion of degeneracy into the cultural sphere and thus to have provided a precise, determinable point of origin for the Nazis’ own notion of “degenerate art.” Here again I want to show that we can soberly examine what it is in Nordau’s book that appears congruent with Nazi ideology while also seeing the pronounced differences between his ideas about modernism in the arts and the Nazis’. Nordau’s notion of Entartung, I propose, might be interpreted as a vain attempt to wrest the concept of degeneration away from an extant antisemitic context and to do so, no less, by rewriting the very antisemitic conceptions of the cultural realm found in such texts as Wagner’s “Judaism in Music.” Indeed, I suggest that Nordau’s notion of Entartung is, among other things, a reworking of Wagner’s concept of Verjüdung, a reworking that seeks to strip Wagner’s concept of its antisemitic content by translating its essential features into the language of what Nordau understood to be science. My account of Wagner and Nordau does not call for historical blinkers—I do not see how we can read these texts without remembering how they were appropriated or what happened after they were written—but it does seek to show what it means to read without backshadowing, which is to say, without thinking that we can look at Wagner and Nordau’s writings and see the future already inscribed within them.

Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

25

The Myth of Judaization Focusing on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German versions of the myth of Judaization, the intellectual historian Steven Aschheim explains that the term “Judaization” referred both to the belief that the Jews exerted “disproportionate influence,” occupying positions of great “economic, political, and cultural power,” and something more radical, a condition in which the “Jewish spirit” had somehow permeated society and its key institutions, one in which Jewish Geist had seeped through the spiritual pores of the nation to penetrate and undermine the German psyche itself.2

As Aschheim points out, the distinguishing feature of the myth of Judaization is precisely the notion of the Jewish spirit’s malleability, the way its putative attributes change according to the object under critique, be it liberalism, capitalism, or secularism,3 or, to take the cases that matter to us here, Dada, Surrealism, or Expressionism. But despite this malleability, it’s worth pointing out several features of the myth of Judaization that are particularly salient for understanding the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form. First and most obviously, the myth of Judaization has long been inextricable from ideas about materialism, usury, and fi nance. The Jews were first associated with usury and moneylending in the Middle Ages, when the Crusades led both to an increasing demand for credit and to the exclusion of Jews from most other economic roles.4 While Jews were by no means the only moneylenders, the activity was scorned and censured as Jewish and eventually declared a heresy.5 Christians who engaged in usury were called Kristenjuden. In his 1625 essay “Of Usury” Sir Francis Bacon reports as a commonplace the view that all usurers “should have tawny orange bonnets, because they do Judaize.” 6 Aschheim notes that in the modern period Judaization was always understood to include a “corrupting materialist message” and that this eventually “melded with a new, peculiarly modern consciousness of the role of ‘material’ forces in moulding culture, with a heightened awareness of the ‘economic’ as an autonomous factor in social and political affairs.” 7 But we can say more: the modern myth of Judaization can be understood as the corollary of the distinctive way that the modern antisemitic imaginary

26

Modernist Form as Judaization

conceives of the figure of the Jew. The critical theorist Moishe Postone claims that a careful examination of the modern anti-Semitic worldview reveals that it is a form of thought in which the rapid development of industrial capitalism, with all its social ramifications, is personified and identified as the Jew. It is not merely that the Jews were considered to be the owners of money, as in traditional anti-Semitism, but that they were held responsible for economic crises and identified with a range of social restructuring and dislocation resulting from rapid industrialization: explosive urbanization, the decline of traditional social classes and strata, the emergence of a large, increasingly organized industrial proletariat, and so on. In other words, the abstract domination of capital, which— particularly with rapid industrialization— caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.8

Postone argues that the figure of the Jew serves to personify those invisible, unrepresentable, abstract aspects of capitalist social relations that exceed the cognitive reach of most, and his thesis is central to my claim that modernism and antisemitism share a certain representational problematic. I will have more to say about this in the chapters that follow, but here I want to emphasize Postone’s observation that the power attributed to Jews “is mysteriously intangible, abstract, and universal” and that it “does not manifest itself directly, but must find another mode of expression. It seeks a concrete carrier . . . through which it can work. . . . It is considered to stand behind phenomena, but not to be identical with them.” 9 If the Jew does not appear directly, and if his power is invisible, intangible, abstract, mobile, and stands behind phenomena, then we should understand Judaization as a sort of wild symptomatic interpretation obsessed with showing how certain social and cultural forms—forms that may not on the face of it have anything to do with actual Jews— should nevertheless be read as the modes of expression of Jewish power. Second, the myth of Judaization often expresses a concern with the problem of what we might call interpretive deviation. The Jew serves as an uncanny reminder to European Christianity that what goes without saying can be contested, that what seems to constitute the fabric of the world as it is—the normal, the natural, the self-evident—rests on a particular interpretation. Here it’s worth recalling that before “Judaizer” was the name for a usurer it was the name for a heretic. The Apostle Peter’s followers, who

Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

27

urged conformity to Jewish ritual law against the Apostle Paul’s universalizing message, were called Judaizers, and Jews themselves were regarded and treated as heretics in the Middle Ages.10 The medieval association of Jews and heresy is particularly revealing because, strictly speaking, as Joshua Trachtenberg notes in The Devil and the Jews, the Jews could not be heretics. Heresy, Trachtenberg points out, “implies a deviation from a prescribed and accepted course but not refusal to pursue that course ab initio.”11 Because they were not Christians to begin with, according to ecclesiastical doctrine the Jews were guilty of perfidy, not heresy.12 Yet popular opinion, many church leaders, and ultimately the Inquisition all ended up treating Judaism as heretical and, perhaps most importantly of all, as responsible for other heresies within the Church.13 This slippage reflects the ambiguous relationship of Judaism to Christianity: on the one hand, it is a different religion (hence perfidy); on the other, it shares a fundamental sacred text, even as it contests how to interpret and how to name it (Old or Original Testament?). And Judaism also, of course, presents a nagging reminder of the origins, lineage, and debts of the Christian dispensation. Hence the Christian iconography of blindfolded Synagoga to radiant Ecclesia.14 In modern antisemitism the medieval concern with Judaization as heresy metastasizes into an obsession with Jewish control of the cultural apparatus, particularly those branches concerned with words rather than images. In his 1906 The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, arguably the founding figure of what Saul Friedländer calls “redemptive antisemitism”15 (the belief that the world-historical fate of Western Civilization rests on a battle to the death with the Jews), writes that One does not need to have the authentic Hittite nose to be a Jew; the word indicates rather a special kind of feeling and thinking; a person may very rapidly become a Jew without becoming an Israelite; some need only to associate actively with Jews, read Jewish newspapers and become accustomed to the Jewish conception of life, literature, and art. . . . We must agree with Paul, the apostle, when he says: “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly in the flesh, but he who is a Jew inwardly.”16

For Chamberlain, Judaization means not only Jewish control of the culture but internalization of Jewish ideas and sensibilities. So one might see the myth of Judaization as a fetishistic theory of the subject’s insertion into the

28

Modernist Form as Judaization

symbolic order: a projective, displaced form of recognition of the presence of alien views within oneself, of the constitutive dispossession of the subject, in which that dispossession is imagined to be entirely contingent, as if European subjects would not be strangers to themselves if only there were no Jews in control of the culture, planting strange ideas and tastes inside of them. What I find both most troubling and most interesting about the myth of Judaization is this explicit preoccupation with the Jew within. We tend to understand the figure of the Jew to embody all that the antisemite projects, that is, all that he represses, disavows, and externalizes. But Judaization reveals the antisemite as acknowledging and dwelling upon precisely what we imagine he cannot bear to contemplate: his own possession of the traits he attributes to the Jew. In doing so, however, he does not reflect critically on the source of his ideas; instead he fi nds a demonstration of just how powerful and dangerous the Jewish spirit is: even those who guard most vigilantly against it are not immune! This veiled acknowledg ment can take place, I suspect, not least because the discourse of Judaization provides a way for the antisemite to talk about what he wishes to disavow but cannot do without, be it antecedents for Christian belief or the social relations of production in industrial capitalism, the social conditions necessary to subject formation or the necessity of interpretation to the very constitution of art as art. Rather than such acknowledg ment leading to a change in consciousness, however, it serves to reinforce and even strengthen the fantasy of Judaization.17

Wagner: Jews and Judaization, Modern Art and Modernism In his 1850 essay “Judaism in Music” Richard Wagner speaks of the Verjüdung der modernen Kunst: the Judaization of modern art.18 This first use of the German word for Judaization, Verjüdung, appears precisely in conjunction with the antisemitic interpretation of modern art as Jewish. While we would not now recognize his targets (Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and, in passing, Heinrich Heine) as even protomodernist, Wagner’s account of their work sounds like nothing so much as a primer on modernism. He argues that alienation and estrangement are at once conditions of

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29

this art’s production, its predominant formal features, and its primary effects upon its audience, and that the work is characterized by abstraction, imitation rather than expression, form rather than content, “how” rather than “what,” coldness, and a lack of properly human feeling. Little wonder, then, that the language of Wagner’s essay had a significant effect upon the reception of modernism in the twentieth century. As the German cultural historian Jens-Malte Fischer has shown, Hitler’s own diatribes against “degenerate” art and “degenerate” music drew upon and plagiarized from the essay, as did many other antimodernist diatribes of the 1920s and 1930s.19 “Judaism in Music” thus offers a plausible, even necessary, starting point for an inquiry into that interpretation of modern art that views work that is neither by nor about Jews as somehow “Jewish.” Wagner’s essay has, needless to say, already received a great deal of scholarly attention. Historians and cultural critics such as Jacob Katz, Saul Friedländer, Paul Lawrence Rose, Jens-Malte Fischer, and Jeffrey S. Librett have studied “Judaism in Music” to evaluate the nature and virulence of Wagner’s antisemitism and thereby to determine his influence upon and responsibility for the Nazi Judeocide.20 Germanists such as Marc Weiner, David J. Levin, and others have employed the essay as a template for their investigations into how Wagner’s antisemitism manifests itself in his operas.21 Theodor W. Adorno’s claim in In Search of Wagner that “all the rejects of Wagner’s works are caricatures of Jews” may remain controversial among Wagner devotees, but it has become a commonplace of contemporary scholarship.22 In what follows I do not so much seek to add to this commentary as to establish just what Wagner means when he talks about Judaization, show how his ideas about Jews and his ideas about artistic form intertwine and mirror each other, and see how his notion of the Judaization of modern art sheds light on the ways in which we think and talk about twentieth-century modernism. It is also worth recalling at the outset that Wagner is commonly believed to have had a personal stake in “Judaism in Music”: he feared that he himself might be Jewish. Most scholars trace this concern to Wagner’s suspicion that Ludwig Geyer, whom Wagner thought might have been his biological father, was a Jew.23 Jeffrey S. Librett even suggests that the image of Jewish musicians as parasites feeding on the carcass of German musical  history with which Wagner’s essay reaches its climax originates in

30

Modernist Form as Judaization

Wagner’s concern that he himself is a Geyer (the German word for vulture).24 Paul Lawrence Rose also points to evidence in Wagner’s correspondence that the composer believed he might be Jewish not because of his genealogy but because of his “Jewish” egoism and preoccupation with money.25 Although I will not explore the biographical question here, it seems possible, then, that Wagner was troubled by the idea that he was both a Jew and a Judaized German. To grasp what Wagner refers to variously as the Verjüdung der modernen Kunst (Judaization of modern art), Judenschaft in der Kunst (Jewry in art), and the Judaic period in the history of modern music, a summary of the essay is helpful. Wagner first published “Judaism in Music” under a pseudonym (K. Freigedank—that is, K. Freethought) in the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. He takes as his point of departure a recent debate in the pages of that journal over the question of “Hebraic art taste.”26 Wagner insists on the selfevident reality of this phenomenon and, more broadly, of the Verjüdung der modernen Kunst, which he says there is no need to “substantiate”: “it is a phenomenon which leaps to the eye unbidden and is plain for all to see.”27 He proposes to explain the basis of this taste in the repulsion (Widerwille) that Europeans, despite their abstract liberal faith in emancipation, continue in reality to feel toward Jews.28 This repulsion exists despite the fact that Wagner believes the Jew has already been emancipated, indeed: it is we who now find ourselves in the position of having to fight for emancipation from the Jews. As things stand in the world at present, the Jew is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will continue to rule as long as money remains the power before which all deeds and actions must needs pale into insignificance.29

Wagner finds the Jewish body, appearance, and physiognomy “unfitted for artistic treatment” and thus incapable of either “any artistic expression” or “of the artistic presentation of pure humanity in general.”30 But he gives far more weight to the premise that the Jew speaks “the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells” as a foreigner.31 The Jew, says Wagner, stands outside his host nation’s traditions, not having participated in them unconsciously. Because he cannot understand these languages he cannot express himself in them naturally and idiomatically; he can only imitate proper

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31

speech, speaking in a manner that draws attention to how he says something rather than what he’s saying.32 Moreover, the Jew’s own language (Yiddish) is repellent: Wagner says it sounds horrendous and involves a use of inversion that is utterly uncharacteristic of our own national tongue, and the arbitrary way in which the Jew twists words and constructions gives his pronunciation the unmistakable character of an intolerably confused babble of sounds, so that when we hear it, our attention is involuntarily held by this offensive manner of articulating the “how,” rather than by the “what” that his discourse contains. . . . 33

Moreover, if Yiddish is alien and offensive, the Jew’s sacred language (Hebrew) is dead and inert.34 Wagner’s argument leaves the Jews without any language in which they can adequately, let alone fully, express themselves as human beings. Despite their obvious, repellent differences, however, Wagner also believes that today the Jews can no longer be refused entry to a society in which money grants access (a social change that he says that the Jews themselves brought about).35 The Jews turn to music because, says Wagner, it is the easiest art to learn, but once more they don’t understand the tradition and so cannot reproduce it properly: the Jewish musician’s understanding and reproduction of this music are superficial, jumbling forms and styles of different periods. Jewish synagogue music— at once hideous and static— shapes how even the assimilated Jew listens and composes.36 These problems are all manifest for Wagner in the work of the “cultured Jew” Felix Mendelssohn, whose music, despite his specific gifts, expresses what Wagner regards as typically Jewish traits: it is cold and loveless, lacking all passion and true feeling.37 He also thinks it also lacks historical propriety: Mendelssohn takes the formalist Bach as his model, because the musical language of Beethoven can only be spoken by a full human being. Wagner points to another Jewish composer (the figure goes unnamed but is generally recognized as Giacomo Meyerbeer) who, he says, successfully exploits the popular desire for distraction.38 But what, asks Wagner, does it mean that Jewish composers now flourish? Modern music, he says, could not succumb to Jewish domination if it were not already dead within.39 Mozart and especially Beethoven expressed everything that could be expressed; after them it is easy to be eloquent in music without really saying anything.

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Thus, according to Wagner, music has entered a period of unproductivity, impotence, and decomposition. The Jew, he says, is a symptom of this condition. Seeking a unification of the arts as well as the culture, Wagner calls upon the Jews to follow the example of the journalist and satirist Ludwig Börne, who understood that such redemption—becoming a human being (Mensch)—meant ceasing to be a Jew. Wagner implores his Jewish contemporaries to join “us” in seeking redemption from the curse of Ahasuerus, by means of Untergang, destruction.40 Let’s acknowledge that to take Wagner’s argument seriously as an argument rather than as a symptom of something, one would have to accept much that is unacceptable. I mean not only the claim that to become proper, pure, full human beings the Jews must cease to be Jews, but also the deployment of the stereotypical figure of the Jew itself, spoken of in the singular. I mean as well the assertion, a generation before Jewish political emancipation was complete, that the Jews have already been emancipated and actually rule, and the premise, treated as self-evident, that the Jews are repulsive to all Eu ropeans and that their artistic tastes and productions should be evaluated on the basis of this assumption rather than that of, say, Jewish traditions and practices. I also mean to highlight Wagner’s strange assertion that one’s physical appearance determines one’s humanity and one’s capacity to express emotion, as well as his assumption that language acquisition is a matter of a certain relation to tradition rather than, say, mimesis and environment. Wagner’s claim that Mendelssohn did not take inspiration from (let alone offer brilliant interpretations of ) Beethoven is also quite simply false. Let’s also acknowledge that a later reader of an antisemitic stripe could easily come away from Wagner’s essay convinced that Jews, as Jews, are neither capable of art nor really human. When Wagner says, “When we hear a Jew speaking, we are unconsciously offended by a total absence of all purely human expression in his speech,” he seems to mean that because the Jew cannot express himself he is not really human.41 And he does mean that: the question is just what that lack of humanity means for Wagner. Moreover, in the late 1860s, when Wagner republishes the essay (with a long, vitriolic appendix), he speaks of how the Jews have persecuted him for speaking out against them, of the need to overturn the Jewish victory over European civilization, and of the Jew as the enemy of all humanity. Jens-

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Malte Fischer argues that this republication, at a time of great peace and progress in German-Jewish relations, almost singlehandedly restored antisemitism to cultural respectability in Germany.42 Nonetheless, I think the 1850 essay, disturbing, racist, and dehumanizing as it is, is saying something significantly different from the proto-Nazi text one might easily imagine it to be. Put simply, for Wagner in “Judaism in Music,” to be purely and properly human is to do a certain kind of work. Wagner claims that Jewish mimesis (of language and of music) fails to convey the human not because the Jews belong to a different species or are innately incapable of creativity or expression but because historically they have not shared in the unconscious collective labor that makes human beings properly or fully human. Thus when Wagner makes his claim that Jewish speech is repellent because it fails to grasp and reproduce properly any of the Eu ropean languages, he does not justify it by saying that the Jew is and can only ever be an outsider and alien. Instead, Wagner says that the Jew is trying to copy a tradition in whose creation and development he has not participated, that is, a tradition to which he has not contributed any labor.43 Wagner argues that what the European finds repellent about the Jew is less his body than his speech, but what’s truly repellent for Wagner about Jewish speech and music is that they manifest Jewish estrangement from collective labor. His essay rests on something like a labor theory of artistic value, in which human expression, passion, and feeling are the product of, and cannot emerge without, a certain kind of work and suffering. Reading “Judaism in Music” as being primarily concerned with the Jews as those who do not work explains much about the essay’s notorious conclusion. When Wagner calls upon Jews to take upon themselves “a work of redemption [Erlösungswerke] through self-annulment [Selbstvernichtung],” to become human by ceasing to be Jews, the Erlösungswerke is, precisely, work itself.44 It depends upon the Jew performing a collective labor that Wagner identifies with “sweat and deprivation, and . . . the fullest measure of suffering and anguish.” 45 Of course, the gates of Auschwitz proclaimed the same idea: Arbeit macht frei (Work will set you free). Unlike the Nazis, however, Wagner seems to mean it. As I have noted, Wagner’s concluding paragraph urges the Jews to follow the example of Ludwig Börne (born Loeb Baruch). One might well wonder why one convert from Judaism to

34

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Christianity (Börne) is exemplary while another (Mendelssohn) remains for Wagner a “cultured Jew.” But if we understand labor as central to “Judaism in Music” we can begin to find an answer. While Mendelssohn’s parents had him baptized as a child, which meant he did not have to do anything to become a Christian, Börne converted as an adult to overcome professional obstacles to Jews, which for Wagner might be taken to signify a measure of willed sacrifice. Wagner also acknowledges more than once that the Jewish alienation he speaks of is largely the result of social conditions and restrictions imposed upon the Jews: their historical exclusion from European societies and most spheres of economic activity other than moneylending. He does so only to exclude them from his inquiry into “the aesthetic character of said results.” 46 But it is signally important that he acknowledges them at all: it shows he has a sense of the Jews as not simply a timeless essence but also a people shaped, like all peoples, by their history. The core idea of “Judaism in Music” might, then, be traced to the following passage, one in which that history plays no minor role: From the moment in our historical development onwards when, with increasingly candid acceptance, money fi rst came to be raised to the status of actually conferring power, it was no longer conceivable that the Jew, whose only possible trade was to make money without actual labor (i.e., usury) [denen Geldgewinn ohne eigentliche Arbeit, d.h. der Wucher], could be denied his patent of nobility as a member of the newer, money-orientated society; indeed the Jews themselves brought that change about.47

This, in a sense, is all that Wagner sees when he diagnoses what is repellent about the Jew. Making money without actual labor fi nds its formal correlative in speaking the language without having contributed to its unconscious creation, which in turn manifests itself as speaking without saying anything, drawing attention to how rather than what, form and not content.48 If labor guarantees the value and meaning of money, words, and music, the Jew shows what Wagner thinks happens when that relation is sundered: just as money comes to bear a value that does not correlate to a product of labor, so too the word does not correlate to a thought or idea, and music does not correspond to a genuine feeling or emotion. To make things without labor one has to rely on the labor of others: What slaves and bondsmen paid their masters through toil and drudgery in Roman and in medieval times, the Jew now converts into capital: does no one

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notice that these harmless- seeming paper bonds are stained with the blood of innumerable generations? What the heroes of art have wrung from the philistine demon of two thousand hapless years with unheard-of exertions that rob him of all pleasure and life is now transformed by the Jew into bills of exchange to be used in the art market [Kunstwarenwechsel]: who now sees that these polished and well-turned objects are held together by the sacred sweat from the brows of geniuses of two thousand years?49

Wagner identifies the Jews with the application of the logic of exchange to the accumulated labor of the German musical tradition. What a more recent translator has interpreted as “bills of exchange to be used in the art market” and William Ashton Ellis had rendered as “an art-bazaar”50 is that strange term Kunstwarenwechsel, which might more literally, if inelegantly, be translated as “art commodity exchange.” This transformation of labor into an object of exchange is what, for Wagner, renders every historical period equally exploitable and exchangeable: “Just as words and phrases are thrown together in this idiom in a peculiarly inexpressive way, so the Jewish composer throws together a variety of forms and styles by every master musician of every period: side by side, in the liveliest and most chaotic confusion, we encounter the formal characteristics of every school paraded before us.”51 Wagner’s point is not simply that art has become a commodity but that the logic of commodification now inhabits the form of the work of art, not least in making form itself visible, the how rather than the what, and this form depends, he thinks, on the exploitation of the accumulated creative labor of the past. So what does Wagner’s description of the musical works of Jews have to do with the general Verjüdung der modernen Kunst? Wagner holds that the traits of Jewish music can now be found in all of German music, because in the wake of the achievements of Beethoven there is no more work to do: “No art offers so great a wealth of opportunities for being eloquent without actually saying anything as does music today, since the greatest geniuses have already said all that music as a separate and absolute art is capable of saying.”52 Once musical language had been perfected, “all that remained was mere senseless repetition of a painfully accurate and deceptively similar nature, just as parrots imitate human words and phrases, but without any expression or real emotion as these stupid birds are wont to do.”53 For Wagner, the Verjüdung of modern art refers to the state in which there is no more “actual labor” to do, no sweating and suffering. Imitation and formalism

36

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are all that’s left to every artist, and humanity is available to none of them, until new life is found for the arts in a “new conjunction.” And to refuse this assessment is yet again to embody the problem he diagnoses: Whoever shies away from making this effort, and turns his back on such an enquiry [as this one], whether because he does not feel the need to do so or because he rejects in advance an insight that might perhaps dislodge him from the indolent rut of a thoughtless and unfeeling routine, must, for that very reason, be included in the category of Jewry in art [ Judenschaft in der Kunst], a category which the real Jews have given only its most conspicuous physiognomy, but certainly not its current significance.54

To be Judaized is to refuse to do the work of recognizing that there is no more work to do. Here Wagner combines his preoccupation with labor with the Christian theological figure of the Jew as blind to the Event, refusing to recognize the (need for) a new dispensation. In his account of the Jewish production of value without labor Wagner would seem, then, to be drawing upon one of the more established and significant tropes of historical and especially modern antisemitism. Is Wagner not saying that the Judaic period in art is a period of parasitism? Wagner might not use the word, but when he presents Jewish music as turning the labor of millennia into a Kunstwarenwechsel or as mimicry of the unconscious creative labor of proper Europeans, the concept of parasitism appears to structure his argument, certainly as an economic notion. What is less obvious is whether his particular notion of parasitism can be extended into the realm of biological life that is generally regarded as decisive for twentiethcentury antisemitism. To see why it’s not, we have to examine where it almost is: the Jews could not gain possession of [bemächtigen] our art until it was capable of proving what they themselves had already demonstrably proved, namely its inner incapacity for living. As long as music, as a separate art, expressed a real, organic, and vital need, as it did up to the time of Mozart and Beethoven, there were no Jewish composers anywhere: it was impossible for an element that was wholly alien to this living organism [gänzlich fremdes Element] to share in its creations. Only when the inner death of a body becomes obvious do outside elements fi nd the strength to take possession of it, but only in order that it may decompose [aber nur um ihn zu zersetzen]. Then, no doubt, the flesh of this body dissolves into a teeming mass of worms: but who, on

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seeing it, could think the body still alive? The spirit, in other words life, has fled from this body to seek its like elsewhere, but this like in turn must needs be life, for only in real life can we rediscover the spirit of art, not in its worminfested body.55

In describing worms eating a decomposing corpse, Wagner seems to want to make the reader feel the very repugnance and disgust he says they must in reality feel toward Jews. It is difficult for this reader, at least, to read this passage and not to feel that I myself am being told that I am one of the worms. But it’s also hard not to notice that just as Wagner’s call for Untergang is, as I argued above, not a call for mass murder but for assimilation and shared collective labor, so too his talk of worms is significantly different from the dominant twentieth-century notion of the Jewish parasite. In “Judaism in Music” the Jew does not represent a mortal danger, does not suck the lifeblood out of a living being as do lice, rats, bacilli, or, for that matter, vampire capitalists.56 The body is already dead, and, says Wagner, the Jews would not have appeared if it were not. Once more what concerns Wagner more than biology are matters of labor, property, and inheritance. It is not the mere physical presence of the Jews that signifies the death of German music but rather their taking possession of it. Life has fled from the body; creative work, living labor, must be found elsewhere, in what he calls a “new conjunction with the other arts.” What shields “Judaism in Music,” however tenuously, from that most murderous strand of antisemitic fantasy is, in a sense, its modernism. I mean the modernism revealed when Wagner decides that the organism of musical development has suffered an “inner death,” a decision that conveys both Wagner’s acute sense of the autonomous internal unfolding of music’s expressive forces and his belief that the achievements of his predecessors, particularly Beethoven, present both a taboo and an injunction to further innovation. Recall what Perry Meisel, along with many others, characterizes as modernism’s “will to modernity,” which requires an active forgetting of history and “is largely a defensive response to the increasingly intolerable burdens of coming late in a tradition.”57 From this perspective, Wagner’s notion of a Judaic modern art must be understood as fundamentally modernist: a certain history of the arts has come to an end. But in

38

Modernist Form as Judaization

identifying the figure of the Jew with refusal to recognize one’s own tradition as dead and move on to seek new life elsewhere, he is espousing that modernism through the Christian theological trope of supersession. We might, then, regard Wagner’s idea of the Verjüdung of modern art as simultaneously modernist and Christian, as most modernist where it is most Christian, and as most Christian where it is most modernist. Yet as I noted at the outset, much of what Wagner describes as Jewish is itself uncannily similar to what we now recognize as modernism. Alienation and estrangement, displacement of conventional and expressive syntax, and various modes of cannibalization of a purportedly deceased cultural tradition appear in the citations of Eliot and Pound, the parody and pastiche of Joyce and Mann and Stravinsky—figures whose works are inconceivable without the model of Wagner’s own achievement. These artists sought to render the experience of modernity through a radicalization of the very means that Wagner disavowed as Jewish. Wagner’s account of Verjüdung in der modernen Kunst emerges from his attempt to deal with many of the same problems that would come to preoccupy modernists, including demographic change, the role of abstract economic and social forces in shaping artistic form and individual psyches alike, and historical belatedness: the sense that the forms of the past are dead and that to be a modern artist one must think about where there is still work to be done, what counts as work, what counts as artistic value, and how those things might be related. As we will see, such problems will prove inextricably intertwined with the Jewish question for modernists too, albeit for different reasons. It is here that it seems not only useful but necessary to think of “Judaism in Music” as expressing a projective fantasy in which the Jew embodies what Wagner not only despises but also wishes to emulate: the freedom to create without laboring and suffering, to speak without saying anything, to explore how without worrying about what, to play freely among and with the history of musical forms and styles.58 We should perhaps not take too lightly the amusement with which many of Wagner’s contemporaries read “Judaism in Music,” noting that the description of Judaized music reminded them of the works of no one so much as Wagner himself. “Judaism in Music” presents a blueprint for both the antisemitic interpretations of modernism and for a different kind of art, one emancipated from the very things that Wagner claimed to believe were necessary to ground art and guarantee its

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39

value. Which is to say that Wagner’s example suggests that before twentiethcentury artistic modernism was a historical reality, it was an antisemitic dream.

Nordau, Degeneration, and Degenerate Art In Bios, his 2008 study of biopolitics, the Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito writes: it is the Hungarian doctor of Jewish origin Maximilian Südfeld, known to the larger public as Max Nordau, who more than any other localizes degeneration in the intellectual sphere. In his book dedicated to Entartung, Pre-Raphaelites, Parnassians, Nietzscheans, Zolians, Ibsenians, and so on are all included in this category— all assimilated on the typological level to those who “satisfy their insane instincts with the assassin’s knife or with the dynamite’s fuse rather than with pen or paintbrush.” It is impossible not to see the threat that ties similar evaluations with future Nazi lucubrations with regard to degenerate art.59

Evidently a number of critical commonplaces about Max Nordau and his 1892 bestseller Entartung (Degeneration) persist: the idea of a genealogical connection between Nordau’s book and the Nazi idea— and exhibition— of degenerate art, which one must both insist upon (“impossible not to see”) and distance oneself from by keeping the connection causally indeterminate (“the threat that ties similar evaluations”); the idea that Nordau, as a doctor, bears a special responsibility (“more than any other”) for a form of symptomatic reading that fuses the medical and the legal into the biopolitical; and the hint that it is ironic that Nordau is “of Jewish origin” because the notion of degeneration in the arts he formulates would eventually be turned against the Jews and function as a step toward the Nazi genocide.60 In Degeneration Nordau interprets degeneration in the arts as a sign of ner vous exhaustion brought about by failure to adapt to the demands of modern life: “The degenerate is incapable of adapting himself to existing circumstances.” 61 Instead of controlling and disciplining the excess of ner vous stimulation and excitement that characterizes the experience

40

Modernist Form as Judaization

of modernity, the degenerate artist seeks out such experiences and tries to reproduce them: the distortion of the human body in fashion, the use of dramatic colors in painting, the depiction of violence and sex in literature all aim, for Nordau, “at exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses.” 62 In mimicking the exhausting overstimulation of modern life the degenerate artist claims to be modern but in fact, says Nordau, displays nothing so much as his own atavism: “The disease of degeneracy consists precisely in the fact that the degenerate organism has not the power to mount to the height of evolution already attained by the species, but stops on the way at an earlier or later point.” 63 Like Benedict Morel and Cesare Lombroso, the scientific theorists of degeneration who preceded him (Nordau dedicates Degeneration to Lombroso), Nordau also believes that such failures of adaptation can be read off the surface of the body but that in the case of the arts, one does not need “to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the  lobe of a painter’s ear, in order to recognise the fact that he belongs to the class of degenerates.” 64 Nordau intends to show that the degeneracy of the artist can be discerned through a symptomatic interpretation of his works. That is what his book claims to provide, by means of analyses of the Pre-Raphaelites, Parnassians, Nietzscheans, Zolians, and Ibsenians that Esposito refers to as well as such figures as Tolstoy, Wagner, Huysmans, Verlaine, Hauptmann, and others. There is no question, then, that Nordau presents his book as a medical interpretation of the art and literature of the fin-de-siècle, an account of the arts that could only be provided by a physician, one not available to what Nordau calls “the purely literary mind.” 65 While the passage Esposito interprets as a threat when read in full actually asserts that “not all degenerates are criminals,” it is also true that Dr. Nordau holds that degenerate artists present a threat to the health of a society and should thus be treated as if they were criminals (not, we might note, subject to special legislation but shunned and, if recalcitrant, severely beaten). And there is no question that Nordau was “of Jewish origin.” As is well known, he abandoned any attachment to Judaism at the age of sixteen and did not again think of himself as Jewish until some time in his early forties, when he decided that there was no escaping antisemitism, which meant, for him, no escaping being treated as a Jew. He therefore decided to join the Zionist movement, of which he is now regarded, along with Theodor Herzl, as one of the founding figures.

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It is certainly possible to imagine that the Nazis read and appropriated his ideas: how else, one might ask, did their attacks on the arts end up appearing under the titles “Degenerate Art” and “Degenerate Music”? It also seems no accident that in certain crucial respects Nordau’s arguments resemble and even extend those of Wagner in “Judaism in Music.” Like Wagner, Nordau offers a symptomatic reading of the art of the present in which he deems purportedly “modern” art a failure to adapt to modernity, sees modern art as fundamentally imitative— and a bad imitation at that, capable only of grasping “the externals” rather than the essence of what is mimicked— and feeding upon the earlier collective labor of others: “They live, like parasites, on labor which past generations have accumulated for them; and when the heritage is once consumed, they are condemned to die of hunger.” 66 Also like Wagner, Nordau identifies this parasitism with egotism, a failure of properly communal feeling. Unlike Wagner, however, Nordau can also answer the question of how eliminating those he sees as corrupting the culture he values will solve that culture’s problems. Wagner does not explain how the Jews ceasing to be Jews would help solve the problem of the historical exhaustion of the individual arts. Nor could he: his argument is profoundly, constitutively ambivalent about whether the main cause of Judaization in the arts should be traced to “external” causes (the presence and influence of Jews) or internal ones (the completion and subsequent decline of the German musical tradition). Nordau, on the other hand, repeatedly returns to the question of why his readers should be concerned about, let alone feel threatened by, the degenerate individuals he regards as doomed to extinction. His answer lies in the notion of social contagion: It is only a very small minority who honestly fi nd plea sure in the new tendencies. . . . But this minority has the gift of covering the whole visible surface of society, as a little oil extends over a large area of the surface of the sea. It consists chiefly of rich educated people, or of fanatics. The former give the ton to all the snobs, the fools, and the blockheads; the latter make an impression upon the weak and dependent, and intimidate the ner vous.67

Nordau is anxious about the mass or crowd as a social formation in which individuals become susceptible to “a much more rapid and violent outspread of the mental contagion.” 68 His concern here is not with those he regards as

42

Modernist Form as Judaization

truly degenerate but with those who “through heedless curiosity, flock where they see a crowd” and thereby become subject to an “invading mental malady” that is setting about “poisoning a whole generation.” 69 Insofar as fears of contamination of the healthy (but passive and receptive) by the weak (but seductive, active, and thus dangerously powerful) inform his argument, Nordau might be understood to articulate what Wagner could not, and thus he could be construed as contributing a decisive conceptual step toward a certain strand of Nazi thinking about modernism in the arts. To posit causal connections of this strength between Nordau and Nazism, however, also requires us to imagine the Nazis not only reading the work of someone they would have regarded as a Jew, but reading the work of someone who did not see degeneration as they did (as a matter of heredity and racial impurity) but as instead a failure to adapt to the fatiguing demands of modern life. It requires us to imagine the Nazis reading and appropriating the work of someone who regarded art itself—which for the Nazis was tantamount to religion— as an atavistic, childish pursuit that would ultimately cede its social role to scientific observation. And it requires us to imagine the Nazis reading and appropriating the ideas of someone who denounced as degenerate many of the features that would come to characterize Nazism itself, including the privileging of emotion over reason, the subordination of crowds to charismatic leaders, and the refusal to adapt to reality (which the Nazis sought to reshape according to their will), along with flight into mysticism (Alfred Rosenberg), egomania (Adolf Hitler), and obsessive ideas (take your pick). In Nordau the Nazis would also have found themselves reading someone who, not incidentally, regarded antisemitism itself as a form of hysteria: “that most dangerous form of the persecution-mania, in which the person believing himself persecuted becomes a savage persecutor, capable of all crimes.”70 Nordau regards this mania as particularly virulent in Germany and counted it among the symptoms of Richard Wagner’s degeneracy. Certainly the reception of Nordau sometimes seems to be nothing but the story of strange reversals: the young Lukács and his friends in Hungary discovered Baudelaire, Verlaine, Tolstoy, and Zola after reading Nordau’s critique of them in Degeneration; the enthusiastic Japanese reception of Zola was catalyzed by Nordau’s pages denouncing him.71 But arguments for

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a causal link between Nordau and “Degenerate Art” require something more substantive than such amusing ironies. Roberto Esposito’s claim that Nordau, more than any other, localizes the idea of degeneration in the arts also requires us to ignore earlier precedents. No one has shown more convincingly than Esposito himself how important the concept of Entartung is to Nietzsche, the appropriation of whose philosophy by the Nazis is well documented and remains heatedly debated to this day.72 If we want to talk about historical origins, we might note that Nietzsche’s final works were completed a few years before Nordau began Degeneration.73 Where Nordau seems to explain and justify conventional bourgeois aesthetic and moral judgments by attributing them to an underlying pathology, Nietzsche elaborates an authentically physiologicalbiological interpretation of politics, morality, culture, and art. Moreover, as is painfully obvious to his admirers and detractors alike, Nietzsche’s genealogical story about how the Jewish slave revolt in morality turns against life, particularly life as embodied by active, unreflective, blond beasts, clearly helps authorize a connection between degeneration and the Jews that held an obvious appeal to the Third Reich. Even closer to the Nazi home, the notion of degenerate art can also already be found in antisemitic publications of the Bismarck era. In the September 1, 1888, edition of the Leipzig journal Antisemitic Correspondence: Central Organ of German Antisemites— some four years before the publication of Degeneration— one could read that “the degeneration [Entartung] of art is the certain harbinger of moral and furthermore of physical degeneration.” The German cultural historian Jens-Malte Fischer suggests that it is in the Antisemitic Correspondence rather than in Nordau that the word Entartung is first used to connect the cultural and the somatic.74 In other words, the Nazis may well have used the word Entartung in relation to modernist works of art not because Nordau denounced what he regarded as modernism with the same term but because the word Entartung was, even before Nordau’s book, already an integral, longstanding element of the vocabulary with which German antisemites denounced the presence and effects of Jews. If the concept of degeneration was an element not only of Eu ropean scientific and criminological debates (Morel, Lombroso) but also German philosophical and antisemitic discourse about culture before Nordau wrote

44

Modernist Form as Judaization

Degeneration, then it might make sense to think of that book less as a step on the twisted road to the “Degenerate Art” exhibition than as an intervention that sought through “a really scientific criticism”75 to displace the antisemitic theory of cultural and physical degeneration. I’m suggesting that we see Nordau’s argument—that degenerate art and literature were a matter of failed adaptation and fatigue brought on by modern life—as implicitly arguing that degeneration’s causes and features are neither Jewish nor signs of Judaization. Nordau’s Degeneration, in short, as an effort to pathologize modernism in order to, for want of a better word, deantisemitize the concept of Entartung, a project he sought to accomplish by displacing properties commonly associated with Jews onto modern artists. Such a reading builds on Jay Geller’s suggestion that even in Nordau’s pre-Zionist texts “the Jewish Question” operates as a “structuring principle.”76 Geller shows that in both Nordau’s Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (1884) and its successor, Paradoxes (1886), descriptors that were conventionally applied to Jews were deliberately employed without reference either to Jews or Jewishness. Tellingly, in response to Conventional Lies, one critic, Freiherr V. von Wasserschleben, the author of a work with the unambiguous title Anti-Nordau, took Nordau to task precisely for refusing to identify which fi nanciers in his discussion of capitalism were Jews, as well as for not considering that the behavior of Jews was the primary cause of antisemitism.77 By the time of Degeneration, then, Nordau had already been criticized by antisemites for seeking to circumvent, through a purposeful silence, the discourse around the Jewish Question. Published in 1892, Degeneration is, if anything, a more plausible site upon which to explore Nordau’s negotiation of antisemitic discourse than are his works of the 1880s. Not only does Degeneration appear in the wake of attacks such as von Wasserschleben’s, it also repeatedly condemns antisemitism itself as a form of degeneracy. Furthermore, at the time of its composition, Nordau might once more have thought of himself as Jewish. He wrote to one correspondent that at the age of forty (which would mean around 1889/1890), “anti-Semitism opened my eyes and turned me back to the Jewishness which I had forgotten. The hatred of others taught me to love our people.”78 We might also note that George Bernard Shaw, in The Sanity of Art, his 1908 response to Degeneration, described Nordau as “one of those remarkable cosmopolitan Jews who go forth against modern civili-

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zation as David went against the Philistines or Charles Martel against the Saracens, smiting it hip and thigh without any sense of common humanity with it.”79 For Shaw, then, Degeneration was not just the work of a Jewish author but, in its failure to express sympathy with the object of its critique, a distinctively Jewish text. One way to see how Degeneration might concern the Jewish Question is, paradoxically, to examine those moments where Nordau sounds most like the Nazis. The concluding “Therapeutics” section of Degeneration is most revealing in this respect. On the one hand, Nordau claims in that chapter to be confident that the degenerates are not dangerous: he is sure they will die out in a generation or two, both because they are sterile and because they cannot possibly compete with the “clear minds, solid stomachs, and hard muscles” of healthier human specimens.80 On the other hand, this confidence also gives way to calls for degenerate artists to be subject to various forms of violence to prevent the contamination of weak minds that, as we have seen, Nordau asserts to be his central concern. That violence is not always as directly physical as it sounds: what initially appears to be a murderous call for “annihilation” is in fact a slightly more benign proposal for the social exclusion of artists and works identified as degenerate from respectable society. But a passage such as the following cannot be so easily explained away: . . . whoever considers civilization to be a good that has value and deserves to be defended, must mercilessly crush the anti-social vermin [Ungeziefer] under his thumbs. . . . We cry: “get out of our civilized society [Gesittung]! Rove far from us! . . . if you dare return to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.”81

At such moments Nordau talks about degenerate art and degenerate artists not, as we’ll see, in the way that the Nazis talked about degenerate art but in the way the Nazis talked about the Jews. Ungeziefer: not just any kind of animal, but an unclean, injurious, abject, disgusting kind of animal—an insect. The Germanist Todd Presner, whose excellent retranslation of Degeneration I have just quoted, comments on the passage’s “decidedly uncomfortable resemblance to national-völkisch ideologies and their own obsession with ridding society of its so-called anti-social vermin.”82 No question. But just who is made uncomfortable? The most obvious answer is: we are—that is, we post-Holocaust scholars of intellectual history— and one reason we

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feel that way is because, as we’ve seen with Esposito, we neither want to say that Nordau’s work led to Nazism (Presner: “I am in no way suggesting that the ideas expressed in Nordau’s Degeneration led to the purifying ideology of National Socialism”) nor that he had nothing to do with it (Presner: “it is worth pointing out that the violence of Nordau’s social Darwinism and his cultural decisionism did have an afterlife . . . [in certain right-wing thinkers who themselves supported Nazism]”).83 But anxiety about the potential afterlife of ideas is our problem, not Nordau’s. Nordau’s problem could be found in such works as Eugen Dühring’s 1881 Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage [sic] (The Jewish Question as Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question): “Whenever he [the Jew] settles in the flesh of the people, as his kind does, and shows his contentment, then the people should be heedful of their own health.”84 Or Paul de Lagarde’s 1887 Juden und Indogermanen: It needs a heart as hard as a crocodile’s skin not to feel for the poor sucked dry Germans and—what comes to the same—not to hate and despise those who—in the name of humanity!— speak up for these Jews or are too cowardly to crush this vermin. One does not negotiate with trichinae and bacilli; trichinae and bacilli are not chosen to be educated, they are exterminated as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.85

In other words, Nordau talks about degenerate artists as the Nazis will talk about the Jews because that is how antisemites already talked about the Jews in Nordau’s day and well before: as parasites and vermin, as ratlike bearers of the plague.86 The similarity between Nordau’s discourse and that of the Nazis is not an irony of history but a sign of something more deliberate on Nordau’s part; our methodological and moral discomfort with that similarity is likely mild compared to Nordau’s discomfort at being the object of this kind of attack in the first place. Further evidence that Nordau seeks to deantisemitize a certain way of talking about modern art can be found in his reworking of the lexicon of Wagner’s “Judaism in Music.” Nordau tries, I think, to incorporate Wagner’s discourse of Verjüdung into Entartung. That incorporation is particularly conspicuous in Nordau’s diatribe against Wagner himself and in his critique of the contemporary German naturalist novelists he calls the “Young German Plagiarists.” While Nordau does not explicitly present his critique

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of Wagner as a refunctioning of the terms of “Judaism in Music,” he does refer to that text and does explicitly criticize Wagner’s belief that Jews were preventing production of his operas.87 And indeed, Nordau’s discussion of Wagner and the Young German Plagiarists dwells upon just the kinds of things Wagner had condemned as Jewish: a failure to adapt to the present, atavism (“this pretended musician of the future is an out-and-out musician of long-ago. All the characteristics of his talent point not forward, but far behind us”),88 sterility, and a resort to mimicry and plagiarism instead of achieving properly human expression. And while Nordau ultimately sees the demands of modern life as the primary cause of degeneration, he shares with Wagner the sense that mimicry only becomes a problem when there is already something rotten within the Eu ropean cultural body itself that renders it vulnerable to the outside. For Nordau that rottenness is, essentially, a failure of political and cultural authority: “Our republic of letters is neither governed nor defended. It has neither authorities nor police, and that is the reason a small but determined band of evildoers can make a great stir at their pleasure.”89 He calls for the establishment of a Society for Ethical Culture that will determine which works and artists are degenerate and thus need to be annihilated for the good of society. For Nordau as for Wagner, it is when resistance is weak that the parasites can feast. Nordau seeks to wrest the concept of degeneration away from the antisemitic discourse about the arts in which it is already embedded and toward what he regards as its proper targets. He does so, of course, with remarkably little reflection on his terms. And if Nordau does not stop to consider whether imitation might be inevitable, even necessary, in the arts (even as he himself imitates certain tropes of Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s), neither does he reflect on why he is so obsessed with obsessive ideas or on why he writes so many hundreds of pages about graphomania. He accepts the valuations that had been the stuff of antisemitic cultural diatribe—he just doesn’t think they should apply to Jews. That acceptance of the valuative terms of the discourse of degeneration is not the least of the reasons why, in the end, Nordau’s attempt to separate the notion of artistic and cultural Entartung from its antisemitic deployment fails so conspicuously. At the end of Degeneration, Nordau concludes not with calls for the annihilation and elimination of the degenerate vermin but thus:

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Modernist Form as Judaization The emancipation for which we are striving is of the judgment, not of the appetites. In the profoundly penetrating words of Scripture (Matt. V, 17): “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfi l.” 90

Why does Nordau, who reportedly thought all of the Bible “childish and revolting” and who perhaps understood himself to be a Jew, conclude a book that presents itself as a physician’s diagnosis of modernism with the Sermon on the Mount?91 Nordau’s work from his pre-Zionist period might well be structured by and seek to displace the Jewish Question, but that does not stop him from answering the question in terms that are structurally, even literally, Christian. With this final rhetorical flourish Nordau puts himself in the position of identifying degenerate art and degenerate artists with the old law, the old dispensation, the (so-called) Old Testament. Here he shows— or concedes—that he cannot put into play the oppositions between the healthy and the degenerate; between those who are authentic, creative, and those who are imitative; between those who interpret properly and those who interpret perversely; between those who embrace life, reproduction, and the future and those who are atavistic, sterile, perverse, fixated, without at the same time reiterating the Christian/Jewish opposition and doing so in Christian terms. Certainly the Christian conception of that opposition admits its dependence (not, God forbid, its parasitism) on the subordinated term (“I am not come to destroy, but to fulfi ll”), but for Nordau, as for Christianity, that dependence is always also understood as a supersession. For Nordau, we might say, the fact that the art he condemns as degenerate can be antisemitic does not prevent it from nevertheless also being, in a significant sense, Jewish. The real irony of Nordau’s account of the art he labels degenerate, then, is not that a concept that turned out to be so important to the Nazis was formulated by a writer “of Jewish origin” but that a writer who so vigorously opposed antisemitism and who arguably strove to deantisemitize the idea of artistic Entartung would reveal that the position of the degenerate was nevertheless still ultimately, for him, the position of the Jew. Both despite and because of his own intentions, the example of Nordau might then allow us to begin to understand why, if the biopolitical drive was so powerfully determined by modern scientific and, particularly, medical impera-

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tives, it was the Jews—the religious enemy—who came to be among its central targets. And it is perhaps this disclosure, rather than Nordau’s intended project of providing a medicalized discourse for understanding modernism in the arts, that most strongly ties him to the Nazi conception of degenerate art.

T wo

Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of “Degenerate Art” as Historicopolitical Spectacle

Introduction: Examples and Counterexamples There is no more notorious, iconic, and resonant example of the National Socialist campaign against modernist art than the roughly dozen pages in the 1928 book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race) in which the Nazi architect and art educator Paul Schultze-Naumburg sets black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Modigliani, Picasso, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, and others alongside photographs of bodies that are, for want of a better phrase, grossly deformed and disfigured.1 If we take Schultze-Naumburg’s Art and Race as our paradigm, the contours of the Nazi conception of degenerate art (entartete Kunst) seem clear: a condemnation of modernism as the wrong kind of representation of the wrong kind of bodies; a racial, eugenic, and biopolitical notion that takes us directly from the expropriation and destruction of paintings and sculptures deemed degenerate to the elimination of life deemed unfit to live; 50

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Figure 1. Juxtaposition of works by modernist artists with photographs of physical deformities. From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Art and Race, 1928.

modernist art as prefiguring homo sacer.2 It is just such an understanding of degenerate art that we find in the work of such different figures as the American Jewish cultural studies scholar Sander Gilman, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, and the French art historian Eric Michaud.3 In The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany Michaud spells the equation out particularly explicitly: One of the most remarkable aspects of Nazism was the way in which, throughout its reign, it meted out the same treatment to both men and works that were judged to be “weak and mildewed”—what Hitler called das Schwache— treatment that ranged from exclusion to cremation. Conversely, all the measures for “the protection of the race” were matched, under the Third Reich, by measures for the protection of art.4

For Michaud, the “ploy of examples and counterexamples, the efficacy of which had long ago been demonstrated by Schultze-Naumburg,” makes “the aim of the contrasting exhibitions of ‘degenerate art’ and ‘German art’

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abundantly clear: attraction to the Nordic type and repulsion of the antipeople (Gegenvolk) were supposed to become progressively natural reflexes for all members of the community.”5 Michaud is right to claim that the “ploy of examples and counterexamples” structures the contrasting exhibitions. Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment planned the antimodernist exhibition “Degenerate Art” as a “counterexhibition” (Gegenausstellung) to the fi rst annual exhibition of “Great German Art,” which opened in Munich’s newly consecrated House of German Art on July 18, 1937. “Degenerate Art,” a hastily assembled selection of over six hundred modernist and avant-garde artworks seized from museums throughout Germany, opened a day later in Munich’s Archaeological Institute, an appropriate enough venue for works that were to be consigned to the dustbin of history— exhibited one last time before being removed from the public sphere to be sold at auction or destroyed. The “Degenerate Art” exhibition was visited by a reported 2,009,899 people in Munich alone before traveling to Berlin, then on to Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Salzburg, and onward through the Nazi Reich until 1941.6 Example and counterexample, no question. But is the contrast between “Degenerate Art” and “Great German Art” really derived from Kunst und Rasse? It would be absurd to deny the importance of Schultze-Naumburg’s text in particular, or biopolitics in general, for Nazi aesthetics. Nevertheless, it is a striking fact about the 1937 Munich exhibition of “Degenerate Art” that nothing like Schultze-Naumburg’s photographs and plates appears in it. There are no photographs of deformed bodies next to the modernist works of art on display, no vitrines open to the relevant pages of SchultzeNaumburg’s tome. While the exhibition guide (published after the Munich station of “Degenerate Art” closed) does juxtapose photographically reproduced images, these juxtapositions do not compare portraits and medicalized bodies. Instead, they compare artworks by modernists (Klee, Kokoschka, and others) with paintings and drawings by the mentally ill. The accompanying texts do not insist upon a diagnosis of the artists as degenerate by virtue of the similarities apparently on display, but on the difficulty posed for the viewer in distinguishing between the works of the modernists and those of the insane. Of course, one could still suggest, with Michaud, that Schultze-Naumburg’s model implicitly structures the Nazi way of seeing,

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including how visitors saw the exhibition. I do not want to exclude this possibility (indeed, I return to it in the last part of this chapter), but given the absence of anything like it in “Degenerate Art” itself, I do want to ask: what does making Art and Race the dominant paradigm for understanding that exhibition prevent us from seeing? Interpreting the “Degenerate Art” exhibition purely by appeals to Schultze-Naumburg’s photographs and, say, Nordau’s medicalization of aesthetic form in Degeneration (as Gilman and Esposito do) actually requires us not to look at much of the exhibition itself. For the Nazi opponents of modernist and avant-garde art, “degenerate” was one epithet to choose from among others. Their anxieties and fantasies about that art simply cannot be reduced to a conceptual history of the term. The same polemicists also spoke of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and “Art-Bolshevism,” and, indeed, it is these terms that occur most frequently in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition guide, which dwells on “the common roots of political anarchy and cultural anarchy . . . to unmask degenerate art as art-Bolshevism in every sense of the term” and construes “artistic anarchy” as “an incitement to political anarchy” and “class struggle.”7 Early Nazi exhibitions that sought to discredit modernist and avant-garde art appeared under a variety of names, including, but not limited to: Schreckenskammer (Chamber of Horrors); Kulturbolschewistiche Bilder (images of cultural bolshevism); Kunst, die nicht aus unserer Seele kam (art that did not issue from our soul); Novembergeist. Kunst im Dienste der Zersetzung (November spirit: Art in the ser vice of subversion); Regierungskunst (government art); and Kunst der Geistesrichtung (intellectual art).8 In his June 30, 1937, mandate issuing the order to seize works of art from German museums in preparation for the exhibition, Goebbels refers not to entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) but to Verfallskunst (decay art, art of decline).9 If it is a mistake to think that the name of the exhibition makes its content and meaning self-evident, looking more closely at the exhibition itself proves no more straightforward. When Adolf Ziegler, the National Socialist president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, declares open the 1937 Munich exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” he does so with the words, “German Volk, come and judge for yourselves!”10 In a sense, what the German Volk could “judge for themselves” was clear enough: the modernist and avant-garde artworks on display. Just what kind of an event Ziegler in-

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vites the German Volk to take part in has proven, however, a little more difficult to decipher. How to look at these works, this display? Through what lens, from what angle? Traditionally, art historians who turn their attention to “Degenerate Art” have tended to forget that they are examining an event staged by a propaganda ministry and have concentrated instead on what the Nazis do, or fail to do, as curators of an exhibition of modernist art. As such, the exhibition “Degenerate Art” is, in the judgment of such critics, extraordinarily incompetent: the pictures are hung too closely together, works are incorrectly attributed and labeled, exhibits meant to represent a single artistic movement (say Dadaism) include works from quite unrelated movements (like Der Blaue Reiter), quotations from artists and critics are displayed without regard for either their accuracy or their original contexts. Thus, through their curatorial scorn, postwar art historians express their desire to overcome the past. Yet correcting these art-historical errors does not help us understand the spectacle and function of “Degenerate Art” any better. Whatever else they reveal about the function of modernist art under Nazism, the mistakes should always also be seen as integral to the exhibition, displays by the National Socialist state of its power to do as it will with impunity. Casual errors flaunt the speed with which the state is able to expropriate artworks from museums all over Germany and erect this exhibition— all in a matter of less than three weeks. Furthermore, as we’ll see, the main targets of the exhibition are precisely those critics, dealers, and museum directors who claim to comprehend this art properly and to speak for it. In the face of the regime’s deliberate incomprehension, simply to reiterate the rejected discourse and categories of modernism is obtuse. We need, rather, to see how the Nazis refunctioned modernist art, and why. The way to a productive interpretation of the Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art” lies in taking seriously the implications of its role as a historical counterexhibition, as consolidating a radical break between the Weimar past and the Nazi present. The political scientist Roger Griffin identifies in fascist political ideology a “mythic core” of “palingenetic . . . populist ultranationalism.”11 Fascism, says Griffin, is based upon myths of national rebirth (palingenesis means rebirth). The “Degenerate Art” exhibition plays a crucial role in the staging of that myth. In 1933 Hitler had invited the

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German people to give him four years to transform and redeem Germany. The idea is reproduced on one of the walls of Room 6 of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition: “Sie hatten vier Jahre Zeit” (“They had four years’ time”).12 The celebrations of 1937 were intended, among other things, to mark the achievements of the regime in those years, to invite the German people to see what a difference Hitler had made to their lives. Goebbels himself emphasized the need for the exhibitions to distinguish between “the arts of those days and the art of our days.”13 (Note the transition from the plural to the singular, as if from diversity and multiplicity to singularity and unity.) The exhibition guide accompanying “Degenerate Art” proclaims that the exhibition seeks to “make it clear that this degeneracy in art was something more than the sort of short-lived foolishness, idiocy, and rash experimentation that might have spent itself and died even without the National Socialist revolution.”14 Modernist art, in other words, is dead, and the Nazis want recognition for killing it. A few pages later: “we can only choke back our fury that so decent a people as the Germans could ever have been so foully abused.”15 “Degenerate Art” seeks to demonstrate and document that abuse and to present the Nazi revolution as the savior and redeemer of the German people. None of what I argue about the “Degenerate Art” exhibition is meant to deny the racial and biopolitical obsessions of the Nazis, nor to deny that these obsessions made their way into certain moments of the exhibition. Indeed, in the end, my own interpretation of the exhibition’s goals is thanatopolitical. But I do think that if we look closely and soberly at the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition we do not fi nd the kinds of simple analogical relationships that critics have tended to look for. Modernist works of art are not presented as being like the bodies of “the weak and mildewed”; the space of “Degenerate Art” does not presage that of the camps. It is not an alien other that the Nazis want visitors to “Degenerate Art” to see and be horrified by but rather the condition, during what the Nazis call “the years of the major Bolshevik-Jewish onslaught upon German art,” of their own past selves.16 In the Munich exhibition, the Nazis are not, for the most part, concerned with art that is by Jews, or art that is somehow like Jews, but with art that they believe has been Judaized. I begin my analysis of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition by arguing that the very need on the part of the Nazi regime to make so vivid the historical distinction between “the arts of those days and the art of our days,” to stage

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it so publicly, suggests that the difference between the two periods in art remained, in 1937, a matter of some uncertainty. Crucial here is the fact that the works of German Expressionism that constitute the bulk of the exhibition had actually been the subject of much dispute in the early years of the National Socialist regime. When we look at the main ideological positions for and against a “National Socialist revolutionary art” that would have included the German Expressionists Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach (both of whom ended up in “Degenerate Art”), we see the extent to which the “Degenerate Art” exhibition symbolically resolves and retrospectively disavows the vexed question of the historical place of German Expressionism within Nazism. What the Nazis emphasize in the staging of parallel exhibitions in 1937 is a certain recuperation under Nazism of several ideal types. Many of the works displayed in the counterexhibition “Degenerate Art” are presented as “sullied” reflections of the same generic images the Nazis sanctify as subjects for “Great German Art”: farmers, soldiers, mothers, and landscapes. Yet the structural relation between the two exhibitions is most interesting where it breaks down, as it does when we examine the logic of “Degenerate Art’s” spectacular display of “mocking” images of Christ in the first room of the exhibition. Ultimately, the Nazis’ concern with “degenerate” representations of a figure about whom they were highly equivocal is best explained in relation to how the “Great German Art Exhibition” presents images of the sacred. This preoccupation with the sacralization of political and cultural authority will help us understand Nazism’s peculiar fascination with and imitation of Dadaism, an imitation that we might regard as determining the entire shape of the exhibition itself.

The Art of Our Days If the divide between “Degenerate” and “Great German” art is marked by time, by Goebbels’s distinction between “the arts of those days and the art of our days,” then the tertium comparitionis that enables the parallel is place, in particular, national territory: both exhibitions focus on what the Nazis regard as German art. Those whom Goebbels empowered to “select” works for “Degenerate Art” and, more generally, to clear German museums of

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artworks produced after 1910 that were symptomatic of the decay the Nazis ascribed to this era, did seize works by non- German modernist artists and could have displayed them, but they did not. Those non-German artists whose works were displayed in Munich either had been based in Germany (Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger) or were among the sample of artists classified and exhibited in a separate room for being “Jewish, all too Jewish,” such as Marc Chagall. In Munich, “Degenerate Art” was not, for the most part, art produced by Jewish hands. And while the expulsion of these works from the German public sphere runs parallel to the removal of Jews from the arts and from public life, this parallel cannot be read as a simple prefiguration of the destruction of Europe’s Jews. Most of the works classified as “degenerate” were auctioned off or sequestered, not destroyed. The Nazi project of annihilating Eu rope’s Jews proceeded even at a cost to the larger German war effort; the “Degenerate Art” exhibition did not similarly override economic self-interest. As it happens, the most heavily represented artist in “Degenerate Art” is Emil Nolde, who had been a Nazi party member since 1920. This is a telling detail. First, it reminds us that the majority of the works displayed as “degenerate” are examples of German Expressionism. Second, that the most visible target of this exhibition should be a Nazi party member is symptomatic of one of the major issues addressed in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Prior to 1937, the position of German Expressionism within Nazi cultural politics had been hotly contested, part of a struggle between Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels for control of Nazi cultural policy. The “Degenerate Art” exhibition provides a symbolic resolution to this contest. The broad outlines of what is known as the “Rosenberg-Goebbels dispute” are familiar enough. Rosenberg and the members of his Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Fighting League for German Culture) proselytized for a strictly representationalist way of seeing that interpreted figural distortion as a sign of degeneracy—whether physical (in the subject), mental (in the painter), or political (in the circumstances that allowed such works to be recognized as “art”). The Goebbels-affiliated group Die Norden, on the other hand, claimed figural distortion and non-naturalistic use of color as part of an “expressive” and future-oriented vision appropriate to a “National Socialist revolutionary art.”17 From 1933 until 1935 Die Norden published a

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journal called Kunst der Nation (“Art of the Nation,” or “The Nation’s Art”) that promoted Expressionism as a just an art. In July 1933 the group organized a public demonstration in favor of Nordic Expressionists (especially Barlach and Nolde): Bekenntnis der Jugend zur deutschen Kunst (Youth Commits to German Art) at the Friedrich-Willhelm University and in the same year under the auspices of the NS-Deutsche Studentenverband (Nazi-German Student Union) held an exhibition entitled “Thirty German Artists” that included many of the major German Expressionists. The nationalist strain in Die Norden’s activities is pronounced: “Art of the Nation,” “Thirty German Artists,” “Youth fights for German art.”18 A particularly Nazi version of Expressionism, then, both “national” and “Nordic,” in which Expressionists like the Jewish leftist Ludwig Meidner or the Russian-born Kandinsky had no part.19 That the question of whether Expressionism was a species of “degeneracy” or of “National Socialist revolutionary art” could be argued at all, and that the latter position could, for a time, be supported in publications and state-supported exhibitions, sharply distinguishes German Expressionism from the other targets of negative Nazi propaganda with which it was ultimately identified. For the most part, the status of the Nazis’ “bad objects” was beyond debate. No Nazi ever argued that promotion of the Jews, Weimar, communism, or parliamentary democracy would, seen from the proper perspective or under slightly different historical circumstances, be compatible with National Socialist ideology; no Nazi could have ever argued this way and remained a Nazi. Yet because Expressionism did not become the official art of Nazi Germany, the Expressionist dispute within Nazism has aroused little interest among scholars of Nazi aesthetics: the dramatic condemnation of modernism is understood as intrinsic to fascist cultural politics. The ideological and cultural significance of even a “minor” and apparently eliminated position should not, however, be underestimated.20 While many scholars tend to take Rosenberg and Schultze-Naumburg’s views as the central statements of Nazi aesthetic ideology, in 1934 Hitler himself mocked them as “Teutonic nonsense” while also apparently regretting how party members had treated Ernst Barlach and contemplating some kind of reconciliation with him.21 The Nazis’ contest over the meaning of Expressionism offers a crucial context for understanding the internal impetus behind a state-sponsored

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exhibition in which German Expressionist artworks are juxtaposed with “Great German Art” and presented, if not performatively disavowed, as “degenerate.” Neither side of the Rosenberg-Goebbels divide was as straightforward as it appeared. Take Goebbels, who is reported to have owned and displayed in his home works by both Emil Nolde and the socialist artist Käthe Kollwitz (yes!) and to have held Ernst Barlach in great esteem.22 Goebbels is generally interpreted as performing an “about-face” on Expressionism. In addition to his initial support for Die Norden’s demonstrations and exhibitions, the novel he wrote in the early 1920s, Michael, speaks explicitly about Expressionism and has been interpreted as itself representative of one aspect of that movement. That he then cast Expressionist works onto the “degenerate” scrapheap is therefore seen as a pragmatic appropriation of the less politically agile Rosenberg’s ideological position.23 Yet this “turn,” including his stage-managing of the parallel exhibitions, is quite compatible with what Goebbels had been saying about Expressionism all along. For one thing, Goebbels consistently identifies Expressionism with a particular decade, the 1920s—he starts doing this in that decade itself and continues to do so through the 1930s. No wonder, then, that by 1937 Expressionism has become one of the “arts of those days.” It has aged. For another thing, the version of Expressionism promulgated in Goebbels’s writings is not primarily a matter of whether or not one has a taste for a particular kind of aesthetic production, such as the paintings of Nolde, Barlach, and others. It has far more to do with the political realization of one’s will in shaping the world. The narrator of Michael proclaims: In composition our decade is thoroughly Expressionist. We, the people of today, are all Expressionists. We want to structure the world from within. Expressionism wants to build a new world from within. Its secret and the source of its strength is fervor.24

What does the narrator mean when he identifies his generation as “Expressionist”? The parataxis suggests that “we” are all Expressionist only insofar as “we” also approach the task of creating a new world from “within.” But where the Expressionists want to build a new world, the future Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment wants to structure “the world.” As Georg Lukács observes, “the expressionists themselves took their creative

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method only as a stylizing grasp of the ‘essence’: the mendacious demagogue Goebbels identifies this method with the reality itself.”25 The narrator’s interest is in the idea of a fervent form-giving from within, not a particular kind of art object. Michael’s new world might have nothing to do with the artworks called “Expressionist”; it might even condemn them as “degenerate.” Goebbels may well manifest his political version of Expressionism precisely by repudiating Expressionist artworks and arranging instead the world-structuring mass propaganda that was the real incarnation of fascist art: party rallies, Olympiads, festivals of German art, and exhibitions of “Degenerate Art.” Goebbels’s notion of Expressionism has enough room to accommodate a “Degenerate Art” exhibition; conversely, Rosenberg’s anti-Expressionism is elastic enough to endorse individual Expressionist artists and even aspects of the movement as a whole. In his 1930 Myth of the Twentieth Century Rosenberg notes that Expressionism is the product of “correct feeling,” the feeling that the kind of “intellectualism” promulgated by Impressionism and Cubism was mythically bankrupt, and to which, in response, Expressionists “began to search for redemption, expression and strength.”26 He is, of course, more ambivalent about the results. But consider how Rosenberg elucidates his claim that Nolde and Barlach “display an outspoken talent”: [A] Nolde seascape which hangs in the Crown Prince’s palace . . . is strongly and forcefully painted. However, other representative attempts are negroid, irreverent, raw and devoid of true inner strength of form. . . . Barlach dominates his materials like a virtuoso, and no one will deny the monumentality of his woodcuts. But whenever he represents men, he is foreign, completely foreign. . . . Gaze upon Barlach’s Magdeburg War Memorial, which was completed for the church there: little, half-idiotic admixtures of undefinable human types with Soviet helmets are supposed to represent German fighting men!27

More interesting than Rosenberg’s already striking approval of aspects of Nolde’s and Barlach’s works is how he expresses this approval: the Nolde seascape is “strong” and “forceful,” Barlach “dominates” his materials, his woodcuts are “monumental.” The works Rosenberg approves of are not the ones that look most like he thinks the world should look; they are the ones that best express “strength.” This is not the language of adequate representation but the Goebbelsian discourse of power and its expression.

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It is when Rosenberg wants to describe Nolde and Barlach’s failures that he talks in representational terms. Where these artists fail, for Rosenberg, is in representing the human figure. This is ambiguous in Nolde’s case (if hinted at in terms like “negroid”) but explicit in Barlach’s: “whenever he represents men, he is . . . completely foreign.” For the same reason, the “monumentality” of Barlach’s art fades when actual monuments (German fighting men!) are at stake: suddenly it matters what kind of helmets the figures are wearing. We might think that Rosenberg was expressivist about landscapes and representationalist about portraits because his racism blinded him to expressive values in art as soon as the human figure was involved. Yet as the case of the pro-Expressionist group Die Norden demonstrates, Nazi racism and appreciation for nonrealistic representations of the human figure need not be mutually exclusive. Something else is at stake in Rosenberg’s rejection of Expressionism. In a 1935 speech, when his battle with Goebbels was at its height, Rosenberg declares: Artistic personalities who, in themselves, we are ready to promote at any time, but who have gathered the laurels of the November Republic, should no longer have the right to influence the art policy of the National Socialist movement for the purpose of allowing their old Jewish patrons to ensconce themselves once again in German artistic life as so-called “good, exceptional Jews.”28

This passage is striking both for the latitude of Rosenberg’s view of the artists who were to be marked as “degenerate” and, relatedly, for how little the “bottom line” of questions of artistic policy have, on his account, to do with the politics of the image. Such questions are left curiously open. Rosenberg’s speech reveals, instead, a Nazi artistic policy compelled to illustrate Nazi historiography and racial policy. The artwork’s place as a political and temporal signifier short-circuits discussion of its aesthetic properties. Rosenberg allows that the artistic personalities in question were “in themselves” promotable and presumably therefore German, “Aryan,” and potentially Nazi—in other words, that they possessed all of the qualities Die Norden found in Expressionist art. Rosenberg’s assertion that the Nazi regime nevertheless should not promote these artists rests quite explicitly on the need to negate the previous recognition afforded these artists during Weimar (the “November Republic”) and on the imperative to exclude Jews from German culture without

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exception. He thus also brings to light one of the distinguishing features of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition’s ideology. German artists, as Germans, could not be held ultimately responsible for the “degenerate” artworks they produced. Rosenberg suggests that, like the rest of the German nation, these artists (when they were not Jewish or Bolshevik) had simply been seduced by their “Jewish patrons” and betrayed by the “November criminals.” The exhibition is, then, less overtly concerned with art as a racial ideal than with what art starts to look like when art institutions— criticism and museums, consecration and preservation—fall into the wrong hands. Goebbels’s mandate for the “Degenerate Art” exhibition charges Adolf Ziegler, the National Socialist president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, to expropriate “degenerate” works purchased by German museums after 1910. Museums, not private collections: the (mis)administration of public funds is one of the exhibition’s most explicit obsessions. Large red stickers were placed under most of the works in the exhibition declaring: “Paid for with the hard-earned wages of German working Volk.” Accompanying the red stickers were labels disclosing what had been paid for the works, figures that could appear astronomically high if the purchase had been made during the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s. The stickers provide a point of identification—with the “German working Volk”—from which viewers could, as Ziegler instructed, “judge for themselves” whether the works in question (displayed as “mockeries” of sacred German icons and celebrations of “degenerate” ideals) bore either some generalizable usevalue or an immediately recognizable “spiritual” value commensurate with the price on the tag. The stickers work, in short, to reconfigure the works in question as overpriced commodities and to divest them of the auratic effects of institutional consecration, to take them out of the domain of artistic tradition and into that of state administration. The Nazis attribute blame for this misspending of the hard-working German Volk’s wages quite specifically, with interesting consequences for the curation of the exhibition. Much of the first downstairs room of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, for example, is devoted to an attack on the Dresden City Museum’s former director, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt.29 Most striking about the display is an arrangement of paintings confiscated from that museum: the pictures literally surround a wall text that attributes the decision to buy them to “Dr. P. F. Schmidt.” The works serve, in other

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Figure 2. Paintings on the west wall of the fi rst ground floor room of the 1937 Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Text identifies these paintings as from “the collection of the Stadtmuseum in Dresden. Dr. P.F. Schmidt.”

words, as illustrations of his purchasing policy: the “attribution” of these pictures not to individual artists but to the museum’s long-since fired director is the corollary of the Rosenbergian notion that the artists themselves were somehow “innocent” victims of the machinations of the Jewish art world. Insofar as “Degenerate Art” is an assault on the museum and its power to consecrate artworks, it has more in common with the avant-garde of the early twentieth century than with, say, the cultural reaction of the French Academy’s anti-Impressionism in the years of Impressionism’s rise: less a failure to grant recognition to an emergent mode of representation than a concerted attempt to strip works already recognized as art of their consecrated status. Avant-garde movements such as Futurism and Dadaism were also dedicated to the elimination of the museum and its contents. Yet unlike the early avant-garde, as the celebration of the monumental House of German Art reminds us, the Nazis do not attack museums as such. They attack

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museums only insofar as museums are not National Socialist “art temples.” There is, of course, no invitation within “Degenerate Art” either to reflect on how the works for this exhibition were selected and presented or to question the authority of those responsible for doing so. Nor are the artworks in the House of German Art displayed with red stickers, although they too presumably have been purchased with the taxes of the “German working Volk” (when not with funds seized from Jews). According to Ernst Bloch, the House of German Art alone cost nine million marks.30 As I have noted, images of Jews and works by Jewish artists in the exhibition were few, and those on display were placed in a small, separate room. “Degenerate Art” emphasized, rather, the influence of Jewish art critics and art dealers. In 1936, the year before the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, Goebbels prohibited art criticism (Kunstkritik) in Germany because of its role in the Judaization of German art, which he described as its “complete perversion into art judgment in the time of Jewish foreign influencing of art [in der Zeit jüdischer Kunstüberfremdung].”31 From that point on, only art reporting or art description [Kunstbericht] would be permitted, in order to give the public a chance to, yes, judge for themselves: “It [the ban] should give the public the possibility of forming its own judgment. [Er soll dem Publikum die Möglichkeit geben, sich selbst ein Urteil zu bilden.]”32 The notions of art criticism as an instrument of Judaization and of censorship as emancipation from that Judaization appear again in Hitler’s speech opening the House of German Art: “Works of art” that are not capable of being understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book [Gebrauchsanweisungen] to justify their existence— until at long last they fi nd someone sufficiently browbeaten to endure such stupid or impudent twaddle with patience—will never again fi nd their way to the German people. . . . 33 Jewry was able, largely by exploiting its position in the press, to enlist the aid of so-called art criticism not only in gradually obscuring all normal ideas of the nature and function of art and its purpose, but also in destroying the general healthy response in this area.34

Recall the exhibition guide to “Degenerate Art”: “We can only choke back our fury that so decent a people as the Germans could ever have been so foully abused.”

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We cannot let pass without comment the fact that to promulgate the notion of a “natural” way of seeing art, Hitler has to ignore the naturalized interpretive activity he himself carries out when looking at the works he does regard as art. The works on display in the “Great German Art Exhibition” itself make particularly large interpretive demands. The disjunction between the apparent content of any particular painting—nude women, landscapes, and men in uniforms—and what its title asserts is represented— Spring, for example, or The Four Elements— can only be bridged by a strong, active (and generous) allegorical reading. The Nazis’ populist gesture of asking the public to judge for itself effaces the theory-dependence of all identification of artworks as artworks, even as the spectacle and texts of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition manifest the Nazis’ own implicit and explicit aesthetic ideas. During these years the German public is, of course, flooded with myriad Nazi explanations of modernist artworks in terms of degenerate physiology, political corruption, and Jewish world conspiracy: the writings and speeches of Hitler and Rosenberg, Schultze-Naumburg and Wolfgang Willrich, Gottfried Benn and Walther Darré, and many others.35 The Nazis are, in short, comfortable enough with the emergence of instruction books for art that they are prepared to write their own. It is, then, no accident that Adolf Ziegler declares open the 1937 Munich exhibition of “Degenerate Art” with the words “German Volk, come and judge for yourselves!”36 We begin to see just how free that judgment actually is in the very first display of the exhibition, where, next to Ludwig Gies’ 1921 sculpture Kruzifi xus (Crucifi xion or Crucified Christ, relabeled by the Nazis “Christ,” for reasons I will examine shortly) hangs a sample of art criticism in praise of the work. A bright red question mark is superimposed over the text, along with the words “Man staune!” (“Your jaw drops!”). The Nazis themselves present “Christ” as a Schauerwerk—a horror work. The presentation of a sample of this otherwise illegal art criticism next to the Gies sculpture offers a striking illustration of Walter Benjamin’s insight that “fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”37 The public is encouraged to exercise its newly won freedom of judgment upon the very art criticism that had purportedly robbed it of that freedom in the first place. Expression, in other words, is invoked (and provoked) in order to legitimize the removal of rights (such as that to write art criticism) and to represent the rights themselves as

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inhibiting the public’s freedom (the freedom to judge and to express itself about art). This is also to say that “Degenerate Art” is very much an exhibition of words. Specifically, it is very much an exhibition of quotations, most often extracts from works of art criticism that are meant to be revealed as false, absurd, when compared with the artworks to which they refer. These artworks are conveniently located next to the texts for the purpose of that comparison. Crucial to this comparative exercise are the other kind of words prominently on display in “Degenerate Art”: Nazi slogans that describe the works in question, dictate the “proper” meanings of the images, and prompt viewers to interpret the texts in question as either nonsense or swindle: “deliberate military sabotage,” “madness becomes method,” “How sick minds saw nature.” The purportedly historical focus of the exhibition belies the repression of historical knowledge implicit in the Nazis’ staged incomprehension of (and consequent “incompetence” in the face of) the art criticism and works exhibited as “degenerate.” This per formance of incomprehension in the face of art criticism masks the fact that the Nazis too speak a version of this language. Calling for a demarcation of the boundary between “the arts of those days and the art of our days” demands, on Goebbels’s part, the willful forgetting of how even the spectacle that stages and demarcates this boundary might in some sense belong to “those,” rather than “our,” days. The Nazis present the works in “Degenerate Art” as the symptomatic product of a contaminated political past, one they purge with just such exhibitions. But this historical contextualization is also, for the Nazis, the solution to the interpretive questions and ambiguities that modernist art, especially German Expressionism, presents Nazi ideology with in the fi rst place. The exhibit therefore appears to provide a striking example of Judith Butler’s suggestion that the abject is that which is renounced as a possibility, the specter of which threatens the subject with psychotic dissolution.38 If we are to see “degenerate art” as a site of abjection for the Nazis, we cannot look past their need to reduce and restrict the meanings attached to a range of objects that were the source of interpretive disagreement and thus a threat to the fantasy not only of a univocal Volksgemeinschaft but even of a coherent and unified National Socialist worldview.

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Degenerate Christs Reflections on the construction of certain objects as dirty or abject need to be wary of a theory that puts everything into place. Although most of the works displayed in “Degenerate Art” were German Expressionist, telling the story of Expressionism does not tell the whole story of the exhibition. Accounting for the place of Expressionism clarifies something important about the performative function of the counterexhibition, but it does not tell us enough about that performance’s structure and content. In his speech to open the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, Adolf Ziegler, who was responsible for the selection of artworks for both exhibitions and whose triptych of nudes, The Four Elements (later owned by Hitler), hung in the “Great German Art Exhibition” and contributed to his reputation as the “Master of German Pubic Hair,” proclaimed that: One has to be horrified, when, as an old soldier who served on the front, one sees how the German front-line soldier is spat upon and sullied, or when in other works the German mother is mocked by these swine as a lascivious whore or as a “real woman” with a facial expression of mindless imbecility, or when one sees how in a time during which the [Catholic] Center Party sat in government, public institutions could allow themselves to purchase so-called artworks that ridiculed Christian symbols in a nonrepresentational manner. All in all one can say that everything sacred to a decent German was necessarily trampled into the dirt here.39

Note, once more, the framing of “Degenerate Art” as a spectacle of German victimhood, a demonstration of the abuse suffered by all that is sacred to decent Germans. Ziegler’s statement also proves to be the key to interpreting the contents of “Degenerate Art” in the light of its status as a counterexhibition. If “Degenerate Art,” as Ziegler says, necessarily sullies everything the “decent German” holds sacred, the exhibition rooms of “Degenerate Art” should contain a kind of inverted guide to the Nazi sacred, a Nazi sacred that one might fi nd displayed in “Great German Art.” As it happens, the contents of the two exhibitions do reflect the relation that Ziegler describes: whenever something “holy to every decent German” is displayed as besmirched or polluted in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, “cleansed” versions of the same icons appear in the “Great German Art Exhibition.” 40 Where “Degenerate Art” displays images labeled “Mockery

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of the German Woman Ideal: Cretin and Whore,” the House of German Art rescues the “woman ideal” through innumerable idealized mothers and countless allegorical nudes. Similarly, “degenerate” works deemed “Insulting of German Heroes of the World War” find their counterpart in the “Great German Art Exhibition’s” images of soldiers and pilots preparing for battle and SS and SA men on the march. “German Farmers— Seen Yiddishly” are seen “properly” (Aryanly?) in “Great German Art” (indeed, farmers predominate among the professions represented here), and landscapes in “Degenerate Art” labeled “thus sick minds saw nature” are “cleansed” by the landscapes that constituted the majority of the images displayed in the House of German Art.41 All of which is worth bearing in mind when we consider the first room of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, where a large wall text informs visitors: “Unter der Herrschaft des Zentrums freche Verhöhnung des Gotterleben,” which I translate as “Under the Catholic Center’s rule, impudent mockery of the God-experience.” The contents of the room are selected accordingly: with a single exception (Emil Nolde’s Lost Paradise, displayed as “Adam and Eve”), every work in the large first room of “Degenerate Art” represents a scene from the Christian Gospels. The display of Ludwig Gies’ Crucified Christ (labeled “Christ”), the first thing visitors saw when they entered the exhibition, is, as I have noted, one of its more elaborately curated elements and one that is in many ways representative of the exhibition’s techniques. The Nazis reproduce and ridicule a text that praises the work, and beneath the sculpture itself they display a photograph showing it in Lübeck’s cathedral. Next to this photograph they attach a text that proclaims that this “horror” functioned in the cathedral as a “War Memorial to Heroes.” And, of course, the commentary: Man staune! Your jaw drops! Many of the problems the Nazis have with modernism are reflected in the sculpture the Nazis call “Christ.” It is deliberately grotesque: the limbs of the crucified Christ jut out at contorted angles. The blood that spurts from Christ’s wounded side appears penile. The eyes of this figure are more entomoid than anthropoid, a detail difficult to observe without recalling the role of the insect in Nazi antisemitism, most obviously in Heinrich Himmler’s famous claim that antisemitism was “exactly the same as delousing” and the use of Zyklon B, an insecticide developed for delousing buildings, in the gas chambers.42 Like Karl Schmitt-Rottluff’s woodcuts of

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Figure 3. Photograph of Kruzifi xus by Ludwig Gies on display in the first room of the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition.

Christ in the same room of the exhibition, Gies’ sculpture’s apparent modernism is attributable to its rejection of Renaissance notions of verisimilitude. Gies favors modes of figuration that draw upon both contemporary notions of subjectivity (hence Expressionism) and “primitive” art and that also make their own backward leap over the Renaissance to the jagged stylizations of medieval German woodcuts. The appeal to continuity with the earliest German artistic traditions could be seen as making this war memorial a particularly German one, a mourning of the German war dead, just as the original title, Crucified Christ, could be understood to respond to the sacrifices of the First World War, an interpretive possibility that renaming the work “Christ” helps blur. Thus the Nazis introduce their public to degenerate art. They present this “sullied” religious imagery in a way that would lead one to expect that “cleansed” versions of these images would appear in the Nazis’ Temple of

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Art. But here the symmetry that otherwise holds between the two exhibitions seems to break down: in the House of German Art there are no “cleansed” visions of the Christian Bible. There is, it must be said, something puzzling about the Nazi focus on “mocking” images of Christ. Despite the complicity of the Christian Church with some of the more heinous aspects of Nazi policy, and despite the antisemitic resources Christian dogma offered the National Socialists, significant political and ideological antagonism existed between Christian and Nazi institutions. Furthermore, the representation of Christ presented obvious problems for a state obsessed with “racial purity” and a solution to the “Jewish problem.” Christ’s “racial” status preoccupied the Nazis throughout the duration of their Reich. Evidence of continued attention to the issue of Christ’s race as late in the game for the Nazis as 1944 indicates that the issue never gets resolved for them and that it isn’t simply forgotten either.43 The Nazis did not know what to think, nor what they wanted to think, about Christ’s “heritage,” and he remained an ambivalent, troubling figure for them. The only conceivable “Great German” parallels to “Degenerate Art’s” images of Christ are the portraits there of Nazism’s central object of devotion: when the “sullied” images of Christ are “cleansed” in the House of German Art, they turn out to look like Hitler. The ten portraits and busts of Hitler that grace the “Great German Art Exhibition” furnish its parallel to “Degenerate Art’s” preoccupation with images of Christ and the New Testament.44 These images of Hitler correspond to, even necessitate, the “Degenerate Art” exhibition’s preoccupation with sacred experience and authority and the proper attitude toward that authority. The Nazi investment in the symbolism of Christianity in “Degenerate Art” follows from the way the Nazis stage political power and, in particular, how they produce the Führerkult. Sacred symbolism is important to Nazism in a way that Christianity is not. The hypothesis of a relationship between the exhibition of images of Hitler and those of Christ helps account for many peculiarities in “Degenerate Art’s” presentation of religion. Whereas most of the “Degenerate Art” wall texts that describe trampled images of “what is holy to decent Germans” name icons—“German Heroes,” “German Woman Ideal,” “German Farmers”—Nazi references to New Testament images avoid referring to the

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(non-German) “Christ,” “Apostles,” and so on. The Nazis’ references are instead to the quality of iconicity or symbolism itself, upon which a “degenerate” outrage has been perpetrated. Thus Ziegler refers in his speech to Christian symbols (“so-called artworks that ridiculed Christian symbols in a nonrepresentational manner”) but does not say just which symbols are besmirched. Similarly, in the exhibition catalogue one finds comments such as, “Any person of normal sensibilities . . . whatever his own religious allegiance . . . can only regard [these paintings] as a shameless mockery of any religious idea.” 45 Whatever his allegiance, any religious idea: these are oddly ecumenical turns for a party that usually celebrates “fanatical” devotion to sacred tasks like art, politics, and war. On the same pages, the “degenerate” religious paintings are described as “figures of Christian legend.” 46 Predictably enough, the catalogue contrasts these purported mockeries with the absence of “Jewish Old Testament legends.” More surprising is that the Christian images are not described as taken from Scripture or Holy Writ but legend— as if the texts were simply a source of traditions and myths and did not have the status, for Christians, of divine revelation: “This is our oldest and most revered tale,” not “This is the Word of the Lord.” The language of the wall text in the “religion room”—“Under the Catholic Center’s rule, impudent mockery of the God-experience”—echoes Ziegler, but with a twist that most glaringly discloses the ambiguous role of Christian symbolism in this exhibition and its strange fit with the Nazi sacralization of politics. The German compound word that I have translated as “the God-experience” is a neologism, Gotterleben. Ordinarily if one were to speak of a divine experience in German, one would employ the term Gotteserlebnis: experience (Erlebnis) of God (Gottes, the genitive form of Gott). It is a term that suggests a temporally circumscribed event that happens to one: the apprehension, mediated by the genitive case, of God, in whatever manifestation He chooses to appear. Erleben, on the other hand, is a rarely used noun form of a verb that means experience. Erleben compounds are scarce, though they are somewhat less so in Nazi German: the painter Wolfgang Willrich, for one, whose antimodernist tirade Cleansing of the Art Temple served as a blueprint for much of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, employs them with alacrity, especially when referring to another sacred experience, that of art, which he frequently calls Kunsterleben.47 Whereas an Erlebnis is of the moment, an Erleben implies a form of experiencing with

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mystical connotations more likely to emerge from an attitude of sustained devotion. Grammatically Gotterleben also suggests a direct relation, God experienced without mediation (note the absence of the genitive). Hence my rendering: “God-experience.” An awkward translation, but all the more accurate for that awkwardness. The best place to start looking for a parallel to this notion of Gotterleben in the exhibition of “Great German Art” is in a picture by Hermann Otto Hoyer that shows a young Adolf Hitler addressing an assembly in a small, dark room. Hoyer depicts the direct experience of Hitler’s presence as enjoyed by devoted party disciples, who mingle about him in the party meeting room unobstructed by crowds, platforms, technology, or SS guards. Why should we see this image as sacralizing? Hoyer calls the scene In the Beginning Was the Word. The bombastic, allegorical title is typical of Nazisanctioned works in its inflated claims for the significance of its image. Hoyer refers to the beginnings of National Socialism in language quite recognizably borrowed from the Christian Scriptures’ Gospel of John. A wall text like “Degenerate Art’s” “Under the Catholic Center’s rule, impudent mockery of God-experience” translates religion into the language of politics; here— and, by extension, in all of the images of Hitler in the Nazi Art Temple—this relationship is inverted, and politics is transposed into the language of the Christian sacred. Hoyer’s image is representative of the notion of unmediated, holy experience embodied in the Hitler myth. The importance of messianic imagery for Nazi myths of national rebirth (palingenesis) quickly becomes apparent upon even the most cursory examination of Nazi propaganda. In the opening scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, for example, as film scholars from Erwin Leiser on have remarked, Hitler is shown to descend, Messiah-like, to earth from the heavens.48 Films like Riefenstahl’s, mass party rallies, and radio broadcasts provided a sense of immediacy, a sense of direct access to Hitler, even though Hitler’s presence was always, quite literally, mediated, channeled through various media: an Erlebnis presented as an Erleben. As Hitler himself put it at the 1936 Nuremberg Party Rally: “Not all of you can see me, and I cannot see all of you. But I feel you, and you feel me!” 49 At stake in the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition, then, is not Christ as icon but the aura of Christ’s image. The Nazis’ construction in “Degen-

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erate Art” of “mocking” images of Christ almost literally mirrors—reflects and inverts—the utopian, messianic project of National Socialist propaganda. The Nazis’ linguistic vagueness in their defense of Christianity reflects their shuttling between the appeal to entrenched Christian tradition as a repository of sacred icons and populist sentiment and their ideological antipathy to actual Christian belief and institutions. Like the aura of the work of art (which Walter Benjamin derives from the ritual value of objects), religious aura is invoked nostalgically under National Socialism as part of its “conservative revolution” to serve the legitimation of something new: the palingenesis of the German nation under fascist dictatorship.50 New Testament images in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition point us simultaneously toward the instrumentalization of Christian motifs and sentiments for Nazi political purposes (typically through the Nazis’ unveiling of “mockeries”) and the use of Christian motifs and imagery in the display of Hitler himself as a politician who transcends politics. National Socialism’s aestheticization of politics revolves around the experience of Hitler’s charismatic presence: the sacralization of his body and his voice. No wonder, then, that the experience of Hitler, a virtual Hitlererleben, is the Nazis’ “decent” substitute for the so-called impudent mockery of the Gotterleben and that, conversely, among all of the images of “what is holy to decent Germans,” the image of Hitler is the only image that cannot be seen to be trodden into the dirt, the one truly taboo image in an array of purported transgressions. “Degenerate Art” is conceived as a historical exhibition that presents the arts of the past as Judaized and that presents the German people as victims of the Jews insofar as their museums had become occupied by such art: their money spent on these works, their perceptions and interpretations distorted and confused by the discourses that explain and legitimize them as art. The “Degenerate Art” exhibition is predominantly structured by its contrast with the exhibition in the House of German Art, the “Great German Art Exhibition,” which in turn pivots on the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Insofar as what is ultimately at stake in those oppositions is the Christological sacralization of Hitler’s cultural and political authority, the figure of the Jew is important to Nazi aesthetics not only as a racial antitype but as a theological enemy, a heretical figure who refuses to recognize that sacred authority.

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Taking Dada Seriously “Degenerate Art” is, as we have seen, presented as “the arts of those days.” Arts, plural. Different kinds of art present different kinds of problem to the Nazis, and they are construed as insulting decent German people in different ways. Dada occupies a special place in the Nazi imaginary in general and in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in particular. Unlike Expressionism, it was never a candidate for a National Socialist revolutionary art. It is, rather, peculiarly symptomatic for the Nazis of what has gone wrong in modern culture. If the construction of “degenerate Christs” shows the complexity of the Nazi investment in the sacralization of political authority, Dada reveals the crisis brought on by the exposure of the performative nature of all political authority, its dependence on convincing others as a matter of faith and belief that one is, say, the redeemer of the race, at just the time when art too became, not least through Dada itself, a matter of performativity, of having the audacity (and symbolic capital) successfully to declare that a urinal, a snow shovel, or material from the trash was in fact art. More than any other artistic movement, it is Dada that embodies what the Nazis understand as art-bolshevism, the cultural anarchy that fosters political anarchy. The historical element of the National Socialists’ concept of “degenerate art” is at odds with their reified racial ideology (think of the exhibition that followed the parallel art exhibitions in Munich: “Der ewige Jude,” usually translated as the Wandering Jew but literally the eternal Jew). Sander Gilman slots “degenerate art” into the paradigm Hegel erected in the mid-nineteenth century. Just as Hegel excludes Africa from history, so too, says Gilman, do the Nazis exclude the Jews and other so-called degenerates from history by racializing and “eternalizing” them.51 Yet as we have seen, degenerate art strikes the Nazis as a peculiarly modern, even twentieth-century, problem. Goebbels’s mandate dates the beginning of Verfallskunst (art of decline) to 1910. In Mein Kampf Hitler goes back ten years earlier: No more than a political collapse of the present magnitude would have been conceivable sixty years ago was a cultural collapse such as began to manifest itself in futurist and cubist works since 1900 thinkable. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic “experiences” [Erlebnissen] would have seemed

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simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state looked calmly on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders [Denn es ist eine Sache der Staatsleitung], to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness.52

The concept of cultural collapse is essential to Hitler’s account of the past, because without it the rebirth crucial to the temporality of fascist palingenesis cannot occur: no fire, no phoenix. What concerns Hitler here is, again, not the representation of a particular physical type but a certain relation to authority and how that relationship structures a certain kind of experience (Dada, of course, does not provide an Erleben, but multiple Erlebnisse). Hitler assumes that modernist art is insane, but more upsetting for him is the problem of why and how it comes to be regarded as legitimate, why the members of the avant-garde are placed at the head of art associations instead of inside mental institutions. That decision, for Hitler, is “eine Sache der Staatsleitung” (an issue of state leadership). Dada exhibitions take place only because those with power permit them to occur. A Dadaist as president of an art association. It’s a perfect illustration of both the distance and proximity between Hitler and Dada. In his “Memoirs of Dadaism” Tristan Tzara remarks: It is well known that the Dadaist Movement has three hundred and ninety-one presidents and that anyone can become a president without the slightest trouble . . . Soupault proclaimed [to people protesting Dada]: “You are all idiots! You deserve to be presidents of the Dadaist Movement!” . . . Baader, who is head of the Dadaist religion . . . calls himself the president of the world.53

Authority is nowhere because it is everywhere. Dada reserves a special scorn for office, leadership, and authority: presidency entails all three and so becomes the frequent object of Dada ridicule. Notice that the mockery of office is channeled through Dada: they laugh at “presidency” by laughing at themselves. Hitler’s notion that Dadaists now head “art associations” seems so blind to the nature of Dada as to be comical, a projection of all that he reveres onto all that he despises, fears, and fails to understand. But

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it is also, in a certain sense, a perfectly appropriate response. If we assume that Nazi ideology is at all responsive to critique, then it is no accident that Hitler’s fantasy involves Dadaists in positions of authority, because Dada so relentlessly mocks and desacralizes precisely what, as we have just seen, the Nazis hold most sacred in the person of Hitler, and indeed it does so to foment the forms of anarchy that the Nazis identify with art-bolshevism. Yet even more seems to be at stake for the Nazis in Dada in the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition itself. In the large third room of the exhibition appears a prominent display commonly referred to as the “Dada Wall.” It is one of the more revealing sites in the entire exhibition. For one thing, we see that the Nazi understanding of what belongs on such a wall is rather flexible: a rough imitation of an Expressionist oil painting, Kandinsky’s Black Spot, appears as a background mural. This is striking not only because Kandinsky was never a Dadaist but also because nowhere else in the show is

Figure 4. Third room of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. “Nehmen Sie Dada ernst! Es lohnt sich” (Take Dada seriously! it’s worth it”).

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a painting by a modernist actively mimicked. Avant-garde slogans are reproduced everywhere, but here someone has taken a brush and actively sought to reproduce the handiwork of an artist deemed degenerate. Also of interest are the quotations stuck next to Kurt Schwitters’s collages, one a quote from Schwitters’s own writings in which he praises nonsense over sense, the other an excerpt from a review praising Schwitters’s discovery of “previously unknown color harmonies” in “Mülleimermaterial” (“Stuff from the Garbage Can”). It is hard to escape the sense that here, as in the juxtapositions of the works of modernists with those of the insane, the Nazis are less preoccupied with racial archetypes than with the sources and nature of artistic value. The Dada Wall manifests the Nazis’ concern with art that is the product of the wrong sort of labor, that is fashioned from the wrong kinds of materials, and that expresses the wrong forms of subjectivity. Across the top of the Dada wall stretches a slogan attributed to one “George Groß” (George Grosz had been born as Georg Ehrenfried Gross and changed his name as an antinationalist, antiwar protest): “Nehmen Sie Dada ernst! es lohnt sich” (“Take Dada seriously! it’s worth it”). What does this mean in the context of the exhibition? Several writers have suggested that the Nazis’ quotations are all displayed “out of context” or “with hostile intent” and are therefore themselves not to be taken seriously.54 But what is the proper context for Dada, and what does it mean to take Dadaist words out of context? Setting rules about the proper and improper uses of Dada has always struck me as ludicrous. For one thing, quotation is always a matter of decontextualization, always requires one to use a sample text to represent an idea, so decontextualization in itself can’t be the problem. As Derrida famously points out in “Signature, Event, Context,” it’s in the nature of all writing to be iterated in new contexts.55 Moreover, the collage techniques that Dada appropriates from Cubism draw attention to this fact some two decades before the Nazis do the same thing to Dada itself. Dada is defined by its defiance and subversion of the notion of proper contexts and of propriety in general. Intuitively, then, it’s hard not to think that however much defenders of the historical avant-garde may not wish to see Dada used against Dada, appeals to contextual propriety will not help. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk tells us that “Dada turns against art as a technique of bestowing meaning. Dada is antisemantics . . . Dadaism

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systematically disrupts—not metaphysics but the talk about it.”56 So when Gross— or Grosz— says “Take Dada seriously! it’s worth it,” on Sloterdijk’s account we have to resist the impulse to make the slogan mean anything: to take Dada seriously means not to take it seriously, means to see that Dada refuses meaning, even the meaning of Dada. Consequently, the protest against removing a slogan like this one from its presumed context is a cry against forcing this statement to mean something, forcing it to bear the weight of “standing for” Dada. The Nazis, we would say, just don’t get the joke, don’t see the humor in the self-contradictory idea of taking Dada seriously, precisely because they do take Dada seriously. They think Dada means something. They know that the Dadaists pull pranks, have “experiences,” use things from the garbage to make pictures, and then, of all things, ask to be taken seriously, ask to have their works displayed in museums, their leaders appointed to head art associations! Still, one wonders. In Cleansing of the Art Temple, the antimodernist screed that was also the sourcebook for the “Degenerate Art” exhibition’s wall texts, Wolfgang Willrich turns out to do more than a bit of deceptive cutting and pasting when he puts a quote together, omitting a word here, altering a word there. Does that change things? And what if the original context of a statement does make a significant difference to how we understand it? As it happens, the original context of the quote attributed to “Gross” is revealing, although not in the way that the art historian defenders of Dada might have imagined. The earliest location for the slogan that I have found is in a photograph of the First (and only) Dada International Fair, held in Berlin in July 1920. That photograph reveals that the Nazis gave the line more context than it had in 1920. The Nazis attribute the slogan to a particular author, “George Gross”; in Berlin it remains unattributed, one slogan among several, including “Dilettantes! rise up against art!” and “Dada is political.” And we learn that the Nazis rewrite the line, by moving the exclamation mark. In Berlin in 1920 that exclamation mark comes at the end (“Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!”); in Munich in 1937 it is shifted to the middle (“Take Dada seriously! It’s worth it”). Where the Nazis’ Munich Dada Wall mocks the Expressionist Kandinsky, the Berlin Fair contains nothing by him. Nor is there anything by the Hannover-based Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was uncomfortable

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Figure 5. Opening of the First International Dada Fair in the bookstore of Dr. Otto Burchard in Berlin, July 5, 1920. Standing (left to right): Raoul Hausmann, Otto Burchard, Johannes Baader, Wieland and Margarete Herzfelde, George Grosz, John Heartfield. Seated: Hannah Hoch and Otto Schmalhausen.

with the revolutionary inclinations of the Berlin Dadaists, who in turn found Schwitters’s politics bourgeois, and relations between them were always strained. Grosz’s politics, however, were radical: he was among several Berlin Dadaists, including his friend the photocollagist John Heartfield, who joined the German Communist Party on New Year’s Eve 1918 and received their membership cards from Rosa Luxembourg herself. There are traces of this political tendency of Berlin Dada in the International Fair. Whereas in “Degenerate Art” the Dada slogan sits above an imitation of abstract art—the fake Kandinsky—in the fair what we see below the exhortation to “Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!” is Otto Dix’s 1920 painting War Cripples, a controversial protest against a catastrophic war and a painting that itself ended up in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.

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Yet both Dix and Grosz have more ambiguous links with Dadaism than their presence at the Dada Fair might suggest. In the 1920s both were more strongly identified with the more realistically inclined artistic movement New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). In other words, the absence of Schwitters and the presence of Grosz and Dix suggest that even within the International Dada Fair, it’s not clear what does and does not belong to it. And perhaps this is another part of the provocation of Dada for the Nazis: membership, just what and who belongs to Dada, is difficult to determine. These same considerations should also make us wary of presuming too much about the proper context in which to read a hostile iteration of Berlin Dada. If we assume for a moment that the slogan “Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!” can in fact be attributed to George Grosz, then it no longer makes sense to read it in the terms proposed by Sloterdijk, as an antisemantic antistatement. A more compelling context is provided by turning to an essay that Grosz coauthored with John Heartfield in 1920, the year of the Dada International Fair. “The Art Scab” responds to a public request made by the painter and art professor Oskar Kokoschka after a Rubens painting had been damaged by a bullet during the Kapp Putsch. Horrified, Kokoschka made a general plea to the combatants to remove their fighting from the proximity of the Dresden gallery in the interests of preserving other such threatened “works of human culture.”57 Grosz and Heartfield proclaimed: With joy we welcome the news that the bullets are whistling through the galleries and palaces, into the masterpieces of Rubens, instead of into the houses of the poor in the working-class neighborhoods! . . . We welcome it if the open struggle between capital and labor takes place in the domain of this disgraceful culture and art, which consistently served to suppress the poor while edifying the bourgeois on Sunday, so that on Monday he could all the more calmly resume . . . his exploitation!58

Here, then, is a less antisemantic, more decipherable position on art and meaning than the one Sloterdijk represents as Dadaist. The language of “The Art Scab” suggests that Grosz and Heartfield’s Dadaism springs from a political impulse: Dada as “antiart,” as a critique of what Peter Bürger calls “the art institution,” a critique, in particular, of high culture’s complicity in the exploitation of labor and its pathetic indifference to the violent political

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crises that shook Germany in the wake of the First World War. If we interpret the sentence, “Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!” using the rhetoric of “The Art Scab” and some knowledge of Grosz’s politics as our “original context,” then to take Dada seriously begins to imply something less like an avant-garde spin on the liar’s paradox and more like a political spin on the brief history of the avant-garde. In other words, to take Dada seriously would mean to take seriously the critique of bourgeois cultural institutions, to rise up and smash them—Rubens, Kokoschka, the lot. And why the words “it’s worth it”? Quite simply because it’s worth stopping the bourgeois exploitation of the wage laborer. Seen in this politically charged context, attributed to an artist with revolutionary inclinations, “Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!” seems less like a self-consuming artifact and more like a densely coded kind of propaganda. I suggested earlier that for conceptual and art-historical reasons it might be legitimate to take the phrase “Take Dada seriously, it’s worth it!” out of context because Dada is itself predicated on collage and radical recontextualization. But it may also be worth doing so because what it means for Dada to be “in context” is far from self-evident. It’s clear that Dada is a movement of many contexts, a movement with members committed to differing political agendas and with differing conceptions of Dada itself. We do neither Dadaism nor Grosz himself much justice by pretending they can only be understood within the autonomous sphere of avant-garde art and the special antisemantic demands attached to its vocabulary. Nor do we do them justice by pretending they have nothing to do with ideology and its propagation. Similarly, there is more to be said about the Nazis’ use of the Dada slogan than that they just don’t get it. I initially proposed a reading in which the Nazis interpreted the sentence as a literal and dishonest demand: Gross wants you to take Dada seriously, even if that means seeing garbage (say, Schwitters’s Mülleimermaterial) as art. But, of course, even presenting that sentence to the public demands a level of irony: since the Nazis are condemning Dada and “Gross,” there’s going to be a way in which they think it’s ridiculous to take Dada seriously in the way the Dadaists demand. So even when the slogan is read “naïvely,” the performative context of the quotation contradicts its literal meaning and still allows the Nazis to exhort their audience not to take Dada seriously.

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But that same context points us toward a second level of irony. For if the Nazi rhetoric of a “Degenerate Art” exhibition, a counter to the “Great German Art Exhibition,” suggests that Dada is on display to be ridiculed and dismissed, not to be taken seriously at all, the Nazis’ attention to Dada suggests quite the reverse. Recall the size and scale of the exhibition itself, not to mention the Nazis’ imitation of Dadaist methods and techniques of presentation. While these methods and concerns are not restricted to Dada alone, the points of resemblance between the curation of the First Dada International Fair and that of the Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” in all their clutter and jumble, their mixtures of image, sculpture, and text, are particularly suggestive given that the Dada International Fair is explicitly cited in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition itself. Think too, of the Nazis’ need to exhibit these works one last time before eliminating them from the Nazi body politic rather than simply selling or destroying them immediately. The scope of the investment in displaying and publicizing “Degenerate Art” demonstrates that the Nazis take heed of the slogan in question and take Dada— and modernist art in general—very seriously: they do think it’s worth it. And, like the utterer of the slogan, they transform that seriousness into a demand that others take it seriously too, by transposing that slogan into a propaganda exercise that takes the form of a Dadaist installation. Perhaps nowhere more than in relation to Dada does the apparently diametric opposition between Nazism and modernism and the avant-garde begin to come undone. The exhibition, both in its curation and in its content, displays a strange kind of pleasure in the artistic freedom embodied by modernist and avant-garde techniques. It thus suggests something akin to Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of the antisemite: one is allowed to indulge the outlawed drive if acting with the unquestionable aim of expunging it. . . . Anyone who sniffs out “bad” smells in order to extirpate them may imitate to his heart’s content the snuffl ing which takes its unrationalized pleasure in the smell itself. . . . 59

But if Dada presents a particular kind of crisis and temptation for Nazism, the Nazi display of Dada in “Degenerate Art” also represents a kind of crisis for Dada, or, better, a crisis in our understanding of what we mean by Dada. If we dismiss the presentation of Dada in the “Degenerate Art” exhi-

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bition as decontextualized or philistine, then we ignore the fact that the Nazi exhibition renews for Dada questions that Dada once raised for itself and for the rest of art: how seriously to take it, what its value or worth is, how it conceives of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. If we say that Nazism’s appropriation of Dadaist techniques, its turning Dada against itself, does not belong in the sphere of things we think of as Dada, we ignore one of Dada’s most shocking and effective uses. We ignore the fact that with the Dada wall the Nazis do not simply take art and turn it into propaganda but take art that was already promoting a specific kind of belief, a certain kind of politics, and try to turn it to other ends. When Walter Benjamin celebrates Dada’s power to destroy aura through decontextualization, and the destruction of aura as something that will enable the development of concepts “completely useless for the purposes of fascism,” he is, I think, mistaken, but in a most instructive way.60 What leads him into error is the drive for conceptual purity, the fantasy that artistic techniques or concepts could inherently be “completely useless for the purposes of fascism” and, more broadly, the notion that things can be shielded from political appropriation by insisting upon where they do and don’t belong. Instead of wishing that these matters—Dada, the Nazis, propaganda and art, aesthetics and politics—would stay in their places, we need to see what we can learn from the fact that they don’t.

Limits: Heartfield The disputes about Expressionism within Nazism, the relentlessly materializing manner of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition’s curation (in which the works are presented as overpriced commodities), and the ultimate expulsion (some through destruction but largely through auction) of these artworks from the German public sphere like so much dirt, or, following Mary Douglas, “matter out of place” 61— all of this points to the “Degenerate Art” exhibition as an attempt to construct modernist art as abject, as analogous to that part of the self which must be expelled for it to (continue to) be constituted as “clean and proper” and the return of which threatens it with psychotic dissolution.62 At the same time, these sources of abjection are artworks that the Nazis managed to integrate into their propaganda. Popular

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interest in the exhibition leads to its run in Munich being extended. Whatever danger the Nazis attributed to “degenerate” artworks, it was clearly a danger they thought their display could contain. If “Degenerate Art” mimics certain aspects of Dada so closely as to raise the possibility that we might regard the exhibition as itself a kind of Dadaism, it is also Dada or, better, the work of one Dadaist in particular whose absence from the “Degenerate Art” exhibition most precisely reveals its limits. I refer to Grosz’s collaborator on “The Art Scab,” John Heartfield. The Dadaist, communist, and photocollagist’s name appears only once in the exhibition: as the “comonteur” (with Grosz) of the April 1920 cover of Der Dada Nr 3. Heartfield’s photomontages of the late 1920s and early 1930s were familiar to the Nazi cultural establishment, and Heartfield himself was well known enough as part of the group of artists and writers—including both Grosz and Heartfield’s brother, the writer and publisher Wieland Herzfelde (Heartfield, like Grosz, changed his name to protest the Great War)—who came under concerted attack in “Degenerate Art” to warrant, on the face of it, extensive inclusion in the exhibition. Indeed, it is harder to think of anyone, including Bertolt Brecht, who would have been more inclined to accept the label of art-bolshevist as a badge of honor. In one sense, the reason for the absence of his work is obvious: Heartfield’s photomontages directly mocked not the Gotterleben but the Hitlererleben: they showed Hitler extending his hand in the Nazi salute to receive money from big business, or swallowing gold; they showed Goering wielding an axe. There is no room for such satire even in a Nazi exhibition devoted to the display of ostensibly Judaized and Bolshevik art objects. Yet appealing to a taboo on negative images of Hitler does not explain why Heartfield’s other works, those less directly offensive to the Führerprinzip and lacking the faces of any party members at all, are also missing from the exhibition. There are structural reasons for this absence: inclusion of his work in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition would have demanded changing its central targets from the Weimar art world and German museums to the communist press. In contrast to the “degenerate” artworks, Heartfield’s photomontages for The Club, The Red Flag, and the Workers’ Illustrated News (AIZ) were not readily susceptible to the anti-institutional mode of attack. They

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Figure 6. John Heartfield, photomontage. “The meaning of the Hitler salute: Little man asks for big gifts. Motto: Millions stand behind me!” Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung 11, no. 42 (October 16, 1932). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

were not purchased through taxes. Texts from aesthetically and politically oriented journals appear, but very few visual images from the press. Magazines and newspapers lie outside the domain from which the Nazis could strip institutional aura: they belong to the world of mechanical reproducibility. More importantly, there are no artistic photographs in either “Degenerate Art” or “Great German Art.” Photographs depicting “degenerate” works and artists are displayed (as in the case of the Gies sculpture), but these photographs document the condition of art bolshevism rather than serving as examples of it. To understand the compelling formal reason for Heartfield’s absence we need, I think, to return to Schultze-Naumburg and the dozen pages of Art and Race where he juxtaposes modernist paintings and deformed bodies. Those pages provide a remarkable example of what we might call fascist photomontage, a demonstration of how a profoundly racist,

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reactionary aesthetics could put to work the latest technology. 1928, the year of Art and Race’s first publication, is also the year of Paul Valéry’s “La conquete de l’ubiquité,” which discussed emergent techniques for the reproduction of artworks and which eight years later provided the epigraph to Benjamin’s essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” It is also the time of Siegfried Kracauer’s “On Photography” (1927) and of the exploration of the photographic image in Surrealism in  general and André Breton’s Nadja (1928) in particular. For SchultzeNaumburg, of course, there is no emancipation to be found in the Surrealist visual exploration of chance and the unconscious, but there is a certain value in those very capacities of technological reproducibility that Benjamin described as immune to the purposes of fascism, namely, the stripping of aura from the artwork. Schultze-Naumburg strips aura, of course, not in the name of socialist emancipation but medicalization. His images establish an equivalence between modern art and pathologized bodies and invite speculation about their causal relations. (For Schultze-Naumburg the arrow points from modernism to physical monstrosity: he believes that modernist artistic images could promote and elicit degenerate body types). If we accept that despite their absence from the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition itself, Schultze-Naumburg’s methods, promulgated by members of the Fighting League for German Culture in countless pamphlets, magazines, books, newspapers, and lectures, nevertheless provide a crucial framework for understanding how the Nazis wished degenerate artworks to be perceived, then we might argue that the Nazis’ curation of this exhibition must exclude works that themselves are constructed by and draw attention to the manipulation of photographic images. That, of course, is precisely what Heartfield does. Heartfield’s photomontages are specifically designed for mechanical reproduction, intended to appear on walls next to other political posters and in newsstands next to other publications. Even when his photomontages were exhibited for their own sake, as works of art, Heartfield insisted that copies of the publications they appeared in be put on show beside the “original” photomontage, to remind viewers of the ease with which each image could be and had been repeatedly reproduced, even as they could see for themselves each instance of cutting and pasting that went into the original’s construction.63 The “Degenerate Art” exhibition,

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itself a propaganda exercise, interprets much of modernist art as political propaganda, but it rests on the gesture of unmasking it as such. Art, like Heartfield’s, that makes no secret of its identity as political propaganda cannot be unmasked in the same way. There is, needless to say, something unsatisfying about the assumption that the Nazis would not want to contradict themselves, would not want to criticize someone for doing what they themselves do. They seem most likely not to care about ideological coherence so long as the contradiction remains unstated and so long as the symbolic foundation of Nazi power, the Führerprinzip, remains untouched. But that is precisely what Heartfield’s photomontages do, namely, put Hitler in contact with just those things that his distance from and purported ignorance of help in defi ning his identity as “clean and proper,” as beyond politics: calculated political deals, money and business, blood and corpses.

Conclusion Heartfield’s work, then, constitutes for the Nazis a kind of second-order abject, that order of representation that they ban and expel but cannot publicly disavow, an abject that cannot be contained by propaganda exhibitions. The absence of Heartfield’s photomontages from the “Degenerate Art” exhibition shows us the difference between a site of interpretive disagreement that can be exhibited and one that cannot. It also calls into question the idea that the art the Nazis did exhibit as degenerate constituted as direct a threat to either their self-understanding or their representational codes as we might like to believe. This thought brings us, in conclusion, to the question of the exhibition’s success. For most commentators, success for “Degenerate Art” would mean that the Nazis convinced their public to fi nd modernist and avantgarde art degenerate and to consent to its removal from the public sphere. There is no way to know what the public thought: no comprehensive surveys were taken, and, even if they had been, their value in a state that ruled by terror would be minimal. Certainly there were those, such as the diarist Franz Göll, who left the exhibition more positively disposed toward modernism than when they had arrived. Of Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (The

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War) Göll wrote, “the picture is not a bloody-minded depiction of the degenerate, war is.” 64 But to think that what mattered to the Nazis in “Degenerate Art” was to sway popular opinion about modernist and avant-garde art is to misrecognize its purpose. Those opinions were already irrelevant: the decision to remove this art from the public sphere had already been made. What mattered was the public’s participation in and assent to a certain kind of political spectacle of which they were both the subjects and objects. Goebbels saw “Degenerate Art’s” gargantuan visitor statistics as in themselves proof of the exhibition’s success. If we understand the “Degenerate Art” exhibition as a political event on a par with Nazi party rallies and festivals, then we can infer that more important for the Nazis than the sight of the artworks on display inside the exhibition itself is the spectacle made by the constant stream of visitors that crowd through it, witnessing themselves as horrified “decent Germans,” deceived “German working Volk” subject to the foul abuse embodied by modernist and avant-garde art. It is here that the exhibition becomes truly thanatopolitical. From this perspective, the most important words in the exhibition are those that appear on the last station of the journey the exhibition’s visitors took, on the north wall above the vitrines on the second ground floor. These words are repeated in the exhibition guide itself: “We would rather exist unclean than perish clean; we leave it to stubborn individualists and old maids to be inept but decent [anständig], reputation is not our worry.” 65 They are attributed to John Heartfield’s brother, Wielande Herzfelde, who wrote them at the beginning of the 1920s. They appeared in the “Letters” page of a leftist journal he edited, Der Gegner (The Opponent), in the course of a discussion about whether the journal should contain advertising.66 In Munich in 1937, they have a different meaning. Recall how Adolf Ziegler declared the “Degenerate Art” exhibition open: “All in all one can say, what is holy to a decent German [anständigen Deutschen] is necessarily trampled into the dirt here.” 67 He almost seems to have had Herzfelde’s words in mind. Recall also the “Degenerate Art” exhibition guide’s expression of completely italicized, barely controlled outrage: “We can only choke back our fury that so decent [anständig] a people as the Germans could ever have been so foully abused.” By concluding the exhibition with Herzfelde’s remark, the Nazis announce just what the decent German is expected to

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consent to in accepting the purported benefits of the National Socialist revolution. Exist unclean, or perish cleanly? The project of “Degenerate Art” is, in short, to teach the Germans to accept that the price of emancipation from the purportedly foul abjection of modernist art will be their own destruction.

T h r e e

Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on the earth or under the earth, etc. The commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people in its civilized era felt for their religion, when they compared themselves with other peoples, or explain the pride which Mohammedanism inspires. Immanuel K ant, The Critique of Judgment [1790]1 Abstraction swayed the minds of the Mahometans. Their object was, to establish an abstract worship, and they struggled for its accomplishment with the greatest enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was Fanaticism, that is, an enthusiasm for something abstract—for an abstract thought which sustains a negative position towards the established order of things. It is the essence of fanaticism to bear only a desolating destructive relation to the concrete. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History [1837]2 Many painters, indeed, have no repugnance, it would appear, for the surging ecstatic featureless chaos which is being set up as an ideal, in place of the noble exactitude and harmonious proportion of the eu ropean, scientific, ideal—the specifically Western heaven. . . . I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek, to that hot, tawny brand of superlative fanat icism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness. I am for the physical world. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man [1927]3

It is hard to read the painter and novelist Wyndham Lewis’s 1927 magnum opus, Time and Western Man, without thinking of Richard Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism in Music.” To be sure, while “Judaism in Music” troubles even Wagner’s most committed defenders, Lewis, a central figure in the 90

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early history of British modernism, particularly as the editor (and main author and visual artist) of the Vorticist avant-garde journal Blast, has been lauded for producing in Time and Western Man “one of the dozen or so most important books of the twentieth century” (Hugh Kenner), an “immense and prophetic book” (Fredric Jameson), “one of the key works of Modernism. . . . one of the great books of the twentieth century” (Paul Edwards).4 Yet the echoes are striking. Like Wagner, Lewis presents a modernist critique of modernism. “To create new beauty, and to supply a new material, is the obvious affair of art of any kind to-day,”5 Lewis writes, and then he attacks Joyce, Stein, Proust, Pound, Picasso, and Diaghilev (among others) for failing in just this task, for claiming to present the new, the revolutionary, only to “nourish” their art and ideas upon the dead materials and dead matter of “the Past.” 6 The metaphor of nourishment cannot but recall Wagner’s image of Jewish musicians as worms feeding upon the corpse of German music. The correspondences between Wagner’s account of Jewish composers and Lewis’s description of his erstwhile friend James Joyce are still more arresting. Lewis describes Joyce as a craftsman interested in how but not what, in ways of doing things but not what he’s doing, without ideas of his own, incapable of grasping the “secret of an entire organism,” attuned only to isolated details but otherwise given to the reassembling and rearranging of received ideas and clichés, of the dead matter, the excrement, of the past. Like Wagner’s Jews, Lewis’s Joyce is a mimic, his talents predominantly “imitative,” Ulysses an orgy of sedulous “apeishness,” suffering from Joyce’s “inability to observe directly, a habit of always looking at people through other people’s eyes and not through his own,” so that “the secret of an entire organism escapes him” and he can render only fragments, details, which brings him to “the mechanical and abstract, the opposite of the living.”7 But do these correspondences demonstrate that Lewis’s critique of modernism is—like Wagner’s— an antisemitic critique, in which he understands modernist form as somehow Jewish? It is the question of whether we should understand Lewis’s critique of modernism as somehow antisemitic rather than whether Lewis himself should be regarded as an antisemite that interests me in this chapter. Here we might note that Lewis’s critique of modernism in Time and Western Man also seems to anticipate certain preoccupations of the Nazis’ own critique of modernism in the exhibition “Degenerate Art.”8

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And Lewis is, of course, routinely held up alongside Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, Céline, Benn, and Hamsun as proof of the connection between literary modernism and reactionary politics. During the 1930s Lewis was an outspoken admirer of Nazism: his 1931 book Hitler offers a positive evaluation of its subject. His writings of that decade are rife with antisemitic images and asides. Yet Lewis’s interpretation of aesthetic modernism in Time and Western Man is not self-evidently antisemitic in the manner of “Judaism in Music” or “Degenerate Art.” Lewis does not announce that modern art has entered a Judaic period, does not mock Ulysses as showing Dublin “seen yiddishly.” And while those he regards as not merely representative of the forms of cultural and aesthetic modernism he critiques but actively responsible for it tend to be figures who could be identified as Jewish—Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein—Lewis himself does not directly name them as such, does not speak of “the Jewish phi losopher Bergson,” “the Jewish science of psychoanalysis,” or “Jewish physics.”9 The absence of such direct naming and denunciation does not, however, immediately settle the question of the role of antisemitism in Lewis’s cultural criticism. Much scholarly debate over antisemitism in Lewis has taken place around the question of encoding. David Ayers has argued that Lewis “heavily implies that there is a Jewish conspiracy against the West, but refuses actually to state that this is so” because of the gag of liberal morality, which Lewis in turn regards as part of said Jewish conspiracy.10 Paul Edwards, the world’s leading authority on Lewis, rejects Ayers’s interpretation—and others like it—as a projection that takes political advantage of Lewis’s “modernist techniques,” particularly the reliance on his readers’ ability to draw inferences. Edwards believes that with the passing of the original, restricted audiences to which Lewis addressed himself, modernist texts like Lewis’s are now forced by dogmatic critics to mean what they do not explicitly disown.11 Neither position is entirely satisfactory. Ayers’s argument relies heavily on the conventionally antisemitic connotations of certain crucial words in Lewis’s lexicon and on loaded juxtapositions of passages from Lewis with lines from Hitler and Rosenberg. But how much does Lewis’s lexicon prove? Ayers risks exposure to the charge of mistaking for antisemitism what is in

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fact misanthropy; it sometimes seems as if the way antisemites speak about Jews is simply the way Lewis speaks about everyone. It is perhaps for that reason that the English lawyer and literary critic Anthony Julius, usually an enthusiastic prosecutor of literary and historical antisemites, dismisses Lewis’s antisemitism as “essentially trivial.”12 Edwards’s defense of Lewis, on the other hand, both leaves him open to the charge of willful blindness to the historical resonance of Lewis’s words and requires him to set aside compelling evidence to the contrary (more on that shortly). And both scholars, for understandable reasons, are far more concerned with coming to a judgment of the life, opinions, and works of Wyndham Lewis than with bracketing such moral evaluations in order to think about how the antisemitic terms and references that do appear in Lewis’s work structure his interpretation of modernist form. As I will show, however, recognizing Lewis’s claims in Time and Western Man about the Jewish properties of modernism is not a matter of decoding the antisemitic meanings hidden within Lewis’s critical lexicon.13 It is, instead, a matter of paying close attention to what Lewis manifestly says about the ancient Jewish origins of political modernity and the ideological significance of modernist form. If Lewis does not, in the manner of Wagner or the Nazis, directly state that he regards modern art as Judaized, there are nevertheless a number of ways in which he indicates that the cultural and aesthetic modernism whose philosophical sources he locates in Bergson, Freud, and Einstein and whose literary roots he tracks to Stein and Proust is a Jewish modernism, and a Judaizing modernism, and that the modernism of Joyce, because it demonstrably manifests the influence of these Jewish figures and their stylistic signatures, is a Judaized modernism. Lewis holds that modern Western subjectivities and the form of the modernist work of art alike have become vessels for Jewish political and cultural tendencies. Jewish figures, ideas, and styles have, in his view, actively colonized and taken possession of European subjectivities, who passively absorb and mindlessly imitate them. In Hitler Lewis advises the Nazis that for English and American audiences one must “coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke! if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion.”14 Lewis may coo rather than shout what he has to say about modernism and the Jews, but he still finds a way to convey it. To see how he does so, we need to trace the way that Lewis absorbs and revises Nietzsche’s notion of “slave morality” in his

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1924 story “The Strange Actor,” which serves as a blueprint for Lewis’s subsequent cultural and political diatribes, and then attend to how the revised Nietzschean motifs of Lewis’s “The Strange Actor” are themselves once more reworked in Time and Western Man. Lewis’s example shows us (as will Céline’s) that far from being a distinctively German phenomenon, the myth of Judaization circulates throughout European modernism and that the antisemitic critique of modernist form is integral to a certain strand of high modernism itself. It also adds a new element to our picture of the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form: Lewis provides an elaborate account of how particular literary styles should be regarded as both symptoms and instruments of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit. He does so with obsessive attention to the sources and implications of Joyce’s style in par ticular and thus prepares us to consider how Joyce himself engages with and defi nes his own formal innovations against the modern antisemitic imagination. Before I make this argument, I should address one potentially fatal objection to it. In the same pages in which Lewis characterizes Joyce’s methods in terms that uncannily recapitulate Wagner’s “Judaism in Music,” he also manages to describe Ulysses as “a thousand pages of heterogeneous, peculiarly unjewish, matter.”15 Does this not trouble the theory that Lewis saw Joycean modernism as Jewish? Actually, no. The notion of “peculiarly unjewish” matter emerges in the context of Lewis’s discussion of how Joyce represents Bloom: There is no sign throughout the book that he has ever directly and intelligently observed any individual Jew. He has merely out of books and conversations collected facts, witticisms and generalizations about Jews, and wrapped up his own kindly person with these, till he has bloated himself into a thousand pages of heterogeneous, peculiarly unjewish, matter. So he has certainly contributed nothing to the literature of the Jew, for which task he is in any case quite unsuited. . . . Where a multitude of little details or some obvious idiosyncrasy are concerned, he may be said to be observant; but the secret of an entire organism escapes him.16

According to Lewis, then, there is such a thing as a “literature of the Jew” to which one can contribute, if one can intelligently observe and capture the secret of the Jew’s entire organism. Ulysses is “unjewish matter,” for Lewis,

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precisely because it fails in this task. Moreover, when Lewis exercises his own direct, intelligent powers of observation upon the “organism of the Jew,” he emphasizes precisely the mimetic qualities that he attributes to Joyce. Thus, to give only one example among several, when in his 1930 novel The Apes of God Lewis represents the character of the Jewish writer Julius Ratner (modeled on the writer and publisher John Rodker), he describes Ratner as: the eternal imitation-person in a word, whose ambition led him to burgle all the books of Western romance to steal their heroes’ expensive outfits for his musty shop—the split-man of another tale.17

David Ayers notes of this passage that it “is consonant with antisemitic convention.”18 But it is also, I think, consonant with Lewis’s account of a Joyce who has “merely out of books and conversations collected facts, witticisms and generalizations about Jews, and wrapped up his own kindly person with these.”19 Lewis’s notion of “unjewish matter” cannot, then, be said to settle the question of whether he regards aesthetic modernism as shaped by a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit; it can only make that question more acute. More specifically, it compels us to consider the formal features of the Judaized modernism Lewis critiques and the place of imitativeness in that critique. What is Lewis’s “time mind,” and what does it mean to think of it as Jewish? In Time and Western Man Lewis argues that cultural modernism’s glorification and hypostatization of time and historicity, flux and chaos, Bergsonian durée and Freudian unconscious leads to the dissolution of the subject as an individual agent, segmenting the self into disconnected oneday units bereft of either coherence or continuity. This process, he claims, gives rise to the compensatory attachments to national, class, and sexual identity and, in turn, to wars between nations, classes, and sexes, all while the fetishization of history as a kind of independent reality makes the subject a passive, fatalistic observer. As Fredric Jameson points out, Lewis’s argument is ultimately idealist.20 Lewis believes that what dissolves the subject is not capitalism but the philosophy of Henri Bergson.21 Yet Lewis also insists that the Bergsonian fetishization of time is fundamentally a political phenomenon, one that makes the subject ripe for mass mobilization and industrialized warfare. For Lewis, the claim of philosophers such as Bergson and Benedetto Croce that reality is “dynamical” means “the bustle

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and rush of action,— of Big Business, Armaments, Atlantic ‘hops,’ Wall Street and Mussolini.” As an image of a “dynamic personality” Lewis conjures: an iron-jawed oil-king in a eight-cylinder car, ripping along a new motor-road, with a hundred-million-dollar deal in a new line of poison-gas bombs blazing in his super-brain, his eye aflame with the lust of battle— of those battles in which others fight and die. So there is no need to explain what “dynamical” means.22

Lewis is concerned, then, with how the subject is dissolved by abstract social and economic processes that prepare it to be submerged into fantasmatic collective entities. His notion of the time mind permits him to refer to aspects of both capitalism and communism as manifestations of a still larger social and historical process. To grasp how this account of modernity might be underwritten by a certain antisemitic outlook, it is useful to recall the critical theorist Moishe Postone’s description of modern antisemitism as “a form of thought in which the rapid development of industrial capitalism, with all its social ramifications, is personified and identified as the Jew.”23 Arguing against figures such as Max Horkheimer, Postone emphasizes that the Jew is not solely identified with money and circulation but also with a range of social transformations— economic crises, the decline of traditional social classes, the emergence of an organized industrial proletariat—that for many on the political Right converged in the threat of communism. For the antisemite, says Postone, a critique of the realm of circulation, of money and finance, coexists with a fear of communism, since both are identified with the rapid development of industrial capitalism, and both are personified by the Jew. Postone’s work helps us grasp the coexistence of these concerns in Lewis. The Romantic anticapitalist distinctions between the organic and mechanical, the living and the dead, the productive and the parasitic that Postone sees as animating modern antisemitic ideas about capitalism (and that structure Wagner’s “Judaism in Music”) play an important role in Time and Western Man. In the book’s opening pages Lewis criticizes advertising as a symptom of “money culture” (recall Wagner’s assertion that his is a “moneyorientated society”) “born out of the competitive frenzy of finance”24: Advertisement has functioned in the social and artistic or learned world rather as the engineer has in the factory. It has taught the public— as the engineer

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taught the producer—that as Advertisement-value nothing is refuse or waste. Indeed, the garbage is often more valuable than the commodity from which it proceeds. But this value is a money-value essentially, and functions imperfectly in its social application.25

For Lewis, artistic value created from the materials of the past rather than from an engagement with the conditions of the present is fundamentally illegitimate. It is for this reason that Lewis labels Pound, his collaborator on Blast, an uncreative “parasite,” and it is why he compares Ulysses to “a monument like a record diarrhoea” and a “river of what now is rubbish, but which was not then . . .”26 The various claims to “revolution” associated with Mussolini, Darwin and Freud, feminism, the Russian Ballet, and communism Lewis decries as “returns merely to some former period of history. . . . there can be no object except a commercial one in advertising it as ‘new.’ ”27 At such moments one might imagine Lewis’s central charge against aesthetic modernism to be akin to Wagner’s against the modern art of his time, namely, a kind of artistic usury: the creation of present artistic exchangevalue out of the past creative labor of others. Indeed, Lewis’s belief in distinctions of this sort (between social and money value) would decisively affect the course of his life and the fate of his reputation. Even after the Second World War Lewis continued to explain and justify his attraction to Nazism as being attributable to the Nazis’ recognition of the difference between armaments manufacturers (for Lewis, “rich working men”) and finance capitalists (those who make money out of nothing but the need for money and the time that elapses between that need and the ability to repay).28 In the same book, however, he also separated the Nazis’ (for him) appealing social and economic policies and their antisemitism, which he describes as “idiotic.”29 While a certain antisemitic ideology might nevertheless underpin Lewis’s critique of finance capital and advertising (did he really not notice that the Nazis distinguished productive and parasitic capitalism in terms of race?), if we are to find overt signs of antisemitic thinking in his work, it is far more productive to consider his views about communism and the Russian Revolution. It is, of all people, Paul Edwards— as we’ve seen, a critic of those who read Lewis as antisemitic—who tells us that Lewis believed Lenin was a Jew by the name of Rosenbauer, that he regarded the Russian Revolution as

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Jewish, and that while Lewis was disabused of his ideas about Lenin by 1925, he continued to speak of the Russian Revolution as the work of Jews as late as 1936 and did not change his views on the matter until 1939.30 We also know that Lewis understood political, social, and aesthetic claims to revolution as part of the same philosophical tendency. There is no question that by the beginning of the 1930s he made no distinction between the transformations brought about by the Bolsheviks and those associated with Joyce and Stein. Hugh Kenner observes that by the time of The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (1931), Lewis regarded the modernism of Joyce and Stein and the avant-garde journal Transition alike as part of a “communizing frame of mind” that was served by the promotion of “the unconscious, the stream of consciousness, and the mongrelization of European languages.”31 Lewis declared: “Should Transition die tomorrow, there will in due course be another Transition, and another, until the Red sea is quite crossed.”32 As we will see, this is not the first time that Lewis links modernism, communism, and Jews by relocating them to an ancient biblical location or even the first time he identifies these with “mongrelization.” It is prima facie plausible, then, to think that even though Lewis did not name the artistic tendencies he identified with the “time mind” as Jewish, Judaic, or Judaized, he nevertheless identified those he regarded as responsible for aesthetic and cultural modernism with the Jewish forces he believed were behind the Russian Revolution. If the Russian Revolution is the decisive historical context in which to read Lewis’s Time and Western Man as a thesis on Judaization, the decisive subject position is one apparently unexplored in Lewis scholarship: that of the fanatic. The German scholar Victor Klemperer points out that for the French Enlightenment fanatique and fanatisme were “terms of the utmost censure.”33 The root of the word, he notes, “is fanum, the shrine, the temple—a fanatic was someone in a state of religious rapture racked by ecstatic convulsions.” The fanatic experiences ecstasy; he or she literally goes out of, loses, him or herself. The fanatic was thus a “natural adversary of [Enlightenment] rationalism.”34 In his 2010 Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, Alberto Toscano distinguishes between two European traditions of thought about the fanatic.35 On the one hand, the prerevolutionary Enlightenment that interested Klemperer—Voltaire, for example— sees the fanatic as the figure of religious irrationalism; on the other, in the wake of

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the French Revolution, the fanatic becomes identified (for Burke and Kant, among others) with the Jacobins, with an excess of reason, a dedication to abstract ideals at the expense of human life. In Lewis, we might say, the two traditions converge: the fanatic is both a figure of abstract universal reason and religious mania, of dedication both to metaphysical principles and theological prescriptions, although the former is ultimately understood as a mask for the latter. More specifically, the fanatic is, for Lewis, the telos of the time mind as a political phenomenon and the enemy other of Western Man. Where Lewis insists on the importance of the autonomous individual, the fanatic is a figure of heteronomous self-subordination to a communal goal, cause, or ideal; where Lewis insists on the present, the fanatic is a figure of psychic regression; where Lewis insists on the importance of distance and cold analysis, the fanatic is defined by an excess of misguided enthusiasm. As the merest glance at his selfportraits and programmatic pronouncements in Blast reveals, Lewis values nothing more highly than the very boundaries of the self that the fanatic’s ecstatic religious convulsions would dissolve. Like Hegel, for whom the fanat icism of the “Mahometans” was an “enthusiasm for something abstract” that bore “only a desolating destructive relation to the concrete,” Lewis appears to posit a relationship between a certain representational (or antirepresentational) regime and a particular kind of subject formation.36 Where Lewis asserts the importance to Western Man of the concrete, physical image, the fanatic is, for the philosophical tradition from within which Lewis writes, dedicated to abstract principles and iconoclasm. There are indications that for Lewis, too, the representational regime of the time mind—which he characterizes as surging, ecstatic, featureless chaos—recalls and reproduces this “enthusiasm for the abstract,” which in turn, for him as for Hegel, produces the fanatical subject. But there is also in Lewis a preoccupation with something intrinsic, something in the nature of different kinds of people, that makes some people incline toward concreteness and some toward abstraction, some toward individualism and some toward collectivity. And this, I think, is ultimately a question of race and religion. To understand why Lewis thinks the Jew in particular is a fanatic, we need to recognize that Lewis subscribes to a version of what Gil Anidjar calls the Semitic hypothesis. The Semitic hypothesis, says Anidjar, is that

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historical discourse in which “whatever was said about Jews could be said about Arabs, and vice versa.”37 Among the founders and representatives of this discourse Anidjar includes, along with Hegel, J. G. Herder, Ernest Renan, Disraeli, and William Robertson Smith. Lewis’s antisemitism, I propose, is best understood as an anti-Semitism, as not simply fantasies and beliefs about Jews but fantasies and beliefs about Jews that are inextricable from his understanding of Jews as a Semitic people indistinguishable from Arabs. The figure he thinks of as Western Man is ultimately under threat from—what else?— a predominantly Eastern, that is, Oriental, that is, Semitic sensibility. Scholars have not addressed Lewis’s Orientalism, let alone its relationship to his antisemitism, but in Time and Western Man his preoccupation with a certain notion of the Orient leaps off the page. It is not just that all the features Lewis attributes to what he calls the “time mind”— apart from fanat icism, the list includes passivity, femininity, deadness, inertness, abstraction, softness, flabbiness, vagueness, fluidity, and fatalism— are familiar from what Edward Said has taught us about the vocabulary of Orientalism, but that Lewis himself tells us so. The souls of revolutionary simpletons “are . . . ‘carried towards the East’ ”; the time mind is ultimately a “mongrel westernizedorientalism.”38 And Lewis regards modernist form as an instrument in this process. To see how he arrives at this position, we need to turn to Nietz sche.

Nietzsche and Jewish Values Much of Lewis’s polemical writing of the 1920s has been read as a revision of Nietzsche, particularly of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), where Nietzsche famously opposes noble or “chivalric-aristocratic morality” to “slave morality.”39 Nietzsche establishes noble or aristocratic morality as the original code: strong, active, spontaneous, expressive, primarily concerned to affirm its own, higher form of life as good and only as an afterthought dismissing lower forms as bad. Slave morality he presents as a reaction to that noble morality, an expression of resentment of and desire for revenge upon the aristocratic or noble, obsessed with redefining all that noble morality affirms as good as instead evil.

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As is well known, Nietzsche holds that “the slaves’ revolt in morality begins with the Jews.” 40 The Jews, says Nietzsche, “a priestly people with the most entrenched priestly vengefulness,” achieved a “radical revaluation” of the values of their enemies and conquerors through an act of deliberate or spiritual [geistigen] revenge. The Jews reject the “aristocratic value equation” in which the good was equated with the noble, powerful, beautiful, and so on, and, says Nietzsche, declare, “ ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good . . . salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’ ” From “the tree of revenge and hatred, Jewish hatred,” says Nietzsche, springs Christianity. Christianity, for Nietzsche, is hatred (for the strong, noble, aristocratic) disguised as “new love” (for the weak, suffering, downtrodden). Thus: Jesus of Nazareth, as the embodiment of the gospel of love . . . —was he not seduction in its most sinister and irresistible form, seduction and the circuitous route to just those very Jewish values and innovative ideals? Did Israel not reach the pinnacle of her sublime vengefulness via this very “redeemer,” this apparent opponent of and disperser of Israel? Is it not part of a secret black art of a truly grand politics of revenge, a far-sighted, subterranean revenge, slow to grip and calculating, that Israel had to denounce her actual instrument of revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail him to the cross so that “all the world,” namely all Israel’s enemies, could safely nibble at this bait?41

The struggle between aristocratic and slave moralities animates, for Nietzsche, the subsequent millennia of human history (“there has been no greater event than this battle, this question, this contradiction of mortal enemies”), which Nietzsche symbolizes as “ ‘Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.’ ” 42 And the result is not in question: “without a doubt Rome has been defeated.” The classical ideal returns, says Nietzsche, in the Renaissance, but crucially, “Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal with the French Revolution.” 43 On the one hand, then, Nietz sche’s account of Rome versus Judea offers a radical, subversive reinterpretation of Eu ropean Christianity’s

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self-understanding. Nietzsche posits continuity just where Christianity announces its epochal break, tells Christianity it owes most to the Jews just where it understands itself most decisively to separate itself from Judaism, and thereby insists upon a radical revaluation of the motivations and drives behind Christianity itself, detecting (and later demonstrating) hatred and vengefulness where Christianity claims love and forgiveness. On the other hand, this radical reinterpretation is predicated on a characterization of ancient Judaism that is patently open to a strong antisemitic appropriation. Nietzsche’s ancient Jews are distinguished by resentment and hatred, are most powerful precisely where they seem weakest, and possess an extraordinary, invisible power that does not manifest itself directly but through the material carrier of an “apparent opponent” (Jesus Christ) who is in fact Judaism’s most powerful “instrument of revenge.” Steven Aschheim identifies Nietzsche as the founding figure of what he calls a “radical antisemitism” in which Christianity itself is treated as the agent of Europe’s Verjüdung and among whose adherents Aschheim counts the nineteenthcentury German antisemites Paul de Lagarde (who called for Christianity to purify itself of its Jewish elements), Wilhelm Marr (the founding father of the modern antisemitic movement), and Eugen Dühring (who combined a socialist materialism with antisemitism).44 There is good reason to think that Wyndham Lewis too was an inheritor and proponent of this view.

“The Strange Actor” We can see how Lewis builds on and revises the story Nietz sche tells about Rome and Judea in a short story he publishes in 1924. “The Strange Actor” is a brief, undramatic piece, barely a story, not quite an essay. As Paul Edwards points out, it also contains Lewis’s “first real exposition of the underlying thesis of ‘The Man of the World.’ ” “The Man of the World” is the unifying title of the project under which all Lewis’s major critical prose of the 1920s appeared. Lewis called it “my five hundred thousand word book . . . (longer than War & Peace, Ulysses & so on.)” These works include “The Dithyrambic Spectator: An Essay on the Origins and Survivals of Art”; The Lion and the Fox (his 1927 book on Shakespeare); The Art of Being Ruled (1926); “Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change” (1926); and, last but not least, Time and Western Man itself.45

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The narrator of “The Strange Actor” encounters “a journalist,” whom he takes to be “a nice university-made Jew.” 46 The journalist tells him that “a new age had begun for the world,” one of “social solidarity, of subordination of the individual to society,” in which “ ‘individualism’ was happily extinct” and, with the individual, so too the “battle gods of our northern race.” 47 Much of the subsequent narrative depicts the narrator listening to and responding to the journalist’s theory of the “ ‘break-up of western civilization’; of the western doctrine of ‘Force’ pitted against the new or rather the opposite doctrine of brotherhood” and how he, the narrator, responded to that theory.48 This part of the narrative draws to an end around the question of heredity, with which the journalist, says the narrator, has an “especial quarrel.” 49 Against the continuities heredity would impose, the journalist asserts that “Civilization can be altered so radically and so quickly that the outlook of humanity on nearly every fundamental matter can be changed in a single generation.”50 The narrator replies that the “fighting northern male,” whose doctrine of “Force” is supposedly in decline, wishes not to change: what does the journalist have to say about that? It is at this point that the voluble journalist is dumbfounded and silenced, and his exposition (though not the story itself) comes to a close.51 The assumption that his interlocutor is Jewish leads Lewis’s narrator to reflect that “English ‘independence,’ individualism, or whatever you like to call it, must be a thing very abhorrent to the Jew.”52 He contrasts the English taste for solitude and independence with the Jew’s “patriarchal faithfulness to his own race and family, deep religious atavism, deep desire for forms and sanctions . . . morbid sociability, clinging gregariousness, and satisfaction in crowds.”53 The narrator describes the breakup of Western civilization as “the Jews supplying the Romans with Christ once more: the power of the unarmed prophet against Augustus and his legions.”54 The journalist’s assertion that he (the journalist) and Christ are on the same side (“Christ is on our side: we are on His”), inspires the narrator to imagine Christ among the ancient Jews: I could see the wandering fanatical prophet fitting His words to the “people of the Roman province.” He had not as fi ne a people as Buddha’s. Instead of the Indian teacher’s gentle compatriots, inclined to unworldliness and contemplation, Christ would be surrounded by violent, rough, fanatical natures, their hands anxious to fly at the throats of their antagonists. They would be like Mahomet’s followers. The only way He could curb them (assuming he was different

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from them) would be by presenting them with a sobbing theatricality in exchange for their murderous biblical rage.55

No sooner does this Nietzschean vision come to an end than the conversation turns directly to Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche, says the journalist, “rages against the meaning of the new world of democracy, brotherhood and the opposite of Force, which he knows is destined to overwhelm his superman. He exclaims: ‘I impeach the greatest blasphemy in time—the religion (Christianity) which has enchained and softened us.’ ”56 Lewis’s narrator insists that the “murderous biblical rage” persists in his contemporary Jewish interlocutor. He reports, “I told him that I thought he was a fairly aggressive type of man” and that “a very warlike light was noticeable in his eyes!”57 But the journalist’s theatricality (sobbing or otherwise) is also emphasized. Despite the story being largely an account of a conversation, the narrator does not trust what he hears: “I agreed, if you can agree with anyone who assembles words to frame what seems to you a truth, but who you feel is far from one of truth’s purest servants . . .”58 Hence the notion of the strange actor: the journalist (that is, the Jew) “accommodated himself to your vision of him” and appeared to be “engaged in a dual drama, whose end and beginning were elsewhere. All his conclusions looked disguised, or else unmasked, or climaxes in another and alien event.”59 Just as Nietzsche renders modern values and events carried out in the name of equality, liberty, and fraternity (the French Revolution) as the triumph of a millennia-old vengeful Jewish dispensation, so too Lewis renders the political modernity of the journalist’s “new age” (heralded, we can assume, by the Russian Revolution) as the age of ancient Jewish values: “religious atavism” advertised as moral and political progress, “murderous biblical rage” masked as democratic inclusiveness and self-sacrifice. Yet if Lewis’s debt to Nietzsche is evident, so too are his revisions. While Christ is a Jewish instrument against Rome for both Nietzsche and Lewis, Lewis alone imagines him both as a mimic “fitting His words to” his contemporaries and as the origin, in turn, of a new form of mimesis: “presenting them with a sobbing theatricality in exchange for their murderous biblical rage.” What I most want to emphasize here, however, is Lewis’s identification of Christ and his Jewish contemporaries not as vengeful but fanatical and his alignment of them, by virtue of that fanatical violence, with “Mahomet’s

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followers.” Both are indisputably Lewis’s modifications. There are very few references to Islam and Mohammed in Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre, and none of what he does say about them appears in his account of slave morality and the Jews. Lewis thus supplements On the Genealogy of Morality with the Semitic hypothesis, the postulate of the interchangeability of Jews and Arabs (figured as Muslims). And for Lewis the past is not merely metaphor or symbol. The journalist rejects heredity, but for Lewis’s narrator, this rejection is a ruse hiding the lasting influence of the Jewish character upon morality and politics. What appears to be reason is actually a mask for a Jewish inheritance. The references to Christ and those around him as fanatical are not made in obvious relation to any matter of religious doctrine but rather are attributable to their “violent, rough, fanatical natures”; they are “not as fine a people” as those surrounding the Buddha and are “inclined” to violence rather than contemplation. In “The Strange Actor” the Jew functions as personification and origin of a certain political modernity. Lewis’s story undermines the Jew’s claims to brotherhood, egalitarianism, the end of force, and the sacrifice of the individual and substitutes for it a version of Nietzsche’s hermeneutics of suspicion, in which the new is rewritten as the old, benevolence and fellowfeeling unmasked as aggression and rage, and the entire manifest narrative treated as a performance whose true, latent significance resides elsewhere, offstage. “The Strange Actor” was Lewis’s first exposition of “The Man of the World.” Of course, that does not necessarily mean that his ideas about Jews and modernity will persist into the longer works he produced over the next few years. But as a matter of fact, they do. If anything, Lewis’s preoccupation with the notion of the fanatic and with the fanatic as a Semitic figure appears even more pronounced in Time and Western Man than in “The Strange Actor,” enough to shape his understanding of the politics of modernist form decisively.

The Ancient East In the three years between “The Strange Actor” and Time and Western Man Lewis becomes more circumspect about race. From at least as early as

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Blast Lewis identifies with what he calls a northern sensibility, an identification that persists with Lewis’s defense of “fighting northern men” in “The Strange Actor.” In Time and Western Man, however, the compass of his identitarian rhetoric shifts to the West, perhaps to distance himself from too obvious an association of his northern fetish with notions of the Nordic and the Aryan (in deference, perhaps, to the imagined gag of Jewish-liberal morality that Ayers thinks structures Lewis’s writing). This concern does not, however, prevent him from moments of express anxiety about the destiny of “the White Race” or “White Peoples.” 60 Moreover, while Lewis speaks of the “fighting northern man” as a reality, he speaks of “Western Man” as “the completest myth,” but this myth should be “erect[ed] into a reality” because it would “serve our purposes better than the multiplicity of myths that swarm in our drifting chaos” and “respond[s] to something that the European is responsible for.” 61 As the work of philosophers such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy and art historians such as Eric Michaud on the crucial role of myth in the Nazi project of forming a people shows, such claims about the need to make a reality of a new European myth are consistent with a continued preoccupation with race and even with Aryanism itself.62 In the preface to Time and Western Man Lewis announces that the “main characteristic” of the “time mind” is “hostility to minds that are not Time minds.” 63 Even before it is glorification and hypostatization of flux and the subjective experience of time, or constipation by the past, or the dissolution of the personality, the time mind is, for Lewis, the enemy of his “spatializing” mind. And it is a fanatical enemy. In Book 1 of Time and Western Man alone (Book 2 turns to history and philosophy), Lewis makes nearly two dozen references to fanat icism. Lewis writes of how those who have been “fanatically indoctrinated” into the Time philosophy will be slaves of time and how Bergsonian durée gives one a “fanatical hegemony” of “self-feeling” even as it dissolves political individuality.64 In the appendix to Book 1 he refers to “a hard-worked, hard-headed, fanatical class-warrior, for whom Marx is Mahomet. . . .” 65 Around Diaghilev he sees a “fanatical cult”; Pound’s followers and Pound’s dedication to his methods are likewise fanatical. In “An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce” references to fanat icism fly particularly fast and thick. Lewis speaks of “time-fanaticism” 66 and

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“fanatical space-timeists,” 67 and while he notes that Joyce rejects “fanatical ‘nationalism’ ” such as that of Sinn Fein (itself a symptom, for Lewis, of the time mind’s eradication of authentic regional differences), he also insists that Ulysses displays a fanatical observation of the unities of time and place and adheres to naturalism of a “fanatical order.” 68 This fanatical adherence to naturalism is at the center of Lewis’s critique of Joyce: it is what produces the novel’s “mechanical heaping up of detail,” 69 which in turn results in an im mense nature- morte . . . a suffocating, moetic expanse of objects, all of them lifeless, the sewage of a Past twenty years old, all neatly arranged in a meticulous sequence. . . . You will have had a glut, for the moment (if you have really persevered), of matter, procured you by the turning on of all this river of what now is rubbish, but which was not then, by the obsessional application of the naturalistic method associated with the exacerbated time-sense.70

Joyce’s fanatical submission to the laws of naturalism is, not to put too fi ne a point on it, what makes Ulysses, in Lewis’s eyes, a pile of shit, “a monument like a record diarrhoea”: “So he [Joyce] collected like a cistern in his youth the last stagnant pumpings of victorian-anglo-irish life. This he held steadfastly intact for fifteen years or more—then when he was ripe, as it were, he discharged it, in a dense mass, to his eternal glory.”71 Lewis’s claim, then, is tripartite: that Joyce has submitted himself fanatically to a par ticular formal rule that belongs to the past (nineteenth-century naturalism), that that formal rule has led him to find his materials in the past rather than the present, and that his fanatical submission to that rule has made Ulysses an achievement of mechanical, repetitive scale and accumulation rather than one that grasps the present to create new beauty. Fanat icism is, then, unquestionably a distinguishing feature of the time mind for Lewis in Time and Western Man, one whose application he does not restrict to Jews and Muslims. But Lewis does indicate that time-mind fanat icism emanates from and is proper to a certain East rather than the West. As we have seen, for Lewis the time mind is an Oriental mind—“mongrel westernized-orientalism”72—which is to say, a Semitic mind. Lewis says as much in the conclusion to “An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce,” where, as in “The Strange Actor,” he slides from a denunciation of the possibility of changing or transcending the human condition, through a rejection of the subordination of the individual to the community (the political

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idea that “a-thousand-men is a better man than one”),73 to a fi nal declaration of his opposition to “the great time philosophy”: I prefer the chaste wisdom of the Chinese or the Greek, to that hot, tawny brand of superlative fanat icism coming from the parched deserts of the Ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness. I am for the physical world.74

In “The Strange Actor” the fanat icism that concerns Lewis is explicitly identified with Jews and Muslims. The same is true in Time and Western Man: the “hot, tawny brand of superlative fanat icism coming from the parched deserts of the ancient East, with its ineradicable abstractness” is, for Lewis, a Semitic abstractness. Although neither Jews nor Arabs (figured as Muslims) are mentioned here, elsewhere in Time and Western Man the ancient East is associated with both. In the same passage in which Lewis reflects on the mythic nature of Western Man he also remarks that “we are told, for instance, that the jewish [sic] settler in Palestine is so very ‘Western’ that the Arab can see no traces in him of that first-cousin who left the Ancient East after the exploits of Titus, and indeed regards him as a complete alien.”75 Yes, Lewis is suggesting that the Jew is perceived as Western, but look at how Lewis distances himself from the idea: “We are told . . . that the Arab can see no traces in him.” The Arab can see no traces of their connection, but Lewis can; they are, in his eyes, related, first cousins, which is to say, of course, that they share a certain heredity. The appeal to the desert is not incidental either. It plays an explanatory role both in the Semitic hypothesis (Anidjar makes much of its role in Renan) and in discourses focused more specifically on the Jews. For example, in his 1911 The Jews and Modern Capitalism the German economic historian Werner Sombart argued that the Jews were particularly suited for capitalism precisely because they were a nomadic, desert people unaccustomed to a qualitatively differentiated and distinctive landscape (such as could be found in the forests of the north) and thus innately inclined, rather, toward abstraction and quantification.76 Lewis derives the features of the time mind from the “Ancient East” and sees it as a form of “mongrelized western-orientalism” characterized by fanat icism and the refusal of physical, concrete images. Read in conjunction with what we know of Lewis’s understanding of the Russian Revolu-

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tion as orchestrated by Jews and his assigning responsibility for the time mind to Bergson, Freud, Stein, and Proust, not to mention his claim in the closing pages of his discussion of Joyce that “the mind of Einstein, like that of Bergson, or like that of Proust, is not a physical mind. . . . It is psychologic; it is mental,”77 we can see that Lewis’s characterization of the “westernoriental” time mind, with its preoccupation with time rather than space, flux rather than form, vague abstractness rather than precise linear abstraction, merging and indistinctness rather than borders and boundaries, indicates that it is, for him, a Semitic, which is also to say, in a Western context, a Judaic mind.

Fanatical Style Thus far I have argued that Lewis identifies the dominant aestheticopolitical features of the time mind—abstractness, vagueness, flux, and fanaticism— with a certain Semitic ancient East and that there is for him something Semitic about presenting the old as the new and revolutionary, about fanatical submission to the principles of flux, abstraction, and chaos. I want now to refi ne and extend those claims, to show that in his central exhibit of the time mind in the culture of his time—James Joyce’s Ulysses—Lewis seeks to demonstrate that Ulysses has been contaminated by a Semitic, and specifically Judaic, style. This charge of Judaization is, as we’ll see, a very different claim from asserting that the form and language have become Jewish. Indeed, Lewis’s text displays a logic particular to modern antisemitism, one in which it is precisely the Jew who is excluded, held separate from, the phenomenon of Judaization. In such narratives the Jew is active, the Christian European passive, the Judaized are taught liberalism, tolerance, openness, along with atomization and fragmentation, while the Jews themselves insist on the importance of blood ties, cohesiveness, patriarchy. My claim, then, is that Lewis emphasizes Joyce’s mimetic and imitative abilities, his passivity, receptivity, curiosity about form and indifference to content in order to say that because of these qualities Joyce is susceptible to colonization by the time mind, that he, like Nietzsche’s Christ, is the mimetic, all-too-mimetic instrument of an alien, Semitic ideology.

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The agent of Joyce’s Judaization, according to Lewis, is Gertrude Stein, the distinctive formal characteristics of whose style Lewis does see as Jewish. In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis notes that Stein’s “art is composed, fi rst, of repetition, which lyricizes her utterances on the same principle as that of the hebrew poetry.”78 In Time and Western Man Lewis again refers to “the spurious child-language of Miss Stein, cadenced and said twice over in the form of the hebrew recitative.”79 Certainly referring to Hebrew reminds the reader that Stein is Jewish, but it does more than that. It is here that we should recall Edward Said’s account of Ernest Renan’s theory of the Semites as a language group, in which “Oriental languages, Semitic languages” are all “inorganic, arrested, totally ossified, incapable of selfregeneration.”80 Stein’s prose, in Lewis’s characterization, is not merely Hebraic but Semitic: “mechanical,” “dead,” “mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate material.”81 On this reading, Lewis’s further elaborations of how Stein’s style embodies the time mind—that she writes “like a child” and is responsible for the “child cult,” which Lewis identifies with “the culture of the primitive and the savage” and the “demented”82— are no more than contemporary manifestations of this regressive Semitic foundation. Yet Lewis does not see Stein herself as subject to the imperatives of her linguistic inheritance or heredity but rather as deliberately manipulating them. He offers a test for “counterfeit in the arts” in which he invites us to imagine Stein as a painter, compelled to say whether she really sees things in a manner “strange according to the human norm, though it might appear normal enough to the senses of some other animal.”83 Lewis argues that if Stein can explain her work in ordinary language it is proof that she is a sham (because she doesn’t have to talk that way), but if in explaining her work she continues in the same manner in which she writes, that too is proof of dishonesty, because it shows that she is not conducting a selfconscious experiment that presents human experience and language from a new and interesting angle but pretending to possess “an exclusive and peculiar sensibility”: “her stutter in her explanation even of her other celebrated stutterings, is a proof, then, to my mind, that she is a homologue of the false-blind; that, in some measure, she is a sham.”84 Lewis creates a double bind for his hypothetical Stein, one in which she cannot not be shamming, and thus also makes evident the impossibility of falsifying his

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own theory of her mendacity. Stein’s style, like the strange actor’s speech, is, for him, a piece of theater that masks aggressive, regressive, colonizing intent in the name of populist, democratic change (he says Stein’s style manifests “all the false ‘revolutionary,’ propagandist plainmanism of her time”).85 Here, again, the difference for Lewis between Jewish mimesis and non-Jewish mimesis: Stein’s performance, like both the ancient Jews and the journalist of “The Strange Actor,” is deliberate, programmatic, deceptive. Which brings us to Joyce. In describing Joyce’s preference for “ways of doing things, and technical processes, and not things to be done,” and his indifference to “what he writes, or what idea or world-view he expresses,” Lewis observes that It is such people that the creative intelligence fecundates and uses; and at present that intelligence is political, and its stimuli are masked ideologies. [Joyce] is only a tool, an instrument, in short.86

For Lewis, Joyce’s interest in ways of doing things, in tools, and his lack of interest in ideology makes him vulnerable to using forms and techniques that are themselves directly—as forms—ideological. And there is, of course, no question of just which ideology inhabits Joyce’s work: “Mr. Joyce is very strictly of the school of Bergson-Einstein, Stein-Proust. He is of the great time-school they represent.”87 Missing from that list is Freud, whom Lewis nevertheless treats at times as even more important than Bergson, particularly in the case of Joyce. Ulysses, says Lewis, in one of half a dozen such comments, “imposes a softness, flabbiness and vagueness everywhere in its bergsonian fluidity. It was in the company of that old magician, Sigmund Freud, that Joyce learnt the way into the Aladdin’s cave where he manufactured his Ulysses; and the philosophic flux-stream has its source, too, in that magical cavern.”88 By now we can see that the Orientalizing image of Freud in Aladdin’s cave is consistent with the rest of Lewis’s argument. What Lewis places greatest weight upon, however, is Joyce’s relationship to, or, rather, occupation by, Stein. Stein embodies for Lewis the creative intelligence that fecundates and uses Joyce, that stimulates him with masked ideology. Stein’s “habit of speech,” he says, “like a stuttering infection, is very contagious. Mr. Joyce even has caught it.”89 And, correspondingly, Joyce’s “vices of style, as I understand it, are due rather to his unorganized

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susceptibility to influences, and especially from the quarter I have been discussing (Miss Stein has influenced him, for instance), than to a native shortcoming.” Lewis traces Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness (which he calls “telling from the inside”) to Stein’s “gargantuan mental stutter” and “the influence exercised on him by Miss Stein’s technique of picturesque dementia.”90 The significance Lewis attaches to these claims cannot be overstated. If Lewis wants to prove anything in “An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce,” he wants to prove that Joyce’s mind has been colonized by Gertrude Stein. He concludes his textual analysis of Ulysses proper by juxtaposing the last lines of Ulysses with a passage from Stein’s Saints in Seven to show that Molly Bloom’s soliloquy repeats Stein’s style, and then he remarks: I have been gathering together all those factors in the mind of Joyce which make it, I am able to show, a good material for a predatory time-philosophy, bearing down upon it and claiming his pen as its natural servant.91

A predatory time-philosophy that claims Joyce’s pen as its natural servant. For Lewis, then, it is not only that Joyce’s fanatical submission to the demands of naturalism are structurally similar to the Semitic-Judaic fanatical submission of oneself to an abstract principle, nor simply that Joyce’s text tries to sell the old as the new, in the manner of the Jewish journalist of “The Strange Actor,” but that the very structure of his sentences (or lack thereof) is itself directly attributable to infection and occupation by a Semitic source. Joyce is not the only writer whose work Lewis believes Stein has colonized and contaminated. Anita Loos (the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Ernest Walsh (the then recently deceased editor of This Quarter), and Ernest Hemingway are all held up—Loos and Walsh in Time and Western Man, Hemingway in Men Without Art—as subject to Stein’s style. The “false ‘revolutionary,’ propagandist plainmanism of her time” is, then, the mask for formal, that is, ideological, domination. We might, then, take Lewis to claim that Stein’s style represents something like literary fanaticism. Stein’s style undoes the boundaries between and identities of individual authors, who, like the fanatic, sacrifice their own ways of doing things to submit to and merge in an ecstatic, abstract, regressive, formless, and ultimately, if we bear in mind that Lewis deems feminism a return to the

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old because it seeks to install a “primitive Matriarchate,” matriarchal verbal chaos.92 Lewis’s conception of the time mind in general and Joyce’s Ulysses in particular can be understood in terms of a certain notion of Judaization, one that emerges from his version of the Semitic hypothesis in which the Jew is the bearer into the West of Eastern abstraction and fanat icism. Such an interpretation of Time and Western Man is less a matter of identifying conventionally antisemitic references to parasites and money than of tracing references and allusions within and between Lewis’s own texts: tracking his revisions of Nietzsche from “The Strange Actor” to Time and Western Man and acknowledging his own characterization of the ancient East, noting that he holds the Russian Revolution to be the work of Jews, and demonstrating that he sees Gertrude Stein’s style as both fundamentally Semitic and, as such, an aggressive, predatory bearer of Semitic modes of thought and action.

Uncanny Conclusions Lewis condemns the aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, and political revolutions of his time for claiming to present the new only to rehash and represent the old. He judges time-mind modernism dead, mechanical, repetitive, and inert, yet his book seeks to document just how extraordinarily vital and contagious that deadness is, how it is, in fact, more powerful than the Western culture he would defend against it. No one’s prose is deader in Lewis’s eyes than Gertrude Stein’s, yet apparently no one’s influence is more widespread. It is no stretch, then, to suggest that Time and Western Man is, among other things, an essay about the uncanny, which Freud teaches us is best understood as the return of modes of thought that one believes oneself to have surmounted. Most of the terms Lewis seeks to defi ne himself against also return, in one way or another, to haunt his writing. As we have seen, Lewis faults Joyce for being a predominantly mimetic writer, devoid of insight, observation, or ideas of his own. But Time and Western Man’s account of Joyce is itself distinctively and even rather creatively mimetic. Almost every metaphor, model, or image Lewis presents to describe the form of Ulysses derives from

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something that is represented within that novel, usually something the significance of which Lewis takes pains to disavow. Thus Lewis claims that it is of no real significance that Joyce represents Bloom at stool, yet Ulysses becomes for him a “monument like a record diarrhoea”; Lewis suggests the novel is uninterested in sex (“the mind of Joyce is more chaste than most”),93 yet his argument that Stein fecundates Joyce reworks the scene in “Circe” in which Bloom and Bella Cohen switch genders and Bloom is penetrated, just as the theatricality of “Circe” gives Lewis the image of Joyce dressing up as a stage Jew. Lewis derides the mannered representation of Stephen Dedalus, but Stephen’s acute sensitivity to domination and servitude provides Lewis with his image of Joyce as the “natural servant” of the time mind. One might even speculate that the “one day world” of “Advertisement” that Lewis speaks of in the first chapters of Time and Western Man bears some relation to the plot of Ulysses, which, of course, charts a single day in the life of an advertising canvasser. What is true of mimesis also holds, in a different way, for fanat icism. In the same pages in which he declares himself against the fanat icism of the ancient East Lewis writes: It is a good deal as a pictorial and graphic artist that I approach these problems [of Joyce and the time mind]; and a method that does not secure that definition and logical integrity that, as a graphic artist, I require, I am, I admit, hostile to from the start. But no doubt what made me, to begin with, a painter, was some propensity for the exactly-defi ned and also, fanatically it may be, the physical or the concrete. And I do not think that you have to be a painter to possess such inclinations. Many painters, indeed, have no repugnance, it would appear, for the surging ecstatic featureless chaos which is being set up as an ideal, in place of the noble exactitude and harmonious proportion of the eu ropean, scientific, ideal—the specifically Western heaven.94

Just as the time mind is, before it is anything else, “hostile to minds that are not time minds,” so too Lewis declares himself innately “hostile” to methods that do not secure “definition and logical integrity”; just as the time mind displays a fanatical inclination toward the abstract, so too his own preference for the physical and the concrete becomes a fanatical preference, albeit in passing, as if he has been contaminated by his own obsessive vocabulary. Elsewhere in Time and Western Man Lewis recalls that among

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those involved with Blast (which for Lewis chiefly means himself ) Ezra Pound’s poetry was, “to the mind of the more fanatical of the group . . . a series of pastiches of old french or old italian poetry, and [thus] could lay no claim to participate in the new burst of art in progress.”95 Such moments indicate that for Lewis, at its limit, all subject formation involves subjection to some kind of ideal (be it surging ecstatic chaos or noble, “european,” scientific proportion) and some accompanying temporal imperative (regression to the past or insistence on the new): any kind of heteronomy, then, is ultimately fanatical. Yet it is also obvious that there is a major difference for Lewis between being fanatical and being a fanatic. It is here, I think, that Lewis is with Hegel in finding a significant difference between the effects upon the subject of an enthusiasm for the abstract and one for a concrete physical image. Both seem to think that an incarnate, physical, concrete ideal is necessary for the subject itself to have proper boundaries and borders, to not itself become chaotic and featureless, to not itself merge with others in an indiscriminate, manipulable mass. For Lewis, again, such attachments are also innate, heritable, part of one’s nature: some people— or peoples?—have violent fanatical natures and a “propensity” for the abstract, others a propensity and inclination toward the physical and concrete. Subject formation is, for Lewis, a matter of representational regime, of the effects of the kind of art and image one takes as an ideal. But which ideal one will, or should, be drawn to, have an inclination toward, is, for him, ultimately, I think, a matter of race. In demonstrating the importance of a certain notion of Judaization to Time and Western Man I have not sought to explain why Lewis would end up praising Hitler and National Socialism but to show at once the proximity and distance between them. We have seen, for one thing, that Lewis’s argument against the time mind rests upon an assumption that the Nazis would reject: namely, the Semitic hypothesis that what could be said about Jews could be said about Arabs and vice versa. As Anidjar reminds us, the Nazis did not racialize Arabs as systematically as they did Jews, and they even expressed some admiration for Islam as a militant religion.96 More important still is the status of the fanatic itself. While Lewis concedes a certain degree of fanat icism in his own obsessions, this does not lead him to modify his fundamentally negative view of the fanatic. In particular,

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Lewis consistently rejects the kinds of collective self-sacrifice that, as Victor Klemperer shows in his eyewitness study of the language of the Third Reich, made “fanat icism” and “fanatical” terms of high praise under Hitler, precisely because those who commit such sacrifices fail to recognize that, as Lewis believed, one’s “individual life” is all that exists, is “your bird in the hand.”97 For Lewis as for Wagner and Nordau, then, it is just where he most closely converges with Nazism—in Lewis’s case, seeing the Jew as a contagious, colonizing danger, as a figure of communist revolution and Oriental regression, as undermining and dissolving the boundaries of the Western subject, and as, not least of all, an avatar of something like artbolshevism—that we might at the same time measure his ideological distance from them. It also has to be said that Lewis is simply more insightful about the aesthetic objects of his critique than either Wagner, Nordau, or the Nazis. As is widely acknowledged, Lewis is right to identify the modernism of his period with a certain fetishization and glorification of time, private experience, and the past. According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce himself seemed to grant that Lewis might have been right, if incredibly limited, in aspects of his interpretation of Ulysses.98 More broadly, and perhaps more interestingly for contemporary scholars, Lewis’s arguments raise with particular force the question of just what we mean when we call a work of art “modernist” and why, at least in the English-speaking academy, that particular term continues to maintain such a hold on our thinking about certain kinds of cultural production that were manifestly preoccupied with memory and the past. Time and Western Man shows that the notion of modernism as Judaized is not peculiarly German but fi nds one of its most radical articulations in the Anglo-American modernist canon. If we accept the standing of Time and Western Man attributed to it by figures such as Kenner, Jameson, and Edwards, then the question of Judaization and modernist form appears to be at the heart of one of the major books of the past century. Even if we demur, Lewis’s book gives us yet another striking example in which the fraught, contested question of modernist form’s ideology and temporality is resolved into theological, political, and racial ideas about Jews. In Lewis’s case this happens without obvious recourse to the Christian historicophilosophical models of redemption and fulfillment that we have

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seen at work in Wagner, Nordau, and Nazism. What remains to be seen is whether Lewis’s self-understanding as a classicist and a secular critic of Christianity withstands scrutiny, or if in seeking to overcome Christianity and high modernism alike as themselves still too Semitic, he writes in terms that are ultimately structured by the Christian dispensation itself. The question of Christianity might give us the final instance of the uncanny in Lewis: that stage of development he believes himself to have overcome but that, in his defending the truly new and present against the old and that which exists only in time, in declaring his adherence to physical, concrete, incarnated representation against the abstract, and in choosing the specifically Western heaven, he nevertheless finds himself haunted by and unable to escape.

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Fou r

Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses

In Part I of this book I explored the history of the interpretation of modernism as Judaization: the essay and book that are seen as its origins, the exhibition that should be seen as its apotheosis, and the modernist magnum opus that treats cultural modernism as a programmatic contamination of Western culture in the interests of Jewish political domination. In Part II I argue that such interpretations of modernism and modernity are also central to the work of three iconic Eu ropean modernists: James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett. I begin with Joyce. As I show, many of the formal features of Ulysses that Wyndham Lewis sees as evidence of Judaization— abstraction, excess, repetition, imitation— are already, for Joyce, presented in relation to his critique of the antisemitic interpretation of modernism and modernity. But this chapter will also be a meditation on the facility with we can make such claims. It is widely taken for granted that Ulysses is inherently critical of fascism and antisemitism. Why? Put simply, I want to suggest that its inherent 121

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opposition to fascism and antisemitism seems so obvious because Joyce tells us so. This chapter explains just how he does that, by reflecting on the relationships the text presents between the various ideas that circulate throughout the novel about Bloom and its own distinctive formal strategies. Reading these elements in conjunction constitutes this chapter’s central contribution to the study of Joyce. Historically, approaches to the question of Ulysses and Jewishness have tended either to focus on the representation of Bloom as a Jew, at the cost of ignoring the formal and stylistic innovations of Ulysses— ignoring, that is, what makes Ulysses modernist (or worth our attention at all) and treating them as distractions in an essentially “realist” novel—or to examine Joycean textuality itself for signs of Jewishness (say, through analogies to the Talmud or to Levinas’s philosophy) to bracket both how Bloom is represented and spoken about while promulgating a rather fetishistic, essentialist notion of Judaism.1 Even those who acknowledge the selfconsciousness with which Joyce invokes the notion of “Jewishness” tend not to consider the par ticular literary techniques and styles that distinguish Ulysses.2 In what follows, I propose that to achieve the synthesis of representation and form I am calling for we need to think less about the putative Jewish identity of either Bloom or the text and more about structural similarities in the way both Bloom and the work Ulysses are perceived by others. Most critics now agree with Wyndham Lewis that Joyce’s novel does not present some kind of insight into the purported nature or essence of Jewish people and agree that Ulysses is far more concerned with what people (including Bloom himself) say, think, and observe about Jews. For some commentators, these properties of the text show that Joyce wants to draw our attention to the indeterminate, polysemous nature of Jewish identity itself (as if all other identities were determinate, fi xed, and monologic). But does an interest in the discursive construction of the Jew really tell us anything about Jewish identity at all, rather than, say, revealing something about those who talk and fantasize about the Jews? I want to show that, particularly in the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses, what Joyce draws attention to is the function of the Jew in the antisemitic imagination: Bloom as a screen onto which ideas about Jews are projected. In particular, I want to draw attention to a certain conceptual homology between the antisemitic notion of the Jew

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and aspects of Ulysses’ form, insofar as both might be seen to represent the abstract realm of social relations under industrial capitalism. The account of modern antisemitism that I find most productive in this context is once more that put forward by the critical theorist Moishe Postone. Postone focuses on the romantic anticapitalist confusion of the appearance of capitalist relations for their essence. Capitalist social relations appear antinomically, as the opposition of the abstract and concrete. Because . . . both sides of the antinomy are objectified, each appears to be quasi-natural. The abstract dimension appears in the form of abstract, universal, “objective,” natural laws; the concrete dimension appears as pure “thingly” nature.3

Romantic anticapitalism, however, hypostatizes the concrete, rooted, and organic and identifies capitalism solely with the abstract dimension of the antinomy. As Postone writes, “that concrete labor itself incorporates and is materially formed by capitalist social relations [the abstract dimension] is not understood [by romantic anticapitalism].” 4 According to Postone, modern antisemitism takes this romantic anticapitalist model a step further and sees the abstract dimension of capitalist social relations (for the romantic anticapitalist, capitalism as such) personified in the Jews. Central to the story Postone tells is the observation that the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern antisemitism— abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility . . . are all characteristics of the [abstract] value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx. Moreover, this dimension, like the supposed power of the Jews, does not appear as such, but always in the form of a material carrier, the commodity.5

In other words, the Jew as imagined by modern antisemitism solves the problem of finding a concrete embodiment, or, more precisely, a personifi cation, for powerful social and economic forces that otherwise lack a material manifestation. The Jew serves to personify processes within capitalism that have no concrete manifestation, that are quite literally unrepresentable. Thus we might infer that the problem that antisemitism solves is a problem of representation and that antisemitism must therefore possess an intrinsically aesthetic dimension. An aesthetic dimension, and a specific kind of aesthetic at that:

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the Jew gives a human shape to the abstract circuits and cycles of capitalism. Yet precisely because of this contradictory representational and representative burden— concretizing the abstract, giving a “thingly,” “organic” form to that which has none—the Jew is also always on the verge of being dehumanized.6 Postone’s account of the modern antisemitic image of the Jew resonates strikingly with influential Marxist accounts of Ulysses’ form, in which the text’s proliferation of styles is also explained in terms of the abstraction of modern life. Think of the links Fredric Jameson draws between the internal differentiation of Ulysses—the “autonomization” of “individual chapters and sub-episodes”—and the Taylorization of the labor process7 and of Terry Eagleton’s claim that in Ulysses “what is turned disruptively against bourgeois culture is in a sense bourgeois economy: the leveling, equalizing, indifferent operations of the commodity form itself, which respects no unique identity, transgresses all frontiers, melts solidity into air, and profanes the holy.”8 Eagleton’s and Jameson’s accounts suggest that the form of Ulysses emerges from, reflects, and reproduces within literature the same economic processes to which Postone traces the anxieties and projections of the antisemite. But whereas Ulysses’ response to an increasingly abstract world is to mime and imitate it, and thereby to strip literature of its anthropocentric “illusions,” the antisemite’s response is to reassert the claims of anthropocentric representation, to insist on an answer to the question “Who is doing this?” and to fi nd the Jew behind the curtain, pulling the strings. In Ulysses, then, we find a prime exhibit for my claim that modernism and modern antisemitism share a historically specific representational problematic, namely, how to represent or explain the apparently unrepresentable, increasingly abstract processes of the modern and modernizing world. This shared problematic— one to which Joyce and the antisemite fi nd very different solutions—raises the possibility that the various fantasies and ideas about the Jew that circulate in Ulysses could be read as having a significant relationship to the form of the text. Indeed, insofar as modernisms such as Joyce’s solve the problems of modernity not through projection and expulsion but rather by a kind of homeopathic mimesis of the experience of modernity itself, one might even anticipate how certain artistic strategies might arouse in the antisemite the same kinds of anxieties he experiences

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in relation to modernity and the Jews, how, for example, someone like Wyndham Lewis might intuit in the form of Ulysses a symptom of a certain Judaization. To grasp the relationship between the form of Ulysses and notions of Jewishness we need to turn our attention toward how and why Bloom is constructed as a Jew, toward the kind of Jew that he is constructed as, and to look for signs of a self-conscious connection within the text itself between the antisemitic notion of the Jew as personified abstraction and the way the text itself exploits linguistic abstractions.9 These elements converge most revealingly in “Cyclops,” the chapter of Ulysses in which Bloom is violently confronted and makes a stand as a Jew (an identity he later disavows), but also a chapter in which we see a singularly self-conscious reflection on the structure and form of Ulysses itself. “Cyclops” also has a special status in the compositional history of the text. Until shortly after the end of the First World War, Joyce had been writing Ulysses in what he called the novel’s “initial style”: stream of consciousness, dialogue, and intermittent third-person narration.10 It was with the writing of “Cyclops” in mid-June of 1919 that Joyce abandoned this style and, as Michael Groden tells us, began to write a “second” Ulysses, one “in which a succession of parody styles . . . began to take over.”11 “Cyclops” represents Joyce’s “first total break”12 with the initial style, particularly in its sequence of thirty-three interpolations of various hyperbolic and mythic discourses. (In contrast, the reader’s first indication that Ulysses will not remain stylistically stable—the headlines of the work’s seventh chapter, “Aeolus”—were not added to the text until 1921.) I shall return to the implications of the stylistic break represented by “Cyclops” below; for now, I will focus on that chapter’s other prominent formal-narratological feature: the narrative voice known to critics as “the Nameless One.” The Nameless One is a witness-bystander to Bloom’s visit to Barney Kiernan’s pub, during which Bloom is verbally and then physically attacked by the ultranationalist, antisemitic character known as the Citizen. It is the Nameless One who relates these events, in a markedly oral style that Karen Lawrence describes as a “low Dublin idiom,”13 and it is the Nameless One’s voice that gives the chapter its narrative coherence. Despite the conviction of numerous critics that the many discourses of “Cyclops” produce a relativistic universe of different stories and different truths, the

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story of the chapter (to follow Seymour Chatman’s distinction between story and discourse) is generally extracted exclusively from the Nameless One’s narrative. The chapter is seen to contain a description of a hanging in a parody of journalistic prose but no actual hanging; Bloom is described in biblical parody as ascending to heaven, but no one wonders why the experience didn’t have more of an effect upon him in subsequent chapters. Yet in those later chapters Bloom does repeatedly refer to his encounter with the Citizen, which the Nameless One does describe. Despite the Nameless One’s biases, the story he tells is, in certain respects, reliable. I propose that we regard the Nameless One as a narrative anomaly within Ulysses, an embodiment of everything that the rest of Ulysses is not. I’m hardly alone in seeing the Nameless One in this way. Joyce scholars have long sought to give an account of the relationship between the Nameless One’s formal distinctiveness within the novel and his patently dubious political and social views. The standard explanation is that his one voice, his monologue, reflects his one-eyed, cyclopean view, which, unlike the polyphonic novel he appears in, intolerantly excludes other perspectives and voices. There are a number of problems with this account of “Cyclops.” Suffice it to say that what distinguishes the Nameless One cannot be that he is monologic— a “one-eyed” single voice as opposed to the polyphony of Ulysses—if only because, most obviously, the narratives of Bloom, Molly, and Stephen are all, in their own ways, also monological. What distinguishes the Nameless One within Ulysses is not that he is a monologist as such but that his monologue is marked by mimesis of the spoken voice and by direct address. The Nameless One is the only narratorprotagonist in the novel who is meant to be literally speaking. The reader of Ulysses has seen renderings of speech before this chapter, but only in the form of dialogue. The styles that interrupt and succeed the Nameless One will be overtly written. The Nameless One is the first and only narrator in Ulysses whose style is markedly oral. At the level of implied address there is a kind of familiarity with the addressee that seems to distinguish the Nameless One’s narration from that of the initial style’s narrative norm. Equally distinctive of the Nameless One’s narrative is its use of direct address: “O, as true as I’m telling you,” “true as you’re there,” “true as I’m drinking this porter,” “Do you know what I’m telling you?”14 Ulysses’ famous talkers use direct address all the time, of course, but no other narrator in

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Ulysses does anything like it. The narrations focalized through the consciousnesses of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (and subsequently also Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom) do not address anyone; all of them, instead, present the characters as they talk to themselves. This is not the least of the sources of Ulysses’ notorious difficulty. People do not signpost when they talk to themselves; stream of consciousness does not stream toward anyone else. If we accept that what distinguishes the Nameless One’s narration is not that it is monologic but that it mimics the voice and direct address, then the theorist we should be reading alongside “Cyclops” is not Mikhail Bakhtin, the theorist of heteroglossia, but Louis Althusser. It is Althusser who structures his doctrine of ideology in terms of a voice that hails, addresses, and names— and thus interpellates—the subject that responds to that voice. Recall the example Althusser builds his theory upon: a policeman calls “Hey, you there!” to a pedestrian, and the pedestrian recognizes him- or herself as the presumed guilty subject of the law’s address and turns to respond to the call.15 The same kind of linguistic performance that distinguishes the Nameless One within Ulysses—a scene of spoken address—is what Althusser’s notion of interpellation relies upon. We can use Althusser’s model of interpellation to think through the relationship between the formal distinctiveness of the Nameless One’s narrative style and its political content, which seems to be what makes the narrative style appear not merely anomalous but a “bad object.” In doing so, however, we need to bear in mind that while in Althusser the response to the policeman is a prima facie confession of guilt of which one seeks to acquit oneself, in the narration of Joyce’s Nameless One the implied addressee is reassured to the extent that he or she recognizes him- or herself in the narrator’s voice and prejudices. The interpellative call in the Nameless One’s narration is not a call to take punishment upon oneself but rather a call for his addressees to recognize themselves in his exemplary, normative voice and the way of seeing it purveys, and to reject and condemn the deviations of another (namely, Leopold Bloom) from that linguistic normativity. It is through the figure of the Nameless One that Joyce stages the difference between the normative, populist, interpellative aesthetics embodied by his text’s bad object and his own apparently emancipatory modernism. But why does Joyce present the aesthetics of that bad object as antisemitic?

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Why should the target of the Nameless One’s hostile self-differentiation be a Jew rather than, say, a colonizing Englishman? And, of course, the Nameless One is not the only one performing an act of self-differentiation in “Cyclops”: If the Nameless One represents a narrative anomaly within Ulysses and the Nameless One’s own other, scapegoat, or enemy is perceived as Jewish, what does that tell us about the relationship between the antisemitic Nameless One’s perception of Bloom as a Jew and the form of Ulysses itself? These questions are best approached by a closer examination of what the Nameless One has to say about how Jews— especially Bloom— speak.

The Language of the Jews From the outset, Ulysses acknowledges just the kind of antisemitic personification that Postone diagnoses. In “Telemachus,” Haines, Mulligan’s visiting chum from Oxford, tries to reach out to Stephen in the language of shared nationalism and antisemitism: “Of course I’m a Britisher, Haines’ voice said, and I feel as one. I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.”16 Garret Deasy, headmaster of Clongowes school, offers a still more striking illustration of how anxieties about the nation-state and economics are intertwined in antisemitism: England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength. . . . As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction.17

In such passages the Jew clearly serves to tie together (or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, to “quilt”) the anxieties about economic and territorial integrity that finance capital arouses; Deasy’s diatribe shows especially clearly the slide from economic to organic-biological thinking that is representative of antisemitic personification.18 The Nameless One and his companions in Barney Kiernan’s have a lot to say and repeat about Bloom, most of it familiar to anyone acquainted with both traditional and modern antisemitic notions about Jewish bodies and behaviors. Bloom is rumored to be a menstruating, “mixed middling,”

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a notion that combines medieval ideas about the bodies of male Jews with the theory of the femininity of the Jewish male proposed by Otto Weininger in his 1903 Sex and Character, a book that was all the rage in fi n-de-siècle Europe and whose influence on Joyce has been documented.19 Bloom’s refusal to drink or treat others to drinks despite the fact that he is rumored to be carry ing vast winnings from his bet on “Throwaway” resonates with stereotypical antisemitic notions of Jewish stinginess, secretiveness, and diffidence toward local forms of community. (It is worth noting here that in earlier drafts of “Cyclops” the rumor was that Bloom had won big in the Hungarian lottery.20 What remains consistent throughout the different versions of “Cyclops” is the fantasy of Bloom’s hidden, hoarded money.) Even the rumor of “John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the idea for Sinn Fein to Griffith” is congruent with notions of the Jew as exercising a hidden, conspiratorial political power: that Bloom would be  seen as both a capitalist-type moneybags and an anti-imperialist revolutionary conforms all too well to the fantasy world of modern European antisemitism described by Postone, which imagines the Jew as the “hidden force” behind such “apparent” opposites as capitalism and socialism.21 In these respects Bloom is perceived, or misperceived, to personify the Jew in a manner congruent with modern European antisemitism. But it is Bloom’s language, the way he talks and what he talks about, that the Nameless One most obsessively and antagonistically dwells upon. The Nameless One marks his own speech as normal and proper and Bloom’s as deviant and improper. Admittedly, there’s something counterintuitive about the claim that the Nameless One, whose monologue is, after all, a morass of malapropisms, should be concerned about “proper speech.” But the Nameless One’s apparent linguistic missteps seem deliberate and willful rather than, as Emer Nolan suggests, signs of a faulty education.22 Complaining of Bloom, the Nameless One says, I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.23

You can’t declare the truth of something to your “aunt” and to your “antimacassar” in the same breath without showing that you know perfectly well

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which one, in standard English, is your relative and which one protects your furniture. The Nameless One’s language has, rather, a family resemblance with Cockney rhyming slang: a product of working- and lower-middle-class culture, playfully resistant to the standardization of national languages that Benedict Anderson has shown was crucial to the formation of nationstates.24 Yet it is still a language with its own codes and conventions, mastery of which means identity and inclusion, incompetence in which means exclusion—means exclusion, most significantly, for the stranger, immigrant, or outsider. This very alliance between shared identity and idiomatic speech might lead us to imagine that what gets abjected from the social body is too strict a conformity to the official laws and standards of the language, that precisely too close an adherence to the law is felt as a transgression of the boundaries of what we might call “properly improper” or incorrect behavior and taste. Especially for those nations that stake their singularity on defiance of English rigidity— alongside Ireland and Scotland, the United States and Australia come immediately to mind— a good part of national identity might reside in the skilled and proper rupture of English linguistic and other proprieties. Something of this “improper propriety” seems to make itself felt in the Nameless One’s objections to Bloom’s pedantic and playless diction. To see what is at stake in the Nameless One’s attacks on Bloom’s speech, it helps to see what is not. Most of the deviations from “proper speech” that the Nameless One draws attention to are Bloom’s, but the first is attributed to the creditor whose debt the Nameless One is supposed to collect, Moses Herzog: Jesus I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. He drink me my teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys? 25

This rendering of Herzog’s speech amounts to an English-language version of what was in the German-speaking world called mauscheln, a derogatory term used to characterize the Jew’s manner of speaking German.26 Sander Gilman shows that it was thought that because of their prior linguistic “contamination” by Hebrew and Yiddish, Jews were constitutionally incapable of properly mastering either the grammar or pronunciation of the German language. Similarly, the Nameless One’s imitation of Moses

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Herzog’s language plays with and mocks how Yiddish grammar might distort spoken English, both through a different use of pronouns (“he eat me my”) and the use of plurals where standard (and even nonstandard) English permits only the singular: the “teas,” “sugars,” and “moneys.” In her account of what she calls Ulysses’ “poetics of Jewishness,” the Joyce scholar Marilyn Reizbaum asserts the centrality of the concept of mauscheln to the representation of Bloom as a self-hating Jew.27 But as Bloom’s memories and “Circe’s” burlesque demonstrate, Herzog’s mauscheln is the language of Rudolph Virag/Bloom, Leopold’s father the immigrant: unassimilated, unmodern, even anachronistic, for whom English remains a foreign language. Mauscheln is not the language of Leopold Bloom, who patiently explains to his wife the meaning of “metempsychosis” and is amused by the stylistic awkwardness of his secret pen pal, Martha. The language of Ulysses may be hybrid and may seem like a kind of translated English, but describing it as akin to a language that plays such a marginal role in the text itself and from which Bloom is so clearly distinguished does not seem to help us understand Ulysses. Yet the Nameless One does locate something “foreign” in Bloom’s language. Nothing about Bloom disturbs him more. Thus, in response to Bloom’s scientific explanation for why hanged men have erections, he protests, “And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.”28 In response to Bloom’s opinions about foot and mouth disease he remarks, “Mister Knowitall. Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks.”29 An argument about corporal punishment produces the following: —But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere? I mean wouldn’t it be the same here if you put force against force? —Didn’t I tell you? As true as I’m drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.30

There is also, finally, a particularly striking moment in the midst of the Nameless One’s account of a discussion of “Irish sports” (some of which I have already quoted): So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of the lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all of that. And of course Bloom had to have his say

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too about if a fellow had a rower’s heart violent exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.31

Leopold Bloom doesn’t talk like Moses Herzog; he doesn’t mauscheln. Nor does the Nameless One think otherwise; the Nameless One’s irritation with how Bloom talks is not a question of Bloom’s lack of assimilation or a ghetto-like archaism. Yet the Nameless One’s incessant harping about how Bloom speaks and what he says still has to be seen as of a piece with his antisemitism. Let’s note, first of all, that the features ordinarily ascribed by modern European antisemitism to the person of the Jew are recapitulated in the qualities of the language the Nameless One ascribes to Bloom: abstract, dilatory, detached from concrete particulars. The tension Postone describes between the visible, concrete, “thingly” appearance of the commodity and what seems in excess of and parasitic upon it reappears in the Nameless One’s remarks about Bloom’s verbal and verbose defiance of common sense: Bloom can’t let a straw be just a straw, a thing in itself about which there is nothing to say. Second, when we recall that the Nameless One himself appears to embody a kind of antitype of Joycean narrative protocols, we might suspect that when Joyce makes discursive style central to the Nameless One’s criticism of Bloom, Joyce thereby also introduces a certain selfconsciousness about literary language to the Nameless One’s descriptions of and attacks on Bloom. Let me elaborate on these claims in turn. Certain characteristics of Bloom’s speech mark him as a stranger, and it is clear that he either doesn’t understand (as Fritz Senn argues) or doesn’t want to play by (as Wolfgang Hildesheimer suggests) the rules of the language game that regulates discourse in Barney Kiernan’s pub.32 Bloom seems to function as a harbinger of modernity, for what he introduces to the conversation is what modernity—particularly scientifi c modernity— also brings: the sense of the conventionality and contingency of traditional ties that were once seen to be natural. The Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III has parsed the Copernican revolution (and thereby, arguably, modernity itself) with the phrase “your location is not special.”33 When Bloom asks about corporal punishment, “Wouldn’t it be the same here . . . ?” it

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seems less important to worry about what this says about his political credentials than to recognize that what irritates the others about Bloom’s question is that it does not take the uniqueness of the Irish situation as a given, as something that, like a straw picked up from the floor, goes without saying. If we follow Georg Simmel’s reflections in his essay “The Stranger” on the effects of Jewish immigration and assimilation in Western Eu rope, the same unsettling destabilization of location that Gott describes as an effect of the Copernican revolution, what we might call a modernity effect, is also brought about in the life of organic communities by the appearance of the stranger.34 In sharing his scientific preoccupations in Kiernan’s pub, Bloom’s discourse yokes together the modernity effects of both science and the stranger. There is, however, also a kind of distortive violence in the Nameless One’s representation of Bloom’s speech. Bloom may challenge received wisdom— as he does, say, on the virtues of strenuous exercise or the British use of corporal punishment—but contrary to the Nameless One’s account, he does not contravene natural laws—telling you that living is dying or that ducks can be milked—and there is little evidence throughout most of Ulysses that Bloom is anywhere as verbose as the Nameless One makes him out to be. In fact, in the rest of Ulysses Bloom is often rather reticent and awkward, especially in comparison to garrulous types like Simon Dedalus (whose imitation of Larry O’Rourke provides a stark contrast to Bloom’s own exchange of banalities with him), eloquent storytellers like Martin Cunningham (who rescues Bloom’s bumbled attempt to tell his “awfully good” story about Reuben J. Dodd), and confident, if clichéd, speechifiers like the Citizen. “Cyclops” represents a rare moment of Bloom aggressively asserting himself verbally: no wonder he boasts about it afterward. In his rich, suggestive essay “Bloom Among the Orators,” the Swiss Joycean Fritz Senn claims that the Nameless One objects to Bloom’s unadorned accounts of things: “Where everybody is expected to wield tropes divertingly, for the fun of it, Bloom remains, even in his most rhetorical moments, factual (whether he gets the facts right or not), sincere and truthful, devoid of Odyssean trickery.”35 According to Senn, Bloom is not interested in imaginative embellishment for the sake of entertainment, and that is why the Nameless One interrupts him with his own versions. But this is exactly the opposite of what the Nameless One says he objects to in Bloom:

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not an obsession with the facts but an obsession with explanations that undermine your sense of what the facts are; not sincerity, but manipulation. As quoted earlier: —But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere? I mean wouldn’t it be the same here if you put force against force? —Didn’t I tell you? As true as I’m drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.

The gap between what Bloom says and what the Nameless One re-presents him as saying is symptomatic of the distortions of antisemitism, of what we might call the difference between Jewish people and the figure of the Jew. Both the gap itself and the fact that the Nameless One continually cuts Bloom off (in this respect the above example is atypical) point also to the way antisemitism in Ulysses—and in general—is deeply bound up with problems of representation. The Nameless One’s most extreme claims about Bloom are false, yet they have a kind of intuitive plausibility. If we haven’t seen Bloom lecture for hours on “phenomena,” we have seen that he is preoccupied with popular scientific knowledge, and it is true that certain concepts and objects can trigger from him a stream of unfiltered information related to the concept or object in question.36 What the Nameless One describes himself objecting to conforms not to how Bloom really talks but how we have seen him think—how we have seen Joyce write him—in what Joyce called the “initial style” of the previous chapters.37 André Topia’s description of “Bloomian discourse” captures the essential features: The clear designation of the theme . . . plays [in “Lotus Eaters”] the role of a kind of title, a chapter-head which automatically summons, elicits, and reels off the whole series of generic expressions which fit it and belong to its “compartment.” Rather than a space of reverie we are dealing with a linguistic, a rhetorical, an encyclopedic space. Rather than playing out the unbroken continuum of a description, the text scatters indices each of which corresponds to a subclass, a subgroup of a dictionary grouping, a vast repertory of clichés on the “Far East.”38

The third-person past-tense narrative voice that designates the theme is known conventionally as the “narrative norm.” The Nameless One’s “Look

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at, Bloom, do you see that straw, that’s a straw!” parallels the narrative norm’s description of the phenomena that catch Bloom’s attention and to which he responds not with a steady hour’s dilation on each but always enough associated thoughts for Joyce to fi ll a paragraph until the next stimulus appears. What’s at stake here is the specific kind of narration that Ulysses presents: the text invites us to read the Nameless One’s critique of Bloom in terms of its own procedures. In other words, the Nameless One appears not just as a narrative anomaly but as a kind of narrative enemy, a narrating consciousness that is not only hostile toward how Bloom speaks but, by extension, also appears to embody and articulate a hostile account of the fi rst half of Ulysses. Here, in other words, we begin to see how the tension Joyce stages between the Nameless One and Bloom is also marked by a certain selfconsciousness about antagonisms concerning literary language. This tension only becomes more pronounced as the chapter continues. What replaces the initial style—and what keeps interrupting the Nameless One’s own narration—is an even more extreme form of what the Nameless One says he cannot tolerate: the numerous parodic interpolations, in which discourse proliferates in a manner that confounds conventional literary narrative and linguistic common sense alike. As soon as the Nameless One has declared to his antimacassar that Bloom could talk about a straw for an hour his own narration is interrupted by an interpolation: A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of Brian O’Ciarnain’s in Sraid na Bretaine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race.39

No sooner is Bloom accused of excessive dilation than the text itself immediately proceeds to expand upon the discussion that the Nameless One has just skimmed over. The various interpolated discourses in “Cyclops” do precisely what the narrator sees Bloom as doing: producing endless (or at any rate excessive) streams of discourse upon meaningless bits and pieces plucked, like the straw, apparently at random from the environs and events of Barney Kiernan’s pub. The interpolation makes the analogy unmistakable. The text

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aligns the Nameless One’s claims about Bloom’s abstract loquacity with the proliferation of pastiches that dominate Ulysses’ second half. What follows? Clearly, the interpolation undermines the opposition that operates within the Nameless One’s own discourse, not to mention those that he recounts: it suggests that the romanticized myth of origins is not that different from, is even a byproduct of, the increasingly abstract and standardized modernity from which the nationalist wishes to distinguish himself and his country. The discourse of nationalism and “Gaelic sports” is implicated in the world and logic that the Nameless One identifies with Bloom: the very language of the concrete, local, organic, and heroic is shown to be abstract, mobile, and subjectless.40 It also seems to me that Joyce points here to a connection between the sources and kind of hostility Bloom encounters and the sources and kind of hostility his own work initially encountered.41 The Nameless One’s reactions to Bloom can also be read as Joyce’s representation of how his own work might appear through the eyes of a figure whose narrative voice embodies everything that his own work is not. The structural connections between the Nameless One’s account of Bloom’s language and the actual structure of Ulysses’ language suggests that, for Joyce, the ostracism of a stranger perceived as a Jew and resistance to modernist innovations in literary presentation emerge from the same anxieties about representation and abstraction. If the Nameless One’s criticisms work to identify Bloom’s language with the abstract discourses of modernity, the interpolated texts deconstruct this very identification. They do so, first, by showing that the Nameless One’s own discourse, and that of his drinking buddies, is equally implicated in the abstractions of modernity, although these figures themselves fail to recognize it. Second, the distortions to which the Nameless One subjects Bloom’s language point to how much he displaces onto Bloom: what the Nameless One attributes to Bloom—like what the antisemite attributes to the Jew— are actually the features of the “abstract value dimension of social forms.” In the Nameless One’s case these features also strikingly resemble a number of the techniques of Ulysses itself. The interpolated text on “ancient Gaelic sports” is representative of the moment in which Joyce himself abandons personification. Franco Moretti’s account of the difference between the initial and the later style in Ulysses is helpful in this context:

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Bloom reactivates discourses formed around him . . . and then [in the second half of the book] Joyce reactivates those reactivated discourses, without any longer passing through Bloom’s mind. He reactivates them, in other words, without motivating them any longer. Like Pound with The Waste Land [Moretti refers to Pound’s rigorous editing of Eliot’s fi rst draft], Joyce eliminates the bodies and keeps the voices: he erases the original motivation, and allows the new technique to take off freely.42

This moment of transition is entwined with the question of antisemitism. In “Cyclops” Joyce abandons the use of Bloom’s body to focalize the discourses and phenomena of modern life. And at literally the same time as Joyce does so, he connects the way that the Nameless One constructs Bloom as linguistically Jewish with his novel’s own distinctive features: its abstraction, its context-ignoring rationality, its “improper” verbal excesses; these disembodied discourses deliberately mimic the rhetorical features that the Nameless One attributes to Bloom. Ulysses is not, then, a Jewish text but rather one that draws attention to the properties that the antisemite sees personified in the Jew by manifesting and exploiting these same features. None of this is to deny that Bloom does, at least in the early chapters written in the initial style, seem to serve to embody certain key experiences of modernity in forms conventionally linked to the experience of modern European Jews: his mobility, his rationality, his alienation, his preoccupation with commerce and consumption. But in “Cyclops” this kind of embodiment is called into question. Joyce’s critique of antisemitic fantasies about the Jew can be seen as vital to the way we understand Ulysses’ break with the language of the individual, with voice, and with anthropocentric representation. “Cyclops,” the site of this break, marks the point at which Joyce emphatically abandons the personifi cation of modern life in favor of an artistic exploration of modernity that imitates its abstraction, intangibility, and excess; modernity is represented linguistically and analogically rather than through a particular kind of person. In the “Cyclops” chapter— and beyond it—Joyce displays the creative potential to be found in undoing antisemitic fantasies rather than indulging such fantasies as a means to poetic inspiration. Joyce’s recognition of the impossibility of representing all that is abstract, intangible, and excessive in the modern world becomes the point of departure for radical artistic innovations that challenge the constructions of the Jew that prevailed both in the works of other modernists

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and in the broader discourses of nation and race of the period. Ulysses’ most singular formal features can therefore be read as a complex, critical reflection on the early twentieth-century European antisemitic imagination. This departure rests, however, upon a certain mimesis and personifi cation of the figure of the antisemite. Where the Jew personifies for the antisemite the otherwise unrepresentable aspects of the experience of modernity, the antisemite appears in Joyce as the one who is wedded to embodied experience and representation itself and who cannot properly recognize, tolerate, give form to, that experience. My point is not that in personifying the Nameless One in this way Joyce is morally and politically indistinguishable from the antisemite but rather that his doing so shows the complex mimetic relations between the modernist and antisemitic imaginations, how each rests upon the disavowal of the other. Joyce’s critique of the Nameless One points to the Nameless One in something like the manner that the Nameless One points to Bloom. Joyce implicitly asks his addressees what kind of language, what kind of storytelling, they will accept, what kinds of stories and forms they will recognize themselves as subjects in and submit to the interpretive claims of, and he does so by personifying the alternative in a par ticular aestheticopolitical figure. For the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor W. Adorno too, the figures of the antisemite and the “enemy of modernism” are well-nigh identical, and both are crucial to how Adorno thinks about and articulates a certain modernist poetics. The stakes could not be higher: Adorno regards modernist art as part of the appropriate response to the Nazi Judeocide. But he also believes that modernist art excites the same hostile affects in its enemies as the Jews elicit in the antisemite. In the next chapter I show just how closely linked Adorno’s ideas about antisemitism and antimodernism are and try to explain how he might reckon with the hostile response to modernism as a fitting response to the event he calls “Auschwitz.”

F i v e

Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism

Introduction: Prohibitions and Their Effects No one in the immediate postwar period or since has given more thought to how and why to continue the modernist project in the aftermath of the Shoah than the German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and literary critic Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno understands Nazism as fundamentally regressive. The brilliant Adorno scholar and translator Robert Hullot-Kentor has described his master’s work as “an oeuvre that is fundamentally a critical study of the dynamic of historical regression.”1 But the critique of regression should not be confused with a wholesale rejection of all efforts to return to the past, even the ancient past, which, for Adorno, can also be a source of profound value. Indeed, Adorno thinks that the way forward for philosophy, culture, and the arts—beyond complicity with the social and cultural forces that lead to genocide—requires a certain set of movements backward, above all, a movement back to the biblical Second Commandment’s 139

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prohibition of images (Bilderverbot). Exodus 20:4– 6 instructs: “You shall make no carved likeness and no image of what is in the heavens above or what is on the earth below or what is in the waters beneath the earth. You shall not bow to them and you shall not worship them.”2 “I see no other possibility,” Adorno declares, “than an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once originally meant.”3 Adorno puts the prohibition of images at the heart of his work, using it to explain how a genuinely materialist thought can avoid subsuming particular objects beneath general concepts and “grasp the thing” rather than received ideas and images of it, to justify his political philosophy’s refusal to depict utopia, and to elaborate the virtues of modern works of art that do not mirror reality.4 Most commentators also assume that the prohibition underwrites his various declarations about the barbarism or impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. The Bilderverbot is generally understood as a distinctive kind of purity law, and Adorno’s modern, materialist extensions suggest that he too intends it as such: as a model for the prevention of various kinds of philosophical, moral, political, and aesthetic contamination, be it projection, idealism, fetishism, sadism, or commodification.5 But if purity is the intention of Adorno’s Bilderverbot, it is, he knows, not always the effect. Adorno recognizes that while there are those who will be loyal to the prohibition, there will also be those who will respond badly to it, without necessarily knowing much, if anything, about it. At crucial junctures in his work—particularly his reflections on antisemitism and antimodernism—Adorno recognizes and reckons with what I will call the problem of the improper response. This problem emerges from Adorno’s implicit observation that in many subjects the prohibition of images seems to elicit precisely what it is meant to prevent: the substitution of images, ideas, projections, and fantasies for the thing itself. Adorno diagnoses that substitution as false projection. This chapter explores the relationship between the prohibition of images and false projection (in which repressed internal desires are externalized and become images). My wager is that reading Adorno’s account of the Bilderverbot in conjunction with his theory of the improper response to it can alter our understanding of how he thinks the relationship between Jews and modernism. A significant strand of (largely French) postwar thought seeks to reverse

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directly the valences and fantasies we have seen unfold from Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” through Lewis’s Time and Western Man to the Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” where modernism is a symptom of the Jewish cultural pollution of modernity. Thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman, and others identify in Jews and Judaism a kind of zone of purity, a “sublime other” (as Gillian Rose puts it) of a modernity that is otherwise contaminated by its complicity with the Nazi genocide.6 As other chapters in this book show, many commentators extend this sublime otherness to literary modernism, interpreting figures such as Joyce and Beckett as “Judaic” or “non-Jewish Jewish” writers and modernism as uniquely free of modernity’s contamination because it too is somehow Jewish.7 Adorno too believes that the Holocaust calls modernity radically into question. He also clearly holds that the Bilderverbot offers an alternative to just those features of modernity that led to the genocide. His use of the prohibition thus could easily be construed as a part of a self-conscious effort to propose Judaism as the privileged other of modernity. Yet Adorno’s thought is, I think, at odds with that postwar tradition of thought, and it is so precisely because of his understanding of the Bilderverbot. One reason is that Adorno’s account of the prohibition precludes interpreting it as any kind of signifier of Jewish identity; if anything, he means it to critique just such efforts. The main reason his philosophy is at odds with the postwar French tradition, however, is less conceptual than contextual. Adorno understands that there is more to overcoming received ideas and fantasies about Jews and modernism than a certain conceptual reconfiguring, and that this “more” involves a confrontation with the conditions and subjects that produce those ideas and fantasies in the fi rst place. His reflections on the improper response put modernist iterations of the Bilderverbot up against those social, political, and psychological conditions least hospitable to it. In short, whereas French postwar thought reverses the valences and fantasies of the recent past, Adorno’s reflections on the improper response to the Bilderverbot show that he seeks instead, via a certain inoculatory repetition of those valences and fantasies, to confront and work through them. In the opening section of this chapter I critique the idea that Adorno’s concept of the Bilderverbot can be read as an expression of Jewish identity. Once we see that there are good reasons not to read Adorno as authorizing

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the notion of modernism as Jewish, other more productive approaches to Adorno’s understanding of how the prohibition of images mediates the relationship between Jews and modernism open up. I take Adorno’s early claim that what connects Jews and modernism is their lack of connection, their being out of place, as a point of departure for thinking about the perception of both Jews and modernism as dirt. Turning to the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which provides Adorno’s most detailed account of how false projection misrecognizes Jewish purity laws such as the Bilderverbot as sites of abjection and transgression, I challenge the notion— one with some currency in recent scholarship—that Adorno holds the Jews in some measure responsible for antisemitism. It is a mistaken interpretation of Adorno but a very useful one, because to grasp why it is wrong we need to attend to the extent to which the concept of false projection informs Adorno’s description of Jewish laws and practices. Doing so allows us to see that what at first glance might appear to be Adorno’s own views are actually his representations of the antisemitic perspective. Adorno’s theory of antimodernism recapitulates his theory of antisemitism to a surprising degree. Both, for him, are theories of false projection’s encounter with the Bilderverbot. The question then becomes: how can Adorno maintain that a modernist observance of the prohibition is an appropriate response to the situation of the camps when he knows that it will revive the same fantasies, aggression, and violence that first gave rise to that situation? The fi nal part of this chapter explores, through a close reading of a crucial passage in the “Meditations on Metaphysics” section of Negative Dialectics, how we might read Adorno as addressing and seeking to solve this problem.

The Bilderverbot and Jewish Identity What does it mean for Adorno, a secular, materialist thinker, to declare loyalty to the prohibition of images? What does he think loyalty to the prohibition of images means in the twentieth century? A consciousness interpolating images, a third element, between itself and that which it thinks would unwittingly reproduce idealism. A body of ideas would substitute for the object of cognition, and the subjective arbitrariness of such

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ideas is that of the authorities. The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological prohibition of images [Bilderverbot]. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology.8

Adorno extends the image ban to received ideas. This is reason enough for us to approach with caution assertions that his loyalty to the Second Commandment must express his Jewish identity or that it reveals that his own thought (or the modernism he likewise believes observes a version of it) is Jewish. Of such assertions there is no shortage. Micha Brumlik insists that the Bilderverbot is incomprehensible without reference to its historical origins in ancient Judaism. The Bilderverbot, he suggests, therefore turns any philosophy that observes it into jüdisches Denken—Jewish thought.9 Alexander Garcia Düttmann wonders, “can the ban on names and images be detached from its Jewish origin?” and gives no reason to think it could be, along with plenty of reasons to think that Jewish identity is the central fetish of Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book from which he extracts the notion that “whoever thinks ineluctably becomes a Jew.”10 Martin Jay sees Adorno’s “refusal to spell out the utopian alternative to present-day society by reference to the Jewish prohibition on picturing God or paradise” as a “substantial” expression of his recognition of “the true ramifications of his Jewish heritage” in the wake of the Holocaust.11 Steven S. Schwarzschild claims to follow Adorno when he maintains that because a certain strand of aesthetic modernism observes the logic of the Bilderverbot it represents nothing less than art “assimilating Judaism.”12 Similar assertions can be found in the work of Richard Wolin, Terry Eagleton, Lambert Zuidervaart, Thierry de Duve, and Sander Gilman.13 There are a number of problems with such claims. Adorno would see the implicit rhetorical question that underlies them—“How can the prohibition of images not be Jewish?”— as drawing upon just the kind of coercive, authoritarian appeal to self-evidence that he rejects. More specifically, Adorno appeals to the Bilderverbot precisely to prevent what he calls identity thinking— subsuming individual objects, nonidentical particulars, beneath general concepts, categories, and ideas that obliterate their distinctiveness. To think of the Second Commandment as an example of Jewishness is to

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subsume it beneath a general concept, to deny its nonidentical singularity within Adorno’s thought. For Adorno, the stakes are high: in Negative Dialectics he declares that “Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death” because within pure identity “the destruction of nonidentity is ideologically lurking.”14 To assume the inherent Jewishness of Adorno’s loyalty to the Bilderverbot is not, for him, to take the side of the victims of genocide but to repeat the kind of thinking he thinks led to their destruction.15 Nor can one defend this form of identity thinking with an appeal to the historical origins of the Bilderverbot in ancient Judaism. For Adorno, origins do not condition outcomes; he is far more inclined to argue instead that outcomes change our understanding of origins. In Dialectic of Enlightenment the rise of the bourgeois subject compels us to revise our understanding of Odysseus and see in him “the prototype of the bourgeois individual, whose concept originates in the unwavering self-assertion of which the protagonist driven to wander the earth is the primeval model”; in Negative Dialectics Auschwitz discloses the “untruth” that had always resided in the traditions of philosophy, art, and “the enlightening sciences.”16 In “Trying to Understand Endgame” he announces, “the catastrophe that has befallen the whole is illuminated in the horrors of the last catastrophe; but only in those horrors, not when one looks at its origins.”17 Adorno’s remarks about the Second Commandment in Aesthetic Theory are not only consistent with this tendency; they also reveal that his understanding of the prohibition’s original context is more complex than one might think: The Old Testament prohibition on images has an aesthetic as well as a theological dimension. That one should make no image, which means no image of anything whatsoever, expresses at the same time that it is impossible to make such an image. Through its duplication in art, what appears in nature is robbed of its being-in-itself, in which the experience of nature is fulfi lled.18

For Adorno the Old Testament prohibition is always already aesthetic; that it was established before the arts emerged as a distinct realm, let alone before modernism emerged as a distinctive strand within the arts, means neither that the origin explains those subsequent developments nor that those subsequent developments are reducible to that origin. The theological prohibition of images, he thinks, was never purely theological.

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Thus, whereas someone like Karl Löwith argues that putatively secular concepts in the philosophy of history are historically derived from, structurally akin to, and thus finally reducible to religious ideas, Adorno proposes instead that the Bilderverbot can recur in secular contexts without its religious origins determining the meaning of those subsequent iterations.19 Those second-generation Frankfurt School theorists (Jürgen Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, Seyla Benhabib) who protest that Adorno’s loyalty to the Second Commandment, while an admirable expression of solidarity with Europe’s Jews, nevertheless renders his thought theological and therefore unphilosophical do not recognize that Adorno’s conception of the prohibition can only be grasped if categories such as “religious,” “secular,” “philosophical,” or “aesthetic” are not regarded as mutually exclusive.20 By the same token, my point is not that the prohibition has nothing to do with the Jews but that it is not always necessarily Jewish, and that the ways in which it is Jewish do not and should not go without saying. Adorno does not think of modernism as Jewish, not despite but because of the role of the prohibition in his conception of modernism, be it his own, Beckett’s, or anyone else’s.21 Yet the prohibition is pivotal to his ideas about both Jews and modernism. While Adorno does not conflate the two, he does think they are significantly related. In 1940, in preparation for their joint composition of Dialectic of Enlightenment, he writes to Max Horkheimer that “there are by the way the closest connections between . . . our conception of modern art and that of Jews as nomads, since the absence of a settled existence and the failure to bind to the reified character of an object of action stem from the same source.”22 Close connections and parallels, not identity and descent. Before he begins to think of both in terms of the Bilderverbot, what Adorno thinks connects Jews and modernism is, tellingly, a singular lack of connection, that they are out of place: “absence of settled existence,” “failure to bind.” If Adorno thinks that Jews and modern art are closely connected in these ways— disconnected, unsettled, rootless—we should perhaps not be surprised to learn that he thinks antisemitism and antimodernism are closely connected too, nor that Adorno’s thinking about hostility toward Jews and toward modern art alike will continue to be informed by his earlier description of what closely connects them even once the Bilderverbot becomes a governing term of his philosophy. To think through those close

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connections I turn now to Adorno’s account of antisemitism, particularly in the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. That chapter’s account of how antisemites imagine the Jews provides Adorno’s most detailed analysis of the dynamics of the improper response: both where it comes from and how it does and does not respond to those who observe the prohibition of images.

False Projection and Antisemitism Adorno categorically rejects the idea that one can explain antisemitism by examining the Jews—who they are, what they do—because he sees antisemitism as an emphatic and categorical refusal of all experience of Jews: “All too often the presupposition is that anti-Semitism . . . could be countered through concrete experiences with Jews, whereas the genuine anti-Semite is defined far more by his incapacity for any experience whatsoever, by his unresponsiveness.”23 Nevertheless, some commentators think that despite this methodological premise, in practice Adorno holds the Jews partly responsible for their fate. Indeed, in “Elements of Anti-Semitism” (which scholars agree is largely his, not Horkheimer’s, work) Adorno pronounces on such matters as the effects of Jewish gestures and expressions on nonJewish sensibilities and the role of the Jews in the rise of capitalism. I want to show, however, that it is conceptually consistent for Adorno’s account of antisemitism both to insist on the methodological primacy of understanding the antisemite as incapable of experience of the Jews and to examine distinctive features of the Jews. The explanation lies in what I call projective object selection. In “Elements of Anti-Semitism” Adorno explores why antisemites select the Jews as the object of their projections and how the Jews appear in the light of such projections. Adorno’s account of the fantasy of the abject or dirty Jew, in its various permutations, needs to be understood in the light of this projective encounter. The antisemite categorically refuses all experience and knowledge of Jews. So where does Adorno think the antisemite’s ideas about Jews come from? Anti-Semitism is based on false projection. It is the reverse of genuine mimesis and has deep affi nities to the repressed. . . . If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself . . .

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displac[ing] the volatile inward into the outer world, branding the intimate friend as foe. Impulses which are not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object, the prospective victim.24

The short answer is that the antisemite’s ideas about the Jews are repressed, externalized self-perceptions. Adorno believes that the antisemite sees in the Jew what he cannot acknowledge in himself: the desires to dominate and exploit, to indulge in forbidden, tabooed pleasures, and to live happily without power. Projection is a psychoanalytic concept, but Adorno alters Freud’s model in two significant ways. First, Adorno distinguishes among kinds of projection. He thinks that “in a certain sense, all perception is projection.”25 What matters is whether projection is accompanied by self-reflection. Conscious projection, says Adorno, reflects on the difference between subject and object and is conscious of how the external world both enters consciousness and is different from it. If materialist “thought aims at the thing itself,” selfreflection is how Adorno thinks it tries to grasp it.26 False projection, on the other hand, refuses to reflect: “The pathic element in anti-Semitism is not projective behavior as such but the exclusion of reflection from that behavior.”27 Adorno also supplements the notion of projection with that of mimesis. In a sense, in the concept of false projection Adorno simply makes explicit what is latent in Freud, since both understand the projecting subject as seeing in the world his own disavowed, unrecognized image. But Adorno draws a couple of further implications from the mimetic component of the concept. One is that projection seeks actively to dominate its environment (“false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself”); the other is that false projection possesses a kind of unconscious cunning. Adorno thinks that what the antisemite projects he nevertheless imitates and enjoys: “they detest the Jews and imitate them constantly. There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness.”28 How can someone imitate what they profess to despise? Adorno claims that the antisemite rationalizes his enjoyment of otherwise repressed mimetic pleasures by claiming to seek them out only in order to eliminate them: one is allowed to indulge the outlawed drive if acting with the unquestionable aim of expunging it. . . . Anyone who sniffs out “bad” smells in order to

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extirpate them may imitate to his heart’s content the snuffl ing which takes its unrationalized pleasure in the smell itself . . . The Jews as a whole are charged with practicing forbidden magic and bloody rituals. Disguised as an accusation, the subliminal craving of the indigenous population to revert to mimetic sacrificial practices is joyously readmitted to their consciousness. . . . The popu lar nationalist fantasies of Jewish crimes, of infanticide and sadistic excesses, of racial poisoning and international conspiracy, precisely defi ne the anti-Semitic dream, and fall short of its realization.29

Nazi antisemitism clearly invited this diagnosis. Even before Adorno and Horkheimer had begun work on Dialectic of Enlightenment, the American critic Kenneth Burke had come to a similar conclusion in his 1939 analysis of Mein Kampf, paraphrasing Hitler thus: “The ‘Aryan’ is ‘constructive’; the Jew is ‘destructive’; and the ‘Aryan,’ to continue his construction, must destroy the Jewish destruction. The Aryan, as the vessel of love, must hate the Jewish hate.”30 For Burke as for Adorno, the purposive response to an imagined threat shields the perpetrator from detecting in his fantasy of the Jews an image of his own repressed impulses. Adorno argues, in short, that to understand antisemitism we need to understand the antisemite as he refuses to understand himself. This refusal is the enabling condition of the antisemite’s paradoxical self-imitation, that is, his imitation of his own repressed, projected impulses. But Adorno also wants to know why the antisemite projects onto the Jews and, further, wants to know why what is projected onto the Jews are these par ticular fantasies. One might wonder if Adorno thereby abandons the model of projection, since he is no longer examining the projecting subject but rather the object, which he otherwise seems to insist has no bearing on the equation. But these questions actually extend the idea of projection. Why? Because there is no such thing as a blank projection surface. Consider, by way of analogy, the projection of a film onto a movie screen. The screen for a movie projection is not literally blank, but white and flat. We could still see the projected image without a screen that was white and flat, but we would not see it in the same way (think of the distracting effects of a dirty screen or of a movie projected onto a colored curtain). Without a surface of any kind for the projected light to strike, we would see nothing. Our ability to see the image as well as we do on the flat, white screen is

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predicated on our forgetting of the positive properties, perhaps even the existence, of the screen itself. None of this entails that the whiteness of the screen causes or is responsible for the projection but rather that we would not see the movie in the way we do if the projected light did not strike that surface in that way. The object of a false projection is not blank either but has certain properties that make visible what is projected onto it. A Jew allows us to see certain things about the projecting antisemitic subject; a person of African descent might allow us to see other things about the same projecting subject or might elicit different things about a subject whose encounters with Jews revealed nothing, and so on. What is made visible in one kind of encounter will not necessarily remain so when projected elsewhere, but that does not mean that we should think that the object is therefore the cause of what is projected onto her or him. Moreover, just as the screen is not a natural object but is constructed to meet certain specifications, so too a theory of false projection might attend to how projection’s objects are tailored for the purpose of serving as a projection surface. Such a study might examine how the particular histories of oppressed groups are forcefully inscribed into their members’ gestures, language, and self-understanding, and might consider the particular social, political, and historical spaces the group’s members are permitted, induced, or compelled to occupy.31 Although Adorno never explicitly articulates the problem of projective object selection in so many words, it is just this problem that much of “Elements of Anti-Semitism” addresses. Adorno reflects on the circumstances that make any group murderers or victims and on what makes the Jews “conspicuous and unprotected” to the antisemite.32 When he describes Jewish gestures and voices as uncanny reminders to the bourgeoisie of their recently overcome past, he does so not, as Wagner did in “Judaism in Music,” to suggest that there is something inherently repellent about the Jew to the German but rather to undermine the very idea of an inherently Jewish gesture. Adorno thinks such gestures need to be understood as symptoms of a history of social exclusion, inscriptions upon Jewish bodies of their slow, partial, and highly conditional assimilation into European societies. Initially more problematic are Adorno’s descriptions of the Jews as “the colonizers of progress” and “bearers of capitalist modes of existence.”33 Both claims seem at first glance to suggest that the Jews are agents of

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capitalist modernity who therefore pay the price for anti-capitalist resentment. The relationship of capitalism and the Jews has, of course, been a source of debate and polemic at least since Karl Marx’s dispute with Bruno Bauer, and even today one can find arguments for a special Jewish cultural and dispositional affinity for capitalism.34 But Adorno’s point is different. He argues that the Jews are not capitalism’s prime movers but rather its strategically positioned proxies, permitted access only to certain realms of the economy (circulation, not property ownership), sent out by those with real social, economic, and political power to do their dirty work (hence colonizers of progress in the sense of settlers sent away from the homeland), and thus deliberately left exposed as capitalism’s conspicuous, visible scapegoats. Thus when Adorno writes of the “knights of industry” that “their anti-Semitism is self-hate, the bad conscience of the parasite,”35 he does not mean that the knights of industry are no different from the Jews they loathe but that they have actively remade the Jews in their own disavowed image. Nowhere is it more important to bear in mind Adorno’s premise that antisemitism is false projection than when we read his account of the relationship between antisemitic fantasy and Jewish prohibitions. Here, however, we encounter a major complication. As we have seen, Adorno suggests that false projection has a significant relation to repressed mimesis. But how and why was mimesis repressed in the first place? For some commentators (most notably Julia Kristeva), this repression is inaugurated by Jewish monotheism.36 While Adorno does not make this argument, there are those who think he ascribes a similar role not to monotheism as such but to the Jewish institution of the Bilderverbot. But if the Jews are responsible for the initial repression of mimesis, they are not just screens that make visible the disavowed self-image of the antisemite: they are the ones who, so to speak, built the projector; they are the reason for there being false projection at all. That is, if Adorno believes that prohibitions such as the Bilderverbot repress mimesis, he might therefore imply that antisemitism is not simply a matter of Christian European projections onto Jewish others but also a delayed effect of Judaism’s contributions to civilization itself: antisemitic false projection as the chicken come home to roost. That, at any rate, is how one of the more influential contemporary commentators on the Frankfurt School, the intellectual historian Anson Rabinbach, understands “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” Rabinbach takes Adorno

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to argue that “the murder of the Jews is a form of revenge for civilization’s triumph over nature; those who first turned ritual sacrifice into rationality by carry ing out the prohibition are themselves sacrificed as the expression of ‘repressed mimesis.’ ”37 Rabinbach suggests that “it might be argued” that in “Elements of Anti-Semitism” Adorno ultimately holds the Jews accountable for their own fate. In contrast to the image of the Jews in the first chapter [of Dialectic of Enlightenment], where, in Freud’s words, they secure “a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality,” the Jews appear . . . [in “Elements of Anti-Semitism”] in a more ambivalent light, both as those who impose the taboo on mimesis and as the carriers of a “premythological,” “prematriarchal” residue of mimesis. Adorno’s thesis that anti-Semitism preserves the image of Jews as “nomadic” explicitly identifies them, not merely with the perpetration of the taboo [on mimesis], but with the refusal to adapt to it.38

Rabinbach’s interpretation would, in other words, align Adorno with Kristeva’s apologia for Céline’s antisemitism in Powers of Horror, as the inevitable response of a mimetic, rhythmic, expressive writer to Judaism’s patriarchal prohibitions, and draw him into the orbit of figures such as Jan Assmann and Regina Schwartz, who locate the origins of Western intolerance, exclusion, and repression in Jewish monotheism.39 It would be strange if Adorno, who declares extreme loyalty to the Bilderverbot, also held it responsible for the repression of something else he values, namely, mimesis. In the introductory chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” Adorno and Horkheimer present Jewish prohibitions as providing a kind of compromise with mimesis: “In the Jewish religion, in which the idea of the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth, the link between name and essence is still acknowledged in the prohibition on uttering the name of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism propitiates magic by negating it in the idea of God.” 40 Here Jewish prohibitions are presented not as the origins of civilization’s rationalist suppression of mimesis but as an alternative to it: rather than repressing, they acknowledge and appease. But Rabinbach would deny none of this: his claim is that this position is not sustained in “Elements.” He might remind us that when Adorno declares in “Elements” that the condition of civilization is “the severity with

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which, over the centuries, the rulers have prevented both their own successors and the subjugated masses from relapsing into mimetic behavior,” his first example is “the religious ban on graven images.” 41 He might further point out that subjugations of mimetic behavior are, for Adorno, “the triumph of society over nature” and that Adorno notes, “the Jews themselves, over the millennia, have played their part in this.” 42 So just what is that part, and how decisive is it? While Rabinbach is right to think that false projection represents for Adorno the return of repressed mimesis, he is, I think, mistaken to claim that Adorno believes it is the Jews who initially repress it, let alone that they are therefore in some way “accountable for their own fate.” This misreading of Adorno stems, first, from a failure to bear in mind the concept of false projection in Adorno’s explanation of antisemitism and, second, from a persistent redescription of the Bilderverbot as a Mimesisverbot, a prohibition of mimesis.43 This redescription leads Rabinbach to read the prohibition of images as a repression of all mimesis rather than as what Adorno consistently argues it is, namely, a sublation of mimesis. Rabinbach’s reading produces a more straightforward causal explanation of antisemitism, but at the cost of confusing Adorno’s views on the prohibition with those of the antisemites he diagnoses. “Elements of Anti-Semitism” does not present Jewish prohibitions as long-term causes of the antisemite’s false projection; rather, it describes how Jewish prohibitions appear in the light of antisemitic false projection. Although I will not press the point, we should also note that even if Adorno did think that the Jews were the first to repress mimesis this would not, for him, make them accountable for their subsequent fate, because, as we have seen, he does not think that origins explain outcomes. One might add that in the passages from “Elements” in which the Bilderverbot subjugates mimetic behavior, Adorno’s position on that subjugation is far from unequivocally negative. Adorno opposes regression, so preventing a relapse to mimetic behavior (rather than, say, a recollection or sublation of it), is, for him, no bad thing. For the same reason, his acute awareness of the costs of society’s triumph over nature should not be taken as a wholesale rejection of that triumph: as many scholars have argued, in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer do not so much condemn reason and civilization as call for their fulfillment.

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Where Rabinbach sees an attribution of responsibility I see an exposition of the conditions and consequences of false projection. This exposition is most evident as Adorno elaborates on how Jewish purity laws— prohibitions of images, names, and certain foods—produce fantasies of Jewish abjection: As the oldest surviving patriarchy, the incarnation of monotheism, they [the Jews] converted taboos into maxims of civilization while the others were still enmeshed in magic. The Jews appeared to have successfully achieved what Christianity had attempted in vain: the disempowerment of magic by means of its own strength, which, as worship of God, is turned against itself. They have not so much eradicated the adaptation to nature as elevated [aufgehoben] it to the pure duties of ritual. In this way they have preserved its reconciling memory without relapsing through symbols into mythology. They are therefore regarded by advanced civilization as both backward and too advanced, like and unlike, shrewd and stupid. They are pronounced guilty of what, as the first citizens, they were the fi rst to subdue in themselves [zuerst in sich gebrochen haben]: the susceptibility to the lure of base instincts, the urge toward the beast and the earth, the worship of images. Because they invented the concept of the kosher, they are persecuted as swine. The anti-Semites appoint themselves executors of the Old Testament: they see to it that the Jews, having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, unto dust shall return.44

Here, as in the introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno takes pains to point out that repressing mimesis is precisely what the Jews do not do, that the prohibitions of images and of naming God, along with the dietary restrictions, are not equivalent to banning mimesis as such. He explicitly describes the prohibitions as forms of Aufhebung, sublation, with its denotations (famously exploited by Hegel) of simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and elevation. The major cultural achievement of the prohibition is thereby distinguished from repression, a word conspicuous here by its absence. Aufhebung of mimesis rather than repression: this is the crux of Adorno’s argument about the Bilderverbot throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is what civilization fails to recognize and thus distorts: the Jews, says Adorno, have sublated (aufgehoben) the mimetic relation to nature without relapsing to nature and “are therefore regarded by advanced civilization as both backward and too advanced, like and unlike, shrewd and stupid.” Therefore

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regarded—not rightly but mistakenly. Judaism’s dialectical solution—both enlightenment and mimesis, progress and memory— does not fit Christian civilization’s linear model of history. Adorno implies that the dialectical Jewish solution is misunderstood as ambivalent, the memory of mimesis misread as what Rabinbach calls a “residue” of the same. Rabinbach attributes these views to Adorno, but the talk of residue is not Adorno’s characterization of Judaism as such but of antisemitic projection and misrecognition. Failure to recognize Aufhebung— in other words, the projection of a linear conception of history onto a dialectical screen— leads, Adorno thinks, to the distinctively contradictory content of antisemitic fantasy; it is why the antisemite perceives the Jews as ambivalent, as both advanced and backward, like and unlike, out of place because out of time. If anything like repression appears in this passage, it is where Adorno describes the Jews overcoming “the lure of base instincts, the urge toward the beast and the earth, the worship of images.” Here the Jews seem to achieve something like the organic repression that in Civilization and Its Discontents Freud claims lies at the foundation of human culture.45 Adorno emphasizes, however, that the Jews have not forbidden these urges to others but have subdued them or, literally, broken them in themselves (in sich gebrochen haben). Note the example that follows: “Because they invented the concept of the kosher, they are persecuted as swine.” Kashrut applies only to Jews; it says nothing about the eating habits of gentiles. Yet that self-prohibition and its implicit self-overcoming is enough, Adorno suggests, to catalyze the fantasy of Jewish abjection: Jews as pigs, likely an allusion to the historical Judensau that Adorno (baptized a Catholic and confi rmed as a Protestant) must have seen decorating so many old German churches. According to Adorno, what is unbearable about the Jews, what stimulates fantasies about their indulgence of low and abject desires, is less anything that the Jews have imposed upon the rest of Western civilization than what they have imposed upon themselves. The sight, or thought, of it—the fantasized scene—is more than the antisemitic imagination can bear. In other words, Adorno thinks Jewish purity laws appear to the antisemite as forms of abject, transgressive indulgence because they actually display a paradoxical form of freedom. Adorno suggests that the prohibitions

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emancipate the Jews from the bondage of the very base mimetic desires that are attributed to them. The antisemite, on this reading, correctly intuits that the prohibition preserves mimesis’s desires but, unable to grasp the prohibition as a dialectical sublation, misrecognizes it as a kind of hypocrisy in which the Jews continue secretly to enjoy the base pleasures that they claim to deny themselves. Here it is useful to recall that in Moses and Monotheism Freud too locates a kind of pleasure in Judaism’s prohibitions. For Freud, when an instinctual renunciation is made for internal rather than external reasons, “in obedience to the super-ego,” it “also brings the ego a yield of pleasure— a substitutive satisfaction, as it were.” 46 This in turn leads to further renunciations: “in a fresh rapture of moral asceticism [the Jews] imposed more and more instinctual renunciations on themselves and in that way reached—in doctrine and precept, at least— ethical heights which remained inaccessible to the other peoples of antiquity.” 47 Thus, as Eric Santner points out, the Jews, for Freud, “rediscover, on a different level of experience and imagination, the ‘pagan’ excesses which Judaism had ostensibly evacuated from the religious experience.” 48 While there are certain clear differences between Adorno and Freud—Freud would see this pleasure as having more to do with masochism than freedom—by attributing to Jewish prohibitions a certain preservation and transformation of mimesis, Adorno will also come to see in them a source of pleasure. At stake, then, in “Elements of Anti-Semitism” is not, as Rabinbach maintains, a contradiction between two images Adorno presents of Jews— progressive inaugurators of patriarchal rationality versus residually matriarchal nomads—but a tension between two ideas about the antisemite’s perceptions of Jews. On the one hand, Adorno insists that antisemitic subjectivity is distinguished by the refusal of any real experience of Jews. On the other, to persecute the Jews as swine because they have invented the laws of kashrut, to imagine them as hypocritically enjoying the pleasures of mimesis despite their prohibitions is also, Adorno suggests, to have a kind of accidental insight about them. But this insight has nothing to do with either the antisemite’s direct experience of the Jews or the longue durée responsibility of the Jews for false projection: it is how things appear in the distorting light of false projection. For Adorno, what the antisemite perceives about the Jews he perceives partially, symptomatically, and only because he

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is already looking for it, in order to give himself an excuse to imitate not the Jews themselves but his fantasy image of them. Adorno does not, then, see the antisemitism of his time as a kind of historical revenge for repressive prohibitions first imposed by the Jews. If anything, his explanation of antisemitism reverses an earlier explanation of vengefulness itself as Jewish: Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment in the Genealogy of Morality. For Nietzsche, as we have seen in previous chapters, “the slaves’ revolt in morality begins with the Jews.” 49 That revolt, says Nietzsche, consists of a reversal of noble values born of ressentiment, the hatred felt by those too weak to act toward those strong and spontaneous enough to do so. Adorno sees things otherwise. He holds that it is the powerful who are consumed with envy at sight of the self-overcoming and psychological freedom of powerless Jews. Adorno argues, in short, that the prohibition of images serves as a kind of catalyst for the abject fantasies and violent actions of the antisemite. The prohibition would, then, seem to play a significant role in Adorno’s causal account of the genocide that was unfolding in Europe as he and Horkheimer were writing Dialectic of Enlightenment. It should therefore strike us as not entirely intuitive that in his postwar writings Adorno then declares that the appropriate response to Auschwitz involves the prohibition’s reiteration in the spheres of culture, philosophy, and literature. It is one thing to say that Jewish observance of the image ban is systematically misrecognized by antisemites and quite another to say that observing the ban is an appropriate response to genocide. Will these iterations be subject to the same projection and aggression? Adorno believed that contemporary postwar Europe had not changed since the liberation of the camps: “barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror. The societal pressure still bears down, although the danger remains invisible nowadays.”50 The conditions that lead to the death camps, including the tendency to false projection, still obtain. Despite certain significant differences between them, Adorno does indeed imply that the postwar modernist iteration of the Bilderverbot will be subject to the same projections and aggression as those that he examines in “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” The question is, then, why and how Adorno might see such iterations as appropriate responses to the event he calls Auschwitz.

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Modernism, the Bilderverbot, and the “Enemies of Modern Art” In Negative Dialectics Adorno pronounces that “Beckett has reacted to the situation of the concentration camps— a situation he never calls by name, as if a prohibition of images lay over it—in the only fitting manner. What is, he says, is like a concentration camp.”51 The invocation of the Bilderverbot is more than a passing comparison, but to see just how deeply the prohibition structures Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett we need to turn to his 1961 essay on Endgame, where Adorno declares of Beckett’s refusal to write more obviously political or “committed” plays, Playing with elements of reality without any mirroring, taking no stand and fi nding pleasure in this freedom from prescribed activity, exposes more than would taking a stand with intent to expose. The name of the catastrophe is to be spoken only in silence.52

Here Adorno attributes to Endgame many of the features he sees as distinctive of the Bilderverbot’s logic. This is most obvious in the name that is spoken in silence, which reiterates the Jewish prohibition on naming God. Once again, Adorno makes clear that this prohibition is not a repression but a sublation. The prohibition on direct, literal naming does not mean the name is not spoken at all but that it is spoken otherwise: the name is simultaneously canceled, preserved, and elevated. The silence points ostensively to the catastrophe, just as Jewish substitutions for the name of God nevertheless indicate the divinity. The representation of reality too is aufgehoben: elements of reality are played with without any mirroring, without, that is, conforming to the demands of any form of representational realism, yet they are constitutive parts of the work itself, preserved through artistic play. As with the kosher laws, Adorno posits for the one who observes these prohibitions an experience not of repression but freedom and, as for Freud, pleasure. For both Jews and artists, Adorno sees the logic of prohibitions not in terms of demands imposed upon another but as demands imposed upon oneself in the interests of emancipation. Even that earlier moment of Adorno’s theory of the connection between the Jews and modern art—“the absence of a settled existence”—returns: what distinguishes Endgame from more overtly political art, says Adorno, is that it takes keine Stellung, which Weber Nicholsen’s excellent translation gives as “no stand” but which we

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can also more literally render as “not moving into one’s position,” that is, remaining nomadic, out of place. Adorno tells us that Endgame “exposes more” than would “committed” works. Exposes more what? One might assume that Adorno means that Beckett’s art exposes more about the state of the world than does committed art, that it ostensively reveals the world more strikingly and truthfully: what is is like a concentration camp. But reading through the lens of Adorno’s theory of antisemitism we can venture a different, if complementary, interpretation of what such exposure might mean. As we have just seen, on Adorno’s account, Endgame repeats the features of the Bilderverbot that reveal the antisemite’s fantasies. So when Adorno says that Endgame “exposes more” than would committed art we might also take him to mean that Endgame’s playfulness and refusal to name expose more about the audience that encounters it. In other words, Endgame reveals that what is is like a concentration camp not only through a certain kind of unspoken assertion about the world but also by making visible an affective response that exposes the lack of change in the structure of Eu ropean subjectivity.53 Adorno provides more support for this interpretation than one might imagine. In 1957 he writes to Horkheimer about a visit to Vienna: “My most significant artistic impression was of a literally magnificent production of Beckett’s Endgame. This is really a significant text which you absolutely must read—if only because certain of its intentions are closely connected with ours. And it’s correspondingly uncomfortable [ungemütlich], so much so that there was booing.”54 What confirms for Adorno the close connection between the intentions of his work with Horkheimer and Beckett’s play is not any distinctive formal structure, theme, or motif but the effect of the work on the audience: it is correspondingly ungemütlich enough to provoke booing. This response from a Viennese audience: less than twenty years earlier, residents of Vienna, which had enjoyed for the first part of the twentieth century a reputation as the most antisemitic city in Eu rope, welcomed Hitler with literally outstretched arms. Could Adorno have witnessed this audience’s discomfort with Endgame and not have thought also of Vienna’s recent antisemitic past? Could he have heard the booing, the Pfui-Rufe, and not wondered if these expressions of hostility drew from the same source that fueled Austrian complicity in the persecution and deportation of the Jews?

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When Adorno writes on Beckett, the Bilderverbot is an explicit point of reference and the improper response implicitly so; in the posthumously published volume Adorno had planned to dedicate to Beckett, Aesthetic Theory, it’s the other way round. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno describes the socially reactionary postures of those he calls the “enemies of modern art” in terms that strikingly recapitulate those of his analysis of the antisemite. He invokes the authoritarian personality common to both antisemitism and antimodernism, noting that the “bond between a socially reactionary posture and hatred for the artistically modern, which the analysis of the obedient character makes apparent” is “confirmed by empirical social research.”55 Adorno writes that those who rail loudest against the anarchy of modern art . . . convince themselves of what they presume to be the nature of their enemy on the basis of crude errors at the simplest level of information; indeed, there is no responding to them, because what they have decided in advance to reject they are not willing to experience in the first place.56

Nevertheless, what the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn. In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it.57

Both the enemies of modern art and the antisemite perceive (through a kind of optical illusion) the presence of— and a certain pleasure in—the repressed. And just as the antisemite hunts down purported Jewish mimetic indulgences (smell, blood rituals) ostensibly to eliminate them but actually to enjoy them himself, so too, says Adorno, do the enemies of modern art claim to protect the sacred in order to express profane destructive urges: “The rage against the purported destruction of sacrosanct cultural goods, which for that reason alone can no longer be experienced as such, serves to mask the real destructive wishes of the indignant.”58 Enmity toward modern art, in short, as another instance of false projection. Like the antisemite, the enemy of modern art refuses to experience

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the object of his hatred and only reveals himself in his enmity; like the Jew, the work of modern art possesses particular qualities that appear a certain way from the perspective of false projection. The parallels do not hold throughout. In the case of modern art, as distinct from that of the Jews, there is not only a refusal to experience the object, but something inherently resistant to experience in the object itself. Adorno qualifies his claim that the enemies of modern art have decided in advance to reject it with the caveat, “in this the division  of labor incontestably bears part of the blame. The non-specialist will no more understand the most recent developments in nuclear physics than the lay  person will straightaway grasp extremely complex new music or painting.”59 In “Trying to Understand Endgame” too Adorno writes  that  “understanding [the play] can mean only understanding its unintelligibility.” 60 Adorno also shows little interest in whether the enemies of modern art somehow tailor the aesthetic sphere to meet the specifications of their projections. Despite his Marxism (not to mention his awareness of both Wagner and the Nazis’ obsessions with the Judaization of the art temple) Adorno does not consider how the workings of value in the markets of art and literature might provide a kind of reversed, disavowed image of the “market proper” or how modern art, like the Jew, might be pushed into occupying a site that makes it a conspicuous, visible surface onto which some other selfstyled knights (champions of cultural values?) can, in the name of the values they claim to defend, project their bad conscience. Nevertheless, the parallels that do obtain are striking enough to make one wonder why the prohibition of images, which Adorno suggests catalyzes powerful antisemitic projections, can then also be an appropriate response to those same events. Why bring to light—why revive—those affects that come to the surface in false projection’s encounter with modern art? Despite Adorno’s glib claim in Aesthetic Theory that the Greek government’s ban on Beckett demonstrates the inherently progressive content of the work (because, he says, the tyrant recognizes opposition when he sees it), the improper response might be regarded as an empirical counterexample to Adorno’s normative theory. If aesthetically advanced works of art elicit reactionary responses in the real world, does this not prove that, despite their progressive, emancipatory potential, they have objectively regressive ef-

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fects? Adorno might reply that the exposure of false projection is an end in itself, that if “the societal pressure still bears down, although the danger remains invisible nowadays,” the solution is to make it visible. The disclosure of continuity might in itself be significant for two reasons: first, because it contradicts the idea of a Stunde Null, in which Europe, and particularly Germany, is reborn from the womb of the Marshall Plan as a liberal democracy; second, because after Auschwitz Adorno thinks it is self-evident— so self-evident that it is obscene even to attempt to justify the idea—that there should be no such continuity with the conditions of the past. Total social transformation is needed. Such events and their putative force to expose how things actually are, however, are themselves subject to the improper response. One can always fail to recognize them, especially if one is a subject who projects falsely. Do such subjects matter? For Adorno, yes: in “Education after Auschwitz” he writes that those who wish to prevent the repetition of the death camps “must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection.” 61 The subjects whose transformation is decisive are precisely those who are most resistant to it. But Adorno does not see their condition as terminal: everything, for him, hinges on their education. His sense of the urgency of this task could not be greater: “a new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” 62 How, then, might Adorno imagine the Bilderverbot to address, rather than exacerbate, the problem of the improper response? How might the prohibition dissuade subjects from the striking out it seems to elicit and instead educate them toward self-reflection? I want to suggest that we can read Adorno as investing his hopes in a certain response to the improper response, as arguing that the very refusal of experience can trigger the kind of self-reflective experience he seeks. On this reading, the improper response is important to Adorno not simply because it exposes an otherwise invisible danger, as if the act of exposure were an end in itself, but because it provides a mechanism that brings about a desirable change in the subject. That change would take place in the psychoanalytic terms that Adorno favored,

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via the working through of the fantasies and projections that emerge in these encounters.

Primal Scenes: Old Adam, New Culture As with the Bilderverbot itself, the path forward for Adorno here involves a movement backward. Adorno places great faith in the transformative potential of recollecting childhood responses to certain kinds of primal scene. In Negative Dialectics he suggests that metaphysics can be transformed by recalling what we felt as children when we heard the words “dung hill” and “pig sty,” by remembering what we were curious about before “civilized education” repressed such ideas and questions; these memories, he claims, will take us closer to absolute knowledge than anything in Hegel.63 He then suggests, in a passage that I think is crucial to his late philosophy, that similar recollections can transform culture by overcoming its founding repressions: A child, fond of an innkeeper named Adam, watched him club to death the rats pouring out of holes in the courtyard; it was in his image [Bild] that the child made its own image of the first man [Mensch—literally, human being]. That this has been forgotten, that we no longer know what we used to feel before the dogcatcher’s van, is both the triumph of culture and its failure. Culture, which keeps emulating the old Adam, cannot bear to be reminded of that zone, and precisely this is not to be reconciled with the conception that culture has of itself. It abhors stench because it stinks—because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit. Years after that line was written, Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed.64

Just as Adorno thinks the memory of the child’s fascination with dung and pigsties promises absolute knowledge, so he seems to suggest that the memory of what the child feels when witnessing old Adam clubbing the rats and watching the dogcatcher’s van offers a way to overcome the repressions inscribed in contemporary culture. That is what is implied by his claim that culture’s triumph as a repressive mechanism and failure as a genuinely civilizing force resides in its repression of the child’s memory of its feelings about those scenes.65 Just what that memory is and how it undoes that repression Adorno does not say, problems we will return to shortly. But he

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likely thinks that these memories might be recovered through a certain kind of repetition of these Urszenen. My hypothesis is that for Adorno the improper response to modern art triggers just such a repetition and that it does so for the witness to the scenes of the hostile response to the modernist prohibition. Of fundamental importance here is Adorno’s understanding of both old Adam and culture as enacting false projection. This is explicit in the case of culture, which Adorno says has a false conception of itself and “abhors stench because it stinks.” We can read old Adam as projective both because culture emulates him and because his acts prefigure those of the antisemite and, particularly, the Nazi (the clubbing of the rats evokes the juxtaposition of Jews and rodents in the Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude; the rounding up of strays into the dogcatcher’s van recalls the long historical association of Jews and dogs, as well as the herding of Jews into cattle cars for deportation to the camps).66 Adorno would likely see old Adam as clubbing rats to death to repress his own animal nature: the child’s image of the first man shows him violently distinguishing himself from and asserting his power over animals even as his actions show him imitating a human image of instinctive animal violence. The enemies of modern art fit neatly into this series because they perfectly exemplify Adorno’s claim that culture emulates old Adam in carry ing out, with more than a little covert pleasure, repressive violence against the nonidentical and not-yet-categorized in art in the name of order, decency, morality, and cleanliness. If the enemies of modern art emulate old Adam, then the witness to their attacks occupies the position of the child and is in a position to recall what the child once felt before such scenes, the recollection of which, Adorno suggests, promises the transformation of culture.67 Why should this position hold any more promise than that of the person who encounters the modern work of art itself? Because it is in principle available to everyone: we can all remember what it is like to be a child in a way that we cannot all— as Adorno’s remarks on modern art’s replication of the division of labor and the impossibility of understanding Endgame acknowledge— understand an innovative, advanced work of art. The position of the child is one in which ignorance and confusion are not obstacles but rather a prelude to learning. Such learning would be just as available to the people booing Endgame as it is to Adorno himself. Which is also to suggest that

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ultimately Adorno might regard the figures of the antisemite and the enemy of modern art less as personifications or character types than as something like Kleinian positions that one might move into and, hopefully, out of. My point is not that the improper response is why Adorno is loyal to the Bilderverbot; it is, rather, to say that he reckons with the improper response and understands it to play a role in establishing the conditions for its own dissolution. Adorno suggests that the recollection of childhood feelings in the face of the repetition of culture’s Urszene offers the possibility of finding a different response to that scene from the one he thinks we have been taught to have. Regardless of just what is recalled, it is also clear that Adorno thinks that the act of recollection itself enables the recovery of those realms of experience whose initial repression led to false projection in the first place. If that form of repression no longer obtains, false projection will not be manifest in the same way, will no longer seek the same kinds of objects. Theoretically, then, this change in culture brings to an end those expressions of false projection we know as antisemitism and enmity toward modern art. Thus Adorno might be taken to argue that the expression of false projection, the improper response, can become the means of its own overcoming. As I have noted, Adorno does not tell us what he thinks the child feels (as if to prove that we really have forgotten). Clearly more important to him are the claims that the child has a certain affective response to such scenes at all and that this response has since been repressed. And perhaps his argument needs no more than that: overcoming the fundamental repression, regardless of what it is that is repressed, and remembering and recognizing one’s own feelings as one’s own feelings, rather than repressing and then displacing them onto another, could well represent the beginning of a solution to the problem of violently striking outward. Yet the absence of any discussion of just what he thinks the child feels is frustrating. Knowing what kinds of feelings Adorno attributes to the child makes a difference to understanding just how recalling them would change culture. Here Adorno’s work gives confl icting signals. On the one hand, it offers, as is well known, a sustained critique of coldness, a critique, that is, of the refusal of mimetic, empathic identification with others, an absence he sees as both fundamental to bourgeois subjectivity and a nec-

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essary condition for Auschwitz. The death camps, he argues, can only happen when most people are indifferent to the fate of all but those closest to them.68 Adorno thinks that children, however, are still properly mimetic beings, still capable of empathic identification with (as opposed to identitarian violence toward) others; he also thinks the categorical imperative that the like of Auschwitz never recur derives not from any reasoning but from the intuitive, somatic response to the physical suffering of the Nazis’ victims. From this perspective we might take Adorno to suggest that the child feels empathy toward the victims in these scenes—the rats and the dogs— and that Adorno thinks, more than a little nostalgically, that if we (particularly those of us not given to self-reflection) can recall this empathy we will respond appropriately to culture’s emulation of old Adam, its acts of violent repression, and will resist them in a way that culture has failed to teach us to do, has even prevented us from doing. On the other hand, Adorno also says that the child is fond of old Adam (ihn gern hatte). Adorno may mean here to evoke the peculiar disillusionment felt when someone you love does something you hate. He goes on to emphasize culture’s repeated betrayal of its own declared purposes and so may be suggesting that if we can recall that sense of disappointment and betrayal, we will demand that culture finally become what it has for so long falsely claimed to be: a genuinely civilizing force that will “take hold of men and work a change in them.” 69 Yet by describing the child as fond of old Adam, Adorno also opens the possibility that the child identifies with him rather than with the rats and dogs—that is, with the perpetrator rather than the victims. It is not hard to conceive of children finding these animals disgusting or frightening or to think that there could even be an element of pleasure for the child who experiences himself as weak and vulnerable in imagining that being a fully grown human like Adam means being able to dominate, even to destroy, such creatures. Here we might consider Adorno’s claim that from old Adam the child makes his image (Bild) of the first man. What does this claim mean for a thinker loyal to the prohibition of images? In this context we should recall, once more, that the prohibition of images does not repress mimesis but sublates it: might Adorno intend the recollection of such feelings about old

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Adam also to be sublated? This sublation might include a negation of that image (as the locus of our understanding of what it means to be human), a preservation of it (by remembering rather than repressing it, we would recall that, despite what “civilized education” teaches us to believe about ourselves, we are not radically different from old Adam and that to think otherwise is to repeat old Adam’s own acts of violent repression), and an elevation of it (through such reflection). To recall how the child felt when witnessing Adam clubbing the rats would not, on this reading, be a matter of retrieving a repressed positive attribute (mimetic empathy) but of elaborating a certain psychological and political maturity in relation to the child’s feelings and fantasies. This narrative would give us what Adorno calls for in “Education after Auschwitz”—the transformation from unreflective to reflective, from enthralled child to reflective adult—by means of a culture that replaces the model of old Adam with that of the logic of the Bilderverbot. Witnessing others in the position of old Adam—particularly those others who act out against the prohibition in the realm of culture—lets us examine our own excited identification with those others, reflect upon it, and thus perhaps mature as political agents. And here we might add that it could be essential to Adorno’s argument that this witnessing takes place in the realm of culture, representation, and images, that acting out against Endgame has a homeopathic effect, while acting out against living, suffering beings is an obvious moral wrong. Of course, there can be no sure path from unreflective striking out to critical self-reflection. It is unreasonable to expect that the sociopolitical problem Adorno confronts could be resolved by any kind of aesthetic experience, no matter how broadly we conceive of the aesthetic. Adorno himself recognizes this problem. In “Education after Auschwitz” he announces “the turn toward the subject” as a response to the fact that “the possibility of changing the objective—namely societal and political— conditions is extremely limited today.”70 It is, needless to say, just these objective conditions that are, for Adorno, decisive in shaping subjectivities and in determining whether the impulse to act out rather than reflect upon oneself becomes a matter of national (or pan-European) policy. Perhaps all normative aestheticopolitical projects must come to grief on this problem, but Adorno distinguishes himself by sketching out one way that the pathologi-

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cal refusal to recognize what a work of art is trying to do might be integrated into an understanding of that work’s political significance. We would also do well to remember that his claim is not that the prohibition of images is a causally decisive response to the situation of the camps, only that it is a fitting one. And what he thinks makes it fitting, we can now see, is not only a matter of enjoining us to purity and piety but also of creating conditions in which we might reflect upon our own acting out, might see that acting out as the product of hatred, fear, aggression, and, it seems, no little pleasure.

Conclusion Adorno must reject the idea of modernism as Jewish not despite but because of the role of the Bilderverbot in his work in general and his conception of modernism in particular. He does, however, see modernism and Jews as closely connected and does articulate those connections through the prohibition. But he also sees the prohibition as catalyzing just what it is meant to prevent: misrecognition, projection, and aggression. These improper, hostile responses to iterations of the Bilderverbot ultimately matter as much to him as those responses he wishes for: he examines them to explain how and why antisemites identify Jews with dirt and abjection and why the enemies of modern art see the art they oppose as a source of anarchy and disorder. Adorno’s reflections on how we might respond to the improper response and the scenes of violent repression it produces suggest that he thinks we will no longer be complicit in acts of repressive violence if we can recall what we (might have) felt when and if we witnessed such acts as children. He does not specify what it is that we should recall when we witness such scenes, perhaps because more important than what we recall from childhood is what we make of the fact, and act, of recollection itself. It may even be the case that he thinks that the memory of one’s own aggression and hostility, a form of identification with the perpetrator, serves as a catalyst of political change, precisely because such memories could make the potential perpetrator aware of himself as a perpetrator. This solution is subjunctive and hopeful, lacking in evidence for the general progressive political effects

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of aesthetically advanced works of art, but it does give a certain coherence to what otherwise appears as a tension, if not an outright contradiction, in Adorno’s thought. For Adorno, then, the fantasies of both modernism and Jews as abject cannot be countered simply by a discursive reversal and revaluation of received ideas about them. To place one’s faith in philosophical revaluation alone, as the postwar French tradition seems to, is to fail to remember properly the fate of the Nazis’ victims, because it is to forget the social and political conditions and consequent fantasies and projections that led to that fate. While Adorno does not overtly desire a revival of such fantasies and projections, he recognizes that in his time and place a reiteration of the Bilderverbot must expect these fantasies and projections and work through them. At the same time, the very sociological, contextual element that gives Adorno’s ideas about the postwar conjunction of modernism, Jews, and fantasies of dirt and pollution a distinctive force is also where they encounter their greatest obstacle. Adorno would no doubt take a kind of grim satisfaction in elaborating the ways in which the work of modern art cannot be integrated into his theory any more than it can be integrated into a totally administered society. The political significance of late modernism stands and falls for Adorno with the interpretation and reception of Beckett’s work. For the argument of this book too Beckett plays an important role. Beckett is, I think, a literally pivotal figure in twentieth-century literature: on the one hand, he is a direct inheritor of high modernism, translating Surrealists, writing a brilliant, brief volume on Proust, and serving an apprenticeship with Joyce that makes him as much a second-generation as a late modernist; on the other, he is an author whose example, for all its rhetoric of exhaustion, reduction, and silence, has proven extraordinarily fruitful for countless postmodern and contemporary writers across the globe, with subsequent Nobel Prize winners such as Harold Pinter and J. M. Coetzee only the most prominent among them. For Adorno, as we have seen, Beckett’s work can best be understood through the model of the Second Commandment. While in this chapter I have treated that claim seriously, ultimately, I think, the model of the Bilderverbot actually blinds us to the far more direct and interesting ways  that Beckett engages with the historical, political, and ideological

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contexts of concern to this book. While Beckett’s postwar project too involves a certain kind of going backward in order to go forward, that backward movement is not— as is so commonly assumed throughout Beckett scholarship—to the Old Testament but to the antisemitism of the interwar period.

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The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Céline

Introduction: Beckett and Jewish Names Theodor Adorno is the first of many to maintain that Samuel Beckett provides a paradigmatic literary response to the Nazi concentration camps because of what he does not directly say, represent, or name. Indeed, this idea has taken such a firm hold in Beckett criticism that commentators often have trouble interpreting those moments when Beckett does name, does represent, does make things explicit. For Beckett does make explicit his engagement, not with Auschwitz, but with ideas about Jews. The primary example of this is his use of a Jewish name or, more precisely, a name for a Jew. As I will argue, that name is the most revealing instance of a significant yet unexplored feature of Beckett’s writing: his refunctioning of ideas about Jews to articulate his poetics. Specifically, in Molloy, his first major work of the postwar period, we can see Beckett presenting the birth of his poetics out of the negation of the spirit of antisemitism. 170

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My argument has several steps. After briefly sketching a slightly different account of how negation works in Beckett from that proposed by Adorno, I critique the systematic refusal of Beckett scholars to interpret the antisemitic meaning of that central exhibit in my reading, the name for a Jew. I argue that despite this nearly universal response, there are good reasons to interpret Molloy in the light of that name’s meaning. Doing so reveals Beckett presenting the distinctive formal features of his postwar prose as determinate negations of a certain antisemitic poetics. Central to my interpretation is Beckett’s engagement with the French novelist LouisFerdinand Céline, whose notorious antisemitic writings of the late 1930s manifest an obsession with the Judaization of France. I argue that the fantasy of Judaization resolves for Céline and others a certain crisis around subject formation, namely, the crisis of meaning that follows the traumatic recognition of the fundamental meaninglessness of socially inscribed identity. The fantasy of Judaization makes that meaningless experience intelligible. This, I show, is the context in which we need to understand Beckett’s engagement with the antisemitic imagination. It allows us to understand him as writing both in the wake of a certain crisis in meaning for the subject and as a critic of meaning’s redemptive re-creation through the fantasies of the antisemitic imagination. My argument does not apply to all Jewish names in Beckett. One should acknowledge from the outset that one of the best-known Jewish names in Beckett’s oeuvre is well known precisely because it does not appear in a finished work. In the early drafts of Waiting for Godot the tramp who came to be named Estragon was called Levy. This is just the kind of excision usually understood as typical of Beckett: an element stricken from the published text because it is too meaningful, would make the play seem too much like a depiction of a Jew in hiding from or waiting for death, would draw too direct a line from an apparently self-enclosed, autonomous text to the historical contexts of Eu ropean racism and Nazi genocide. Paradoxically, then, a recognizably Jewish name is apparently excluded from Beckett’s work according to a logic evocative to many of the prohibitions of ancient Judaism. But the rule does not apply to Jewish names alone. Genetic textual scholars such as Dirk van Hulle have demonstrated the importance of such processes of excision throughout Beckett’s texts as they approach completion; specific historical and geographical references, signs

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that permit location rather than abstraction, end up in the archives, if not the garbage bin: indications that Endgame is set in the aftermath of the First World War, references to a nuclear holocaust in Happy Days.1 Pascale Casanova makes a related point, arguing that Beckett always sets out to erase “all historical traces of his individual trajectory, in order to transform them.”2 Yet this logic of prohibition, exclusion, and excision is neither the whole story with Beckett nor even the most interesting part of it. Consider his use of the famous tailor joke, in which a client, tired of waiting for his tailor to repair (or make) his pants, complains that while God made the world in six days, the tailor has taken six months for a single pair of trousers. “But my dear Sir,” replies the tailor, “look— at the world— and look— at my TROUSERS!”3 Histories of French Jewish life from the 1920s recount versions of the same joke unfolding either between Rabinovich the tailor and his client Yossel or between Levy the tailor and his client Moshe.4 When Beckett, a denizen of Paris, first heard the joke it in all likelihood included just such names. He went on to employ it twice, both times at crucial junctures in his career: first in the title and epigraph to his first publication in French, La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon (1948) and second in arguably his greatest play, Endgame (1957), where he extends and substantially rewrites the joke. In the essay on the van Velde brothers he refers only to a tailor and client; in Endgame Nagg speaks of a tailor and an Englishman. As with Godot, in his version of the tailor joke Beckett removes Jewish names from the published text. But in this case things are more complex. While there is no way to infer from the name “Estragon” the character’s earlier incarnation as “Levy,” Beckett’s tailor joke still bears the traces of Moshe, Levy, Yossel, and Rabinovich. Despite their absence many readers continue to recognize the joke as Jewish: Adorno refers to “the allegedly metaphysical Jewish joke”; Simon Critchley speaks of a “hackneyed Jewish joke.”5 By preserving the structure of the joke Beckett makes visible what he has removed from it or, rather, makes visible that something has been removed from it, thus creating space for the ( justified) assumption that what has been removed are Jewish names. Such gestures—negations that point toward what they are negating— are at least as important to Beckett as the negation itself. We see examples of them in the picture turned to face the wall on the set of Endgame, which

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encourages us to speculate on what is depicted that can no longer be tolerated or faced; in Buster Keaton’s flight from eyes and covering over of images and mirrors that is the main drama of Film; and in the aporias of Beckett’s prose, the self-cancelling sentences that, in the words of the Unnamable, “proceed . . . by affirmations and negations,” as in the closing lines of Molloy: “Then I went into the house and wrote, it is midnight, the rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” 6 In all these instances Beckett does not simply observe a prohibition upon representation but rather dramatizes acts of refusal, disavowal, and negation and shows himself making his art out of such acts. The name for a Jew that I will focus on in this chapter is not an archivist’s discovery or an interpreter’s inference but a prominent feature of a published text. Yet this name too is subject to a kind of negation, a negation through which Beckett expresses the relation of his poetics to the fantasies of modern— and, I will suggest, even modernist— antisemitism. The Second Commandment’s prohibition of images— so central, as we have seen, to Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett—is far from the only way to understand how notions of disavowal operate in Beckett. Rather, Beckett’s drama of negation points the way to understanding how we might see him engaging with ideas about Jews without necessarily identifying his work as operating according to a Judaic logic. The name is that of the authority who Moran, the narrator of Part 2 of Molloy, says is the “chief” of the “vast organization” he works for: “one Youdi.” It is Youdi who instructs Moran to travel, accompanied by his son, in search of Molloy and, later, to return home from that journey and write a report on the adventure. Needless to say, I’m hardly the first critic to fi nd Youdi a strange, conspicuous name. Numerous scholars have pointed out that the word youdi is, or resembles, a French antisemitic slang term for a Jew, the equivalent of “Yid” or “Kike.” Indeed, for anyone who had lived through the German Occupation in Europe this meaning might have been intuitively obvious, since Youdi echoes so closely the German word for Jew—Jude—pronounced “You-deh.” Beckett wrote Molloy in Paris and concludes the French edition with the date 1947, marking two years since the end of the Occupation. During the war millions throughout Eu rope had become familiar with the sound of the German pronunciation of Jude and its implications in the occupiers’ vocabulary. The cooperation of significant

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segments of the French population in the deportation of Jews to the death camps is well known, as, indeed, is the prominent role of antisemitism in the political and cultural life of France in the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever else one might think of it, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s suggestion that the name Youdi evokes the words “You die” is historically apt.7 Yet while most Beckett scholars acknowledge the name’s provenance, none of them have satisfactorily addressed the question of its significance.8 Indeed, nearly all prefer, having acknowledged that meaning, immediately to talk instead about how Youdi’s name resembles the unspeakable name of the Jewish God, Yahweh.9 Admittedly, there is more to this connection than their phonetic similarity: Moran does refer to his fear of Youdi as inspired by his reading of the Old Testament, and Youdi’s instruction to Moran that he take his son with him on his journey reminds many readers of Abraham’s journey with Isaac. Others have pointed out that if you reverse its syllables, Youdi becomes a homonym for Dieu, the French word for God!10 There is nothing wrong in itself with trying out such interpretations; far more troubling is the way that the names Yahweh and Dieu have effectively become screens masking, to borrow a phrase of Beckett’s, the more “fundamental sound” of the name,11 so one can no longer hear youdi or youspin or youtre, so that one does not have to think about antisemitism but can dwell instead on Jewish monotheism.12 Of course, one might argue that the biblical allusions are compelling and that the character of Moran is not manifestly a portrait of an antisemite. He does not rant against the Jews and arguably refers to the God of the “old testament” with some fear; his passing reference to Goering conveys no obvious sympathy with National Socialism (nor, for that matter, does it convey antipathy). One might argue, in short, that it seems self-evident that in Molloy the proper name Youdi just doesn’t mean that. But even if one were to concede this much, one would still want to know why almost no one has seriously considered the implications of Beckett’s use of what everyone acknowledges is an antisemitic slang name for a Jew. Oddly enough, on the rare occasions when the implications of the name Youdi are addressed, a different kind of displacement occurs, one that again represses the question of antisemitism. In Beckett’s Fiction Leslie Hill claims that the “anti-semitic French slang” name

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puts into play the idea of a religious community which is not whole and does not possess its own law within itself but one which has fallen subject to its own diaspora. The founding religious texts are not one . . . but multiple, and constitute, not a single authoritative book of faith, but a palimpsest overlaid with successive commentaries and glosses.13

How does an antisemitic slang name for a Jew “put into play” notions of diaspora, multiplicity, and commentary? Is it not worth at least entertaining the idea that using the French equivalent of “Yid” in a novel originally written in French, in Paris, in the immediate wake of the Nazi genocide might have less to do with interpretive proliferation than with violence, exclusion, and annihilation, and might invite reflection upon, rather than repetition of, stereotypes about Jews and Jewishness? Hill goes on to refer to Youdi as “the name of the Jew.” Yes, but doesn’t it matter that it is the antisemite’s name for the Jew? Shouldn’t this naming too be treated as something other than “single” and “authoritative”? Why, after all, is Youdi the name of the Jew? Hill’s desire to celebrate the idea of the profusion of meanings as somehow Jewish becomes one more way of avoiding a consideration of what the words on the page most obviously say. The name Youdi, then, is customarily subjected to two kinds of interpretive displacement away from the question of antisemitism: on the one hand, onto ancient Judaism and the question of the origins of Western culture in Jewish monotheism; on the other, toward the fetishization of Beckett’s works as structurally or metaphorically Judaic. It is as if the very idea of Beckett making so explicit his engagement with antisemitism simply did not fit into any available conceptual schema for the interpretation of a purportedly autonomous and antireferential late modernist novel. Far preferable, apparently, to acknowledge perfunctorily the name’s primary meaning and then, without further ado, move on to reiterate the habitual consensus that it “really” refers to the Jewish God.14 I do not deny that Moran’s narrative repeatedly alludes to what the Christian tradition and Beckett himself call the Old Testament, but I do want to argue that the antisemitic meaning of the name Youdi requires us to reframe such allusions. Such reframing can work at a very local, textual level. When Moran, apparently referring to his fear that Youdi will punish him for disobedience, remarks, “it was not for nothing I had studied the old

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testament,” the reference might be taken to show not that Youdi is the God of the “old testament” but that Moran reads that part of the Bible as a guide to Youdi’s behavior.15 More broadly, reframing means asking: why, even if we were to accept that the name Youdi can be read as alluding to the Old Testament deity, did Beckett choose to make that allusion with a name that requires one first to acknowledge that it is antisemitic slang? Why would Beckett use that name to allude or refer to the Jewish God? Does it not seem likely that he does so to suggest a connection between antisemitic ideology and Eu ropean ideas about Jewish monotheism? I’m proposing reframing, then, as something like early deconstruction: overturning an established hierarchical opposition (that which privileges the Old Testament God over antisemitic meaning) followed by its general displacement (both are instances of the subordinated, antisemitic meaning). That is, I reject both the claim that the name Youdi directs us toward the Old Testament God rather than modern antisemitism and the assumption that to speak of Youdi as the Old Testament God is no longer to talk about antisemitism. The reasons for this insistence that the name Youdi must be translated into that of the Jewish God are no doubt multiple: the sheer inertia of critical habit, a sense of the weight of Beckett’s Protestant upbringing, the conviction that to see Beckett as dismantling the Jewish patriarchal inheritance is to show that he plays for the highest possible cultural stakes. The latter reading dances the familiar interpretive dance of repression and emancipation: Youdi embodies the repressive law, and Moran is the bourgeois protagonist who finds true freedom only when he can escape that law. Even Beckett interpreters who claim to work in the footsteps of Foucault, who offered so strong an alternative to the repressive hypothesis, seem to wish to recapitulate this interpretive model. But perhaps the strongest reason for the insistence on this translation has to do with a tendency to read Beckett as writing in the wake of the collapse of some version of the symbolic order, of which the death of God is the paradigmatic case. Beckett as showing what is left when a belief structure that had once given order, meaning, and coherence no longer exerts its hold. And here I concede that such readings do make a certain sense of Moran’s narrative. Youdi appears to authorize a certain kind of meaning for Moran, who, alone among Beckett’s narrators, obsesses over the distinction between

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truth and lie (particularly in the speech of others), an obsession that seems expressed also in how he narrates: confidently and without qualification, without the affirmation and negation— aporia—that distinguishes Beckett’s other narrators. And it is only toward the end of his story, with his relationship to Youdi profoundly altered, that Moran changes, becomes like Molloy not only as a protagonist but as a narrator, with the detailed, unqualified description of his actions and decisions giving way to that emblematic aporia: “It was not midnight. It was not raining.” Hard not to think that what unfolds here is some version of what we think of as the death of God, the collapse of some guarantee of the symbolic order represented by Youdi that makes possible the difference between truth and lie and organizes and authorizes the relationship between words and things. But this is not the only way to read Beckett. Ask the philosophers. Stanley Cavell argues that Beckett reveals “not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitarian, success”; Simon Critchley claims that Beckett shows that “the world is overfull with meaning and we suffocate under the combined weight of the various narratives of redemption,” so that what he seeks is “a radical de-creation of these salvific narratives, a . . . stripping away of the resorts of fable, the determinate negation of social meaning through the elevation of form.”16 This approach seems to me to offer a far more convincing account not only of Beckett’s strategies, of what he does to and with language, but also of what we know of both his literary-historical location—writing after a generation that had already made the exploration of the death of God its central project—and his programmatic concerns. I want to argue that reading Youdi as an antisemitic slang name lets us see how Beckett writes both in the wake of a certain crisis in meaning and as a critic of meaning’s redemptive re-creation. My touchstone here is a remark of Freud’s on the Schreber case: “The delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.”17 The kind of meaning Beckett seeks to negate in Moran’s narrative has the structure of the delusion-formation: reconstituted meaning, meaning that seeks to make sense of a certain loss of meaning. (Beckett, unlike Freud, treats the very attempt to restore meaning as itself pathological.) Antisemitic fantasy, I argue, is just that kind of meaning, the kind of meaning that the subject projects onto a world that appears to have lost its coherence, sense, and order.

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The loss of meaning I will concern myself with in the rest of this chapter is bound up with a certain crisis around subject formation and particularly with the traumatic, disavowed recognition of the ways in which the subject emerges and finds its place in the social order in response to external calls and demands. Throughout I borrow a certain conceptual vocabulary proposed by Judith Butler, one that lets us foreground the place of narrative form in relation to the historical problematic of what she calls the constitutive dispossession of the subject. Butler argues that we only emerge as selfreflexive subjects when we give an account of ourselves. That account, she says, has the form of a story, and that story unfolds within a certain scene of address: in response to a request, in relation to certain norms without which the account will not be regarded as intelligible, and addressed toward some audience, whether implicit or explicit. Becoming a self-reflexive subject, says Butler, thus always involves a certain constitutive dispossession, both because we give those accounts to others and because we narrate them at all only in response to another.18 There is also, we should note, a certain contingency to that dispossession, because the conditions under which one is asked to give that account, the norms to which one will have to respond or conform, vary from one social formation to another. What is most useful about Butler’s model is the way it lets us think about a certain mode of narrative self-consciousness as the most ideologically revealing moment of the kinds of stories that concern us. She claims that “when the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.”19 If the story one tells about oneself must include the conditions of one’s emergence as a subject, and if one emerges as a subject only in giving an account of oneself, the account one gives of oneself must include an account of the conditions of the emergence of the account itself. In short, to become a self- reflective subject one must tell a story that explains how one came to tell one’s story. It follows that we should pay particular attention to what the subject-narrator says and believes about the scene of address, about who or what asks her to give an account of herself, about the norms and conditions to which that account must conform, and to whom it must be directed—and, last but not least, how, if at all, the subject imagines giving this account will shape her as a subject. All of which, I think, constitutes an implicit theory of the subject’s own dispossession.

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Beckett and Antisemitism: Contexts In My Own Private Germany, his study of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Ner vous Illness, Eric L. Santner argues that the late nineteenth century witnessed shifts in the fundamental matrix of the individual’s relation to social and institutional authority, [in] . . . the ways he or she is addressed by and responds to the calls of “official” power and authority. These calls are largely calls to order, rites and procedures of symbolic investiture whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status, is filled with a symbolic mandate that henceforth informs his or her identity in the community. The social and political stability of a society as well as the psychological “health” of its members would appear to be correlated to the efficacy of these symbolic operations— to what we might call their performative magic—whereby individuals “become what they are,” assume the social essence assigned to them by way of names, titles, degrees, posts, honors, and the like. We cross the threshold of modernity when the attenuation of these performatively effectuated social bonds becomes chronic, when they are no longer capable of seizing the subject in his or her self-understanding.20

As Santner shows, it is just when these calls, rites, and procedures no longer function properly that their presence is most acutely felt— so acutely that subjects such as Schreber experience it somatically, as sexual penetration. While for Santner dispossession is less a matter of giving an account of oneself than it is a matter of being subject to external laws and demands, it is no coincidence that his subject, Schreber, feels compelled to give such an account, one in which he speculates about the conditions in which he gives it, and even gives the problem of dispossession a further twist, expressing the concern “that [he] might only be repeating, might only be parroting back, thoughts, words, and phrases originating elsewhere.”21 Santner argues that the paranoid European fantasy of Verjüdung (which he translates as Jewification) must be understood as a particular response to the crisis of symbolic investiture. Where for Freud Schreber’s delusions represent an attempt at recovery, to reinvest the world with meaning, for Santner the fantasy of Verjüdung represents the attempt to invest with meaning the traumatic recognition of the fundamental meaninglessness of socially inscribed identity. Schreber’s crisis, says Santner, follows Schreber’s

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recognition that “his own symbolic power and authority as judge— and German man—was founded . . . by the performative magic of the rites of institution, that his symbolic function was sustained by an imperative to produce a regulated series of repeat performances.” Schreber experiences as abject “this idiotic repetition compulsion at the heart of his symbolic function.”22 It is only “by way of a kind of secondary revision” that it comes to be encoded as, among other things, homosexualization, feminization, and Verjüdung.23 Santner’s account of how a certain subject experiences the recognition of its emergence within a certain scene of address as a crisis and how that crisis in turn produces the fantasy of Verjüdung is useful and coherent. But it is also incomplete. The subject who experiences and describes his crisis as one of Verjüdung does not merely name and disavow his condition; he also seeks to explain it, to point to a cause for his becoming Judaized. Recall Wagner’s protest in Verjüdung’s Ur-text, “Judaism in Music”: “it is we who now find ourselves in the position of having to fight for emancipation from the Jews. As things stand in the world at present, the Jew is already more than emancipated: he rules.”24 Verjüdung is not only a fantasy about one’s resemblance to dispossessed, unmanly Jews but also an expression of anxiety about Jewish power. If the social calls, rites, and procedures no longer seize subjects in their self-understanding, it is because these calls now issue from the Jews. Those obsessed with Verjüdung see the Jew as the external agency who calls me to give an account of myself; in being compelled to respond to his demands I become alienated from my proper (European, Christian, male, heterosexual) identity both because I occupy the position of the Jew and because the demands I respond to, and thus the account I am compelled to give of myself, are themselves Jewish. The causal explanation of the condition of Verjüdung is also what enables such subjects to posit as its solution the removal or destruction of the Jew, as its agent-cause. It is not difficult to read Beckett as writing in the midst of the crisis Santner describes. Like Schreber, Beckett’s narrators feel compelled to give accounts of themselves, sometimes in response to the demands of unnamed, unidentified agencies and to unknown addressees with unclear expectations, sometimes for no reason they can identify at all. Like Schreber, they too are concerned, if not convinced, that they might only be repeating, might only be parroting back, thoughts, words, and phrases originating

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elsewhere. Thus Molloy: “you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten”25; the Unnamable: “But now I shall say my old lesson, if I can remember it.”26 Or think of Beckett’s characters’ various comic encounters with the law, conventional morality, political rhetoric, and the philosophical tradition (not to mention the esteemed but also warm and fart-impervious Times Literary Supplement), all of which indicate a chronic atrophy of the hold of social and cultural institutions and authorities. And just as for Schreber the crisis is experienced as the end of the world, a catastrophe that he alone has survived, so too, in plays like Endgame and Happy Days, is Beckett preoccupied by just such scenarios. But why would Beckett’s artistic exploration of this crisis have anything to do with the notion of Judaization? Certainly one can argue that the course of Beckett’s life in the 1930s and 1940s was significantly determined by his opposition to antisemitism and his bearing witness to the suffering of various Jewish friends,27 but one might still wonder if any of these events similarly shaped his writing, particularly in Molloy, his pivotal first novel of the postwar period.28 To understand Beckett’s postwar engagement with the antisemitic imagination in Molloy we have to consider his prewar reading and writing and the events of 1937. It is in 1937 that Beckett visits Nazi Germany and begins to think about the ideological and formal implications of antisemitic fantasy, and it is in 1937 that the French novelist LouisFerdinand Céline, whom Beckett greatly admired and whose influence on his postwar prose is undisputed, published the first of a trilogy of antisemitic books.29 We can treat Beckett’s thinking about the problematic of form and formlessness as significantly, perhaps even decisively shaped by what he witnessed of Nazism. The crucial evidence for this approach can be found in the journals he kept during his 1936–1937 travels through Germany, and particularly in a well-known entry dated January 15, 1937: I am not interested in a “unification” of the historical chaos any more than I am in the “clarification” of the individual chaos, & still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. . . . I say the background & the causes are inhuman and incomprehensible machinery & venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them.30

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While Beckett does not say that “the anthropomorphisation” he has in mind is specifically antisemitic, it is no stretch to imagine that he was thinking of the figure of the Jew. He wrote these lines in Hitler’s Germany, with the Nazi Party at the height of its domestic power and popularity. His correspondence from the time reveals that in almost every German city he visited his access to the Expressionist paintings he sought to view (educating himself about this art and learning German being the main reasons for his visit) was obstructed by antimodernist measures of the sort that culminated in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. He could not have been in a better position to observe the construction of the figure of the Jew as an anthropomorphized, unifying explanation for the “historical chaos” that Germany had experienced in the wake of the First World War. One might then see Beckett here to anticipate many of the main strands of contemporary theories of antisemitism in which the Jew becomes the name for various crises of meaning and representation, be it the personification of the unrepresentable abstract processes of capital; the quilting point of various social, economic, and cultural crises of modernity; or the secondary revision of the experience of the crisis of symbolic investiture. Such concerns would remain central to Beckett’s poetics for decades. In a frequently cited 1961 interview Beckett tells the visiting scholar Tom Driver that the “task of the artist now” is “to find a form that accommodates the mess,” a form that “admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else.”31 Of course, Beckett does not say what he means by the chaos or the mess (to do so would be a performative contradiction). But by the time he comes to write Molloy the chaos and mess for which he sought to find an appropriate form is evidently that around the formation of the subject, with its attendant anxieties about the boundaries between inside and outside, active and passive, self and other. Think, for example, of what Beckett himself regarded as the major formal innovation of the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable): what he called the narrator/narrated. Hugh Kenner, who found the term in Beckett’s correspondence, takes this to refer to the narrator’s bringing himself into existence “by recalling his own past or delineating his own present,”32 by, that is, giving an account of himself. But how could Beckett, who wrote a book on Proust, regard that as an innovation? The narrator/narrated more likely refers, I think, to the structure whereby each narrator in the Trilogy is sub-

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sequently revealed to be the literary creation of the next: Molloy to have been written by Moran (or vice versa), both of them written by Malone, who is revealed in turn to have been written by the Unnamable. Everyone who writes is also written, everyone who narrates is also narrated—which is also to say, no subjects without subjectivation. Beckett arrives at these formal solutions to the problem of the constitutive dispossession of the subject, possibly even arrives at his understanding of that problem as the site of “the chaos,” through his engagement with the work of Céline. Céline is both celebrated as the author of a number of extraordinary novels, including Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night; 1932) and Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan; 1936), and condemned as the author of three virulently antisemitic books: the bestselling Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre; 1937), L’école des cadavres (The school for corpses; 1938), and Les beaux draps (A fine mess; 1941). Céline’s influence on Beckett’s work has been widely acknowledged. Beckett’s former lover Peggy Guggenheim recalls him saying that “Journey to the End of the Night was the greatest novel in both French and English literature” and his even becoming testy when she asked what that claim meant for his opinion of Joyce.33 Beckett’s letters reveal him contemplating a book on Céline to accompany his volume on Proust.34 Ruby Cohn shows that Céline directly influenced Beckett’s first postwar fictions in French; Ackerley and Gontarski note Céline and Beckett’s shared pessimism, interest in colloquial language, and calculated use of cliché and obscenity.35 Jean-Michel Rabaté detects so many tonal parallels between Journey and Beckett’s postwar fiction that he thinks the only worthwhile question is not whether there is any influence but why it took Beckett until the late 1940s for the results of his 1930s reading and annotations of Céline’s texts to become manifest in his own works.36 None of these critics, however, considers the problems Beckett might have faced in being so drawn to a writer who wrote so obsessively about, and with such hostility toward, the Jews. Beckett’s various biographers say nothing about what he made of Céline’s antisemitic writings, and, indeed, Beckett makes no reference to them in his correspondence. Yet it is difficult to imagine that Beckett, living in Paris at the time of their publication, did not read any of the antisemitic books or was not at least aware of them. Anthony Cronin, for example, notes that Céline was still Beckett’s “main

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literary enthusiasm” in 1939; by this time all but the third of the antisemitic texts, Les beaux draps, had appeared.37 Nor can one dismiss the antisemitic writings as of no interest to a Beckett who cared only about Céline as a prose stylist. As many scholars have noted, the antisemitic writings are not simply diatribes against the Jews but also treatises on the sources and reception of Céline’s style, in which the Jew is held to embody all that Céline opposes; some also regard the texts as laboratories in which Céline made advances in literary technique, particularly his signature use of ellipsis. My hypothesis is that Beckett’s absorption of Céline’s style was delayed by the time it took him to formulate both a critique of and an alternative to the antisemitic foundations of Céline’s poetics. There is, for example, striking prima facie textual evidence that Beckett’s postwar preoccupation with the foregrounding of the scene of address as a distinctive formal device comes out of his engagement with Céline. Céline’s Mort à crédit (which Beckett read in 1936 on the boat to Germany) begins with the narrator presenting the scene of address as a problem, if not a crisis. At the beginning of the novel but the end of the story, Ferdinand finds himself alone in a room, the woman who used to own it now dead, wondering how he got there. He declares, “I don’t know whom to write to anymore . . . Those people are all so far away [ . . . ] Whom will I write to? I’ve nobody left [ . . . ]”38; “I know I could talk about my hatred, I’ll do that later on if they don’t come back. I’d rather tell stories. I’ll tell stories that will make them come back, to kill me, from the ends of the world. Then it will be over and that will be all right with me.”39 Sound familiar? A decade later Beckett would begin Molloy in a very similar way, at the end of his story, with his narrator-protagonist (Molloy) alone in the room of a dead woman (his mother), wondering how he got there. Molloy too finds himself compelled to write and wonders about the people he writes for, whom he has never seen and who mark his pages “with signs I don’t understand” and tell him he’d “begun all wrong, that I should have begun differently.” 40 And Molloy too writes toward death, only—no minor difference—his is not expected to come at the hands of an external enemy: “what I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying.” 41 In short, the opening pages of Molloy signal the importance for Beckett not only of posing questions about the scene of address but also of Céline’s precedent in doing so.

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In Bagatelles pour un massacre, the first of Céline’s antisemitic books, published a year after Mort à crédit, Beckett would have seen how Céline went about resolving the crisis expressed in the opening pages of the novel he so admired. At the center of Bagatelles is the paranoid fantasy of Judaization. While Céline has a lot to say about the Jews and does his best to exhaust the archives of antisemitic thought,42 ultimately it is Judaization that obsesses him and provides for him a solution to the crisis of symbolic investiture. Céline seeks to expose French subjection to political, cultural, economic, and sexual domination by the Jews ( juifs) or Yids (youtres). The Jews, he says, control what can and cannot be said (particularly about themselves), what is published or performed (Céline obsesses over the rejection of his ballets by the 1937 Paris Exposition), what is critically praised or condemned, and, not least, what is culturally sanctioned (Céline is particularly preoccupied by the Prix Goncourt). In short, all sources and institutions for the consecration of value are, he believes, in the hands of the Jews. Although we now count Céline among the modernists, he himself saw modernism in the arts as yet another symptom of Judaization and distinguished his own work sharply from it.43 Céline is not shy about drawing out the consequences of this domination for the subject. What he has to say about the Judaization of the subject helps us see both the extent to which his antisemitism addresses the crisis I have described and how Beckett’s own preoccupations might be understood as directly invoking and reversing Céline’s. So, for example, when the Aryan tries to give an account of himself, says Céline, he is permitted only to give an account on the Jews’ terms, in the Jews’ language. The Aryan can speak only as “the avowed, unbridled exuberant parrot [cacatoes: literally, cockatoo] of all of the Semitic fantasies” 44 and cannot give an account of himself that is anything but an account of his admiration for the Jew: The Jew possesses the goy unto the very roots of his entrails, unto his vertebrae, confidently, effortlessly, by appealing to this vanity, and to his hickishness. [ . . . ] Were [the Aryan] to show himself as being somewhat curious, somewhat suspicious, he is quickly called to order, and immediately made to understand, and to repeat over and over, until he is able to repeat the fi ne lesson all the way through: One cannot possibly imagine anything loftier, more preeminent, more perfect in the whole world, than a Jewish scholar! a Jewish Minister! a Jewish movie star! a Jewish singer! a Jewish painter! a Jewish director! a Jewish

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fashion designer! a Jewish fi nancier! a Jewish architect! a Jewish doctor, etc.! . . . That these Jews surpass everybody . . . Roll of the drum! The Chosen People! supremely gifted . . . 45

Thus, says Céline, the Jews have dispossessed the French of their nationalracial inheritance, their own proper sensibilities and language. Which brings us to Céline’s chief concern: the consequences of Judaization for literature. Contemporary French literary taste, for Céline, amounts to a “denial of his [the Frenchman’s] own rhythms”; the Aryan “no longer understands anyone other than the Jew . . . all that issues from Jewish taste . . . He eats it up, he’s transported by it . . . And by none other! Aryans, and above all Frenchmen, no longer exist . . . No feeling of racial mutual support. No longer any sort of mystical community.” 46 Céline thinks his own writing is rejected by the critical establishment if it contains “any sort of authentic substance, motive or lyricism” because “the Frenchman in particular has become completely alienated from the Aryan ensemble by an intractable, inexpiable hatred, for all of that which, even from afar, reminds him somewhat of that [that is, Céline’s] lyricism.” 47 It is here, incidentally, that we see the importance of grasping Céline’s poetics not merely as articulated in opposition to Jewish domination but as a call for emancipation from the Jews.48 We do not understand his antisemitism at all unless we recognize that he regards it as a form of anticolonial ideology (he repeatedly compares the condition of the French under the Jews with that of the Irish under the English): Bagatelles pour un massacre as Decolonizing the French Mind. In Bagatelles pour un massacre Céline answers the questions he posed about the scene of address at the beginning of Mort à crédit. Ferdinand (the name by which Céline also refers to himself in Bagatelles) has no one to write to anymore because the Jews have alienated his audience from themselves and thus from him; since they have not come back he is free to break taboo and talk about his hatred (for the Jews), even if, as a result, his enemies will now come “from the ends of the earth” (Moscow, London, New York, Hollywood) to kill him. Céline’s ravings about Judaization exemplify the delusion-formation response to the crises around symbolic investiture. Cultural, political, and economic institutions no longer seize Céline in his self-understanding because, he posits, they have fallen into Jewish hands. Céline even offers his own iteration of Schreber’s somaticization of these

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procedures, expressed not as feminization but still as a form of sexual passivity and receptivity: “15 million Jews will cornhole 500 million Aryans.” 49 In retrospect, the contrasts between Céline’s and Beckett’s poetics of dispossession are clear. Where Céline sees his fellow Frenchmen as parrots, reciting lines fed to them by the Jews, Beckett’s postwar narrators describe themselves as parrots, stammering out lessons: they too understand themselves as subject to demands from others, but these others are not named or identified, let alone racialized. For Céline, dispossession is contingent, the product of Jewish domination: to escape the domination of the Jew is to be liberated from dispossession as such, to repossess identity and mystical community. In Beckett there is no alternative to dispossession, no personified figure the removal of whom would completely restore the subject to him- or herself. Céline believes his language can be his own and can express authentic identity; Beckett famously prefers “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”50 Indeed, despite the critical consensus about their tonal, stylistic, and thematic affi nities, the kinds of sentences that distinguish Beckett’s postwar prose—the syntax of weakness, the predilection for aporia—cannot be found in Céline, and for good reason: they undermine precisely the expressive and lyrical capacities that Céline extolled and opposed to Jewish alienation. So we can easily enumerate the differences between the two. But how, writing in the wake of Céline, did Beckett get there?

The Birth of Beckettian Poetics out of the Negation of the Spirit of Antisemitism Beckett’s German journal and his interest in Céline suggest why a certain engagement with the antisemitic imagination in general and the antisemitic conception of the dispossession of the subject in particular would have been important to his poetics. Now we can begin to close the hermeneutic circle. Just as taking seriously the antisemitic meaning of Youdi led us to contexts that explain why Beckett would use that name, these contexts in turn give us a sense of how to interpret Youdi’s role in Molloy. We would recall, at the outset, that reading Youdi as the antisemite’s name for the Jew

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means understanding that name as drawing attention not to the one who is named but to the one who so names, as inviting us to consider what Moran says about Youdi, what he attributes to him, as congruent with antisemitic projection. Reading Youdi as representing not the Jewish God but rather the antisemite’s figure of the Jew means reading him not as an abstract entity but a personification of otherwise unrepresentable forces (the chaos, the mess). We note that Youdi’s name, unlike that of the Hebrew God, is eminently speakable, is uttered casually even by those who work for and fear him, and that it appears to refer to someone with a specific business address (Moran recalls it as “8, Acacia Square”) and—to gauge from Youdi’s messenger Gaber’s descriptions of his conversations—a body. From our perspective the “vast organization” of which Moran believes Youdi is “chief” would suggest not some cosmic order but rather the widespread antisemitic fantasies of invisible Jewish power, and Gaber’s mediation of communication between Youdi and Moran, while it may hint at the Angel Gabriel, would also uncannily echo the modern antisemite’s belief, described by Moishe Postone, that Jewish power always remains hidden and seeks to work through “a concrete carrier.”51 At the center of our interpretation would be those indications that Moran’s report to Youdi expresses a fantasy of Judaization, where that fantasy is understood as a specific account of the scene of address. Moran’s broad expressions of estrangement from his narrative—“this relation that is forced upon me”—we would see not as waning faith in some divine imperative but as a protest against having to give an account of himself in response to the call and authority of this figure. Youdi, then, is the name Moran gives to the experience of his own dispossession in giving an account of himself. But for Beckett, as we have seen, to give that experience of dispossession a name is already to disavow it. To see how that critical idea takes form in Moran’s narrative we need to focus on a remark he makes (with variations) on three separate occasions: “He asked for a report, he’ll get his report.” At first glance it’s a simple enough sentence, but like the commodity form for Marx, it proves a strange one, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. We would acknowledge and then put to one side the idiomatic reading, according to which the sentence appears a threat (“He asked for . . . he’ll get his . . .”), one that combines resentful reaction with a promise of

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excessive mimetic violence. While it is important that Moran appears to express such resentment and hostility, interpreting this sentence ultimately requires us to understand what it means for Youdi to “get his report,” an issue I will return to below. Crucial for our purposes is how Moran uses the sentence to underline his dispossession by Youdi. This is most obvious in his use of the thirdperson possessive to refer to what he writes. “His report”: a striking locution from the most possessive of Beckett’s narrators (Moran speaks of “my house,” “my garden,” “my bees,” “my son,” “my God,” and so on). But we can also see Beckett staging with this sentence Moran’s simultaneous acknowledg ment and disavowal of a certain experience of dispossession. This is the burden of the first two iterations: I went down to the kitchen, prepared and set out on my handsome lacquer tray a bowl of hot milk and a slice of bread and jam. He asked for a report, he’ll get his report. . . . Before going into my son’s room I went into my own. I still had the cigar in my mouth, but the pretty ash had fallen off. I reproached myself with this negligence. I dissolved a sleeping-powder in the milk. He asked for a report, he’ll get his report.52

I take it that in these examples Moran indicates that he has just written the kind of sentence that he would not otherwise write but that he believes Youdi demands of him; that, in other words, he writes here not as he wishes but as the Jew demands. I also take it that the sentences Moran draws our attention to are examples of what distinguishes Moran’s prose from that of Beckett’s other narrators, whose tendency would be to undermine their simple declarations, to call into question the veracity of the memory or the validity of the words used to describe it, or to let the sentence peter out before it is finished. While Moran may resemble Beckett’s other narrators in selfconsciously commenting on the kinds of sentences he writes, in expressing a certain dispossession of the account he gives of himself, he is alone, I think, in disavowing his writing in this way, in saying that this writing is not mine; the others express dispossession without thereby disavowing what they write. It would be a mistake, though, to let the contrast with these other narrators, with their undermining of syntax and semantics, lure us into thinking

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that what Moran protests is that he is compelled by Youdi to mean something. That, I think, is where the Old Testament reading of Youdi would lead: Youdi as the name of the agency who imposes patriarchal meaning, the Name of the Father, upon the subject. What Moran draws attention to, rather, is that he feels compelled to write sentences that report his trivial, quotidian movements, sentences that are tedious and meaningless, in a word, what Franco Moretti calls filler, sentences describing what happens between one significant event and the next. There is no filler in the Hebrew Bible— as Eric Auerbach taught, its narrative is, rather, distinguished by gaps and omissions, by the refusal of detail—but plenty in the modern novel, that most secular of forms. Moretti argues that with fillers “the logic of rationalization pervades the very rhythm and form of the novel.”53 In Moran’s narrative the connection between rationalization and filler becomes overt: the writing of fillers has become a bureaucratic task, a report. Thus in his correspondence with Erich Franzen, the German translator of Molloy, Beckett insists, “I prefer Gegend to Gebiet precisely because it is vaguer (limits never determined by Molloy) and somehow less administrative. Gebiet is a Moran word, not a Molloy word.”54 The administrative word is the Moran word, which for Moran means the word that Youdi demands of him. And here it is also interesting to note that in Bagatelles pour un massacre Céline too identifies bureaucratic writing with writing for a Jew, telling the story of his time working as a technical secretary at the League of Nations for a man he refers to as Yubelblatt, who, he says, taught him a particular style of writing such that in the end he had me trained and I, ever the super-prankster, would write hemming-and-hawingly, like some sub-Proust, some quarter- Giradoux, some para- Claudel . . . I went [ . . . ] into circumlocution, I wrote like a Jew, in that fi ne spirit so fashionable these days . . . dialectical . . . omissive, coyly reticent, lackadaisical, high- schoolish, prefabricated, and elegant like all of those fi ne shits, the Francongourt academicians and the fi stulas of Annales. . . .55

On my reading, then, Moran sees Youdi as Céline sees Yubelblatt: he holds Youdi responsible not just for the fact of his having to write an account of himself but also for the very rhythm and form of how he writes, and that rhythm and form are treated not as symptoms of the so-called Judeo-

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Christian dispensation but of a Judaized modernity’s evacuation of meaning from modern life—Weber’s Entzauberung (disenchantment)—the historical process that divests the social performative of its magical force. Yet just as we take Moran to draw attention to and disavow the meaninglessness of his sentences, we also need to note that despite that disavowal, those very sentences have Moran himself as their grammatical subject: I went down, I set out, I went into, I still had, I reproached, I dissolved. In this context it is worth recalling Butler. While Moran may understand himself to be dispossessed by Youdi’s request, in fulfilling it and giving an account of himself, he also establishes his own identity and agency: Youdi asked for his report, and in writing it I say I and thus performatively become myself. But what for Butler is a general description of how one becomes a self-reflexive subject for Beckett is a formal and ideological problem. Moran can say “I” with confidence only so long as he thinks he is responding to him—where he is not merely a structural, enunciative position but an anthropomorphized figure. Beckett’s texts repeatedly insist that how one conceives of the agencies of one’s scene of address shapes the form and the grammar of that account and, in turn, the subject’s self-conception. This insistence is manifest in the difference between Moran’s reporting to Youdi (“I went down to the kitchen, prepared and set out on my handsome lacquer tray a bowl of hot milk and a slice of bread and jam”) and the opening lines of The Unnamable: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.”56 The name Youdi indicates that here the subject understands himself within a particular historical framework, one in which the figure of the Jew, by being explicitly held responsible for that subject’s dispossession, is revealed as the covert foundation through which he reasserts self-possession. Moran himself spells this out when, early in his narrative, he questions his own belief that he works for a large organization when in fact he has never seen any of its other agents: at times . . . I came even to doubt the existence of Gaber himself. And if I had not hastily sunk back into my darkness I might have gone to the extreme of conjuring away the chief too and regarding myself as solely responsible for my wretched existence. . . . And having made away with Gaber and the chief (one Youdi), could I have denied myself the pleasure of—you know.57

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You know—making away with himself too. But Moran is not talking about suicide; he is asking what is left of himself, of his self, without Youdi. The pleasure, which he eventually does permit himself, is the pleasure of the dissolution of identity. Moran acknowledges here that Youdi serves him as a kind of projection surface, a way to externalize and displace responsibility for his own existence (not to mention his own actions and words). More interestingly, Moran also appears to acknowledge that the very act of externalization itself is what gives him a certain coherence as a subject. Beckett thus opens the door to a rereading of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of antisemitic mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “there is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness.”58 What Moran imitates is not, or not only, his disavowed mimetic desires but also fantasies of power, integrity, and potency. And here we might return to the words upon which I have placed so much weight, the third iteration of which runs: “A letter from Youdi, in the third person, asking for a report. He will get his report.”59 And what does Moran write? A report to Youdi that refers to him in the third person and that intimates a certain potential to dominate him, to force upon Youdi the kind of writing that he has forced upon Moran, to address him as he has been addressed. One could go on, say, to consider the implications for a theory of antisemitic mimesis of Moran’s explicitly imitating Youdi in his harsh treatment of his son,60 but we have already seen enough to make plausible the idea that Moran’s relationship to Youdi recapitulates certain central features of the antisemitic imagination in general and the antisemitic account of subject formation in particular. From this perspective, we can already grasp why the novel begins with Molloy and turns in its second half to Moran rather than the other way around. Molloy poses questions about his scene of address to which Moran provides answers, but these answers are Beckett’s equivalents to the antisemitic reconstruction of meaning in the wake of its collapse. The real question, then, is what, having constructed this analogy, Beckett then does— or, rather, undoes—with it. Toward the end of his narrative Moran begins to hear a voice that he is not sure he understands, that gives him advice in a language that “did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in

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his turn had taught to his little one.” 61 It is once Moran begins to hear this voice that his prose changes. The fi nal, aporetic sentences of Moran’s narrative—“Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining”— appear at the end of a series of reflections on his relation to the voice, what it has told him to do, and whether he understands the language in which it speaks to him. The text, through parataxis, makes it appear as if such sentences are the product of the new relation to the voice, are what happens when instead of writing a report for Youdi, with all that entails for the coherence of his world and his language, Moran listens to the voice and tries to understand it. In the last paragraph of his narrative Moran notes, “It told me to write the report.” The voice has, in a sense, taken Youdi’s place. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this voice in Beckett. Moran is anything but alone in hearing it: Molloy receives instructions and comfort from it, the Unnamable’s narrative consists of little other than his descriptions of it and efforts to distinguish himself from it, the narrators of Texts for Nothing try to locate it (within or without), and How It Is begins with it. Ackerley and Gontarski describe the voice as Beckett’s “most profound literary creation,” lying at the heart of his exploration of “the paradox of being and the mystery of creativity.” 62 Moran becomes something like a paradigmatic Beckett narrator when he begins to hear this voice and, it seems to me, as a result, begins to write a different kind of sentence. That the voice appears in contrast with Youdi is obvious; that Moran, in listening to this voice, begins to occupy the more properly Beckettian enunciative position is uncontroversial. But discerning a significant relationship between the two? That might seem foolish. Molloy can read at times as if it has been designed for nothing so much as to entrap those looking for meaningful textual relationships—particularly between the two parts of the novel—in a series of deliberate dead ends. Yet the very contexts that show us how and why to read Youdi as an antisemitic slang name also encourage us to posit a causal relation between Youdi and the voice. Moran’s relation to Youdi represents an antisemitic poetics of dispossession; the relation to the voice is paradigmatic of Beckett’s own poetics of dispossession. Thus it is in Moran’s account of his shift from Youdi to the voice that we can see Beckett presenting the birth of his poetics out of the negation of the spirit of antisemitism.

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The birth scene would be found in a long passage late in Moran’s narrative: I have no intention of relating the various adventures which befell us, me and my son, together and singly, before we came to the Molloy country. It would be tedious. But that is not what stops me. All is tedious, in this relation that is forced upon me. But I shall conduct it in my own way, up to a point. And if it has not the good fortune to give satisfaction, to my employer, if there are passages that give offence to him and to his colleagues, then so much the worse for us all, for them all, for there is no worse for me. And scrivening which is not of my province, it is for reasons very different from those that might be supposed. I am still obeying orders, if you like, but no longer out of fear. No, I am still afraid, but simply from force of habit. And the voice I listen to needs no Gaber to make it heard. For it is within me and exhorts me to continue to the end the faithful servant I have always been, of a cause that is not mine, and patiently fufi ll in all its bitterness my calamitous part, as it was my will, when I had a will, that others should. And this with hatred in my heart, and scorn, of my master and his design. Yes, it is rather an ambiguous voice and not always easy to follow, in its reasonings and decrees. But I follow it none the less, more or less, I follow it in this sense, that I know what it means, and in this sense, that I do what it tells me. And I do not think there are many voices of which as much may be said. And I feel I shall follow it from this day forth, no matter what it commands. And when it ceases, leaving me in doubt and darkness, I shall wait for it to come back, and do nothing, even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments. But this evening, this morning, I have drunk a little more than usual and tomorrow I may be of a different mind. It also tells me, this voice I am only just beginning to know, that the memory of this work brought scrupulously to a close will help me to endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom.63

What I want to emphasize here is that Moran elaborates a series of qualitative differences between the voice and Youdi, and between his relation to each: in place of a person (an anthropomorphic figure), a voice; in place of a named character, a nameless, abstract entity; in place of a business address, an indeterminate location (here within, elsewhere without); in place of commands mediated via the messenger Gaber, unmediated communication and advice. In contrast with Moran’s conviction that Youdi’s language and in-

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structions are clear, transparent, and imitable (easy enough when one is attending to a projection), a voice that is “not always easy to follow.” Each of the elements of the new relationship can, I think, be understood as a determinate negation of some element of the antisemitic conception of the scene of address and its consequences. By determinate negation I mean, first of all, that the specific properties of the voice, of Moran’s relationship to it, and even of his understanding of the implications of this new relation might all be understood as derived in opposition to the specific properties and qualities of his relation to the personified figure of the chaos named Youdi. And I mean that what emerges in place of the antisemitic conception is not a more sociologically accurate account of the scene of address (Moran doesn’t realize that it is not Youdi but an array of social agencies and authorities that demand he give an account of himself) but a particular formal solution. The voice does not resolve the crisis of the subject’s dispossession but reconfigures it with distinctive properties that precisely oppose those contained in the previous solution: ontologically indeterminate, hard to understand, hard to locate—not itself a solution to that crisis but a version of the mess, a formless form. I also (fi nally) mean determinate negation to contrast with Céline’s abstract negation: in Céline the alternative to the Judaized scene of address is no scene of address at all; the alternative to dispossession by the Jew is complete self-possession, mystical community. What comes to an end when Moran no longer obeys Youdi is not dispossession as such but a particular account of his scene of address, of who it is that dispossesses him and what follows from it. Moran’s account of his dispossession by Youdi does not give way to autonomous, sovereign self-possession and self-expression but instead to a different kind of dispossession. Moran expresses his relation to the voice as a matter of following, describing the voice as “not always easy to follow” but insisting that he will “follow it none the less,” will “follow it from this day forth.” Whereas after murdering his doppelgänger Moran writes that “Youdi will take care of me, he will not let me be punished for a fault committed in the execution of my duty,” 64 here Moran says that he will follow the voice “even though the whole world, through the channel of its innumerable authorities speaking with one accord, should enjoin upon me this and that, under pain of unspeakable punishments.” Once again the form of Moran’s relation and responsiveness to the voice appears to emerge

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through a structural relation, namely, the qualitative opposition of the specific terms of his previous relation to Youdi. From this perspective we might want to replace the idiomatic interpretation of the promise of “He asked for his report, he’ll get his report” with a more counterintuitive and literal reading: Youdi will, despite Moran’s resentment and sense of dispossession, get his report. But if Beckett’s poetics emerge from the determinate negation of the antisemitic conception of the scene of address, why does Moran still have to write his report to Youdi? The immediate answer is obvious: Moran now writes not because Youdi demands it but because the voice tells him to do so; his account of himself is no longer work for Youdi but work on (and for) the subject (Moran) himself. But why is this kind of work required at all? Beckett is obsessed with the problem of just how to finish things, just how to bring habits, relationships, stories to a close. The “memory of work brought scrupulously to a close” evokes the psychoanalytic concept of working through. We might take Moran’s report on how certain affects and attitudes toward Youdi—in particular fear—persist as habits as an acknowledgment of how difficult it might be to turn the page on the antisemitic imagination, that something more than how one conceives of one’s dispossession is required to overcome the affective habits and structures of antisemitic projection. Turning the page also requires a very specific kind of work: giving an account of yourself that is an account of your changed understanding of how, why, and to whom you give that account, so that these changes are part of who you tell others you are. The “memory of this work brought scrupulously to a close” would, then, be not just the memory of a job well done but the memory of this account of one’s own transformation. Having gone this far we might as well concede the utility of the Hegelian vocabulary and recognize the voice as both determinate negation and sublation of the relation to Youdi. Sublation, first, because the relation to Youdi is both cancelled and preserved (at a different level) and, second, because the new terms are negations of negations, that is, negations of what Beckett thinks are negations, namely, denials and disavowals of the chaos. The forms that Beckett develops to accommodate the mess, here, would be directly derived from those forms and structures first developed to deny and disavow that mess. Talk of Hegel might make some readers fear an excessively teleological interpretation. But let’s also recall that we don’t know when or even if the

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work that Moran is now busy with in writing his report will ever be brought to a close. It might end with his fi nal lines, but we might, equally, see Beckett to suggest that there is no giving an account of oneself without some projective fantasy about those to whom one gives it. In other words, even if Moran no longer believes in these projections— even if he now writes for different reasons—we do not know if he can write without them. Or is the suggestion that without such projections writing comes to an end, and that only with that is one ready for the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom, because only then can one put down one’s pencil? Beckett leaves it ambiguous, but what is clear is that in the way Moran presents the problem of the passage from one relation to another we have already arrived in properly Beckettian terrain. Against a recent suggestion that we read Molloy as an allegory “where the characters [Youdi, Gaber, Moran] are the personifications of agencies involved in the process of writing” 65 I have argued instead that Beckett articulates his own literary principles by negating such personifications. Properly Beckettian narrative conditions are presented as emerging only when Moran abandons the personified understanding of the conditions in which he gives his account of himself.

Conclusion The distinctive formal features of Beckett’s postwar prose—the voice, the strange scenes of address, the very syntax of his sentences— emerge out of his critique of the antisemitic solution to the historical crisis around subject formation. Beckett’s engagement with antisemitism is not just a matter of a new historical context to which we can see him referring, but is integral to his poetics, to what we might call its modernism. From this perspective, Beckett would be modernist not only because he pursues formal solutions to ideological problems but because he understands these ideological problems themselves as having both a particular historical content and distinctive formal features, and because he thinks that these formal features are intrinsic to what makes them ideological problems. My interpretation of Beckett transposes elements of Eric Santner’s reading of the Schreber case.66 For Santner, the difference between Schreber and the Wagner of “Judaism in Music” (and by extension, the Nazis) resides in how each treats the unconscious identification with “those figures in

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whom modern European society ‘secreted’ its disavowed knowledge of chronic structural crisis and disequilibrium”—women and homosexuals, yes, but mainly, for Santner, Jews. Schreber accepts and inhabits the identification; Wagner and the Nazis try to eliminate it: “by becoming the unmanned Wandering Jew, Schreber, in effect, identifies with the symptom that for Wagner— and for German culture more generally—materialized the blockage in the smooth functioning of the social body.” 67 Beckett, I have argued, does something different: he dematerializes the blockage and refuses to identify with the symptom, instead seeking to return to expose and even dwell in the crisis that produced it. Beckett’s poetics, as articulated in Molloy, seek to bring to an end the story that begins with Wagner’s elaboration in “Judaism in Music” of the idea of Verjüdung, Judaization. The historical reasons lie most directly in his engagement with and working through the precedent of Céline’s literary antisemitism and, of course, his observations of Nazi antisemitism, perhaps particularly as it manifests itself in the attack on modernist art as degenerate. Yet Beckett does not think that this story, much as we might now recoil from its terms, can be finished simply by a declaration that it is over. He does not confront and oppose the notion of Judaization with some kind of reversal whereby, say, his own modernism would embody the features that Wagner, Céline, and the Nazis found Jewish. Rather his work suggests that what is called for is a negation of the structuring terms of this fantasy and the working through—with the emphasis on the word working— of its accompanying affects. It is through these procedures that he hopes to uncover new forms that are capable of accommodating and recognizing the crisis and chaos that those fantasies seek to disavow. Paradoxically, if I am right about Beckett then we need to question the idea that he is a distinctively postwar writer, and particularly Adorno’s frequently cited claim that Beckett offers “the only fitting response to the situation of the camps.” Beckett does not so much respond to the camps as to certain strands of modern antisemitic ideology. The questions Beckett addresses in Molloy had, through his travels in Nazi Germany and his encounter with the work of Céline, all already surfaced by 1937. The idea that Beckett responds to Auschwitz is an optical illusion brought about in part because Beckett responds so directly to the crises and fantasies to which the Nazis sought their “fi nal” solution and in part because the prewar prob-

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lems he addresses appeared to a commentator like Adorno as repeated in the wake of the war. The German economic miracle and the associated culture of forgetting, a postwar France in which everyone claimed to have been a member of the Resistance and to have harbored Jewish friends—in hindsight these did not prove nearly as dangerous as the fantasy of Judaization itself, but it is not incomprehensible that they too could appear as delusional attempts to restore a certain kind of meaning in the wake of that meaning’s utter collapse. For Beckett, then, the catastrophe had already happened before the Second World War began, and that catastrophe is not the crisis of meaning but our efforts to make that crisis meaningful. If Schreber experienced as abject the “idiotic repetition compulsion at the heart of his symbolic function,” 68 for Beckett the meaning-making urge that follows such discoveries, experiences, crises, and traumas was no less abject, no less a kind of idiotic repetition compulsion. And it is this, rather than his dismantling of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that, for better but mainly for worse, makes Beckett still very much our contemporary.

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Notes

Introduction. Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite

1. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998), 108. 2. Gaceta de Tenerife (June 14, 1935), cited in C. B. Morris, This Loving Darkness: The Cinema and Spanish Writers, 1920–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 28–29. 3. Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944 (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1979), 39. 4. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Vom Glück und Unglück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem Letzten Kriege (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1990). Translated and cited by Ian Buruma, “There’s No Place Like Heimat,” New York Review of Books (December 20, 1990): 36. 5. Syberberg, Vom Glück und Unglück, 36. My translation. 6. Sander L. Gilman, “The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History, and Degenerate Art,” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (October 1985): 575– 597. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 7. See Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 14; Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 304. 8. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 9. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 349.

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Notes to pages 7–14

10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291–312. 11. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 151. My emphasis. 12. On “political formalism,” see Rita Felski, “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 501–517. For “activist formalism,” see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–569. Levinson attributes the term “activist formalism” to Susan J. Wolfson, “Reading for Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 1–16. 13. Felski, “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies,” 512. 14. Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” 560. 15. My thoughts here develop and modify Gillian Rose’s claims that for postwar thought the Holocaust is “the great contaminator” and Judaism “the sublime other of modernity.” See Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28, 37. 16. Melena Ryzik, “Lars von Trier Kicks Ups [sic] a Cannes Controversy,” http://www.artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com /2011/05/18/lars-von-trier-kicks-ups-a -cannes-controversy. 17. For a more complete picture of von Trier’s comments and their context, see Chris Heath, “Lars Attacks!” GQ (October 2011), http://www.gq.com /enter tainment /movies-and-tv/201110/lars-von-trier-gq-interview-october-2011. 18. Scott Spector, “Modernism without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 620. Spector discusses Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 19. Amir Eshel and Todd Presner, “Introduction,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 4 (2006): 611. 20. Sarah Hammerschlag gives a subtle, nuanced account of that tradition in The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Nevertheless, I am proposing an alternative perspective to that offered in her book. I am suggesting that the postwar Western European fetishization of the figure of the Jew must be seen as not only welcoming alterity but also seeking to avoid further contamination. So we might say that while it was laudable for the French student movement of 1968 to declare, in a nation that refused to acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Jews to the death camps, its identification with the radically other— “We are all German Jews”—this gesture also represents a striking disavowal. “We are all German Jews” also means “We are not the children of Vichy

Notes to pages 14–27

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France.” If these same students had found a way to express solidarity with the outcast, oppressed, and excluded by declaring, say, “We are all the children of Vichy France,” they might have inoculated the New Left of its self-parodic and ultimately destructive self-righteousness. 21. Carl Schmitt, “Weisheit der Zelle,” in Ex Captivitate Salus (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950), 90. My translation. 22. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 23. Bernstein’s account of backshadowing itself works to undermine another mode of phobic interpretation: he indicts the condemnation by some Israeli writers of the purported blindness and passivity of European Jews as a mode of anxious self-differentiation and self-defi nition. 24. Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 18. 1. Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau

1. I put to one side here most of the theological discussion of Judaization within Christian thought and its use as a description of certain policies and practices of the Israeli government regarding land and population. 2. Steven E. Aschheim, “ ‘The Jew Within’: The Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany,” in his Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 45. 3. Aschheim, “ ‘The Jew Within,’ ” 51. 4. See, e.g., Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti- Semitism (1943; Philadelphia, Penn.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 188. 5. In 1257, Pope Alexander IV issued “a bull officially identifying usury with heresy and placing it under the tender jurisdiction of the Inquisition.” The Council of Vienna confirmed the decision in 1311. See Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 191. 6. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 192; and Aschheim, “ ‘The Jew Within,’ ” 47, both mistakenly present these lines as Bacon’s own views, but Bacon clearly represents them as one of a number of received ideas about usury that he wishes to question. 7. Aschheim, “ ‘The Jew Within,’ ” 52. 8. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 306. My italics. 9. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 305. 10. Aschheim, “ ‘The Jew Within,’ ” 46.

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11. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 174. 12. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 176. 13. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 175–180. 14. John A. Moses describes these images on Strassburg, Freiburg, and Ulm cathedrals in The Reluctant Revolutionary: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Collision with Prusso- German History (New York: Berghahn, 2007). See Chapter 3, “The Problem of Anti-Semitism in Germany from Luther to Hitler.” 15. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 87. 16. Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1906), 1: 544– 545, quoted by Aschheim, “ ‘The Jew Within,’ ” 58. 17. Cf. the critique of critical theory’s investment in the power of exposure in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. 138–143. 18. “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” in Jens Malte Fischer, Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik”: Eine kritische Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2000), 147. My translation. The anonymous translation offered in “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988) gives “Jewish-dominated” for Verjüdung, while William Ashton Ellis gives “be-Jewing.” See Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 82. The latter volume was originally published as Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London: Kegan Paul, 1907). For much of this chapter I refer to the more recent, uncredited translation of “Das Judenthum in der Musik” from the 1988 volume of the journal Wagner. While more elegant and idiomatic than its predecessor, it omits a number of important lines and distorts the meaning of others. In these cases I rely on the Ellis translation, which I will refer to as “Ellis.” 19. Fischer, Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik.” 20. Jacob Katz, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Antisemitism (Hanover, N.H.: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1986); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998); Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (London: Yale University Press, 1992); Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 21. Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Antisemitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); David J. Levin, Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner

Notes to pages 29–34

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Antisemitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 22. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (New York: New Left Books, 1981), 23. 23. See Katz, The Darker Side of Genius. 24. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue, 255. 25. Rose, Wagner, 86. 26. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 21. 27. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 22. 28. Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 145. 29. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 22. 30. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 23. 31. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 84. 32. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 23. 33. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 24. 34. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 24; cf. Ellis, 84. 35. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 23; cf. Ellis, 87. 36. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 27; cf. Ellis, 90– 91. 37. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 29–30; cf. Ellis, 93– 95. 38. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 31; cf. Ellis, 96– 97. 39. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 32; cf. Ellis 98– 99. 40. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 33. 41. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 33. “Hören wir einen Juden sprechen, so verletzt uns unbewußt aller Mangel rein menschlichen Ausdrucks in seiner Rede. . . .” Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 151. Cf. the discussion of Wagner’s antisemitism as a humanism in Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue, 251. 42. Fischer, Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik,” 89– 90. 43. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 24; cf. Ellis, 84–85. 44. Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik”; Fischer, Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik,” 173. I draw on Ellis, 100. 45. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 33. Wagner’s italics. 46. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 84. Cf. Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 173. 47. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 25, translation modified. Cf. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 87; and Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 153. 48. “When we heard this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.” (Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 85. Wagner’s italics); “what [Wagner’s italics] the cultured Jew had to speak . . . could be nothing but the trivial and indifferent, because his whole artistic bent was in sooth a mere luxurious, needless

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thing . . . for never was he driven to speak out a defi nite, a real and necessary thing, but he just merely wanted to speak, no matter what; so that, naturally, the how [Wagner’s italics] was the only ‘moment’ left for him to care for” (Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 88–89). When Mendelssohn tries to draw from the wellspring of the folk music tradition: “only a How, and not a What, rewards his pains” (Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 90). 49. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 22. Translation modified. 50. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. Ellis, 82. 51. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 28. 52. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 26. 53. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 26. Cf. Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,”156. 54. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 32; cf. Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,”171. Wagner’s italics. 55. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 32. Cf. Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,”172. Wagner’s italics. Translation modified. 56. On the Jewish parasite, see Alex Bein, “The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with Special Reference to Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 9 (1964): 1–40; and, more recently, Hugh Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 521–566. 57. Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 2. 58. Such an interpretation owes an obvious debt to the “Elements of AntiSemitism” chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. 59. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 123. My emphases. 60. There is much of value in Esposito’s work, but I fi nd the construction of this particular paragraph troubling. Why does Esposito refer to the author of Entartung as Maximilian Südfeld and to Nordau as the name by which he is known “to the larger public,” as if there were some more restricted, even secret circle who knew him by his original, “real” name? While it is common to point out that Nordau changed his name (reversing the south [Süd] to the north [Nord] and exchanging the field [Feld] for the valley [Au]), it is unusual, having done so, to insist on continuing to refer to him as Südfeld. Entartung was not published under that name. It is strange that a philosopher who proposes a theory of what makes the Nazi genocide a singular event within modernity would not be more sensitive to how his own gesture repeats a common trope of modern antisemitic diatribes, namely, the unmasking of “secret” Jews. Nor is this the only place where Esposito’s otherwise useful book appears troubled on the matter of the Jews. But discussion of that will have to wait for another time and place.

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61. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), translation from the second edition, no translator credited, 22. 62. Nordau, Degeneration, 11. 63. Nordau, Degeneration, 556. 64. Nordau, Degeneration, 17. 65. Nordau, Degeneration, 15. 66. Nordau, Degeneration, 540. 67. Nordau, Degeneration, 7. 68. Nordau, Degeneration, vi, 551. 69. Nordau, Degeneration, 552, 557. 70. Nordau, Degeneration, 209. 71. On Lukács and Nordau, see Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 64. On Nordau in Japan, see Christopher Hill, “Exhausted by Their Battles with the World: Neurasthenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth- Century Japan,” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis, ed. Nina Cornyetz and Keith Vincent (London: Routledge, 2009). 72. See Esposito, Bios, esp. Chapter 3. 73. See, for example, Nietz sche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 74. Jens Malte Fischer, “ ‘Entartete Kunst’ ”: Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs,” Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 38, no. 3 (April 1984): 348. 75. Nordau, Degeneration, vi. 76. Jay Geller, “The Conventional Lies and Paradoxes of Jewish Assimilation: Max Nordau’s Pre-Zionist Answer to the Jewish Question,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 3 (1995): 140. 77. Freiherr von Wasserschleben, Anti-Nordau: Eine Kritik des Buches “Die konventionelle Lügen der Kulturmenschheit” (Berlin, 1885); cited in Geller, “Conventional Lies,” 136. 78. Nordau to Reuben Brainin, 1896. I take the passage from Geller, who in turn takes it from Louis Lipsky, A Gallery of Zionist Profiles (New York: 1956), 18. Geller adds that Nordau’s wife and daughter, in their biography of him, date his change to 1893. Geller, “Conventional Lies,” 151–152, n. 8. 79. George Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists Being Degenerate (London: New Age Press, 1908), 4. My italics. 80. Nordau, Degeneration, 541. 81. Max Nordau, Entartung (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1893), 2:556–557. Here I quote Todd Samuel Presner’s translation, which appears in his article, “ ‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’: Max Nordau and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2 (2003): 279.

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Notes to pages 45–51

82. Presner, “ ‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles,’ ” 279. 83. Presner, “ ‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles,’ ” 295, n. 29. Presner also draws attention to the connotations and history of the word Ungeziefer. 84. Cited and translated in Bein, “The Jewish Parasite,” 12. 85. Paul de Lagarde, Juden und Indogermanen, Eine Studie nach dem Leben (Göttingen 1887), 339, 347. Cited and translated in Bein, “The Jewish Parasite,” 32. 86. As Hugh Raffles writes, “For Germans, the association of Jews with disease was a long one, encased in the memory of the Black Death as a Judenfieber, a Jewish sickness, penetrating from out there, beyond the eastern borders. Of the modern Black Deaths, it was the lice-borne typhus, with its sudden and catastrophic mortality rates, that was the most feared, and, even though by 1900 it was ‘virtually dormant,’ its menace was palpable— and also locatable: in Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other degenerate social groups associated with the ‘east.’ ” Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” 558. Raffles footnotes the Judenfieber as “a notion resurrected by Hitler in Mein Kampf; see Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 221.” On typhus Raffles directs us to the classic Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Biography, Which after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus Fever (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, and Company, 1935); and Paul Julian Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8. 87. Nordau, Degeneration, 172. 88. Nordau, Degeneration, 204. 89. Nordau, Degeneration, 534. 90. Nordau, Degeneration, 560. 91. Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 26. 2. Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of “Degenerate Art” as Historicopolitical Spectacle

1. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse [1928] (Munich/Berlin: J. F. Lehmann’s Verlag, 1938). 2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 3. Sander L. Gilman, “The Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History, and Degenerate Art,” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (October 1985): 575– 597. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Notes to pages 51–53

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4. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 150. 5. Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, 156–157. 6. These statistics apparently make the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition the best-attended exhibition of modernist art in history. The earliest report of this figure I can fi nd is in a text by one of the exhibition’s organizers. Dr. Walter Hansen, Judenkunst in Deutschland [Jew-art in Germany] (Berlin, 1942), 197; cited in Joseph Wulf, ed., Die Bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1963). Under half a million people visited the “Great German Art Exhibition.” Yet the contrast did not seem to concern the Nazis; if anything, the “Degenerate Art” figures were exaggerated—the attendance reported seems to require that a visitor entered the show every two seconds for the entirety of its run! Of course, some see these “Degenerate Art” statistics as evidence of the power of the artworks themselves and of the need many people felt to see them before they disappeared, perhaps forever. Certainly there were such visitors among the two million. But why did they all wait until the last moment? Paul Ortwin Rave, the director of the Berlin National Gallery, thought mockery and ridicule predominated among the visitors’ responses. Those who paused too long before any individual artwork were hurried along by attendants (Rave Archiv, Nachlaß, 232.7.1937, “Bericht über den Besuch der Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst” in München am 21 und 22. Juli 1937”). Georg Bussmann cites Rave’s Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, Hamburg, 1949: “There can be no doubt that at the time the aim of the propaganda, which was to deal a death blow to genuine modern art, was in large measure achieved.” See Georg Bussmann, “ ‘Degenerate Art’—A Look at a Useful Myth,” in German Art in the Twentieth Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1905–1985, ed. Christos Joachimides et al. (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1985), 57. Walter Grasskamp says that “Degenerate Art” was “an attack that was surely conclusive for many viewers and that did not fully lose its effect even after the liberation from national socialism.” See Walter Grasskamp, “ ‘Degenerate Art’ and Documenta I: Modernism Ostracized,” trans. Michael Shae, in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), 168. 7. Fritz Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst (Berlin: Verlag für Kultur-und Wirtschaftswerbung, 1937), 10. Reproduced and translated in Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant- Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry Abrams; Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art, 1991), 368. See also Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 12, 14 (in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 370, 372) for more of the same. 8. See Christoph Zuschlag, “An ‘Educational Exhibition’: The Precursors of Entartete Kunst and Its Individual Venues,” in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 98–101.

210

Notes to pages 53–59

9. Cited in Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau, “ ‘Deutsche Kunst’ und ‘Entartete Kunst’: Die Münchner Ausstellungen 1937,” in Die “Kunststadt” München 1937: Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst,” ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1987), 92. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Schuster are my own. 10. Reprinted in Schuster, Die “Kunststadt” München 1937, 218. 11. “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra- nationalism.” Roger Griffi n, introduction to Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4. Griffi n’s italics. 12. A photograph of the wall bearing this quotation can be found in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 62. 13. “[Zwischen den] Künsten von damals und der Kunst unserer Tage.” Cited in von Lüttichau, “ ‘Deutsche Kunst’ und ‘Entartete Kunst,’ ” 95. 14. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 4; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 360. My italics. 15. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 22; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 380. Italics in original. 16. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 4; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 362. 17. Die Norden’s formation was reputedly catalyzed by the Fighting League’s rejection of Nolde’s membership application. Bussman, “ ‘Degenerate Art’—A Look at a Useful Myth,” 117. 18. Ernst Piper, Nationalsozialistische Kunstpolitik: Ernst Barlach und die “entartete Kunst” (Munich: Suhrkamp, 1987), 16. 19. Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 91. 20. Apparently eliminated but reputedly continuing to operate in secret: Otto Andreas Schreiber, one of the leaders of Die Norden, claimed to have continued to organize exhibitions of Expressionist art—3,500 of them—under the auspices of the German Work Front’s “Strength through Joy” program until 1942. Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1970), 65. 21. Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 23. 22. Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich, 25. 23. Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches, 98–100. 24. Frank Whitford’s translation of Josef Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (1929), in “Radical Art and Radical Politics,” in Germany in Ferment (Durham: Durham University Press, 1970), 5; cited in Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 179.

Notes to pages 60–67

211

25. Georg Lukács, “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline [1934],” in Essays in Realism, trans. David Fernbach (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980), 111. 26. Reprinted in Alfred Rosenberg, Race and Race History and Other Essays, ed. Robert Pois (New York: Harper and Row: 1970), 152. 27. Rosenberg, Race and Race History, 160–161. 28. Published the next year as “Weltanschauung und Kunst” in Gestaltung der Idee, Blut und Ehre, ed., Thilo von Trotha (Munich, 1936); reprinted in Rosenberg, Race and Race History, 164–165. 29. Earlier the pictures displayed in this room were part of a “Dresden Chamber of Horrors,” a traveling exhibition and precursor to “Degenerate Art” orga nized by the Fighting League for German Culture. See MarioAndreas von Lüttichau, “ ‘Entartete Kunst,’ Munich 1937: A Reconstruction,” and Christoph Zuschlag, “An “Educational Exhibition,” both in Barron, “Degenerate Art.” 30. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Oxford: Polity, 1991), 77. 31. “An die Stelle der bisherigen Kunstkritik, die in völliger Verdrehung des Begriffes ‘Kritik’ in der Zeit jüdischer Kunstüberfremdung zum Kunstrichtertum gemacht worden war, wird ab heute der Kunstbericht gestellt; an die Stelle des Kritikers tritt der Kunstschriftleiter.” Order of the Reichsminister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda on Art Criticism of November, 27, 1936, in the Völkischer Beobachter (November 28, 1936); in Wulf, Die Bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich, 119. 32. Hitler’s speech opening the House of German Art announces the end of publicly sanctioned modernism thus: “the artist does not work for the artist, but like everyone else he works for the people! And we shall take good care that from now on the people will be the judges of his art.” Translated in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 388. 33. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 18; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 376. 34. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 20; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 378. 35. For an excellent analysis of Nazi aesthetic ideology, see Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, chap. 4. 36. Reprinted in Schuster, Die “Kunststadt” München 1937, 218. 37. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken: 1985), 241. Translation modified. 38. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 234. 39. “In allem kann man sagen, was einem anständigen Deutschen heilig ist, mußte notwendigerweise hier in den Schmutz getreten werden.” Cited in Schuster, Die “Kunststadt” München 1937, 218. My emphasis.

212

Notes to pages 67–75

40. The “Degenerate Art” exhibition also constructs a series of “degenerate” attributes, which receive labels like: “Negro as racial ideal,” “Jewish, alltoo-Jewish,” and “Madness becomes method.” 41. On professions represented in the “Great German Art Exhibition,” see Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), 112. 42. Himmler, speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Reprinted in U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 4:574; cited in Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” 522. On Zyklon B as a delousing agent, see Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” 556. 43. See Wulf, Die Bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich, 298. On the Nazis and the question of Jesus’s Jewishness more generally, see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 44. Otto Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1978). Thomae’s figures do not include the countless medallions bearing Hitler’s image that were awarded during this exhibition. 45. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 8; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 366. Kaiser’s emphasis. 46. Kaiser, Führer durch die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, 10; in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 368. Kaiser’s emphasis. 47. Wolfgang Willrich, Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Munich/Berlin: J. F. Lehmann’s Verlag, 1937). 48. Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema, trans. Gertrud Mauder and David Wilson (New York: Collier, 1975). 49. Adolf Hitler, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus (Wiesbaden, 1973), 1:2:641; quoted in Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches, 142–143. 50. On the conservative revolution, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); and Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 51. “In [the] main portion of Africa, history is in fact out of the question. Life there consists of a succession of contingent happenings and surprises. No aim or state exists whose development could be followed; and there is no subjectivity, but merely a series of subjects who destroy one another.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 176. 52. Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Sydney: Hutchinson, 1983), 235. German from Mein Kampf (Munich, 1935), 283–284; in Wulf, Die Bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich, 299.

Notes to pages 75–90

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53. Reprinted in Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 306–310. 54. See Franz Roh, “Entartete Kunst”: Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1967); as well as von Lüttichau, “Entartete Kunst, Munich 1937: A Reconstruction”; and Zuschlag, “An Educational Exhibition.” 55. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 309–330. 56. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London: Verso, 1988), 397–398. 57. John Heartfield and George Grosz, “The Art Scab,” trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 484. 58. Heartfield and Grosz, “The Art Scab,” 485–486. 59. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 151. 60. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” 218. 61. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 35. 62. I draw here on Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 63. Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 43. 64. Cited in Peter Fritzsche, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 163. Göll attended the exhibition on Saturday, March 12, 1938. I thank my colleague Jim Hala for drawing this text to my attention. 65. Von Lüttichau, “Entartete Kunst, Munich 1937: A Reconstruction,” 80. The wall text reads in German: “Wir ziehen es vor, ‘unsauber’ zu existieren, als ‘sauber’ unterzugehen. Unfähig, aber anständig zu sein, überlassen wir verbohrten Individualisten und alten Jungfern.” I have modified the translation. 66. Julian Gumperz and Wieland Herzfelde, eds., Der Gegner 2, no. 12 (1920/1921): 401. As it happens, I have traced a number of the quotations from avant-garde journals in “Degenerate Art” back to their original sources, but a discussion of those fi ndings will have to wait for a later project. 67. Cited in Schuster, Die “Kunststadt” München 1937, 218. 3. Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis’s Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 135. Translation modified. Kant’s italics.

214

Notes to pages 90–93

2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1958), 358; quoted in Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (New York: Verso, 2010), 153–154. 3. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1957), 112–113. My italics. 4. Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (New York: New Directions, 1954), 74; Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 123; Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 307, 315. 5. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 93. 6. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 83. Thus Paul Edwards defends the critique of aesthetic modernism in Time and Western Man on the grounds that Lewis “wants a revolutionary art that genuinely revalues the world instead of reflecting the ideology of a decaying capitalism or escaping from it into a Romantic elsewhere.” Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 305. 7. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 101–102, Lewis’s italics. 8. Lewis critiques the avant-garde for exploiting revolutionary rhetoric for commercial purposes and condemns modernist writing that he thinks cynically manipulates naïve audiences into accepting and even imitating its deviations from norms of perception and representation he deems properly human. Thus “Diaghileff” [sic] is denounced for exploiting revolutionary rhetoric and claims of artistic and fi nancial risk while never having “seriously attempted what he was not sure would sell.” Lewis, Time and Western Man, 32. Gertrude Stein’s writing is compared to that of a child whom he then describes as bloated, acromegalic, squinting, and spectacled. Lewis also invites his readers to imagine Stein as a painter whose works do not conform to “the human norm” and are produced with deliberately fraudulent intent, a fantasy scenario that I will discuss in more detail later. See Lewis, Time and Western Man, 50. 9. For a contemporary, philosemitic version of the claim that Einstein’s physics were Jewish (because his working methods remind the book’s author of the Talmud), see Steven Gimbel, Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 10. See David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 11. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 287. 12. Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti- Semitism, and Literary Form (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 187. 13. That said, I do share a number of Ayers’s views about Lewis. Like Ayers, I see Lewis’s Jew as a figure of the East and of collectivizing, anti-individual forces and see Lewis’s version of Christ as echoing Nietzsche. See Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, 330. But I do not see the antisemitism of “The

Notes to pages 93–99

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Strange Actor” (let alone Time and Western Man) as “mysteriously coded” (Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, 43). Ayers says nothing about Orientalism or modernism as Judaization, and his discussion of Time and Western Man focuses instead on Lewis’s attack on A. N. Whitehead. Nor, fi nally, does Ayers demonstrate any of the textual connections between antisemitism and Semites and between “The Strange Actor” and Time and Western Man that constitute the core of my argument. 14. Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 42; cited in Jameson, Lewis, 182. 15. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 101. 16. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 101–102. 17. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God [1930], ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1997), 143–144. 18. Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, 147. 19. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 101. 20. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 125–135. 21. “Bergson’s doctrine of Time is the creative source of the timephilosophy. It is he more than any other single figure that is responsible for the main intellectual characteristics of the world we live in, and the implicit debt of almost all contemporary philosophy to him is immense.” Lewis, Time and Western Man, 162. 22. Lewis, Time and Western Man, xiii. 23. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 306. 24. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 13. 25. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 14. 26. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 69, 92– 93. 27. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 35, 37. 28. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1984), appendix 2, 258. 29. Lewis, Rude Assignment, 256. 30. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 195–196. 31. Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, 77. Kenner’s italics. 32. Quoted in Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, 77. 33. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (New York: Continuum, 2006), 52. 34. Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 52. 35. See Toscano, Fanaticism. 36. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 358; quoted in Toscano, Fanaticism, 153–154.

216

Notes to pages 100–6

37. Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 18. 38. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 28, 138. 39. Edwards shows Lewis to have engaged intensely with Nietz sche’s writing from early in his career, placing a particular emphasis on how The Enemy of the Stars critiques the third essay of Genealogy of Morality; Ayers has suggested that Lewis’s sense of the gag liberal morality places on his freedom of speech derives from Nietzsche’s views on the derivation of contemporary morality from ancient Judaism. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18. 41. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 17–18. 42. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 32. 43. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 33. 44. Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 61. 45. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 286–288. 46. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society, 1914–1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1989), 89. 47. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 89. 48. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 91. 49. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 94. 50. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 94. 51. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 94. 52. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 90. 53. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 90. 54. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 91– 92. 55. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 92. My italics. 56. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 93. 57. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 89, 93. Lewis’s italics. 58. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 94. 59. Lewis, “The Strange Actor,” 95. 60. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 14, 254. 61. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 138. 62. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291–312; Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 63. Lewis, Time and Western Man, xv. 64. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 8.

Notes to pages 106–16

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65. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 123. 66. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 85. 67. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 91. 68. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 92. 69. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 75. 70. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 92. 71. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 92– 93. 72. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 138. 73. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 112. 74. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 113. My italics. 75. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 139. 76. See Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism [1911], trans. M. Epstein (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1982), esp. chap. 14, part 3. 77. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 111. 78. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1989), 346. 79. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 46. 80. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978), 145. 81. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 61. 82. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 53, 54. 83. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 51. 84. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 51. 85. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 62. 86. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 90. 87. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 88–89. 88. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 110, my italics. 89. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 52. 90. Lewis is quoting his The Art of Being Ruled in Time and Western Man, 104–105. 91. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 110, Lewis’s italics. 92. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 35. 93. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 94. 94. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 112. 95. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 39. 96. Anidjar, Semites, 19. 97. Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 52–56. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 229. 98. “Allowing that the whole of what Lewis says about my book is true, is it more than ten per cent of the truth?” James Joyce to Frank Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce, 10; and interview with Frank Budgen, cited in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 596.

218

Notes to pages 122–25

4. Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses

1. Ulysses as realist novel about Jewish identity: Neil R. Davison, James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and “the Jew” in Modernist Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Joyce as Jewish because Talmudic: Ira Nadel, Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Joyce as Jewish because Levinasian: Steven Connor, “ ‘I . . . AM. A’: Addressing the Jewish Question in Joyce’s Ulysses,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 219–237. 2. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 3. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 308. 4. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 309. 5. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 308. 6. Postone interprets the death camps as the Nazis’ attempt to literalize the abstract essence of “the Jew” by revealing Jews as ciphers, numbered abstractions. 7. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998), 149. 8. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 36. 9. In The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti- Semitism in Literary AngloAmerica (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Jonathan Freedman emphasizes the link between Jews and capitalism in his readings of late nineteenth-century English and American novels. But where Freedman’s work explores the equivocal status of the Jew as a displaced representative of the writer’s place in the mass marketplace, my focus is on form. In Freedman, see especially chapter 2, “The Temple of Culture and the Market for Letters: The Jew and the Way We Write Now.” 10. Karen Lawrence refers to this third-person narrator as the novel’s “narrative norm.” See her The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), chap. 2. 11. Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 126. 12. Groden, Ulysses in Progress, 125. 13. Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, 101.

Notes to pages 126–33

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14. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 297, 302, 338. 15. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward An Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 16. Joyce, Ulysses, 21. 17. Joyce, Ulysses, 33. 18. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), 17–19. 19. See the essays by Marilyn Reizbaum and Natania Rosenfeld in Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, ed. Nancy Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University Press, 1995). 20. Groden, Ulysses in Progress, 132. 21. For the rumor about Bloom see Joyce, Ulysses, 335. 22. Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 110. 23. Joyce, Ulysses, 316. 24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1986). 25. Joyce, Ulysses, 292. 26. For more on the history of this notion see Sander Gilman, Jewish SelfHatred (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 27. Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other, esp. chap. 3. 28. Joyce, Ulysses, 304. 29. Joyce, Ulysses, 315. 30. Joyce, Ulysses, 329. 31. Joyce, Ulysses, 316. 32. Fritz Senn, “Bloom among the Orators: The Why and the Wherefore and All the Codology,” in Joyce’s Dislocutions, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 152–155. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, The Jewishness of Mr. Bloom (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 20–23. Senn is preoccupied by Bloom’s inability to make himself popular and sees the Nameless One’s objections to Bloom as a response to Bloom’s not being terribly entertaining. In Senn’s reading of “Cyclops” politics and especially antisemitism hardly figure. 33. J. Richard Gott III, quoted in Timothy Ferris, “How to Predict Everything,” The New Yorker (July 12, 1999): 36. 34. Simmel compares the effect of the stranger in the community to the “trace of strangeness” that can enter “even the most intimate relationships”: “It is strangeness caused by the fact that similarity, harmony, and closeness are accompanied by the feeling that they are actually not the exclusive property of this particular relation, but stem from a more general one— a relation that potentially includes us and an indeterminate number of others, and therefore prevents that relation which alone was experienced from having an inner and

220

Notes to pages 133–36

exclusive necessity.” Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1964), 406–407. 35. Senn, “Bloom among the Orators,” 154. 36. The “straw” is, however, an unfortunate example, since it suggests the very leitmotif—Blazes Boylan’s straw hat— about which Bloom is incapable of saying a single word, even to himself. 37. Michael Groden describes the initial style as involving “a combination of third-person, past tense narration and direct first-person, present-tense depiction of the characters’ thoughts.” See Groden, Ulysses in Progress, 15. 38. André Topia, “The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in Ulysses,” trans. Elizabeth Bell and the author, in Poststructuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 109. 39. Joyce, Ulysses, 316–317. 40. The particular parody that I have focused on is full of similar reflexive ironies. The Irish “Sraid na Bretaine Bheag” translates back into “Little Britain Street.” The masterful Irish literary scholar W. J. McCormack has suggested that the Citizen’s speeches rely on English clichés, while Bloom’s account of the post mortem erection, “It’s only a natural phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the . . .” exploits a feature of Irish called na cura cainte, “the runs (or throws) of speech,” which are “lengthy phrases which have an established and recognized existence as units” and which are integral to speaking Irish fluently. See W. J. McCormack, “James Joyce, Cliché, and the Irish language,” in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988): on Bloom and the Citizen, 330; for na cura cainte, 327. On the other hand, Emer Nolan insists that the interpolations, in their very verbal excess, are actually better renderings of the style of the Irish than the translations upon which they are based. Yet even Nolan identifies the interpolations as manifestations of “the endlessly levelling discourse of the modern” and does not convince me that the interpolations undermine Gaelic myth any less than they “subvert the language of the modern from the inside.” See Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, 107. Of course, Bloom too is on occasion the object of these interpolated parodies. Yet what matters is not how Bloom actually talks and whether the parodies are like that too but that the parodies are like the kind of language that the Nameless One projects onto him. Even when the interpolations parody Bloom’s traits, the text is still doing what the Nameless One says that Bloom does. 41. Although Ulysses as a fi nished text appeared on Joyce’s birthday in 1922, chapters in progress had appeared in the Little Review as early as June 1918. David Trotter sees this date, which marks the publication of the first version of “Calypso” and thus also the point at which it became clear that Ulysses would be radically different from Dubliners and Portrait, as the birthdate of literary mod-

Notes to pages 137–41

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ernism. See David Trotter, “The Modernist Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 83. Serial publication also gave Joyce four years to hear what people made of the initial style and, in his responding to them, to initiate a second break from literary convention without leaving time for people to get used to the first one. His role in subsequent preemptive strikes against criticism, above all the essays written in defense of Finnegans Wake, Our Exagmination Round His Factifi cation for Incamination of Work in Progress, is well known. 42. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World- System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996), 188. My italics. 5. Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism

1. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 3. 2. Robert Alter, trans., The Five Books of Moses (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 428–430. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, “Reason and Revelation,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 142. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1993), 10:616. A strange declaration: on the one hand, extreme loyalty, which seems to suggest a literalist fidelity to the ancient text; on the other, a determination to extend that loyalty far beyond what it once originally meant, that is, a refusal to allow those origins to determine all subsequent iterations. 4. Grasping the thing: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 207. 5. The Second Commandment, in its insistence on separation, on observing the gulf between the human and the divine, as opposed to the Christian emphasis on unifi cation with God through the sublation of the boundaries between the two realms, exemplified in the consumption of the divine body and blood in the Eucharist, is regarded by many as the paradigmatic Jewish purity law. See, for example, Christina von Braun, “Zum Begriff der Reinheit,” Metis 6, no. 11 (1997): 7. 6. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26. For a patient, intelligent exposition of the figure of the Jew in Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 7. For Joyce and Beckett as “non-Jewish Jewish writers”: David Carroll, “Foreword: The Memory of Devastation and the Responsibilities of Thought:

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Notes to pages 143–45

‘And let’s not talk about that,’ ” in Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xxiv. 8. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 205–207. 9. Micha Brumlik, Schrift, Wort und Ikone: Wege Aus dem Bilderverbot (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 12–13. 10. Alexander García Düttmann, The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Heidegger and Adorno, trans. Nicholas Walker (New York: Continuum, 2002), 115, 113. 11. Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), 19–20. 12. Steven S. Schwarzschild, “Aesthetics,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 6. 13. For a critique of the essentialist interpretation of Adorno proffered by these scholars, see Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17–18. 14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. 15. I therefore agree with Michael Steinberg, who writes: “Theodor W. Adorno is a preeminent critic of the ideology of identity with respect to politics, philosophy, music, and Jewishness.” See his Judaism Musical and Unmusical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 227. My argument shows why Adorno’s critique of the ideology of identity should not be forgotten even when we encounter in his work motifs drawn from the Jewish tradition itself. 16. On Odysseus see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 36. On cultural traditions after Auschwitz see Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 366–367. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:249. 18. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 67. 19. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 20. My understanding of these philosophers’ discomfort with the prohibition of images in Adorno is deeply indebted to Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 3 (July 2002): 291–318. 21. Again, my argument might be understood to work in parallel with Michael Steinberg’s: “There is no such thing as Jewish music, in Mahler’s case or anywhere else, just as there is no such thing as Jewish modernism. But there

Notes to pages 145–50

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are significant convergences of Jewishness and musicality, convergences that are to be understood in the context of highly specific cultural mediations and overdeterminations.” Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical, 228. 22. Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, September 4, 1940. Max Horkheimer Correspondence, Max Horkheimer-Archiv, Stadt und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main; cited in Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 186. 23. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 101. 24. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154. My emphasis. 25. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154. 26. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 205. 27. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156. 28. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 151. Note, again, that this does not mean that the antisemite imitates the Jew; rather, he imitates an externalized image of his own repressed impulses, i.e., he imitates himself. 29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 151, 153. 30. Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’ ” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1967), 204. We might also note that in his reflections on sacrifice Adorno’s thoughts remain contemporary. Historians of the Holocaust such as Dominick LaCapra and Saul Friedländer (LaCapra admittedly drawing more on Bataille than Adorno) have also emphasized the excessive, purifying component of Nazi genocide as a return of repressed sacrificial practices. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1998); and Dominick LaCapra, “Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond,” in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 31. None of this pretends to be a complete theory of antisemitism; it is, rather, an attempt to make coherent the terms of Adorno’s theory of antisemitism as false projection. Needless to say, one might wonder about those antisemites, such as the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who reputedly formulated their ideas without ever having met any Jews at all; here, I think, Adorno would encourage a flexible understanding of just where that projection surface needs to be located in order to serve its purpose. 32. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 140. 33. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 142. 34. Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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Notes to pages 150–53

35. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 143. 36. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 179. 37. Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 188. 38. Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 189–190. My emphasis. 39. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 40. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17. 41. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 148. 42. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153. 43. As Andreas Huyssen reminds us, mimesis is a multivalent concept for Adorno, far from restricted to the realm of representation alone. It includes, along with the psychoanalytic sense, a critique of commodification, a biological postulate about how we behave in order to survive in the face of mortal threats, an aesthetic sense derived from Benjamin’s theory of language and, most important for our purposes, an anthropological postulate of a fundamental human impulse to imitate, merge with, assimilate, or adapt to one’s environment. See Andreas Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno,” New German Critique 81 (Autumn 2000): 66– 67. See also Josef Früchtl, Mimesis— Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann: 1986). 44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153. Cf. Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 5:216. My italics. Certainly Adorno emphasizes the historical priority of the Jews, their originary status: the oldest patriarchy, the first to subdue the base instincts, the inventors of kashrut. But the litany of what the Jews were the first to accomplish does not lead to any claims about causation or responsibility but rather to how they are perceived by advanced civilization, what is projected onto them. This point holds even if, as Rabinbach reports, Adorno felt compelled to examine the origins of Judaism because he believed antisemitism predated any of the phenomena usually examined to account for it: Jewish- Christian antagonism, liberalism, capitalism. In the finished text he nevertheless provides what Rabinbach describes as “an imaginary prehistory.” Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 185. Precisely. For Adorno the real historical origins will not necessarily explain anything. Adorno wants, rather, to select from the historical archive those details that will allow him to read the present and the past dialectically. Antisemitism enables a certain reading of the ancient Bilderverbot, which then is telescoped forward to illuminate the present further.

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45. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 53–55. 46. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23:116–117. Quoted in Eric L. Santner, “Freud, Žižek, and the Joys of Monotheism,” American Imago 54, no. 2 (1997): 202. 47. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 134; quoted in Santner, “Freud, Žižek, and the Joys of Monotheism,” 202. 48. Santner, “Freud, Žižek, and the Joys of Monotheism,” 202. Santner’s emphasis. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18. Nietzsche’s emphasis. 50. Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 19. 51. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 380–381, translation modified. “Beckett hat auf die Situation des Konzentrationslagers, die er nicht nennt, als läge über ihr Bilderverbot, so reagiert, wie es allein ansteht. Was ist, sei wie das Konzentrationslager.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 373–374. 52. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 248–249. Translation modified. “Das aller Spiegelbildlichkeit ledige Spiel mit Elementen der Realität, das keine Stellung bezieht und in solcher Freiheit, als der vom verordneten Betrieb, sein Glück findet, enthüllt mehr, als wenn ein Enthüller Partei nimmt. Schweigend nur ist der Name des Unheils auszusprechen.” From Theodor W. Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen,” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 290. 53. Even today, when performances of Beckett are far more likely to conclude with standing ovations than booing, one can still see indications of the kind of thing he is talking about. Many frustrated lay readers of Beckett (and undergraduate English majors) believe Beckett is deliberately keeping to himself the key to their aesthetic satisfaction: the knowledge of who Godot is and whether he’ll come, of whether Clov will leave the shelter, of how Molloy ended up in his mother’s room and if he and Moran are the same person. The renunciation of certain kinds of representation is conflated with a withholding of them ( just as the antisemite believes the Jew keeps to himself the very pleasures he claims to have renounced). The rules of the composition of the work of art— what Beckett submits himself and his text to—become, like Jewish laws, perceived as an unbearable, asymmetrical demand upon the audience. 54. Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Signifi cance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 525. Translation modified. “Der bedeutendste künstlerische Eindruck

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Notes to pages 159–66

war eine buchstäblich großartige Aufführung des ‘Endspiels’ von Beckett. Das ist wirklich eine bedeutende Sache, die Sie unbedingt lesen müssen— allein schon deshalb, weil gewisse Intentionen mit den unseren sehr zusammenhängen. Es ist denn auch entsprechend ungemütlich, und so, daß es immerhin Pfui-Rufe gab.” Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993), 584–585. There is a lot at stake for Adorno in the ungemütlich. The German word negates gemütlich, comfortable, even cozy, with ideological overtones of complacency, of being at home in one’s own home. Adorno’s moral philosophy might be seen as a sustained assault on the value of making oneself gemütlich. In Minima Moralia he insists it is “part of ethics not to be at home in one’s own home.” Adorno, Minima Moralia, 38. Austrian culture is commonly regarded as placing a particular value on Gemütlichkeit. 55. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 235. 56. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 235. My emphasis. 57. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18. 58. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 249. 59. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 235. 60. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 243. 61. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 193. 62. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365. 63. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 366. 64. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 366–367. Translation modified. My italics. 65. Thus even the triumph is a kind of failure, which is why after the deceptively even-handed binary formulation of “triumph and failure” Adorno only talks about culture as failed, condemning it as dog shit, and, in the next paragraph, untruth, garbage, and nothing but ideology. 66. On Jews and dogs, see Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000); cited in Hugh Raffles, “Jews, Lice, and History,” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 526. 67. I have suggested that these questions emerge in bearing witness to a certain kind of scene. Adorno’s witnessing the booing of Endgame is one such instance, but even if the paradigm is inevitably theatrical, the instances do not need to take place in the theater. Adorno’s examples include political repression (the Greek government’s banning Beckett) and scholarly criticism (he thinks the Swiss critic Emil Staiger’s condemnation of modernism discloses the authoritarian personality of modern art’s enemies). It might even be enough to bear witness to one’s own acting out. 68. On the centrality of coldness to Adorno’s critique of bourgeois subjectivity, see J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 396–414. 69. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 367. 70. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 192.

Notes to pages 172–74

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6. The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Céline

1. Dirk van Hulle, Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); on Endgame’s early historical references, see C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 2004), 174. 2. Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliot (New York: Verso, 2006), 76. 3. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 22–23. I have excised the stage directions. 4. I draw here on Richard Raskin, “God versus Man in a Classic Jewish Joke,” Judaism 40 (Winter 1991): 1. Raskin finds the French versions of the joke in Raymond Geiger, Nouvelles histoires juives (Paris: NRF, 1925). 5. Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 256. Simon Critchley, Very Little— Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1997), 164. 6. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable. [Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett; Malone Dies and The Unnamable, trans. Samuel Beckett] (New York: Grove, 1958), 291, 176. 7. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 298. 8. Even Anthony Uhlmann, who points out this deficiency, does not really, despite the tremendous historical knowledge and theoretical sophistication he brings to bear upon Beckett’s texts, give any thought to the problem of antisemitic ideology as such. See his Beckett and Poststructuralism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 48. 9. Thus Alan Astro, “His boss is named Youdi, a pejorative French term for Jew, which in this context might evoke the Hebrew God Yahweh,” in Understanding Samuel Beckett (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 61. Linda Ben-Zvi writes, “Youdi, from which Youspin comes, a colloquial French epithet for Jew—perhaps the Old Testament God, who sends his messenger Gaber or Gabriel to deliver his orders.” Samuel Beckett (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 90. See also Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 98; and even the column by Philologos, “Waiting for Youdi,” Jewish Daily Forward (November 12, 2004). The equation of Youdi and Yahweh persists in Rubin Rabinovitz, Innovation in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 38; Thomas Cousineau, After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 83– 84; and Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 109.

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Notes to pages 174–75

10. Steven Connor, “Scribbledehobbles: Writing Jewish-Irish Feet,” http:// www.stevenconnor.com /scribble. Connor follows Leslie Hill. 11. “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else.” Samuel Beckett, letter to Alan Schneider, December 29, 1957. In “Beckett’s Letters on Endgame,” The Village Voice Reader, ed. Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 185, reprinted in Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 109. 12. Those who read Beckett through the Old Testament also tend to bracket issues of formal distinctiveness in favor of quasi-religious interpretation, as Julia Kristeva does when she suggests that Beckett’s is “a writing that comes across less as ‘aesthetic effect’ than as something one used to situate close to the ‘sacred.’ ” Julia Kristeva, “The Father, Love, and Banishment,” in Desire in Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 148. Moreover, critics who focus on Youdi as Yahweh see Beckett’s prose as engaged in a critique of the limits of the Jewish monotheistic dispensation. Anthony Uhlmann suggests that Moran’s martinet-like insistence on punctuality mimics Youdi and therefore also the law of the Old Testament God, as if we were supposed to read the God of the Pentateuch as a kind of middle manager who punished his people for failing to show up on time. See Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, 133. Such readings converge with the broader contemporary current represented by Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and others referred to in the previous chapter, which attributes the various ills of Western modernity— abstraction and sensual repression, the rule of disembodied law, division of social groups into us and them, adherents of the true faith and idolators—to their supposed origins in Jewish monotheism. 13. Hill, Beckett’s Fiction, 98. 14. It should be noted that those making the commonplace reading of Youdi as the Old Testament God do not then take on the more radical implications of such an association. They suggest that a text marked with the completion date 1947, written in a city that had recently deported hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children to concentration and death camps, sets responsibility for authoritarianism and repression at the feet of the deity of the Hebrew Bible. Wouldn’t this reading reveal Beckett as the subtlest, not to mention the coldest, of the antisemitic modernists? While Beckett is hardly a sacred cow among Hegelian Marxist critics from Lukács to Jameson, most Beckett scholars tend to admire him in a way that inhibits this kind of inquiry. (Incidentally, this is also why it seems hard to find anyone willing to interpret Endgame as Beckett’s meditation on his own complicity with fascism—not only in Hamm, the writer who struggles to fi nish his story as Beckett struggled to fi nish that very play, contemplating his coldness, and all those he might have saved, but also in Clov, whose dream of emancipation is, like that of the fascists, also a dream of order, stasis, and death.)

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No one has considered the antisemitic implications of the Old Testament interpretation because those who argue for a critique of Jewish monotheism generally understand themselves to be doing so in the name of emancipation. How could an argument for emancipation have anything to do with something as oppressive, authoritarian, and reactionary as antisemitism? But as we have seen, modern antisemitism understands itself as a fundamentally emancipatory movement, throwing off the yoke of Jewish domination. It is no defense against the charge of antisemitism to point out that the impulse of an argument or a poetics is “fundamentally emancipatory.” The drive to emancipation is not a priori evidence for or against antisemitic ideology or structures of thought. Everything depends on what one thinks one is emancipating oneself from. 15. Beckett, Three Novels, 118. 16. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say: Modern Philosophical Essays in Morality, Religion, Drama, Music, and Criticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 117. Critchley, Very Little, 179. 17. Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (1911; New York: Touchstone/Collier, 1993), 147. 18. “. . . the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation— or set of relations— to a set of norms. . . . The ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence.” Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 8. She adds: “I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me.” Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 15. 19. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 8. My italics. 20. Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), xi–xii. Santner’s italics. 21. Santner, My Own Private Germany, 21. My italics. 22. Santner, My Own Private Germany, 121. 23. Santner, My Own Private Germany, 125. The secondary revision of Judaization that Santner describes is the work of a culture that, for various reasons— including the myth of Jewish male menstruation, a contemporary obsession with circumcision as castration, differing codes of masculinity within Judaism itself, and a preoccupation with the legal orientation of Jewish religious observance—perceives Jewish men as passive, receptive, and castrated (thus aligning them also with stereotypes about women and homosexual men). 24. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Wagner 9 (1988): 22. 25. Beckett, Three Novels, 32. 26. Beckett, Three Novels, 306.

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Notes to pages 181–83

27. In Ireland the libel case in which Beckett testified on behalf of the Sinclairs against St. John Gogarty for references to them as Jews hardened his rejection of Irish culture and firmed his resolve to remain in France; in Paris he apparently joined the French Resistance in direct response to the arrest and disappearance of his Jewish friend Paul Léon; in hiding from the Gestapo, in Roussillon, he became close to the painter Henri Hayden, who had fled the Nazis because his wife was Jewish and he himself had Jewish ancestry. See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 298. Another close Jewish friend, Alfred Péron, died shortly after being liberated from the Mauthausen concentration camp. See Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906–1946 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 28. Which is also to say, his first work after his famous revelation that his artistic path required him to embrace the “darkness” he had spent his life trying to avoid— dramatized in Krapp’s Last Tape as taking place on the pier at Dún Laoghaire but according to Beckett actually occurring in his mother’s room (precisely where Molloy too finds himself at the beginning of the novel): “Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.” Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 319. Knowlson cites “the things I feel” from Gabriel d’Aubarede, Nouvelles littéraires, February 16, 1961, initially quoted in Graver and Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 217. 29. Here I follow the literary critic Wyatt Mason in rejecting the widespread custom of referring to these texts as pamphlets because the term “pamphlet” falsely suggests that these works are dozens, rather than hundreds, of  pages long and seems to imply that they did not circulate in public but underground. Wyatt Mason, “Uncovering Céline,” New York Review of Books 57, no. 1 ( January 14, 2010), www.nybooks.com /articles/archives/2010/jan /14 /uncovering-celine/. 30. From Samuel Beckett’s German Notebooks, Samuel Beckett Collection, Reading University Library. Quoted in James McNaughton, “Beckett, German Fascism, and History: The Futility of Protest,” in Historicising Beckett/ Issues of Per for mance, ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 107. 31. Beckett interviewed by Tom Driver, quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 523. My emphasis. 32. Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 94. 33. Beckett “replied brusquely that . . . Joyce was the master, there was no one to equal him. He existed on one plane in literature, alone and incompara-

Notes to pages 183–86

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ble. It was on the next lower plane, where everyone else existed, that Céline was the greatest.” Bair, Samuel Beckett, 275. 34. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 462. 35. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 98ff.; cited (and elaborated upon) in Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 88. 36. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Beckett et la Poesie de la Zone (Dante . . . Apollinaire. Céline . . . Lévi),” in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui: Poetry and Other Prose, ed. Matthijs Engelberts et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000), esp. 75–77. 37. Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Da Capo, 1999), 307. 38. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1971), 15. 39. Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, 15–16. 40. Beckett, Three Novels, 7–8. 41. Beckett, Three Novels, 7. 42. Including: that the Jews disproportionately avoided military ser vice in the Great War but are nevertheless leading Europe into another conflagration (the massacre of the title); that they are the puppeteers behind Soviet communism, global capitalism, and Hollywood; that they are uncreative, mimetic, diseased, poisonous, greedy, obsessed with gold; that modernism (in painting, literature, and philosophy) amounts to nothing but a Jewish conspiracy to “negrify” Aryans; that Einstein, Freud, Bergson, and Proust only receive the recognition they do because they are Jews; that Jews are racist, concerned only with the promotion and protection of their fellow Jews; that they wield unparalleled power but insist on being treated as victims. I have made extensive use of the anonymous translation, Trifles for a Massacre (AAARGH Publishing House, 2006), http://www.vho.org/aaargh /fran /livres6/CELINE trif.pdf, made available by the Holocaust revisionist websites www.vho.org and through them, www.vho.org/aaargh, L’Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerres et d’Holocaustes, apparently a French group of Holocaust deniers. My comparisons with the original text (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1937) suggest that the translation is competent. 43. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, 47. 44. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, 93. 45. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, 94. 46. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, 48. My emphasis. 47. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, 49. 48. David Carroll points out that for Céline, where the Jew is circumcised and therefore unable to feel properly, he, as an Aryan, foreskin intact, is

232

Notes to pages 187–97

capable of proper emotion, and where the Jew is imitative and mimetic, he is authentically expressive. See David Carroll, “Poetics and the Ideology of Race: Style and Anti-Semitic Representations in Céline’s Pamphlets,” Poetics Today 16, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 274–277; David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti- Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 7. Julia Kristeva is more aware of the emancipatory drive of these texts, but she uses that drive to excuse Céline’s antisemitism: where the Jew obeys the abstract, patriarchal law of the symbolic order, Céline, she says, posits “another Law,” one characterized by rhythm, joy, and jouissance. For Kristeva, then, it is not fantasies about the Jew but the actual burden of the Jewish dispensation that is at stake. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 174–187. 49. Trifles for a Massacre, 92. Translation modified. 50. Beckett, Disjecta, 139. 51. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 305. 52. Beckett, Three Novels, 120, 121. My emphasis. 53. Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1:381. 54. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett vol. 2: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 458. 55. Céline, Trifles for a Massacre, 80, my emphasis. 56. Beckett, Three Novels, 291. 57. Beckett, Three Novels, 107, my emphasis. 58. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 151. 59. Beckett, Three Novels, 175, my emphasis. 60. Such a reading would pivot around two points. First, when his son disobeys his instructions about which stamps he can bring on the journey, Moran reports of the manner in which he announced the punishment (to leave both stamp albums at home), “Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes with you. I went out.” Three Novels, 109. Second, when, exceptionally, he feels some tenderness toward his son, Moran comments, “how remote Youdi was at that instant.” Three Novels, 118. Both show Moran imitating his own externalized urges and drives. 61. Beckett, Three Novels, 176. 62. Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 607– 608. 63. Beckett, Three Novels, 132. 64. Beckett, Three Novels, 155. 65. Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 144. Szafraniec continues: “Molloy is

Notes to pages 197–99

233

the recalcitrant presence of the sensible that has to be captured in language; Youdi is the source of the obligation to write; Gaber is a transmitter of Youdi’s absolute authority. Moran is (initially) the blind force charged with the execution of orders that Blanchot calls the ‘hand holding a pencil.’ ” 66. A move no doubt enabled by Santner’s own rewriting of Schreber as a kind of Beckett avant la lettre: “engulfed by a meaningless chatter of voices and inarticulate noise, Schreber survives . . . by momentarily refusing to make sense of it all and by himself becoming a player in the ruination of meaning.” Santner, My Own Private Germany, 93. 67. Santner, My Own Private Germany, 144. Santner’s italics. 68. Santner, My Own Private Germany, 121.

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Index

abject, the, 66, 83; modernist art as, 66, 83, 87, 89 abstraction, 90, 91, 108, 114; and the concrete, contrasted, 90, 108, 114, 115; as dead, devoid of life, 91; Jews and, 17, 29, 108, 113; Semitic inclination towards, 109; and time mind, 90, 99, 114 Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski, 183, 193 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 6, 18, 121, 138, 139–168, 192, 199, 225–226n54; on aesthetics after Auschwitz, 18, 138, 139–142, 156, 157–158, 167, 168, 170, 198–199; on antimodernism, 140, 142, 159–160, 164; on antisemitism, 140, 142, 146–148, 156 (see also antisemitism: as false projection; antisemitism: and repression; mimesis: and antisemitism); on antisemitism and antimodernism, parallels between, 138, 142, 145, 159–160, 164, 167; on artistic play, 157, 158; on Beckett, 157–159, 168, 170, 172, 173, 198, 225–226n54; and Bilderverbot (see Bilderverbot); coldness, critique of, 164–165; committed art, 157–158; false projection (see false projection); identity thinking, rejection of, 143–144, 222n15; improper response, notion of (see improper response); Jewish gestures and expressions, 146, 149; Jews as abject, 153, 154, 168; Jews achieving

what Christianity could not, 153, 154, 155; Jews, accusations against (ritual murder, well-poisoning, etc.), 148; Jews and capitalism, 146, 149–150; Jews and civilization, 153–154; Jews and mimesis (see mimesis; mimesis, repression of ); Jews and modernism, 140, 141–142, 145, 157–158, 167, 168; Jews and nomadism, 145, 151, 157; Jews as parasites, 150; Jews and projective object selection, 148–150; Jews’ responsibility for antisemitism, 142, 146, 148, 149–153, 155, 156, 224n44; materialist thinking of, 140–144 passim, 147, 160; mimesis (see mimesis); modernism as Jewish, rejection of notion of, 141–142, 143, 145, 167; modernism and negativity, pleasure in the repressed, 159; “Old Adam,” 162–166; origins and outcomes, relation between, 144, 145, 152, 224n44; on postwar Europe, 156, 158, 161, 166; postwar valorization of Jews as sublime other, rejection of, 141; recollection, value of, 162–166, 167; on reflection, 147, 161, 166; regression, critique of, 139, 152; transformation of the subject, 18, 141, 161–162, 166, 167–168; on Wagner, 29; working through, 18, 141, 161–162, 167–168 (see also improper response: and Bilderverbot modernism)

247

248

Index

Adorno, Theodor, works of: Aesthetic Theory, 144, 159, 160; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7–8, 18, 82, 142–156 passim, 192; “Education after Auschwitz,” 161, 166; Minima Moralia, 225–226n54; Negative Dialectics, 142–144, 157, 162; “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 144, 157, 160 advertising, 96–97, 114; as recycling (of waste), 97 Ahasuerus. See Wandering Jew, the Alexander IV (pope), 203n5 Althusser, Louis, 127 “Ancient East,” 90, 98, 108, 109 Anderson, Benedict, 130 Anidjar, Gil, 17, 99–100, 108, 115 antifascist aesthetics, notion of, 83, 86 antimodernism, 2; antisemitism, parallels with, 138, 142, 145, 159–160, 164, 167; defense of the sacred masking destructive rage, 159, 163; as false projection, 140, 142, 159–160, 164. See also improper response: and Bilderverbot modernism; and individual authors antisemite, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12–13, 14, 17, 18, 28, 82, 138, 155–156; as antimodern, 14; envy of Jews’ self-overcoming and consequent freedom, 156. See also antisemitism antisemitic interpretation of modernist form, 1–6, 12–17, 19, 23–24; as foreshadowing/paralleling Nazi genocide, 2, 4, 5, 15, 16, 55. See also Judaization; Judaized or “Jewish” art, qualities of; and individual authors and Judaization antisemitism, 3, 25–28, 33, 43, 44, 46; as anticapitalist and anticommunist, 96; antimodernism, parallels with, 138, 142, 145, 159–160, 164, 167; as contaminatory, 10, 12–14, 202n15; contradictory content of, 96, 129, 153–154; as degenerate, 44; as false projection, 7, 8, 14, 18, 140, 142, 146–150, 152–156 passim, 159–160,

164, 223n28, 223n31; and mimesis (see mimesis: and antisemitism); and modernism, shared representational problematic, 17, 26, 124; modernist antisemitism, 173 (see also Céline, Louis-Ferdinand; Lewis, Wyndham; Wagner, Richard); Nazism and (see National Socialism: antisemitism of ); and personification (see personification, antisemitic; Postone, Moishe); as problem of representation, 123–124; as redemptive re-creation of meaning, 177; and repression, 82, 146–147, 148, 154 Arab, figure of, 17, 100, 105, 108, 115 art-bolshevism, 53, 55, 74, 76, 84, 85, 116 “Art Scab, The,” 80–81 Aschheim, Steven, 25, 102 Assmann, Jan, 151, 228n12 Astro, Alan, 227n9 audience and affective response, 158, 166, 225n53. See also improper response: and Bilderverbot modernism Auerbach, Erich, 190 Auschwitz. See Holocaust, the authoritarian personality, 159 avant-garde, the, 63, 75, 77, 81, 214n8; Blast, 91, 97, 99, 106, 115; Transition, 98. See also Dada/Dadaism; Futurism Ayers, David, 92, 95, 106, 214–215n13, 216n39 Baader, Johannes, 75 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 31 Bacon, Francis, 25, 203n6 backshadowing, 15, 24, 203n23 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 127 Barlach, Ernst, 56, 58, 59, 60–61 Bataille, Georges, 223n30 Baudelaire, Charles, 42 Bauer, Bruno, 150 Bauman, Zygmunt, 14, 141 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 6, 10, 13, 18–19, 121, 168–177, 180–185, 187–199, 225n53, 228n14, 230n28; Adorno on, 157–159,

Index 168, 170, 172, 198, 225–226n54; antisemitic conception of scene of address, negation of, 187, 192–195, 196–198 passim; antisemitic name (Youdi), use of, 171, 173–176, 177, 187–188, 193, 227n9, 228–229n14; and antisemitism, 169, 175, 181, 187, 197, 228–229n12, 230n27; antisemitism, negation of and birth of poetics, 170, 171, 173, 187, 193–196, 197; aporias, 173, 177, 187, 193; and Bilderverbot (see under Bilderverbot); and Céline, 19, 171, 181, 183–184, 185, 187, 195, 198, 230–231n33; on chaos, 181, 182; closure/endings, 196, 197; crisis of modernity, dwelling within rather than disavowal of, 188, 189, 191, 196, 198, 199; Estragon formerly Levy, 171; excision of names and specific references, 171–172; Expressionism, interest in, 182; and form, 181, 197; formal solution to accommodate the mess/chaos, 182, 195, 196, 198; Jews and Judaization, engagement with ideas about, 170, 173, 181, 188, 190–191, 198; and Joyce, 168, 183, 230–231n33; Moran as narrative anomaly, 176–177, 189; Moran’s transformation to Beckettian narrator, 192–195, 196, 197; narrators, 176–177, 180–181, 182–183, 189, 193; narrator/ narrated, 182–183; Nazi Germany, travel to, 181–182, 184, 198; on Nazism, 181; negation in, 171–172, 173, 177; Old Testament allusions in, 175–176, 228n12, 228–229n14; poetics of dispossession, 187, 193, 195, 196; postwar literature, influence on, 168; and Proust, 168, 182, 183; redemptive re-creation of meaning, critic of, 177; tailor joke, 172; as taking “no stand,” 157–158; valorized as “Judaic” or “non-Jewish Jewish” writer, 141; the voice in, 193, 197; working through, 19, 196, 198; as writing in response to

249

modern antisemitism rather than the camps, 170, 198–199; as writing in wake of collapse of symbolic order, 176–177, 180–181, 182, 199; Youdi as antisemite’s figure of the Jew, 188, 192; Beckett, Samuel, works of: Endgame, 157–158, 160, 163, 166, 172, 181, 228n14; Happy Days, 172, 181; How It Is, 193; Krapp’s Last Tape, 230n28; La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon, 172; Malone Dies, 182, 183; Molloy, 18–19, 170, 171, 173–177, 181–184 passim, 187–197, 198, 230n28, 232n60; Texts for Nothing, 193; The Unnamable, 173, 181, 182, 183, 191, 193; Waiting for Godot, 171, 172 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37 Beller, Steven, 12–13 Benhabib, Seyla, 145 Benjamin, Walter, 65, 73, 83, 86, 224n43 Benn, Gottfried, 65, 92 Ben-Zvi, Linda, 227n9 Bergson, Henri, 17, 92, 93, 95, 109, 111, 215n21, 213n42 Bernstein, Michael André, 14–15, 203n23 Bilderverbot, 90, 143–146, 150–153, 156, 224n44; Adorno’s championing of observance of, 6, 18, 139–146, 151, 152, 156, 157, 160, 164, 166, 167, 168, 221n3; Adorno’s championing of as expression of his Jewish identity, 13, 18, 141–144, 222n13; and antisemitism, catalyst for, 18, 156, 160; Beckett and, 157–158, 168, 170, 173, 198; civilization, role in, 151–152; Exodus 140; as expressing Jewish identity, 141–145; extra-theological dimensions, 143, 144–145; and “improper response” (see improper response: and Bilderverbot modernism); as purity law, 140, 142, 221n5; as sublation of mimesis, 151, 152–155, 157, 165–166. See also prohibitions, Jewish; purity laws, Jewish biopolitics, the biopolitical, 48–49, 50–51, 52, 55

250

Index

Blanchot, Maurice, 14, 141, 232–233n65 Blast, 91, 97, 115 Blaue Reiter, Der, 54 Bloch, Ernst, 64 Börne, Ludwig (Loeb Baruch), 32, 33–34 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11 Brecht, Bertolt, 2, 84, 162 Breton, Andre, 86 Brumlik, Micha, 143 Buddha, 103, 105 Buñuel, Luis, 1, 2 Bürger, Peter, 80 Burke, Edmund, 99 Burke, Kenneth, 148 Butler, Judith, 66, 178, 191, 229n18 capital and capitalism, 123–124; abstract and concrete dimensions, 123–124, 132; fi nance capital, 96, 97; fi nance capitalism contrasted to industrial capitalism, 97 Carroll, David, 231–232n48 Casanova, Pascale, 172 Catholic Center Party. See Center Party Cavell, Stanley, 177 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 19, 92, 94, 171, 181, 183–187, 190, 195, 198, 230–231n33, 231–232n48; antisemitism as anticolonial ideology, 186; antisemitic writings, 151, 171, 181, 183–184, 185–186, 190, 230n29, 231n42, 231–232n48; Aryan loss of mystical community, 186; on Judaization, 171, 185, 186; Judaization, consequences for literature, 185, 186; modernism as Judaization, 185, 190; own work opposed to Jewish alienation, 186, 187; scene of address in, 184, 185, 186, 195; self-possession, mystical community opposed to Jewish domination, 187, 195; style, 184 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, works of: Bagatelles pour un massacre, 185, 186, 190; Death on the Installment Plan, 184, 185, 186; Journey to the End of the Night, 183

Center Party, 67, 68. See also “Degenerate Art” Exhibition: Weimar Republic, critique of Chagall, Marc, 57 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 27 Chatman, Seymour, 126 Christianity, 101–102; as agent of Europe’s Judaization, 102, 104; Catholic Church and the Jews, 203n5; Christian Church and Nazism, 70; as Semitic, 117; as superseding Judaism, 5, 26–27, 38, 48, 101–102 civilization: and nature, conquest over, 151, 152, 154; taboo converted to maxims of, 153. See also culture Claudel, Paul, 190 Coetzee, J.M., 168 Cohn, Ruby, 183 collage technique, 81; in “Degenerate Art,” 76–77 communism, 97; Jews and bolshevism, communism, socialism, 3, 53, 55, 96, 97–98, 116, 129 231n42. See also Lewis, Wyndham: on communism and Russian Revolution concretion, 90, 115; and the abstract, contrasted, 90, 108, 114, 115. See also capitalism: abstract and concrete dimensions; Lewis, Wyndham: fanatical devotion to the concrete; Western Man: concrete image, importance of constitutive dispossession of the subject, 178, 179, 183, 229n18; Jews as agents of (via fantasied scene of address), 180, 184, 187, 188–189, 190–193 passim, 197 contamination/pollution: antisemitic interpretation as, 10–14, 19; Jews figured as, 10, 18, 46 Critchley, Simon, 172, 177 Croce, Benedetto, 95 Cronin, Anthony, 183–184 Cubism, 2, 60, 74, 77 culture: and false projection, 163; civilizing force, failure as, 144, 162,

Index 165, 226n65; repression and repressive violence, foundations in, 162–166 passim. See also civilization Dada/Dadaism, 11, 16, 25, 54, 63, 74–75, 76–83; as anti-art, 80; authority, scorn for, 75–77; challenges to definition of art, 74, 83; First Dada International Fair, 78–80, 82; institutions, critique of, 80–81; meaning, refusal of, 77–78, 81; Nazi imitation of in “Degenerate Art,” 11, 56, 63, 76–78, 79, 81–84 passim; as politically committed, 80–81, 83 Dali, Salvador, 1, 2 Darré, Walter, 65 Darwin, Charles, 97 deconstruction, 176 Duve, Thierry de, 143 degeneracy, degeneration (Entartung), 16, 43; annihilation of, 45, 47; and antisemitism, 43; antisemitism as, 44; as atavistic, a failure to adapt, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47; and contagion, 41–42, 45; in cultural realm, 16, 24, 39–49; and failure of political and cultural authority, 47; genealogy of concept, 43–44; Nazism as, 42; Nordau’s deantisemitizing of, 16, 24, 44, 46–48; as racialized notion, 42; as scientific/ medicalized notion, 24, 43 degenerate art: genealogy of notion, 43. See also degenerate art; degenerate art (Nazi notion); degenerate art (Nordau’s notion) degenerate art (Nazi notion), 2, 16, 24, 29, 43, 65; as abject, 66, 83, 87, 89; as abuse of Germans, 55, 62, 63, 64, 67, 73, 88; as dead, 55; eugenic interpretation: modern art analogized to Jews, 2, 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 50–51, 55, 57; human figure, representation of, 60, 61; Judaization of German art, 55, 61–63, 64, 73, 74–75, 84; as ( Judeo-)bolshevist, 53, 55, 74, 76, 84, 85; and mental degeneracy, analogies to, 52, 57, 75; mockery of the

251

sacred, 62, 65, 67–74, 88; as negroid, 60, 61; and race/biopolitics, 50–52, 55, 74. See also “Degenerate Art” Exhibition degenerate art (Nordau’s notion), 39, 41, 43; as imitative, 41, 47, 48; as figuratively Jewish, 48; as mimicking modernity, 39–40; as possible only when culture moribund, 16, 47 “Degenerate Art” Exhibition, 2, 4, 16–17, 51–57; 59, 60, 62–74, 76–78, 79, 80–89, 182, 209n6, 211n29; appeals to judgment, 53, 62, 64–66; artistic value, critique of established notions of, 77, 83; aura, stripping of, 62, 63, 83, 85, 86; and authority, 73, 74; critics, dealers, and art institutions, attack on, 54, 62–63, 65–66, 68, 73, 84; curation of, 54–57 passim, 62–63, 64, 65–66, 67–69, 70–71, 73, 76–79, 81, 82–83, 84, 86, 88, 212n40; Dada, Nazi imitation of, 56, 63, 76–78, 79, 81–84 passim; exhibition guide, 52, 53, 55, 64, 71, 88; and Expressionism, 2, 16, 56, 57, 59, 60, 67, 69, 76, 78; German art, focus on, 56–57; “Great German Art” Exhibition, counterexhibit to, 51–52, 54, 56, 58–59, 67–71, 73, 82; Heartfield, absence from, 84–87; Hitler, images in, 84; Jewish artists and Jewish content in, 55, 57, 64, 71; mistakes and decontextualization in, 54, 68, 76, 77–78, 81, 82–83; modernist art and art of the mentally ill, juxtaposition, 52, 77; modernist imitation, pleasure in, 82; non-German artists in, 57; overpriced commodities, artworks as, 83; and palingenetic myth, 54; and photography, 52, 85–87; and quotation, 54, 66, 77–81, 85, 213n66; as spectacle, 54, 67, 88; success, question of, 87–88; as travelling exhibition, 52; visitor statistics and responses, 52, 83–84, 88, 209n6; Weimar Republic, critique of, 16, 54–56, 59, 61–64, 66–68, 73, 74–75, 84

252

Index

Degeneration (Nordau), 4, 16, 24, 39–49, 53 delusion-formation, 177, 179, 186 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 77, 141 desert, the/desert people, 2, 90, 108 Diaghilev, Sergei, 91, 106, 214n8 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 7–8, 18, 82, 142–156 passim, 192 dirt, 6–7; antisemites as, 10; Jews as, 142, 145; modernism as, 83, 142, 145 disavowal, 4, 6, 7, 8 disenchantment (Weber), 191 Disraeli, Benjamin, 100 distortion, figural: disfigured bodies and modern art, juxtapositions of, 50–52, 85–86; as degenerate, 57, 68–69, 86 Dix, Otto, 79, 80, 87–88 Douglas, Mary, 6, 83; notion of “dirt,” 6–7, 83 Driver, Tom, 182 Dühring, Eugen, 46, 102 Düttmann, Alexander García, 143 “dynamical” reality, 95–96 Eagleton, Terry, 124, 143 East, the, 100 education after Auschwitz, 161, 163, 166, 167 Edwards, Paul, 91, 92, 93, 97–98, 102, 116, 214n6, 216n39 Einstein, Albert, 92, 93, 109, 111, 214n9 Eliot, T.S., 38, 92, 137 Ellis, William Ashton, 35 Ellmann, Richard, 116 Eshel, Amir, 13 Esposito, Roberto, 2, 39, 40, 43, 46, 51, 53, 206n60 Expressionism, 25, 60, 69, 74, 76, 83; and Judaization, 25; Nazi debates about, 16, 56, 57–61, 66, 67, 74, 83, 210n20. See also under “Degenerate Art” Exhibition Ewige Jude, Der (exhibit), 74 Ewige Jude, Der (fi lm), 163

false projection, 140, 142, 147, 156 , 164; and antisemitism (see antisemitism: as false projection); conscious projection, contrasted to, 147; and culture, 163; projective object selection, 146, 148–150, 160, 223n31, 224n44; and repression, 146–147, 152, 164; surroundings made to resemble oneself, 146–147, 150 fanatic, the. See fanaticism fanaticism, 90, 98–99, 100, 105, 106–108, 115; abstraction, enthusiasm for, 90, 99, 112; “Ancient East” as origin, 90, 107–108, 112, 114; Christianity’s origins in, 103, 104–105; destructive relation to the concrete, 90; devotion to abstract vs. concrete contrasted, 115; literary fanaticism, 106–107, 112; and modernism, 17, 41, 106; Nazism as, 115–116; reason, excess of, 99; as regression, 99, 112–113; and religious fervor, 90, 98, 99, 115; loss of boundaries of the self, 99, 112, 115; as Semitic, 90, 99–100, 103, 104–105, 107–108, 109, 112, 113; and time mind, 106–108; and violence, 103–105; Western rationalism, contrasted to, 98, 99 fascism: as palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism, 210n11 fascist photomontage, 50–52, 85–86 Fauvism, 2 Feininger, Lyonel, 57 Felski, Rita, 8, 9 feminism, 97, 112–113 feminization (as secondary revision), 180, 187, 198, 229n23 Fighting League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), 57, 86, 210n17, 211n29 fi ller and the modern novel, 190 fi nance capital, 96, 97; contrasted to industrial capitalism, 97 Fischer, Jens Malte, 29, 33, 43

Index foreigner/stranger, 133, 219n34; figure of the Jew as, 30, 33, 136; Jewish speech as foreign 130, 131, 132–133 form, 4, 9; antisemitic interpretation of modernist form, 1–6, 12–17, 19, 23–24; Judaized art and predominance of formalism, 35; and modernist and avant-garde art, 9, 19. See also formalism; and individual authors and works formalism: predominance in Judaized art, 35; political, activist, 8, 9, 202n12 Foucault, Michel, 176 France: and antisemitism, the Holocaust, 174, 175, 228n14; under Nazi Occupation, 174; student movement, French, 202n20; Vichy France, 202n20 Frankfurt School, 145 Franzen, Erich, 190 Freigedank, K. See Wagner, Richard Freedman, Jonathan, 218n9 French Revolution, 99, 101, 104 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 92, 95, 97, 113, 147, 151, 157, 177, 179, 231n42; and modernist style, 111; the uncanny, 113 Freud, Sigmund, works of: Civilization and Its Discontents, 154; Moses and Monotheism, 155 Friedländer, Saul, 27, 29, 223n30 Futurism, 2, 63, 74 Geller, Jay, 44 German art: as Judaized, 55, 61–63, 64, 73, 74–75, 84. See also degenerate art (Nazi notion); “Degenerate Art” Exhibition; “Great German Art” Exhibition German economic miracle, 199 German music, 13, 28–29, 31–32, 35–37, 91 German press, 84–85 Geyer, Ludwig, 29–30 Gies, Ludwig, 65, 68, 69, 85 Gilman, Sander, 2, 51, 53, 74, 130, 143 Giradoux, Jean, 190

253

Goebbels, Joseph, 52, 53, 55, 64, 74, 88; Expressionism, views on, 57, 59–60; Michael, 59–60 Goering, Hermann, 84, 174 Göll, Franz, 87–88 Gombrich, E.H., 13 Gott, J. Richard, III, 132, 133 Grasskamp, Walter, 209n6 “Great German Art” Exhibition, 51–52, 65, 67, 85; “Degenerate Art” Exhibition, counterexhibit to, 51–52, 56, 58–59, 67–71, 73, 82; curation of, 70, 212n41; ideal types, display of, 56; and Nazi sacred, 56, 67–68, 69–70, 72 Griffi n, Roger, 54, 210n11 Groden, Michael, 125, 220n37 Grosz, George, 77, 78, 79, 80–81, 84 Guggenheim, Peggy, 183 Habermas, Jürgen, 145 Hammerschlag, Sarah, 14, 202n20 Hamsun, Knut, 92 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 40 Heartfield, John, 79, 80, 84–85, 86–87 Hebrew, 31 Hegel, G.W.F., 74, 90, 99, 100, 115, 153, 162, 196, 212n51 Hemingway, Ernest, 112 Heine, Heinrich, 28 Herder, J.G., 100 Herzfelde, Wieland, 84, 88 Herzl, Theodor, 40 heteroglossia, 127 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 132 Hill, Leslie, 174–175 Himmler, Heinrich, 212n42 Hitler, Adolf, 42; on art policy and degenerate art, 29, 58, 64–65, 75–76, 211n32; on biopolitics/eugenics, 51; as Führer, 55; Führerprinzip, 84, 87; and “Great German Art,” 67; Hitler myth, 70, 72, 73, 76; images of in “Degenerate Art,” 84, 87; images of in “Great German Art,” 70, 72, 73, 212n44; Mein Kampf, 74–75, 148, 208n86

254

Index

Holocaust, the, 57, 68, 144, 156, 163, 165, 218n6, 223n30; aesthetics after, 18, 138, 139–142, 156, 157–158, 167, 168, 170, 198–199; and backshadowing, 15; culture’s relationship to, 144, 162, 164–165; fate of degenerate art and, 2, 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 50–51, 55, 57; and postwar thought, subjectivity, 202n15, 202n20; prevention of reoccurrence, 139, 156, 161, 165 homosexualization (as secondary revision), 180, 198, 229n23 Horkheimer, Max, 96, 145, 146, 158. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment House of German Art, 52, 64, 211n32 Hoyer, Hermann Otto, 72 Hulle, Dirk van, 171 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 139 Huysmans, J.K., 40 Huyssen, Andreas, 224n43 imitation/imitativeness: and Judaized and modernist art, 29, 35, 36, 41, 47, 48; Jewish speech/language and, 30–31, 33; Jews and, 30, 31, 95; Joyce and, 91, 94, 109, 113 Impressionism, 60, 63 improper response, 138, 140, 146, 161–162, 164, 166, 167–168; and Bilderverbot modernism, 141, 142, 156, 158–159, 160–161, 163, 166, 167, 168, 225–226n54, 226n67; as means to its own overcoming, 18, 141, 164, 166, 167; working through as means to transform the subject, 18, 141, 161–162, 167–168. See also false projection interpellation, 127 Islam. See Muslim, figure of Jacobins, 99 Jameson, Fredric, 91, 95, 116, 124, 218n14 Jay, Martin, 143 Jesus Christ: in “Degenerate Art,” 56, 65, 68–73, 74; in “Great German Art,”

70; as Jewish mimic, 104, 109; in Lewis, 103, 104–105, 109; in Nietzsche, 101, 102, 104, 109; racial status for the Nazis, 17, 70 Jew, figure of: as abject, 153, 154, 168; and abstraction, 108; accusations against (ritual murder, well-poisoning, etc.), 148; Ancient Jews, 93, 102–105 passim, 111, 216n39; and art-bolshevism, 116; as atavistic, regressive, 103, 104, 116; blood ties and cohesion contrasted to atomized European, 103, 109; and bolshevism, communism, socialism, 3, 53, 55, 96, 97–98, 116, 129 231n42; and capitalism, fi nance, materialism and usury, 25–26, 30, 34–35, 44, 108, 123–124, 129, 149–150, 218n9; and Christianity, 26–27; collectivizing, anti-individual, 214n13; conspiring against the West, 92; and democratic, populist politics, 17, 104, 111; as “dirt,” 6; and disease, contamination, 208n86; and the East, 214n13; as foreigner, outsider, 30, 33; as heretical, 26–27, 203n5; humanity questioned, 30–33 passim; as imitative, 30, 95; and interpretive deviation, 26–27; materialist age, inaugurator of, 31, 34; and mimesis (see mimesis); and Nietzsche’s slave morality, 101–102, 103–104; nomadism, absence of a settled existence, 108, 145, 151, 157; as not himself Judaized, 109; as not sufficiently modern (failure to recognize Christ), 15; as outside of history, 74; as parasitic, 29, 36–37, 46, 150; personification and (see personification, antisemitic); physiognomy, 30, 32; power of, 3, 19, 25, 28, 30, 32, 180; power as invisible, not manifesting itself directly, 3, 26, 102, 123, 129, 188; valorization of in postwar thought, 13–14, 140–141, 168, 202n15, 202n20; as vermin, 45, 46, 208n83, 208n86. See also: Jewish

Index speech/language; and individual authors Jewification. See Judaization Jewish monotheism, 153; repression of mimesis, as inaugurated by, 150; Western intolerance, as inaugurated by, 151 Jewish speech/language, 30–31, 32–34 passim, 130–131, 132; as bureaucratic, 190; “how” predominates over “what,” 31, 34, 38, 205–206n48; as imitative, 30–31, 33; as repellent, 31, 33, 37, 205n48; and Ulysses (see Ulysses: Bloom’s speech as Jewish, foreign) Jewish spirit, 25, 28; as invisible and abstract, 26; as malleable, shapeshifting, 25; as materialist, 25; as mobile, 26 Joyce, James, 5, 6, 17, 116, 121–123; 124–138, 217n98; as fanatic, 106–107; as imitative, 91, 94, 109, 113; failure to be new, 91, 95, 97, 107, 112; failure to grasp the “whole,” mired in details, 91, 107; homeopathic mimesis of modernity, 17, 124; “how” predominates over “what,” 91, 109, 111; as Judaized and Judaizing, 93, 94, 109–110, 111–112, 113, 114, 121, 122, 125; Lewis’s critique of, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 106–107, 109–110, 111–112, 113–114, 116, 121, 122, 125; and Stein, 110, 111–112; and time mind, 106–107, 109, 111, 112, 114; Ulysses (see Ulysses); valorized as “Judaic” or “non-Jewish Jewish” writer, 10, 13, 17, 141 Judaism: and patriarchy, 151, 153. See also prohibitions, Jewish; purity laws, Jewish “Judaism in Music” (Wagner), 1, 4, 16, 23–24, 28–39, 41, 46–47, 90, 92, 94, 96, 141, 149, 180, 197, 198, 204n.18, 205–206n48 Judaization, 3–5, 15–19, 180; and antisemitic personification (see personification, antisemitic); as anxiety about Jewish power, 180;

255

causes of, 41; Christianity as agent of, 102, 104; and crisis of subject formation, 171, 179–180; distinct from being Jewish, 109; as fantasy of dispossession, 180; genealogy of concept, 16, 23–28; as inner occupation, “Jew within” 16, 27–28; Jewish destruction as solution to, 180, 198; and materialist forces, dominance of, 25, 30; and moribundity of host culture, 31–32; not restricted to German culture, 94, 116; and secondary revision, 180, 182, 186–7, 229n23; Verjüdung, translation of, 204n18 Judaization of the arts: art criticism as instrument for, 64; of modernist art, 1–5, 9, 13, 17, 55, 61–63, 64, 73, 74–75, 84; negation of fantasy of in modernist art, 3–6 passim, 17, 19. See also under individual authors Judaized or “Jewish” art, qualities of: abstraction, 29; cold and lacking in human feeling, 29, 31, 35, 36; formalism, predominance of 35; “how” predominates over “what,” 29, 35, 38, 206n48; imitativeness, 29, 35, 36, 47. See also under individual authors Julius, Anthony, 93 Kandinsky, Wassily, 57, 58, 76, 78, 79 Kant, Immanuel, 90, 99 Katz, Jacob, 29 Keaton, Buster, 173 Kenner, Hugh, 91, 98, 116, 182 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 2 Klee, Paul, 52, 57 Klein, Melanie, 163–164 Klemperer, Victor, 98, 116 Kokoschka, Oskar, 52, 80, 81 Kollwitz, Käthe, 59 Kracauer, Siegfried, 86 Kristeva, Julia, 150, 151, 228n12, 231–232n48 Kunst der Nation, 57–58

256

Index

LaCapra, Dominick, 223n30 Laclau, Ernesto, 8 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 7, 106 Lagarde, Paul de, 46, 102 Langmuir, Gavin, 3 Lawrence, Karen, 125, 218n10 Leiser, Erwin, 72 Lenin, Vladimir, 97–98 Levin, David, 29 Levinas, Emmanuel, 14, 122, 141, 218n1 Levinson, Marjorie, 9 Lewis, Wyndham, 4–5, 17, 90–100, 102–117; Ancient Jews, 93, 102–105 passim, 111, 216n39; anticapitalism, 96; antisemitism, question of, 91–100 passim, 103–109 passim, 113, 116, 214–215n13; artistic usury, 97; Blast, 91, 97, 99, 106, 115; capitalism, critique of, 214n6; Christianity, critique of, 103–104, 109, 116–117; on communism and Russian Revolution, 97–98, 104, 108–109, 113; on false revolution (see revolution, false); on the fanatic, 90, 98–100, 103, 104–105, 106–109, 112, 113, 114–116; fanatical devotion to the concrete, 114, 115, 117; on heredity and peoples, 99, 103, 105–106, 108, 115; Jewish vs. nonJewish mimesis, 111; Jews as fanatics, 99–100, 103, 104–105, 107–108, 112, 113; Jews and abstraction, 108; Jews and art-bolshevism, 116; Jews as atavistic, regressive, 103, 104, 116; Jews’ blood ties and cohesion contrasted to atomized European, 103, 109; Jews as collectivizing, anti-individual, 214n13; Jews and communism, 96, 97–98, 116; Jews as conspiring against the West, 92; Jews and democratic, populist politics, 17, 104, 111; Jews and the desert, 108; Jews and the East, 214n13; Jews as imitative, 95; Jews as not themselves Judaized, 109; Jews as personifying

political modernity, 105; Jews as Semites, 100, 104–105, 107–108, 109, 110, 113; Joyce, critique of, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 106–107, 109–110, 111–112, 113–114, 116, 121, 122, 125; Joyce, account of as itself mimetic, 113–114; “literature of the Jew,” 94; modernism of, 91, 92; modernism as communizing, 98; modernism’s deviation from human norms, 214n8; modernism’s failure to be new, 91, 95, 97, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116; on modernism as “Jewish” and Judaizing, 92–95, 98, 109–113, 115–116; on modernism as Semitic, 117; modernist critique of modernism, 91, 214n6, 214n8; modernist form, ideological significance, 93, 105, 111, 116; money culture, money value, 96, 97; and Nazism, 91, 92, 93, 97, 115–116; Nietzsche, influence of, 17, 93–94, 100, 102–104, 105, 113, 214n13, 216n39; and Semitic hypothesis, 17, 99–100, 104–105, 107–108, 113, 115; on Stein, 17, 91, 92, 93, 98, 109–114 passim, 214n8; on subject formation, 99, 115; on subordination of individual to collectivity, 103, 107, 115–116; time mind (see time mind); visual artist, 91, 114; and Wagner 90–91, 96, 97, 116 Lewis, Wyndham, works of: “An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce” (see Time and Western Man); Hitler, 92, 93; Men Without Art, 112; The Apes of God, 95; The Art of Being Ruled, 110; The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator, 98, 102; The Enemy of the Stars, 216n39; “The Man of the World,” 102, 105; “The Strange Actor,” 93–94, 102–105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 214–215n13; Time and Western Man, 4, 17, 90–96 passim, 98, 100, 102, 105–110 passim 112–117 passim, 141, 214–215n13

Index Librett, Jeffrey, 29 Lindsay, Lionel, 2 Lindsay, Norman, 2 Lombroso, Cesare, 40, 43 Loos, Anita, 112 Löwith, Karl, 145 Lukács, Georg, 42, 60, 228n14 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 141 Mahler, Gustav, 13, 222–223n21 Mann, Thomas, 38 Marr, Wilhelm, 102 Marx, Karl, 106, 123, 150, 188 Mason, Wyatt, 230n29 masonry, 1 mass or crowd, 41, 42 Mauscheln, 130, 131 McCormack, W.J., 220n40 mechanical reproduction, 85–86 Meidner, Ludwig, 58 Meisel, Perry, 37 Mendelssohn, Felix, 2, 28, 31, 32, 34, 205–206n48 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 2, 28, 31 Michaud, Eric, 51–53, 106 mimesis, 147, 154, 224n43; and antisemitism, 4, 7–8, 28, 82, 146, 147–148, 155–156, 159, 192, 223n28; and empathy, 164–165, 166; Jews guilty of, 148, 153, 155; Jews’ sublation of, 151, 152–155, 157, 165–166; valued by Adorno, 151 mimesis, repression of, 150–151; and civilization, 151–152; and Jewish responsibility for antisemitism, 150–152, 153, 155, 156; origins in Bilderverbot, 150 modern art. See modernist and avantgarde art modernism, literary: and reactionary politics, 92; valorized as “Jewish,” 141 modernist and avant-garde art: and antisemitism, shared representational problematic, 26, 124; as communizing, 98; failure to be new, 91, 95, 97, 107,

257

112, 113, 115, 116; and form, 9, 19; human norms, deviation from, 214n8; and Jews, parallels to, 145, 157–158, 167; “Jewish” in philosemitic sense, 4, 6, 10, 12–13; as Judaized or “Jewish” (see Judaization of the arts; Judaized or “Jewish” art, qualities of ); and Nazism (see degenerate art [Nazi notion]; “Degenerate Art” Exhibition); as negation of fantasy of Judaization, 3–6 passim, 17, 19 (see also under Beckett, Samuel; Joyce, James); negativity, pleasure in the repressed, 159; as obsolete, not sufficiently modern, 5, 16, 41; as parasitic, 41; resistance to intelligibility, 160 modernity, 132; abstract, standardized, mobile, subjectless, 135; contaminated by complicity with Nazi genocide, 141; as materialist, 31, 34, 96–97; “modernity effect,” 132–133; and representation, 4, 9, 17, 38, 39–40; scientific, 132; modernity, crisis of: converted into Judaization via “secondary revisions,” 180, 182, 198, 229n23; crisis in symbolic investiture and weakening of social bonds, 179–180, 182, 191 Modigliani, Amedeo, 50 Molloy (Beckett), 18–19, 170, 171, 173–177, 181–184 passim, 187–197, 198, 230n28, 232n60 Morel, Benedict, 40, 43 Moretti, Franco, 136–137, 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 31, 36 Muhammad/Mahomet, 103, 104, 105, 106 Muslim, figure of, 17, 90, 99, 103, 104–105, 107, 108 Mussolini, Benito, 97 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 10, 106 National Socialism (Nazism): anarchy, denunciations of, 53, 74–75, 76; antisemitism of, 7, 16, 45, 46, 61, 65,

258

Index

National Socialism (Nazism) (cont.) 68, 70, 73, 74, 197–198; and Arabs, 115; and Christianity and Christian institutions, 70–73; as degenerate, 42; as fanaticism, 115–116; and the Holocaust (see Holocaust, the); and Nordau, 16, 24, 39, 41–44, 45–46, 48–49, 53, 116; Occupation of Europe, 173–174; politics, aestheticization of, 73; politics, sacralization of, 70–74 passim, 76, 84; and race, 51, 52, 55, 61, 70, 73, 74, 106 (see also National Socialist art policy: racial politics of ); as redeemer of the German people, 16, 55; as regressive, 139; as revolution, 72, 73, 74–75, 89; thanatopolitics of, 55, 88–89; and Wagner, 23–24, 29, 33, 41 National Socialist art policy, 50–53, 56–57, 74; art criticism, prohibition of, 64, 65; “Jewish” art world, attacks on, 61–62, 63, 64; modernism, condemnation of, 50, 53, 65, 74, 87, 89; modernism, invitation to public to judge, 211n32; National Socialist revolutionary art, debates about, 56–61, 66–67, 83; racial politics of, 50, 55, 61–62, 64, 77, 85–86; seizure and expulsion of artworks, 53, 54, 57, 62, 82, 83, 87, 88. See also degenerate art (Nazi notion); “Degenerate Art” Exhibition; “Great German Art” Exhibition Naturalism, 107, 112 New Left, 202–203n20 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), 80 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 100–102, 104, 105, 109; antisemitism of, 102; degeneration (Entartung), notion of, 43; and Nazism, 43; On the Genealogy of Morality, 100–102, 104, 105, 156, 216n39; reconfiguration by Lewis, 17, 93–94, 103–105, 113; on slave morality, 43, 100–102, 104, 105, 156; on slave morality, Jewish origins, 101–102, 105, 216n39

1937 Paris Exposition, 185 Nolan, Emer, 129, 220n40 Nolde, Emil, 2, 50, 56–59 passim, 60–61, 68, 210n17 Nordau, Max, 4, 16, 24, 39–49; and antisemitism, 24, 40, 42, 44–48; Christian language, 48; degeneration, notion of (see degeneration, degeneracy [Entartung]); Jewish identity of 39, 40, 42, 44–45, 48, 206n60, 207n78; on Jews and “Jewish Question,” 44–46, 48; and Nazism, 16, 24, 39, 41–44, 45–46, 48–49, 53, 116; and Nietzsche, 47; and Wagner, 24, 40, 41, 42, 46–47; Zionism of, 40 Nordau, Max, works of: Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, 44; Degeneration (Entartung), 4, 16, 24, 39–49, 53; Paradoxes, 44 Norden, Die 57–58, 59, 61, 210n17, 210n20 Nuremberg Party Rally (1936), 72 Nussbaum, Martha, 174 Orientalism, 100, 107, 111. See also fanaticism: as Semitic; time mind: as Semitic Orientalism (Said), 100 palingenesis (Nazi revolution as), 54, 72, 73, 75 personification, antisemitic: critique of in Joyce 17; Jew as personification of unrepresentable aspects of modernity 4, 9, 25–26, 96, 105, 123–124, 182 philosemitism: interpretation of modernism, 10; Jews and Judaism valorized in postwar thought, 13–14, 140–141, 168, 202n15, 202n20 phobic interpretation, 10–14, 19, 203n23 photography. See “Degenerate Art” Exhibition: and photography; fascist photomontage physical, the. See concretion Picasso, Pablo, 2, 50, 91

Index Pinter, Harold, 168 Postone, Moishe, 3, 8, 26, 96, 123–124, 129, 132, 218n6 Postwar Europe, 156, 158, 161, 166, 199; valorization of Jews, 13–14, 140–141, 168, 202n15, 202n20 Pound, Ezra, 38, 91, 92, 97, 106, 115, 137 Presner, Todd, 13, 45–46 primitive, the, 110 “primitive” art, 69 Prix Goncourt, 185 prohibition of images. See Bilderverbot prohibitions, Jewish, 150; as compromise with mimesis, 151, 152, 153; as demand upon self rather than others, 154, 157. See also purity laws, Jewish propaganda: Dada as, 87; “Degenerate Art” as, 52, 54, 81, 82, 83, 87, 209n; Nazi propaganda, 60, 72 Proust, Marcel, 17, 91, 92, 93, 109, 111, 168, 182, 183, 190, 231n42 purity laws, Jewish, 142; and antisemitic fantasy, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 224n44; as paradoxical form of freedom, 154–155, 156, 157; as source of pleasure, 155, 157; relation to mimesis, 154–155 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 183 Rabinbach, Anson, 150–154, 155, 224n44 Raffles, Hugh, 208n86 Rave, Paul Ortwin, 209n6 recycling and modernist form. See Ulysses: recycling in Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, 53, 62 Reizbaum, Marilyn, 131 Renan, Ernest, 100, 108, 110 repression, the repressed 154, 162, 164; and antisemitism, 82, 146–147, 148, 154; and civilization/culture, 154, 155, 162–166 passim; modernist art’s negativity as, 159 revolution, false (Lewis): and Jews, 97–98, 104; “old” presented as “new,”

259

91, 97, 104, 105, 109, 111, 113, 214n6, 214n8 Riefenstahl, Leni, 72 Rodker, John, 95 Rose, Gillian, 141, 202n15 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 29, 30 Rosenberg, Alfred, 42, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 65, 223n31 Rubens, Peter Paul, 80, 81 Said, Edward, 100, 110; Orientalism, 100 Santner, Eric, 8, 155, 179–180, 197–198, 229n23, 233n66 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14, 221n6 Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand, 62–63 Schmitt, Carl, 14 Schmitt-Rottluff, Karl, 50, 68–69 Schönberg, Arnold, 13 School of Paris, 2 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 177, 179–181, 186, 197, 198, 199, 233n66 Schreiber, Otto Andreas, 210n20 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul, 58, 65, 85, 86; Kunst und Rasse 50–53, 85–86 Schwartz, Regina, 151, 228n12 Schwarzschild, Steven, 143 Schwitters, Kurt, 77, 78–79, 80, 81 Second Commandment, the. See Bilderverbot self-evident, the 26; Jews as challenge to appeals to, 26; Judaization of modern art presented as, 30 (see also “Degenerate Art” Exhibition: appeals to judgment) Senn, Fritz, 132, 133, 219n32 September 11, 2001, 10 Shaw, George Bernard, 44–45 Simmel, Georg, 133, 219–220n34 Sinn Fein,107 Sloterdijk, Peter, 77–78, 80 Smith, William Robertson, 100 Sombart, Werner, 108 Soupault, Philippe, 75 spectacle, 54, 60, 67, 72, 88 Spector, Scott, 12–13

260

Index

Staiger, Emil, 226n67 Stein, Gertrude: failure to be new, 110, 111, 112, 113; Jewish modernism of, 93; as Judaizing, 109–113 passim; Lewis’s critique of, 17, 91, 92, 93, 98, 109–114 passim, 214n8; prose as Jewish, Semitic, 110, 112, 113; style, critique of, 110–112, 214n8; style as literary fanaticism, 112; and time mind, 110, 111, 112 Steinberg, Michael, 222n15, 222–223n21 Stravinsky, Igor, 38 stream of consciousness: Lewis’ critique of 98, 111, 112; in Ulysses, 98, 111, 112, 125, 127, 134 “Strength through Joy” (German Work Front), 210n20 Stunde Null (Zero Hour), 161 subject formation: crisis around, 178, 182; in giving an account of oneself, 178, 179, 191; parroting in, 179, 180–181, 185, 187; via scene of address (in relation to external call), 178, 179, 180, 191, 229n18. See also constitutive dispossession of the subject Surrealism, 2, 25, 86, 186 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 2 symptomatic interpretation, 40, 41 Szafraniec, Asja, 232–233n65 Talmud, 122 Time and Western Man (Lewis), 4, 17, 90–96 passim, 98, 100, 102, 105–110 passim, 112–117 passim, 141, 214–215n13 time mind, 95–96, 98–100 passim, 106, 107, 108–109, 110–115 passim; abstraction of, 99, 108, 109, 114; and “Ancient East,” 107–108, 109; and dissolution of the subject, 95–96, 106, 116; and eradication of regional differences, 107; as fanatical, 106–108, 109; as Jewish, Judaizing, 95, 98, 109, 112; and modernism, 100, 111, 113, 116; the past, preoccupation with, 106,

116; as political/ideological phenomenon, 95–96, 99, 111; as Semitic, 100, 107, 109, 110, 112; versus space and spatializing mind, 106, 109 Tolstoy, Leo, 40, 42 Topia, André, 134 Toscano, Alberto, 98 Trachtenberg, Joshua, 27 Transition, 98 Trier, Lars von, 10–11 Trotter, David, 220–221n41 Tzara, Tristan, 75 Uhlmann, Anthony, 227n8, 228n12 Ulysses ( Joyce), 6, 17, 107, 116, 121–123, 124–138; as abstract, mechanical, 91, 107; antisemitic personification in, 128–129; antisemitism, critique of, 121–123, 137–138; Bloom as harbinger of modernity, 132–133, 136; Bloom, representation of, 94, 122, 125, 128–129, 131, 137; Bloom’s speech and abstract discourses of modernity, 136; Bloom’s speech as Jewish, foreign, 129–134, 220n40; as diarrhea/ excrement, 97, 107, 114;formal features and antisemitic notion of the Jew, homologies between, 122–123, 124, 125, 128, 132, 135–137, 220n40; formal features as critique of antisemitic interpretation of modernism and modernity, 94, 121, 137–138; formal features as Judaized, 17, 121, 125; formal self-consciousness, 125, 132, 135; initial style, 125, 134, 135, 136–137; initial style, break with (interpolations, parade of styles), 35, 125, 126, 135–137, 220n40; and Jewishness, critical approaches to, 122; Jewishness, poetics of, 122, 131; Judaization, representation of, 128; Lewis’s critique of (see Lewis, Wyndham: Joyce, critique of ); Marxist interpretations of, 124; “Nameless One”

Index as narrative anomaly, 125, 126–128, 132, 135; Naturalism, critiqued for, 107, 112; personification abandoned for mimesis of modernity, 124, 136–137, 220n40; “properly improper” speech, 129–130, 220n40; recycling in, 91, 95, 97, 107; stream of consciousness in, 98, 111, 112, 125, 127, 134; as “unjewish,” 94–95 Valéry, Paul, 86 Verfallskunst, 53, 74 Verjüdung. See Judaization Verlaine, Paul, 40, 42 Voltaire, 98–99 Wagner, Richard, 8, 24, 40, 41, 42, 197–198; antisemitism, 24, 28–39; art as commodity, 35, 36; Christian language, 36, 38; Hebraic art taste, 30; on Jewish musicians and music, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 206n48; Jewish physiognomy, 30, 32; Jewish speech as repellent, 31, 33; Jews, call for destruction of 32, 33, 37; Jews as foreigners, outsiders, 30, 33; Jews, humanity of, 30–33 passim, 205n41; Jews and imitation, 30, 31; Jews and money, exchange, 30, 31, 34–35; Jews as outsiders, alienated, 30, 33, 34; Jews as parasitic, 29, 36–37; Jews, power of, 30, 32, 180, 186–187; “Judaism in Music,” 1, 4, 16, 23–24, 28–39, 41, 46–47, 90, 92, 94, 96, 141, 149, 180, 197, 198, 204n.18, 205–206n48; Judaization, causes of, 41; Judaization and dominance of

261

materialist forces, 30; Judaization of modern art, 1, 16, 23–24, 28–39, 41; Judaized art, qualities of, 29, 31, 35, 36, 38, 47, 206n48; labor theory of artistic value, 33–37, 38; modern music as moribund, 31–32, 35, 36–37; and Nazism, 23–24, 29, 33, 41; protomodernism of, 24, 37–39 Walsh, Ernest, 112 Wandering Jew, the, 32, 74, 198 Wasserschleben, Freiherr V. von, 44 Weber, Max, 191 Wedekind, Frank, 1, 2 Weimar Republic. See “Degenerate Art” Exhibition: Weimar Republic, critique of Weiner, Marc, 29 Weininger, Otto, 129 Wellmer, Albrecht, 145 Western Man, 100, 106, 108; concrete image, importance of, 90, 99, 117; as Judaized, 93 Whitehead, A.N., 214–215n13 Willrich, Wolfgang, 65, 71, 78; Cleansing of the Art Temple 71, 78 Wolin, Richard, 143 working through, 6; in Adorno, 18, 141, 161–162, 167–168; in Beckett, 19, 196, 198 Yeats, William Butler, 92 Yiddish, 31 Ziegler, Adolf, 53, 62, 65, 67, 71, 88 Žižek, Slavoj, 8, 14, 128 Zola, Émile, 42 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 143