Jean-François Lyotard’s Heidegger and “the jews” didn’t help me much with what I’d come to it for, which I suppose was the hope of learning something about Heidegger and what he thought about the Jews. I should have known by Lyotard’s lower case and quotes (“I use lower case to indicate that I am not thinking of a nation” writes Lyotard, and “I use quotation marks to avoid confusing these ‘jews’ with real Jews”; how, I wonder, can he tell the real ones from the others?). Still more, I wanted to understand better how we Jews should think of Heidegger. Instead the book made me think about Confederate statues (“’confederate’ statues”?) being pulled down—a topic irrelevant to Lyotard, who published this pair of essays in France in 1988 (but contrary to the title, with the essay called “’the jews’” first, followed by the one titled “Heidegger”). Those statues are often denominated memorials or monuments, and what Lyotard has to say about the logic of the memorial is incisive: “this memory of the memorial is intensely selective: it requires the forgetting of that which may question the community and its legitimacy.” Such forgetting is compensatory: “One elevates because one must enthrall/remove. The pain brought on by shame and by doubt generates the edification of the worthy, the certain, the noble, the just.” And while the trope of “fake news” was not, in 1988, as I recall, on the horizon, Lyotard implicitly prepared for that conversation too, reminding us of a ticklish problem: that a historian’s “claim to ‘realism,’ to confront the community with what menaces it, that is, with the forgotten of the memorials,” is not sufficient, since “the referent is not the ‘reality’; it is the stakes of a question, of several questions, which take place in an argument,” and “to fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that one forgets as soon as one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain.” This means that what Nietzsche called critical history begins to take on something of the “stupidity” (Lyotard’s word) of monumental history as soon as it forgets that it “exists only in expectation of its complements, supplements, corrections, additions, contributions. ‘The dice’ will never be cast, or they will never cease to have to be.” That’s why the journalist who recently worried out loud about his profession turning into “an ongoing morality play about Truth” was right to worry. Anyway, all this discussion got me thinking that toppling statues must be the most Jewish, or maybe I should say “jewish,” or better still, Abrahamic thing—that toppling Confederate statues, idols by another name, must be the most Abrahamic thing one could possibly do: a voiding of representation. Later, still wondering about Heidegger, I went to another book with almost the same title as Lyotard’s—minus the quotation marks and (marked unmarked) lower case j: Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks, by the Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, who has combed the notebooks unpublished during Lyotard’s lifetime for evidence of Heidegger’s antisemitism. As a whole—despite her propensity to put the worst possible gloss on any passing remark (or silence)—what she’s found adds up as irrefutably damning. And yet Di Cesare knows better than to imagine that we should read Heidegger (as an anti-Semite) just in order to forget about him (as a philosopher). This damned philosophy remains. It’s one in which, it sometimes seems, everything that is not Greek or German is Jewish. No wonder he feared that “what is ‘Jewish’”—and there go Lyotard’s quotation marks again!—“has everywhere completely taken over domination, so that even the struggle…against what is ‘Jewish’ becomes subjected to that.” Is it frivolous then to wonder whether Heidegger’s mad struggle against “what is ‘Jewish’”—including in himself and his Christian background—makes him merely the most extreme example of what Isaac Deutscher dubbed “the non-Jewish Jew?” He’s a monument who keeps getting toppled; but the fallen monument never ceases to sit there, toppled, a memorial to its own durability.
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Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts with an introduction by David Carroll, is published by the University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1990. Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks, translated by Murtha Baca, is published by Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2018.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.