deadken posted:Great writers tend not to be nice friendly Anglicans. In the West, at least, they’re of two types: Jews and antisemites, antisemites and Jews. One type, really. Antisemitism is just a desperate attempt to capture some of the Jew’s particular talent for self-loathing; Judaism is just a desperate attempt to account for the antisemite’s hatred. A Jew doesn’t have to be circumcised: Yitzhak Shapira is not a Jew; Jacques Lacan was a Jew par excellence. The Jew is the one for whom something is missing, circumcision is just a reminder of that fact. You try to replace it: that’s where you get psychoanalysis, political radicalism, Christianity. Pathological inventions, all of them.
T.S. Elliot is funny because his anti-Semitism is a desperate attempt to prove how rootless he really is.
wasted posted:T.S. Elliot is funny because his anti-Semitism is a desperate attempt to prove how rootless he really is.
yea jews and antisemites are basically the same people. literally in my case but w/e
deadken posted:i mean if you're going to take this weird narrative of historical consistency then no zionism isn't a christian ideology, christianity is a jewish ideology
of course christianity is a jewish ideology, it is the triumph of the ideology of the oppressed diaspora. the slaves in egypt were early christians.
what im saying is that there is still an element of ancient morality in the old testament, the kind of morality in leviticus and the historical descriptions in the early torah of the human-like God, defeating other gods and conquering lands for his people. the elements of the bible liberals hate and purge for the 'love thy neighbor' stuff. obviously this is not the main trend in judaism, however i am arguing that it's existence is what allows so many jews to be marxists and good philosophers (not liberals).
but where does the jew himself come from? what does philosophy for jews, by jews mean? what would a jew look like without anti-semitism. you say that he couldn't exist, but I think differently. I think that it is not a coincidence Marx was Jewish, I think that a Jew self-actualizing in a positive way is a return to the early historical Jew, who existed even before the greeks and Platonism (which is the beginning of christianity and the modern Jew).
Maybe you should give up the futile task and accept the warm embrace of the Savior.
deadken posted:emancipatory universalism isnt inscribed on jewish dna like tay-sachs disease smockTard. marxism isnt a return to the historical judaism because there is no Grand Lineage Of Historical Judaism, that's the zionist invention. u said yourself judaism forms a dialectic, that means it changes, and a 'return' to the past emerges only as a new antithesis in response to current material conditions, as with zionism.
perhaps it's better, rather than saying 'jews' to say 'non-Christians'. I don't mean atheists or 'spiritual people' or whatever, I mean people who are born in an entirely different tradition, who are excluded from it as an essential feature of christianity. it is just a coincidence of history that Jews have been the ones to play this role, theoretically it could be anyone and at times others have been made to play the role of the jew.
I think the material conditions at the beginnings of capitalism to world war II allowed jews a unique possibility to see capitalism and move beyond it. maybe I'm putting too much emphasis on the narrative of the torah, but I think at minimum the contradictions in within it and the call to study it allow space for free thought. something which doesn't exist in christianity as it is basically coherent in its ideology.
I think the dialectic i mentioned was exactly the difference between marxist jews and zionist jews. maybe the zionists won, since there are no longer any significant jewish-socialist movements or jewish philosophers (I guess if Bernard Henri Levy is the modern jewish philosopher than the zionists have indeed won). but I think the idea of the bible, taken at its face instead of historicized away by liberals (as by different authors or whatever) and/or made into whatever you want it to be (anti-evangelical christians ignoring leviticus for example) is worth exploring instead of making everything entirely about material conditions.
Agnus_Dei posted:All of Jewish/atheist philosophy after Christ is a symptom of the variety and extent of rationalization one must undergo in order to hide from the unavoidable truth that Jesus was the Messiah. You'll entertain any explanation, any ideology except Christ's; the notion that God loves all mankind is too much to bear for a self-hating heart.
Maybe you should give up the futile task and accept the warm embrace of the Savior.
this is exactly what I'm saying. what is a jew after christianity? the modern zionist or liberal-democrat jew (who are the same ofc) is not distinguishable from a christian in any way.
maybe the jew no longer exists and i'm stretching a whole lot. but as someone who was born looking in such a way that it is impossible for me not to be 'jewish', and as someone who has never given any importance to Christianity or zionism, I feel like there's an idea on the tip of my tongue that I'm trying to get out.
Sartre and Nietzsche are 100% correct in their description of jews. but that's because they're not jewish. as a jew, what's left after them? what does it mean to actually exist as a person when you are the symbolic 'other'. maybe it means to craft a fake historical narrative out of fake tradition, as I'm trying to do, the way the Nation of Islam did in self-actualizing as a race. zionists have done that but failed to create anything other than the ultimate expression of christian liberalism. work with me ppl.
theres a book called i think the jewish century which talks about the minoritarian position of european jews & yeah there are other examples of peoples playing a 'jewish' role, chinese in malaysia for example (who coincidentally formed the backbone of the communist insurgency there)
thing is its precisely this concrete minoritarianism that means so many revolutionary thinkers were jewish. that's why zionism is anti-jewish, not any connection with christianity. zionists talk the whole time about israeli scientific advances, but it's astounding that in a country full of jews the closes thing to a great writer is amos oz or ab yehoshua. meanwhile of course palestine produces poets as a mass phenomenon
gyrofry posted:rhizzone project: Lets Read the Talmud
yo, there are certain things you shouldn't do and I'm gonna tell you 500 times till you get the point. you won't though lol. enjoy roman occupation
roseweird posted:umm ok i guess, i still think arendt is worth reading, at least the human condition, i couldn't get through origins of totalitarianism
people on this forum have a problem because they pretend that she still holds on to some phallic understanding of power. I mean, despite the shift you have in the fucking 30s-50s (with horkheimer and adorno no less) with regard to decentralized power, this forum still thinks jews attach significantly to some original sin. that's why you have bhpn sucking nietzsche's dick while he passively acknowledges his debt to heidegger.
same with marx. why would i want to read arendt talk about labour when i can read marx talk about it in a much more thorough and revolutionary manner? i wasn't like "WOW THIS SUCKS", maybe I just read her too late and went "who cares about any of this except as some kind of sparknotes to philosophy" and then I learned about her politics and her propaganda against communism and went "oic -_-"
lol
Linked to this is an interesting struggle which has been going on recently (not only) among Lacanians (not only) in France. This struggle concerns the status of the "One" as the name of a political subjectivity, a struggle which has led to many broken personal friendships (say, between Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner). The irony is that this struggle is taking place among ex-Maoists (Badiou, Milner, Levy, Miller, Regnault, Finkelkraut), and between "Jewish " and "non-Jewish" intellectuals. The question is: is the name of the One the result of a contingent political struggle, or is it somehow rooted in a more substantial particular identity? The position of "Jewish Maoists " is that "Jews " is such a name which stands for that which resists today's global trend to overcome all limitations, inclusive of the very finltude of the human condition, in radical capitalist "deterritorialization" and "fluidification" (the trend which reaches its apotheosis in the gnostic-digital dream of transforming humans themselves into virtual software that can reload itself from one hardware to another). The name "Jews " thus stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is. Along these lines, François Regnault claims that the contemporary Left demands of Jew s (much more than of other ethnic groups) that they "yield with regard to their name" —a reference to Lacan's ethical maxim "do not yield with regard to your desire" . . . One should remember here that the same shift from radical emancipatory politics to the fidelity to the Jewish name is already discernible in the fate of the Frankfurt School, especially in Horkheimer's later texts. Jews here are the exception: in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity — except Jews , whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism .. . In contrast to this approach, Badiou and others insist on the fidelity to the One which emerges and is constituted through the very political struggle of/for naming and, as such, cannot be grounded in any particular determinate content (such as ethnic or religious roots). From this point of view, fidelity to the name "Jews " is the obverse (the silent recognition) of the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews " are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror. {BHPN note: Deadken's argument} To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the Jewish question" is the "final solution" (their annihilation), because Jews qua objet a are the ultimate obstacle to the "final solution" of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.
But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud? The irony is that in the history of antiSemitism Jews stand for both of these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a "homeless" and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms. The first thing to recall is thus that this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity.{BHPN note: my argument} And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (in the precise Nietzschean sense) "politics of "fear" which focuses on preserving one's particular identity.
The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the "public use of reason" hinges on their subtraction from every state power —this position of the "part of no-part" of every organic nationstate community, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who "subtracts" himself from this state, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, living in their interstices — and it is thus an uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as "Zionist anti-Semitism," a foreign excess disturbing the nation-state community. These Jews , the "Jews of the Jews themselves," worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the "public use of reason," refusing to submit their reasoning to the "private " domain of the nation-state.
I think I gave in too soon to deadken's anti-semitism because I was still thinking while vocalizing.
No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name "Jews " are also those who warn us against the "totalitarian" dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror.
this isn't my argument at all
deadken posted:the call for peace and love is a call to arms, it can only be a liberal mantra once liberalism is secure
i agree with this too in my gut but how the hell is it supposed to work in a practical revolutionary scenario
