Why You Should Read Arendt Before Badiou

Alain Badiou’s essay “The Uses of the Word Jew“ is surprisingly popular and equally disturbing. While Badiou admits the return of a more banal and covert, but no less pernicious,  form of anti-Semitism due to a lowering of the threshold at which public opinion no longer tolerates this sort of racialist provocation (paragraph 2) he nonetheless, unwittingly (I assume), creates the conditions for the possibility of a more overt form of anti-Semitism.

In the essay, Badiou suggests the elimination of identity predicates such as “Jew,” “Arab,” “Palestinian,” “French,” “Muslim” etc. in political discourse.   The focus of the essay is specifically aimed at the use of the identity predicate “Jew”. Badiou asks if  in the general field of public intellectual discussion, the word “Jew” constitutes an exceptional signifier, such that it would be legitimate to make it play the role of a final, or even sacred signifier (paragraph 4). Badiou argues that  racial discrimination (anti-Semitism) and racial consciousness (philo-Semitism) are equal contributors to the problem of anti-Semitism and call for the same egalitarian and universalist reaction because both raise the identity predicate to a paradigmatic position that erroneously sacrilizes it so that it constitutes an exceptional signifier (paragraph 4). This shocking claim makes the exceptional use of the word Jew by Hitler in Mein Kampf and the use of the word Jew in Elie Wiesel in Night equally anti-Semitic.

Badiou’s chief claim is that the word Jew has achieved an unwarranted transcendent status as a result of the the Shoah which conferred upon the victims a sacred status. This status is rooted in what Badiou calls a victim ideology which he rejects because he does not accept that an atrocity confers a surplus value on a predicate (paragraph 9). In short, the victims of the Shoah and their descendants are of no more value than any other victim of an atrocity, or community in general. He argues that the use of identity predicates in public discourse disrupts the identitarian configuration of the cosmopolitan state (paragraph 11.) Applying his analysis to the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Badiou argues instead for a secular and democratic Palestine… subtracted from all predicates where private and political uses of identity predicates are strictly separated (paragraphs 11, 13). He recommends that Israel no longer refer to itself as Jewish or Palestinian state.

Badiou’s essay seeks to reduce the unique communitarian identities of private citizens to a zero-level of national homogeneity in the political realm as a resolution to hostilities arising from these differences. Essentially, Badiou’s argument is that there can be no racial discrimination if there are no racial predicates in use. This argument is similar to offering decapitation as a remedy for headaches: no head, no headache.  Unfortunately, this reduces the particular identities and histories of citizens to political insignificance. The very assertion that the history and identity of Jewish people  (or Palestinians, black South Africans, Native Americans or American descendants of slaves for that matter) is politically insignificant is ethically abhorrent.

A re-reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is instructive before reading Badiou’s essay. Arendt spends a good deal of time in this work highlighting the precursors to the Shoah. She points out that the alien was a threat to the totalitarian state. Difference was viewed with distrust and had to be eliminated.  She writes:

The reason why highly developed political communities, such as the ancient city-states or modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those natural and always present differences and differentiations which by themselves arouse dumb hatred, mistrust, and discrimination because they indicate all too clearly those spheres where men cannot act and change at will, ie., the limitations of the human artifice. The “alien” is a frightening symbol of  the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy… No doubt, wherever public life and its law of equality are completely victorious, wherever a civilization succeeds in eliminating or reducing to a minimum the dark background of difference, it will end in complete petrification and be punished, so to speak, for having forgotten that man is only the master, not the creator of the world (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 301-302.)

One of the first acts of the Nazi regime was the transformation of European Jews and other undesirables into a “stateless mass”. European Jews were stripped of their citizenship and consequently were no longer protected by the law or subject to it.  As Giorgio Agamben, has pointed out, The Jew living under Nazism … may be killed but not sacrificed (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.) Badiou’s argument seems to be a linguistic equivalent of the Nazi’s political policy of de-nationalization. By removing the legal identity predicates from the Jews of Europe the Nazi’s created a group that was outside the law and could then be murdered without impunity. While one may concede that it was the elevation of the identity predicate “Jew” that allowed for this exceptional status under the Third Reich it must be admitted that the Nazis were systematically eliminating all identity predicates except one: Aryan. One wonders if Badiou’s suggestion might lead to exactly the same situation. Whenever identity predicates are removed from the political realm and human beings are denied the right for “self display”(cf.  Selbstdarstellung “the urge for self display’ Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking, 29); that is the natural expression of difference, which Arendt argues is an innate impulse to reveal oneself as an individual, the conditions for the possibility of extermination are present. Arendt writes:

… whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. It is indeed as though everything that is alive – in addition to the fact that its surface is made for appearance, fit to be seen and meant to appear to others -has an urge to appear, to fit into the world of appearances by displaying and showing, not its “inner self” [which would be a zero-level predicate] but itself as an individual (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Thinking, 29)

The innate impulse for self-expression that takes the form of identity predicates in discourse can only be repressed at our own peril. Badiou’s call for the elimination of identity predicates in public discourse creates the conditions for the possibility of a new anti-Semitism. Let us take the time to read Arendt before we read Badiou.

The Return of Homo Sapiens: Zubiri and Arendt on the Intellectual Situation of the Modern Subject

In an essay titled “Our Intellectual Situation,” written in May 1942, Xavier Zubiri describes the intellectual situation of the modern subject as marked by confusion, disorientation and discontent. Technology as utility, he argued, had supplanted the ancient notion of techne as a mode of knowing which characterized the intellectual life of the ancient subject. Ideas were now used rather than understood. He described this situation as a transformation of the human subject from homo sapiens to homo faber:

… the colossal development of technology has profoundly modified the way in which man exists in the world. It can be said, really, that technology constitutes that concrete manner in which contemporary man exists among things. But although technology, for the ancients, was a mode of knowing, for modern man it is progressively taking on an ever more purely operative character. Homo sapiens has been yielding his place to homo faber. Whence the grave crisis which affects the very idea of the world and of the proper function of man in his life (Zubiri, “Our Intellectual Situation,” Nature, History, God, 28-29.)

The grave crisis in which homo faber was now mired was an isolated existence, which Zubiri referred to as a “sonorous solitude,” in which human life was separated from natural life. Michel Foucault would later make a similar assessment and trace this situation to what he termed bio-power (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)  Whereas previously the human subject had been founded on the metaphysical ideas of being, world and God, now each of these ideas disintegrated leaving the modern subject in a profoundly metaphysical situation beyond the totality of reality and beyond the physical. Created reason could no longer be based upon an uncreated reason. The modern subject was metaphysically empty and intellectually adrift. Zubiri described this situation and the path out of it in the following way:

Thus the man of the 20th century finds himself even more alone; this time without the world, without God, and without himself. A singular historical condition. Intellectually nothing is left to the man of today except the ontological place where the reality of the world, of God, and of his own existence were at one time able to be written. It is absolute solitude… …. But if, by a supreme effort, man is able to fall back upon himself, he will sense the ultimate questions of existence pass by his unfathomable depth like umbrae silentes. The questions of being of the world, and of truth echo in the depths of his person (Zubiri, “Our Intellectual Situation,” Nature, History, God, 30-31.)

The way out of the situation of homo faber is the return of the homo sapiens, a revival of “thinking” which gives action meaning. Zubiri, suggests reopening the metaphysical questions of being, world and truth precisely because the intellectual situation of the modern subject is metaphysical; that is transphysical (Zubiri, “Our Intellectual Situation,” Nature, History, God, 31.)

Hannah Arendt made a similar suggestion in her 1973 Gifford lecture titled “Thinking,” published posthumously in The Life of the Mind. She pointed out that “nothing seems to make much sense any more” for the modern subject precisely because “the whole framework of reference in which our thinking was accustomed to orient itself” has disintegrated. (Arendt, “Thinking,” The Life of the Mind, 11.) Arendt sees in Adolf Eichmann an example of the modern subject for whom this framework has disintegrated. She writes:

I was struck by a manfest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and  neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness (Arendt, “Thinking,” The Life of the Mind, 4.)

The confused, disorientated and discontented intellectual situation of the modern subject that Zubiri highlighted in 1942 was still palpably clear in 1973 when Arendt gave her lecture. While the progress of homo faber is undeniable in modern life,  the means have not justified the ends. The demise of homo sapiens is the gravest tragedy of modernity and is the single factor that could make Eichmann’s of us all: thoughtless actors of monstrous deeds. The way out is the way in: from doing to thinking, from the active life to the contemplative life, from homo faber to homo sapiens.

The Shame of Homo Sacer

Contrary to Aristotle’s claim that shame is not properly a characteristic of a good person, except perhaps conditionally (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.9), Baruch Spinoza argued in his Ethics that shame was good:

… shame, like compassion, though, not a virtue, is yet good, insofar as it shows, that the  feeler of shame is really imbued with the desire to live honourably… therefore, though a man who feels shame is sorrowful, he is yet more perfect than he, who is shameless, and has no desire to live honourably(Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics, Part Four, Prop. LVIII.)

The person who feels shame is “more perfect” than the person who is shameless, because the feeling of shame indicates a desire to “live honorably”. To feel shame is to recognize the distance between one’s actions and what is honorable; and consequently, shame is already a kind of ethics, or at the very least, an ethical orientation.

The difference between Aristotle’s view of shame and Spinoza’s is no mere philosophical subtlety. It is the result of dramatic shift in the human subject as it emerged from Antiquity to Modernity. Foucault referred to this shift at the end of his introduction to The History of Sexuality where he wrote, “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)” The life of the modern subject, according Foucault, has become politicized in what Foucault called bio-power, which brings “life and mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life (Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, 143.)” The modern human being finds their life called into question by the very apparatus that sustains it.

Giorgio Agamben has located the paradigm of the modern subject in the ancient Roman juridical figure of homo sacer, who having been judged for a crime was rendered sacred (removed from the normal order and yet remaining in it). As such, homo sacer was prohibited from being sacrificed but could be killed with impunity (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71.)” Agamben suggests the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany as an example of the life of homo sacer. The Jew in Nazi Germany was judged sacred, removed from the normal order and yet remaining in it. In the concentration camps, these homines sacri were reduced to bare life (zoe) until they became what were referred to as Muselmann, a being in whom all animal instincts and human reason is cancelled and yet lives. However, Agamben rejects that the extermination of the Jews in the concentration camps was a “Holocaust.” This term is an unfortunate misnomer, that indicates a sacrifice was made. The extermination of the Jewish people in the concentration camps was not a sacrifice. It was simply killing with impunity. Agamben writes:

The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes, as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed” inherent in the condition of the Jew as such (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114.)”

Curiously, those who survived the camps wrestled with deep feelings of shame for having survived. Why? They had not committed any crime for which they should feel guilty. Surely no one would accuse a survivor of such horrific circumstances of having saved their lives at the expense of someone else’s. Agamben suggests that shame is the bedrock sentiment of homo sacer, not because they have committed an offense for which they should feel guilty but simply because of their status as sacred within the biopolitical sphere. Agamben defines shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject.” For Agamben, shame represents the locus of a new ethical material in the human being that lives in a post-Auschwitz world. “The lesson of Auschwitz,” writes Agamben, is that “the human being is the one who can survive the human being (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 133.)” This human being is “always beyond or before the human, the central threshold through which pass currents of the human and inhuman, subjectification and desubjectification, the living being’s becoming speaking and the logos’ becoming living (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 135.)”

Drawing on Marx’s claim that shame is the beginning of a revolution, Agamben argues that the modern subject feels a “silent shame of being human” that leads to a severing of the link between themselves and the political power in which they live. This is “the shame of the camps” which recognizes that the unimaginable has occurred; “that what should not have happened did happen (Agamben, Means Without End, 131). This kind of shame cannot be mastered through accepting it, as Nietzsche would have it in the myth of the eternal return, or declaring one’s innocence, as Nazi authorities attempted to do at Nuremberg by arguing that they were compelled to follow orders and therefore could not be held responsible for war crimes. Instead, this kind of shame becomes the fundamental structure of the human subject.

Shame is the “hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness” and means simply, “being consigned to something that cannot be assumed (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 128.)” What Agamben is suggesting in his definition of shame is that shame is the product of an ontological bipolarity intrinsic to the modern human subject that is simultaneously embedded in the bio-political sphere and extricating itself from it. As such, shame involves a paradoxical movement of “subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty (Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz, 107.)” What remains to be seen is where this shame will take us. For Agamben, it will move us toward a community that resists bio-political sovereignty that reduces life and makes homines sacri of us all. One can only hope that Spinoza was right, and that shame is the beginning of a more honourable life.

Der Muselmanner: Witness of the Lacuna

Giorgio Agamben has suggested der Muselmanner as an ethical cipher for the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. He refers to the concentration camps as an extreme situation; using the juridical sense of the term where a judge uses an extreme situation or state of exception “for the foundation and definition of the normal legal order (Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 1999, 48).” The concentration camps can therefore serve as a determinative paradigm for what his inhuman and what is human, and the Muselmann is the cipher for this determination. The Muselmann (the Muslim), so called because in his stooped and folded posture he resembled a Muslim at prayer, but also because the Arabic word muslim means “the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God (Agamben, 45)” were inmates in the camps who had given up. They had submitted to the will of the Nazis and become “the living dead” who were certain candidates for the gas chambers (Agamben, 51). They were walking symbols of the fate of every inmate and therefore the pariah of the camps. Some were so close to death that they no longer responded to the hunger impulse while others did not even respond to beatings given by the guards (Agamben, 42). Most inmates avoided the Muselmann and held them in disdain because what was at stake in the camps was to survive unchanged as a person and the Muselmann, by giving up, had “marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man (Agamben, 47).” And yet the Muselmann is an enigma standing on the border between life and death, a third realm between the human and the inhuman (Agamben, 48). It is precisely for this reason that the Muselmann are for Agamben, the “complete witness” of the camps (Agamben, 47). It is impossible to give an account of the horror of the camps. Only the dead can bear witness to this extreme situation. The survivors claim only to testify in their stead (Agamben, 34).

Drawing upon Agamben’s treatment of the Muselmann as the “complete witness” Slavoj Zizek argues that the Muselmann is “a kind of absolute/impossible witness… the only one who fully witnessed the horror of the concentration camp, and for that reason, is not able to bear witness (Zizek, Slavoj, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” in The Neighbor:Three Inquiries into Political Theology, 2005, 160).” Contrary to Emmanuel Levinas’ claim that the capacity to say “Here I am!” is intrinsic to the ethical subject, Zizek argues that the Muselmann can no longer say “Here I am!” because of his enigmatic status. This inability, Zizek suggests, constitutes a failure by Lévinas to account for the “inhuman Other” that is in inherent in the paradoxical figure of the Muselmann (Zizek, 160). Zizek writes:

Consequently, is the paradox of the Muselmann not that this figure is simultaneously a zero-level, a total reduction to life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its “normal base”? This is why the figure of the Muselmann signals the limitation of Lévinas: when describing it Primo Levi repeatedly uses the predicate faceless, and this term should be given its full Lévinasian weight. When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, lack of depth (Zizek, 161).

But, the Muselmann is not simply inhuman, but also human. It is his paradoxical nature that is so terrifying. Zizek fails to see that the Muselmann has a face precisely in his facelessness. The face of the Muselmann, even in its facelessness still confronts us with the question “human or inhuman?” It is precisely here that the Muselmann calls us into question so that we become vulnerable to the enigma of the facelessness, and consequently are called to a work of justice that does not finally resolve the question “human or inhuman?” Instead, we stare into the facelessness of the Muselmann without retreating from the terrifying paradox he confronts us with. We cannot, and we must not, ever answer the question. It is a liturgy of justice that moves into the abyss of the Muselmann never to return. It is a vulnerability to the silence of the impossible testimony in the midst of the ethical lacuna of the concentration camps.