Language:
French
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
Controverses; revue d'idees
Angaben zur Quelle:
7 (2008) 247-270
Keywords:
Badiou, Alain.
;
Holocaust (Christian theology)
;
Anti-Zionism
Abstract:
An in-depth analysis of how the French extreme left-wing philosopher, Alain Badiou, arrives at the antisemitic conclusions he presents in "Circonstances, 3, portées du mot 'Juif'" (2005). The nexus in this work is the idea that the only real Jew is the one who denies himself, since the "Jew" is nothing but a Nazi invention. Using the politico-philosophical concept-value pairs of full/empty and universal/particular, Badiou opposes the politics of emptiness to the politics of fullness, and reaches the conclusion that Israel is a Nazi state and the Palestinians are the real Jews; the Jews, on the other hand, do not exist. Discusses Badiou's 1993 essay on the consciousness of evil, where he first developed his thoughts on the Jews and Nazism. In this work, Badiou attacks the "ethical ideology" or "moralism" of Jewish and pro-Jewish French thinkers, as well as various political attitudes, including the politics of human rights, democracy, and tolerance. These are results of the philosophy of "recognition of identities", which Badiou combats. In line with this, he reduces Nazism to a prototype of politics of identity, and files down Nazi criminal antisemitism. The Jews were killed, he argues, only because they incarnated abstract universalism, not because of their particular identity. Badiou echoes Stalinist "anti-fascism", which viewed Hitler's antisemitism as a scam, whose purpose was to camouflage Germany's character of capitalist dictatorship in the eyes of the proletariat. In "Circonstances", Badiou turns his ethics into anti-Israeli politics and goes so far as to claim that the fact that Israel calls itself a Jewish state makes it the most antisemitic state in the world.
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