This is excerpted from my novel Calme bloc ici-bas, published by Éditions P.O.L. in 1997. Here is a brief account of the scenario. Simon Symoens is a construction worker on the run after having escaped from prison. He wanders about in a country called Prémontré accompanied by a young child, David, who was placed in Simon’s care by David’s mother, Élizabeth Cathely, a terrorist killed by disease, and for whom Simon felt an obscure and violent love. Simon takes on the identity of a provincial radio station manager, Ahmed Aazami, who had spectacularly disappeared from public at the end of a rock concert. Slowly, he begins to identify with this character. Tracked down in the south of Prémontré by a police officer called Lancini, the false–true Ahmed Aazami seeks refuge for David and himself in the house of a man called René Fulmer, a Jewish mathematician from a great country of the East, Darzia. While the child sleeps, the two men have a long conversation. I’ve picked out the fragment of this conversation that pertains to Jewish identity.
It was two in the morning; time no longer had any meaning. Aazami and Fulmer – one settled in an armchair like a Roman emperor after a day’s battle (since when had Aazami listened to anyone not seated in an armchair? Since Audruick, since the interview with Aazami and Kwado Asara?), the other on his work stool, frenzied, his beard flat like a moving wall on which his head, if not his aucupating eyes, had been placed and partly hidden – wander, both of them, in their speech, such that the leaden weariness of the one and the excitation of the other converged on an analogy of intoxication [ivresse].
Certainly, Fulmer exercised discretion, which he was conscious was friendly, but he yearned to hear those stories – in his view consonant with the life story of his father, who himself had gone to an abstract death under the injunction of equality – so he had in any case succeeded in extorting from out of his interlocutor’s mistrust, or at least from out of his suffering interiority, some snippets of information about his origins, Élizabeth, David’s birth, Lancini, the tracking, the wandering. Not a lot, though. Aazami had disclosed neither his former name (which anyhow he was slowly forgetting himself), nor his country of origin (to which nothing held him any longer), nor the murder of that dragon, Frédéric Rassinoux (which he had put down, not without some malaise, to sheer necessity). Above all, he had, like whoever wishes to keep to himself the rule that orders the disparate fragments of the self, strictly avoided all mention of the other Aazami.
FULMER: How do you make it up to our young friend in the beret? On the run in the countryside from the police at the age of five! The first time that happened to me, with Isaac, I was fourteen. By the way, you put a beret on him. You don’t see them often in Prémontré nowadays, do you?
AAZAMI (off guard for the first time): Boys in my country wear them.
FULMER: Your country?
AAZAMI (blushing): In Epirus.
FULMER: Epirus! I’m Jewish, you know. A Darzian Jew. That’s why I love Epirus. You’ll discover that I don’t know anything about it. But I love it. I picture myself walking in the desert, and I meet a wise man from Epirus. And so, we talk about being, mathematics, about the desert as the ground of all that is.
AAZAMI (somnolently relating common opinion): The people in Epirus are against Jews.
FULMER: Precisely! They’re against them because nothing distinguishes them from each other.
AAZAMI: What is a Jew?
FULMER: Imagine that there is a law which says that you are you, and that, in God’s eyes, you alone are who you are. ‘You’ is something that comes from the mother. She was your ‘you’ before you, the ‘you’ that is recounted in books. My mother Sarah died this year. My own ‘you’ before me is dead; I am Jewish in the orphanage of the provenance of the word.
AAZAMI: I never knew my mother. Where I was born, you leave the country with your father at a very young age. You go back when there’s money. But there’s never enough there to go back.
FULMER: I’m sorry!
AAZAMI (nearly sniggering): I’ve seen a lot worse human misfortune! You can speak openly. It’s important to be conscious of things. Élizabeth would say to me: ‘I’ll tell you about Robert, the worker. It does no good to anyone to be ignorant.’ But perhaps knowing is bad too. She knew, and she died like a dog.
FULMER (trembling a little): ‘Jew’ is also often caught up in the worst misfortunes of humanity. But not alone. What happens is that someone gets up who says: if I alone am who I am, that’s because this ‘myself’ is nothing but all the others. Which is the only solution. Otherwise, you remain imprisoned in substance under the fated eyes of God. Let’s call ‘Jew’ the one who says in the name of all others that there is no law separating them. He is the one who grasps his own being to break the divisive law, and thereby exposes humanity to the universal.
AAZAMI (who has been listening very attentively): That doesn’t work. For if you constitute the Jew in law, then when he says ‘there’s no law’, he has the Jew commit suicide.
FULMER: Ah! You’ve put your finger on the paradox. There’s no being in this affair; there is the paradox of the universal under an inherited name. The universal can take on the name ‘Jew’, which is absolutely particular. But note that the name of the universal is inevitably particular. If we mention some Jews, who should we name? Whether you speak of Spinoza, of Marx, of Freud, you see clearly: they are people who enjoin the thought of all to the strictest universality, and, in memorable founding acts, enacted a rupture with any and every end of the law that was somehow exclusionary or identifying. They say ‘no one is elected, otherwise everyone is’. And they can say it precisely because they were the supposed bearers of the most radical election in the eyes of God. They can announce the dissolution of all identity because above all they paid the price for their own identity, which is the strongest, since it has come from antiquity, God, and exile. That’s why they’ve attracted the hatred of those whose identity is so precarious that they must seek it in substance, land, and blood. It is not the identity of Jew that produces that hatred; it is the power that it accords to thought to dissolve identity. The Jew is not hated because he is the Other. The Jew is hated because he is the Same.
AAZAMI: And who’s the guy who started that story?
FULMER: It has been around forever. But we should attribute it to Saul, Saint Paul. He is the greatest Ancient Jew.
AAZAMI (knitting his brow as if searching for a distant memory): I think my father said that Saint Paul was a Christian king. He cannot have been Jewish.
FULMER: Saint Paul founded Christianity, your father was right. But that’s not the most important thing. I’m not Christian in the religious sense, not by any means, nor Jewish, nor, excuse me, Muslim. In fact, I am opposed to religions, absolutely opposed. I tell you this in all sincerity. Saint Paul was Jewish, and he said, before Spinoza, before Marx, and before Freud: ‘The Law, because it separates, must be abolished. If there is religion, it is for everyone. There are neither Jews, nor Greeks, nor Romans; there is the potential thought for all.’ He was a great Jew, then. The Jew is not the universal, which precisely cannot be. He is the one who, singularly, proclaims the universal.
AAZAMI: I knew a Jew who was a butcher. He didn’t proclaim much.
FULMER: Of course. Most of the time vast amounts of Jews only assert their identity, like you and me. I call them virtual Jews. They pass on virtuality. Because it must necessarily be there, that powerful and detestable identity, to enable a Jew who is more than the Jews to come, such as Saint Paul for example. This Jew is the one that I call an actual Jew because his act of declaration is an act that a Jew is capable of doing. The virtual Jews ought above all not to be despised or renounced. They are like everyone else, no more, no less. They’re people, that’s all. There are Jewish-people like there are people-from-Epirus. Sarah, my mother, was rather virtual. She prepared the stew of inheritance. She thought that when my father Isaac was seized by the actual Jew that she’d have to prepare for the worst, and she wasn’t wrong. My father was assassinated in the revolution of popular Delegates. It is the complicated coexistence of the virtuals and the actuals that historically weaves the paradox.
AAZAMI (blindly): And your own way of proclaiming consists in these sheets of calculations here.
FULMER (delighted, moved): I think so. I hope so. Lots of mathematicians are Jewish, lots aren’t. Being a mathematician means proclaiming the universal straight up, without even taking a detour through the negative. Saint Paul and Marx, Spinoza and Freud, like all revolutionaries, like my father, have to engage in savage polemics; they have to wring the neck of the Law. In mathematics, you make straight for transparent being, the being of thought such as it is transparent to being that is. You don’t negate anything. You actualize the Jew in a single blow, and, admittedly, with fewer personal risks.
AAZAMI: What do all your calculations say, then? My Jewish butcher didn’t proclaim a lot, but he liked to count. Only everyone said that he liked counting his pennies.
FULMER: Between you and me is he the only one?
AAZAMI: It’s true that Jewish or not, there’s nothing to do with pennies in the evening other than count them. (With brusqueness) Were it not for David, I wouldn’t count them.
FULMER (smiling): That’s your way of actualizing the Jew that you will have had to be.