Two terms joined in order to create a title: Of Jews and Animals. With that creation, there is the inevitable risk that their conjunction will be misunderstood. It could be read as though the terms announce a possible reduction or a forced similarity in which not only would specificity be denied, but the prejudice in which Jews were equated, to their detriment, with animals would have been reiterated, as if, in other words, that reiteration and thus connection were simply unproblematic. Nonetheless, there is an important relationship between Jews and animals. They appear within the history of philosophy, art and theology in ways in which the differing forms of conjunction mark the manner in which dominant traditions construct themselves. In certain instances, however, it is the separate presence of Jews and animals that serve the same ends. This study is concerned with both these eventualities. The weave of animal and Jew, their separate and connected existence, thus of Jews and animals.
To begin: allowing for a specific figure of the Jew provides, for example, the axis around which Pascal can develop his version of Christian philosophy. The interconnection between the Jew and the animal within the philosophical writings of Hegel, again as a specific instance, becomes an exacting staging of the complex way these two figures are already implicated in the philosophical project of positioning the relationship between particular and universal, The result of that positioning is that neither the Jew nor the animal, though for different reasons, can form part of a generalised conception of universality, especially that conception of the universal that would incorporate all modes of being. In broader terms a fundamental part of the argument to be traced in the writings of Heidegger, Hegel, Pascal, Agamben and Blanchot as well as in relation to specific moments within art history concerns the complex relation that the Jew and the animal – separately and together – have to forms of universality. The form taken by that relation is that to the extent that universality prevails both the Jew and the animal have to be held as excluded. What this means, of course, is that both are retained within the subsequent history that accompanies philosophy, theology, etc., as the excluded; hence the state of being ‘held’. Consequently, a fundamental element guiding this analysis is that the Jew and the animal, on their own as well as together, can be attributed a privileged position, firstly, in the way philosophical systems create and sustain identities as figures and, secondly, in the analysis of the complex interplay between universal and particular.1
There are therefore two elements that are at work within the presence, either related or separately, of the Jew and the animal. Allusion has already been made to both. The first concerns what will be called the figure of the Jew and the figure of the animal.2 The second refers to the question of particularity. In regards to the first, the point of the term ‘figure’ is that it indicates that what is at work is the presentation of the Jew and the animal in ways that enable them to play an already determined role in the construction of specific philosophical and theological positions. Figure can be defined therefore as the constitution of an identity in which the construction has a specific function that is predominantly external to the concerns of the identity itself. Not only will this play a significant role within the imposition of the quality of being other, it will sanction, at the same time, the possible repositioning of the other as the enemy. (The ‘other’ here is the generalised term designating alterity.) This is by no means an extreme or attenuated repositioning. On the contrary, the move from other to enemy is a possibility that is already inherent in the category of the other. A further aspect of the figure that needs to be noted in advance is that figures are not just given, they have to be lived out. The figure therefore can have an effect on the operation of institutions as well as the practices of everyday life. Finally, in the case of the figure of the Jew there will be an important distinction (one admitting of a form of relation) between a construction of Jewish identity within Judaism itself and the figure of the Jew. The latter is always external to Judaism while at the same time presenting back to Judaism an identity that invariably comes from without but which has a continual effect on how identity is to be affirmed.
The second element central to the overall project concerns what can be described as the development of a metaphysics of particularity. As has been indicated the fundamental conjecture underpinning this project is that the complex determinations taken by the relationship between the universal and the particular are continually being worked out in the way the figure of the Jew and the figure of the animal are positioned within specific philosophical and theological texts as well as in given works of art. Two of these determinations are of special interest in this context. The first involves what will emerge as the threat of particularity and therefore, in light of this threat, of the need for its exclusion in the name of the universal; the second is the retention of the particular within that structure in order that its continual exclusion sustains universality. Precisely because retention refers to the presence of figures, retention does not entail the actual presence of the excluded. Indeed, a significant aspect of the figure's presence is that actions that take place in relation to it need not depend upon the actual existence of those figured. (The figure can function therefore within an effective imaginary existence in which the threat of the particular is effective independently of the actual or real presence of those figured.3)
The differing components of the figure as well as those that characterise the continual positioning of the particular in relation to the universal are clearly interconnected with regard to the formation of philosophical and theological texts. This is especially the case when the larger philosophical project is either to establish that which is proper to human being or where that sense of propriety is already assumed in the further elaboration of positions depending upon it. While this setting holds across a range of sources, within this project it also provides the point of entry into works of art. In this context, it will be the human face in which portraiture becomes the face of human being. The retention of that face brings with it the need to exclude others (present as other faces) whose specific presence, often in terms of deformation, reiterates the same structure of exclusion and inclusion. The faces in question, in this instance, are those of Jews.
While both these elements stand in need of greater clarification, as has been indicated above, they intersect. The figure of the Jew is already the enacting of a version of particularity. The figure presents, in sum, the particular that cannot be named by any form of universality as belonging to that universal. Naming in this sense is a form of exclusion. This is not to suggest that the more abstract philosophical problem of universals and particulars needs to be given automatically this extension. The force of the overall argument is the other way around. Namely, that any position that is concerned with the question of identity is always articulated within a certain construal of particularity and universality. In other words, it is not as though questions of identity – the work of figures – cannot be approached philosophically. In allowing for such an option what emerges as a consequence is another way in which the philosophical can engage with the political. (This position will be developed in greater detail in the analyses to follow.)
Even though the figure refers to the constitution of an identity it should not be counterposed to the assumption of authenticity. The contrary is the case. While the figure concerns a form of construction, what it – the figure – is opposed to is the possible affirmation of an identity. Affirmation has no necessary relation to the essential. (The figure is that which essentialises.) The affirmation of identity becomes a way in which identities – in their complexity – are either lived out, or there is a related position in which those identities, thus lives, are allowed to be lived out. (The latter position is clearly that which obtains in regard to animals.) The figure stands opposed to this double possibility within affirmation. What this opposition to affirmation amounts to therefore is the refusal of any possible fraying or undoing of the singularity that the figure constructs. The manner in which the figure functions in constructing versions of the singular and thus of particularity provides the way into understanding what can be called the work of figures. There is, however, an inbuilt reciprocity with the work of the figure. To the extent that figures are created, figures that grant identity by imposing it, then what occurs with that act of imposition is the self-attribution of identity. Figures are involved in a double attribution of identity. In other words, not only does the figure impose identity, the act of imposition is integral to securing the identity-of the position from which the initial identity-giving act originated.
The work of figures becomes one of the means by which the position of the other, in all its permutations, including the other as enemy, is created and sustained. That creation will involve a form of constitution that can work in at least two different ways. In the first, the other (in all its possible forms) acquires that status through considerations that have a pragmatic quality. This would include calculations concerning how political power may be obtained and sustained. The second way a form of constitution works is linked to the movement in which the other acquires the position of being other as the result of a process of naturalisation. Within this setting the other is the other because of ‘nature’. The positing of nature, however, has to be understood as a construction that is internal to the process that is itself the creation of figures. A clear instance of this occurs in Plato's Republic in regard to the repositioning of the other as the enemy.4 Even though the ‘enemy’ may be a limit condition, the distinction between other as friend and other as enemy has direct relevance to the operative dimension within the figure of the Jew.
In an attempt to nuance the distinction between friend and enemy Plato allows for two different realms of struggle. The first concerns internality, hence a difference that is situated within the domain of the Greeks, while the second is between two entities defined by two distinct and unrelated senses of internality. The distinction gives rise to the following formulation:
I say that the Hellenic race genos is friendly to itself
and akin and foreign and alien to the barbarian. (470C)
In regard to the latter there is an enmity and thus the presence of enemies that are positioned as such by ‘nature’ (phusis). In order to distinguish between these two domains Plato defines the relation between the Hellenic and the foreign in terms of ‘war’ (polemos) and any division that pertains exclusively to internal relations in terms of a ‘faction’ (stasiw). (These involve civil wars or internal rebellions.) While the distinction may bring with it a series of attendant problems, and though this will always be the case when what is at stake is the attempt to establish a clearly defined opposition, nonetheless, it sets out in advance the way the divisions and thus related concepts such as security and war are given by the interplay of commonality on the one hand and the complex relation between friend and enemy on the other.
The difference between friend and enemy is that the latter is positioned in terms of externality. Being the enemy is a position constructed through the conflation of race and nature. Once created as a consequence of that conflation the state of being the enemy is one that cannot be overcome. This is the power of nature. The enemy therefore has to be conquered. Subjugation is the only possibility. The point is that once understood in terms that give ‘nature’ a productive dimension within the work of figures it then follows that enemies do not exist because of nature; rather ‘nature’ is used to create and then define the other as the enemy.
What is central here therefore is the way the enemy figures: the enemy as a construction defined in relation to ‘nature’. Nature emerges – more emphatically nature is posited – in order to create the non-arbitrary quality of the enemy. The formulation in the Republic is clear. Greeks and barbarians ‘are enemies by nature’. In other words, they are enemies in virtue of being what they are. The antipathy is not only ‘natural’ (‘nature’ as a posited ground), it depends upon the individual singularity of those involved. This construction of an essential nature – the construction of a figure – can be reinforced by reference to another dialogue, i.e. the Menexenus.5 Here the argument is that in certain instances those who are only ’nominally Greek’ – Greek by name or convention (nomow) – are nonetheless ‘naturally barbarians’ (245D). What this means is that though the barbarians were named Greek, where the process of naming follows convention (onoma determined by nomow) this does not affect the quality of the already attributed specific essential nature and thus the work of the figure. Convention is structured such that it is necessarily distinct from the construction of an essential identity. The latter is a construction in which nature provides the figure with both its identity and its unity. The figure will always have a singular determination. In regard to the distinction between friend and enemy the determining presence of ‘nature’ means that the relation is not determined by convention and thus is not a distinction that is merely strategic or pragmatic.6
While the distinction between the enemy and the faction has a complex presence within Greek philosophical thought the distinction is relevant here as it can be taken to mirror a distinction that Pascal will draw in his creation of the figure of the Jew in the Pensées. In that text, and reflecting a longer tradition, he allows for two types of Jew.
Les juifs étaient de deux sortes. Les uns n'avaient que les affections païennes, les autres avaient les affections chrétiennes. (289)
(The Jews are of two sorts. Those who only have pagan feelings, the others that have Christian feelings.)7
The difference in which the second type can be located has a complex register. The Jew with ‘Christian feelings’ can be tolerated. The difference is not essential. It is not given by nature. These are the Jews that will in the end be an object of ‘love’. ‘Love’ (agapé) within the Christian context is that which announces the overcoming of difference.8 On the other hand, those with ‘pagan feelings’ are not simply intolerable, if there is a difference then it cannot be overcome. It is as though ‘nature’ is operative. This is the Jew that is positioned as the ‘enemy’.9 While the analysis of Pascal – in Chapter 7 – will argue that both conceptions of the Jew, with their own form of difference, are fundamental to the construction of Christianity as universal (and in its apparently secularised form within constructions of universality that involve a reiteration of the same logic), what is of interest here is that what is enacted is the distinction between friend and enemy. The enemy is always an object of an act of creation that is then naturalised. The result of the process of naturalisation is that what cannot be addressed to the enemy are questions concerning how that status has been acquired. The enemy becomes what is – again the position or designation ‘enemy’ is produced – the result of an ineluctable, thus unavoidable, process. The response to such a set up can only ever be to denature it. If there is a further element to the affirmation of identity then it can be found in its already being the ‘denaturing’ of nature's posited existence.10
Particularity is a form of identity. As such the difficult question concerns how the particular comes to have that identity. Particulars are, of course, already given in relation to a universal. The question of what counts as a universal has its own history within both philosophy and theology. As a consequence there can be no clear unanimity of response. Within the context of this study what remains an open, if implicit, question is the possibility of a conception of the particular that falls beyond the hold of the universal. It should be remembered that were this to be possible it would entail firstly a conception of identity that was not subsumed by the universal such that the particularity of the particular would be effaced in the process, and secondly a conception of particularity that was not the particular as excluded where the practice of exclusion involved the retention of the particular as the excluded. In the case of the latter it is not just that exclusion takes place, the retention of the excluded as the excluded would be fundamental in order that the overall identity of the universal be maintained. This is, of course, the twofold possibility that is, as was indicated above, at work in Pascal. The first type of Jew is the one that can be included. What needs to be noted, however, is that the consequence of inclusion is that whatever it was that marked the Jew as Jew would have been effaced, of necessity, in the process. The other type, the pagan Jew, was the one that was held from the start in the position of the excluded. With that exclusion, of course, the Jew would then have been positioned in order to realise the project of the universal. Once the Jew was located in this way it would then function in terms of the retention of the excluded. This position will be developed in terms of what will be described as ‘the logic of the synagogue’.11
And yet the philosophical question of the relationship between universals and particulars is not simply explicable in terms of the figure of the Jew. The argument is that the figure of the Jew can only be accounted for adequately if it is understood as connected to a specific conception of the relation between universal and particular. This means that what is often taken to be a merely abstract formulation without any entailments in relation to the identity or the particularity of forms of life only works as such because those forms of life are themselves already understood as abstractions. (The assumption is that the abstract precedes any form of differentiation.) In other words, once life is to be understood in terms of an undifferentiated setting, or once human life is equated with an abstract conception of human being (again with abstraction allocated a primary rather than a secondary existence) what then follows is that questions of particularity, which will include questions of embodiment, become irrelevant in relation to the overall power of abstraction. Abstraction and universality, assuming a complementarity between these terms, work in tandem. The point of the studies undertaken here is to investigate the way abstraction, particularity and universality continue to intersect in the way the relationship between human and non-human animals is constructed as well as in the way the distinction between the Jew and a universalising conception of human being is staged.
There is, of course, an implicit project at work here. In outline it involves the attempt to develop a metaphysics of particularity.12 The figure of the Jew and the figure of the animal are already given formulations in which a certain conception of the particular (and its relation to the universal) is presented. The point of insisting on the interarticulation of the work of figures and the relationship between universal and particular is that it is intended to preclude the possibility of a response to the work of figures that remained either indifferent or hostile to the question of metaphysics. In other words, it is not as though an attempt to ameliorate the condition or position of animals can be based on an ethical position that remained unaware of the role of the animal within the history of philosophy and the positioning of the animal within a relation between universal and particular that resulted in the animal being essentialised (all animals, in the plural, becoming the animal, in the singular) and excluded in the name of human being.13 Redressing the question of the animal – perhaps reposing the question in order to take in founding differences – is not merely ethical. It has to involve an understanding that exclusion operates within and as metaphysics, hence the need to rethink the metaphysical project at the same time as the ethical one. A similar argument needs to be developed in relation to the figure of the Jew. Rethinking the Jew's presence is to trouble a conception of alterity that insisted on abstraction. Equally, it must involve the recognition that the Jew's exclusion is the result of the operation of a structure of thought (with it own ineliminable relation to the operation of power). Fundamental therefore to any project of rethinking is to understand that what is necessary, given such a setting, is the development of other modes of thought. In this context what is meant by a different, thus other, mode of thought is the development of a metaphysics of particularity.
Each of the chapters that comprise this study involves tracing the way figures – specifically what has been called the work of the figure – and the interplay of particularity and universality are operative in a range of texts. Starting with Heidegger, and specifically the presentation of the animal in The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, what is of central importance is not just the configuration given to the difference between the human and the animal but the way in which the thinking of that difference constructs, on the one hand, a certain figure of the animal and, on the other, positions the animal in relation to an abstract conception of human being. Within the latter, the presence of abstraction can be understood as the formation of the universal. While this will involve the incorporation of a language and terminology that is not Heidegger's, the justification for such a move is that Dasein for Heidegger is the term in which it is possible to identify that which is proper to human being. In addition, the sense of propriety that Dasein brings with it turns all other aspects of human being into the merely contingent. As such the body and therefore human animality are necessarily distanced. Central here is the way this distancing is understood.
While the passage will be analysed in greater detail in Chapter 2, Heidegger's claim in The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics concerning the relation between Dasein and a dog in which ‘the dog does not exist but merely lives’ will be taken as reiterating a fundamental position in which there is an important separation between the realm of existence and life.14 This separation establishes the way the distance is to be understood. And yet terms such as ‘distance’ and ‘separation’ still envisage a form of connection and thus of relation. What will be argued in regard to Heidegger is that what emerges with the introduction of the dog and the distinction between ‘existence’ and ‘life’ is far more profound. What occurs is a radical separation of that which pertains to the human (thus to human being) from the concerns of the animal (more exactly from that which is taken to be animal concerns). The separation is the absence of a relation. It inheres in the distinction that Heidegger will draw between ‘behaviour’ and ‘comportment’. As will emerge this distinction is central to Heidegger's project in The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics. Human being exists without relation to the animal. This state of the without relation will have a fundamentally important role in the analyses throughout this study. The without relation is central both to the construction of figures and to their work.
In regards to Maurice Blanchot – whose work is the object of focus in Chapter 3 – the without relation is positioned in terms of his own use of Hegel, mediated through Alexander Kojève's commentary on Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit.15 The basis of Blanchot's argument concerning the emergence of literature is that the inauguration of literature is occasioned by the death of the animal. Here Blanchot takes up and deploys positions that are identified as originating in both Hegel and Kojève. The without relation emerges in connection to a logic of sacrifice. The animal's death is fundamental in order that there be literature. The aim of the analysis is to question the retained presence of the relationship between writing and death in Blanchot's oeuvre. What has to be taken up is the extent to which Blanchot's work remains caught up in the founding logic of sacrifice. As will be argued the without relation which marks here the way the animal is retained as excluded – hence the figure of the animal – informs Blanchot's overall project and even plays a fundamental role in his construction of ‘community’. This opens up and reiterates the question that also arises with Heidegger, namely what would a community or a mode of existence be like that accorded an inbuilt relation to animals and to animality? Such a possibility would involve an already present relation as opposed to one necessitating a logic of sacrifice or a founding without relation.
With Derrida's work – as developed in Chapter 4 – there is a radically different project. Central here is the way in which Derrida connects the history of philosophy and thus the reiteration of a dominant conception of metaphysics to the effective presence of anthropocentrism. Derrida's development of a deconstructive approach to the question of the animal – an approach that has exerted a strong influence on this study – is positioned, in the context of the actual chapter, in relation to the presentation of the animal in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Of strategic importance is the investigation of the conception of difference that is at work within the without relation as it figures in Hegel's text. The without relation is already a conception of difference. Difference as has already been noted is not just other, but incorporates a range of positions that move from the other understood as the other to the same, to a conception in which the other is the enemy. Hence an essential part of the value of Derrida's project is that it is directly concerned with how this ‘difference’ is thought. Any approach to the philosophical that incorporates Derrida's work will allow, as a consequence, for a detailed investigation of the conception of difference within the without relation and in so doing open up the possibility of another thinking of difference. This is an extremely important move. If it is to be assumed that there is a difference between human and non-human animals then the question that has to be addressed does not concern the simple positing of difference as though difference came to exist merely through its being posited. Rather what matters is how that difference is to be thought. Once this becomes the guiding question it is more likely that what is then avoided are those modes of thought in which difference is reiterated continually as the without relation (given that the without relation is a version of difference, albeit an inadequate one).
Part II of this work consists of a series of chapters in which the figure of the Jew is developed in a sustained way. The differing analyses of the presence of the Jew are positioned in relation to the complex interplay between the figure and the universal/particular relation. In the first instance – in Chapter 5 – the starting point is the way in which disease is thought in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Disease, as will be argued, is an instance of particularity. It is, of course, aberrant in relation to the good of the whole (the Universal). Hence, overcoming disease is overcoming aberrant particularity. The Jew as present in the Philosophy of Right is also presented as an aberrant particular. Jews can form part of the Universal only because they are, in Hegel's words, ‘above all men’. Incorporation into the universal takes as its condition of possibility therefore the exclusion of the particular's actual mode of being, i.e. being a Jew. The only sense of particularity that cannot be absorbed is the animal. The animal can only exist as pure particularity. What this leaves open as a question is the extent to which an affirmed conception of Jewish identity is able to start with Hegel's animal. The animal retains its identity. The Jew for Hegel has to lose its self-proclaimed and thus self-affirmed identity. The tolerance and retention of the Jew within civil society is premised upon the Jew's eventual elimination (as a Jew), an elimination sanctioned by the work of the logic in which particularity is effaced through its absorption into the category ‘Man’. The latter is, of course, the presence of abstraction, an abstraction which is taken to be primary but which in fact occurs as an after-effect of having eliminated the initial site of particularity, an elimination that occurs through the repositioning of an initially unmasterable Jewish presence in terms of the figure.
Chapter 6 starts with a discussion of two paintings both having ostensibly the same content. The first is by Piero della Francesca and the second by Bartolomé Bermejo (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2 in Chapter 6). Within both paintings the Archangel Michael is killing a dragon. And yet close attention to the paintings reveals a fundamentally different conception of the devil. In the case of the painting by Piero della Francesca the devil is pure animal. There are no traces of human animality. In the case of Bartolomé Bermejo the animal is already partly human. There is therefore a divide in the presentation of the animal. In the first instance human good necessitates a founding sacrifice. In the second case the animal and the human overlap. As such human animality cannot be eliminated with a founding move in which the animal's death would establish the uniquely human. (That death would be another instance of the without relation.) There is the need for practices that maintain vigilance against the possibility of animality's interruption. In this instance the without relation becomes a practice rather than a founding event. This divide complicates the way in which the animal is present. Moreover, it complicates both the attempt by Giorgio Agamben to take up the question of the animal in his book The Open: Man and Animal and his subsequent attempt to examine and respond to what has been called the figure of the Jew. Not only does Agamben's inability to provide an account of that figure locate a limit to his philosophical project, that lack is compounded by the inability to provide an account of an original sense of particularity. In fact with Agamben, as will be argued in Chapter 6, the opposite is the case. The conception of the ‘homo sacer’, a concept central to his work, is precisely what hinders any attempt to think such a conception of the particular.16
Pascal's Pensées both as a text and as individual fragments are demanding for a range of reasons. One of the major ones is the inherent problem of how to order a text that is comprised of fragments. The selection of pensées to be discussed is therefore always complex. Nonetheless, a number of fragments have acquired canonical status, if only because of the quality and range of commentary they have solicited. One such fragment is number 103. In sum, the fragment is concerned with the relation between ‘justice’ and ‘force’. In addition it draws on and engages with the tradition that has equated right with might. However, what is invariably left out of any discussion of 103 is fragment 102. Or, if another numbering system is used, what is invariably left out of discussion of the relationship between ‘justice’ and ‘force’ as understood by Pascal is the figure of the Jew in the Pensées. It is as though the concerns of justice and force bore no relation either to the extensive presence of the figure of the Jew throughout Pascal's text, or to the figure's presence within the logic of the synagogue. Once fragment 103 is juxtaposed with 102 the former necessitates an approach that can no longer exclude the figure of the Jew. Fragment 102 reads as follows:
Il faut que les Juifs ou les Chrétiens soient méchants. (102)
(It is necessary that the Jew or the Christian are wicked.)
The effect of the either/or is that it establishes a clear divide in which the Jew is to figure. In addition, the description of the Jews as ‘méchants’ utilises a term that plays a central role in ‘justice, force’ This means that the apparently neutral concerns of 103 already have the figure of the Jew being worked out within it. The project of chapter 7 will be to pursue the differing ways in which these two fragments relate. If there is an overriding question that is announced within the chapter, albeit soto voce, then it concerns what it means to be just to particularity.
Portraits portray. However, the portrayed face always oscillates between a named presence and a generalised sense of humanity. The latter is a redescription of the history of portraiture as the history of the enacted presence of abstract humanity. Indeed, that history complicates the history of the self. The face as a site of eventual neutrality and therefore the face as that which will be the presence of the elimination of embodied difference holds equally for Nicholas Cusanus as it does for Hegel. Hence it is at work as much in the Renaissance as it is within Modernity.17 The presence of the face as generalised humanity becomes both more exact and more exacting, however, when the portrait is described as a self-portrait. In any self-portrait it is always legitimate to ask the question of the implicit conception of self that is portrayed within it. There are, of course, self-portraits that are never named as such. It can be argued that a number of Dürer's portraits of Christ are in fact self-portraits.18 The first painting to be analysed in detail in Chapter 8 is Dürer's Jesus Among the Doctors. The setting is provided by a discussion of a painting The Fountain of Grace that can be attributed to the School of van Eyck. Both paintings are concerned with the relationship between Christians and Jews. However, both paintings contain a divide within the presentation of Jewish faces – a divide that will necessitate a more exact language and thus a distinction between various forms of face.
To begin there are faces that can be assimilated and are thus no more than faces that are merely different. There are, however, other faces that are present in both paintings. What characterises those faces is that they are deformed or marked such that they cannot be assimilated. They are faces that do not form part of the common. It is as if they have been separated by nature. Here, of course, is an early version of the two types of Jew identified by Pascal. Here, moreover, is a reiteration of the distinction between the other as part of the common and the other as ‘enemy’. The questions that arise from this analysis concern the possibility of faces that are not inscribed within an oscillation between universality and particularity. If there is a question that reiterates what it means to be just to particularity, then it concerns the presentation of other faces.
Fundamental to all the analyses that comprise this work is the recognition that the attempt to pose the question of what marks out being human involves differing forms of the without relation as the way the relation to the animal is held in place.19 Moreover, the particularity of the Jew is effaced continually in the name of a form of universality. It is precisely this predicament that opens up the question of how to account philosophically for a radically different situation, namely one in which the particularity of human being did not depend on forms of privation and thus sacrifice. And conversely where regional conceptions of identity could be affirmed. What would be the effect – the effect on being human and thus the thinking of that being philosophically – if both the maintained animal were allowed and the particular affirmed? If, that is, the without relation gave way to a fundamentally different form of relationality? (Were the animal to play another role within philosophy then the effect of its presence would need to be given in relation to this question.20) Each of the chapters suggests openings while at the same time marking different senses of closure. What continues to emerge are ways of thinking an initial presence of the animal and the Jew which, given the abeyance of the work of figures – figures being understood here as sites of closure – opens up forms of relationality that are no longer the after-effects of the differing ways in which the without relation has an operative presence.
That there cannot be a final word or even a moment of summation as completion reflects that which is central both to the work of figures and to the affirmation that is their (the figures’) only possible counter. Indeed, what is clear from both is that figures and affirmation are inextricably bound up with modes of life and thus with senses both of commonality and being in the world. Countering figures therefore is not reducible to analysis and argumentation even though both are essential to such an undertaking. What matters is the continual invention of practices that are inextricably tied up with the affirmation of particularities.
1. This is not to preclude the possibility that there are other positions, thus other figures, that could be attributed a similar status.
2. The use of the term ‘figure of the Jew’ is intentional. It is meant to signal the necessary distance – a distance that always has to be negotiated – between the presence of the Jew within philosophical and literary writing and what can be called Jewish life. The latter is the lived experience of being a Jew: a reality that is bound up with different forms of affirmation. While Jewish life is formed in different and conflicting ways, it is not automatically the same as the Jew's figural presence. I have discussed this distinction in a number of places. See, my Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 85–99 and Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997).
3. A similar point is made by Stephen Greenblatt in relation to the presence of what is called the figure of the Jew in those works of Shakespeare and Marlowe – specifically The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta – that were written at the same time as there was no actual Jewish presence in England. See Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 256–88.
4. References to the text and translation of The Republic are to Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
5. Reference to the text and translation of the Menexenus is to Plato, Menexenus, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).
6. There is an important range of texts which deal with both the question of the way the other as a concept within Greek thought is related as much to questions of simple alterity as it is to the identification of the other as the ‘enemy’. To this end see, among a range of important texts: Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Henri Joly, Études Platoniciennes: La Question des étrangers (Paris: Vrin, 1992) and Julius Jüthner Hellenen und Barbaren (Leipzig, 1923).
7. This particular fragment is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7.
8. For love as the double effacing of the Jew within the Christian Bible see Romans XIII: 10.
9. It is true that Pascal in fragment 391 argues that far from being ‘exterminated’ (exterminés) the Jews should be ‘conserved’ (conservés) precisely because they functioned as ‘prophets’. Nonetheless, what remains unexamined is the type of Jew that should be preserved. The ambivalence within the creation of the figure of the Jew will always allow for the identification of the ‘evil’ with the enemy.
10. This position can be extended. Nature also figures as that which provides historicism with its point of departure. Historicism is chronology where the latter is taken to be historical time's natural presence. The critique of historicism will necessitate the ‘denaturing’ of time. I have argued for this position in relation to the work of Walter Benjamin in my Style and Time: Essays of the Politics of Appearance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006).
11. Again this has been a theme that I have deployed throughout my writings on the figure of the Jew. (For a number of the references see the works mentioned in note 2 above.) The logic refers to the allegorical figure of the ‘Old Testament’ (thus the Jew). The synagogue is either a statue or a painting of a woman whose banded eyes do not allow her to see the truth that she carries. The truth involves repositioning the ‘Old Testament’ as containing prophecies that have been realised by the coming of Christ and documented in the ‘New Testament’. The Jew has to remain in this precise occurrence. The work of this logic is central to the operative presence of the figure of the Jew. The logic's detail is developed in Chapters 5, 7 and 8. While it is not named as such the operation of a similar logic is traced in detail by Joseph Cohen in his analysis of Hegel's early writings on Christianity. See his Le Spectre juif de Hegel (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2005), in particular pp. 49–83.
12. In this regard see my ‘Perception, Judgment and Individuation: Towards a Metaphysics of Particularity’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 15, no. 3 (2007), pp. 481–501, and ‘A Precursor – Limiting the Future, Affirming Particularity’, in Ewa Ziareck (ed.), A Future for the Humanities: Critique, Heterogeneity, Invention (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
13. In order to engage with the necessary presence of animals in their plurality Derrida invents the term ‘animot’. See Jacques Derrida, L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006).
14. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995) (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004). Henceforth page reference to this work will be to the English and then the German editions, here p. 211/308.
15. The text of Kojève's that will be the focus of study will be the treatment of Hegel on death in his L'introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
16. Agamben's text is Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
17. To this end see Ernst Cassier's discussion of Cusanus on the face in the former's The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000), pp. 31–2.
18. The central text in this regard is Joseph Lee Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The central aspect of Koerner's texts concerning the Dürer ‘self-portrait’ will be taken up in Chapter 8.
19. The expression ‘human being’ is used deliberately. The question to which it gives rise is: how is the being proper to the human – human being – to be understood? Underpinning the project therefore is the attempt to address this question. Hence there is a straightforward ontological concern. However, rather than arguing that the response to that question is already internal to human being the animal provides another point of departure. For both Kant and Heidegger, among others, the response to the question of human being is defined in terms of what can be described as the interiority of an anthropocentric conception of human being. In the case of Kant it is the operation of ‘consciousness’. For Heidegger it is the definition of Dasein as the one for whom the question of Being is a question. Heidegger is clear on this point:
20. This is the possibility that the animal holds open. The necessity of its presence – a presence that works within the constraint given by the logic of sacrifice – cannot preclude the possibility that the animal may either escape or eschew that reduction. As such the animal's insistent presence could be a prompt for thought. However, responding to that prompt could not take place within the very structure that sought to exclude both the animal as well as a recalcitrant animality: an exclusion in which both are included in order to be sacrificed. Here is a direct affinity with Derrida's work on the animal. See in this regard his L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2006). Derrida's concern with the animal pre-dates this particular work. A key work in this area is De l'esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), in particular pp. 75–89. While the letter of Derrida's own analyses has not always been followed in this project the overall prompt, as has already been indicated, resides in the question of what would happen to the philosophical were it to admit the animal. Admitting and thus allowing the animal would not involve an act of extension but rather a transformation of the philosophical itself. That transformation would be occasioned by allowing into the philosophical an element whose exclusion was often taken to be foundational.