Risk and Extortion LXXXI: Anti-Semitic, Anti-Semantic, Anti-Somatic 5

Once again: Against Identity-Thinking

The concept of the self-hating Jew operates in the same framework as the accusatory performativity of deploying the word anti-Semitism. Both Zionists and anti-Semites deploy this trope because both base their ideology on the premise that “Jews are”. This ontologization of Jewishness follows exactly the same structure as race-ideology and derives from what many feminists have denounced as “essentialism”. The problem, however, with essentialism is easily mistaken as a moral one. This is how “wokism” ran itself into the gound. By treating semantic politics as a moral issue, one tends to seek protection from the language police, which is the state.

The essentialism of race- or gender-ideology, however, is not primarily a moral issue, it is an ontological one. The idea that there are “genetic” essence to race and gender is itself not morally wrong, simply because some of this can be identified at a molecular level. The real issue is the question whether it is ontologically adequate to argue that the things that living beings do can be explained by their genetic composition? This would require an equally scientifically evidenced correlation between genetics and mimetics, which does not exist.

Instead, what is much easier to provide is that associations between genetic and mimetic forces are ecologically generated. That is, the somatics of physical existence may still bear the traces of race and gender, for example in terms of pigmentation or genitals, but their significance is completely framed by their situatedness, relationality and performativity of practicing everyday life. Of course, they are not chosen at will. Somatics do matter. Men cannot give birth, for example. However, how they matter is not derived from isolation, but only from practical constellations that have been collectively cultivated (for which we often use the short-cut “culture”).

We do not need to become Anti-Somatic to avoid becoming  Anti-Semitic. However, we must – for the sake of aligning truth and justice – resist the somatic reductionism through which essentialism materializes. We do not do justice to the truth if we analyse the genocide in Gaza from the starting point that “Jews are”. Nor do we do justice to the Jewish Diaspora if we deploy that assertion that “Jews are”.  Instead, we may be better of treating ideologies and religions in a quasi-essentialist manner, not as derived from somatics, but as derived from generic principles. For example: Judaism is a religion derived from the generic principle that God has instructed Moses to write the Thora, which consists of 613 laws that one must follow to aspire to be Jewish. The purpose of this is to live one’s life in praise of God the Creator of heaven and earth and the eternal covenant with his people. The essence of a religion is like the essence of a triangle. It is defined by a set of related principles that only function together. The starting point may be arbitrary (Why start with the number 3? Why start with non-parallel lines? Why measure angles? Why is a full circle 360 degrees?), but as soon as you accept them, everything else is logically related.

The essence of a religion, however, cannot be compared to the essence of a tribe or clan, let alone to the essence of an individual human being. Essence only makes sense through abstraction. Life, however, is not lived as an abstraction. The multiplicity of events that makes up everyday life do not allow for strict adherence to generic essences. They require pragmatics. The somatics of life-forms may pose specific problems that are linked to physical-material conditions, but they do not proscribe how problems are to be understood let alone resolved. Humans, for example, have developed an immense arsenal of tools and techniques to solve problems and pursue interests. Many of these tools interconnect with the somatic functions of the human body, but are not determined by them. Media can be understood as “extensions of  man [sic]” (McLuhan, 1964), but we cannot understand “man” without these media.

The need to completely reject any notion of Jewish exceptionalism is thus not primarily moral but ontological. Jews are not an exception as such. They have been made into an exception by anti-Semitism. One cannot reject anti-Semitism while insisting on Jewish Exceptionalism. There is no ontological ground to uphold the claim that there is a “Jewish essence” related to a somatic genus that determines how Jews think and what Jews do. And because it is ontologically wrong to claim this, it is also morally wrong to do so. The necessity of aligning Truth to Justice is not just an imperative for critical thinking, secularism or science. All religions seek to align Truth and Justice, even if they may differ in the methods with which this alignment is to be realized and what Truth and Justice therefore exactly entail.

The relations between anti-Semitism, anti-Semantism and anti-Somatism are complex. Racialization – even is performed as a positive affirmation – always invokes a very distorted and misleading association between semantics and somatics. They corrupt the alignment of Truth to Justice. What starts as the violence of language can easily turn into the violence of the political that is directed against life. 

That Jewish-Exceptionalism is the cornerstone of both the ideologies of anti-Semitism and Zionism is no coincidence, just as both ideologies happily deploy the concept of the self-hating Jew. That warning should already be enough in and of itself and bolster wide-spread resistance against the very practice of racialization. The reason why the vast majority of powerful people in the modern world are so keen to deploy notions of racialization – even if these insist on taking pride of the fact that one belongs to a certain ethnic, national or racial group is that they always pitch self-preservation against the web-of-life. If we want to develop a politics that aligns Truth and Justice and considers the Web-of-Life to be its primary matter of concern, then we must oppose every form of racialization and identity thinking.