Imagine for a minute how you might respond if I were to insist that Cornell West can only be understood as a black philosopher and presented my own work in terms of the necessity of overcoming black philosophy. Imagine that my work involved understanding the history of philosophy in terms of a contrast between black and Greek philosophy and moreover understood different black philosophers in terms of their place in this contrast. Moreover, imagine that Cornell West repeatedly publicly stated that he hated my reductive understanding of his work as merely being epiphenomenal aspect of some black racial essence, yet I continued to hector him with it.
Would it be hyperbole to say that I was being racist?
Is it hyperbole to say that the homologous aspects of François Laruelle's work are anti-semitic ("black" being "Jewish" and "Cornell West" being Jacques Derrida)? I write this because I feel bad for snarkily responding to a comment by "APS" to this post. The fact is, I had no idea what she was talking about when she wrote:
So is this what OOO does now? They just write posts about how they are unfairly maligned and treated poorly while their major figures go around accusing people of anti-semitism? Neat. Really makes me want to take you guys seriously.*
APS' comment was not only surreally uncharitable to my post, but I just had no idea who is going around accusing people of anti-semitism. This has prompted quite a bit of e-mail discussions to try to discern what she was talking about. Yesterday we figured it out.
"APS" was talking about posts written about a year ago (e.g. this) by Tim Morton, who finds himself horrified for a variety for a variety of reasons by Laruelle's division of all philosophy into "Greek" and "Jewish." I also found this paper by Andrew McGettigan which describes Laruelle's comments about Jewish philosophy homologously to the racist nonsense with which I started this post.
Let me note two things to try to forestall a useless debate in what follows. (1) I'm not convinced that this isn't something that people of good will can disagree about. Thus, I have no beef with "APS" (whoever she is, I am presuming that she understands this stuff better than me) thinking that Morton, McGettigan, etc are mistaken. But on the other hand, I can't see how it's beyond the pale for someone to say that they find these kinds of expressions of essentialist thinking** to be anti-semitic. (2) I'm not at all convinced that this reflects in any profound way on Laruelle as a (non-)philosopher. From the papers I've attended and people I've talked with (I don't know enough continental philosophy to understand his books, which by all accounts are difficult to read in any case), Laruelle's thinking is seperable from the anti-semitic tropes. Is the anti-semitism expressive of some greater flaw in the thinking? This seems to me to be an open question about which reasonable and informed people of good will can disagree. My intuition from going to talks and reading Mullarkey's great book is that the thinking is seperable.
Moreover, French academic philosophy weirdly permits kinds of essentialist thinking that everyone else in the West has rightfully consigned to the 19th century.*** Just google "French feminism homosexuality" and see how influential French academic feminists to this day use essentialist thinking to oppose legal recognition of the marriage rights of homosexuals. This is of course ironic, since so many of the great 68 philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida (and de Beauvoir before them) produced fundamentally anti-essentialist work of lasting significance. But maybe it's not so ironic. That is, if you work in an institutional framework where it is acceptable for your colleagues to dismiss your work as far as you can tell based solely on your ethnicity, you probably will end up having greater insight into essentialist tropes.
[Notes:
*Of course the remark itself is very good evidence that it is a priori that APS will not "take us seriously." Fine, seriousness is overrated anyhow.
** No fair noting all of the ways that Laruelle is himself anti-essentialist in other contexts. We are not talking about those contexts or Laurelle as a person. We're talking about the expressions themselves. This being said, see point (2).
***Cf. Duhem on the French versus English way of doing science or the way Nietzsche talks about various ethnicities sometimes; this kind of thing used to pass for common sense.]
New APPS 
31 responses to “François Laruelle on “overcoming the Jewish obstacle””
Oh, I don’t really want to get into the if Laurelle is anti-Semitic, but Tim Morton has made posts about this as recently Jan. 10, so I think that APS has this a bit freshly on his mind. http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/search/label/Francois%20Laruelle
And yes, APS is very knowledgable and invested in the work of Laurelle. http://amzn.to/KZDVxY
I’m not sure why he decided to post that on that particular blog post. I have talked to APS about the issues around calling Laurelle an anti-Semitic about a year ago, and he was pretty convincing on the point. And while I have not read much Laurelle myself, some of Mullarkey’s stuff about Laurelle and animals, and APS’ book, have really made me realize that perhaps ignoring Laurelle has been a big mistake.
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Also, I am not saying you are wrong, per se, but this seems like an odd claim, “Moreover, French academic philosophy weirdly permits kinds of essentialist thinking that everyone else in the West has rightfully consigned to the 19th century.”
Considering US feminism has long as essentialism and anti-essentialism debates. And while the anti-essentialist have, for the most part, ‘won’ in the US, there is still a lively and offensive debate when it comes to trans* issues in the US among certain feminists. On the side of pro-gay rights in the US, essentialism basically is the mainstream dogma. In order to be seen as a good ally, these days, one has to advocate that homosexuality and heterosexuality are fundamentally static categories that are genetically coded into you. Remember when Bill Richardson was trying to run for president in 2007, and he said he thought homosexuality was a choice, and one we should support, and it was seen as a major gaffe? http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/richardson-clarifies-gay-gaffe/?_r=0 I have no real ability to compare how ‘essentialist’ French thinking is, as opposed to American thinking is. It just seems to me that essentialism versus anti-essentialism is a live argument “in the West.”
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Jon, is Laruelle’s division of all philosophy into “Greek” and “Jewish” meant to be a recasting of the contrast between “Athens vs Jerusalem”?
Recall that in that contrast, Jerusalem had no philosophy–and that it was classically used (and frequently in antisemitic fashion) in order to dismiss a variety of things associated with the Old Testament and Jews. Depending on the valence of ‘Jewish’ and the nature of overcoming, Laruelle’s division may be well be a corrective to an antisemitic trope, or rely on it, or reinforce–the devil will be in the details.
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Scu,
Two things.
(1) I have no idea who APS is. I had great discussions with Anthony Paul Smith at the Schelling conference. Given the warmth he showed towards me personally, it’s nearly inconceivable to me that he would be so uncharitable as to write what he did.
While writing the video games book I read a great deal of first, second, and third wave American feminist writers and at no point did I encounter anything remotely analogous to the kind of feminists discussed, for example, in this article (http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139527/david-a-bell/liberte-egalite-but-not-homosexualite), and the way they have publicly used this “difference feminism” to mobilize people against recognizing others civil rights. Again, consider analogous claims made about racial difference in the context of the civil rights struggle more broadly conceived.
Perhaps I am mistaken and these are fringe figures in the French Academy (surely you can find some American academic saying any silly thing), but I haven’t seen anyone argue as much.
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Neat, another instance of an OOO type who hasn’t read Laruelle just throwing around incredibly serious accusations without any actual support as if they simply were facts. No analysis of what antisemitism is politically, what that would mean philosophically, no analysis of where Laruelle is picking up those terms (I realize y’all don’t like to read Derrida, but it’s from Derrida himself…), just the vague fuzzy sense that it is a very bad thing indeed. I have never responded to Morton’s bizarre unhinged attacks, but am writing a response to McGettigan for a book. But, it’s very heartwarming to see you’ll engage in what is essentially slander to protect your tribe. Or at least I enjoy it, since it reveals the deep levels of hypocrisy present in your tribe’s demands that everyone be nicer to them.
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I am charitable when others are charitable. When you descend into Morton-esque unhinged attacks… I see very little reason to be.
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I think this is an important point, and maybe something is lost in translation.
I haven’t seen anything on whether Laruelle is reacting to Straussiana. But even the possible positive construal is in danger of ending up painfully similar to the racists in my youth trying their best (and I’m not being faceitous) to be caring people and thus going on painfully at length about how good the nigras are at sports and fieldwork. Yes they were better than their interlocutors, but both sides of such debates are importantly wrong.
Clearly, a part of the solution has to be not to see people as merely placeholders for their ethnic type. As far as I’m understanding Derrida’s fury, it was because of Laruelle doing this to him. If that’s the case, it does strike me as clearly anti-semitic.
Again, it’s ridiculous to judge a person by the worst thing they do. From reading Mullarky, talking with Anthony Paul Smith, and going to some really nice papers, I’m pretty confident that Laruelle’s ideas are independent of the anti-semitism (though I don’t think that someone who disagrees is a priori bad for doing so, as “APS” seems to). And I have no idea whether what strikes me as obnoxiousness with respect to Derrida was expressive of anything deeper in his personality.
But as you write, the devil is in the details, and I’ll be really interested if some Laruelle people could speak to your comment.
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So the narrative you are trying to construct, again without any references and on the basis of Tim Morton doing his Tim Morton thing and one book review is that Laruelle “just is” an anti-semite? Wow. Height of critical thinking there, Jon.
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APS,
I’m sorry, you just somehow massively misread the previous post (http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/01/the-day-punk-died-nardwuar-the-human-serviette-versus-sonic-youth.html), which was about music, and didn’t contain any attacks on anyone. Just because I quoted Graham Harman does not mean I’m attacking you or anybody. As far as it is critical of anything it is critical of my own generation and my own tradition of philosophy (analytic). What you wrote also struck me as grossly unfair in light of the set of things I post about at Newapps and the way I engage with people.
I have absolutely no idea how you read an attack of any sort, much less an “unhinged” one in the post or in the above. I really don’t. Does anybody else? Can you quote what about made you so angry and explain what was wrong instead of just insulting me?
I’m happy to be corrected when I goof stuff up. Some very decent Sonic Youth fans (and fans like that are a pretty good advertisement for a band, I must say) spent a good deal of time this weekend showing me and other haters what is great about that band ( http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/01/the-day-punk-died-nardwuar-the-human-serviette-versus-sonic-youth.html ), and I was very happy to have been wrong about their music and to see the infamous Nardwuar interview in a different light.
Isn’t that how philosophy is supposed to work? Tell everyone exactly what’s bothering you and we can converse in a spirit of good will.
Just so that this does not become farcical or boring, please have the last word on exactly what I did to elicit these two things from you, and know that I don’t bear you any ill will.
If you have an answer to Andrew McGettigan’s paper published somewhere,* I’ll be happy to publicize it here. Or please share in these comments. If you don’t have time, I understand, but it does seem to me that McGettigan’s paper deserves a critical yet charitable response from Laurellians. I tried to make it clear above that I have no axe to grind about any of this, and would be interested in the response.
Jon
[*Addition: I wrote this before seeing comment 6 above, which may or may not be in response to what I wrote. The typepad ordering of comments weird. APS notes in 6 that as APS notes that he is writing a response to McGettigan in a book. But if it’s worthy of response in a book why all the bile for me citing it? I don’ t get it.]
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No. Not at all. I don’t understand people like that at all.
How could you read the above and think I meant Laruelle “just is” an anti-semite? Read the second footnote. Again, please if you have time give a more considered response. If you ask me a question I will answer, but otherwise please have the last word.
Finally, what I wrote was not “on the basis of” anything Morton wrote, but on the McGettigan article* to which I provided a link. Please check the post, it’s there. Maybe having missed this will convince you that you are not reading these posts the way everyone else is.
[*Update: This was written prior to APS saying in note 6 that he was working on McGettigan’s article for a book, and in response to the claim that my post was based on some else’s blogging.]
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Anthony,
Do you have any idea how obnoxious it is to end your comments with things like the following?
“Neat. Really makes me want to take you guys seriously.”
“But, it’s very heartwarming to see you’ll engage in what is essentially slander to protect your tribe.* Or at least I enjoy it, since it reveals the deep levels of hypocrisy present in your tribe’s demands that everyone be nicer to them.”
“Height of critical thinking there, Jon.”
What do these kinds of ad hominems have to do with anything? And for God’s sake, philosophy isn’t a soccer game with two teams.
I don’t contribute to this blog so as to waste my time in fruitless exchanges nor to provide people a platform for people embarrassing themselves. Have the last word if you want and then I’ll close comments. I won’t even answer any rhetorical questions you pose.
What a colossal drag that it comes to this.
If any other Laurellian reading this wants to do a guest post on the topic RAISED BY APS about antisemitism in his initial bit of invective (http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/01/we-are-the-goon-squad-and-were-coming-to-town-beep-beep-beep-beep.html) please e-mail me and if it scans I’ll run it by the board.
[I assume by “your tribe” you mean people with minimal sympathy towards object-oriented ontology and/or speculative realism?
For future reference, castigating someone for the sins of their “tribe” is a particularly unfortunate way to talk in a thread about anti-semitism, and especially unfortunate when your target is someone whose mother’s family suffered so egregiously in the holocaust and who is indeed named after his great uncle Jan Akkerman, one of the Nazis six million Jewish victims.
I am *not accusing you of being an anti-semite. Just begging you to ratchet it down a bit and consider that the people you are maligning are actual people with their own beliefs and desires and reasons and stuff.]
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“And for God’s sake, philosophy isn’t a soccer game with two teams.”
Clearly not, because philosophy is done by the referee too (i.e., you) who decides what counts as a game, when to start it, and when to end it. Let’s all converse in a spirit of good will, lest we be non-philosophers—oh, yeah, like Laruelle!
God is not dead, he’s alive and well as a referee.
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Oh for goodness sakes B4Btv.
(1) I didn’t decide that the ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy.
(2) My decision to let APS have the last word and offer to allow a Laruellian to do a guest post on this issue (again, raised by APS) bears absolutely no relation to someone who “decides what counts as a game, when to start it, and when to end it.”
(3) Nobody’s preventing you from starting your own blog.
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Way to hijack a perfectly interesting discussion guy(s). Up to comment 4, we had a conversation going here.
Scu: I think it is pretty well understood in US feminism – of both the activist and the academic sorts – that sexual preference is not a fundamentally static, genetically coded, binary. Really virtually no one believes that and pointing out the silliness of it is kind of 101 level – again both in the academy and in the activist world. That is quite different from reacting to the “it’s a choice” idea.
First, those who trumpet the view that “it’s a choice” in the public realm are almost always pushing a hateful agenda. Second, there is a huge gap between denying a static genetic binary and thinking it is “just a choice” as if one says “Hey, I think I’ll like boys today!”
Now even in the narrow sense of “choice” sexual preference probably is a choice for some – I certainly know people who report it as such for themselves – and in other more extended senses, probably for a significant number.
But basically I think you are reading way too much into the rhetorical context of denouncing bigots who say that sexual preference is a choice. By contrast, there really are articulate essentialist versions of feminism with lots of influence in France of the sort Jon is talking about.
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I haven’t read Laruelle, but it seems this kind of opposition (between Greek and Jewish philosophy) is indeed in play in Derrida himself, at least to a certain extent. See, in particular, Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” (which is largely about Levinas), as it is in Writing and Difference. If Laruelle is following Derrida here, I don’t really see how this can be anti-semitic…
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I am not a Laruellian, but I have lived in France for 33 years, and have constantly read French philosophy. I was at first surprised by the prevalence of this Greek/Jew trope when I arrived, but by now I am quite used to it and don’t see any reason for all the fuss.
If you look at Lyotard’s JUST GAMING (1979), he keeps up all through the book an opposition between the Greeks, or the pagans, and the Jews. The Greeks symbolise a pluralist thought that ultimately leads to relativism, and thus expresses Lyotard’s earlier views in for example LIBIDINAL ECONOMY, and the Jews symbolize a thought that refuses the category of ontology and that gives primacy to ethics. This is also expressed as an opposition between metaphysics and deconstruction. As Lyotard himself passed from a “pagan” phase to a “Jewish” phase, I see no essentialism.
Also these are shorthand phrases that Lyotard will occasionally concretise as Homer’s ILIAD and ODYSSEY and the TALMUD. Or as language games: the pagan language game has no determinate criterion of judgement to guide in the application of the law, the jewish language game acknowledges that there is a law but that we do not know what it is, paganism privileges multiplicity and judaism alterity, etc.
None of this is a racial essence. It goes back at least to discussions by Blanchot and Levinas of going beyond Heidegger’s “Greek” limitations. We can find the trope in Deleuze and in Derrida etc.
So when Laruelle wants to claim that the Jewish mode of thinking does not undo the sufficiency of philosophy he is criticising Levinas’s and Derrida’s pretention to do just that. These are tropes of images of thought, that bear other names too, and are not reducible to empirically existing populations or texts that instantiate them to varying degrees.
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Yes, Derrida is very explicit about this kind of trope. See the last paragraph of the essay mentioned above:
“Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who, we? Are we (not a chronological, but a pre-logical question) first Jews or first Greeks? And does the strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel, the living logic which reconciles formal tautology and empirical heterology91 after having thought prophetic discourse in the preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind? Or, on the contrary, does this peace have the form of infinite separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other? To what horizon of peace does the language which asks this question belong? From whence does it draw the energy of its question? Can it account for the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism? And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”?”
Incidentally, this trope is not exclusive to French philosophy. Erich Auerbach also starts his Mimesis by comparing the Old Testament with the Odyssey, claiming that Western literature is somehow caught between these two sources of influence.
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Not to mention Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in ALL THINGS SHINING, and Paul Feyerabend in CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE
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Most of the McGettigan paper to which I linked above is a discussion of this very issue, including a discussion of where Derrida plays with the distinction, and comparing this to Laruelle’s treatment.
If McGettigan is correct, then Derrida was right to be infuriated by having his philosophical opus reduced to a racial caricature (the deracinated Jew in contrast to Levinas’ true Jewishness). Note that Levinas is not a philosopher for Laruelle. While for Laruelle this is a compliment, it is a backhanded one since it fit squarely with the anti-semitic “Athens versus Jerusalem” trope (that Eric Schliesser mentions above) where Jewishness is essentially non-philosophical.
One is reminded of someone who accepts Aristotle’s gender views but then say that it’s better to be a woman (in Aristotle’s sense) because reason and all that stuff is bad anyhow.
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McGettigan discusses that very passage on page 37 of his article.
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Ooh thanks for the Auerbach citation. “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature” is high on my reading list.
Feyerabend is probably not someone we want to quote in this context. Among other things this is the guy who in a public lecture told protesting black students that they ought to practice voodoo, that that was appropriate to them.
I only know the Athens versus Jerusalem thing from Straussians. Before trying to find out what APS meant in his earlier quote I’d thought it was something that informed people of good will took to be (at best) the height of silliness. Maybe I’m confusing the contrast with other things Straussians believe. I’ll be interested to follow Auerbach and see what he does with it. It still seems 19th century in a sinister way to me, but I’ll give it a chance.
As a chunk of theology at least Christianity has clearly always been a marriage of both, but at least form McGettigan’s paper, that’s not what Laruelle was up to with that. Again, if someone wants to engage with McGettigan and explain what’s going on, send it to me as a possible guest post.
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“Jewgreek is greekjew”. The opposition – and it’s contention – is a theme in Ulysses.
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I only know the Athens versus Jerusalem thing from Straussians.
It’s a theme in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, though he uses that exact term only once (it seems), in quote, and mostly talks about “Hebraism and Hellenism”, and there as means for describing and criticizing trends in (his) contemporary Brittan. It’s been a while since I read it, but I didn’t take it to be particularly (or maybe at all) anti-semitic in his use. I suppose I may have missed something, though.
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Yeah, Molly’s soliloquy. I don’t really know Joyce that well. I hope to take a class some day. Isn’t there something presupposed about Jews not really having an identity as a way to say something about Ireland?
My friend Francois Raffoul just retranslated I think the entirety of Derrida’s writings about Joyce. In light of all this, it would be interesting to tie that bit of Violence and Metaphysics to the other stuff he wrote about Joyce.
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Laruelle declares that Levinas breaks with philosophy’s authority by appealing to a pure transcendance, but that Derrida brings this break back inside philosophy: http://www.onphi.net/lettre-laruelle-les-effets-levinas-12.html (2006). Yet THE FUTURE CHRIST suggests that this break does not really separate Levinas from philosophical Worlds: “Neither Levinas nor Heidegger freed themselves from the vicious circle of the World from which, via diverse operations, they perpetuated the humanly fruitless conflict. Only the heretics use the Greeks without being Greek in thought, and the Jews without being Jews in affect” (110). This confirms my hypothesis that Laruelle’s usage is to be seen in the French context of struggling to conserve Heidegger’s phenmenological radicality but to overcome the ethical deficit of his philosophy. This is Levinas’s and Blanchot”s, and Lyotard’s goal (cf Lyotard, HEIDEGGER AND THE “JEWS”, where the “Jews” are kept in inverted commas to distinguish the mode of thought and of affection from empirical instantiations).
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You seem rather infatuated with this language of decision. Alas, how philosophical.
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Just to be clear. I don’t think anybody is saying that all generalizations about cultural norms are bound to be “ist” in some way.* The claim under dispute was Laruelle’s understanding of the distinction. How he supposedly shovels all philosophy into either of the two camps and then reads Derrida in terms of the distinction.
This being said, there is a kind of 19th century essentialist discourse around racial and ethnic stereotypes that we should be wary of. The problem isn’t so much noting statistical differences (as long as these are true differences and understood as properly contingent). The problem is looking at an individual person and just seeing an instance of some ethnic or racial essence. Again, as far as I understand things, this is what infuriated Derrida with respect to Laruelle. If that’s true, then I think he had a right to be furious.
I mean, nobody today would talk about the “Jewish way of doing philosophy” and understand other philosophers entirely in terms of that. But this kind of thing was common in the 19th century.
I don’t see why I can’t decry it in Schopenhauer but also realize that it is secondary to his thinking. Schopenhaurians have made this case compellingly with respect to the stuff Schopenhauer wrote about woman, and it seems clear to me that Laruellians should with respect to him (or to show that McGettigan is off base). APS claims in 6 above to be answering McGettigan in some manner in his forthcoming book, though all the weird stuff about “your tribe” etc. is so hamfistedly defensive that it creates a little bit of a priori doubt. I mean, he’s not even reading anything I wrote but just interpreting me in terms of some older set of grievances I don’t know anything about and moreover have nothing to do with.
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Ooh, that’s very helpful. Thanks. Going to go back to Mullarkey now.
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Yes. Thank you.
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“I only know the Athens versus Jerusalem thing from Straussians.”
That’s on you, Jon. It’s “sorta a thing” in the world beyond Strauss and whatever nefarious purposes he put it to use there. I suspect much of the RP review is predicated on a misunderstanding of the history of religious thought and its study, frankly. It is also the height of intellectual irresponsibility to base your entire discussion of someone whom you clearly haven’t read upon a review. I’m also not going to bow to your bullying by recourse to the Shoah. The fact that you want to have your cake (anyone who says there is something called Jewish thought is an anti-semite, essentially the logic of charging Laruelle as an anti-semite) and eat it too (“I get to appeal to something uniquely Jewish to silence you) with regard is beyond offensive to me. It’s a typical defensive mechanism of male academics, to make demands for civility in the most uncivil of ways.
But, step back for a moment, actually look at yourself. Was your intention with this post to “have a conversation”? About an author you clearly haven’t read and have zero interest in? Really? For people who aren’t your friends, do you really expect us to believe that?
Longer response coming at <a href=AUFS.”>http://itself.wordpress.com>AUFS.
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Wow. Most bizarre thread ever.
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