The Frontiers of Theory Of Jews and Animals Phần 1 pdf

The Frontiers of Theory Of Jews and Animals Andrew Benjamin Approximate Pantone colours: 727, plus tint on flaps, spine 4625 ‘Andrew Benjamin has written an original and provocative medit

Jacket illustration: Goya, The Dog (1820-23)

Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid

Jacket design: Michael Chatfield

The Frontiers of Theory

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan

This series brings together internationally respected figures to comment on and

re-describe the state of theory in the twenty-first century It takes stock of an

ever-expanding field of knowledge and opens up possible new modes of inquiry within it,

identifying new theoretical pathways, innovative thinking and productive motifs

The Frontiers of Theory

Of Jews and Animals

Andrew Benjamin

Approximate Pantone colours: 727, plus tint on flaps, spine 4625

‘Andrew Benjamin has written an original and provocative meditation on the place of

the ‘figure’ of the animal in modern philosophy and culture The book is remarkable for

its sensitivity to the issue of visibility and the use of visual material The engagement

with the philosophical history of art is beautifully sustained and serves not only to work

through the theme of figuration but also to make the philosophical narrative available

to a wider range of readers.’

Howard Caygill, Goldsmith’s College, University of London

‘A stimulating book which will help those readers who, interested in the work of

Agamben and the late Derrida, wish to reflect more on the image of the animal in

classical continental philosophy.’

Peter Fenves, Department of German, Northwestern University

Of Jews and Animals

Andrew Benjamin

A philosophical concern with animals has played a central role within contemporary

philosophical discussions since Peter Singer’s work in the 1980s However, recently

within the area of Continental Philosophy the question of the animal has become an

important area of academic inquiry In addition, work on the figure of the Jew has for

years been an area of scholarly investigation

By developing his own conception of the ‘figure’ Andrew Benjamin has written an

innovative and provocative study of the complex relationship between philosophy, the

history of painting and their presentation of both Jews and animals As Benjamin makes

clear the ‘Other’ is never abstract He underscores the means by which the ethical

imperative, arising from the way the history of philosophy and the history of art are

constructed, shows us how to respond to an already identified, even if

unacknowledged, determinant other

Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics and

Director of the Research Unit in European Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Monash

University His most recent books are Writing Art and Architecture (2009) and Style and

Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (2006).

Of Jews and Animals

The Frontiers of Theory

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan

The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger,

Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer

Timothy Clark

Dream I Tell You

Hélène Cixous

Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius

Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Robert Rowland Smith

Reading and Responsibility

Of Jews and Animals

Andrew Benjamin

Edinburgh University Press

© Andrew Benjamin, 2010

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Adobe Sabon

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and

printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 4053 9 (hardback)

The right of Andrew Benjamin

to be identifi ed as author of this work

has been asserted in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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7 Force, Justice and the Jew: Pascal’s Pensées 102 and 103 130

Index 195

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List of Illustrations

Figure 6.2 Bartolomé Bermejo, St Michael Triumphant Over

Figure 8.2 Jan van Eyck, segment focus from The Arnolfi ni

Figure 8.6 School of van Eyck, The Fountain of Grace and

Triumph of the Church Over the Synagogue (1430) 161

Figure 8.7 School of van Eyck, segment detail from The

Fountain of Grace and Triumph of the Church over the Synagogue (1430) 162

Figure 8.8 Dürer, face detail from Jesus Among the Doctors

(1506) 168

Figure 8.9 Dürer, hands detail from Jesus Among the Doctors

(1506) 169

Figure 9.1 Turner, Dawn After the Wreck (c.1841) 182

Figure 9.2 Piero di Cosimo, Satyr Mourning the Death of

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I would like to acknowledge colleagues and friends whose comments

on specifi c chapters played an important role in helping me develop

the overall argument: Howard Caygill, Karen MacCormack, Heidrun

Friese, Helen Hills, Paul Hills, Terry Smith, and Elena Stikou In

par-ticular, I would like to thank Dimitris Vardoulakis who not only read

the work, but our ensuing discussions played an essential part in its

overall formulation I presented most of these chapters as lectures and

seminars in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College,

University of London Goldsmiths College was the indispensible setting

that enabled the book to be written I would like to thank John Hutnyk

and Scott Lash for the kind invitation to be a Visiting Professor in the

Centre I also wish to thank Lydia Glick and Juliet Trethenick for their

help in the preparation of the manuscript Martin McQuillan, editor

of the series The Frontiers of Theory, and Jackie Jones at Edinburgh

University Press have both been unstinting in their support of my work

A number of these chapters have been published before However, they

have been extensively rewritten and the vocabulary of this project has

been incorporated within them

For Sam and Lucy, with love

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Series Editor’s Preface

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends

and after- life It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no

longer resistant to Theory but a signifi cant consensus has been

estab-lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream

of the humanities Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and

new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory This leaves

so- called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures

of auto- critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream

Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other

disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and

what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken

place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a

more- than- critical affi rmation of a negotiation with thought, which

thinks thought’s own limits?

‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nomial effect the

trans-formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in

an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a

‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisons such

think-ing To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon

Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it- is- necessary of

Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds) Rather,

this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges

complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking

It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in

the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers

of what is accepted, including the name of Theory In particular, it is

interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of

cross-ing disciplinary frontiers without dissolvcross-ing the specifi city of disciplines

Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,

this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued

xii Of Jews and Animals

exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters

modes of closed or conservative opinion In this respect the series aims

to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory

Martin McQuillan

M2093 - BENJAMIN PRELIMS.indd xii 4/3/10 12:18:01

Opening

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Chapter 1

Of Jews and Animals

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 specifi city 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

reit-eration 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 specifi c fi gure 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 specifi c

instance, becomes an exacting staging of the complex way these two

fi gures are already implicated in the philosophical project of

position-ing the relationship between particular and universal, The result of that

positioning is that neither the Jew nor the animal, though for

differ-ent 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 specifi c 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

4 Of Jews and Animals

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, fi rstly, in the way philosophical systems

create and sustain identities as fi gures 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 ence, either related or separately, of the Jew and the animal Allusion

pres-has already been made to both The fi rst concerns what will be called

the fi gure of the Jew and the fi gure of the animal.2 The second refers

to the question of particularity In regards to the fi rst, the point of the

term ‘fi gure’ 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 specifi c philosophical and

theo-logical positions Figure can be defi ned therefore as the constitution

of an identity in which the construction has a specifi c function that is

predominantly external to the concerns of the identity itself Not only

will this play a signifi cant role within the imposition of the quality of

being other, it will sanction, at the same time, the possible

reposition-ing 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

pos-sibility that is already inherent in the category of the other A further

aspect of the fi gure that needs to be noted in advance is that fi gures are

not just given, they have to be lived out The fi gure therefore can have

an effect on the operation of institutions as well as the practices of

everyday life Finally, in the case of the fi gure 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 fi gure

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 affi rmed

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 fi gure of the Jew and the fi gure of the animal are positioned

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Of Jews and Animals 5within specifi c philosophical and theological texts as well as in given

works of art Two of these determinations are of special interest in this

context The fi rst 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 fi gures, retention

does not entail the actual presence of the excluded Indeed, a signifi cant

aspect of the fi gure’s presence is that actions that take place in relation

to it need not depend upon the actual existence of those fi gured (The

fi gure 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 fi gured.3)

The differing components of the fi gure as well as those that

char-acterise 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 specifi c 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 clarifi cation, as has

been indicated above, they intersect The fi gure of the Jew is already the

enacting of a version of particularity The fi gure presents, in sum, the

particular that cannot be named by any form of universality as

belong-ing to that universal Nambelong-ing in this sense is a form of exclusion This

is not to suggest that the more abstract philosophical problem of

uni-versals 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

fi gures – cannot be approached philosophically In allowing for such an

option what emerges as a consequence is another way in which the

phil-osophical can engage with the political (This position will be developed

in greater detail in the analyses to follow.)