Dear Friend,
I always find it very difficult to check the ‘passion of the head’ at the door when running into a barrier. To find my way out and transition to the ‘head of the passion’ instead, causes much agony and consternation. In the abolition of the pain as the presence of a contradiction, there are two movements at work.
First is the ‘Ego’s’ struggle with the external source of tension. At this moment, it is mere repulsion and rejection which, however, does not reconcile the Ego with self. Second is the absorption of cleavage. Here the Ego has taken in the contradiction. The source is now wholly within. Now, at a cross road, the existential compulsion as Ego’s refuge may lead to the disgust with it all –the hell with it. Or, you suffer through and rid yourself from infestation with the ‘other,’ with what you are against, by rooting the Ego in the element of Universality! This, I believe, is also what you are yearning for when you call for a country or a world that is ‘for all of us.’
Thus, self-consciousness seems to have a ‘choice.’ Part of what you refer to as the failure of the Europe consists in the collective desire to forget, to close the book on mass extermination of the Jews for, otherwise, thought would have to take responsibility for what transpired. It is much more gratifying to the Ego to leave it at the level of condemnation of National Socialism and move on. ‘Eclipse’ of thought in forgetting must not be construed as a deliberate attempt to suppress a secret inclination for Fascism. No, it is sincere.
But when the tired Ego has to face ‘infinite’ negations, as it were, to get to ‘Truth,’ it is far easier to declare the ‘Absolute’ incomprehensible and, therefore, resort to an ‘Ought.’
(I should add, parenthetically, that none of the defendants at the Nuremburg Trials felt guilty. What they did was ‘rational’ and emerged from a sense of duty of a functionary. Eichmann, when he was put on trial, summed up the rational. He claimed to be a true Kantian. In carrying out the law, he was in compliance with the ‘Ought,’ with the precepts of moral conscience, the ‘spirit’ of the law. Adolph Hitler himself in distinguishing his Plan from that of the Russian Pogroms claimed that ours derives from a sense of rationality and is carried out through the most modern administrative techniques. When Martin Heidegger, in a rare moment, broke his monstrous silence after the War, he exclaimed that “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, essentially the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps.” Auschwitz, then is your typical assembly line: deported Jews as the ‘rational’ processing of raw material and death at Gas and Crematoria as the end product.)
The point is that the ‘Ought’ whether in Adorno’s ‘Never Again’ or Marcuse’s ‘great refusal’ substitutes permanent resistance, or sheer negativity, in place of genuine reconciliation of thought with itself. But if you attempt to escape self-responsibility, ‘it’ will continue to haunt you and will surely come back to visit! On the other hand, one cannot attempt to construct a New Universal by leaving behind the Concrete, the historic context, and hence, the confrontation with the self-opposed Absolute. That’s precisely what’s wrong – resorting to a fixed particular when one needs to be universal, and escape to the abstract universal, when one has to be concrete. How else can one embrace, to quote Sartre, the human condition in its totality from within? Look, the Nuremburg Laws were passed in 1935. What happened between 1935 and 1945, and by no means only in Germany? Oh no, one will skip over this decade at our peril, not ‘just’ for the sake of intellectual honesty, or even out of mere ‘sympathy’ for the Jews but the fact that Humanity as a whole had reached an impasse. Will ‘Man’ prevail? Can we become free in this Changed World? Over 50,000 books have been written on Fascism and WWII, and we are still at the precipices. When thought gets tangled up in the concrete and gets ‘exhausted,’ it shoots to a predicate-less universal as a ‘beyond.’ Mind here driven to the acme of its opposition is now Pure Insight. Lacking ‘Method,’ its ‘volition,’ divorced from ‘volitional agent,’ as Subject, consumes the latter and becomes an infinite yearning for ‘a’ Universal.
Is it any wonder, then, that ‘Post-Modernism’ has landed thought on the non-actuality of the Subject as a Grand ‘Metaphysical’ postulate? Surely, Fascisms is the offspring of the Counter-Revolution, it cannot be conceived without the defeat of German revolutions. Of course it appealed to nostalgia and the ‘resurrection’ of the Nation, but at its very core it was forward looking. Fascists sought to build a new world, made ‘eschatological’ promises, they were ‘revolutionaries,’—that was their self-understanding. They appealed to the working class by condemning ‘Jewish Capitalism.’ State-Capitalists through and through, they no longer had any need for ‘the Jewish Merchants.’ Here we are in 2009, and the ‘post-humanist’ de-constructionism wants to make us believe that fascism is not just an outgrowth of Capitalism, but the child of Humanism.
Thus, the French philosopher, Lacoure-Labarthe, lamenting against the ‘vanity’ of the ‘cause,’ holds that ‘Fascism is Humanism’, because “it rests on the determination of subject’s absolute self-creation.” Ironically, all proponents of ‘metaphysics of subjectivity’ are the off-shoots of Heidegger whether they admit it or not. Here then is the philosopher of ‘Being’ (Dasein), Heidegger, after the War. He is isolated and discredited for his Nazi affiliation, writing his famous, almost book-length, ‘Letter on Humanism.’ Listen carefully to what he has to say: “The modern metaphysical essence of labor is presaged in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the self-establishing precedent for unconditional production, which is reification of what is actual, experienced by man as subjectivity.” Now we know the root of man’s ‘homeless-ness.’ Of course, Marx too caught in Hegel’s Phenomenology the dialectics of labor but as man’s process of self-creation. But with Heidegger, it is not that man’s labor objectifies itself in opposition to itself –objectification as loss of object, as alienation; and therefore the drive for unification of the objective and subjective. With Heidegger the very notion of man as the creator, as the active ‘agency,’ is the source of modern ‘spiritless-ness.’ Would you believe that even Herbert Marcuse, this great Hegelian Marxist, who was once the student of Heidegger, wrote in his Eros and Civilization that we ought to now retire the myth of Prometheus as the personification of labor and ‘toil’? What’s needed, he argued is a turn to serenity and rest. The ‘reified’ man is a tired man!
But who, then, is this ‘Being’ to whom Heidegger attributes the character of an unmediated ‘Is’? It is presupposition-less, it is un-grounded. It is, as he says, above and beyond theory-practice, subject-object, and all other antithetical categories. In short, it is a pure abstraction, a fiction of Heidegger’s imagination. You see, it is far easier to just launch a purely ‘political’ attack on him, as others have done, by exposing his Party membership, or the rector-ship of Freiburg University under Goebbles. But it is another thing to grapple and reveal the ‘lie’ of his principle which remained unchanged before and after the War. In large measure, he is responsible for modern Nihilism.
To get back to my point, after this lengthy excursion, it is no longer concrete, after the Nazi experience, to continue to advocate ‘assimilation,’ even if you invoke the early Marx’s call for universal human emancipation. It is not that you give up the goal, but that you work out a new pathway to get there. All genuine Marxists, Luxemburg and Trotsky, included, were for assimilation of the Jews. After all, the Jews were at the forefront of revolutionary movements in Europe. No wonder Hitler always hyphenated the word Marxist, by calling it ‘Marxist-Jews.’ Even the great chauvinist, Joseph Stalin, knew how to fight his opponents when he called them ‘rootless cosmopolitans.’ Marxists simply took it for granted that the Socialist Revolution will take care of all social ills, including the so-called ‘Jewish Question.’
No; WWII changed all that. Tell now if escaping the Nazi Holocaust is tantamount to ‘nostalgia’ for Mount Zion? And what exactly do you do after the Camps were librated? Where do you go now? How many refugee ships were tuned back, how many drowned in high seas, when no one would bother with that mass of humanity, before you give up the myth of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’? (At an opportune time, I will tell you the story of ‘Tehran Children,’ the story of Jewish children who escaped holocaust and took refuge in Iran.)
Let’s not also forget that in 1945, the population of Palestine was barely over two million, of which 800,000 were indigenous Jews. Why shouldn’t they open their doors and arms to the refugees? Should they have obtained invitation from the British or Trans-Jordan with its claim over the entire territory? Or perhaps they ought to have appealed to the Mufti, who, sitting in Berlin for 4 years, kept begging Hitler for the aerial bombardment of Tel Aviv? Moreover, what precisely is an ‘artificial’ state? Who then carved up the whole of the Middle-East after the Ottoman Empire collapsed? Who put those potentates and local clansmen at the helm in Lebanon, Syria or Jordan? Please let’s not pretend as if they came to power through a libratory movement. When the power of the fellow Moslem, but nevertheless Colonial, Turks fell apart, there was no nation state anywhere close by. But that should hardly be the point of contention for someone with Universalist aspirations. What should matter, and is really of the essence, is how we transcend the divide between the Concrete and the Universal. What’s left of the Universal if it is purged of the Particular and the Individual? I tell you what’s left, an empty shell, resembling Plato’s Republic rooted on substance rather than subject. Otherwise, by calling for what is simply not to be, I am afraid we not only find ourselves with bad company, but perhaps betray high minded universal freedom as but a kaput!
Now, the object of this letter has not been to defend my essay. I lay no claim to a breakthrough in thought. It is not a reflection on Europe or an analysis of the Palestinian movement. It cannot be what it is not. However, if that’s any consolation to anyone, it contains plenty of condemnation of the state of Israel. Imbedded in the overview of Israel’s genesis and transformation, one will also find the unequivocal opposition to State-ism as detrimental to the creation of a new society. Neither did I embrace uncritically the communal settlements, and its crystallization in Kibbutzim. My idea in part was to point out and substantiate, in a limited space allocated for an essay article, the actual presence of a very different historic narrative than what the Left has espoused, i.e. Israel’s creation by Big Powers as a ‘colonial’ project.
My narrative is an attempt at looking at history as a struggle for freedom. Obviously I do not share the view that Zionism is racism. There is more than enough evidence to prove the diversity of views within Zionism. Ironically, the most orthodox Jews are opposed to Zionism. Some even went to Iran at the invitation of Ahmadinejad. There is much more depth in the richness of the Zionist tendencies than the essay brings out. Of course, there were the Socialists as a viable tendency. Naturally, Zionism in power, like all ideologies, Arab Nationalism, Isalmism, etc. as state ideology tangled up as they all are in capitalist mode of life, are anti-human, racist and sexist. But this need not be proven.
What I appreciated from your comments is the inability of the Moslem world to create a Martin Luther King or a Mandela. That really struck me. For I have always been fascinated by Mandela’s appeal to white Afrikaners’ historic narrative, their Boer wars and concentration camps – incidentally that’s where the expression originated from – their battles against the British. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine an Arab leader who could appeal to the Jewish narrative, solidarize with it, break through this ‘other’ as the enemy? There are some grass root movements in this direction among Arabs and Jews. But they are not yet fully viable. There are even Jewish/Arab youth groups who visit Auschwitz in Poland. I know also of an Arab Lawyer who has created a holocaust memorial museum in the West Bank, even as he has been excommunicated by his family, lost his job, and stoned by the multitude. But, do please recall what I said about the meaning of a tendency historically – the dialectical movement is from quality to quantity to measure! (Abstract as it sounds, let me again add parenthetically, that historically the Jews and Arabs have a lot more in common and have been the object of European hostility for a longer period of time. When the Arabs first invaded Europe, some feared them as ‘the return of the Jews.’ Judea-Christian ‘tradition’ too is of a modern origin. Hegel’s characterization of both as religions of the ‘Sublime’ also points to similarity than diversity.)
As Hegel would say, the idea is not so feeble as to have a right or an obligation to exist without actually existing. “There is nothing in thought which has not been in sense and experience.” (Logic, Par. 8)
Best sincere hope for a continuous dialogue,
Raha 04/23/2009
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