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<font face="BOOKMAN" size="2">As [[Jean-Claude Milner]]<a [[name]]="1x"></a><a href="#1"> 1</a> put it, [[democracy]] is based on a short-circuit between the majority and the All: in it, the winner takes all, has all the [[power]], even if his majority is merely a couple of hundred votes among the millions, as was the [[case]] in the 2000 US elections in Florida: "the majority counts as all." In <i>The [[History]] of the VKP</i>, the Stalinist bible, there is a unique [[paradox]] when [[Stalin]] (who [[ghost]]-wrote the book) describes the outcome of the voting at a party congress in the late 1920s: "With a large majority, the delegates unanimously approved the [[resolution]] proposed by the Central Committee" - if the vote was unanimous, where did then the minority [[disappear]]? Far from betraying some [[perverse]] "totalitarian" twist, this [[identification]] is constitutive of democracy as such.<br><br>
This paradoxical status of the minority as a "something that counts as [[nothing]]" enables us to discern in what precise [[sense]] the <i>demos</i> to which democracy refers "incessantly oscillates between the all and the <i>nonall / pastout</i>: "either the [[language]] of the limited Alls encounters a [[figure]] of the unlimited, or the unlimited encounters a figure of [[limit]]."<a name="2x"></a><a href="#2"> 2</a> That is to say, there is a [[structural]] ambiguity inscribed into the very [[notion]] of <i>demos</i>: it either designates the [[non-All]] of an unlimited set (everyone is included in it, there are no exceptions, just an inconsistent [[multitude]]), or the One of THE [[People]] which has to be delimited from its enemies. <i>Grosso modo</i>, the predominance of the one or the [[other]] aspect defines the opposition between American and European democracy: "In the democracy in America, majority [[exists]], but it does not [[speak]] (the silent majority) and it is speaks, it becomes a [[particular]] [[form]] of minority." <a name="3x"></a><a href="#3"> 3</a> In the US, democracy is perceived as the field of the interplay of multiple agents, none of which embodies the All, i.e., which are all "minoritarian," while, in [[Europe]], democracy traditionally referred to the rule of the One-People. However, Milner draws from this an elegant conclusion as to what is going on today: in contrast to the US which are predominantly "[[Non-all|non-All]]" as a [[society]], in their [[economy]], [[culture]], [[ideology]], Europe is now going much further towards constituting itself as an unlimited POLITICAL (non-)All through the [[process]] of European unification in which there is [[place]] for anyone independently of [[geography]] or culture, up to Cyprus and [[Turkey]]. However, such a [[unified]] Europe can only constitute itself on the condition of the progressive erasure of all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations: consequently, the unified Europe is based on the erasure of history, of historical [[memory]].<a name="4x"></a><a href="#4"> 4</a> [[Recent]] phenomena like [[holocaust]] revisionism, the [[moral]] equation of all victims of the WWII (Germans suffered under the Allied bombardments no less than Russians and Englishmen; the fate of the [[Nazi]] collaborators liquidated by the Russians after the war is comparable to the victims of the Nazi genocide, etc.), are the [[logical]] outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on behalf of abstract [[suffering]] and [[victimization]]. And - this is what Milner is aiming at all along - this Europe, in its very advocacy of the unlimited [[openness]] and multicultural [[tolerance]], again [[needs]] the figure of the "Jew" as a structural obstacle to this [[drive]] to unlimited unification; however, today's [[anti-Semitism]] is no longer the old ethnic [[Anti-semitism|anti-Semitism]]; its focus is [[displaced]] from [[Jews]] as an ethnic group to the [[State]] of [[Israel]]: "in the program of the Europe of the 21st century, the State of Israel occupies exactly the [[position]] that the name 'Jew' occupied in the Europe before [[The Cut|the cut ]] of 39-45."<a name="5x"></a><a href="#5"> 5</a> In this way, today's anti-Semitism can [[present]] itself as anti-anti-Semitism, [[full]] of [[solidarity]] with the victims of the holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual [[dissolution]] of all limits, of the fluidification of all traditions, the Jews wanted to built their own clearly delimited [[Nation]]-State.<br><br>
The paradoxes of the non-All thus provide the coordinates of the vicissitudes of the modern anti-Semitism: in the early modern anti-Semitism (exemplified by the name of [[Fichte]]), Jews were denounced for their limitation, for their sticking to their particular way of [[life]], for their [[refusal]] to dissolve their [[identity]] in the unlimited field of modern secular [[citizenship]]. With the late 19th-century chauvinist [[imperialism]], the [[logic]] was inverted: Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, "deracinated" [[existence]] which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic [[community]]. Today, however, with the move towards the post-Nation-State [[globalization]] whose [[political]] expression is an unlimited [[Empire]], Jews are again cast into the [[role]] of [[being]] stuck onto a Limit, a particular identity - they are more and more perceived as the obstacle on the path towards unification (not only of Europe, but also of Europe and the Arab [[world]]).<br><br>
