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{{BSZ}} <font de0031="" color="" face="courier" size="1">[[lacan]].com 2004</font>

<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> Milner thus locates the notion of "Jews" in the European [[ideological ]] [[imaginary ]] as the [[moment ]] which prevents unification-peace, which has to be annihilated for Europe to unite, which is why Jews are always a "problem" demanding a "solution" - [[Hitler ]] is merely the most radical point of this [[tradition]]. No wonder that, today, the [[European Union ]] is getting more and more anti-Semitic, in its blatantly biased criticism of Israel: the very [[concept ]] of Europe is tainted with anti-Semitism, which is why the first [[duty ]] of Jews is to "get rid of Europe," not by ignoring it (only US can afford to do it), but by bringing to light the dark underside of European [[Enlightenment ]] and democracy... So why were the Jews elevated into this role of the obstacle? What does the Jew stand for? Milner's answer is here radical: much more than the form of existence delimited by tradition, much more than stubborn attachment to a Nation-State - the Four-fold /<i>quadruplicite</i>/ of the [[masculine]]/feminine/parents/children, of the [[exchange ]] of generations as a [[symbolic ]] passage sustained by the Law.<a name="6x"></a><a href="#6"> 6</a> The ultimate horizon of the ongoing [[postmodern ]] overcoming of Limits is no longer that of [[Christianity]], but, rather, the neo-pagan New Age [[dream ]] of overcoming [[sexual ]] [[difference ]] as the [[index ]] of our link to a [[singular ]] [[body]], of immortality through cloning, of our transformation from hardware into software, from [[human ]] into post-human, into [[virtual ]] entities that can migrate from one to [[another ]] temporary embodiment - here are the very last lines of Milner's book:</font></p>

<font face="BOOKMAN" size="2">If [[modernity ]] is defined by the [[belief ]] into an unlimited realization of [[dreams]], our [[future ]] is fully outlined. It leads through the absolute [[theoretical ]] and [[practical ]] anti-[[Judaism]]. To follow Lacan beyond what he explicitly stated, the foundations of a new [[religion ]] are thus posited: anti-Judaism will be the [[natural ]] religion of the humanity-to-come.<a name="7x"></a><a href="#7"> 7</a></font></p>

<font face="BOOKMAN" size="2">The figure of the "Jew" is thus elevated into the index of a properly [[ontological ]] limit: it stands for the human [[finitude ]] itself, for symbolic tradition, language, paternal Law, and, in Milner's "[[Lacanian]]" account of anti-Semitism as inscribed into the very European identity, "Europe" stands for the (Greek and [[Christian]]) dream of <i>parousia</i>, of a full <i>[[jouissance]]</i> beyond Law, unencumbered by any obstacles or prohibitions. Modernity itself is propelled by a [[desire ]] to move beyond Laws, to a [[self]]-regulated [[transparent ]] [[social ]] body; the last installment of this saga, today's postmodern neo-pagan Gnosticism perceives [[reality ]] as fully malleable, enabling us, [[humans]], to transform ourselves into a migrating entity [[floating ]] between a multitude of realities, sustained only by infinite [[Love]]. Against this tradition, Jews, in a radically anti-millenarian way, persist in their fidelity to the Law, they insist on the insurmountable finitude of humans, and, consequently, on the [[need ]] for a minimum of "[[alienation]]," which is why they are perceived as an obstacle by everyone bent on a "final solution"...<br><br> Insofar as Jews insist on the unsurpassable horizon of the Law and resist the Christian [[sublation ]] (<i>[[Aufhebung]]</i>) of the Law in Love, they are the embodiment of the irreducible finitude of the [[human condition]]: they are not just an empirical obstacle to full incestuous <i>jouissance</i>, but the obstacle "as such," the very [[principle ]] of impediment, the perturbing [[excess ]] that cannot ever be integrated. Jews are thus elevated to the <i>[[objet ]] a</i> (<i>notre [[objet a]]</i>, the title of Francois Regnault's booklet on the Jews),<a name="8x"></a><a href="#8"> 8</a> the [[object]]-[[cause ]] of (our Western) [[desire, ]] the obstacle which effectively sustains desire and in the [[absence ]] of which our desire itself would vanish. They are not our [[object of desire ]] in the sense of that what we desire, but in the strict Lacanian sense of that what sustains our desire, the metaphysical obstacle to the full self-[[presence ]] or full <i>jouissance</i>, that which has to be eliminated for the arrival of the full <i>jouissance</i>, and, since this non-[[barred ]] <i>jouissance</i> is structurally [[impossible]], that which returns stronger and stronger as a [[spectral ]] [[threat ]] the more Jews are annihilated.<br><br>

The weakness of Milner's version of anti-Semitism can be specified at a [[whole ]] series of interconnected levels. First, is all we find beyond the Law really only the dream of a full <i>jouissance</i>, so that Lacan appears as the ultimate defender of the paternal Law? Is not the fundamental insight of the late Lacan precisely that there is an inherent obstacle to full <i>jouissance</i> operative already in the drive which functions beyond the Law: the inherent "obstacle" on account of which a drive involves a curved [[space]], i.e., gets caught in a [[repetitive ]] movement around its object, is not yet the "symbolic [[castration]]." For the late Lacan, on the contrary, the [[Prohibition ]] - far from standing for a [[traumatic ]] cut - enters precisely in [[order ]] to pacify the [[situation]], to rid us of the inherent [[impossibility ]] inscribed into the functioning of a drive.<br><br> Second problem: is one of the key sources of European modernity not the tradition of secularized Judaism? Is arguably the ultimate formulation of a "full <i>jouissance</i> beyond Law" not found in [[Spinoza]], in his notion of the [[third]], highest, level of [[knowing]]? Is the very [[idea ]] of modern "[[total]]" political [[revolution ]] not rooted in [[Jewish ]] messianism, as, among [[others]], Walter [[Benjamin ]] made it clear? The very tendency towards the unlimited which needs the Jews as its obstacle is thus grounded in Judaism.<br><br> The third problematic feature concerns Milner's political premises: "The [[birth ]] of the State of Israel proved that victory and justice can go hand in hand."<a name="9x"></a><a href="#9"> 9</a> What this [[statement ]] obliterates is the way the [[constitution ]] of the State of Israel was, from the standpoint of Europe, the realized "final solution" of the Jewish problem (getting rid of the Jews) entertained by the [[Nazis ]] themselves. That is to say, was the State of Israel not, to turn Clausewitz around, the continuation of the war against Jews with other (political) means? Is this not the "[[stain ]] of injustice" that pertains to the State of Israel? 26 September 1937 is a date anyone interested in the history of anti-Semitism should [[remember]]: on that day, Adolf Eichmann and his assistant boarded a train in Berlin in order to visit [[Palestine]]: Heydrich himself gave Eichmann permission to accept the invitation of Feivel Polkes, a high member of Hagana (the Zionist [[secret ]] organization), to visit Tel Aviv and discuss there the coordination of [[German ]] and Jewish organizations to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine. Both Germans and Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestina: Germans preferred [[them ]] out of [[Western Europe]], and Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestina to outnumber the Arabs as fast as possible. (The visit failed because, due to some violent unrests, the British blocked the access to Palestina; but Eichmann and Polkes did meet days later in Cairo and discussed the coordination of German and Zionist activities.)<a name="10x"></a><a href="#10"> 10</a> Is this weird incident not the supreme case of how the Nazis and the radical Zionists did share a common interest - in both cases, the [[purpose ]] was a kind of "ethnic cleansing," i.e., to [[change ]] violently the ratio of ethnic groups in the population? Are not today rather the Palestinians, these "Jews among the Arabs," who are a kind of <i>objet a</i>, the intersection of the two sets of Israelis and Arabs, the obstacle to their peace?<br><br>

The irony missed by Milner is that, today, it is Muslims, not Jews, who are perceived as a threat and obstacle to globalization: it is a journalistic commonplace to point out that all great world [[religions ]] found a way to live with [[capitalist ]] [[modernization]], with the exception of [[Islam]], which is why the present [[conflict ]] is often described as the one between the democratic West and the "Islamic [[Fascism]]." However, the crucial weakness of Milner's [[analysis ]] concerns the (rather surprising) [[complete ]] absence of the [[market ]] economy and [[money ]] in the rise of anti-Semitism: what [[about ]] "Jew" as the figure in which social [[antagonism ]] is reified? As the figure which stands for the financial ("nonproductive") [[capital ]] and the profit in the sphere of exchange, and which thus enables us to elude the exploitation inscribed into the very process of production, and to sustain the [[myth ]] of the [[harmonious ]] [[relationship ]] between Labor and Capital, once we get rid of the parasitic Jewish intruder? It is HERE that Lacan's logic of <i>pastout</i> finds its proper use: significantly, although Milner points out that the [[thesis ]] "all is political" belongs to <i>pastout</i> (a [[remainder ]] of his [[Maoist ]] youth?), he deploys the social [[dimension ]] of the <i>pastout</i> only in the guise of inconsistent/unlimited All, not in the guise of the antagonism that cuts across the entire [[social body ]] ("[[class ]] [[struggle]]"). The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew enables us to obfuscate the non-All of the constitutive [[social antagonism]], transposing it into the conflict between the social All (the corporate notion of society) and its [[external ]] Limit, the Jewish intruder which, from [[outside]], brings into it imbalance and degeneration.<br><br> And this allows us to throw a new light on Milner's notion of "Jews" as the obstacle to unified Europe: what if the persistence of the anti-Semitic logic, far from being the necessary obverse of the non-All Europe, is on the contrary an indication of the tendency to conceive Europe as a limited All with the need for a constitutive exception? The task should be thus to fight for a non-All Europe as a truly new political form slowly emerging through the impasses of "unification" - THIS non-All Europe will no longer need the "Jew" as its limit-obstacle, as its constitutive exception. What if such a Europe will be a Europe of exceptions, a Europe in which every unit will be an exception? In short, what if this is the "solution to the Jewish problem" - that we all turn into "Jews," into <i>objets a</i>, into exceptions? That is to say, is it not that, in the "postmodern" [[global ]] empire, what was till now the "Jewish exception" is more and more becoming the standard rule: a particular ethnic group which fully participates in the [[global economy ]] while, simultaneously, maintaining its identity at the level of Milner's Four-Fold, i.e., through its founding [[cultural ]] [[myths ]] and [[rituals ]] which are transferred from generation to generation? Milner misses this key point insofar as he fails to grasp the actual functioning of the emerging global <i>pastout</i> empire: in it, all particular identities are NOT simply "liquefied," rendered fluid, but maintained - Empire thrives on the [[multiplicity ]] of particular (ethnic, [[religious]], sexual, life-style...) identities which form the structural obverse of the unified field of the Capital.<br><br> Radical as it may appear, Milner's idea perfectly fits one of the two clichés that pervade the European [[public ]] space with [[regard ]] to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the one extreme, Muslims continue to function as Europe's constitutive Other: the main opposition of today's ideologico-political struggle is the one between the tolerant multicultural [[liberal ]] Europe and the fundamentalist militant Islam. Any political or even cultural organization of Muslims is immediately dismissed as a fundamentalist threat to our secular values. Exemplary is here Oriana Fallacci with her thesis that Europe already spiritually capitulated: it already treats itself as a province of Islam, afraid of asserting its cultural and political identity. From this perspective, the [[distinction ]] between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is a fake: every critique of the Israeli [[politics ]] is a mask (and a new form of [[appearance]]) of anti-Semitism. European advocacy of peace in the [[Middle East ]] and its solidarity with Palestinians is perceived as the continuation of the old anti-Semitism with other means... At the other extreme, there are those for whom the West Bank occupation is simply the last case of European colonialism, and the evocation of holocaust is thoroughly politically instrumentalized in order to legitimize this colonial expansion, and the same ethico-political standards should apply to all, Israelis included. From this standpoint, the fact that Arab Muslims continue to function as Europe's constitutive Other is precisely what one has to submit to a critical analysis which should "deconstruct" the [[image ]] of the Islamic fundamentalist threat... The truly enigmatic feature is how (again, in a kind of [[parallax ]] gap) these two thoroughly opposed views can coexist in our public space: it is possible to [[claim]], at the same [[time]], that anti-Semitism is all-pervasive again in its "postmodern" version, AND that Muslims continue to function as the figure of the cultural-racial Other. Where, in this opposition, is the [[truth]]? Definitely not in any kind of the middle ground, of avoiding the two extremes. One should rather assert the truth of both extremes, conceiving each of the two as the [[symptom ]] of its opposite. Does the idea of Jews turning into a Nation-State not imply the END of Judaism - no wonder the Nazis supported this plan! Jews stood for the "Four-fold" precisely in order to maintain their identity without a Nation-State.<br><br>

<a name="1"></a><a href="#1x">1</a>. Jean-Claude Milner, <i>Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique</i>, [[Paris]]: Editions Verdier, 2003.<br>

<a name="4"></a><a href="#4x">4</a>. Milner evokes the post-Yugoslav war of the early 1990's as a "particularly revelatory example" (<i>op.cit.</i>, p. 66.) of this erasure: in order to account for this conflict, one has to [[return ]] to historical [[figures ]] which, as Milner puts it acerbically, come "earlier than the Treatise of Rome," to the WWII, to the Versailles treaty, to the Congress of [[Vienna]], etc. - perplexed by this intrusion of history, Europe raised its hands and had to appeal to the US... What we have here is a "particularly revelatory example" of the [[ignorance ]] of Milner himself: the reference to history, to "ancient passions and unsettled accounts exploding again," was one of the commonplaces of the Western European [[perception ]] of the post-Yugoslav crisis - all [[media ]] and politicians endlessly repeated the cliché that, in order to [[understand ]] what was going on in ex-[[Yugoslavia]], one had to [[know ]] hundreds years of history. Far from the Western Europe refusing to confront the "weight of history" in the Balkans, these specters of the [[past ]] rather served as an ideological [[screen ]] resuscitated in order to enable Europe to avoid confronting the actual political stakes of the post-Yugoslav crisis..<br>

<a name="10"></a><a href="#10x">10</a>. Heinz Hoehne, <i>The Order of the [[Death]]'s Head. The Story of Hitler's SS</i>, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, p. 336-337.</font>