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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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Page 15
For the late nineteenth-century Jews of Vienna, Freud "was their self-appointed intellectual elite, mediating them over into the promises and perils of modernity."
13
The psychoanalytic method opened a private space in civil society, in which the neurotic Jewish patient could deal with the traumatic past, including the family past of unacceptable shtetl behavior. Freud's discoveries, of course, became a universalizing science because the psychological dilemma of Viennese Jewry was an acute example of a pervasive malaise, the personal price paid for modernity by Western society. Still, psychoanalysis remains the special purview of secular Jews, and it is no accident that Philip Roth, whose novels straddle the fence between Modernism and Postmodernism, writes his most notorious work as a parody of a tortured Jewish session on the couch. From Freud to Roth, Jewish Modernism couples exorbitant alienation with scrutinizing critical intellect. The result is usually an affront to refined sensibilities.
Here we have another reason for the Jewish literary intellectual's probable difficulty with Postmodernism. Jameson states that between Modernism and Postmodernism, there is a "shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology [which] can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject."
14
On the theoretical level, this correlates to post-structuralism's critique of the centered human subject. Likewise, Postmodern works of art "are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria," as in, say, the poems of John Ashbery or the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. But self-conscious Jewish writers and intellectuals, I would argue, tend to be wed to what Jameson calls "the older
anomie
of the centred subject":
15
not only do they cling, however nostalgically, to history and to cultural metanarratives, they cling to their selves too, however anxiety-ridden they might be.
Postmodernism's failure to seize the Jewish literary imagination does not mean, however, that Jewish intellectuals are not affected by the Postmodern environment in which they must inevitably operate. Indeed, if my extrapolation of Trilling's definition is at all correct and Jewish literary intellectuals are particularly prone to the disputatious drama of cultural life, then the controversy, the scandal of the Postmodern is bound to attract them.
Take, for example, the seductive power of that "multitudinous photographic simulacrum," the infinitely expanding image-world which Benjamin, with his usual prescience, called to our attention so long ago. Benjamin's ambivalence toward what would eventually
 
Page 16
grow into the totalizing sphere of the mass media is expressed in the counterpoint of his two great essays "The Storyteller" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the former mourning the loss of auratic culture, the latter celebrating its destruction by the reproducible image. "The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition," notes Benjamin, and yet it is this "tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind."
16
Benjamin's doubts about multiplying images are deeply Jewish, for such practices oppose the Second Commandment, a point which Cynthia Ozick never ceases to make in her excoriations of contemporary writing. Yet Benjamin is as much the secular Jewish intellectual in his messianic fascination with the twentieth-century technologies of the image, for a long and serious consideration of that which was traditionally deemed
assur
forbiddenstrongly marks Jewish intellectual life since the Haskalah.
But Postmodernism does not only fuel the drama of Jewish cultural thought through the provocation of ambivalent responses: at least one important Postmodern notion speaks directly to Jewish intellectuals' self-conception, their understanding of their obviously vexed Jewish identity and the role they play in the greater drama of culture at large. Consider the following portentous statement:
First consequence:
différance
is not. It is not a present being, however excellent, unique, principal, or transcendent. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of
différance,
but
différance
instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. And it is always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach
différance
with wishing to reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with a capital letter.
17
As articulated in one of Derrida's seminal post-structuralist essays,
différance,
which the philosopher expressly forbids us from understanding as a positive philosophical or "ontotheological" concept, certainly must be implicated in the Postmodern self-understanding of Jewish literary intellectuals. Derrida's work and his very figure as a product of secular Jewish culture constitute a border between the
 
Page 17
modern Jew of culture and the Postmodern Jew of
différance
. On an intellectual if not a psychosocial plane,
différance
means an end to the ordeal of civility and a palpable Jewish return of the repressed.
Différance
produces itself through the production of differences. Thus if modernity rends the individual from the social fabric, Postmodernity as
différance
subverts both the individual and the social fabric in their entireties. And as Derrida says, "If the word 'history' did not in and of itself convey the motif of a final repression of difference, one could say that only differences can be 'historical' from the outset and in each of their aspects."
18
For Jewish writers and critics, this situation is of special moment. Through the assertion of difference, Jewish intellectuals reveal their historicalor better, their counterhistoricalaspect. Secular, largely assimilated, they speak of culture and to culture, knowing all the while that culture itself can be understood as a play of differences. Yet they do not dissolve completely into this play of differences, the nihilistic void on the edge of which thinkers like Derrida always tread. They cleave to the narratives of culture, including that of Judaism itselfa narrative of difference from which they are free to speak.
Put quite simply, Jewish intellectuals operating under the non-concept, the negative force of
différance,
are more aggressively Jewish than their earlier modern counterparts, who labored under an ameliorating vision of humanism, usually aligned to a liberal or leftist political agenda. As Mark Shechner explains,
It is not mistaken to regard Marxism, at a certain moment of its penetration into Jewish existence, as a substitute Judaism, endowed with all the powers once possessed by halakhic or Orthodox Judaism for interpreting the world, dictating principles, forming character, and regulating conduct. When it collapsed for those intellectuals, the event was no less disorienting for them than the dissolution of traditional Jewish life under Halakha had been for their grandparents.
19
The dissolution of what was once a relatively stable ideological foundation makes up the tale of that generation of Jewish intellectuals usually associated with the
Partisan Review
. This process of dissolution (for Shechner it consists primarly of a movement through socialism and psychoanalysis, "a series of apostasies, losses, and disillusionments") inadvertently discouraged the direct incorporation of identifiably Jewish modes of thought and of textuality into their
 
Page 18
work. Ironically, it could well be that the present generation represents a return to a more definite Jewish identity, though it is one that has surely gone through the crucible of modernism.
I do not mean to say that the earlier Jewish intellectuals failed to identify and write about their Jewishness in a variety of ways. Yet there is a great difference between books like Alfred Kazin's
New York Jew
or Irving Howe's
World of Our Fathers
on the one hand, and Cynthia Ozick's
Art and Ardor
or Geoffrey Hartman's
Criticism in the Wilderness
on the other. Among writers of the earlier generation, Judaism (or perhaps I should say an individual's Jewish identity) is to be understood from a socio-historical perspective: to be a Jew means to have a certain origin, a certain relation to society, a certain set of cultural goals. For the following generation, all of these conditions obtain, but in addition Judaism provides a relatively detailed intellectual infrastructure and a creative, formative idea as well as a unique social milieu.
In order to speak more definitely about this shift in what we can call "the sociology of knowledge" pertaining to Jewish literary intellectuals, I would like to compare two critics, both extremely influential in their time: Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. Trilling, who died in 1975 after a career of over forty years, appears to us across the abyss opened by recent developments in literary theory as a figure from the history of criticism. But as Mark Krupnick reminds us in his excellent study of Trilling, "the fate of cultural criticism" of the kind Trilling produced has been largely an unfortunate one, especially due to the split between increasingly specialized academic writing and a waning tradition of intellectual journalism.
20
Readers rarely grant the same authority to critics today as they once did; and few literary intellectuals feel comfortable making the great moral generalizations which Trilling was apparently licensed to offer. The drama of cultural debate through which one could emerge as a critic-hero has given way before a general skepticism of the critical will to power. And yet it is just such a roleelder statesman if not cultural
nabi
to which Harold Bloom seems to aspire. For after years of defiantly recondite theorizing, Bloom at sixty emerges in his recent
Ruin the Sacred Truths
his Charles Eliot Norton Lecturesas a centralizing voice, "the Yiddisher Dr. Johnson."
Here, of course, is the difference. It is not merely that Jews are now thoroughly at home in the American academy; it is also that Jewish literary accomplishments in the mainstream of intellectual discourses of late have drawn self-consciously upon Jewish sources.
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