Simulacra: Riddles, Enigmas
and Puzzles
La première chose, pour guérir,
c’est de connaitre sa maladie. Or,
l’antisémitisme nous fait illusion ; il nous aveugle sur nous-mêmes en
s’efforçant de nous faire croire qu’au lieu d’être en nous, la cause de notre
mal est hors de nous. Pas d’erreur plus
dangereuse. Nous sommes atteints d’une
affection intérieure, qui tient à notre constitution et à tout notre régime, et
les antisémites s’obstinent à nous répéter qu’il n’y a là qu’un mal
superficiel, accidenta, etranger a notre race et a notre sang.[1]
The first thing to find a cure
is to know your illness. Well,
anti-Semitism creates an illusion for us; it blinds us to ourselves by forcing
us to believe that instead of being inside us the illness lies outside of
us. No error is more dangerous. We are
attacked by an interior affliction which takes hold of our constitution and our
whole organism, and the anti-Semites insist on repeating to us that it is only a superficial disease,
accidental, alien to our race and our
blood.
Barely a year before the Dreyfus Affair began with the arrest of the
Jewish army officer, Anatole Leory-Beaulieu presented a long argument against
anti-Semtism as foreign to the soul and culture of modern France. It was something that came from benighted
lands such as Germany, Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. This hatred of Jews, with all its irrational
projections of discomfort and pain deep within the Frenchman who was puzzled by
the enigma of modernity, frightened by the creation of a secular and
cosmopolitan society, had to be confronted, or there could be no cure—only the
false and dangerous treatment of expelling or murdering all the Jews in the
nation. Leroy-Beaulieu was trying to
give an antidote to the malicious and scandalous, but wildly popular France juive (Jewish France) by Edouard
Drumont, who was now in the 1890s editor of La
libre parole (Free Speech), one of the fiercest anti-Semitic newspapers in
France, Drumont who would decades after his death would still be cited
favorably by Julius Streicher in his Nazi books and articles.
The delusion—the illusion, the hysterical vision of France and the rest
of Christian Europe over-run by pernicious little Jewish insects, wrapped in
the tentacles of a spider or octopus Jewish capitalist, raped and pillaged by
hordes of Kikes and Hebes—was that the People of Israel were demonic monsters,
little devils, sent by Satan with the inexpungible wish to destroy and replace
Christianity, to undermine its culture and morals, and to bleed it dry of all
its wealth and culture. The anti-Semites
exaggerated the number of Jews in each nation and the extent of their
influence. They read translations of the
Hebrew Bible, studied translations and précis of the Talmud and other
rabbinical books, they took exotic words out of context, turned minor customs
into satanic rituals, misconstrued cries of shame and fear into declarations
of war against their churches and leaders, and took every list of Jewish names
in professional organizations or in educational institutions as a clear sign of
how successful this invasion of the Semites was.
While these Judeophobes made little or no distinction between Ashkenazi
Jews and Sephdim, between the poor bedraggled refugees from pogroms in Poland
and Romania and the sophisticated merchants, bankers and journalists from
Germany and Austria who were seeking to better themselves and their families in
free advanced cities like Paris and London, they did often zero in on one
target point of the horrid disease they feared most: all the stories of
Crypto-Jews and Marranos who fled from Spain and Portugal, hiding their true
Jewish identities out of generational experience of the way the Inquisition
insidiously tracked them down and brought them before the tribunals of the Holy
Office. The anti-Semites took the anecdotes and family memories of secret
conclaves meeting in cellars to celebrate Yom Kippur and Passover as evidence
of a network of Jewish conspirators plotting the overthrow of France and
Germany. They found Jewish scholars
discussing the legal status of people who had been cut off from their ancestral
roots for hundreds of years who were seeking a return to the religion of the
Law, and they misread these discussions as part of the great syndic or conclave
of spies and traitors. They rubbed their
hands with glee when they heard rumors of the homens de naçio, a self-declared nation of men of affairs and
commerce, a Jewishness founded clearly on the merchandising, manufacturing,
banking, speculation and corrupt business practices. However, this is not what the men of the
nation meant. But the hysterical cries
for blood—Down with the Jews! Kill the Yids!—could not be silenced.
Wajcsman says “The hysteric is a speaking riddle, the symptom that
elicits speech from the other,” and we follow by claiming that the Secret Jew
is a speaking (where speaking means living) riddle, and the speech elicited
from the other (the other who is all sorts of threatening, untrustworthy but
highly inquisitive persons and institutions, including him or herself and his
or her own family, friends, and community) is something that is historical and
truthful, though not necessarily filled with the truth of history, only its
simulacrum. If the member of the nation asks the question, Who am I? there is a different answer appropriate to
each listener, (1) those to whom the question is asked in a rhetorical way in
order to establish kindred feelings of belonging to a shared history of
persecution, pride in the inability to escape and cope, and the need to reflect
back and forth the unanswerable quality of the question; (2) those to whom the
question is meant as a taunt and a challenge, as though to say, because you cannot understand who I am and want to consider me crazy, absurd and irrational, you can never understand who you are and
are therefore the truly insane person whose whole historical culture is
worthless in regard to the very values you
claim to have over me; and (3)
those to whom the question is innocent and disarming because it seems to make
no sense—because the person who asks the question seems a perfect mirror image
of themselves, whether of one thing (an Iberian Catholic) or another (a
Sephardic Jew), and the question itself mystifies all the rational, traditional
certainties normal people normally need to believe themselves normal. The other answer, we must assert, is (4) that
those who regard themselves as having a technique to interpret the discourse of
hysteria and believe in their own created language thus generated are
hysterical; and consequently what they say needs to be radically unpacked and
interpreted.
The riddle to be unriddle, however, always remains a riddle because the rules of
the naçio enforce the secrecy of the
group as such, just as, since ancient times, no one has been able to decipher
or unriddle either (a) the questions of the Sphinx, and have offered instead
superficial and banal simulacra, such as the questions concerning the ages of
man; or (b) the hidden mysteries of Demeter in the Mysteries of Eleusis, and
have walked in labyrinthine never-ending circles and been mocked as they pass
under the bridge of their own rational arrogance. The heart of the matter in each case is the
secrecy itself, not a secret truth that can be disclosed to initiates, as in
the case of Gnostic cults, but in the traumatic passing on from generation to
generation of the need to remain unknown, obscure and apparently mad. This kind of unknowing both calls attention
to itself from within by its anxiety and dread, but always denies it is anything
other than what it seems, which is normal—and hence without depth or
worry. The obscurity confounds precisely
because it tantalizes the outsider with a suspicion of profound otherness just
out of view and at the tip of the tongue that speaks its soothing reassurances,
yet simultaneously takes the otherness of its differences to the very
limits—and beyond—of the normal, the ordinary and the meaningless. Finally, the madness—the craziness of Don
Quixote and Hamlet, the weird gesticulations of the hysterical woman whose body
defies rational control and the wild raging of the rabid man flinging himself
against history,[2] and the
silent, perpetually infantilized creature who has only the faintest traces of
the human form and yet performs like a simulacrum to keep testing the essential
definitions of what it is to be homo sapiens—on the one hand, proves the
assertion of wisdom, truth and beauty
(which is “all ye need to know”), and on the other, destabilizes, undermines
and mocks the belief that such ideals can exist in reality, that is, outside of
waking dreams or hysterical nightmares.
[1] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Israël chez les nations, 5e
ed. (Paris : Calmann Lèvy, 1893) p. ix.
[2] It is important to recall how Didi-Huberman
showed that Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière photographed women
into to invent the modern form of hysteria but these poor
patients/prisoners/victims acted out the roles expected of them in order to
avoid worse punishments. Lurking in the
perspective—the photographic lens, the physician’s gaze, and the positivistic
science of Bernard—lies the dream (songe)
of the lie (mensonge) modernity tells
about itself. Freuyd partly came to
understand the role-playing game enacted on and over the hysteric’s body, but
then grew frightened and backed off from his insight. Was he to allow psychoanalysis to be a Wissenschaft des Judentums, a Jewish
science? Or should it rather become a Witzenschaft,
a way of telling jokes on the unconscious?
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