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As you (hypothetical reader!) may have noticed, I enjoy beginning my little inquiries with patently absurd statements, and then unpacking these paradoxes with theory to demonstrate the logic of the absurd. This is an implicitly Deleuzian method, and also a somewhat puerile one, but it’s also fun and productive for some reasons that will hopefully become a little clearer in the course of this brief piece.

So here’s the absurd statement: Not only were Hitler and the Nazis onto some important ideas, they were ‘geniuses’ of a sort when it came to the Jewish ‘Idea.’ This is not only absurd, but patently offensive to anyone with a reactionary mind. But this sort of reactionary mindset is eminently counterproductive. If we want to actually investigate evil, to understand the structural logic behind its genesis, then we can’t conduct our investigations from the perspective of the goodly thinker, the beautiful soul. Instead, we have to think about the conditions which determine the evil Idea, within its own absurd frame of reference. This is perhaps an ethnography of evil, minus the participant aspect: we have to obtain an emic understanding of what it’s like inside the evil mind, before we can begin to translate it into etic terms, understandable by those of us who are, if not ‘good,’ at least morally unobjectionable.

First: Why do I say that the Nazis were ‘geniuses?’ We are all familiar with the concept of the evil genius, but this sort of notion could be made a bit clearer by thinking about genius in relation to the Deleuzian plane of immanence. Reason is a process which takes place in the plane of representation, actualized in expression and formalized in a language (this would include formal languages, such as logic or mathematics). Reason, as I began to consider in a very preliminary way in last night’s post, is a delimitation and structuration of a differential plane of immanence within the body and brain of the subject, which for convenience we shall refer to as ‘the mind.’ Reason is the law of the mind, a set of social conventions which determines what expressions of that differential plane are acceptable in the context of serious rational inquiry. Genius, on the other hand, is quite different from reason. Genius is the process by which conscious thought directly accesses the mind’s plane of immanence and determines hidden connections between and within things, the genetic logic of a given existing thing; this virtual logic is always covered over in the actual, and inexpressible according to the conventions of representational reason. This is perhaps clearest in the case of the savant: they access the immanent plane of mathematics directly, and can perform feats of computation which seem impossible to those of us shackled by reason. Yet they generally remain unable to understand this process in a rational way, and are barred from the world of ‘real’ mathematics by their inability to ’show their work.’ This is the genius of the idiot, the genius which exceeds all possibility for rational determination. Rational geniuses, by contrast, try to make sense of the connections revealed by their genius in a reasoned way, to ensure that the connections they ’see’ with their genius are not merely figments of their poetic imagination, or worse, of their bad intentions. The most successful rational geniuses ultimately generate a paradigm shift of rationality: the laws of reason are remade in such a way that these hidden connections can now be grasped in the actual. This should make the opposing position of the evil genius clear: they recognize hidden connections, differential Ideas covered over in the process of actualization, but instead of interpreting these connections through the lens of reason (however difficult this process may be), they jump to conclusions. These conclusions are almost invariably not rational ones, but ones shaped in bad faith by their own prejudices and unconscious drives.

This discussion, interesting in itself, should help to illuminate the genius of Hitler, and the process by which it became an evil genius. Deleuze says that all Ideas are problematic. Hitler was therefore absolutely correct that the Jewish Idea ‘poses a problem;’ the problem posed by Hitler is how exactly he determined the Jewish problem in such a way that it led to a barbaric and unquestionably evil solution. The problem of the Jewish Idea is simple: why be a Jew? This formulation of course leaves a great deal unsaid, and so we ought to formulate it in a proper rational way as follows: why is it that the Jewish people have remained a Jewish people in the Diaspora, instead of assimilating? The genius of Hitler was that he recognized the problematic character of the Idea which structures the Jewish race as diasporic; the evil of Hitler is that the problem was formulated according to a logic in which the Jewish difference was necessarily subordinate to the unitary historical identity of the Germanic people.

This is not evil in itself, but evil in that it is absurd. The Jewish Idea not only pre-exists the Germanic one, but is eminently superior in terms of the depth of its historical ‘identity.’ While the Germanic race is a fictional pastiche of differential Ideas, both genetic and social, the Jewish race is perhaps the archetype of racial identity. Indeed, the Jewish problem can be more accurately formulated in these terms: why does the Jewish race seem so different? The answer lies precisely in its identity: Western (that is, European) culture is constructed in terms of various fluid identities which barely conceal an underlying play of difference. ‘We’ have progressed from intermingling tribes, to aristocratic families, to ‘peoples’ of the Germanic, Italian, Iberian, etc. type, onto this silly fiction of the nation-state, none of which are truly ’self-identical’ concepts, and yet we constantly proclaim the unity of these identities in a sort of reaction-formation on a grand scale. The Jewish people, constructed through centuries of subjugation by these fluid, territorialized identities, emphasizes its own difference from these constructed identities as a means of preserving its own internal cohesion. The result is an enduring ‘culture,’ a group identity far stronger than that to be found within these European pseudo-identities; thus it only makes sense that in the most intensive moments of the process of European identity-construction, Europeans have always sought to exclude or subordinate the Jewish identity.
Thus we are led past the Jewish ‘problem’ to its equally problematic cases of solution. Why be Jewish?
It should be noted that the Jewish Idea is no less problematic from within than from without, and indeed only takes the form ‘Why be Jewish’ from within. The various schisms within contemporary Judaism make it clear that different factions of Jews have very different solutions to the problem of Jewish identity. The first solution is the orthodox one: Be Jewish because of the will of YHWH, be Jewish because you are part of a Chosen People. This is an extremely strong solution, so long as people remain within their theological mindset; indeed, this solution, and the strict separation it has long entailed, is in part designed to keep the race within that mindset. Yet as intercultural barriers have broken down and more Jews have been secularized through European dissemination, this solution has become less persuasive. Thus we come to the solution of the less-orthodox and non-observant Jew: Be Jewish because you are, be Jewish because you are born into this identity and its entire history stands behind you. Thus a religion becomes an ethnicity. I don’t think of myself as a non-observant Catholic, but a non-Catholic, yet non-observant Jews tend to continue their self-identification as such. This is because Catholicism is a European pseudo-identity, an inferior simulacrum of the Jewish Idea, while Judaism in every form still understands the essence of identity-formation. I am not implying here that either mode of identity is superior – I enjoy the fluidity of my Europeanesque pseudo-identity – but simply pointing out the different cultural attitudes towards the concept of identity, and identity of the concept. The third solution that jumps out, perhaps simply because it is the most radical, and the only one acceptable from a Eurocentric perspective: stop being Jewish. This is assimilation, the radical negation of a given identity in favour of a self-made one. Of course, the (mass and individual) conversion of Jews to Catholicism has a number of interesting implications w/r/t the (forced or willing) trading of a ‘real’ (or at least more fixed and concrete) identity for a pseudo-identity; for now, I’ll move on.

The question implied by the Jewish problem from outside is a bit more contentious: What to do with the Jews? This has been the problem for any political entity which contains Jews within its territory; really this is the same problem posed by any political identity in its process of construction when it comes up against a pre-existing political identity. Barring assimilation, the process which the Jewish identity has been ‘designed’ to resist, there is one obvious answer: expel them. This was the ’solution’ to the original Jewish problem which made it an international one: if the insecure political identities of Babylonia and the Romans had not expelled the race from their respective territories, then the Diaspora would never have occurred, and the Jewish people would have remained a territorial assemblage. Instead, they became a territorial assemblage separated from its territory; rather than finding a new territory, as many European tribes in similar positions did, they dispersed around the known world, and developed new forms of deterritorialized identity which were nevertheless founded upon the historical territory and its loss. (We might note that the infrastructure of those very empires perhaps facilitated the distribution the Jewish population across a vast territorial expanse, while the resilience of the people and their textual culture served to perpetuate its now-distributed identity.) This process of expulsion merely served – in the eyes of nascent European cultures – to spread the ‘problem’ around; recognition of this factor is another element of Hitler’s evil genius. (I say European specifically because historical evidence makes it clear that most Arabic, Turkish and other empire-formations were in general less hostile to the Jewish identity.) Thus we arrive at Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem: not simply to expel the race from a territory, but from existence. For the Nazis, the Jewish problem and the deconstructive threat it posed to a nascent Germanic identity took precedence over all conventions of morality: the nation above all, this national fiction before the reality of human life. This is the structural logic of anti-Semitism: the persistence of the distinctly Jewish form of identity within the European implies that for the European form to succeed, the Jewish must be eliminated.

The self-evident (at least to anyone who isn’t an anti-Semite) immorality and absurdity of this logic leads to the real final solution to this ‘external’ formulation of the Jewish problem: learn from the problem, without trying to ’solve’ it. Following Levinas, we might propose that genius without evil demands openness to the Other; not necessarily the infinite Other of God, but all those forms of otherness which trouble ideal, ‘totalitarian’ concepts of nation.  In terms of an ‘instrumental’ justification of such openness (rather than a properly ‘ethical’ one), we need not refer simply to the fact that Judaism is one of the richest sources of historical material, or that its past can calerly shed light on the processes of cultural identity-formation in general. Both of these observations are essential in themselves. In a more immediate and concrete way, however,  we must stress the fact that Jewish culture, with its progressive movements of deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, is of central importance to any debate with regard to this supposed ‘postmodern crisis’ of the nation-state. As supranational corporations and subnational multiplicities began to supplant traditional political organization, the question of cultural identity and its relationship to politics, capital, and territory has become absolutely essential. We must question not only the apparent novelty of these territorial displacements, but also the fundamental premises of cultural identity, along with that totalizing impulse of political ‘unity’ which still persists. Until ‘we Europeans’ open ourselves fully to the value of the Jewish identity and its history in this light, the Jewish ‘problem’ will remain dominated by the pseudo-question of whether one ought to be anti- or pro-Semitic, along with all those absurd and often violent ’solutions’ which stem from such a question.