Sympathy for the antisemites

by Sam Kriss

For all their faults – and they have plenty – it’s undeniable that antisemites are incredibly productive. Other racists don’t even come close: a slur, a darkly muttered comment, occasional eruptions of violence; they don’t need to really say anything because their racism already forms the unvoiced content of society at large – the state does their job for them, groups like the EDL can even function as an auxiliary wing of the police and the border agency. People who hate Jews are different. They need to write it all down; each one of them has to produce their own personal account of exactly what it is that they think the Jewish hive-mind is up to. From Martin Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Trifles for a Massacre to contemporary polemics on the Zionist Occupied Government, antisemities are driven to produce manifestos. It’s hard to not feel sorry for them. They’ve been trapped, and it’s not entirely their fault. The problem with all their constant literary production is that the ramblingly impassioned hate-screed is very much a Jewish art. Nobody hates the Jews quite like the Jews themselves; ordinary antisemites are grasping amateurs. In the Old Testament the Jews are so venal and wicked that God is required to periodically massacre them as they plod in circles through the desert. The prophets are full of bitter reproach. Jeremiah thunders: Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? she is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot… This people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone. Ezekiel seethes: They are impudent children and stiffhearted. Little’s changed since. Every Jew-hating tract is an unwitting tribute to Portnoy’s Complaint. In his study of the phenomenon Sartre writes that the antisemite depends on the Jew to maintain his status as an antisemite, that if there were no Jews the antisemites would have to create them. He came close, but as he wasn’t a Jew or an antisemite, he couldn’t see what was actually going on. The antisemite doesn’t just depend on the Jew; consciously or not, antisemitism is an imitation, an attempt to capture and reproduce some of the Jew’s unique talent for self-loathing.

These days there are very few Jews and even fewer antisemites, and both are furiously engaged in the invention of the other. I’ve always been fascinated by antisemitism, especially in its conspiracy-oriented strains. Part of it’s pure narcissism: I’m a Communist and a Jew, someone whose face is turned to history as to a single catastrophe, and it’s quite nice to hear that I’m not in a desperate struggle against existing conditions but actually part of a tiny cabal that secretly rules the world. At the same time this stuff has an incredible heuristic potential; it’s not unlike Borges’ First Encyclopedia of Tlön, a description of a totally different world that intends to slowly map itself onto our own. Read enough antisemitic literature and you’ll learn that the chief architect of our alienated and commodified culture is none other than Theodor Adorno, otherwise known for his scathing critiques of alienated and commodified culture. You’ll discover that Lenin’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, the same revolution that prompted military intervention from the imperialist powers, was in fact a ploy by the Rothschild banking houses. You might even encounter something called ‘sexual Bolshevism,’ which for some unaccountable reason is held to be a bad thing. Antisemitism in the West has for the most part shed its appearance as mass or state violence; it’s turned into a glitteringly inventive mythopoeia. That’s why I’m unusually heartened by the news that the model and reality TV personality Tila Tequila has decided to launch a one-woman crusade against the international Jewish conspiracy.

Tila Tequila – born Thanh Thi Thien Nguyen – is one of those people that inhabits a strange shadow-zone on the borderlands of ontology. She exists (even if her reality is more virtual than actual), but unlike tables and mountains and other things that exist in the ordinary sense of the world she continually has to justify why. In this she’s in pretty exclusive company, sharing her spectral realm with Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, and the State of Israel. Unlike Hilton or the Kardashians, whose rise to fame could be seen as a sensible old-fashioned reinvestment of already existing capital, Tila Tequila’s emergence represents more of an autogenerative point of intensity in the swirling field of aleatory alienation that constitutes present-day existence. She was spotted by a Playboy scout in a Houston mall; by some quirk of chance (or eternal destiny, there’s little difference) the music she put on MySpace snowballed into mass popularity and a record deal while other near-identical attempts didn’t. Since attaining stardom Tequila has had a number of high-profile media gigs, including hosting duties on the televised striptease contest Pants-Off Dance-Off and cameos in The Cleveland Show, finally culminating in A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, her own reality dating programme. In early 2012, she announced that she was converting to Judaism. In late 2013, she set up a new (and very much non-anonymous) website called Anonymous Truth Blog, in which she announced, among other revelations, that a secret ‘dark cabal’ of Jews controls the world and that she is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

Clearly Tila Tequila isn’t at all well, but to simply state that fact out misses the point. Given that antisemitism is now primarily a literary phenomenon, are Tila Tequila’s Jew-hating rants actually any good? Are we dealing with a Louis-Ferdinand Céline or a Mel Gibson?

Tequila’s writing isn’t immediately accessible, but it’s not necessarily bad either – in fact, it can be situated squarely within the tradition of continental Modernist literature. Her screeds are punctuated with *giggles* and *sighs*, conventions that have their origins in internet language but that also represent an attempt to break through the ossification of the written word and recover some of the immediacy of speech. Here Tequila pushes against the binds of the antisemitic pamphlet as literary form – one that is, of course, heavily indebted to the Jewish scriptural tradition. By advancing this logocentrism she attempts to claim back the primacy of the Greek system (abstract logic, vocal discourse, circular time) against that of Judaism (written polemic, scriptural law, linear time) – in other words, to undo both the Pauline and the Derridean critique of the logos. It fails, of course: in fighting the tainted written word she can’t help but refer back to other literary works. There are strong traces of Céline, who perhaps succeeded most in stripping writing of its textual quality and dragging it into new forms. He’s there in the breathless fury of her ellipses and interjections – Tequila writes: They literally are out to kill you and if they cannot kill you, they will find other means, anything dirty and corrupt they can think of to fuck with you! Céline shouts in agreement: So you want to cover me with garbage! I hear your tawdry surreptitions! your riflings-through! your screwings-over of your wastebaskets! How dimwitted and stupid you are! More flatulent! More cowardly! At the same time her habit of sneaking in unattributed lines from other sources recalls the poetic bricolage of TS Eliot, that other great literary antisemite, and her manic asyntactic switching between themes and topics – declaring Hitler a prophet in one sentence, making jokes about her name in the next – bears the stamp of Antonin Artaud’s prose-poetry. (In fact, some of Artaud’s Letter against the Kabbala could probably be slotted into the Anonymous Truth Blog without much notice: I think I have taken about as much shit as I’m going to from Kafka, his arsoterical allegorical symbolism, as well as this Judaism of his, which contains every last one of those chicken-livered suckaprickadickadildoes that have never ceased giving me a pain in the ass… What I especially abhor in Kafka is that return of the old kike spirit, that intolerable kike mentality.) On occasion, her reflections tend towards a stoic melancholy that could be called Beckettian. What the fuck is wrong with these people?? she complains. Oh man… it’s just too bad because I think if they had a more open mind or if they weren’t already dead… Beckett’s Molloy utters a similar sentiment: Someone has drawn the blinds, you perhaps. Not the faintest sound. Where are the famous flies? Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others.

Despite her engagingly doomed contributions to the genre, there’s no getting away from the content of what she writes. In between her exposés of the Jewish conspiracy, Tila Tequila claims to be a goddess, to be an avatar of Vishnu, and to have created two parallel universes. She’s (probably) mad – and given the tragic difficulties in her life so far, it’s not hard to see why – but the pathologisation of antisemitism is far less interesting than the pathology of that pathologisation. Why is it that antisemitism – which for an unacceptable prejudice has a fairly respectable intellectual pedigree – is now seen as a token of madness? Conversely, why is it that madness now manifests itself as an antipathy specifically towards Jews?

Unlike finance and entertainment, Jews don’t in fact have a monopoly on the conspiracy racket. In Azerbaijan and Turkey there’s some belief in the idea of a global Armenian conspiracy, one led by a secret cabal that fabricated the Armenian genocide and works tirelessly towards their goal of Armenian world dominance. For some reason, the Armenian conspiracy never reached the same heights as its Jewish counterpart. There’s something about the Jews: we were the bad conscience of Europe, but at the same time we have projects.

Deleuze and Guattari discuss some of this in Kafka: Towards  a Minor Literature. In their understanding, Jewish populations are not themselves minoritarian or in a state of absolute deterritorialistion, rather they’re molar formations, ‘an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses.’ However, they raise the potential for minority within the minority: a becoming-minor more defined by the trajectory of its Becoming than the phases through which it passes, something ‘creating an interplay of similarity and difference that conspicuously resists reduction into identity.’ There are Jews of the Jews: Jesus of Nazareth sent to the cross; St Paul torn between Jerusalem and Rome, Spinoza excommunicated by the Amsterdam community; Karl Marx baptised as an infant; Kafka writing in German. Through this operation minority is put in direct contact with the universal, whether it’s as the undifferentiation of humanity in the body of Christ, the prior ontological substance, or emancipatory Communism. Along the way, you get all the other great Jewish inventions: linear time, literature, numerology, psychoanalysis. It’s also precisely this Jewish renunciation of molar identity that has its distorted (and sometimes murderous) mirror-image in antisemitism. Tila Tequila doesn’t want to be herself any more, so she starts hating Jews.

This quality is also precisely what’s missing today. The reason that antisemitism turned into a literary and heuristic project is that there are no Jews any more. Sartre’s prophecy has come to pass, and once antisemitism becomes fundamentally an  invention of its own object there’s no reason why it shouldn’t also invent parallel universes, black magick, reborn Hindu deities. Antisemitism has become isomorphic with madness because of something cataclysmic that happened in the middle of the twentieth century. With the horrors of the Holocaust, the old antisemites almost managed to destroy themselves as antisemites by wiping out the Jews. With the realisation of the Zionist project, Jews have finally succeeded in destroying ourselves. Israelis aren’t Jewish; all this messing about with states and armies and the systematic dispossession of other people is, in the end, something fundamentally very goyische. 1948 marks at once the culmination of Jewish universalism – finally we have a state, just like every other nation – and its extinction – finally we have a state, just like every other nation.

For all its crimes, perhaps the most startling thing about the State of Israel is just how boring it is. We’ve made the desert bloom, and now palm trees scar the Negev with their strict regimented grids. The settlements are as blandly pleasant as American suburbs, but they’ve been fully and murderously weaponised. For a country founded by the inheritors of one of the world’s oldest literary traditions, it’s astounding how few decent writers Israel has. Amos Oz is no Franz Kafka. AB Yehoshua is no Bruno Schulz. Meanwhile, across barbed wine and concrete walls, the Palestinian refugee camps are full of poets.