I brought up Adam Kirsch vs. Slavoj Zizek once before , wisely dropping the matter after one post, but now they’re back, and anyone interested should check out their (surely final) exchange at The New Republic . I don’t know if it’s worth the time to make heads or tails of Zizek’s compressed defense of himself, but I do know this jumped out:
all I do in the passage from which Mr. Kirsch has torn out a couple of words ("fidelity to the Messianic impulse," etc.) is to point out the debt of political and theoretical universalism (of what Kant praised as the "public use of reason") to the Jewish experience, claiming that the conflict between the defenders of and skeptics about the State of Israel is inherent to the Jewish identity.
In another ‘couple of words’, Zizek calls these Spinozan Jews "Jews of Jews." It sure seems like this means, perversely, ‘meta-Jews’ — Jews whose position with regard to Jewry is like that of Jews to Christendom. And it sure seems like that means Jews who have rejected Judaism . . . but, even more specifically, who then view themselves as being in the same relationship with Judaism as an observant Jew and bad old Christianity. But this of course would be an artifice, a projection into Jewishness of something Christians imposed over it. It would also be an attempt to bill Jews repudiating Judaism — that is, the Jewish God — as "more Jewish than Jewish." This would be a fundamental, violent transgression against what it is to be Jewish — at least on a reading such as that of Philip Rieff, who seems to suggest that anti-Jewish Jews of this kind did much throughout modern history to instruct Christian gentiles in how to become anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. Just from the quote above, it still sounds to me like Zizek wants, like I alleged in the prior post, the power to decide what a Jew is — the power to put the word Jew in scare quotes. Perhaps Kirsch is actually missing something when he says "Zizek’s attitude towards Judaism is not the major problem with his thought."
