Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (74 page)

One young feminist suggested to me that the American poet Audre Lorde had offered the especially useful distinction between guilt and responsibility and that it was important for progressive German feminists to come to terms with this distinction. Whereas “guilt” is a paralyzing experience and, as Lorde insists, not a feeling, responsibility denotes the possibility of an action that transforms circumstances, one that in the course of being enacted overcomes guilt altogether. I found it interesting that the African American poet and es- sayist Audre Lorde had offered some German feminists this vocabulary. Sig- nificantly, the newspaper accounts of those German boys led to racist violence by social circumstances beyond their control figured the notion of circum- stances as itself causal. If good Christian families were still intact, then there would be no racism against non-Christians.

If, according to the tacit misogyny of popular therapeutic discourses, fem- inism has contributed to the destruction of the Christian family (and is the unspoken cause of racist violence), then, within feminism, racism remains the unresolved trauma that becomes displaced and reiterated in its own discourse of agency and victimization.

It seemed to me that the recent overturning of legalized abortion in Ger- many and the shutting of the borders to refugees condensed these two anxi- eties: the breakdown of the family through the increased economic and cul- tural independence of women and the challenge to a Germanic Christianity by the influx of Muslim refugees. Indeed, in the latter decision, it seems that the causality of circumstances noted above is once again operative in the ra- tionale offered by the state: “The German nation must close its borders be- cause the increased numbers of foreign nationals has led to increased violence

against foreigners.” Here the presence of the refugees is what
causes
the vio- lence against them; the “victim” is blamed through an apparently nonmoral discourse of sociological causality, and the agency of the perpetrator has once again vanished.

I experienced being a Jew very differently than I did fourteen years earli- er. I remember then walking into an antiquarian bookstore in Heidelberg and asking whether the storekeeper might have a copy of Herman Cohen’s
Jüdis- che Schriften
only to encounter the paralyzed and speechless face of a man who could not find the words to tell me how impossible my request was. This time I found several bookstores that were quite enthusiastically featuring Jew- ish authors. And whereas fourteen years ago the members of the Frankfurt Synagogue told me that they were very isolated in that city, this year I was made aware of a series of cultural events bringing Jewish cultural life back into public focus. This was even more true in Prague, where I spent five days be- tween Frankfurt and Berlin. And it seemed linked to a certain desire to return phantasmatically to 1945 to write a different future for European history, one in which the split between East and West and the traditions of antisemitism could be simultaneously overcome. The sudden reclamation of Jewish culture both in Berlin and Prague also seemed to presuppose that it was (only) in communism that antisemitism was continued, where Jews effectively stood for capital. In “overcoming” communism, the idea seemed to me that “anti- semitism” was overcome as well. But I had to ask whether this constituted a deflection of antisemitism as a communist practice (and hence a continuation of cold war ideology in the West). And it worried me, perhaps excessively, that the reclamation of Judaism appeared simultaneously with the invitation of in- creased capital investment, as if the Jews only and always implied capital. I also wondered whether the effort to appreciate the cultural and historical life of Jews in Europe was not finally easier than confronting the profound shifts in German culture currently compelled by the presence of so many who are either poor or “from the East” or from Muslim countries.

The public effort to reclaim the historical contributions of Jews—and, in Berlin, the 1994 exposition (“Juden im Widerstand” [Jews in Resistance, Community for Peace and Development, Exhibition at the Hackeschen Mar- ket]) showing that there
was
a Jewish resistance—seemed both to deflect from the present crisis of racist division and to enact its imaginary resolution. The significance of such an exposition “postwall” is that it sought to redescribe Berlin as a unified city, one in which German and Jewish resisters worked to- gether. In a sense the exposition was structured by a certain nostalgic utopia in which “the past” furnished the resources for elaborating a multicultural ideal for Berlin, except that it is precisely Berlin’s past that is rhetorically cast as the

obstacle to such a collaboration. The effort to show that Jews “fought back,” while seeking to dignify and underscore Jewish agency, sought to establish the presence of German resisters as well and to displace the narrative conventions in which there are only, as Camus put it, “victims and executioners.”

My point is not to call for a reinstatement of such a binary framework, but only to ask, why now is this the apparently obsessive concern of public narrative? I say “apparently,” for I am not fully certain where my own narra- tive begins and ends and where the public narrative begins and ends.

To remain on the safe side, I’ll return to what appears to be my own narrative.

Still fearful of the Habermasians, I arrived at the Institut für Sozial- forschung to discover that there was a more complex and open intellectual at- mosphere than I had anticipated. A number of scholars were working between feminism, Foucault, Habermas, the history of science, philosophy of lan- guage, literary and sociological perspectives, and I found the reception on the part of both men and women to be engaged, if also quite tense. One estab- lished feminist historian unwittingly likened me to Socrates: did I not exer- cise a
verderblicher
(corrupting) influence on my students? What could be the point of putting so many presuppositions into question?

In an article, “Der Korper als Fiktion: Die amerikanische Feministin Ju- dith Butler in Frankfurt” (The Body as Fiction: The American Feminist Judith Butler in Frankfurt) that the
Frankfurter Rundschau
published on Saturday, April 30, 1994, written by Christel Zahlmann, I was at first pleased to see that my work was being taken seriously. The reporter took the lecture home, cited from it, but then offered a curious, but perhaps symptomatic, appraisal of my appearance in which a certain racial and sexual anxiety appeared to converge:

Wahrend (die junge Professorin), von wirklicher Leidenschaft erfüllt, über die Schwierigkeit doziert, noch in irgendeiner Form positiv zu bestimmer, was “Körper” eigentlich ist, verwirrt sie das Publikum dadurch, da . . . sie in doppelter Weise präsent ist: in ihrer Rede und in ihrem Körper, den Tra- ditionalisten ganz einfach als “männlich” bezeichnet würden. Als sympa- thischer junger Mann, vielleicht italienischer Abstammung, mit exakt gesh- nittener Herrenfrisur, lebhaft gestikulierend steht sie am Pult und führt vor Augen, was “weiblich” alles einschliesst, besser: wie Überholt und un- wichtig es ist, Körpern ein genau defi tes Geschlecht zuzuordnen.

[As the young professor, filled with real passion, instructed her audience on the difficulty of determining any positive meaning to what “body” re- ally is, she confused her public because of the double way in which she

was present: in her speech and in her body, she would be considered by traditionalists simply to be “manly.” As a sympathetic young man, per- haps from Italian heritage, with a precisely cut man’s haircut, she stood at the podium and with lively gesticulations made plain to everyone what it is to be included within “femininity.” Better: she explained how exagger- ated and unimportant it is to order sex within an exact definition.]

The author offers a description of how “traditionalists”
would
consider my body, only to leave the hypothetical altogether and occupy without hesitation the voice of the traditionalist herself: “
Als
. . . Mann” (“
As
a sympathetic young man”). The masculinity that the traditionalist might have attributed to me is suddenly attributed to me as the “man” that I ostensibly mime or that I suddenly am. The critical distance that the first sentence barely sustains is suddenly lost in the second, and the author ventriloquizes the voice of the sex- ual conservative who can read gender only as “Frau oder Mann” (“woman or man”). That the entirety of my work calls into question the sufficiency of such stable and oppositional categories is not lost on this author. But she seems compelled to reinstall the categories even as she reported on their destabiliza- tion. But it was not simply that the term
lesbian
could not be uttered in this context and that the challenge to received gender that “lesbian” can perform could not be received, but that this very sign of gender anxiety became an ethnic marking. “Vielleicht italienische Abstammung” (perhaps from Italian heritage); a conjured Italian origin attests to the continuing “illegibility” and “unseeability” of the Jew in Germany. Better: this southern, darker, more emotional, gesticulating, excessive, sexually confusing Other becomes a site for an anxiety over the loss of both gendered and racial boundaries.

If feminism tends to enact its racial anxiety through its discourse on sex- ual agency and victimization, and if popular therapeutic conservatism voices its gender and sexual anxiety in the discourse on racial victimization, perhaps I, too, became a vector for this anxious moment in German discourse.

Contributors

Daniel Boyarin
is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric, UC Berkeley. He has been an NEH Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. In 1994 he received the Crompton Noll Award from the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the MLA. Pro- fessor Boyarin has written extensively on talmudic and midrashic studies, and his recent work focuses primarily on cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, in- cluding issues of gender and sexuality as well as research on the Jews as a col- onized people. His current research interests center primarily around ques- tions of the relationship of Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity. His books include
Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash
(University of Cali- fornia Press, 1990),
Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
(Universi- ty of California Press, 1993),
A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity
(University of California Press, 1994),
Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Hetero- sexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man
(University of California Press, 1997),
Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism
(Stanford University Press, 1999), and
Border Lines: Hybrids, Heretics, and the Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
(University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming in 2004).

Judith Butler
is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of
Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
(Columbia Uni- versity Press, 2000),
Hegemony, Contingency, Universality,
with Ernesto Laclau

and Slavoj Z
ˇ
izˇek, (Verso, 2000),
Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in

Twentieth-Century France
(Columbia University Press, 1987),
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(Routledge, 1990),
Bodies that Mat- ter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”
(Routledge, 1993),
The Psychic Life of

Power: Theories of Subjection
(Stanford University Press, 1997),
Excitable Speech
(Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy and feminist and queer theory. Her recent project is a critique of ethical violence and an effort to formulate a theory of responsibility for an opaque subject, forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

Daniel Fischlin
is Professor of English at the University of Guelph and coau- thor with Martha Nandorfy of, most recently,
Eduardo Galeano: Through the Looking Glass
(Black Rose, 2002). He has also coedited, with Ajay Heble,
The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue
(Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and
Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making
(Black Rose, 2003). In 2000 he was awarded the Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA).

Paul B. Franklin
received his Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University. Currently, he is managing editor and director of research for
Nest Magazine
. He divides his time between New York and Paris.

Jonathan Freedman
is a professor of English and American studies at the Uni- versity of Michigan. Author of
Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aes- theticism, and Commodity Culture
(Stanford, 1991) and
The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Aggression, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America
(Oxford, 2000), he is currently working on two books, one on ethnicity and perversion and one on the culture of money.

Marjorie Garber
is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and director of the Humanities Center in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard Uni- versity. She is the author of ten books, including
Vested Interests; Cross-Dress- ing And Cultural Anxiety, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life,
and
Symptoms of Culture.
Her most recent books are
Quotation Marks
and, with Nancy J. Vickers,
The Medusa Reader.