Otherwise than Universal: On Andrew Benjamin’s Of Jews and Animals

 
Andrew Benjamin’s book Of Jews and Animals is a welcome addition not only to the burgeoning field of animal studies but also to contemporary preoccupations with justice, universality, and particularity and the demands they make on philosophical, ethical, and political thinking. By implicitly questioning the turn toward the “materialist” Christian universality proposed by Badiou and Žižek, the book questions and repositions the terms of the debates about justice and universality by reconstructing a critical genealogy of the joined and dis-joined figures of the “animal” and “the Jew” in the history of Western philosophical conceptions of subjectivity, community and, indeed, universality. The book also engages contemporary thinkers relevant to this debate, including Agamben and Derrida. Needless to say, the figures of “the animal” and “the Jew” constructed by the philosophical and ideological work of anthropocentrism and anti-Semitism are dangerous abstractions, fundamentally different from animal plurality and from the diverse definitions of Jewishness that arise from Judaism itself.
 
The ambitious stakes of the book are articulated clearly in the introduction and carried out through detailed engagements with an impressive selection of philosophical texts and paintings. As Benjamin writes, the most urgent question his book addresses is:
 

[H]ow to account philosophically for a radically different situation, namely one in which the particularity of human being did not depend on forms of privation and thus sacrifice. And conversely where regional conceptions of identity could be affirmed. What would be the effect – the effect on being human and thus the thinking of that being philosophically – if both the maintained animal were allowed and the particular affirmed? If, that is, the without relation gave way to a fundamentally different form of relationality?
 

(16)

 
As animal studies have shown, the figure of the animal has had the dubious distinction of marking a double difference: the difference between humanity and its others, that is, the difference that constitutes what is properly human; and a difference within humanity itself, that is, the difference between those who are properly human and those racialized or gendered others who are said to be inferior and who do not measure up to human essence. And even before the institution of the animal as a separate field of inquiry, a number of writers have contested this ideological role assigned to the animal. Consider, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s playful remarks about the exclusion of cats and dogs charged with marking the hierarchy of sexual difference. As Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own: “Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” (48). Woolf points to the remarkable longevity of Dr. Johnson’s remark about women preachers, the remark repeated in 1928 about women musicians: “‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all'” (54).
 
Benjamin’s genealogical excavations of multiple figures of Jews and animals, together and apart, develop the discussion of animality and otherness by presenting a three-fold argument: First, the book reconstructs the violent but often invisible philosophical work of abstraction and exclusion that these twin figures were forced to perform in philosophy, theology, and art. Second, on the basis of this genealogy, it questions the status of these disciplines and the fundamental categories, such as universality, community, and subjectivity, that structure them. Third, it articulates an ethical affirmation of particularity and proposes a new philosophical concept of relationality. In his remarkable readings of Pascal, Hegel, Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Agamben, among others, Benjamin compellingly shows that the dis/joined figures of “the Jew” and “the animal” are implicated in the fundamental philosophical distinctions between the particular and the universal, friend and enemy, presence and absence, otherness and identity, on the one hand, and in the constructions of exteriority, singularity, relation, community, and justice, on the other. Benjamin claims that the figures of Jews and of animals reveal the way the dominant traditions of philosophy, theology, and, I would add, politics, are constructed: “[T]here is an important relationship between Jews and animals. They appear within the history of philosophy, art and theology in ways in which the differing forms of conjunction mark the manner in which dominant traditions construct themselves” (3).
 
This claim is instantiated though careful and often deliberately provocative readings of selected philosophical texts and paintings. The book examines how the philosophical and theological articulations of universality depend on a double form of violent exclusion: on the one hand, on the effacement of Jewish particularity by the universal; and, on the other hand, on the expulsion of animality from the human – what Benjamin calls separation, or the “without relation.” The first part of this book examines the presence of the animal, often specific animals -in particular, dogs–in the history of philosophy from Descartes and Hegel to Heidegger and Blanchot. The notion of the separation of the animal from the human is first elaborated in Benjamin’s controversial reading of Heidegger’s discussion of animality in terms of a poverty of world (“world-poor”). Even though in Heidegger’s philosophy, both human Da-sein and the animal participate, in different ways, in the complex relationality of the world, Benjamin worries that the distinction between the world of Da-sein and the privation of the animal, and the corresponding distinction between human existence and animal life, leads to the separation, or to the “without relation,” of the human and the animal. The “without relation,” elaborated in different philosophical contexts, is the crucial term in the argument of the book. For example, in his interpretation of Blanchot’s engagement with Hegel, Benjamin analyzes the ways in which “without relation” is intertwined with a logic of sacrifice. Benjamin argues that, for Blanchot, the emergence of community and literature itself is predicated upon the death of the animal.¹ The first part ends with an interpretation of the place of animality in Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics and anthropocentrism. By developing Derrida’s philosophy of the event, which is indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy of the event, Benjamin reinterprets the relation between the event and repetition as the affirmation of the plural and primordial relationality between human and nonhuman animals.
 
One of the most important philosophical interventions of the book is its analysis of the way the figures of “the animal” and “the Jew” both produce and are captured by the complex configuration of abstract otherness and universality. In the second part of the book, Benjamin persuasively shows that both philosophical and theological universality are predicated upon either the exclusion of “the Jew” or the forced assimilation through erasure of the particularity of the Jewish way of life: “[T]his study involves tracing the way figures … and the interplay of particularity and universality are operative in a range of philosophical texts” (10). In his brilliant analysis of Pascal’s Pensées, Benjamin focuses on the neglected relation between the famous fragment 103, concerned with the relationship between justice and force, and the ignored fragment 102, concerned with the relationship between Jews and Christians (“It is necessary that the Jew or the Christian are wicked”).² By interpreting this juxtaposition, Benjamin shows that the force of justice itself is predicated on the violent representation of the Jew as “wicked” (130-146).
 
In Pascal’s Pensées and in Dürer’s paintings, the figure of the Jew is subjugated by the so-called “logic of the synagogue”: “The fundamental characteristic of that figure [of the synagogue] is her banded eyes and thus her blindness. She delivers or presents a truth that she, of necessity, cannot see” (140). As Benjamin points out, the logic of the synagogue is caught in a double necessity: It pronounces the truth, in which, however, neither she nor Jews can participate because of her blindness (140). The question of truth is implicated in the question of language. What is especially of import here is not only the fact that the Jew and the animal are the excluded, aberrant particulars, but also that they cannot be named by any form of universality. If that is the case, then that conception of language in the service of anthropocentrism becomes a form of exclusion. In fact, one of the questions the book poses is, “what is naming given a deconstruction of metaphysics?” (75).
 
Benjamin exposes the dangerous and often ignored interconnections between otherness, aberrant particularity, and the enemy, and argues that such interconnections are among the violent effects of the visible and invisible figures of “the Jew” and of “the animal.” The crucial philosophical and political point the book makes is that the figure of the other is not only intertwined with the figure of the enemy, but in fact makes it possible: “[T]he possible repositioning of the other as the enemy… is by no means an extreme or attenuated repositioning. On the contrary, the move from other to enemy is a possibility that is already inherent in the category of the other” (4). By contesting this structural relationship between the other and the enemy, Benjamin equally questions the Levinasian rehabilitation of the other, which pertains only to inter-human relations and thus reproduces a certain anthropocentrism reinforced by the primacy of language. In Levinas’s ethics, “[t]here is therefore a primacy of relation between humans that is given through the ‘word.’ If it were possible to define the absence of the ‘word’ then that absence would describe the animal’s presence” (95). Agamben is also taken to task for his inability to provide an account of particularity and for failing to “respond to … the figure of the Jew” (14; see also 113-127).
 
Another important contribution of Of Jews and Animals is its concern not only with the philosophical and theological, but also with visual representations of the Jew and of the animal in the history of painting. Such configuration of philosophy and painting problematizes, on the one hand, both the historical and contemporary notions of the “face” and “facing,” and, on the other hand, the notion of the figure itself, which is often used unreflectively in animal studies. In the context of the book, “figure” is not to be confused with figurative language; rather, it is often an invisible ideological construction that presents its effects as “naturalized.” Consequently, the task of the philosophical interpretation, similar in this respect to the ideological and cultural critique, lies precisely in the “denaturalization” of figures and their exposure as figures. In the context of the history of art, from Jan van Eyck and Piero della Francesca to Turner and Goya, Benjamin specifically focuses on the portraiture of the face. As if in implicit response to Levinas’s concept of the face of the other, this visual genealogy persuasively shows that the presentation of the face oscillates between specific faces and abstract humanity, and that this oscillation is in turn supported by the sharp contrast between the idealization of the Christian face and the deformation of the Jewish face. This interplay between the idealization, abstraction, and deformation of the face is what is at stake in Benjamin’s remarkable interpretation of Dürer’s “Self-Portrait” (1498) and “Jesus Among the Doctors” (1506) in Chapter 8, titled “Facing Jews.”
 
The most important contribution of Of Jews and Animals lies not so much in the advocacy for an “animal ethics” or “animal rights” as in the elaboration of the ethical imperative of responding to the particular others caught in the dense web of the violent history of cultural figurations. Through an interrogation and repositioning of the conjoined/disjoined figures of the Jew and the animal, Benjamin articulates the main problematic of the book, namely, how to be just to the particular. This problematic refers in a new way to the three interrelated issues at the center of Andrew Benjamin’s own philosophy, namely justice, plurality, and the affirmation of particularity. At stake here is the philosophical approach to the particular that is neither subsumed under the universal nor reduced to empirical data. As Benjamin points out, “[p]articularity has a twofold presence. In the first instance the particular – Jew or animal- receives its identity from the work of figures. However, that identity, as has been indicated, is always imposed externally…. The other aspect that is central to the development of a conception of particularity” is the particular “located beyond the hold of figures” (185-186). To approach the particular “beyond the hold of figures” and beyond universality leads neither to essentialism nor to abstract alterity; rather, such an approach repositions the particular as relational and as the site of internal conflict (189) and fragile self-transformation.
 
Benjamin’s affirmation of particularity and plurality also has broader, interdisciplinary stakes. Its philosophical elaboration of particularity contests the ideological, anti-Semitic constructions of “the Jew” and the anthropocentric constructions of “the animal” as the excluded others of authentic, Universal subjectivity. In so doing, the book provides a welcome, if implicit, intervention into the recent defenses of “militant” universalism, often associated with a Paulinian Christianity, proposed by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and their followers. Badiou’s and Žižek’s “materialist” defenses of the Christian “generic conditions of universality,” which promote themselves as the only authentic contestations of capital and of neoliberalism, reproduce all too often the entrenched logic of the exclusion of inauthentic particulars that is associated with Jewishness or other “‘victimist’ conception[s] of man” (Badiou 6). Thus, Slavoj Žižek, from 2001’s On Belief to 2003’s The Puppet and the Dwarf, sets up “materialist,” Leninist Christianity as an alternative to both “‘multiculturalist’ polity” (On Belief 4-5)³ and to Levinas’s and Derrida’s “deconstructivist Jewish transcendentalism.”⁴ Similarly, Alain Badiou, in his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, presents the Pauline subjective form of universalism in opposition to Jewish conceptions of the law and particularity, on the one hand, and to the Greek conception of rhetoric and wisdom, on the other (28, 76). The elaboration of such universality is presented as the necessary counter to the so-called “culturalist and relativist ideology” (10) — an empty term that dismisses in advance the interrogations of the violence of universality that have emerged from feminism, Jewish studies, critical race studies, and poststructuralism.
 
By providing an alternative to universalism, the affirmation of the plurality of particulars beyond their ideological determinations, and yet without essentialism, has an important affinity with a number of philosophical and political projects, ranging from feminism and poststructuralism to postmodernism. As Benjamin puts it, the philosophical and the political in his work “have an important affinity. Affirmation as part of a strategy has to work within already given determinations. Particularities within collectivities … continue to work within universals. However, the insistence of affirmation means that it will have become possible to insist on the position in which the universals in question neither direct nor subsume particulars” (190). Such an affinity between the philosophy and politics concerned with the particular should be of great interest to anyone concerned with justice and plurality.