Objectification and the contraditions of bourgeois power: Sartre and the modern prison

The state, it is often and correctly said, is a social relation. The apparatuses of the state are not simply instruments for the use of one class or another, not just techniques of domination, but are themselves embodiments of bourgeois power relations. Thus the modern prison, for example, is bourgeois, not because of its uses or control, but in the very organisation of power that pervades it. Uncovering the bourgeois character of this power relation through an examination of Bentham's model prison, the Panopticon, is one task of this paper. Sartre's critique of objectification appears as a critique of the tyranny of society in general, and this is the way in which Sartre himself sees it. However, its real object of analysis is precisely the power relations of bourgeois society. Sartre's genius lies in the clarity of his perception of the contradictions inherent in these relations; his failure lay in his inability to see their historical character. As a result, his critical humanism reflects, but never gets beneath the surface of these contradictions. Separating the rational kernel from the mystical shell of Sartre's critique is the route taken here toward an understanding of bourgeois power.     

The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism

For Theodor Herzl, Zionism, in the sense of a political movement to establish a sovereign Jewish state, offered the only workable solution to the problem of antisemitism. Some commentators today speak of a 'new anti-Semitism'. They claim, first, that there is a new wave or outbreak of hostility towards Jews that began with the start of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000 and is continuing at the present time. Second, and more fundamentally, the 'new anti-Semitism' is said to involve a new form or type of hostility towards Jews: hostility towards Israel. This is the claim under discussion in Klug's paper. The claim implies an equivalence between (a) the individual Jew in the old or classical version of antisemitism and (b) the state of Israel in the new or modern variety. Klug argues that this concept is confused and that the use to which it is put gives a distorted picture of the facts. He begins by recalling classical antisemitism, the kind that led to the persecution of European Jewry to which Herzl's Zionism was a reaction. On this basis, he briefly reformulates the question of whether and when hostility towards Israel is antisemitic. He then discusses the so-called new form of antisemitism, especially the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. He concludes by revisiting Herzl's vision in light of the situation today.     

Rebuttal versus Unmasking: Legal Strategy in R. v. Zundel

Conventional scholarly wisdom has it that most Italian Americans in the United States were loyal supporters of the policies of Fascism in the inter-war years but eventually rejected the antisemitic measures that Benito Mussolini's regime adopted in their ancestral country in 1938. Contrary to such an interpretation, Luconi argues that many Italian Americans themselves held antisemitic attitudes and, therefore, did not distance themselves from Fascism after Mussolini launched his campaign against Italian Jews. He also contends that these attitudes resulted less from an ideological commitment to Fascism than from both the strained relations between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans, and the antisemitic climate of opinion that characterized American society in the 1930s. Italian Americans and Jews were partners in the labour movement and the Democratic Party. Yet the former resented the latter's distrust in Italian Americans' labour militancy, as well as the earlier rise of Jews in the hierarchies of the unions and the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Italian Americans and Jews competed for jobs, political patronage, cheap housing and relief benefits, especially during the Depression years. Such ethnic rivalries and the appeal of right-wing organizations to Italian Americans contributed to make the latter prone to antisemitism. As a result, few Americans of Italian descent came out against the racial policy of the Fascist regime.     

So what's new? Rethinking the ‘new antisemitism’ in a global age

ABSTRACT

Judaken discusses the various strands that constitute the so-called ‘new antisemitism’. He argues that this is not the first time a new crisis of antisemitism has been heralded. Indeed, in the wake of every major struggle in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Six Day War, prominent scholars and advocates have sounded the alarm about a crisis resulting from the rise of what they designated a ‘new antisemitism’. Moreover, what writers point to as the vectors of the new antisemitism—Holocaust denial, the antisemitism of the extreme left, antisemitism in the Islamic world, anti-Zionism as antisemitism, even anti-racism as antisemitism—all have a fairly long history. What has changed are the role of information technologies and the geo-global context in which they function. These technologies have both facilitated the global dissemination of antisemitism as well as furnishing new means of combatting it. At bottom, this electronic warfare is both a symptom and a cause of the global forces at work in antisemitism today. After delineating the constellation of factors in the rise of global antisemitism post-September 2000, Judaken then draws on the work of Léon Poliakov, Judith Butler, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt School, among others, to assess what Pierre-André Taguieff most aptly calls the ‘new Judaeophobia’.     

Lord Sydenham of Combe's World Jewish Conspiracy

Abstract

Ruotsila's article is the first in-depth examination of the development of the racialist and antisemitic thinking of one of the main expositors of British radical-right doctrine in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Viscount Sydenham of Combe. An active participant in all the major debates of the radical right, a popularizer of conspiracy theories to explain Bolshevism, Zionism and modern internationalism, Sydenham had unusually close connections with a wide variety of conservative (and later fascist) organizations and opinion-formers on both sides of the Atlantic. These gave him notable, and notably well-seized, opportunities to influence debate and help shape the categories that have, ever since, guided radical-right thinking. Ruotsila charts Sydenham's commentary on socialism and perceived German subversion in the pre-First World War period, and explores the linkages that he, and the wider movement of which he was a representative, forged between German power politics, Bolshevik revolutionaries and a supposed Jewish conspiracy. Ruotsila's particular contribution lies in the link made between these fairly commonplace radical-right notions and anti-Zionism, and opposition to the League of Nations and to the international projects of liberalism more generally. These points of the anti-modernist and anti-internationalist argument are shown to have been derivatives of a racialist, eventually antisemitic, conception of a world Jewish conspiracy. Ruotsila shows the development of Sydenham's thought to have proceeded from general, at the time almost consensual, racialist assumptions through anti-socialism to a full-blown antisemitic conspiracy theory.     

The ‘Post-Holocaust Jew’ and the Instrumentalization of Philosemitism

Abstract

Altfelix attempts to examine and explain why xenophiles are politically prone to an ambivalent re-utilization of xenophobic images of the Other. In Germany both ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Ausländer’ have been instrumentalized xenophilically in their capacity as abstract notions by certain system actors and publics in a manner which appears to shed more light on the in-group than the Other. Xenophilia as a self-oriented, positive in-group evaluation may be identified as particularly evident in the post-war German political discourse on the Holocaust. In similar fashion to antisemitism, philosemitism represents an ‘allosemitic’ (Bauman) abstraction of ‘the Jew’, whose evocation is comparable to the idea of a ‘good foreigner’ as expressed in Ausländerfreundlichkeit (foreigner-friendliness). Xenophilia/philosemitism—like xenophobia/antisemitism—is dependent upon a relative opposition between ‘concretized Self’ and ‘abstracted Other’. Altfelix argues that this relationship emerges for two reasons. First, manifestations of xenophilia are generally preceded by bouts of xenophobia. Consequently, some publics may identify a need for creating a positive in-group focus. In this, the Other must not become too concrete for fear of distracting attention away from the xenophile's agenda. Second, the difference between Self and Other must be effectively maintained, since the xenophile's raison d'être depends upon it. Post-war German philosemitism appears to be a good exemplar for this definition of ‘xenophilia’. It demonstrates the dangers of moving within an allosemitic cycle in which difference becomes a method of keeping otherness at bay through abstraction. The fear of a misremembrance of the Holocaust resulting from an abstract memorialization seems to provide a very solid political basis for perpetuating a philosemitic identity construction of ‘the Jew’ as abstracted Other.     

The cult of the victim: an analysis of the collective identity of the English Defence League

Since its creation in 2009 the English Defence League has become the largest street-based social movement in contemporary Britain. Its demonstrations have led to violence and community tensions in town and city centres throughout the country. While these street demonstrations have attracted some attention in academia, as of yet there has been no attempt to analyse the statements of the EDL as an organization. Oaten analyses the EDL's outgoing communicative transmissions and argues that the EDL as a movement is based on a sense of collective victimhood. By drawing on conceptions of collective victimhood from post-conflict studies, he suggests that only by understanding the EDL's collective victimhood can we understand its anti-Muslim and anti-establishment stance. His article stresses that collective victimhood is a zero sum identity, and highlights the fact that, as such, the EDL and its members continuously seek to portray themselves as the ‘true’ victims of abuse by government and British Muslims. Oaten concludes, in light of EDL leader Tommy Robinson's departure, by looking at the potential future trajectories of the EDL. He argues that, despite the fact that Robinson was central to the movement's collective victimhood frame of reference, the EDL continues to utilize the collective victimhood narrative in order to explain Robinson's departure. This suggests that collective victimhood had become a powerful category of self-identification for the movement, and that the movement can continue without Robinson.     

The image of the Jews in Hungarian public opinion

ABSTRACT

Nowhere has the debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ been as fierce and relevant as in France. In recent years this country has witnessed high recorded levels of antisemitism, prompting many commentators to claim the existence of an anti-sémitisme nouveau. Something has indeed changed, at least in terms of the nature, frequency and perpetrators of antisemitic violence in France. Previously connected exclusively to the extreme right, it has now also become associated with a group that is itself a victim of discrimination: ethnic minority youths living in the poor suburbs (banlieues). Peace first discusses and explains the statistics produced by the French watchdog on racism and antisemitism as well as the effects of the Middle East conflict. He then traces the debate on this ‘new antisemitism’ in the French context, contrasting the views of the label's promoters and opponents. He argues that, while antisemitism has undoubtedly evolved, the ‘new’ label is effectively erroneous as it fuses supposedly leftist and ‘Muslim’ antisemitism into one entity when they are not necessarily linked. In addition, he offers vital clarification of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism along with suggestions for further research.     

Reviews

The recent discourse on ‘new antisemitism’ and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sometime gives the impression that Europe is fundamentally and irredeemably antisemitic. Klug maintains that, while there is a persistent vein of antisemitism in the culture, and while there is evidence of an increase in anti-Jewish attacks since 2000, this perception of Europe is exaggerated. He argues that it is part of a mindset that tends to overstate hostility towards Israel and Jews, or to assume that this hostility is antisemitic, or both. Often this goes along with a tendency to connect antisemitism, via anti-Zionism, with anti-Americanism. Klug believes that notion of a mindset, Klug turns to the question of definition, examining the view that antisemitism is indefinitely mutable. Invoking recent work on the subject, he suggests that at the core of antisemitism is the stock figure of the ‘Jew’. This gives us a criterion with which to judge whether or not a given text—including an attack on Israel or Zionism—is antisemitic. On the basis of the analysis so far, Klug critiques the view that hostility to Israel in general is a new twist on an old antisemitic theme. In this connection, he discussed a 2003 Eurobarometer opinion poll in which 59 per cent of respondents said that Israel is a ‘threat to peace in the world’. Some see this as proof that Europe is antisemitic; Klug rejects this interpretation and traces it back to the mindset he has describing. He argues that people in the grip of this mindset tend to take a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This can lead to ‘antisemitism in reverse’: projecting the figure of the antisemite on to someone who does not fit the bill. Klug concludes that the prospects for the European debate on antisemitism are poor unless it can be disentangled from partisan Middle East politics.     

Killing the Messenger: Mark Lilla’s “End of Identity Liberalism” and its Critics

Decades of mind-numbing political correctness on the academic far-left robbed the humanities and social sciences of their legitimacy, generated the alt-right as its very own dialectial alter-ego, and provided an essential catalyzing ingredient in Donald Trump's electoral victory—understood as the clearest expression of a weary nation's revulsion at p. c.'s intolerable moralizing. The illiberal, antisemitic, white nationalist alt-right and the illiberal, antisemitic, anti-American alt-left mirror one another perfectly! Faced with competing totalitarianisms at both extremes, the liberal center should defend itself first of all by forthrightly reclaiming the univeristy as a space for education and not indoctrination. Yet the politically correct professoriate do not want to hear this—and their over-the-top hostile overreactions to the news that they are to blame for what they hate most prove that it's so. Time to repeal and replace political correctness.     

The role of memory in populist discourse: the case of the Italian Second Republic

Cento Bull's paper takes as its starting point Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of populism as counter-hegemonic, and argues, with reference to the Italian case, that populism not only takes the form of a rejection of the establishment and political elites, but also entails a construction of ‘the people’ that requires, as well as the development of empty signifiers as shown by Laclau, also the deployment of common myths based on a collective memory of an imagined past. Cento Bull therefore argues, in line with Ritchie Savage, that the role of memory in populist discourse has been underestimated. Specifically, many populist movements and leaders engage in a fundamental redefinition of who constitutes ‘the people’ accompanied by mistrust and demonization of the Other, which is predicated upon (and justified with recourse to) a reimagining of the nation's and/or democracy's ‘founding moment’. Furthermore, many populist movements make use of a political rhetoric revolving around the ‘anti-subversive impulse’ and aimed at instilling fear and a sense of being under threat.     

‘A quite natural and moderate defensive feeling’? The 1945 Hampstead ‘anti-alien’ petition

In October 1945 an ‘anti-alien’ petition was launched in the London Borough of Hampstead that, under the pretext of securing homes for returning ex-servicemen, campaigned for the removal of the district's predominantly Jewish refugee population. By examining the nature of support and opposition to the petition Macklin's local case study provides further evidence to suggest that reactions to those who had fled Nazi terror remained complex. Those who did find sanctuary were characterized by the local press not as ‘deserving victims’, but as the cause of the problems created by their Nazi persecutors. A detailed examination of the rhetoric of the petition movement reveals how this defence of local amenities against ‘alien‘ encroachment can rightfully be defined as ‘antisemitic’. Following an analysis of the role of the local press, Macklin examines its impact on, and interaction with, local and central government policy regarding reconstruction and immigration, which continued to be dominated by the dogma that harmonious race relations necessitated the strict control of immigrants, regardless of the desperation of their plight. He concludes by examining the media's symbiotic relationship with extremist and fascist politics.     

Net Gains and GUD Reactions: Patterns of Prejudice in a Neo-fascist Groupuscule

Using the student organization Groupe d'union et de défense (GUD) as a case-study, Griffin argues that the radical-right groupuscule should not be treated as an embryonic or stunted form of the inter-war 'armed party' epitomized by the Italian Fascist and German Nazi parties. Rather it is to be seen as a genus of extra-parlia-mentary political formation in its own right, perfectly adapted to the inhospitable climate of relatively stable liberal democracy and capitalism in which revolutionary nationalism has had to survive since 1945. As such the groupuscule's true significance lies in its existence as one minute entity in a swarm of similar organisms which can be termed the 'groupuscular right'. This takes on a collective force greater than the sum of its parts by conserving and transmitting fascism's diagnosis of the status quo and its vision of a new order despite its acute marginalization from mainstream politics. Having surveyed GUD's history and activities over the years, Griffin focuses on its ideology, which he identifies as a form of Third Positionism theoretically allied to anti-western Arab nations and heavily influenced by the Nouvelle Droite notion of 'cultural war' against the homogenizing effects of globalization and on behalf of a reborn Europe. He then considers the extraordinary network of historical and contemporary radical-right associations emanating to and from this one formation, a process considerably facilitated by the Internet. He concludes by suggesting that the importance of the groupuscular right, apart from its formation of cadres who may be recruited by mainstream parties such as the Front national, lies in its function as a self-perpetuating, leaderless, centreless and supra-national 'energy field' of neo-fascist beliefs, which, like the Web, is unaffected by the weakness or loss of individual nodal points (organizations).     

The emergence of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Yugoslavia during the war with NATO

Byford and Billig examine the emergence of antisemitic conspiracy theories in the Yugoslav media during the war with NATO. The analysis focuses mainly on Politika, a mainstream daily newspaper without a history of antisemitism. During the war, there was a proliferation of conspiratorial explanations of western policies both in the mainstream Serbian media and in statements by the Yugoslav political establishment. For the most part such conspiracy theories were not overtly antisemitic, but rather focused on the alleged aims of organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. However, these conspiracy theories were not created de novo; writers in the Yugoslav media were drawing on an established tradition of conspiratorial explanations. The tradition has a strong antisemitic component that seems to have affected some of the Yugoslav writings. Byford and Billig analyse antisemitic themes in the book The Trilateral by Smilja Avramov and in a series of articles published in Politika. They suggest that the proliferation of conspiracy theories during the war led to a shifting of the boundary between acceptable and non-acceptable political explanations, with the result that formerly unacceptable antisemitic themes became respectable. This can be seen in the writings of Nikolaj Velimirovic, the Serbian bishop whose mystical antisemitic ideas had previously been beyond the bounds of political respectability. During the war, his ideas found a wider audience, indicating a weakening of political constraints against such notions.     

The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945-6

Stone engages with his subject on two levels, the theoretical and the empirical. On the theoretical side, he argues for the meaningfulness of the term 'collective memory' by showing how the response to the Holocaust in Britain served certain communal needs. 'Collective memory' here is the way in which a group produces narratives of the past which enable it to perpetuate itself, to take account of the past without disturbing its own self-definition. On the empirical level, Stone shows that this response was one which domesticated the horror of what had occurred in order to make its narration bearable. The process was by no means a deliberate whitewashing of the murders; it demonstrates how, in the construction of collective memory, the most painful episodes are unconsciously written out or integrated into more uplifting stories. For example, the murder of the Jews of Europe was frequently tied into a narrative of catastrophe and redemption in which the Zionist cause signalled the Jews' ultimate triumph over adversity. Looking at well-known texts and figures such as James Parkes, as well as lesser-known ones, Stone shows that 'collective memory' is a useful term for understanding the way in which texts and rituals combine to construct (whether consciously or otherwise) a certain understanding of the past. In the case of the British response to the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, this meant a failure to recognize the full enormity of what had taken place, and the incorporation of the murders into culturally familiar narratives.     

Nazlı's photographic games: Said and art history in a contrapuntal mode

ABSTRACT

Through a focus on photographic portraits commissioned in the late nineteenth century by the Ottoman-Egyptian Princess Nazl? Han?m, Roberts analyses the ways they tested Ottoman and western conventions. An examination of Nazl?'s strategic engagement with photography in this period positions her within the often-separated domains of Egyptian nationalism, Ottoman political reform, western Orientalist art and a proto-feminist moment of Egyptian women's history. One of the striking things about the Nazl? portraits is their transgressive inventiveness. This is transgression as Edward Said defines it, with an emphasis on crossing boundaries, testing and challenging limits, and cutting across expectations. Nazl?'s inventiveness is apparent through her canny experimentation with the codes of portrait photography and the ways she deploys her portraits as tokens of exchange within her culture and with her European interlocutors. Roberts argues that Nazl? Han?m's use of photography operates in a contrapuntal mode in the Saidean sense of a simultaneity of voices that sound against, as well as with, each other. Over the last three decades Said's writings have provided a crucial methodological framework for the critique of western Orientalist visual culture. Recently art historians have repositioned this corpus of western imagery in relation to art by practitioners from the region and addressed cultural exchanges. Said's seminal text Orientalism has been pivotal within these debates. Yet it is not so much this landmark book, but rather Said's writings on music, in which we can find an alternative approach to cross-cultural exchange. By transposing this model into the domain of art history, Roberts engages with his notion of reading contrapuntally. Said was interested in the broader applicability of this term, although its potential as an interpretive model for the visual arts remains unexamined. Through this case study of Nazl? Han?m's photographs, Roberts reassesses the value of Said's writings on music for understanding nineteenth-century visual culture.     

Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers

This article argues that political belonging should be understood in the context of diverse spatial imaginaries which encompass but are not confined to the state. Engin Isin's approach to citizenship provides a theoretical grounding for this claim. By way of demonstration, the article focuses on the spatially reconfigured practices of the neoliberal state in relation to irregular migration. It shows how the policing of irregular migration sustains a logic of political belonging based on connections between state, citizen and territory. This logic is simultaneously compromised by transnational state practices including the exploitation of irregular migrant labour. Irregular migrants are contesting their positioning within these multidimensional statist frameworks that posit them as outsiders even while they are integrated into local sites of a global political economy. The struggle of the Sans-Papiers, a collective of irregular migrants in France, provides an example in this context. Their claims to entitlement also mobilize multiple dimensions of political belonging and provide insight into transitions in political community, identity and practice.     

Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988). By employing different modes of knowledge, the novelists draw out the micro-history embedded within the historical event, and resonate the voice of the Other, a creation of partisan politics. Bapsi Sidhwa appears as a social historian who perceives the event through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsi girl Lenny; Amitav Ghosh, akin to a modern historian, focuses on rigid and illusory territorial divisions from Thamma's (grandmother's) perspective; while Salman Rushdie emerges as a postmodern historian who draws attention to the ambiguity and opacity of both historical and fictional knowledge through Saleem Sinai, born on the day India won her independence. History, as it is perceived by the Other – each belonging to a different generation – is a palimpsest: it is always in a state of becoming, of being lived, evaluated and rewritten. Fiction, as it interprets the historical knowledge, fills in the fissures and absences between the history of the past and that of the present. The article will eventually study how fiction and history inform each other, and how the rhetoric of fiction and history together constitute a dialectical discourse on identity – mapped by borders – which sees a convergence of private and collective memories.     

Cosmopolitan Patriotism as a Civic Ideal

Recent theoretical debates have questioned the compatibility of patriotism with global political responsibilities, as identified by cosmopolitan theory. In response, several authors claim that a cosmopolitan patriotism is both possible and desirable. In this article, we propose two desiderata for cosmopolitan patriotism as a civic ideal, which existing accounts fail to meet. First, arguments for cosmopolitan patriotism should provide an account of collective identification, supporting the relation between the actions of one's country and one's appropriate reactive attitudes. Second, such a theory should be able to explain the patriot's commitment to critical engagement with her country's actions. We then offer a critical appraisal of two accounts linking patriotism with global responsibility—Permissible Partialism and Globally Responsible Nationalism—-and demonstrate how they fall short. Finally, we propose an account of civic republican patriotism, which better explains how cosmopolitanism and patriotism can be brought together.     

Colonial governmentality and the ‘economy’

Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, this paper argues that colonial governmentality in India sought to effect a new relationship between resources, population, and discipline. Drawing theoretical insights from the 'critical accounting literature' to bear on the regulation of economic activity in colonial India, the paper shows how the discursive practices of colonial governance, in particular the modalities of measurement, accounting, and classification, enabled the constitution of the 'economy'. Such statistical data generated as part of colonial administration opened up the possibility of a nationalist accounting of the exploitation of India by the colonial power.