The Queer Jew: Gender,Sexuality and Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Antisemitism

In an attempt to understand the mechanisms that enable the perpetuation of racism, Judaken examines how antisemitic stereotypes can be reiterated in the discourse of those individuals most committed to the eradication of antisemitism. He argues that typologies - mythic images of collective identity - depend upon an associative logic. These associations are engendered in the construction of the Self (both individual and collective), by demarcating it-self from the Other(s), generally through tropes of gender, pathology and race. Judaken focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew,a text which Sartre called 'a declaration of war against antisemitic motifs', and argues that this unintended effect is the result of how Sartre conceptualizes both consciousness and the relation between the Self and Other in Being and Nothingness. This work of existential phenomenology, that sought radically to critique the western metaphysical tradition, nevertheless reinscribes dominant assumptions within western culture about gender and sexuality. Judaken shows how Sartre's re-citation of these assumptions fundamentally determines how he conceives of the relation between the antisemite and 'the Jew'. He concludes, however, by suggesting that imminent to Sartre's own position, there is an-other way of conceiving of the relation between Self and Other that might offer hope beyond the impasses of the western tradition's failures in embracing difference, singularity and particularity.