Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (35 page)

1. 1. My interpretation of Börne is thus entirely different from that of Arendt who wrote, “The anti-Jewish denunciations of Marx and Börne cannot be properly understood except in the light of this conflict between rich Jews and Jewish intellectuals” (Arendt,
      Ori- gins
      54). It is certainly not irrelevant that both Marx and Börne were converted Jews—the limit case of the hybrid and self-alienated Jewish subject.
      

   2. In this essay I will use the term
      Negro,
      following Fanon. Here, obviously, neither
      African
      nor
      African American
      will do, and I do not know if
      black
      is now a more acceptable term than
      Negro.
      

   3. I would suggest that it is this split between Ostjuden and themselves that enabled the Viennese Jews to “maintain a primary identification with the group from which they stemmed” (Spitzer,
      Lives
      38, referring to Rozenblit,
      Jews
      ), i.e., by splitting off good, accul- turated, German-speaking Jews from bad, primitive, Yiddish-speaking ones—who were, often enough, their parents or grandparents! The idea of Judaism as a religion enabled this “primary identification.” The famous Wien chapter of the Benei Brith is reminiscent of nothing so much as the National Benevolent Society of Yorubas in Sierra Leone (Spitzer,
      Lives
      43; Rozenblit,
      Jews
      150). See also Cuddihy,
      Ordeal
      176.
      

   4. In other words, I am suggesting that there are situations in which an imaginary pos- session of the phallus can be less toxic than a desperate effort to get it. Both, of course, are equally products of a certain relation to the dominant fiction.
      

   5. Cf. the kindred argument of Gilman,
      Case
      ; and see also Fuss, “Interior” 38.
      

   6. What my argument amounts to, then, is a claim that precisely insofar as Freud is “in the closet” qua jew and qua “queer” his discourse is oppressive to women and gay men; when he is less closeted, we find the moments of powerful liberatory insight so sharply lo- cated by Bersani in the margins of Freud’s texts (Bersani,
      Freudian
      ).
      

      The sensitive remarks of Enda Duffy seem apposite here as well: “‘Circe’s’ placing of the figure of the abjected woman at the center of the representational economy of terror- ism in the text is repeated time and time again in postcolonial novels since . . . and it evi- dences, I suggest, the inability of a text written at the moment of decolonization to imag- ine an epistemologically different subject altogether beyond the pale of the colonialist and masculinist discourses the subaltern author has inherited. The figure of the abject woman is rendered in effect as scapegoat, and is made to represent the difference (of the colonial master as well as of gender) that the subaltern fears” (
      Subaltern
      21).
      

   7. Robin Morgan has given us a brief and very moving account of her response to Fanon and the ways that he empowered her, in spite of it all (Morgan, “Politics” 113). If I may summarize her strategy, it was to translate what Fanon says about colonized men into discourse about women and to bracket out and voluntarily ignore what he says about women.
      

   8. Note well that “dark continent” is in English. Freud’s search, like Herzl’s, is for an “Anglo-Saxon” white-male sublimity.
      

   9. Although, of course, I am not implying that this is the
      only
      source of prejudice in “native” peoples. See below.
      

   10. I would be somewhat less generous to Fanon than Fuss is here. She reads this state- ment as a “a rejection of the ‘primitive = invert’ equation that marks the confluence of evolutionary anthropology and sexology,” while I would see it as an instance of identifi- catory mimesis of white homophobia, one that does not refuse the categories of European sexuality but reifies and “universalizes” them in the service of a disidentification with the sexual categories of the colonized culture. Fuss’s formulation on p. 36 ( “Interior”) is more critical.
       

   11. See also the fascinating account of this trope—the antisemite as repressed homo- sexual—in Gilman,
       Freud
       196–98; and especially now the stunning Santner,
       My
       .
       

   12. See also Cheung, “Woman” 236–38, for a parallel analysis of Chinese American critical writing and its “lending credence to the conventional association of physical ag- gression with manly valor” and its “sexist preference for stereotypes that imply predatory violence against women to ‘effeminate’ ones” (237). This is not to imply, however, that these effects are the only possible or necessary ones. While some Jewish men, notably some Zionists (see Boyarin, “Colonial”), adopted “macho” models of masculinity, other Jewish men in the same political situations were led to identify rather with femaleness than to deny it, with entirely other cultural effects. On the other hand, the case has been made that this latter effect was more typical of Indian decolonization than anything of the produc- tion of “macho.” See Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Ques- tion,” but see also Roy,
       Indian
       on very similar processes of acquiring manliness in Vivekananda.
       

   13. Hutton very interestingly interprets Freud’s telling of Yiddish jokes as another form of this splitting: “It involves an interplay between the identity of the ‘little Jew’ and that of the intellectual or ‘outsider’ Jew. In telling the joke, Freud or the narrator identifies with both sides, seeing each inside the other” (“Freud” 14). This is a somewhat more genial de- scription of the process than I have given. See also the very telling example discussed in Gilman, “Freud” 162–63.
       

   14. Interestingly enough, in the United States this is entirely different at present, be- cause circumcision itself has been configured as “universal,” although this is certainly changing.
       

   15. I would go so far as to offer the transition between Ramakrishna’s embrace of fe- maleness (not, of course, as Parama Roy so poignantly makes clear, a “feminist” move) and homoeroticism and the aggressively masculinist and heterosexual subjectivity of his pri- mary disciple, Swami Vivekenanda, as an exact parallel to this shift. As Roy remarks, “I do not wish of course to assert that Ramakrishna was not hailed by colonialism. I am sug- gesting, rather, that he probably was hailed by colonialism-and-nationalism (I speak of this here as a single category) in a way distinct from the ways his best-known disciple was hailed. . . . In Vivekenanda, then, Hinduism becomes very specifically an address to colo- nialism and the ‘west,’” and this address is marked, in large part, as Roy demonstrates, by a shift in gender representations to match that of the west. “Vivekenanda discovers him- self as the swami, as Indian, as Hindu, and as male, and implicitly a heterosexual male, in the ‘west,’ outside of the Indian nation-space” (Roy,
       Indian,
       in the chapter entitled “As the Master Saw Her: Religious Discipleship and Gender Traffic in Nineteenth-Century India”). Vivekenanda’s period of greatest activity was precisely the time of Herzl’s and Nor- dau’s Zionist venture and the beginning of Freud’s work as well.
       

   16. I am, of course, drawing a distinction here—as everywhere in my work—between the disenfranchisement of women in the social sphere and misogyny per se, that is, ex- pression of contempt and hatred for women. The two are obviously related but, I think, not to be conflated. The former is endemic in Jewish culture; the latter, I argue, sporadic. Moreover, misogyny per se, in the sense defined, grows constantly stronger throughout Eu- ropean Jewish history reaching its peak in eastern Europe, I would argue, precisely in the moment of modernization (decolonization).
       

   17. See also the elegant discussion of Lacan’s reformulation of Freud’s theory of psy- chosis in Reinhard, “Freud.”
       

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