Gil Anidjar

The historiographic perversion

Introduction: The Names and the Archive 1. The Law and the Fact: The 1994 Campaign 2. Between Amputation and Imputation 3. Refutation 4. Testimony: From Document to Monument Conclusion: Shame and Testimony Against History, by Gil Anidjar Notes Index

THE IDEA OF AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY

The writings of Talal Asad offer a consistent and singular reflection on the anthropological function of concepts. In a variety of manners, the use and mention of a concept identifies the practice of a collective speaker before it testifies to a designated object, real or imagined. The Christian baggage of the concept of ‘religion’, indeed, the Christianity of the subject of religion, however, is at once affirmed and denied by Talal Asad. Is Christianity a religion? Does the concept of religion teach us something about Christianity? This essay attends to Asads body of work and seeks to show that the idea of an anthropology of Christianity – much more than an anthropology of religion (which Asad shows to be a reductive endeavour), and different from an anthropology of Islam – remains both urgent and elusive.

Christianity, Christianities, Christian

Abstract The relation between the concept of religion and its Christian determinations has surely become increasingly visible. In the study of religion, Christianity (vera religio, western Christendom) has served as a paradigmatic occasion, a prime focus, of constant research and investigation. Its history and transformations have rightly been studied in a plethora of ways and approaches. Throughout, the question of Christianity – if there is one – lingers as a question of religion. Everything is therefore as though the interrogation of the concept of religion does not unsettle our understanding of Christianity as a religion. A strange essentialism. For what if Christianity were not a religion? Not exclusively so? What if, for two thousand years, it had been more than a religion? Or something else altogether? What if it became a religion (in the restricted, modern sense) only latterly? Having learned what we can from and about the concept of religion – its novelty, its questionable disappearance, its containment – should we not reconsider what we mean by Christianity?

Weapons (Inscription, Destruction, Deconstruction)

ABSTRACT If writing has been understood as a supplement to a primary orality and a full presence, such is also true of tools or instruments, similarly conceived as secondary and derivative, supplements of a living and generative nature. But what about other dangerous supplements? What about those tools, instruments, machines or engines of death and of destruction? What about weapons? They might appear more derivative still, farther accessories in a positive program, in the “history of the gramme,” or indeed of the chains, in its rapport to “the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the techné, of orientation in general.” Derridas seminars on the death penalty show otherwise, reflecting back on his work as a whole. It becomes possible to demonstrate that in “the chains and the systems of traces,” Derrida placed weapons (means of destruction and of execution) in a more urgent proximity to thought.

Antisemitism and Its Critics

I might as well admit it. I am one of those who struggle against antisemitism. I tend to think about it a lot. I read and reflect; I write about it sometimes. I take action when I can. I even formulated some ideas, a theory of sorts, playing my part, adding my bit to the growing number of accounts of it. You could say that I have been moved, nay, mobilised to criticise antisemitism, fight against it. I am no imaginary Jew, I do not think, not one of those Alain Finkielkraut used to think of at least; nor am I as empirically ignorant of antisemitism as Yoav Shamir claimed to be before his documentary Defamation (and perhaps after it as well).1 I could easily count myself among those who think that it ‘is right to voice concern about rising anti-Semitism, and every progressive Jew, along with every progressive person, ought to be vigorously challenging anti-Semitism wherever it occurs’.2 I am for myself, then, ‘anti-antisemite’. Most definitely, yes. Yes, I am. And I do believe that Jonathan Judaken has offered a strong justification for this admittedly awkward term when he wrote that ‘anti-antisemitism clearly denotes an opposition to prejudices and stereotypes related to Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, and anti-antisemites resist the institutionalization of discrimination against Jews’.3 It is true that I have felt inclined to empathise with Hannah Arendt, with her infamous reservations about her love of the Jewish people, but this too I must confess: I come very close to being a philosemite. Although this word too, Judaken points out, may be troubling: ‘The term philosemitism implies a love of Jews and Judaism. However, its usage almost always refers to those who oppose antisemitism but who often lack an understanding of the history, culture, and religion of the Jews’ (p. 20). Just the same, I trust that the notion may be capacious enough to include someone like me. But I wish to insist on keeping the two tendencies distinct. The philosemite in me is not the anti-antisemite in me.

The Dignity of Weapons

In this article, I wish to ask about the dignity of weapons, the kind of elevated worth weapons appear to have acquired despite (or because) of their role in the production of indignity, a worth which, perhaps not as paradoxically as it may otherwise appear, constitutes (or rather de-constitutes) human dignity. I shall not take Kant as my guide, though, but the other K, namely, Franz Kafka.

Between Past and Present, Jew and Arab: An Exchange between Gil Anidjar and David N. Myers

Amira Hass, Haaretzs fearless journalist, recently told the following joke, an allegory of sorts, set during the Turco-Russian war. Moishele is about to depart for the front, and so his mother offers some sensible advice. “Please take care of yourself, my son. Pace yourself. Kill a Turk all right, but then make sure you rest afterwards. Eat something. Sleep a little. Then go back if you must, kill another Turk, and take another break. Drink lots of fluids, and make sure you maintain and replenish your strength.” “But Mamele,” retorts Moishele, “What if while I am eating and resting, there comes a Turk to kill me?” “Oy va voy, my son! Why would anyone do such a thing? What could he possibly have against you?”