Dorian Bell (Literature, UCSC)

Speakers): Dorian Bell

“Bigger Pictures: Anti-Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Scale”
 
Abstract:
 
I will be presenting the fifth chapter of my book, Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in Modern France and Europe, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. This chapter (“Bigger Pictures: Anti-Anti-Semitism and the Politics of Scale”) ends the book by radiating out from France to consider the supranational, utopic imperialism of the nineteenth-century French novelist Émile Zola alongside a number of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century European intellectual frameworks—including, especially, Nietzsche’s, but also those of Marx and others—likewise concerned to think beyond the nation. What these had in common, I argue, at least in the century of their inception, was the idea that nationalism, anti-Semitism, and related provincialisms sweeping Europe were rooted in scalar falsities and blind spots. To maintain this was not simply to accuse, say, nationalist anti-Semites of failing to appreciate the existence of a global scale; after all, those same anti-Semites were claiming, with their increasingly detailed accounts of world Jewish conspiracy, to uncover and explain just such a thing. Rather, it was to contest their grasp of scalar interrelation. Hence, for example, could Nietzsche ridicule German anti-Semites for unwittingly participating, precisely as strident nationalists and Christians, in the “real” global conspiracy: an ongoing infection of the world by Judeo-Christian values.     
 
However idiosyncratic Nietzsche’s allegation, such a tactic reflects the extent to which, as the material processes of capital and empire produced scale, various social actors engaged in heated ideological conflicts determining how scale would be perceived, understood, and constructed—often for a long time to come. Contemplating the profoundly scalar stakes of the conflict erupting in the nineteenth century over the Jewish question, while returning to the contemporary events with which this introduction began, the chapter maps the intellectual history of a European anti-anti-Semitism whose complicated influence can still be felt today. I argue that the current French and European preoccupation with Muslim anti-Semitism not only indexes tensions in the “new” Europe understood to have emerged from the mid-twentieth-century ashes of war and decolonization, but also harks back to an older mode of figuring the European colonial periphery. That mode emerged when explicit foes of anti-Semitism like Zola and Nietzsche turned toward empire for solutions to reactionary parochialisms on the continent and to instabilities in their own philosophical systems. Henceforth, I demonstrate, would Muslim colonial subalterns increasingly be constructed into anti-Semites, paving the way for their postcolonial European descendants to play the “fascist” role in a postwar European dramaturgy of anti-Nazi vigilance. This is how the sins of the colonizer became the sins of the colonized.
 
Dorian Bell is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research looks at French culture and thought since the nineteenth century; histories of empire, race, and anti-Semitism; media theory; film studies; and political and social theory. The author of several articles, he is currently working on a book project entitled Frontiers of Hate: Anti-Semitism and Empire in Modern France, examining sites of articulation between late nineteenth-century French anti-Semitism and imperialism.