Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Read Online Free PDF

inhabits and cre- ates. 4 Daniel Fischlin continues the French connection but looks at a very dif- ferent sort of text, Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête , wondering why Cocteau, in immediate postliberation France, thought it worthwhile to create a film with distinctly antisemitic moments. Fischlin cites an attack on Cocteau by a certain Laubreaux—lauded by Céline no less—that accuses him of producing “Jewish theater,” and suggests that “the rhetoric of antisemitism evident in Laubreaux’s attack . . . may well be a displacement for an attack on his sexual- ity . . . thus confirming yet again the discomfiting homologies between these
    two forms of alien otherness.” Fischlin further suggests that “Cocteau’s own ambivalent antisemitism may well” represent a kind of bait and switch. By fo- cusing negative attention on what he was not—Jewish—perhaps Cocteau hoped to turn the censor’s gaze away from what he was, homosexual. Paradox- ically, Fischlin observes, “breaking the signifying chain that linked Jew to ho- mosexual . . . was necessarily reinforcing the connections between the two.” 5
    However, Fischlin goes far beyond this initial interpretive gambit, subtly moving “to put pressure on the very signifying structures of the film itself as a symptomatic and historicized instance of the way in which antisemitisms operate and circulate.” Fischlin does not ignore Cocteau’s personal agency and affect in the production of the filmic text, but neither does he make them the meaning of the film. He thus expands rather than contracts the field of inter- pretation. Once more, we find the queer-Jew nexus central to the project of bourgeois nation building via the displaced othering of a sexual “deviant”: the (male) Jew. And once again we benefit from the critical energies of a close and contextual reading operated under the sign of a queer theory that is also his- toriography.
    In a moving and deeply personal coda to this volume’s questions and con- cerns, Judith Butler takes us back to Germany, scene of so many losses for Jews and a range of other queers in the century just past. She does not only recount two different trips she made to Germany, one pre- and the other pos- tunification, she also records differences in the way she “experienced being a Jew” in these two recollected Germanys. The new and newly reunified Ger- many that Butler recalls in her essay is a Germany yet riven by the “problem” of difference and haunted by the Jewish question. Vitally, her reflections on Germany—and on what Germany in some way made of her—open onto a larger set of questions about the historical and affective burdens of memory, identification, and difference. Among other things, Butler illuminates the dis- orienting power of the past as it flashes up into the present.
    On the one hand, Butler suggests, the struggle of contemporary Germans to account for violence against “foreigners” is overburdened by an earlier his- tory of National Socialism and its genocidal violence against Jews (and other “Others”). Publicly to acknowledge and grapple with the larger social and cul- tural frames of neo-Nazi violence in the present seems to promise only the re- turn to paralyzing guilt for the violences of the past. Accordingly, Butler sug- gests, in an anguished defense against the flashing up of past into the present, newspaper accounts of racist attacks on refugees tended to focus on the in- jured psyches of the perpetrators of violence, asking what happened to them, how are they so damaged, that they act out their wounded masculinity on the body of nameless others?
    On the other hand, and alongside the deflections of what she terms a “popular therapeutic conservatism,” the new Germany Butler visited in 1994 was also celebrating Jewish contributions to German culture. For example, Butler details a 1994 Berlin exposition commemorating Jewish resistance to Nazism. “Postwall,” she explains,