Faust, Breaking Bad and the Jews: modern powerlessness and acting out

Faced with the collective experience of modern powerlessness, democracies are doubting and populists across the board are promising to regain control by ‘taking action’. Goethe’s Faust and Walter White, the hero of Breaking Bad, paradigmatic figures separated by two centuries, embody this headlong rush: when understanding the world is no longer easy, we destroy and rebuild it. But always, in the shadow of these stories, a Jewish figure accompanies the destructive impulse, embodies negation, or bears the blame. In moments when modernity cracks, what becomes of the Jewish minority, asks the philosopher Julia Christ? While large sections of our societies are listening to the whispers that promise an immediate way out of powerlessness, she reminds us that only the possibility of building solidarity can guarantee minorities against the tyranny of majority desire.

 

 

Breaking Faust

“In the beginning was the deed.” This is the solution, outlined by Goethe in Faust, by which modern man – man exclusively – can attempt to extricate himself from the predicaments into which he is plunged by modernity. Faust, the universal scholar, who enters the scene monologuing about his despair in the face of an increasingly fragmented and complex world, impossible to understand as a whole that makes sense, returns from his Easter walk and, galvanized by his little trip to town, begins to retranslate the New Testament. It is there that he finds the way out that puts an end to all the suffering of his soul. He understands that “in the beginning was the deed”.

Why is Faust in such a good mood when he returns from his walk? Certainly, by participating in what is nothing less than a compulsory collective ritual on Easter Sunday, he was acclaimed by the crowd and praised for his knowledge and wisdom. But we can bet that it was less the honors received that pulled him out of his melancholy than the experience of a structured, orderly social reality, obvious to his eyes. An experience exactly the opposite of the one he has in his activity as a scholar, and the loss of which leads him to the long lamentation with which he entered the scene at the beginning of the play. At this initial moment, after listing the disciplines he has studied and mastered, Faust comes to recognize the complete failure of his enterprise and claims to see “that nothing can be known”. What precisely cannot be known, and what motivates his despair, is “the spiritual bond that holds the world together”.

The desolation Faust feels in the face of this ultimate knowledge, after a long life of study, leads him first to seek his salvation in a return to the pre-modern. He considers using magic spells, then, given the ridiculous failure of the stratagem, finds himself on the verge of suicide. Before going for a walk among the peasants and bourgeois of the city the next day, on Easter Sunday, the man presented to us is just a depressed wreck, a being confronted with the failure that is his life devoted to knowledge, powerless to act in any field, since he sees that he would not know how to go about it. In short, this is certainly not a man in a position to tackle a task as considerable as the retranslation of the New Testament.

What he experiences in the small provincial town on his Sunday outing is a dual experience. On the one hand, the experience of an existence whose internal link is openly manifest, so charged with eroticism is the atmosphere of this stroll; on the other hand, the experience of the obviousness of reality. Everyone knows their place, how to behave, how to act, who to greet and how, what to say and what not to say. Even heavy eroticism, a potential source of disruption of order, is contained in songs and puns that everyone has mastered. The spiritual bond that holds this reality together is clear, and Faust is also caught up in it, since he knows exactly how to act in this reality. Nothing is alien to him, everything is clear and orderly: the world responds to him exactly as he expects it to. He may well try to stun his assistant walking alongside him with long speeches about the loneliness of the scholar and his distance from the people, but it is here, outside his study, that he is clearly at home. By participating in this small collective ritual of the Easter walk where everything is order and simplicity, he perceives this lost link that unites everything. However fleeting it may be, this vision restores a certain capacity for action, or at least the feeling of being able to act.

It is therefore in this reassured mood that, having returned to his dark lair, Doctor Faust sets to work on the translation of the New Testament. Not because he had nothing else to do on that Sunday evening, but because, at peace with himself, he was now ready to hear the “Revelation”, divine word that could fix, once and for all, the meaning of this reality which appeared to his scholarly gaze only in its senseless fragmentation. The experience of the obvious made him want to find what constitutes the immutable meaning of the world, what makes everything hold together in its indisputable presence: God.

However, the intimacy he rediscovered with the world only lasted for the moment when Faust opened the book he intended to translate. From the very first sentence, doubt assails him once again. What is the problem? It is written, in Greek, “in the beginning was the logos”. From the outset, Faust is reluctant to translate logos as “word”, or “verb”, or even “discourse”, because he “cannot give such value to the verb”. He tries successively to translate it as “meaning”, but rejects this choice because meaning does not create reality, then as “force”, but sees that this choice would pose the opposite problem: creation would certainly be grasped, but devoid of meaning. Finally, he stops, happy with his find, at this formula: “in the beginning was the deed”.

The deed  presupposes a subject, and therefore an intention, but it does not depend on a response from reality: it creates it. The act is murderous, or sexual, or revolutionary but each time it consists of an intervention that is not in search of a response. On the contrary, the deed  is the very model of action where the subject is at one with what he does, without any reflexivity, no matter what follows, it being understood that it is a new, unknown reality that he must then recognize, in retrospect, as having been generated by his deed. In short, the deed  is the means of action for man in a world that has rightly lost all evidence: it allows him to no longer be at a distance from what he does, to no longer see the vanity of his actions in view of the immense complexity of the task he has to assume; and it allows him to relate to the result of the action, to the new reality, however chaotic it may be, as being truly his own. The deed  is a transformation of reality so radical that it creates a new one. This may therefore appear to be a solution to the situation where it seems impossible to get a grip on reality, quite simply because we no longer understand it, we are unable to know it, and therefore even less able to recognize it and feel at home in it.

What Faust understands when he says “in the beginning was the deed” is that the Easter parade ritual was certainly a pleasant interlude, but that returning to this lost world of the obvious is impossible for him. He has gone too far in understanding the complexity of the modern world, he knows too much about all the parts that make up the world for a return to this very reduction of complexity to be possible. As true as the simple life may (still) be for the Thuringian peasant (we assume that Faust is set in Goethe’s country of residence), it is only an illusion, a deception, a subterfuge for the one who sees that one can know nothing’, but who, unlike Socrates, who also knew that and could know it serenely because he lived in a well-ordered city where everything was obvious, has lost all confidence in the possibility of investigating what ‘holds the world together’. Seeing the world and society in their complexity, being faced with this shifting and apparently uncontrollable monstrosity, is not the same as knowing that there are still things to know, while being comfortably settled in a political and social order that is perfectly transparent to itself. In other words, Faust is resolutely modern.

The modern man that is Faust, seized by this paralyzing experience, perceives only two possibilities: suicide, which would definitively put an end to the powerlessness he feels, or the deed, in order to escape from this world without stable beacons for the mind, by producing another. Withdrawal from the world or creation of a new world where everything is simple, not because objective complexity has disappeared, but because man creates the world according to his desire, imposes his will against reality, places himself above the laws that structure it and which he abhors because they have nothing to offer but gray and banal routines blocking access to “life”. Because these laws, human laws, turn out, in this 18th century that is drawing to a close, to be the only ones available. Regulating the daily grind of interdependencies between different groups in society according to a banal order, they lack the panache of divine Revelation. They merely forbid sleeping with the neighbor’s beautiful daughter before marrying her, but no salvation is to be expected from such renunciation. This is indeed a fairly accurate description of the fate of modern man: he must endure both the absence of sublimity in human laws (the regulation of interdependencies), and therefore the fact that they may appear, on reflection, to be devoid of profound meaning, and the constant reconfiguration of the “whole”, that is to say, the increase in knowledge and the adjustment of human laws to this evolution. This second element leaves him in a state of lasting insecurity as to his ability to know what reality is made of and, therefore, how to act in it; the first in the question of the meaning of what he does when he manages to know, and therefore to do, something.

Faust chooses the deed to escape from this feeling of humiliation and powerlessness. He chooses the sexual deed, which must put him in direct contact with life, then the murderous deed, which must remove all obstacles to his desire, before severing the last link he had with his fellow men, the last link of dependence he had maintained in this world, by abandoning the woman he loved to the executioner. Once this is done, he can devote himself – in the second part of the play, written almost thirty years later – to great projects as a builder, transforming natural reality, and ravaging the world in the process while explaining that he is acting for the good of humanity. Finally, when the devil who helped him in all his attempts at violent world domination prepares to claim his soul at the moment of his death, the latter is saved by the “eternal feminine”, and therefore by the only element that retains its consistency throughout the play. The “feminine” is eternal in the sense that it is not exposed to the complexification of reality, it keeps to routines and the hearth, it rests the modern man who knows that nothing holds any more. It is not surprising that Thomas Mann chose the title “Doctor Faustus” for the novel in which he tries to understand Nazism.

Live in your underwear, die in a laboratory: portrait of the modern man

At the end of Breaking Bad, Walter White has one last meeting with his wife before he dies.^[1] We know the story of this American cult series: Walter White, who became a high school chemistry teacher after selling his shares in a chemical start-up he co-founded in his youth, which is now a thriving company worth billions of dollars, father of a teenage son with a slight disability, husband of a strong-willed woman who is pregnant again (an accident), works after school in a car wash where he is incidentally obliged to wash the cars of his own students to support his family, when he is told that he has a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer. Faced with his own mortality, and imagining his family without resources in the near future, he decides to devote his considerable talents as a chemist to the production of Crystal Meth, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake while refusing every opportunity to end his activity, even after having amassed millions – until all his competitors are dead, and he is the undisputed king of Meth production. The explanation he gives to himself, to his accomplices and to his wife when she finally understands his activities is always the same: everything he does, he does for his family, so that they can live comfortably once he has died of his cancer.

The genius of the series lies in the depiction of an ordinary man, thin, not very virile, living in a very egalitarian relationship with his wife, however, when we get to know the family, we see that he manages to confine her to the house to look after the household, for which she takes revenge with behavior that some might describe as emasculating. Walter White is reasonable, responsible, resigned to being content with the poor joys that middle-class life in a leafy American suburb can offer. Unlike Faust, who is enraged by his inability to bring order to a world whose complexity he discovers a little more each day, he seems crushed by the routine of life, a life he knows only too well, which is completely controllable precisely because he can achieve nothing. A life so insipid that even sexual activity is reduced to a mechanical operation (we are made to witness the inconclusive handjob that his wife gives him with her left hand on his fiftieth birthday while fiddling with the keyboard of her laptop with her right hand to sell items on eBay). His life is the very definition of the obvious, nothing happens in it, except for the lack of money. And Walter White seems completely adjusted to this life, as harmless and submissive as he appears, in ridiculous underpants, with his flabby legs and small middle-aged belly which he is not shy about – the embodiment of the well-behaved husband, satisfied with his family life where he can appear without taking particular care of himself, except when it comes to following his wife’s food hygiene instructions (he even swallows vegan bacon to celebrate his fiftieth birthday). A man who presents no sexual or other danger to anyone and who takes the humiliations inflicted on him by his boss at the car wash in his stride, whose boundless energetic and unscrupulous virility is emphasized, precisely, by his disproportionately bushy eyebrows.

However, Walter White, like Faust, is a great scientist. Not a universal scientist who despairs in the face of the constant increase in knowledge, but a virtuoso of his discipline, chemistry, the “science of matter”. Walter White knows what holds the world together and radiates happiness in the moments when he tries to instill this profound knowledge in the heads of his sleepy middle school students. Wherever you look, the hero of Breaking Bad knows everything, his world holds no secrets for him, and yet he chooses to take action by launching into the business of producing a highly destructive and addictive drug that devastates individuals and gradually consumes the suburban happiness of the deep America he has chosen to base his existence on. The transformation of this highly routinized life where everything is in its place into a continuous crisis also results here, as in Goethe’s play, from an initial deed of creation, a radical transformation of his reality, precisely the decision to become a star in the production of Crystal Meth.

However, this deed is less a response to the unbearable uncontrollable complexity of the world than to the unbearable greyness of its obviousness. Everything is regulated, everything is ordered, no initiative is to be taken, no action to be undertaken in one’s own name; even science is not a source of doubt and heartbreak here, but provides knowledge of the immutable order of the universe. What Walter White lacks, however, is the same thing as Faust: the meaning of it all. Although everything is clear, this modern man, confronted with the question of the meaning of his existence through direct exposure to his mortality, does not recognize himself in what he does. At no point in his life does he become one with his action, not, like Faust, because he is structurally distanced from what he does, not because of an excess of reflexivity that creates an abyss of strangeness between him and reality, but because he does not participate in it as a singularity, as a real individual, as a subject. Life does not live, such is the observation that begins Heisenberg’s career (the name under which Walter White operates in the world of methamphetamine). His feeling of powerlessness does not result from a world that is too complex and therefore uncontrollable, but from a world that is too controlled from the outside. This is where the deed comes in, creating a new reality that appears to Walter White’s entourage as nameless chaos, but which provides him the possibility to demonstrate his extreme ability to see in any situation a lever that allows him to rearrange reality to his advantage. Being supremely intelligent, chaos favors him – it’s an opportunity to give new rules to what seems uncontrollable, even inevitably deadly. And every time he does, people die.

When he sees his wife for the last time and looks back on what happened, she firmly forbids him to resort to his usual justification of explaining the destruction he left in his wake by concern for the well-being of his family. It was then that he told the truth: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. I was alive.” Through his initial act, this man created a world in which he found a life that was living, in which he could feel himself being alive. By creating his drug empire, he managed to regain an immediate relationship with reality. He was fully immersed in what he was doing, body and soul, from the chemical production itself to the complex elaboration of schemes to bring down his competitors and murder them savagely. None of his actions were alien to him, he took responsibility for them all, he has no regrets. So Walter White dies in peace, caressing the vats of a Crystal Meth kitchen dedicated to producing the drug according to his own formula. No eternal feminine is needed to lift him up, the cold contact of the instruments of his “work” is enough to revive his feeling of being alive. One can well imagine, on the day when a great writer takes up the Trump/Musk period, seeing him choose “When they broke bad” as the title…

Modernity at a standstill: act or disappear

Two modern men, two centuries apart, who choose action to respond to the same problem: an experience of powerlessness so great that life no longer has any meaning. On the one hand, there is powerlessness in the face of a world whose complexity and instability have been made visible by the increase in knowledge and reflexivity, to the point that the effort of knowledge can no longer perceive what holds it together. Accompanying this experience of powerlessness is a constant feeling of insecurity and, in turn, a fierce desire to deliberately reduce complexity, the quest for immediacy, belief, and emotion as the ultimate justifications for doing and getting things done. On the other hand, there is the powerlessness in the face of a world so regulated that there is nothing left for the individual to do. What corresponds to this experience of powerlessness is less a feeling of insecurity – although it can be perceived, as in the case of Walter White, by the subject himself as being at the origin of his banal life choice – than a feeling of suffocation, a real suffering of the modern individual not to be precisely what is expected of him, namely an individual. When Walter White gets rid of all his routines, sends all the rules that have structured his life to hell, it is because he perceives, at the moment of his announced death which is inevitably a moment when the question of the individual justification of life arises, a contradiction between these rules and what they are supposed to allow individuals in modern societies, namely the autonomous conduct of their own lives.

In both cases, the world does not respond. Either it no longer allows itself to be controlled by the subject who knows it to be too complex to relate to actively, therefore other than in the form of clear-sighted but tearful melancholy. Or it is perfectly controllable, but according to rules which, on reflection, seem not to be the individual’s own, in which he does not recognize himself as an individual, so that he does not feel alive in what he does. In both cases, the experience is one of radical powerlessness. And, having reached this point of realization, the modern individual seems to have only two solutions: suicide or the deed that destroys complexity, and puts individual desire in the place of rules.

It takes a Jew to do the job!

However, our two modern heroes need facilitators. Neither of them manages to realize their project of creating a new reality without outside help. And, in both cases, these dubious characters seem to be Jews. The text does not say that Mephisto, the devil to whom Faust sold his soul, is Jewish, but he has all the characteristics that classic anti-Jewish discourse attributes to Jews, and it is therefore not for nothing that theatrical performances, even in Germany in the 1950s, often depicted him in the caricatured features of a Jew.^[2]

Thus, when he presents himself to Faust, he calls himself “the spirit of negation” that opposes everything that “is born”, a “part of that force that always wants evil”, “a part of the darkness that gave birth to the light (i.e. Jesus)”, “the body” without which “the spirit (i.e. who opposed the letter)” can do nothing.

As for Walter White’s lawyer, Saul Goodman, things are less subtly presented: Saul is not actually Jewish, but he has given himself a Jewish name, he explains, since in his job as a crooked lawyer it is certainly more marketable. Two fake Jews, two fantasies of Jews without whom neither Faust nor Walter White would achieve anything. For both are only dilettantes of the deed in its dimension of destruction of reality. To achieve this, they need “Jewish” acolytes, intermediaries between their desire and a reality too solid to realize it, deniers of this reality: a figure of absolute otherness who not only, in the fantasy underlying the representation of the “Jew”, has no attachment to the world that, despite everything, our heroes of the act cherish, but who, moreover, has the desire (by nature?) to radically deny it and to profit from the activity of intermediary. Destructive on the one hand, parasitic freeloaders on the creative power of non-Jewish man on the other: that is how these fantasies of Jews appear in the two tales. In other words, what is retained from the act for the modern non-Jewish men portrayed is the aspect of the creation of a new world. The destruction of the old world that necessarily accompanies it is not attributable to them – for that they have “their” Jews to accompany them on their tour of misdeeds.

This is also the reason why these two heroes of modernity, despite all the anxiety they arouse, are perceived as true heroes by the public, and are ultimately redeemed. For Faust, this redemption is downright divine through the intercession of the feminine, for Walter White, the manifest happiness in which he dies, free – the police arrive just after his death – against the backdrop of a song in homage to the love of a man’s life, takes the place of redemption. The representatives of the Jews, on the other hand, whether Méphistophélès or Saul, are duly punished: the former must return empty-handed to his hell without the Faustian soul he so longed for, and the latter – as the Better Call Saul series, which follows Breaking Bad, shows us – finds himself, after his frustrated, lonely and anguished escape following the discovery of Heisenberg’s identity, selling Cinnamon Rolls in a nondescript Mall lost in the American heartland, before going to prison. Eternal wandering without satisfaction: that is what awaits the Jews who have the misfortune of thinking they can consort with the creative power of the modern gentile man…

This distribution of roles, if we disregard the antisemitic scandal that it presents, reveals one thing above all: that there is no consent to examine the accuracy of the position of the problem in these fables. In other words, these fables also tell us that the feeling of powerlessness that can invade modernday people can only be addressed in one way: by its urgent and radical elimination. That, in this solution, the destructive and only facilitating part is attributed to the Jews, while the modern non-Jewish man is saddled with the creative and enjoyable part, perhaps even results from this position of the problem of powerlessness.

So what about this powerlessness? There is no denying that the increase in interdependencies, which are now woven together at a global level and include an actor as formidably non-human as nature itself, have become visible and manifest to everyone precisely because of the increase in knowledge that these new links require. This has resulted in a widespread feeling of insecurity about what we do. One can no longer even peacefully tend one’s vegetable patch without a national “peat-free gardening” day disrupting the spring planting routines, however innocent they may appear. What, then, can be said about the wars that are raging this time close to home, or the dismantling of transnational alliances that we thought were so obvious that we no longer even gave them a second thought?

On all sides, indeed, the evidence of reality seems to be evading us. Genders are becoming blurred, nature is not a pure factuality that can be used at will, decolonized countries do not remain in the sphere of influence of the former Empires nor do they aspire to democracy but conclude alliances of interest with autocracies such as Russia, women, despite all the progress in equality, continue to rebel against sexism, some of them ready to go as far as secession (which the new technical methods of reproduction make quite possible), war refugees and climate refugees are continually arriving in Europe, Islam has transformed from a religion of minorities relegated to the periphery of nations into a religion of Europe, a new pandemic could appear at any moment, social networks constitute a source of information for a significant proportion of European citizens, the transatlantic alliance and the promise of perpetual peace in Europe that it seemed to bring is unravelling… The list could go on. At the same time, at the other end of the powerlessness spectrum, in the midst of this loss of clarity, complaints are emerging about the over-regulation of life: too much bureaucracy, too many rules, too many moral requirements, particularly in the treatment of women and minorities, too many diplomas to be obtained in order to be eligible for a decent job, too many ecological standards… Here too the list could go on. It is as if, with each attempt to regulate complexity, reducing insecurity and thereby aiming to soften the feeling of collective powerlessness, there emerged in opposition the protest in the very name of the powerlessness that this regulation seems to impose on individuals. Faust and Heisenberg are the models for resolving these crises, which are inevitable in modern societies, and they would not be hero-cults if their way of perceiving the problem, as well as their way of solving it through action, did not respond to attitudes shared and produced by these same societies.

Think less, act more: modern excesses according to Mannheim

For some time now, and everywhere since J. D. Vance’s speech in Munich and given the concessions Trump wants to make to Putin, it has been said that our era is terribly reminiscent of the 1930s. History repeats itself! This is the cry of anguish that is supposed to guide political action. Because Europe, faced with this return to the 1930s, must take the opposite course to its behavior at the time. Of that, at least, we can be sure.

Much has been said about the “repetition of history”, in particular that it always repeats itself twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Although the White House team looks very much like a farce, it is difficult not to see this story of history repeating itself as a deleterious attempt to reduce the complexity of what is happening to us. Because if there is one thing we have learned from history, particularly thanks to post-1945 historiography, it is precisely that it does not repeat itself. What else, then, is this cry if not a way of “reprimitivizing” thought in the face of a new disorder that seems unthinkable and unmanageable, by applying a historical situation that we know well from having studied it, and trying to behave as if we were in the 1930s and not in 2025?

We owe the expression “reprimitivization of thought” to one of the greatest sociologists of the 20th century, Karl Mannheim, a German-speaking Hungarian Jew, who coined it precisely when he entered the 1930s.^[3] In doing so, Mannheim did his job as a researcher; he did not just draw a parallel between 1929 and 1913, for example, to appease his perplexity at what was happening in Europe in the 1920s. He tried to understand what was happening. So what did he conclude? That increasingly large groups in modern societies were reacting to these two phenomena that we have described – the impression of over-complexity, the feeling of over-regulation – by reducing their perception of reality. He identified at least four variants of this re-primitivization.

At the root of these seemingly different attitudes lies the same root: not wanting to know.

Firstly, there is the fascist, decisionist and vitalist reaction. Through it, one decides to re-establish once and for all an unambiguous meaning of reality. This meaning, in fascism, is drawn from a supposed knowledge of the life and essence of the people, which presents a considerable advantage, namely a direct relationship to life, since the meaning stated by fascist ideology is presented as being the meaning of life itself. To act as a fascist is to be alive, it is to claim to respond in direct contact with life to the demands of life, understood here as a nature that would inevitably command action. Masculinist madmen like Elon Musk, so convinced of their natural superiority that they disseminate their sperm as much as they can to reproduce in mass beings identical to themselves, and who are also convinced that their decisions are naturally above the law, belong to this form of re-primitivization, as do the representatives of the European far-right parties with their eternal refrain “if we want to, we can”. What we actually want is of little importance; what is essential is the assertion that we will impose a single will against reality and its differentiations.

Then there is a reaction that can be called “phobia of interdependencies”, or even “phobia of dependence” for short. It is another ingredient of fascism, in that it hyperbolizes a univocal meaning of life and in doing so denies the complex reality of highly differentiated societies, constantly searching for their meaning. But nowadays, it is also the reaction of ultraliberalism, which hyperbolizes the individual and his free will against the laws and rules that bind the different elements of societies and accepts as the only link, always temporary, the deal that he can conclude on the spot and always undo.

Then there is the reactionary reaction, which does not reject interdependencies but tries to control them through a univocal sense of reality, which this time is derived not from a supposed life that imposes its law, but from a supposed immutable culture, called national or even republican, the essential thing here being that this culture is presented as unalterable.

Finally, there is the reaction that Mannheim calls “orthodoxy”, which could also be called “touch delusion”^[4]. This is the intellectual reaction par excellence when intellectual and scientific elites refuse to investigate social reality, without wanting to give up their prerogative to say “what holds the world together”. In other words, it is the reaction of thought that is most aware of the complexity of reality when it no longer has the means to grasp it in its constant evolution and which, faced with its own renunciation, confines itself to a position of abstract omnipotence by brandishing broad categories supposed to describe what is at the heart of all this apparent complexity. In Mannheim’s era, that is to say the era of flourishing Marxism, these categories were called “exploitation” and “alienation”; nowadays, they are reduced to a single one: “domination”.

What unites all these attitudes, despite the radically different political colors attached to them, is that they all originate from a single act: that of resolutely stepping outside the realm of knowledge and knowledge production. At the root of these seemingly different attitudes lies the same thing: a refusal to know. This is also what makes their carriers all inhabited by a particular form of rage. Because they know that they don’t want to know, not wanting to know was an initial decision without which none of these attitudes could be maintained. Regardless of the surface political orientation, hatred of knowledge and learning, detestation of complexity, investigation and detail go hand in hand with these attitudes. At the same time, they are characterized by a certain rage against oneself, which generally turns into harshness towards others^[5], because, as they are modern, all those who hold this attitude also know that “not wanting to know” is not an option in societies that can only live and survive if they constantly produce new knowledge about themselves.

 

While history certainly does not repeat itself, the same is less true of attitudes. After all, Faust and Walter White react in the same way to the challenges posed by modern societies, two hundred years apart. This is not surprising, since we still live in societies characterized by a constant increase in interdependencies and the need for knowledge that this increase generates, that is to say, by an increase in complexity and attempts to regulate it. If this continuity between the post-revolutionary European societies of the late 18th century and those of the present day exists, it follows that certain reactionary attitudes may be repeated. All the more so as the re-primitivization of thought is nothing more than a pathology of the correct attitude that this new reality also brings to the fore, the one that Mannheim calls “sociological”. What he thus refers to is this attitude of thought which, faced with the visible future of interdependencies between the groups that make up our societies, perceives not only all the differences that distinguish them from one another, but also the ever-new integration produced by this interplay of interdependencies. The sociological attitude is one that perceives the new forms of solidarity that emerge every day, in conflict for sure, but no less surely, in such a way that the meaning of justice that effectively guides the social totality thus formed is specified at every step.

Now, the nascent sociology, as positively as it nevertheless evaluated the moral life of modern societies, also issued a warning: this attitude found in modern societies, which is only transformed into scientific knowledge by the social sciences and their methods, needs these disciplines to maintain itself. If the sense of justice common to members of modern societies is not demonstrated by these sciences, the groups that uphold it risk losing sight of the link between their demands for justice and the new modern forms of solidarity that nourish them. In other words, for the sociological attitude, optimistic about the capacity for integration of new differences, to be maintained in our societies, knowledge must be deployed that exposes the internal norms to this apparently chaotic and extremely complex whole that is modern societies. For without this work of shedding light on norms, experience can, in fact, come to no longer make any sense for individuals. This is what happens in particular in moments of integration crises experienced under the sign of over-complexity on the one hand, and over-regulation on the other. In these moments of great perplexity, it is possible that the members of societies neither understand the meaning of reality nor find their way around when they act.

So much so that, if the attitudes of the 1930s are repeated, then, according to Mannheim’s analysis, the fault lies in part with specialized knowledge, the social sciences, which are not doing their job properly. The latter is not limited to exposing what is wrong (this is their task, which is called criticism): they must also, in the same movement, explain what is the basis of their own criticism, namely the normativity internal to societies, the solidarity that constantly evolves according to the movements of integration that occur within them, the only basis on which pathologies such as situations of domination can be perceived as such.

The responsibility of the social sciences

In terms of attitude, reprimitivization seems to prevail today in all its forms. Sovereigntist populisms of all stripes promise new control over a reality that they are preparing to redefine by decision, while explaining that their decision would be based on a deep understanding of the life of the “peoples” they want to govern. Similarly, the phobia of interdependencies that accompanies the fantasy of the individual finally freed from all his shackles, clever and cunning, looking exclusively after his own interests and those of his family, seems to be a fairly popular option among our contemporaries. Being able to rely on a solid and unchanging culture is also a fantasy that appeals to many. Finally, intellectuals, who should be critical of all these movements, not because of the content they mobilize, but because of the attitude of thought that is expressed in them, refuse to investigate them and are most often content to repeat the same litany about domination supposedly prevailing everywhere, thus falling back on moral affects that take the place of politics.

In this situation, the Jews are doomed. Nothing is more unfavorable to them than societies where the watchword is “we don’t want to know!” and the ensuing attitude is that of people who know that they don’t want to know, enraged both against themselves and against those who want to know. The problem is not so much that it is historically attested that hatred of intellectuality always goes hand in hand with hatred of the Jew. After all, if history does not repeat itself, there is no reason why it should repeat itself in this area. The systemic problem that this attitude poses to Jews lies elsewhere: it has to do with the fact that they are a structurally minority. Unwilling or unable to become a majority as Jews – including, paradoxically, where they are in fact a majority, as in Israel – they are particularly exposed to what is likely to happen when it is not knowledge of interdependencies that guides action, but only decision, affect, orthodoxy, interest, conviction, belief or desire. In short, like any minority, but in their case constitutively, they cannot fail to suffer from re-primitivization. For it will always be the decision, the affect, the system of thought, the interest, the conviction, the belief, or the desire of the majority that will prevail in the struggle over the redefinition of a reality that would finally, once again, have a univocal meaning. To quote the current president of the United States, a prominent enemy of all forms of social science, in the deals it will always be the strongest that will prevail.

Whether in the form of a pre-modern Jew, or in the form of a Jew homogeneous with the thinking of the morally pure majority, and therefore whether in the form of a subjugated otherness or a subjugated identity, Jews have no right to exist, or even to be, except under the conditions of the majority.

Only in societies where politics is informed not only by technical and technocratic knowledge and expertise of all kinds, but also by knowledge of interdependencies and the evolution of the sense of justice that is realized through their constant reconfiguration, can Jews hope to be perceived as a minority essential to the composition of the whole, on an equal footing with all the other minorities that populate society. It is only through the reflexive integration of real interdependencies that Jews, like other minorities, can hope to really count. From the moment our societies no longer want to know what the Shoah is and how it resulted from their own misguided dynamics, what Israel is and how this country is linked to Europe and its long history, what antisemitism and its manifestations are, what the Jewish people are in their diversity, or how the diaspora and Israel are distinguished and articulated today, Jews, because of their structurally minority position, have no chance of being integrated into the new reality. For this new reality will draw its meaning, not from the justice that has already been achieved and is in search of further development, but from the majority’s desire to “do something”, even to remake the world. Unless they find the place that their past has already given them, before they became modern subjects: the place that this majority desire arbitrarily wants to assign them.

So far, we can identify two places for Jews in this game of desire. On the far right and in ultraliberalism, the place of the vassal, of the pre-modern Jew who must beg for protection from the prince, i.e. the strongest. And on the far left, whose orthodoxy remains anchored in the denunciation of domination, the place of the fellow traveler or comrade-in-arms who must renounce all solidarity with his people and his history to pay homage to the morally pure humanism of this left, which would never, oh never, harm a hair on the head of a Jew – as long as they think exactly as they are asked to think. These two re-primitivizations of thought have something in common: whether in the form of the pre-modern Jew, or in the form of the Jew who is homogeneous with the thought of the morally pure majority, and therefore whether in the form of subjugated otherness or subjugated identity, Jews have no right to citizenship, or even to exist, except under the conditions of the majority. Jewish powerlessness in modern societies is directly correlated to the non-Jews’ will to not know, to this act by which they escape from an increase in knowledge that complicates everything and allegedly imprisons them in an unbearable feeling of powerlessness.

Then the powerless moderns act. In the fables about two modern men who chose this way out of powerlessness, the act of creating a new reality whose meaning they defined based on their desire, the Jews who accompanied them in this adventure appear as intermediaries, as parasites taking advantage of the creative power of the non-Jewish man, as immoral, pushing our powerful heroes to commit crimes that they would not have dared to undertake on their own, even if they feel alive while committing them. Here, the Jews represent the cursed part in the creation of a new world that the majority, prey to the throes of its powerlessness, undertakes. We know that the Nazis also blamed the Jews for being ultimately responsible for the heinous crimes they committed against them.

Is this the only place available for Jews when modern people act? Once he has thrown the world into unspeakable chaos, will Trump explain that it is Israel’s fault, that it pushed him to act this way? It cannot be ruled out. Will those who, out of moral superiority, are currently advocating the outright condemnation of Israel as a domineering state, accuse the anti-Zionist Jews of having filled them with hatred of Israel at the first “anti-Zionist” murder to take place in Europe? It is not impossible. For the moment, on both sides of the political spectrum, the demand for submission seems to be the order of the day. And who can sincerely judge those who submit, given the objective powerlessness of the structurally minority minority when the majority takes action?

However, it may not be too late. It is true that large sections of the majority are seduced by the exit by the act. But we are not there yet. For the moment our democracies, here in Europe, are holding up. The relationship between the different interdependent parts of our societies is still governed by law and not by force. During this period, when it is still possible to change the situation, the task for everyone, but particularly for the minority with no hope or ambition of becoming the majority, can only be to describe the situation differently, as an experience of powerlessness for the Fausts and Walter Whites of this world, and to work to consolidate the sociological attitude. That is to say, to do everything possible to ensure that knowledge about our societies becomes a source of action and not a source of inhibition, and to remember that the interpretation of the world is the condition of its transformation – in any case, of the kind of transformation that happens through action.

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Julia Christ