This week on the website, Sarah Hammerschlag returns to Emmanuel Levinas’s postwar thought, examining the uneasy consequences of a formulation of Jewish identity tied to suffering. On Forms of Life, UC Berkeley undergrad Saisha Agarwal reports from Turning Point USA’s final stop at her campus, where competing conceptions of Berkeley’s legacy of “free speech” collide. And from the archive, we’re sharing Point editor Jesse McCarthy’s 2018 conversation with Asad Haider on his book Mistaken Identity. We were saddened to hear this weekend of Asad’s untimely passing, and recommend as well the lucid, intellectually challenging essays he went on to write for us, on Stuart Hall and the political phenomenon of “dismissal.”
There is a strange ironic alignment I experience now with my subject, with the generation of post-World War II French Jews and their allies, intellectuals that I have studied since graduate school. They too felt a call to identify with the tradition, to think about it and write about it, in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The irony arises from the fact that the demand they felt stems from their experience of a shared victimhood, while I feel implicated in the crimes of the perpetrators. It is not a comfortable feeling, one that would be easier to disown if, in the last seventy years, modern American Judaism had not sewn such tight transatlantic stitches, binding itself inextricably to the nascent state of Israel.
The president of Turning Point Berkeley stepped to the podium, and only then did I recognize him as the boy who sits across from me in my political philosophy class. Two months earlier, we had been in the same lecture on virtue when the notification of Kirk’s assassination lit up my phone.
“Our selfhood is something that derives from the languages and systems and norms of the society as it is. It’s not something that we can just get rid of or negate or pretend isn’t there. It’s in some sense our condition for even being able to speak and enter into dialogue with our society. But it’s also something that we have to constantly put into question, if we’re going to put into question the structures of the society as it exists. We have to understand that our selfhood can’t be the foundation of any kind of politics which is seeking to transform the society.”
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