And here is this need for death, facing the social idea: the need to let blood flow and rise into the nation, in order to renew, and affirm, a certain covenant within the people that is ultimate, revealing the face of the social idea as essentially tribal affirmation via sacrifice — an idea that fails in spirit and needs a post-dialogical myth: one that does not depend on the actual other, but carries a longing for memory, a longing for ethics that requires no dialectical materialism and no social structure at all but usually some enemy. Fixated on the youth, to hold blood flowing in a moment of sacrifice that turns into the other's memory, and whose own commitment symbolizes the ethical that is never allowed to be produced between man and God.
Blood is caught in struggle. Blood is purified and gains meaning in death — or, alternatively, in the sanctification of spilled blood.
The social idea does not free itself from its mimetic Catholic and Christian foundations, rooted in mysticism. And in such moments it discovers its absolute enemy in Judaism, where the covenant of blood is in circumcision — in the word.
It sees in Judaism — which refuses to be normalized, and does not need spilled blood to exist, with or without God, as an idea and as a community — a mirror of the ugliness and limitation of the godless "we."
Were it not for Hitler, perhaps nationalism could have defeated the social; but the fusion of the national with the social was a matter of time, since the social needed a myth.
In any case, both the social and the national will see the Jew as alienation. Hence the stab-in-the-back legend, and hence the legend of the Protocols: that the one who tells the stories never gives his blood. And that even if he does, it cannot be that the storyteller does not come from the very blood of his audience.
And especially the Jews: the stories that frame the blood are their product, though they themselves do not make up the blood of society — they trade in it. In this, antisemitism is only the social idea's attempt to produce another mirror for itself, once it has gained power within a national framework: a second mirror, more sophisticated than Feuerbach's. Feuerbach's mirror was the first, in its capacity to criticize monotheism and religion.
The second, antisemitic mirror, which sees the Jew as a demiurge, is already the attempt to confront not only the alienation of the word from blood and from society as a living organism without myth — except the myth of blood struggling for liberation — but to defeat the foundations of forbidden wars, of impure struggles, that still exist within society as private abstractions: as imaginings and desires for freedom of thought.
Or as a system of law — in an attempt to seal society off from it.
In the social phenomenon, the concept is redeemed by the political act, in much the same way that the religious text is redeemed in ritual.
Torah and prayer are critique and praxis.
The political becomes a field of sacrifices that requires a demiurge, one who remains the same whether at the theoretical stage or at the stage of practice. Realization always requires a threat: there is no messiah without an anti-messiah. The social becomes horizontal; instead of wars of religion, wars become wars of political redemption. At the stage of the great faith there is no separation at all. But afterwards, at the stage after the political myth — the stage of the lesser faith and of positioning, in which the need for the second mirror, rather than the first, may be revealed all the more; the stage at which we have reached the sickness and consolidation must be carried out — at this stage a separation may occur again: between the Platonic moment, which requires a fusion of faith and redemptive struggle, and the Machiavellian moment, of producing the second mirror out of the pressure of the social moment. For the social moment, as I write here, always needs a horizontal expansion of meaning on the one hand, and on the other demands the entire horizon for itself — and therefore must enter back into the blood of the other in order to produce moments of meaning.
The paradox of the social lies in its claim to the universal, made out of the struggle against the demiurge.
Because of the Christian foundation, this Amalek is truly alive. This Amalek itself no longer knows whether it is fighting religion, in the first stage; capital, in the second; or the enemies of the revolution, of representation, of justice — who represent an essence that has already been eliminated, yet it keeps searching for a victim, because that essence proves the space cannot be purified of it, and so it searches for victims within the space itself.
For the logic of the project is protection from the victim: protection from the sin of becoming a victim, and protection from the sin of allowing oneself to be a victim. For to become a victim, and to be a victim, without God, is meaningless.
And because of the absence of the Jewish element, it is impossible to create a system of laws that separates us from it without being violent toward it. Nor can any unity be conceived so long as the mask is possible. From the outset, the claim to universality is impossible in the social moment, because its politics is always one of necessary sacrifice.
And this claim to universality — at first a kind of Platonic struggle for justice, a theory that fulfills itself, and later, at the stage of realization, after it has conquered the political field, the purification of the field itself — is nothing more than a license for whoever holds the power of interpretation over blood to rule the social in the name of the universal, through an attack on everything that threatens that power and that interpretation: that is, on the spirit, intellectual and political. What we see here is an ecclesiastical structure, one that seeks to rule blood, word and matter.
Therefore every social idea will begin as a negation of myth, but will then seek to crush the individual and God by finding a scapegoat that is not organic, one that preserves remnants of words, imaginings and interpretations that cannot be enforced or verified through the blood of the worker or the believer — or, today, of the Black man, the woman and the Arab.
In this I see Foucault as a Jewish thinker: one who moves social power from blood to the written word, after the power of blood collapsed. In some measure, a little like Nietzsche — only after the catastrophe Nietzsche partly created — he returns us to an idealist understanding of the word as the force that moves society (like Jung), while recognizing that socialist ideas themselves are no more than mythologies. Yes, the national ones too.
And in this age, apart from a war on the remnants of the verbal, Jewish myth, it is hard to see what else the social idea has to offer that does not depend on the technology of publics — whites, Jews — it itself regards as the enemy. Meanwhile, the left goes on accusing the Jews of being enemies of something deeper than the nation: enemies of the remnants of morality.
And in this we see Hegel, no less than Marx, as the destroyer of culture as a whole — the producer of the paranoia that follows "liberation," after promising social redemption. And, paradoxically, as the one who shows us that the social is never a universal liberation within any structure, but only a way of life that the social idea itself cannot live quietly and wholly so long as it denies religion and its founders —
so long as it fights its founders in their national and ethnic form: a continuation of the second mirror, which sees the myth it needs and can never produce without an equality between logic and morality — that is, the constitution of the Torah.
We want to believe that this is Russia: that it will offer a sober view of the social, post-national fantasy revived in the liberal West from the remnants of criticism.
If so, why does Russia go on producing antisemitism wholesale? Because it, too, does not believe in the social idea; it only uses it as a weapon — to dismantle mythological Jewishness, to weaken the West, and to sustain a world that, in its Machiavellianism, recalls Marx, or simply a Byzantine court: one that trades with everyone like Jews, and trades in Jews with everyone.
Russia does not want to free the father. It has created something new: the Jewish father as a useful factor within a politics already charged with the need to eliminate him. The blood libel changes, driven by a deep metaphysical longing for a justice that does not exist within the social system, outside the demiurge.
Russia does not want a world free of Jews. It wants a world in which Jews are fought. A world free of Jews is of no use to Russia, for then Russia itself might come to be seen as the Jew of the world.
It wants the Jew suffering and fought, so that it can go on exhausting all who remain bound to feudal-vassal conceptions — Western Europe and Islam — along a vector in which the second mirror of the social moment is fought, while forgetting that Feuerbach's first mirror had already dismantled the moment of meaning, from which there is no way back.
In this sense, the world must thank Russia for turning antisemitism into foreign policy. Without it, the social project would long ago have been defeated from within — and would then reveal, even more deeply, the nihilistic void of modernity.
