Suddenly finding yourself with embodied thought (forgive the corniness) doesn’t happen much. It happened to me this week in a seminar on Hannah Arendt at the CCCB in Barcelona, where time folded so that her words took shape and strength in another thinker, none other than Judith Butler. Butler wrote somewhere that, for a Jew, there can be nothing worse than being accused of anti-Semitism. It is something that Arendt also felt when in 1948 she warned of the danger of creating an ethno-nationalist State, since it would end up generating a thought crossed by military strategy and an economic development subordinated to the needs of war, something incompatible with liberal democracy and political plurality. . And in this room full of women, many of them academics, Butler, from the audience, raises her hand and, in a tone of emotion, makes Arendt present from idea to idea. One perceives in it the bitterness of someone who has experienced the intimidating effect of that hysterical political discourse that sees anti-Semitism everywhere and that seeks to silence criticism, as Israel does with the UN or with Europe, or as in its recent overreaction due to the diplomatic position. Spanish.
Butler says he receives a lot of emails from people who live in Israel. One day, when opening one of them under the subject “Feminist Conference,” she saw a video where a Hamas terrorist raped a Jewish woman. Her message urged her to condemn him: “Or is it that the lives of Jewish women are worth less?” They snapped. Butler has been thinking about this for a long time, about the dehumanization of the other caused by religious fundamentalism, about how we manage vulnerability within the framework of such close, but also so unequal, dependencies. In the name of its sovereignty, Israel transforms violence into self-defense to make it appear legitimate. The response of the rest of the democracies, Habermas has said, is another framework: the principle of solidarity. But what if the setting is a colonial context that denies citizenship status to civilians in a stateless population? What if, by thus eliminating the very concept of “civilians,” a crime against them is just “collateral damage”? What happens if, while rape videos released by Hamas circulate, Israeli bombs surgically kill reporters who try to witness what is happening on the other side? At what point have we mixed criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews? These are questions that Butler has asked himself.
The brave North American philosopher also wonders why we are incapable of thinking about them beyond their condition as victims. Thinking of Jews only as victims is the reason why Germany, for example, assumes a victimhood position with which, paradoxically, it arrogates to itself the moral authority to interpret the lessons of the Holocaust. They are lessons that Arendt never translated as “Never again against the Jews” but from universality. “Never again” because we can all be victims. “Never again” because we can all be executioners. Embodied thought.
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