2021, issue 2
After All, It Is Only an Animal…
Guilel Treiber
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Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC
BY 4.0). © 2021 The author(s).
DOI Licence
Krisis 41 (2): 79-80.
10.21827/krisis.41.2.38280
792021, issue 2
After All, It Is Only an Animal…
Guilel Treiber
A standard bon ton in the milieu of radicals is that the colony was the testing ground
for Auschwitz. Initially, the statement was meant to elevate the suering of the colony.
It ended by downgrading Auschwitz. Nowadays, Auschwitz is a mere repetition of the
horrors of colonialism. It is nothing more than the perfection of methods tried else-
where. The argument only holds if one tries hard to forget history, and only if one dives
fully dressed into the warm, murky waters of a Judeo-Christian Europe. What better way
is there to clean one’s sins than by making the victims the originators of the culture and
land that has devoured them again and again and again. According to this logic, very
soon, one will write of Judeo-African-Arab-Christian Europe. One should beware of
naively adopting the discourse of those whose identity has always been mere imitation.
Freud may have been wrong on all points concerning Moses; however, there is
one where he got it right. Antisemitism is one of the oldest, most ancient forms of the
hatred of dierence and, simultaneously, of identity. One hates those who tried to do
things dierently by reducing everything to the one. If there is an original Jewish sin, it
is the sin of the universal, not that of whiteness or European culture. Nietzsche already
stated as much in his genealogy of slave morality. He thought he saw a way out of it.
Little did he know that what he understood as overcoming was just a tiny drunken hic
before full acceleration. Indeed, slave morality and its nihilistic drive have never been
better. The creation of values is dead. Long-live the return of the repressed, long-live
the universal Victim (or the victim of the Universal?).
Adorno wrote that the real dierence between the intellectual and the activist
is that the latter is less aware of its “entanglement” in capitalism and colonialism (§ 6).
He did not know the startling, synthetic form very well: the intellectual-activist who
not only eaces self-reexivity but renders its eacement opaque by linguistic prowess
and wordy acrobatics (Adorno may have detected this gure in the wrestler-intellectual,
§ 87). In their work, the intellectual-activist states, in passing, what they would have
wanted to say out loud – by becoming Israelis, Jews replaced the Nazis. To be honest,
the Jews were never that dierent from their oppressor. The dominated are always
implicated in their own domination (§ 117 & § 119). However, those Jews who replaced
the torments of Europe by wanting to become like all other nations needed time to
learn the art of domination, to master that of colonialism and oppression. They are yet
to grasp that of genocide. They have not actualized a potentiality always implied in
nationalism. Indeed, only the contamination of Jewish thinking by raison d’état could
have led to Gaza.
However, let us not make the mistake, Gaza is not Auschwitz (not yet). And
Auschwitz did not take 400 years to perfect. It took two millennia of ongoing perse-
cution. What was done in Africa, the Americas or Asia was rst tried at ‘home’ on the
Jews. Forgetting this is to forget that the Jewish bourgeois and the European colonialist
of pre-WWII Europe may look alike yet are dierent in rank and kind (§ 6). Let’s say it
clearly: Algiers, Auschwitz, or Gaza, should not be made into a competition of suering;
they are humanity’s “progress into hell” (§ 149).
802021, issue 2
“Only a crippled mind needs self-hatred in order to demonstrate its intellectual
essence – untruth – by the size of its biceps” (§ 87). Indeed, by its willingness to use
violence in the name of victimhood it does not know, to employ misogynic-phallic
metaphors in the name of women it always ignored, and to declare grand state-
ments to obsessively veil the narrowness of mind it tries so compulsively to hide, the
wrestler-intellectual ignores the fact that they too are walking knee-deep in blood.
That the Jews are the apex of White European bourgeoisie and, hence, may be erad-
icated (theoretically at least) is not only “economic sophistry” but also the denial of
“the infernal machine” that is Western history (§ 149). The wrestler-intellectual who
“relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror” for the sake of choosing only one,
most horrible Victim, where all others are eaced, “fails to perceive” “the true identity
of the whole”, that is, “terror without end” (§ 149).
The only “emancipated society” that can exist is not one where pessimistic
intellectuals will pit racial dierences against each other in the name of the Victim’s
moral purity. Nor is it a society where these dierences are eaced for the sake of an
abstract “equality for all”. A truly emancipated society is one where “the realization of
universality” can happen in the “reconciliation of dierences”, where one (and com-
munities) can be “dierent without fear” (§ 66). The only way forward is by writing a
history of the pogrom, of which Auschwitz, Gaza and Cape Town are chapters, where
the perpetrator being Aryan, white, black, Jew, or Asian is a mere epiphenomenon of
what is truly at stake: “what was not seen as human and yet is human, is made a thing”
to be discarded since “after all, it’s only an animal” (§ 68).
Guilel Treiber is an affiliated post doctoral researcher
at the Centre for Research in Political Philosophy
and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE). He specializes in
the study of resistance and political protest via a
poststructuralist perspective. He is currently working
on a synthesis between Foucauldian genealogy
and Critical Theory in order to use the resulting
methodology to analyse our present conditions in
digitally connected mass societies.
Biography
