Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Locating Themselves in History { 123

hilate and abandon himself [sich zu vernichten und aufzugeben] to understand

himself as the passive instrument [das leidende Werkzeug] that affords the deed,

in its quest to become word, passage through a neutral region; in short, to watch

how events manage to find the expression appropriate to them by themselves

and without aid.”^107 Gans’s desire to annihilate his subject position in order

to become a neutral observer and a passive instrument of a historiographical

operation, whereby events write themselves, accords with a nineteenth-century

ideal of scholarly objectivity, but in Gans’s case the will to transparency and

objectivity is overdetermined by the crisis of the status of his Jewish subjectivity.

In the foreword to “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” Zunz adopts the first

person only long enough to banish it from his discourse proper.^108 But if Zunz

in 1818 sought to retreat into the pure objectivity of Wissenschaft, Gans in 1823

finds himself in the thornier predicament of wishing to coincide with a Hegelian

version of necessary rational historical process while also needing to render an

account of the Verein’s historical failure.

As Gans tries to negotiate the hazard his subject position has become, he

enacts something akin to what Freud theorizes as the “splitting of the ego in the

process of defense” to account for the Verein’s failure.^109 Gans narrates this fail-

ure, that is, from a bifurcated enunciatory position that seeks self-confirmation

through a strategy of self-circumvention: “I have many severe things to say today,

and it is not I who says them; I must lay bare the ultimate causes of a miserable

vegetative existence, and it is not I who lays them bare. I must speak of weakness

and poverty of spirit, of half-heartedness and paucity of love; and I wish I were

able to speak of so many virtues.... Would that I could bar the door against this

subject [Gegenstand], so that it would choose a different instrument to divulge

itself! Long have I tried... [and] fought against it and refused it entry, but

its superior power has finally prevailed and insists on asserting itself.”^110 Gans

clearly is loath to see himself and his colleagues as so many stranded subjects

who have misjudged the course of history. His strategy of self-abnegation is both

ingenious and poignant, as it allows him to speak in the negated first person:

no Ich but rather a nicht-Ich enunciates the account of the Verein’s failure. The

enunciating nicht-Ich finds its counterpart in the nicht-Sie it addresses: “Is it we,

I hear it being asked, the members of this association, to whom these words of

incrimination are directed? Is it we, who, with sacrificing love, are dedicated to

a collective purpose, at whom this load [Last] of such strong reproofs is being

hurled?... And I answer: it is not you whom I mean [nicht Sie sind es, die

ich meine] .”^111 Despite certain shortcomings on the part of the Vereinler, Gans

says, they are not the real problem. In fact, Gans remarks that it would be bet-

ter if the fault could indeed be located in the Vereinler, because then they could