284 } Notes to Chapter 1
- Of course, the relationship between the subjective interiority of the practicing Jew
and the exteriority of the state undergoes an uncanny reversal insofar as the particular interi-
ority of the Jew is by definition exterior to what I have described as the “absolute interiority”
of the universal Kantian moral Mensch, which Bendavid sees as essentially coterminous with
the citizen, or Bürger. - Bendavid, ECJ, 59 – 60.
- Whereas the perceived essential identity between the moral and political led Fichte
to attenuate the role and authority of the state sharply, Bendavid attempts to enlist the state’s
support for a general abolition of Jewish ritual (allgemeine Abschaffung des Ceremonialge-
setzes). If politics, at bottom, is ethics by other means, then the state can be called on to
enforce morality. Fichte would later theorize a regime of ethically oriented compulsion, the
Notstaat (Das System der Sittenlehre nach den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre, 238 – 44 ). - Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, 36.
- Paul Rose notes Fichte’s politicization of Kant’s construction of the Jew as the nega-
tion of free moral autonomy: “Relying on Kant’s a priori ethical definition of the Jew as the
negation of freedom and morality, Fichte in 1793 constructed a political definition of the Jew
as a being inherently unsuitable for citizenship and civil rights” (RA, 121 ). - Following Fichte’s own graphic of four concentric circles representing—from largest
to smallest—the spheres of moral conscience, natural rights, contracts tout court, and civil
contracts in particular (that is, states), one could represent a plurality of states as so many
nonoverlapping circles (polka dots, if you will) within the sphere of possible contractual
arrangements (Fichte, Beitrag, 97 ). In such a Fichtian schematic, states within states would
look no different from the larger states within which they were geographically situated. This
is worth emphasizing: if represented in Fichte’s own schematic, states within states are in-
distinguishable from other states. The intersection of states—in this case, the location of
a smaller state within a larger one—is purely spatial and, though raising a host of practi-
cal issues, is philosophically irrelevant within Fichte’s framework. Different civil contracts,
philosophically speaking, cannot overlap and are mutually exclusive. There is, then, an in-
teresting tension between the rhetorical power of Fichte’s antisemitic slogan and his analytic
framework, which actually strips the formulation of any philosophical integrity. Moreover,
the labeling of Jews as a state within a state seems curiously able to weather not only its own
philosophical vacuity (from Fichte’s point of view) but also its own utter inaptness as an
image. As Fichte points out in his highly alarmist way, Jews formed a community across a
great number of disparate states (ibid., 114 ). Thus, if they—as Jews—constitute a state, then
they certainly do not constitute a state within any state, either philosophically or geographi-
cally. - As Wood writes, Kant’s “Formula of Autonomy” in the Grundwerk “leads naturally
to the thought of all rational beings as constituting a moral community under a common
legislation, whose source is the rational volition they all share” (“General Introduction,”
xxix). - On the history of this slogan, see Jacob Katz, “A State within a State: The History of
an Anti-Semitic Slogan.” On Fichte, see ibid., 59 – 64. - Ascher critiqued this structural exclusion of Jews from humanity in Fichte and Kant
directly (Eisenmenger der Zweite, 77 – 78 ). On Ascher as a critic of Kant and Fichte, see
J. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity, 137 – 67.