Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

30 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Bendavid and Fichte by the more fundamental binary of Jew versus Mensch.

The significant differences in their deployments of Kant notwithstanding, a

Kantian perspective leads both thinkers out of the traditional opposition be-

tween Christian and Jew into a pernicious and distinctly modern opposition

between Jew and Mensch, where civic competence is predicated on human

moral competence. Although both Bendavid and Fichte stress the fundamental

misanthropy (Menschenfeindlichkeit) of the Jews, we must—in order to under-

stand clearly the problem that the Jews pose to Bendavid’s and Fichte’s Kantian

reasoning—turn the tables and ask not why the Jews, as the age-old charge has

it, are misanthropic, but rather why the Kantian conception of humanity has

such difficulty accommodating Judaism. As a functioning ethical community

that resists assimilation to the universal ethics of Kantian humanity, the Jews mark

the possibility of a limit to this would-be universalist moral project. It is precisely

because the Jew resides at the periphery of Bendavid’s and Fichte’s Kantian

understanding of the human, I would argue, that they subject the figure of the

Jew to the normative force of their rhetorical violence. In Fichte’s and Benda-

vid’s fantasies of humanization through decapitation of the universal Mensch’s

uncanny Other, the Jew, the normative (but usually self-masking) violence that

constitutes the Kantian moral subject as universal becomes flagrant.

The fact that the two Kantians both resort to decapitation as the only pos-

sible means of incorporating Jews into the enlightened polity is striking. Behind

this radical and paradoxical cure, which succeeds (if it succeeds) by killing the

patient, looms the historical context of the Terror, in the shadow of which Ben-

david and Fichte wrote.^48 The violence also stems from the way each draws

on Kant’s moral philosophy in his conception of humanity, the state, and the

relationship between the two. An excursion into two related aspects of Kantian

moral philosophy will illuminate these issues. The first aspect is the relation-

ship, or rather the lack of relationship, between the sphere of Kantian morality

and any possible alterity or exteriority—the inability of Kant’s system to counte-

nance, or even acknowledge, any form of ethical difference. The second aspect

is the role violence plays in structuring the Kantian moral will. Exploring these

questions will help us understand why our two Kantians cannot imagine forms

of mediation between the ethical universality of the Kantian Mensch and the

moral particularity of the Jews, and so must resort to fantasies of the Jews’ radi-

cal and instantaneous erasure.

In a famous and singularly poetic passage intended to bridge the first and

second parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers a geographical image to

help his readers envision the nature of the epistemological terrain he is mapping.

He likens the phenomenal realm, the sphere of possible human knowledge, to