Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Off with Their Heads? { 37

Bendavid’s harmonization of the violence of state power with the moral

autonomy of the subject remains fragile at best. The problematic equation of

state agency with moral agency cannot provide a satisfactory resolution of the

dilemma of how to engage Kantian Nötigung in a Jewish subject who seems

to exist outside the purportedly universal inside of Kantian ethics. In fact, this

dilemma seems insoluble by any but phantasmic means. I suggest that Bendavid

conjures his gruesome image of decapitation as an attempt to resolve this aporia.

Easily overlooked precisely because it is, while alarming, “only” a metaphor,

Bendavid’s Jewish hydra is a condensation of his Kantian philosophical politics.

Arguing that only a total abolition of Jewish ceremonial practice would be ef-

fectual, Bendavid envisions a clean break from traditional Judaism, likening the

state-sponsored program of eradication he proposes to the heroic task of simul-

taneously severing all the myriad heads of the mythical hydra. We are reminded

of the violence of the categorical imperative that is, I have argued, self-inflicted at

the inception of Kantian ethical subjectivity. If individual Jews can muster, from

within, the will to become Menschen, then the state, with its paternalistic good

will, surely will adopt them as Bürger. Should they obstinately persist in their

allegiance to the collective Jewish pathology, however, the state must intervene

to cut off the malignant Jewishness they lack the will to “cast off ” themselves.

In doing violence to Jewish collective existence, the state does not violate the

basic rights of the Jews because, according to Bendavid’s particular deployment

of Kantian logic, it is only through this very violence that the Jews are liberated

from the pathological collective Jewish body and constituted as autonomous

human beings. The state’s violent intervention stands in for the self-inflicted

violence that inaugurates the Kantian ethical subject and thereby creates the

very autonomous moral subjects with whose moral law its politics can harmo-

nize. If, in Kant’s moral philosophy, Nötigung is imposed by one’s own moral

freedom, Bendavid’s coercion of his fellow Jews is of a more sociopolitical cast:

Kant’s practical reason, we might say, becomes Bendavid’s tactical reason, as he

admonishes Jews to will what is, as he sees it, practically necessary. The normal-

izing thrust of the last part of Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden attempts to

provide the Nötigung required to correct the historically deformed or, in Kant’s

term, “pathologically affected” Willkür of Bendavid’s less enlightened coreli-

gionists. He presents the Jews with a moral imperative to cast off their Jewish-

ness and become universal Menschen.

The metaphor of decapitation seems perfectly chosen to finesse the insoluble

problem that remains: how to incorporate any instance of moral alterity into

the absolute interiority of Kantian ethics. In its absolute violence, decapitation

provides a phantasmic resolution of this problem of the impossibility of me-