original [Wiley] Excluding The Jew Within Us

Why does antiSemitism seem to be so deeply engrained in our societies, our institutions and our attitudes To answer this question we need to look beyond our current practices and see that antiSemitism has much deeper roots that it is woven into the very structures of Western thought.JeanLuc Nancy argues that antiSemitism emerged from the conflictual conjunction of two responses to the eclipse of archaic cultures. The Greek and the Jewish responses both affirmed a humanity freed from myth but put ward two very different conceptions of autonomy: on the one hand, the infinite autonomy of knowledge, of logos, and on the other, the paradoxical autonomy of a heteronomy guided by a hidden god. The first excluded the second while simultaneously absorbing and dominating it; the second withdrew into itself and its condition of exclusion and domination. How could the long and terrible history of the hatred of the Jew, masking a selfloathing, be generated by these intrinsically contradictory beginnings That is the question to which this short book gives a compelling answer.ABOUT THE AUTHORJeanLuc Nancy (1940 2021) was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg.