[Orig to FB]
Joseph Kosuth, “One and Three Chairs” (1965)
Remember those dopey old Sausseurian diagrams with the word “tree” and a drawing of a tree? Or Kosuth’s piece “One and Three Chairs,” with a chair, a photo of the chair, and a dictionary definition of a chair? We need to have a conversation like that about antisemitism and “antisemitism” and “‘antisemitism’” etc — a conversation that carefully maintains distinctions between the idea, the word, the phenomenon, and maybe even a few other levels (like, say, the word’s functions and effects).
We need that conversation because antisemitism, both with and without however many quotes and brackets we wrap it it, behaves like a discursive black hole: it doesn’t acknowledge distinctions between the phenomenon, the photons that carry its image, or the viewer who sees them, it all just gets sucked in.
That’s a big part of how and why it’s such a potent concept — and also central to how the idea is sometimes used cynically and corruptly. I think that also describes how the phenomenon itself works, but my point here is precisely that that possibility MUST remain an entirely separate conversation.
We need this conversation because something very strange is going on: anti-antisemitic discourses, the explicit and deliberate efforts to quell antisemitism, are themselves becoming an empty, formal reenactment of the forms of repression they claim to deny.
I’m well aware that that claim resembles a much uglier illogic, which itself is a staple of antisemitism. But the word resembles is doing an awful lot of work there — and a lot of that work boils down to dissolving the distinctions I noted above.
We need to preserve these distinctions so we can have sane conversations about this. The only alternative is insane non-conversations, which is what we’re seeing now: bastions of intellectual inquiry being attacked, colonized peoples being annihilated, and now entire cities being incinerated because something bad might happen again. Enough. (Kosuth pic to make you look.)