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Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
ISBN 978 0 7486 4053 9
Jacket illustration: Goya, The Dog (1820-23).
Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid
Jacket design: Michael Chatfield
Of Jews and Animals
Andrew Benjamin
The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
This series brings together internationally respected figures to comment on and re-
describe the state of theory in the twenty-first century. It takes stock of an ever-
expanding field of knowledge and opens up possible new modes of inquiry within it,
identifying new theoretical pathways, innovative thinking and productive motifs.
The Frontiers of Theory
Of Jews
and Animals
Andrew Benjamin
Approximate Pantone colours: 727, plus tint on flaps, spine 4625
‘Andrew Benjamin has written an original and provocative meditation on the place of
the ‘figure’ of the animal in modern philosophy and culture. The book is remarkable for
its sensitivity to the issue of visibility and the use of visual material. The engagement
with the philosophical history of art is beautifully sustained and serves not only to work
through the theme of figuration but also to make the philosophical narrative available
to a wider range of readers.’
Howard Caygill, Goldsmith’s College, University of London
‘A stimulating book which will help those readers who, interested in the work of
Agamben and the late Derrida, wish to reflect more on the image of the animal in


classical continental philosophy.’
Peter Fenves, Department of German, Northwestern University
Of Jews and Animals
Andrew Benjamin
A philosophical concern with animals has played a central role within contemporary
philosophical discussions since Peter Singer’s work in the 1980s. However, recently
within the area of Continental Philosophy the question of the animal has become an
important area of academic inquiry. In addition, work on the figure of the Jew has for
years been an area of scholarly investigation.
By developing his own conception of the ‘figure’ Andrew Benjamin has written an
innovative and provocative study of the complex relationship between philosophy, the
history of painting and their presentation of both Jews and animals. As Benjamin makes
clear the ‘Other’ is never abstract. He underscores the means by which the ethical
imperative, arising from the way the history of philosophy and the history of art are
constructed, shows us how to respond to an already identified, even if
unacknowledged, determinant other.
Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics and
Director of the Research Unit in European Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Monash
University. His most recent books are Writing Art and Architecture (2009) and Style and
Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance (2006).
Of Jews and Animals
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The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger,
Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer
Timothy Clark
Dream I Tell You
Hélène Cixous
Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human

Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius
Jacques Derrida
Insister of Jacques Derrida
Hélène Cixous
Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of
Jacques Derrida
Geoffrey Bennington
Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art
Robert Rowland Smith
Reading and Responsibility
Derek Attridge
Of Jews and Animals
Andrew Benjamin
The Romantic Predicament
Paul de Man
The Book I Do Not Write
Hélène Cixous
The Paul de Man Notebooks
Paul de Man
Veering: A Theory of Literature
Nicholas Royle
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Of Jews and Animals
Andrew Benjamin
Edinburgh University Press
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© Andrew Benjamin, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Adobe Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4053 9 (hardback)
The right of Andrew Benjamin
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Series Editor’s Preface xi
OPENING 1
1. Of Jews and Animals 3
PART I 21
2. Living and Being: Descartes’ ‘Animal Spirits’ and
Heidegger’s Dog 23
3. The Insistent Dog: Blanchot and the Community without
Animals 51
4. Indefi nite Play and ‘The Name of Man’: Anthropocentrism’s
Deconstruction 74
PART II 93
5. What If the Other Were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals
and Disease 95
6. Agamben on ‘Jews’ and ‘Animals’ 113
7. Force, Justice and the Jew: Pascal’s Pensées 102 and 103 130

8. Facing Jews 151
ANOTHER OPENING 179
9. Animals, Jews 181
Index 195
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List of Illustrations
Figure 3.1 Goya, The Dog (1820–3) 52
Figure 6.1 Piero della Francesca, Saint Michael (1454) 114
Figure 6.2 Bartolomé Bermejo, St Michael Triumphant Over
the Devil (1468) 115
Figure 8.1 Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfi ni Betrothal (1432) 156
Figure 8.2 Jan van Eyck, segment focus from The Arnolfi ni
Betrothal (1432) 157
Figure 8.3 Velásquez, Las Meniñas (1656) 158
Figure 8.4 Dürer, Jesus Among the Doctors (1506) 159
Figure 8.5 Dürer, Self- Portrait (1498) 160
Figure 8.6 School of van Eyck, The Fountain of Grace and
Triumph of the Church Over the Synagogue (1430) 161
Figure 8.7 School of van Eyck, segment detail from The
Fountain of Grace and Triumph of the Church
over the Synagogue (1430) 162
Figure 8.8 Dürer, face detail from Jesus Among the Doctors
(1506) 168
Figure 8.9 Dürer, hands detail from Jesus Among the Doctors
(1506) 169
Figure 9.1 Turner, Dawn After the Wreck (c.1841) 182
Figure 9.2 Piero di Cosimo, Satyr Mourning the Death of
Nymph (1495–1500) 183
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Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge colleagues and friends whose comments
on specifi c chapters played an important role in helping me develop
the overall argument: Howard Caygill, Karen MacCormack, Heidrun
Friese, Helen Hills, Paul Hills, Terry Smith, and Elena Stikou. In par-
ticular, I would like to thank Dimitris Vardoulakis who not only read
the work, but our ensuing discussions played an essential part in its
overall formulation. I presented most of these chapters as lectures and
seminars in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College,
University of London. Goldsmiths College was the indispensible setting
that enabled the book to be written. I would like to thank John Hutnyk
and Scott Lash for the kind invitation to be a Visiting Professor in the
Centre. I also wish to thank Lydia Glick and Juliet Trethenick for their
help in the preparation of the manuscript. Martin McQuillan, editor
of the series The Frontiers of Theory, and Jackie Jones at Edinburgh
University Press have both been unstinting in their support of my work.
A number of these chapters have been published before. However, they
have been extensively rewritten and the vocabulary of this project has
been incorporated within them.
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For Sam and Lucy, with love
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Series Editor’s Preface
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends
and after- life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory but a signifi cant consensus has been estab-
lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves

so- called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures
of auto- critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a
more- than- critical affi rmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thought’s own limits?
‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nomial effect the trans-
formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in
an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a
‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisons such think-
ing. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon
Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it- is- necessary of
Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,
this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges
complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.
It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in
the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers
of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is
interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of cross-
ing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specifi city of disciplines.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,
this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued
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xii Of Jews and Animals
exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters
modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims
to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.
Martin McQuillan

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Opening
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Chapter 1
Of Jews and Animals
Two terms joined in order to create a title: Of Jews and Animals. With
that creation, there is the inevitable risk that their conjunction will be
misunderstood. It could be read as though the terms announce a possible
reduction or a forced similarity in which not only would specifi city be
denied, but the prejudice in which Jews were equated, to their detriment,
with animals would have been reiterated, as if, in other words, that reit-
eration and thus connection were simply unproblematic. Nonetheless,
there is an important relationship between Jews and animals. They
appear within the history of philosophy, art and theology in ways in
which the differing forms of conjunction mark the manner in which
dominant traditions construct themselves. In certain instances, however,
it is the separate presence of Jews and animals that serve the same ends.
This study is concerned with both these eventualities. The weave of
animal and Jew, their separate and connected existence, thus of Jews
and animals.
To begin: allowing for a specifi c fi gure of the Jew provides, for
example, the axis around which Pascal can develop his version of
Christian philosophy. The interconnection between the Jew and the
animal within the philosophical writings of Hegel, again as a specifi c
instance, becomes an exacting staging of the complex way these two
fi gures are already implicated in the philosophical project of position-
ing the relationship between particular and universal, The result of that
positioning is that neither the Jew nor the animal, though for differ-
ent reasons, can form part of a generalised conception of universality,

especially that conception of the universal that would incorporate all
modes of being. In broader terms a fundamental part of the argument
to be traced in the writings of Heidegger, Hegel, Pascal, Agamben and
Blanchot as well as in relation to specifi c moments within art history
concerns the complex relation that the Jew and the animal – separately
and together – have to forms of universality. The form taken by that
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4 Of Jews and Animals
relation is that to the extent that universality prevails both the Jew and
the animal have to be held as excluded. What this means, of course, is
that both are retained within the subsequent history that accompanies
philosophy, theology, etc., as the excluded; hence the state of being
‘held’. Consequently, a fundamental element guiding this analysis is
that the Jew and the animal, on their own as well as together, can be
attributed a privileged position, fi rstly, in the way philosophical systems
create and sustain identities as fi gures and, secondly, in the analysis of
the complex interplay between universal and particular.
1
There are therefore two elements that are at work within the pres-
ence, either related or separately, of the Jew and the animal. Allusion
has already been made to both. The fi rst concerns what will be called
the fi gure of the Jew and the fi gure of the animal.
2
The second refers
to the question of particularity. In regards to the fi rst, the point of the
term ‘fi gure’ is that it indicates that what is at work is the presentation
of the Jew and the animal in ways that enable them to play an already
determined role in the construction of specifi c philosophical and theo-
logical positions. Figure can be defi ned therefore as the constitution
of an identity in which the construction has a specifi c function that is

predominantly external to the concerns of the identity itself. Not only
will this play a signifi cant role within the imposition of the quality of
being other, it will sanction, at the same time, the possible reposition-
ing of the other as the enemy. (The ‘other’ here is the generalised term
designating alterity.) This is by no means an extreme or attenuated
repositioning. On the contrary, the move from other to enemy is a pos-
sibility that is already inherent in the category of the other. A further
aspect of the fi gure that needs to be noted in advance is that fi gures are
not just given, they have to be lived out. The fi gure therefore can have
an effect on the operation of institutions as well as the practices of
everyday life. Finally, in the case of the fi gure of the Jew there will be
an important distinction (one admitting of a form of relation) between
a construction of Jewish identity within Judaism itself and the fi gure
of the Jew. The latter is always external to Judaism while at the same
time presenting back to Judaism an identity that invariably comes
from without but which has a continual effect on how identity is to
be affi rmed.
The second element central to the overall project concerns what can
be described as the development of a metaphysics of particularity. As
has been indicated the fundamental conjecture underpinning this project
is that the complex determinations taken by the relationship between
the universal and the particular are continually being worked out in the
way the fi gure of the Jew and the fi gure of the animal are positioned
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Of Jews and Animals 5
within specifi c philosophical and theological texts as well as in given
works of art. Two of these determinations are of special interest in this
context. The fi rst involves what will emerge as the threat of particularity
and therefore, in light of this threat, of the need for its exclusion in the
name of the universal; the second is the retention of the particular within

that structure in order that its continual exclusion sustains universality.
Precisely because retention refers to the presence of fi gures, retention
does not entail the actual presence of the excluded. Indeed, a signifi cant
aspect of the fi gure’s presence is that actions that take place in relation
to it need not depend upon the actual existence of those fi gured. (The
fi gure can function therefore within an effective imaginary existence in
which the threat of the particular is effective independently of the actual
or real presence of those fi gured.
3
)
The differing components of the fi gure as well as those that char-
acterise the continual positioning of the particular in relation to the
universal are clearly interconnected with regard to the formation of
philosophical and theological texts. This is especially the case when the
larger philosophical project is either to establish that which is proper to
human being or where that sense of propriety is already assumed in the
further elaboration of positions depending upon it. While this setting
holds across a range of sources, within this project it also provides the
point of entry into works of art. In this context, it will be the human face
in which portraiture becomes the face of human being. The retention
of that face brings with it the need to exclude others (present as other
faces) whose specifi c presence, often in terms of deformation, reiterates
the same structure of exclusion and inclusion. The faces in question, in
this instance, are those of Jews.
While both these elements stand in need of greater clarifi cation, as has
been indicated above, they intersect. The fi gure of the Jew is already the
enacting of a version of particularity. The fi gure presents, in sum, the
particular that cannot be named by any form of universality as belong-
ing to that universal. Naming in this sense is a form of exclusion. This
is not to suggest that the more abstract philosophical problem of uni-

versals and particulars needs to be given automatically this extension.
The force of the overall argument is the other way around. Namely, that
any position that is concerned with the question of identity is always
articulated within a certain construal of particularity and universality.
In other words, it is not as though questions of identity – the work of
fi gures – cannot be approached philosophically. In allowing for such an
option what emerges as a consequence is another way in which the phil-
osophical can engage with the political. (This position will be developed
in greater detail in the analyses to follow.)
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6 Of Jews and Animals
Figures
Even though the fi gure refers to the constitution of an identity it should
not be counterposed to the assumption of authenticity. The contrary
is the case. While the fi gure concerns a form of construction, what it
– the fi gure – is opposed to is the possible affi rmation of an identity.
Affi rmation has no necessary relation to the essential. (The fi gure is
that which essentialises.) The affi rmation of identity becomes a way in
which identities – in their complexity – are either lived out, or there is
a related position in which those identities, thus lives, are allowed to
be lived out. (The latter position is clearly that which obtains in regard
to animals.) The fi gure stands opposed to this double possibility within
affi rmation. What this opposition to affi rmation amounts to therefore
is the refusal of any possible fraying or undoing of the singularity that
the fi gure constructs. The manner in which the fi gure functions in con-
structing versions of the singular and thus of particularity provides the
way into understanding what can be called the work of fi gures. There is,
however, an inbuilt reciprocity with the work of the fi gure. To the extent
that fi gures are created, fi gures that grant identity by imposing it, then
what occurs with that act of imposition is the self- attribution of identity.

Figures are involved in a double attribution of identity. In other words,
not only does the fi gure impose identity, the act of imposition is integral
to securing the identity- of the position from which the initial identity-
giving act originated.
The work of fi gures becomes one of the means by which the position
of the other, in all its permutations, including the other as enemy, is
created and sustained. That creation will involve a form of constitution
that can work in at least two different ways. In the fi rst, the other (in
all its possible forms) acquires that status through considerations that
have a pragmatic quality. This would include calculations concerning
how political power may be obtained and sustained. The second way a
form of constitution works is linked to the movement in which the other
acquires the position of being other as the result of a process of natu-
ralisation. Within this setting the other is the other because of ‘nature’.
The positing of nature, however, has to be understood as a construction
that is internal to the process that is itself the creation of fi gures. A clear
instance of this occurs in Plato’s Republic in regard to the repositioning
of the other as the enemy.
4
Even though the ‘enemy’ may be a limit con-
dition, the distinction between other as friend and other as enemy has
direct relevance to the operative dimension within the fi gure of the Jew.
In an attempt to nuance the distinction between friend and enemy
Plato allows for two different realms of struggle. The fi rst concerns
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Of Jews and Animals 7
internality, hence a difference that is situated within the domain of the
Greeks, while the second is between two entities defi ned by two distinct
and unrelated senses of internality. The distinction gives rise to the fol-
lowing formulation:

I say that the Hellenic race genos is friendly to itself
and akin and foreign and alien to the barbarian. (470C)
In regard to the latter there is an enmity and thus the presence of enemies
that are positioned as such by ‘nature’ (phusis). In order to distinguish
between these two domains Plato defi nes the relation between the
Hellenic and the foreign in terms of ‘war’ (polemos) and any division
that pertains exclusively to internal relations in terms of a ‘faction’
(stasiw). (These involve civil wars or internal rebellions.) While the dis-
tinction may bring with it a series of attendant problems, and though
this will always be the case when what is at stake is the attempt to estab-
lish a clearly defi ned opposition, nonetheless, it sets out in advance the
way the divisions and thus related concepts such as security and war are
given by the interplay of commonality on the one hand and the complex
relation between friend and enemy on the other.
The difference between friend and enemy is that the latter is positioned
in terms of externality. Being the enemy is a position constructed through
the confl ation of race and nature. Once created as a consequence of that
confl ation the state of being the enemy is one that cannot be overcome.
This is the power of nature. The enemy therefore has to be conquered.
Subjugation is the only possibility. The point is that once understood
in terms that give ‘nature’ a productive dimension within the work of
fi gures it then follows that enemies do not exist because of nature; rather
‘nature’ is used to create and then defi ne the other as the enemy.
What is central here therefore is the way the enemy fi gures: the enemy
as a construction defi ned in relation to ‘nature’. Nature emerges – more
emphatically nature is posited – in order to create the non- arbitrary
quality of the enemy. The formulation in the Republic is clear. Greeks
and barbarians ‘are enemies by nature’. In other words, they are enemies
in virtue of being what they are. The antipathy is not only ‘natural’
(‘nature’ as a posited ground), it depends upon the individual singularity

of those involved. This construction of an essential nature – the con-
struction of a fi gure – can be reinforced by reference to another dialogue,
i.e. the Menexenus.
5
Here the argument is that in certain instances those
who are only ’nominally Greek’ – Greek by name or convention (nomow)
– are nonetheless ‘naturally barbarians’ (245D). What this means is that
though the barbarians were named Greek, where the process of naming
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8 Of Jews and Animals
follows convention (onoma determined by nomow) this does not affect
the quality of the already attributed specifi c essential nature and thus the
work of the fi gure. Convention is structured such that it is necessarily
distinct from the construction of an essential identity. The latter is a con-
struction in which nature provides the fi gure with both its identity and
its unity. The fi gure will always have a singular determination. In regard
to the distinction between friend and enemy the determining presence
of ‘nature’ means that the relation is not determined by convention and
thus is not a distinction that is merely strategic or pragmatic.
6
While the distinction between the enemy and the faction has a
complex presence within Greek philosophical thought the distinction is
relevant here as it can be taken to mirror a distinction that Pascal will
draw in his creation of the fi gure of the Jew in the Pensées. In that text,
and refl ecting a longer tradition, he allows for two types of Jew.
Les juifs étaient de deux sortes. Les uns n’avaient que les affections païennes,
les autres avaient les affections chrétiennes. (289)
(The Jews are of two sorts. Those who only have pagan feelings, the others
that have Christian feelings.)
7

The difference in which the second type can be located has a complex
register. The Jew with ‘Christian feelings’ can be tolerated. The differ-
ence is not essential. It is not given by nature. These are the Jews that
will in the end be an object of ‘love’. ‘Love’ (agapé) within the Christian
context is that which announces the overcoming of difference.
8
On the
other hand, those with ‘pagan feelings’ are not simply intolerable, if
there is a difference then it cannot be overcome. It is as though ‘nature’
is operative. This is the Jew that is positioned as the ‘enemy’.
9
While
the analysis of Pascal – in Chapter 7 – will argue that both conceptions
of the Jew, with their own form of difference, are fundamental to the
construction of Christianity as universal (and in its apparently secular-
ised form within constructions of universality that involve a reiteration
of the same logic), what is of interest here is that what is enacted is the
distinction between friend and enemy. The enemy is always an object of
an act of creation that is then naturalised. The result of the process of
naturalisation is that what cannot be addressed to the enemy are ques-
tions concerning how that status has been acquired. The enemy becomes
what is – again the position or designation ‘enemy’ is produced – the
result of an ineluctable, thus unavoidable, process. The response to such
a set up can only ever be to denature it. If there is a further element to
the affi rmation of identity then it can be found in its already being the
‘denaturing’ of nature’s posited existence.
10
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