536825

research-article2014
JES0010.1177/0047244114536825Journal of European StudiesZolkos

Journal of European Studies

Aporias of belonging: Jean 2014, Vol. 44(4) 362­–377

© The Author(s) 2014
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Améry on ‘being a Jew sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0047244114536825
without Judaism’ and the jes.sagepub.com

tradition of conscious pariah

Magdalena Zolkos
Australian Catholic University

Abstract
The figure of the Jewish pariah has permeated Western cultural imagination, as demonstrated,
for example, by the re-emergence of the medieval myth of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, in
modern anti-Semitism. In Western European states the figure (and fantasy) of the Jewish pariah
helped to consolidate national identity in the modern period at the cost of exclusion and violence
against Europe’s others. This article focuses, first, on the cultural and political genealogy of the
tradition of the ‘conscious pariah’, which emerged in Jewish thought in the nineteenth century,
as a formation of the subject who asserts, rather than rejects or evades, her/his status as an
outcast. Second, the article situates the Jewish tradition of conscious pariahdom vis-à-vis the
work of Holocaust philosopher Jean Améry in order to critically analyse his alleged advocacy of
the victim-oriented politics of memory and historical redress. The argument is that in contrast
to the dominant interpretations of Améry’s thought as invested in the subject’s own suffering,
his negative constructions of Jewishness engender a philosophical gesture beyond the lachrymose
readings of Jewish history and pariahdom. Améry’s conception of the conscious pariah is an attempt
to inscribe ‘hyperbolic’ ethical content into the experience of deracination and estrangement.

Keywords
Jean Améry, European Jewish identity, genocidal witness, historical justice, hyperbole, the Jewish
pariah, trauma, victim/perpetrator, victim memory

Introduction
The recent wave of interest in the work of Jean Améry is related to the recognition that
his philosophical reflections on the condition of the victim of genocidal violence,
while written in the specific historical context of the post-war German project of

Corresponding author:
Magdalena Zolkos, Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University, Level 13, Tenison Woods
House, 8-20 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia.
Email: magdalena.zolkos@acu.edu.au
Zolkos 363

Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’), remain highly pertinent to

the contemporary debates of redressive and restorative justice (see, for example,
Brudholm, 2003; 2006). In this context, scholars have focused in particular on Jean
Améry’s engagement with Nietzsche’s ethical irrationalism and non-virtuous emotions
in his radical reframing of the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment as the ‘existential
dominant’ of the victim (Améry 1986: 64; see, for example, Brudholm 2008; Ure 2011;
Ben-Shai 2012). As Thomas Brudholm argues (2008), for Améry the victim’s ‘introver-
tive passion’ of resentment demarcates a radical and uncompromising ethical position in
redressive politics. This is because in contrast to collective attempts at institutionalized
and normalized reconciliation Améry’s ‘refusal to forgive’ articulates a hyperbolic ethics
of historical redress – one that cannot be ever fully and satisfactorily calculated, deliv-
ered and mastered. In a perhaps surprising similarity to Jacques Derrida’s statement
about forgiveness (2001: 32), Améry’s project articulates historical justice as ‘impossi-
ble’ not in the sense of political unfeasibility, but because the ‘possibility of failure …
continues to mark the event, even if it succeeds, as a trace of an impossibility’.1
Critical engagements with Améry’s ethics of resentment have emphasized the prob-
lems with constructing victim-based politics of memory, in which the subject retains a
strong investment in the binary victim–perpetrator relationship, and where the mnemonic
site of suffering continues to dominate the subjective terrain of the self (see Banki, 2009;
Yeatman, 2011: 61–86; Rosen, 2011: 277–305). For example, Joseph Rosen argues
(2011: 277) that in Améry’s subjective condition of the victim the ‘affective after-effects
of violence: an alienation from history, community, and even the possibility of a hopeful
future … persist unabated and even exacerbated by the absence of reconciliation’. The
hyperbolic notion of historical justice means that ‘the victim remains locked in a static
standoff with the historical perpetrator and unable to trust “the world” in general … how
[then] can victims disentangle themselves from the perpetrator so as to enable a re-
engagement with the world?’
Against that line of critique, this article situates Améry’s philosophy of justice in a
close relationship to his complicated European Jewish identity, which Améry defines
through a negative rubric of (non-)belonging as ‘being a Jew without Judaism’. Thus
defined, Jewishness remains focused less on the ‘individual aspects of [Améry’s] experi-
ence’, and more on ‘its exemplary qualities for his disastrous epoch’ (Rosenfeld 2002: 6,
8). My point is that what remains largely unrecognized in the current conceptual reading
of Améry’s work on the subject of victimhood is its Jewish formation. The question of
Jewishness in the interpretations of Améry’s philosophy is either brushed aside, or is
regarded as another dimension of the subjective experience of victimization and a ques-
tion of identity. In contrast, this article approaches the question of Jewishness in Améry’s
oeuvre in terms of the ethical framing of the question of justice, and its key ‘hyperbola’
– the subject’s irreconciliability with the memory not of one’s own suffering, but that of
another.
Conceptually, this article views Améry’s negative conception of Jewishness from the
reading lens of the figure of the ‘conscious pariah’. The tradition of the conscious pariah
developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Jewish thought in an attempt
to oppose the non-Jewish figurations of the Jew as an outcast and outsider (be it in the
form of the Medieval Christian myth of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, or the
364 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

secularized ideas about the Jewish heteronomous or parasitic societal presence in the
modern European nation state). The figure of the ‘conscious pariah’ resists the historical
violence of marginalization of European Jewry, not by rejecting or evading the Jewish
pariah status, but, paradoxically, through its ostensible acceptance, and its subsequent
re-articulation and trans-valuation. This article sketches the trope of the conscious pariah,
concentrating in particular on its two main thinkers and propagators, Bernard Lazare and
Hannah Arendt.
In the proposed interpretation, Améry’s ethics of resentment and hyperbolic justice
constitutes an integral part of the conscious pariah tradition, and, more importantly, it
marks its extension and radicalization in the Holocaust thinking about Jewish peripheral-
ity. Reading Améry’s internally conflicted stance on Jewishness from the perspective of
its aporetic belonging attests to a philosophical gesture beyond what Sznaider calls ‘lach-
rymose version of Jewish history’ (2011: 48) – that is, history of suffering and martyr-
dom. Instead, it inscribes ethical content into the idea of Jewish uprootedness and
estrangement. The second part of this article, proceeding in two sections, offers a reading
of Améry’s conception of Jewishness from this perspective, and elaborates on the signifi-
cance of the trope of the conscious pariah for the hyperbolic philosophy of historical
justice.

Reclaiming marginality: The Jewish figure of the conscious

pariah
In the cultures historically framed by Christian monotheism, the social practices of
marginalization of and violence against the Jewish populations were conflated with
the emergence of the myth of the pariah people (Maccoby, 1996; Nirenberg, 2003).
Within the political horizon of the Jewish emancipation in post-Napoleonic Europe,
the German-Jewish romantic dramatist Michael Beer in Der Paria was the first to
coin the metaphoric connection between, on the one hand, ‘a Hindu outcast not per-
mitted to fight for his country’ and, on the other, ‘the modern German Jew’
(Momigliano, 1980: 313). Within the Indian caste system, the Tamil word paṛaiyar
(literally meaning ‘hereditary drummer’) functioned as a descriptor not of the lowest
castes, but of the subjects located at the peripheries of the caste system, synonymous
with ‘untouchable’, a term prohibited in post-Gandhi India (Mehta, 2002). The caste
system imposed strict mobility restrictions on the members of the pariah group, as
well as ritualized prohibitions of contact between the pariahs and non-pariahs. It also
proscribed commensality and connubium by relegating the pariah to ‘polluting’ occu-
pations, such as grave-digging or butchery.
The logic underpinning Beer’s metaphorical construction of the ‘Jew as pariah’ was
thus that in both the case of the Indian caste system and in post-Napoleonic Europe the
subject encountered what Andrew Benjamin calls inclusion by exclusion, and exclusion
by inclusion (2011). It is not a straightforward rejection or expulsion. After all, the com-
munity needs the pariah to channel anxieties and affects endemic to its collective crises
(cf. Honig, 2003). Rather, it is a gesture of a liminal and precarious formation of a sub-
ject who embodies divergent, and seemingly irreconcilable, orders of belonging. In a
vernacular introduced by Georges Bataille (1985), both the Indian pariah and the
Zolkos 365

marginalized European Jew belong to the ‘heterogeneous’, rather than ‘homogenous’,

symbolic orders. Heterogeneity stands here for figuration of social unassimilability and
irreconcilability. For Bataille it has been rooted in the domain of the sacred, which ‘in
archaic societies [is] encompassed both by the pure and the impure’. To associate the
pariah with operations of subject liminality and marginality implies thus that s/he figures
not on the ‘lowest level of the social hierarchy’, but ‘completely outside the hierarchical
social body’ (1985).
A common archetypal trope in the Western sociological and cultural representations
of the Jewish pariah in the nineteenth century was a displaced, uprooted and wandering
subject. Thus, rather than represent the figure of an enemy or straightforward outsider, in
the cultural-political imagination of the Enlightenment, the Jew became a liminal and
ambiguous figure, bearing unstable meanings, and embodying heteronomous and seem-
ingly irreconcilable conditions of the body, which Zygmunt Bauman (1997), in his socio-
logical analysis of the pariah construct, translates into the Derridean notion of ‘the
undecideables’. For Bauman, the pariah and its counter-concept of ‘parvenu’ are key
notions of modernity. This is based on the assumption, adopted from Georg Simmel, that
modernity is concerned with societal mobility and motion. The parvenu and the pariah
express the nomadic sensibilities and vulnerabilities of the modern era, and are thus pre-
cursory to the post-modern nomadic identities of a refugee, a vagabond, a tourist, etc.
Importantly, the construct of the ‘Jew as pariah’ historically emerged at the time of the
civic and political emancipation of Western European Jewry, which dates back to the
French Revolution and to the Napoleonic extension of citizenship rights to Jews in
the conquered German kingdoms and duchies in the early nineteenth century. As such,
rather than refer to the pre-emancipatory status of the Jew, the pariah figuration was a
particular political enactment that accompanied the abolition of discriminatory laws of
medieval origins. Its deployment coincided with the formation of the so-called ‘Jewish
question’ against the background of the emergence of the European nation state (see e.g.
Parvikko, 1996), and demarcated the modern obsession with the figure of the stranger,
and, as Sarah Hammerschlag (2012: 11) argues, the ‘larger [romanticist] cultural preoc-
cupation with roots and rootlessness in Germany and France’. The pariah myth became
a substitutive and ‘quintessentially non-Jewish story about the Other’.
In their introduction to the Jewish writings of Hannah Arendt, Kohn and Feldman
argue that in the cultural and philosophical context of the Enlightenment the pariah figu-
ration of the Jew was subordinated to the modern politics and ideology of assimilation.
The limits of its political potential were thus evidenced by the fact that it did not sketch
the possibilities of ‘a new Jewish presence in German political life’, and, despite its
emancipatory rhetoric, the figure of ‘the Jewish pariah’ represented a distinctively non-
pluralist vision for Jewish-German co-existence (Kohn and Feldman, 2007: xli–lxxvi).
The philo-Semitic rhetoric often masked deeper anti-Semitic investments in collective
social fantasies insofar as the pariah myth absorbed and metabolized pre-existing preju-
dices against and stereotypes of the Jews. In his work on the sociology of religion,
Ancient Judaism, Max Weber drew from the pariah myth to construct the analytical
category of the so-called ‘ideal-type’ of the Jewish Pariavolk. The seemingly non-
normative stance of Weber’s work sought to describe the Jewish minority’s existence at
the social margins, its alleged separatist and endogamous character, and its alienation
366 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

from the host societies. Drawing from Nietzsche, Weber hypothesized about the com-
pensational character of the pariah people, who allegedly made up for their unequal
societal status and for its denigrating affects (disgust, shame and humiliation) with the
creation of salvational and retributive myths.
A key figure in the Jewish re-articulation and trans-valuation of the pariah myth into
the trope of the ‘conscious pariah’ has been Bernard Lazare, a French-Jewish literary
critic, political journalist and anarchist. Politicized against the background of the Dreyfus
affair, Lazare radicalized the question of Jewishness in modern France insofar as the
events surrounding the conviction of Dreyfus demonstrated for him the futility of Jewish
parvenu ambitions and the fiction of assimilationism more broadly. Combining the rhet-
oric of Jewish nationalism and socialism in Antisemitism, its History and Causes, Lazare
articulated the notion of ‘conscious pariah’ (2009), and thus proposed to adopt what
Hannah Arendt later called the ‘political attitude towards one’s exclusion’ (Kohn and
Feldman, 2007: 279–81), in order to explore emancipative possibilities that emerged
from asserting, rather than evading, one’s marginal position. Lazare’s subject position of
the conscious pariah expressed ambivalence, which, as the next section argues, was simi-
lar (though not identical) to that represented by Améry’s secular Jew due to the inability
to assert his ‘Jewish identity’ through reference to any positive (cultural, religious and/or
linguistic) content. In his aphorisms Lazare wrote: ‘I am a Jew and I know nothing about
the Jews. Henceforth I am a Pariah and I know not out of what elements to rebuild myself
dignity and a personality. I must learn who I am and why I am hated and which I can be’
(quoted in Rose, 2011: 58).
While critical receptions of Lazare’s concept of the conscious pariah point out that it
drew from the dominant ideologies of the racial essentialization of Jewishness, Hannah
Arendt regarded Lazare as a key contributor to the formation of the Jewish ‘hidden tradi-
tion’ of political action. This ‘hidden tradition’ was premised on the ethos of the action
and responsibility of individuals in an oppressive political environment, whom else-
where Arendt characterized as ‘men in dark times’. It stood in stark contrast to what
Arendt outlined in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1976) as ‘the key feature of Jewish
history in the modern period’, namely ‘the Jews’ worldlessness’. Rather than follow the
classical sociological model of pariahdom as a collective descriptor of a minority status
or an ‘ideal-type’, Arendt’s work has individualized the Jewish pariah. Perhaps most
famously in Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, Arendt mapped the dialectical rela-
tionship between the Jewish societal positions of parvenu and pariah onto the life of
Rahel Vernhagen, a Jewish-German hostess of a literary salon in Berlin in the early
1800s. According to Seyla Benhabib, in aiming to narrate Varnhagen’s life ‘as she herself
might have told it’, Arendt insists, against the assimilationist ideal, on ‘the ineliminable
[and] unassimilable fact of Jewish difference within German culture’ (1995: 5–24). In
spite of (or perhaps because of) the precariousness of a literary salon led by a Jewish
woman, Vernhagen’s work engendered new forms of sociability, socio-cultural associa-
tion and worldly engagement. By ‘transforming difference from being a source of weak-
ness into one of strength and defiance’, Arendt imbues the conscious pariah with ethical
content (Benhabib, 1995).
This article argues that Améry continues and develops the approach to Jewish pariah-
dom that Arendt initiated in that he also envisions it as a category situated across the
Zolkos 367

political and ethical domains of action and responsibility ‘in dark times’. Arendt’s work
on the conscious pariah emphasizes that through self-recognition as a perennial outcast,
the Jew has gained a critical perspective on, and ability to resist, modes of violence that
are perpetuated by the symbolic politics of marginality. Including in her register of ‘con-
scious pariahs’ (in addition to Lazare and Vernhagen) Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka and
Charlie Chaplin, and drawing from Lessing’s philosophy of selbstdenken (‘thinking for
oneself’), Arendt has located the inspiration, strength and dignity of the pariah in the
marginal condition of the subject.

Améry’s aporetic Jewishness

This section offers a reading of Améry’s notion of Jewishness, emphasizing its negative
articulation, as encapsulated by the phrase of ‘being a Jew without Judaism’. Through
reading Améry on the ‘necessity and impossibility’ of Jewishness as an extension and a
radicalization of the conscious pariah tradition, the ethical bearing of this position on the
question of historical justice becomes apparent. Améry’s pariah, though rooted in the
traumatic memory of his or her own experience of deracination and estrangement, is
primarily oriented towards, and haunted by, the suffering not of the self, but of others.
The argument is that the ethical and political orientation of Améry’s pariah is not simply
(inter-)relational – it does not assume, or seek to restore, symmetry between the other
and the self – but, rather, it proposes a ‘hyperbolic’ ethical position for the politics of
redressive justice.
This section focuses primarily on two essays by Jean Améry: first, ‘On the necessity
and impossibility of being a Jew’ from At the Mind’s Limits (first published in 1966 under
the title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigen);
and, second, ‘Being a Jew: a personal account’, from Radical Humanism (published
posthumously in 1984). The essays in At the Mind’s Limits were first prepared as read-
ings for the South German Radio. They were commissioned by the German poet and the
director of the Goethe Institute in Brussels, Helmut Heißenbüttel, and delivered against
the background of the renewed interest by the German public in questions of collective
responsibility, spurred by the so-called second Auschwitz trial, ‘the largest and best pub-
licized of all of West Germany’s trials against Nazi perpetrators’. Norbert Frei called it
the ‘watershed of [collective German] memory’, but others, including Améry, were
highly critical of its framing and impact. The primary reason for this criticism was that
the West German court rejected ex post facto law, instead ‘focus[ing] narrowly on spe-
cific individual acts that were considered criminal under Nazi law, and did not place
mere participation in the genocidal enterprise at Auschwitz … on trial’ (Marcuse, 2007:
298–9).
The distinctive feature of Améry’s radio essays was that they adopted a form of direct
address, or even an interpellation, as well as, in Heißenbüttel’s wording, their personal
and confessional character (Heidelberger-Leonard, 2010: 142). This is not to suggest,
however, that the essays were reducible to a personal account; in a letter to Heißenbüttel
in March 1964, Améry wrote that his essays grew into ‘a kind of ontology of the intel-
lect’. Heißenbüttel replied that the essays were ‘one of the most important contributions
ever made to this subject’ insofar as they reached ‘beyond the immediate context and
368 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

[became] a fundamental study in which the failure of the mind [at Auschwitz], [and
gained] a new philosophical quality’ (Heidelberger-Leonard, 2010: 141, 142).
Améry’s intervention was not only underpinned by the ambition to shape the emerg-
ing space of the critical public reflection about the Holocaust in Germany against the
background of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, but also by his determination to voice pro-
found disagreements with those post-Holocaust Jewish authors, including Martin Buber,
Victor Gollancz and Primo Levi, who at the time, using either secular or religious vocab-
ularies, were raising the question of post-Holocaust forgiveness and reconciliation.
Améry also sought to express criticism of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book on the Eichmann
trial, given his refusal to ‘admit the deeper significance of Arendt’s [thesis on the] “banal-
ity of evil”’, especially in regard to the experience of torture (Heidelberger-Leonard,
2010: 142).
What does this oscillation between the personal and the philosophic mean for the last
essay in the collection, ‘On the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew’? In this essay
Améry expresses a deep sense of unease in regard to any identitarian appeals to
Jewishness, given his own ‘inability to identify with Judaism in any other way except
that of the Jewish Nazi victim’ (Rosenfeld, 1986: 109). At the heart of this negative for-
mulation of Jewishness lies subject formation at the interstices of two seemingly contra-
dictory positions, ‘necessity’ and ‘impossibility’. It is not simply a theoretical paradox,
but rather a lived experience of discrepancy, which, Améry admits, has been for him a
cause of a ‘deep-seated discomfort’ and an ‘indistinct pain [eine undeutliche Pein]’
(1986: 82; 1997 [1966]: 131). Heidelbergber-Leonard, who suggests that, for the survi-
vors of death camps and torture victims, ‘the contradiction between necessity and impos-
sibility is [for Améry] at the centre of [the larger question on how to continue] to live’,
offers an insightful definition of Améry’s Jewishness as ‘an absolute vanishing point,
[where] everything runs towards it’ (2010: 165). This approach weaves the question of
Jewishness through the subjective sites of experience in the camp, torture chamber and
exile in Améry’s writing, and connects them within the rubric of negativity (cf. Zolkos,
2010: 42–8). While these diverse dimensions of victimization textualize subjective
deracination and alienation, the aporetic (necessary/impossible) articulation of
Jewishness reveals their Jewish tonality as never simply accidental or supplemental in
Améry’s work, but as constitutive.
Strikingly resonant of Bernard Lazare’s understanding of the pariah, who lacked any
positive determinants of identity, ‘dignity and personality’, the logic of Améry’s
Jewishness connects the conditions of the necessity of its occurrence (as in Lazare’s cat-
egorical ‘I must [learn who I am and why I am hated and which I can be]’) with the
conditions of impossibility and ‘inability’, due to the lack of any cultural, religious or
familial base for his Jewish identity formation. In contrast to Lazare, however, Améry
does not identify Jewishness with a future possibility or a project of becoming. Améry
says instead: ‘Since I was not a Jew, I am not one; and since I am not one, I won’t be able
to become one’ (1986: 82). At the level of historical experience his statement relates to a
critique of the assimilationist project, which, as outlined in the previous section, has been
central to the modern construction of the pariah, and national anxieties around figures of
marginality. Améry’s critical reflection about the failure of assimilationism draws on his
personal remembered account, namely on reminiscences of himself as an adolescent in
Zolkos 369

an Austrian national folk costume, which he now describes as a ‘foolish masquerade’ and
an image of ‘the distant past’ (1986: 92), or participating in ‘the midnight mass at
Christmas’ (1984: 11). The uncanny image is not only inseparable from the memory of
the exclusionary and expatriative violence that followed, but it also invokes a melan-
cholic resemblance to the figure of a jester, an imposter or a pariah. Améry’s Jew, dressed
up in Austrian folk costume, remains unassimilable – unmetabolized – within any posi-
tive modes of national identification. ‘In my deliberations’, Améry argues, ‘I am unable
to consider Jews who are Jews because they are sheltered by tradition.’ His subject is ‘the
Jew without positive determinants, the Catastrophe Jew’, or the negatively articulated
‘non-non-Jew’, upon whom ‘being Jewish burst … with an elemental force’, rather than
being a matter of the volitional agency of an individual, and for whom ‘being Jewish
means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression’ (1986: 94).
What Lacoue-Labarthe has called ‘the caesura of the Holocaust’ (1990), understood
as ‘that which, within history, interrupts history and opens up another possibility of his-
tory’ (Milchman and Rosenberg, 1997: 177) becomes operative in ‘On the impossibility
and necessity of being a Jew’ in terms of the unattainability of positive identification
with Jewishness, as much as the end of the Jewish parvenu aspirations. Prior to the geno-
cidal catastrophe of the Holocaust, Améry argues, the figure of the parvenu had been
inseparable from the introjections of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, or self-abjection, and, in the
phraseology of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1995), of Jewish ‘inauthenticity’. Améry
draws from the Sartrean analysis of the ‘inauthentic’ Jew as one who ‘has fallen victim
to the myth of the “universal man”’ in order to depict the parvenu position as a complex
identitarian amalgam invested with a masochistic strain (1986: 86). Within the caesura
of the Holocaust, however, the assimilationist desire of the parvenu fails to account for
the aporetic subject formation at the interstices of ‘impossibility’ and ‘necessity’ of the
‘Catastrophe Jew’, because the Jewish victimization is irreducible to the problematic of
failed assimilationism or internalization of the anti-Semitic stereotype. Rather, within
Améry’s aporetic articulation of Jewishness there is at play the ‘social and philosophic
[capitulation]’, or the ‘surrender of the Jews to the Stürmer image of themselves, [which]
was nothing other than the acknowledgment of social reality [and] to oppose it with a
self-evaluation based on other standards … had to appear ridiculous and mad’ (1986:
86).
Reframing the Sartrean formulation of the ‘inauthentic Jew’ as one who ‘subjugates
himself, in his flight from the Jewish fate, to the power of his oppressor’, Améry (1986:
86) remains indebted to Sartre’s interpellative and constructivist idea of Jewishness, and
asserts the non-essentialist and non-determinist figuration of the conscious pariah. As
Sartre famously argues (and Améry to an extent agrees), ‘the Jew is one whom other men
take for a Jew’ (1995: 69). According to the Sartrean logic, any ‘semblance of unity
[among Jews]’ comes from ‘[having] in common the situation of a Jew … they live in a
community which takes them for Jews’ (1995: 67, 76–7). Jewishness is an objectifying
category; in being called that name, one is interpellated into the social existence of a Jew.
It is within this Sartrean purview that for Améry the negativity of Jewishness has to do,
in a primary existential sense, with the communal gesture of exclusion and violence
(another literary-philosophical reference for Améry is Max Frisch’s 1961 play Andorra)
(Améry, 1984: 14). As such, the conscious pariah position is formed through the
370 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

recognition that ‘granting and depriving of dignity are acts of social agreements, [and]
sentences against which there is no appeal on the grounds of one’s “self-understanding”’
(Améry, 1986: 89). As I elaborate further, Améry’s conscious pariah asserts her/his dig-
nity under the conditions of abject ‘degradation and death threat’.
The crucial difference between Améry’s conscious pariah and Sartre’s ‘authentic Jew’
is that the former is not a project of self-creation, even if, as the next section shows,
Améry’s subject reclaims dignity and capacity for action through violent resistance.
Rather, s/he occupies a position of enduring, or undergoing, Jewishness. This blurs the
binary opposition between the action of a rebel and the passivity of a victim, and, as
Hayden White, drawing from Barthes and Derrida, has famously proposed in his reading
of modernist literature, is captured by the inflectional category of a ‘middle voice’ in
ancient Greek, which expresses ‘an aspect of action in between the active and passive
voice’ (Rüsen, 2007: 145). The subject in the first-person singular is articulated through
simultaneous undertaking and undergoing of action. This non-binary imaginary of the
Jewish subject is captured in Améry’s association of the pariah subject with the site of
both ‘resignation’ and ‘revolt’.
In addition to drawing from, but also substantially re-framing, the Sartrean thesis on
Jewishness and anti-Semitism, Améry’s intellectual sensitivity reveals a distinctively
Proustian character. While ‘in modern literature the switch of identity is quite a stimulat-
ing game’, he argues that the ‘dialectical process of self-realization [remains] obstructed
[for a Catastrophe Jew]’, because ‘being Something, not as metaphysical essence, but as
the simple summation of early experience, absolutely has priority’ (1986: 84). The ques-
tion of memory – or rather lack of it, since Améry’s ‘Catastrophe Jew’ is ‘without a past’
– is central to the formation of the conscious pariah because, he writes, ‘no one can
become what he cannot find in his memories’ (1986: 84). The trope of embodied mne-
monic return in the process of becoming does not follow a pathway of voluntary or
conscious memory connections, since for Améry, as for Proust, it is ‘our involuntary
gestures [and attachments] that give us away, open the path to who we really are’ (Rose,
2011: 33–4). While the possibility of a positive assertion of Jewish identity is acknowl-
edged by Améry as an entitlement and ‘freedom … my very personal and universally
human privilege’, the ‘dialectical process of self-realization is obstructed’ precisely by
memories that are not subject to conscious control, or to volitional agency, but which
remain ‘haunted’ and ‘spirited’ (Améry, 1986: 83, 84). As Améry argues elsewhere, ‘the
memories [of childhood and youth] … were no longer valid; they were destroyed and
had long since decayed, but they still existed negatively’ (1984: 18–19).
The identification of the Proustian memory trope in Améry’s negative articulation of
Jewishness, however, is not without complications. As Dekel argues (2010: 4), in ‘Sodom
and Gomorrah’, Proust regards the ‘social position of closeted gays and assimilated Jews
[as] interchangeable [categories] in fin-de-siècle discourse’. He comes to ‘imagine and
inhabit’ what, according to Améry, becomes unavailable for Jews within the Holocaust
caesura: the subject position of a ‘semi-open Jewish closet [as] a place where the
Enlightenment fantasy of equal rights is both mocked and masked, allowed to perpetuate
in its basic assumptions … that Proust’s irony both exposes and sanctifies’. For Améry,
in contrast, the subject position of the pariah Jew is inhabitable only as a site of deracina-
tion, which includes, primarily, the uprootedness of memory, making him a ghostly
Zolkos 371

‘shadow of the universal-abstract … without a past’ (1986: 84). Améry’s Ahasverus is

exiled not just from the fatherland or from his native language, but from the realm of
memory. It is within this site of mnemonic deracination or negativity that the ethical
imperative of the Jewish subject position is formed. He writes: ‘I must be a Jew and will
be one’ (1986: 84).
This negatively inscribed Jewishness is exemplified (if not also further complicated)
by the question of the name, and approximated by the significance of Améry’s adoption
of a new name after the war. Until his departure from Austria in late 1940s, Améry’s
name was ‘Hans Mayer’. The change to ‘Jean Améry’ has been commonly interpreted as
a gesture of Améry’s recognition of his displacement and uprootedness from German-
speaking national cultural spaces. And yet, at the same time, it is a form of retention of
his difficult connection to that place as a site of memory; it functions as a testimony to
the aporetic necessity and impossibility of abandonment of Jewishness, which, just like
the name, appears irreducible to the volitional activity of the subject: the first name
(‘Hans’) changes into its francophone equivalent ‘Jean’, and the family name (‘Mayer’)
is an anagram of ‘Améry’.
Drawing from a connection to Derrida’s reading of Paul Celan’s post-Holocaust poet-
ics as a ‘shibboleth’, Ubertowska (2011: 20) interprets this ‘anagrammatic procedure’ as
an ‘authorial signature’ that operates like a bodily wound, a camp tattoo, a circumcisional
cut, or an interruption within a poetic text. Just as his tattooed camp number, which ‘reads
more briefly than … the Talmud, yet provides more thorough information’, for Améry’s
Jewish subject the ‘anagrammatic procedure’ of a name change is co-constitutive of the
post-traumatic subjective formation. Vansant argues (2001: 36) that Améry’s name
change is not simply a symbolic act of dissociation or the adoption of a new identity in a
fantasy of ‘re-birth’, but ‘an expression of … inalienable alienation from the Austrian
self, while it nonetheless acknowledges a connection to this earlier self’. The remaining
camp tattoo on his arm epitomizes the negative Jewishness of Améry’s pariah. It operates
as a kind of ethical obligation in that, Améry argues (1986: 94), it is as ‘binding as a basic
formula of Jewish existence … if to myself and the world … I say: I am a Jew, then I
mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz
number’.

Memory, conscious pariahdom and violence: resignation

and revolt
In both ‘Being a Jew’ and ‘On the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew’ the rup-
tured sense of self and of personal history is associated by Améry with one particular
event: reading the Nuremberg Laws in Vienna in 1935. The narrativization of this event
as a compulsive reiteration, or the echoing of a disastrous event, attests to the operations
of trauma of a proleptic, or prophetic, character – it foreshadows, and is constituted in the
anticipation of, the terror that is still to come. The apocalyptic tone of Améry’s memory
narration acquires a double meaning, relying on the polysemy of the notion of the apoca-
lypse: first, the narrated event has a powerful catastrophic dimension of the eschaton,
which, like a caesura, ruptures or splits the subjective experience of history into ‘before’
372 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

and ‘after’. Second, the event is apocalyptic in the sense of a revelation, or, literally,
uncovering; it ‘clarif[ies] and illuminate[s] the true nature of what has been brought to an
end’ (Berger, 1999: 5).
Améry narrates (1986: 85–6):

I was sitting over a newspaper in a Vienna coffeehouse and was studying the Nuremberg Laws,
which had just been enacted across the border in Germany. I needed only to skim them and
already I could perceive that they applied to me. Society, concretized in the National Socialist
German state, which the world recognized absolutely as the legitimate representative of the
German people, had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew, or rather it had
given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no
consequence to me, namely, that I was a Jew.

If the sentence that society had passed on me had a tangible meaning, it could only be that
henceforth I was a quarry of Death. The Jew … was more firmly promised to death [than non-
Jew] … His days were a period of false grace that could be revoked at any second … At that
moment when I read the Laws, I did indeed already hear the death threat – better, a death sentence.

The reference to ‘murder’ has not only a literal meaning (though also that), but it is
evocative of different destructive actions. Améry draws here from Sartre’s definition of
anti-Semitism as fixated upon Jewish death. For Sartre, anti-Semites are ‘symbolic
murder[er]s’. He writes that while ‘not all the enemies of the Jew demand his death
openly … the measures they propose – all of which aim at his abasement, at his humili-
ation, at his banishment – are substitutes for that assassination which they mediate within
themselves’ (Sartre, 1995: 49). The time aspect of this envisioned murder is significant
in Améry’s description precisely because it is deferred, or belated, which, within the
psychoanalytic discourse, has been considered a mark of traumatic temporality (what
Freud calls traumatic Nachträglichkeit, Caruth suggests (2002: 105), describes an event
that ‘projects, retroactively, what came before’). Not unlike the activation of traumatic
memory, ‘to be a Jew’, Améry writes (1986: 86), meant ‘from this moment on, to be a
dead man on leave, someone to be murdered, who only by chance was not yet where he
properly belonged; and so it has remained … until today’. The coming genocidal murder
of the Holocaust realized what had already become a reality in the 1935 Nuremberg
Laws, namely the ‘denial [der Würdeentzug] of dignity’.
The abjection and deracination of the Jewish subject starts in what Améry calls a
‘methodic “degradation”’, and which in the German original (die methodische
Entwürdigung) has a clear connotation of destroyed or revoked dignity. The constitution
of the Jewish pariah is inseparable from the loss of a dignified life, which, elsewhere in
the essays in the collection At the Mind’s Limits, Améry famously relates to the loss of
the ‘trust in the world [Weltvertauen]’. According to J. M. Bernstein (2011: 39), Améry
makes Weltvertauen the ‘primary locus of ethical experience, the place where our sense
of self-worth is existentially posed in our relation to relevant others’. This notion of dig-
nity is ‘not a metaphysical and natural possession’, but ‘a social accomplishment bound
to structures of recognition’, which can be destroyed or revoked. The lost Weltvertauen
and Entwürdigung are related to the denial of being ‘worthy of being loved and thereby
worthy of life’ (Améry, 1986: 87).
Zolkos 373

The centrality of the idea of dignity for the pariah subject confirms Améry’s politi-
cally situated and relational concept of subjectivity, as well as its precariousness, insofar
as he argues that ‘the granting and depriving of dignity are acts of social agreement,
sentences against which there is no appeal on the grounds of one’s “self-understanding”’.
As such, ‘dignity can be bestowed only by society’ (Améry, 1986: 89). As Bernstein
argues (2011: 40), however, this must not be misunderstood as saying that ‘the meaning
of dignity involves it being one-sidedly endowed, [or] given by the other’. Rather, it is
possible for individuals to ‘insist upon their dignity through resistance and revolt; hence
there is an ethics and politics of dignity’. That possibility, I argue, is a crux of the articu-
lation of conscious pariahdom by Améry. While Bernstein reads Améry’s narrative of the
destruction of dignity (Würdeentzug), as pre-figured in the apocalyptic memory of the
Nuremberg Laws, from the perspective of its corporeal dimension that corresponds irrev-
ocably to his impossible and necessary inhabiting of the Jewish subject position, he curi-
ously pays less attention to the Jewish dimension of Améry’s ‘ethics and politics of
dignity’.
Using a phrase that Améry popularized in one of his later books (1994), though in a
seemingly different context, ‘resignation and revolt’, I suggest that it is precisely the
trope of the conscious pariah that Améry deploys in order to articulate his ethics and poli-
tics of dignity. At play is not a gesture of straightforward protest against the violence of
Würdeentzug that allows the subject to counter the societal destruction of her/his dignity.
Rather, the position of ‘resignation and revolt’ operates as the trope of the conscious pariah
who adopts a political attitude towards his/her marginalization by, paradoxically, accept-
ing, not evading, the peripheral status, and subsequently re-framing and re-articulating it.
Of course, as is poignantly conspicuous in Améry’s texts, the Nazi discourse of Jewish
dehumanization radically exceeds, and is irreducible to, the nineteenth- and early twenti-
eth-century anti-Semitic pariah myth.
Améry argues (1986: 88, 90): ‘I understood, even if unclearly, that while I had to
accept the verdict [den Urteilsspruch] as such, I could force the world to revise it. I
accepted the judgment of the world, with the decision to overcome it through revolt’.
And, even more perspicuously, he continues:

To be a Jew meant the acceptance of the death sentence imposed by the world as a world
verdict. To flee before it by withdrawing into one’s self would have been nothing but a disgrace,
whereas acceptance was simultaneously the physical revolt against it. I became a person not by
subjectively appealing to my abstract humanity but by discovering myself within the given
social reality as a rebelling Jew and by realizing oneself as one.

Améry’s ‘tropological deployments’ (Hammerschlag, 2012: passim) of the conscious

pariah are partly influenced by Sartre’s figure of the authentic Jew, who ‘knows that he
is one who stands apart, untouchable, scorned, proscribed – and it is as such that he
asserts his being’ (Sartre, 1995: 136–7). Améry’s resignation and revolt enable the ges-
ture of regaining dignity by, paradoxically, being resigned to the verdict, or sentence, of
Würdeentzug, and thus taking upon oneself ‘to be a Jew, even though there would have
been possibilities for a compromise settlement’. A parvenu escape from the verdict of
Würdeentzug, as ‘[a] retreat into subjectivity, which might have allowed me to claim that
374 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

I didn’t “feel” Jewish’, was categorically rejected by Améry as an ‘irrelevant, private

game’ (1984: 15).
The subject of the conscious pariah crystallizes in two subsequent gestures of joining
the anti-Nazi resistance and, in the camp, ‘[learning] to hit back [zurückzuschlagen]’.
Both situate the question of (counter-)violence at the core of the emergence of the con-
scious pariah. Here Améry references Frantz Fanon’s notion of violence in the decolo-
nizing armed struggle, though he understands it somewhat differently from the
existentialist reading offered by Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth as a ‘man
recreating himself’. For Améry, the pariah (Fanon’s native) reclaims her/his dignity, and
becomes a historical subject, as the (counter-)violent act brings about the ‘doubling of
violence’, in which its undergoing and undertaking of violence fuse at a site of somatic
expression that is almost intimate in its evocation of both bodily force and bodily precar-
ity. This is highly conspicuous in the description of the following scene, which took
place in Auschwitz:

Before me I see the prisoner foreman Juszek, a Polish professional criminal of horrifying
vigour. In Auschwitz he once hit me in the face because of a trifle; that is how he was used to
dealing with all the Jews under his command. At this moment – I felt it with piercing clarity – it
was up to me to go a step further in my prolonged appeals case against society. In open revolt I
struck Juszek in the face in turn. My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw – and that it was
in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was woefully thrashed,
meant nothing to me. Painfully beaten, I was satisfied with myself. But not, as one might think,
for reasons for courage and honour, but only because I had grasped well that there are situations
in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate. I was my body and nothing else:
in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted
with filth, was my calamity. My body, when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical
dignity. (Améry, 1986: 90–1)

Bernstein interprets this passage as the problematization of the dualist conception of the
body so as to emphasize the corporeal and affective dimensions of revolt against
Würdeentzug. Dignity appear as a quality of both the voluntary and the involuntary body:
‘the hitting back takes the physical fact of his body and attempts to give it a metaphysical
worth by claiming it, but asserting that a border has been violated, and redrawing it as,
emphatically, the border he takes it to be’. The ‘hitting back’ (Zurückzuschlag) restores
‘disjointed personality’ in an affirmative gesture of (counter-)violence, by reasserting
‘bodily integrity [not as a] physical fact but as a moral unity in material form’. The body
appears as both ‘unconditionally vulnerable’, and susceptible, or open, to ‘hurt, injury,
[and] suffering’, and as resilient and capable of ‘self-movement’, and thus ‘a vehicle and
medium for meaningfulness’ (Bernstein, 2011: 58–9).

Conclusions: hyperbola of the other

For Améry the Jewish condition of pariahdom, which he elsewhere calls the ‘exile-in-
permanence’ (1984: 19) persists and recurs, not unlike trauma memory, after the ‘paren-
theses’, or caesura, of the Holocaust due to the societal indifference or unresponsiveness
to the hyperbolic demands of victimization. That societal failure to be affected is
Zolkos 375

constitutive of pariah’s continuing alienation and ‘foreignness’. Améry says (1986: 93,
94): ‘still and each day anew I find myself alone … the postwar years … no longer per-
mitted any of us to react with violence to something that refused to reveal itself clearly
to us … Every day anew I lose my trust in the world’.
The non-oppositional relation between bodily precarity and bodily protest is chan-
nelled through the ‘middle voice’ of the conscious pariah trope of ‘resignation’ (as under-
going or enduring) and ‘revolt’ (as undertaking). The affective dimension of the
resignation is shame, and of the revolt, anger. Importantly, this aporetic structure of expe-
rience is not (as some have argued about Améry’s notion of resentment) introvertive, or
even solipsistic, but is inscribed in an ethical relation to others. Améry re-articulates
Jewishness and pariahdom under the catastrophic conditions in death-centred metaphors,
for example by using the word Siechtum (‘infirmity’ or ‘illness’). The wider ethical ori-
entation of this rhetoric of death and mortal illness, and ‘oppression’, situates the subject
in relation to the suffering of others.
Without providing a basis for any ‘positive community’, but, rather, as Améry puts it,
formative of Jewishness as ‘nonrelation’, the conscious pariah position engenders the
ethics and politics of solidarity (1986: 97). It is solidarity, defined literally as ‘mutual
responsibility’ (solidarité), which emerges ‘in the face of threat’. The significant turn in
Améry’s articulation of pariahdom is its dissociation from the traumatic memory of one’s
own victimization and suffering (though it remains, of course, informed and infused by
it), and, instead, its alignment with the figure of den Bedrohten (‘the threatened’). The
Jewish pariah as the Bedrohten operates upon the condition of both precarity and poten-
tiality. The pariah is not positively grounded in the tradition, language and identity of
Judaism; ultimately, s/he is also irreducible to the negative mnemonic attachments and
articulations of persecution and suffering. Rather, the pariah is ‘[who] awaits a new
catastrophe at any moment’ (1986: 99).
Améry’s statement on pariah solidarity is irreducible to lachrymose notions of
Jewishness. Instead, the figure of the pariah as the Bedrohten engenders the ethics and
politics of solidarity that is hyperbolically oriented to violence and injustice against oth-
ers. Améry’s aporia of belonging of the Jewish pariah subject (impossible/necessary) is
not solipsistically invested in the binary identity construction of victim–perpetrator, but is
oriented towards a horizon far beyond the terrain of the self, which ‘enchains’ the subject
to ‘the awareness of the last cataclysm and the legitimate fear of a new one’ (1986: 99).

Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank Peter Banki, Andrew Benjamin, Michael Janover, Kitty Millet, and
Michael Ure for their insightful comments and feedback.

Note
1. The point is not to suggest that Derrida’s notion of forgiveness and what I term as ‘hyperbolic
philosophy of justice’ in the work of Améry are related, or mutually indebted, projects. In
fact, the very use of the term ‘hyperbole’ will differ, given that Derrida, following Vladimir
Jankélévitch, is preoccupied with the forgiveness of the unforgivable, whereas for Améry
historical justice is declared impossible because of a memory residue (or memory excess),
which is that of the other’s suffering. I am grateful to Peter Banki for helping me to clarify
this important distinction.
376 Journal of European Studies 44(4)

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Author biography
Magdalena Zolkos is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Justice at the Australian
Catholic University. She has published in the areas of critical political theory, post-foundational
concepts of community, trauma and affect, and the concept of catastrophe in political theory. She
is the author of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political
Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész (2010), and the editor of On Jean Améry:
Philosophy of Catastrophe (2011).