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Race and Erudition

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Maurice Olender, Maître de Conférences at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, is best known to English readers as author of The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (translated from French in 1992). Race and Erudition is an abridged edition of Olender's essays and interviews first published as La Chasse aux evidences: Sur quelques formes de racisme entre mythe et histoire, 1978-2005, with new material from between 1981 and 2008. Although not directly concerned with South Africa, the dust cover reproduces an image of Truth and Reconciliation by South African artist, Peter Sachs. The central question posed in Race and Erudition is: "Will we one day be able to unseat the use of the notion of `race', which in the early twenty-first century has once more become so common, as Mauss did for "uncivilized peoples", now stored away in the warehouse of outdated ideas? Far from having deserted the imaginations of its users, this malleable idea of race, undermined by renowned scientists for well more than a century, is still in current use in Europe and elsewhere" (x). Clearly the idea of race persists, refusing to be filed away, despite being scientifically discredited. The possibility that the idea of race may not have been as thoroughly discredited by renowned intellectuals as one might suppose is not considered by Olender. Neither is the possibility that such scientific discrediting might only have credit in the eyes of those who view science itself as proffering less than the final word. One effect of such a thorough scientific discrediting may be to drive the idea of race outside of respectable discourse, consigning it to a thriving unofficial subterranean afterlife. None of these concerns disturb the course of Olender's collection of reflections on the idea of race, its history and semantics. It is worthwhile sketching his outline of the concept of race. Race concerns descent and genealogy, and Race and Erudition is concerned with the pedigree of the word itself and its part in the deciphering visible signs and invisible meanings, classificatory constructs that form the infrastructure of a developmental myth that has its roots in other fables and myths. Race has dissolved in imaginary fluids, circulated in ideas of descent and contamination, and burst forth in genocide. But there is no one dimensional history of race: "there has been no linear or progressive history of ideas about `race'. In short, the modes of thinking that grounded race scientifically were often contemporary with writings that attempted without success to invalidate them" (xvi). From Franz Bopp in 1857 warning against the use of the phrase Indo-European, Saussure's questioning of the equation of language and race, to Lévi-Strauss noting the fetish of transcendence promised by biological concepts, the idea of race has been a vector of contention. In the idea of race as it evolved in the nineteenth century the primordial took precedence over the acquired, stasis over historicity, the intransigent over the transformational, paralysis over living. Racism takes hold, according to Olender, "when everyone feels fragile, when no one can lay claim to a political, social, religious, or economic identity. Then the frenetic quest for origins is unleashed: the search for distinguishing marks of permanence, for the guarantees of transmission that will assure stability by identifying the past with the present, by promising heirs the future and legitimacy of their powers" (5). Racism, then, is a symptom of crisis, real and/or imagined.
Race and Erudition begins with the fascinating story of Belgian Father Pierre Charles's deconstruction of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion during the diabolical interwar period. Charles showed the hoax to be a sloppy imitation of an anti-Bonapartist pamphlet written by Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Maciavel et Montesquieu (1864). These texts are part of a publication saga that spans Russian, French, Italian, and English newspapers and reaches its crescendo towards the end of World War I, accounting for revolutionary upheaval and the collapse of empires. The Protocols was a work published in 1905 that to its initial readers seemed to foretell the condition of the world in 1920. As the Times put it: "'Have we, by staining every fibre of our national body, escaped a "Pax Germanica" only to fall into a "Pax Judaeica"?'" (qtd. on 12). Three articles by Philip Graves in the London Times of August 1921, relying on the information of a former Okhrana officer, declared the Protocols to be a plagiarization of Joly's Dialogue. However, rather than merely exposing the hoax, Joly's text added fuel to the flames of the prosecution as the Dialogue became a Jewish work by the author "Joe Levy" that cunningly disguised the Jewish plan for world domination in the form of an anti Napoleonic pamphlet. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion finally exposed this plan according ton the logic: even if it is fake, it is true.
Charles's heroic missiological struggle battled anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, demonstrating that no biblical text authorized the curse on the black sons of Shem. His anti-racist critique anticipated the work of Leon Poliakov and was in accord with the liberal pronouncements of Pius XI. Charles's deconstruction of the Protocols forgery was countered by the argument that if indeed the document was incoherent and stupid, then that proved it was authentically Jewish. Clearly the contradictions prove that it is the work of a Talmudic mind. Returning from South America after the Great War, Teilhard de Chardin, although a friend and fellow Jesuit, also disagreed with Charles's non-racialism. Charles continued the fight against the Christian theorists of racism who were attempting to structure society according to races, with the command posts reserved for themselves. Writing from Lyons in 1948 about the South African slave system, he prophetically warned of increasing violence and repression.
Olender's elegiac discussion of the work of Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) opens part II, "The Indo-European Idea between Myth and History". Olender reports that Dumézil began his researches combining onomastic equations and theories found in James Frazer's Golden Bough in an attempt to revolutionize the study of comparative mythology. His work had an influence on the young Michel Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Le Goff. (Chapter 5 continues this pre-occupation with intellectual genealogies by marshalling fragments of interviews with Dumézil.) The movement, or oscillation, within the scientific fiction of the Indo-European notion between an underlying source of unity and a means of division has ideological uses. The "New Right", caught between nostalgia and militantism, have mobilized the originally philological and mytho-poetic Indo-European paradigm in the cause of a Western European identity. Olender is concerned to defend the misappropriation of Dumézil's Indo-European hypothesis by neo-conservatives who dressed up prejudice as scholarship in the 1970s. He notes Saussure's epistolary anti-Semitism, and cites Émile Benveniste's 1969 Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes to caution that not all uses of the category "Indo-European" should be tainted with racism. Benveniste, after all, trained to be a rabbi.
The track of Aryanism, Eurocentrism and anti-Semitism leads through the foliage of academic alliances and dissension, their associated publications and rivalries, by way of familiar figures such as holocaust denialist Robert Faurisson and Jean-Marie Le Pen to the current climate in which neoracism masquerades as cultural relevatism:
"Between the contemporary adulation of the prehistoric Indo-European's political virtues, of which no linguist or archeologist can currently give a detailed account, the adulation of the National Front or support for an enterprise denying the existence of the gas chambers, there is a logic whose mechanisms must some day be described." (65)
Olender's naming of the institutions, editors and contributors that give respectability to reactionary ideas that rehabilitate compromised ideas and theories aims to sound a warning.
The elegiac thread of the book resurfaces in the treatment of Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a student of Dumézil. Of Eliade's many scholarly and literary books concerned with archaic religions Olender comments: "Either you subscribe to his work or you don't" (91). This is followed by a review essay on Arnaldo Mimigliano's Alien Wisdom: The Limits Hellenization (1975) and the confrontation between Greek and Roman ideas, and Jewish and Hellenistic ideas. Momigliano's (1908-1987) call for the genealogical study of the ancient civilizations inherent in Western memory, the Christian triangle for Europe formed by Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, is endorsed by Olender.
The most interesting part of the book begins with an appreciation of the work of Marcel Mauss and Léon Poliakov. Although he did not complete his doctoral thesis, Mauss (1872-1950), nephew of Émile Durkheim and teacher of Georges Dumézil and Alexandre Koyré, profoundly influenced Lévi-Strauss who wrote the famous introduction to the texts collected as Sociologie et anthropologie. A socialist critical of Lenin's Russia, he condemned the infantile materialism and psychosis of Bolshevism as well as the violence of Italian Fascism. Olender movingly describes Mauss's lucid terror in the 1930s as he witnessed the return to the primitive in Europe, the fascination with the irrational, and Martin Heidegger's `Bergsonian tarrying with Hitlerism'. Mauss's courage during the Vichy regime is underlined.
The work of Léon Poliakov (1910-1977), ethnologist of mentalities and historian of forgetting, author of Histoire de l'antisémitisme, is located in the crisis of World War II and Poliakov's desire to understand the executioner's secret, "the circumstances under which the leaders of the Third Reich had decided to kill me' (127). Olender takes up this question is taken up via consideration of Rudolf Schottlaender (1900-1988), professor of philosophy at Dresden (on the recommendation of Karl Jaspers), philologist and translator (of Sophocles and Proust), and teacher of high school Greek and Latin. While working for Humboldt University in East Germany in 1962 Schottlaender completed a study of the persecution of scientists in Berlin during the Nazi period. The university authorities considered that Zionists could derive too much benefit from the study and so it was buried until 1986. The reader is left to draw a lesson from both the successful hounding of the Jews in the halls of academe, and the reluctance to confront the past.
Brief discussion of literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997), a major figure in literary theory and the Constance School, focuses this issue. At the intersection of literary history and sociology, Jauss's aesthetics of reception foregrounds the notion of a horizon of expectation between an author, the work and the reader. Jauss joined the Waffen-SS in 1939 at the age of seventeen. Olender recapitulates the polemic around Jauss's personal history, presumably to provide evidence of the previous chapters's account of the repressed legacy of political repression.
Chapters 14 and 15, republished from the H.R. Jauss issue of Le monde des livres (September 1996), consist of a short homily by Karlheinz Stierle, professor emeritus at the University of Constance, and an interview between Olender and Jauss. Stierle criticizes the silence of academics regarding their lack of opposition to the barabarism that swamped the university during the Hitler period. The catastrophe of the Third Reich lives on even though the university has recovered its former dignity, but without any frank and open discussion of the role it played in the National Socialist System. Opportunistic and collaborationst behaviour was left in the ambivalence of silence for fear of reopening old wounds, even as shame had led to the energetic expunging of racism from the university and its disciplines. Stierle concludes by addressing a reunified German that has difficulty grasping its identity because of the failure of a collective German memory to include Nazism.
In interview with Olender, Jauss explains that he was not attracted to Nazi ideology but like future historian Reinhart Kosellek he wanted to be a participant in history rather than a spectator. At the age eighteen and in charge of a hundred men, Jauss's experience was compartmentalized and his horizons limited to survival on the eastern front. He only discovered what really happened at the end of the war. On the silence of Heidegger, Gadamer and others, Jauss surmises a link with "a refusal to understand what is inhuman: the radical strangeness of Nazi barbarism has paralyzed a generation of intellectuals ... One cannot understand the genocide committed by the Nazis because understanding it would be a way of approving it" (142). Jauss doesn't understand Heidegger's or Ernst Jünger's lack of guilt or shame, and the uncritical popularity of Carl Schmitt. "As for myself, I have endeavored to reform the outdated structure of the German university ... an intellectual project that opposed any tendency to return to the idea of nationality or race as meaningful vectors in the human sciences" (144).
In the wake of Jauss's death, Olender reflects on this interview and tries to answer the charge that Jauss had lied about not knowing the truth during the war, or, at best, he elided history. Olender defends the historical importance of his interview and explores the mutism of many Nazi intellectuals about their own pasts through a discussion of Heidegger. Recounting Heidegger's cryptic response to Celan in 1968, his admission of shame but not guilt to Jaspers, his reference to the "absolute evil" (151) of the late 1930s, Olender meditates on the refusal to bear witness. Whether or not Jauss, in his interview, really said nothing (as critics contend), concludes Olender, "we cannot deny that he attempted to articulate his silence" (152).
The concluding "Postscript for Günter Grass" contrasts Jauss with the novelist. The concern with memory, silence, forgetting and shame in Grass's Peeling the Onion prompts the reflection that, "as the ancients never ceased to illustrate" (155), shame and community are interconnected. Jauss's statement that one cannot compensate or make up for the irreparable finds its confirmation in Grass's "'no one could alleviate it'" (158). Olender concludes by asking us to conceive of another version of onion peels:

"One that would tell that, once you peel the onion of memories, tears--which no doubt `cloud the sight'--also shelter the remains of memory that could make the taciturn talkative: so that, under very peel of the bulbous root, `skin after skin', a bit of history might come into being.
That would be the fiction technique of a history written with the aid of new forms of silence transformed into archives, of a history that would gather together the share of forgetting in memory." (158)

In the eyes of this reviewer the strained pathos of this final image inadvertently invites levity amidst the tears.At best Race and Erudition collects some occasional pieces and recalls debates of historical interest. But it is also self-indulgent. Few of the texts shine any new light on familiar debates. There is a lack of urgency in a collection that tabulates intellectual debts, reminiscing over the good work done by good people, rather than interrogating why, despite these efforts, the idea of race has not been consigned to the dust-heap. Why, on the contrary, has race mutated into cultural essentialism and identity politics, haunting issues of community and indigeneity? Beyond pointing to insecurity or fear as catalysts to racism and the frenzied search for origins, Olender fails to analyse the logic of the mechanisms involved. The complacent nature of a book that circles the theme of academic production provides one answer to the question why, despite lack of intellectual credibility, the notion of race persists.