Rounding Up the Bicyclists; Or, Can the Subaltern Please Stop Speaking? A Preface to Spinks

by Gabriel Noah Brahm

For the accompanying essay by Casey Spinks, click here.

On January 7, 2024, we began a series of webinars, “Reckoning with October 7: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Critical Theory,” with the first installment of that projected 12-part, yearlong endeavor. Our question, to start, was how might critical theory have contributed to softening the ground, or paving the way, for the perverse reception of 10/7 on the American college campus in particular, which actually celebrated [sic!] the Hamas torture, murder, rape, and kidnapping spree as a “liberation” movement on behalf the wretched of earth? And how, if at all, might theory redeem itself from such charges of complicity with evil?

Attendance was gratifyingly robust, and the presentations were excellent, erudite, thought-provoking, and disputable in their sophisticated claims to rescue theory, both post-Marxist and postcolonial, from ignominy. The Q&A with the audience was lively. Moreover, in the immediate wake of that occasion, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute received a number of perceptive “takes” on issues that arose for some, inspired both by what they had heard and did not hear in the panel presentations. In this respect, Casey Spinks addresses a deep concern for many, in his aptly titled essay “Killing Jews and Critical Theory.” It prompts one to wonder, what’s the connection between the two?

Is there something fundamentally amiss with theory per se when it presumes theoretical answers to essentially philosophical, metaphysical, or even theological problems, such as the problem of evil? Does it not tend to explain away, or obfuscate, rather than illuminate, what it purports to clarify? Does it not, as it morphs into theodicy, risk turning human behavior into a “symptom” of “root causes,” which turn out to be whatever anybody aggrieved tendentiously asserts? Do such root causes, however, reside in whomever they nominate as scapegoats, worthy of blame for the aggression brought down upon themselves, however difficult to see without the magnifying glass—or distorting lens—of progressive ideology, sublimated into the pseudo-technical jargon of a dominant, institutionalized, canonized body of theory? Does “theory” of this sort not tend toward immanentizing the eschaton, in ways that also bring the source of its delayed arrival down to earth?

Might not vulgar hatred of Jews, in other words, find expression in the ubiquitous, peripatetic discourse of “social justice,” grounded in a simplistic oppressor/oppressed binary, laundered and gussied up by an all too un-critical theory, in order to sound more sophisticated than it really is? For the overdetermined vocabulary of actually existing theory, as we know it, has, alas, been evoked by those justifying [sic!] the Hamas terrorist assault, in particular, as a kind of “resistance” to not just raw, undifferentiated “oppression” at large, but “colonialism,” “white supremacy,” “orientalism,” even “patriarchy” and “heteronormativity,” “capitalism” and its handmaiden, “settler colonialism.” And does not this whole “intersectional” litany of abstractions, willfully or not, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, tend to marginalize if not, indeed, stigmatize Jews as too high up on the ladder of success—thus, properly relegated to a very low position, indeed, in the hierarchy of victim status that governs so much of campus life today? In the age of DEI, CRT, BLM, and LGBT claims to moral and epistemic superiority (“by virtue of our identity, we’re better than you, and so we know things you can’t because of your identity”) appear to necessitate a concerted, meticulously organized, bureaucratized, and ceaseless quest by certified experts, credentialed professionals qualified to incept, help execute, or incite programs/pogroms heralding the arrival of a qualitatively different and better world to come, through what are really just crude, ham-fisted attempts at social engineering.

Moreover, such exciting plans are put in motion, first and foremost, by the corrective indoctrination of youth, hailed by an orthopedics of the soul that interpolates the subject of social justice, habituated to properly channeling ever-ready wellsprings of adolescent rage against approved targets. These include, prominently, their own country and its building blocks, the religious faith it was in part founded on, the Enlightenment reason it was in part founded on, the traditional family it was in part founded on (male father, female mother, and children who are born as either boys or girls), the Western civilization it was an exceptional flowering of, but also, more broadly, civilization itself, tout court, of which it was likewise the grandest expression in modern times. In the meantime, they see, perhaps not coincidentally, according to recent surveys, that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.” In place of civics lessons, people are being tutored in varieties of incivisme or barbarism, with surging antisemitism once more the “canary in a coal mine.”

So why, then, the Jews, of all people—just 0.2% of the world’s population? “Why the bicyclists,” goes the wry punchline to the old joke (“Round up all the Jews and bicyclists!” “Why the Jews . . . ?”). But Spinks discerns better the logic at work behind the election of God’s chosen people for their role as unassimilably particular, irrevocably ancient, and backward-looking, the carriers of long memory that finds authority in the past, and so a threat to the new, forward-marching, and homogenizing (“acephalic,” “deterritorializing”) universality in all its forms, including theoretical ones. A technoscientific worldview intolerant of mystery and the sublime reveals a universe hostile to Jews, with an end-in-view that pictures them as the cosmic blockage standing in the way of utopia that they have always been.

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Gabriel Noah Brahm, Ph.D. (aka Gavriel Abramovich) is Director of the Telos-Paul-Piccone Institute Israel Initiative, Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, and Visiting Researcher in Political Science at Tel-Aviv University. With Cary Nelson, he is coeditor of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @Brahmski. Pronouns: שלו\אותו\הו.