The White Auditorium: On Hyperrationality and Social Perception |
Do you speak Arabic? On Husserl’s “Hyperrationality” in the Context of Antisemitic Experience and the Irrationality of Social Perception
I am attending a conference on philosophy and antisemitism. It is being held at one of those presentable German universities where the budget still suffices for a white auditorium—one that has neither been spontaneously painted by students nor smells musty. Instead, the room resembles the cloister of a cathedral: high arches, a great deal of white, a great deal of dignity, and acoustics suited for things that are meant to carry significance.
Everything is there that an important topic requires: venerable rooms, venerable professors, and a good dozen early-career scholars who are earnestly trying to grasp antisemitism conceptually in such a way that, in the end, it can be demonstrated in Voltaire, Agamben, Husserl, Critical Theory, or in the methodological misunderstanding of whichever other discipline.
At the front, the question is raised as to where Voltaire succumbed to delusion, and whether this can be recaptured deconstructively at all. It is considered whether Critical Theory is a match for analytic philosophy, or whether analytic philosophy is not quite a match for Critical Theory. It is examined whether racism and antisemitism are the same from a philosophical perspective, not the same, or only the same under conditions that themselves would require a separate panel.
Thinking is taking place. And so thoroughly that some contradictions seem to dissolve by virtue of their own complexity. What cannot be explained causally may not exist at all. And what does exist must first be differentiated until it has the decency to appear in a conceptually clean form.
Perhaps it is precisely this methodological compulsion that made Freud consistently sceptical of philosophy. He mistrusted its inclination toward closure—toward those worldviews in which the abyssal appears only once it has already been pacified conceptually.
As a psychoanalyst, one sits at such a conference in a kind of mild exile. Freud did not make a good name for himself in philosophy, and at this conference, I do not even have a name........