Is Reading Antisemitic? Approaching Jewish Writers through ‘Conspiratorial Reading’

• In Event: Reading Against the Grain: New Approaches to Jewish Literary Studies

Abstract

Conspiracy theories are frequently linked to antisemitism. Conspiratorial thinking is a form of ‘reading’, treating the world as a text made up of symbols to be decoded. Equally, following the work of Eve Kososfky Sedgwick, among others, academic reading or critique has been conceptualized as motivated by a logic of paranoia and suspicion. Conspiracy, antisemitism and reading thus intersect – alongside the long history of understanding ‘reading’ as somehow ‘Jewish’, from early Christian Bible commentators criticizing ‘Jewish’ allegorical reading, to psychoanalysis being figured as a ‘Jewish science.’
To examine this intersection, this paper focuses on twentieth-century Jewish authors who have been critically understood as inviting readers to ‘decode’ their texts. These writers seemingly encourage the reader to enact the logic of a conspiracist or antisemite – being suspicious, and seeking to uncover the text’s ‘hidden knowledge’. In this paper, I focus on Clarice Lispector and Georges Perec. Lispector is frequently read by critics as esoteric or even mystical, as if her novels’ linguistic style suggests a greater truth about language or quasi-religious experience. I ask whether this assumption is because Lispector’s texts – I focus here on 'THE PASSION ACCORDING TO GH' (1964) – cultivate such a reading, or whether assumptions about Lispector as an ‘exotic’, Jewish female author take precedence over her writing itself. Perec, famous for his literary games, tricks and puzzles, puts the reader in the position of a conspiracist in 'W, OR THE MEMORY OF CHILDHOOD' (1975). The reader must ‘decode’ the relationships between the texts’ sections, including Perec’s autobiographical sketches and a fictional allegory of antisemitic violence. Yet, in continually questioning the accuracy of his own memory, Perec’s narratorial voice is sceptical and seemingly ANTI-conspiratorial. Is conspiracist logic being encouraged, or parodied?
Focusing on these writers shows that conspiratorial and antisemitic modes of thinking are not anomalous, but central to post-Second World War literature and how it is read. Equally, they show that such thinking can be turned back on itself and treated as a literary game, or even an enactment of liberatory politics, fighting antisemitism.

Author

• Edmund Chapman