Antisemitism

Antisemitism appears here not simply as hostility toward Jews but as a political fantasy that gives an imagined cause to diffuse social antagonisms. Its explanatory power lies in the emptiness of the figure it constructs: the Jew becomes a point onto which incompatible fears can be projected, while the Shoah remains a historically unique excess that cannot be explained away as a mere effect of capitalism.

Historical specificity and the Shoah

The account rejects the pseudo-Marxist claim that modern antisemitism is only a by-product of capitalism and therefore that Jews should not be treated as a distinct group of victims. That reduction does not clarify the history of antisemitism; it obscures the particular transformation that made the Shoah possible. The Shoah is described as a unique excess, but one that could occur only against the background of a shift in the antisemitic figure of the Jew.

This distinction holds together two claims that might otherwise seem in tension: antisemitism has to be understood in its specific historical form, and it cannot be dissolved into a general account of capitalist conflict. A structural explanation that treats antisemitism as secondary to another antagonism risks erasing the very historical conditions through which persecution took its distinctive form.

The Jew as an empty explanatory signifier

The figure of the Jew functions as a Master-Signifier: an empty point of reference used to account for a discordant series of social phenomena. Corruption, perceived moral and cultural decline, sexual depravity, commercialization, and class conflict can all be gathered into the same accusatory construction, despite having no coherent common cause. The figure appears to explain the contradictions by naming an agent supposedly responsible for them.

That apparent explanation is sustained by fantasy rather than by a determinate description. Narratives of mysterious rituals and properties surround the figure, supplying imagined content where the signifier itself remains empty. Antisemitism thus turns a symbolic placeholder into an apparently concrete culprit: social tensions that resist a unified explanation are made to look as though they issue from one hidden source.

Threat, fantasy, and political power

The account connects this mechanism to the way an unspecified threat can exercise power. A threat gains force not by stating exactly what will happen, but by leaving a gap that fantasy fills with imagined consequences. In the same way, the antisemitic figure can serve as a flexible explanation for unrelated anxieties: its lack of stable, specific meaning allows it to absorb new fears without losing its function.

This logic also belongs to a broader account of sovereignty and law. Universal rules can be maintained through a sovereign claim to suspend them in an exceptional case; the excess that appears to stand outside the rule can therefore help sustain the rule itself. The political order’s public principles are not simply separate from their violent or exceptional underside. In this framework, antisemitic fantasy is one instance of how an empty signifier and an imagined threat can organize political meaning, rather than evidence of a coherent hidden cause.

The spectral enemy

The discussion of contemporary political rhetoric clarifies why the enemy must remain spectral. After calls to mobilize against fundamentalism, political leaders may emphasize that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, distinguishing it from fundamentalists. The account interprets this qualification not merely as a gesture of political correctness, but as a way of preserving the enemy’s indeterminate status: the threat must remain available as a figure of danger without being fixed as an entire religion.

This comparison concerns the political function of an imagined enemy, not an equivalence between Islam and Jews or between distinct histories of persecution. It returns to the account’s central point about antisemitism: a fantasy can gather scattered anxieties around a figure whose explanatory force depends on remaining at once recognizable and indeterminate.