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violenceenthusiast · 4 years ago

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im curious why people are saying supernatural is jewish like idk if jewish writers makes an inherently jewish story especially when things like following out the christian apocalypse from revelations and showing a real physical g-d who is just some guy i think is super jarring since though christians claim to be against idolatry they seem totally fine showing depictions of gd or whatever i dont get jesus honestly but jews are far more strict and the idea of showing gds appearance is pretty wrong

WOOF okay um. Maybe this is one of those Tone Doesn’t Come Thru Well Online things but to me this is soo fucking rude… I’m half way between John Mulaney we don't have time to unpack all of that & Ben Wyatt wait it’s gonna bother me if I don’t explain why you’re wrong.

This turned into all my thoughts.

So like. First off, it’s all fun and games. We’re all just joking and joshing and projecting here on destiel dot tumblr dot com and Jupernatural is not an exception in a lot of ways. And so when someone shits on what we’re doing here (yes, even unintentionally) what you get is what happened: oh you think you’re funny well I’m about to be hilarious!!! aka I’m gonna do it even more now out of spite specifically because you said not to. Like it really is all jokes but also you know what’s not a joke? Antisemitism in all its forms, even the casual shit! It’s really draining and it builds up in your veins!! Just. Yeah. You saw a lot of people talking about it today in particular because much like other topics of the day, one thing kicks off a whole other turn of events. So like. one misguided comment that’s playfully antisemitic and then one more little one, and then one big/obvious one launched us (Jewish spn fans) into a whole bigger discussion about antisemitism and erasure of Jews in the spn fandom writ large. It’s one thing to be descriptive, offer a headcanon/what if, or employ a certain mode of analysis. It’s another thing to definitively say This Is The Truth, specifically when to do so overrides something else, especially in this case when what’s being overridden is Jews, an ethnoreligious minority. It’s also another thing to talk over Jews. And mind this has been building for days. Not in a bad way just like, it’s been topical for days and then today one big thing pushed it over the edge to us actually posting abt it (partially bc at that point it’s a pattern, which feels like it needs to be addressed). Like, destiel tumblr is small we pretty much all see all the same posts, and then Jewish spn fans… we’re friends, we chat about life? We joke around together, y’know? If you’re being antisemitic (yes, even unintentionally) we’re all gonna hear abt it. It’s how we stay safe or in this case, curate the online exp.

That being said tho projecting on fiction is like fun and even a good thing at times, and def opens up new modes of analysis. But! the other big thing here is that there IS a LOT of evidence for a Jewish reading of spn, in a lot of ways, and particularly if you know what to look for. Like there’s lots of niche Jewish slang (non-Jews just don’t know these things, and that is a reflection primarily of the writers but once you put it in the script it implies things about the characters too of course), the theology of the early seasons (I’ll get to that in a second), main character motivations (hold on), “Moishe Campbell” implying Mary is (and therefore Sam and Dean are) Jewish, etc.

It’s not surprising to me or anything that non-Jews don’t catch anything/everything Jewish about spn but that Jews catch both sides of it, because that’s just how being part of a marginalized group works. You learn about your own stuff AND the dominant culture’s stuff because that’s how you survive (socially, psychologically, literally). Members of the dominant culture don’t need to learn the marginalized one, are never confronted with it, and so they just.. don’t. I don’t even mean that in a normative or accusatory way, that’s just an observation on the state of things. Non-Jews who aren’t part of another marginalized religion, aka expressed xtians and cultural xtians, have a ton of misconceptions about Judaism, for example, “Jesus was Jewish” and not, “Jesus was an asshole of an apostate who made life harder for Jews at the time in a myriad of ways and whose movement has had a lasting negative impact on world Jewry (and other peoples) for the ensuing millenia”. I truly Don’t Have Time right now to get into the varied and intense history of antisemitism in all its forms but. the point I’m making here is that I’m not shocked I need to explain that life experience shapes your worldview?? So if you’re Jewish you’re always gonna be living life through that version of the world and it does impact you?? Same as anything else?? As unwell as they may be, spn writers aren’t exempt from that. Jewish people writing about xtianity are doing so thru a primarily Jewish understanding and vice versa. Jews can (and did!) write about xtian lore but in a Jewish way! Some core Jewish themes: wrestling with angels/G-d, questioning G-d, IF there’s a G-d they will have to beg MY forgiveness, the afterlife isn’t really a big thing so all that matters is your time on earth, make amends to others directly and thru your actions rather than seeking absolution with G-d, you are not obligated to complete the work nor may you abandon it, etc… So that’s the other reasoning why we say “spn is Jewish” based solely on it being written by Jews. Rather than Death of The Author, let’s look at what the author has imbued the story with, both intentionally and unintentionally. And re: Chuck and idolatry… I don’t even know where to start with the way you phrased this but. the Jewish Spn Writers of Note are apparently Kripke, Gamble, and Edlund. All of whom stopped writing for the show years before the Chuck Is God plot!

Like yes it feels very stupid to be writing a thousand words on antisemitism and supernatural but like. this is a spn blog run by a Jew so. This whole thing is also just the same every time. This is very representative of typical casual antisemitism.

#asks #no readmore we die like men (gender neutral)#sorry its so long alma #jupernatural #anonymous #scream maybe i should add a readmore.. maybe in the morning

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burn-the-retcon · 3 years ago

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I’ve witnessed an awful lot of drama caused by the claim going around that the Strilondes are canonically Jewish and therefore it’s okay to harass people who do things like draw them celebrating Christmas. It not being okay to harass people over drawings and Dave canonically helping Jade set up Christmas decorations (in April) aside, I can categorically state that no, I am pretty sure they are not. Cut for length, anti-Semitism, and general anti-religionism (on Hussie’s part, hopefully not on mine); please read whole post before commenting.

The evidence which gets cited as proof here is the fact that Dave and Rose came up with elaborate metaphors involving “ethnic weddings”. I’ve seen at least one person claim that Dave must be Jewish because “he knows what happens at Jewish weddings”. This baffles me completely. I know what happens at Jewish weddings and I’m certainly not Jewish, and by that argument, Hussie must be Jewish because he’s the one who wrote it. I’ve also seen a claim that Dave is “obsessed with Jewish weddings”. He mentioned them exactly one time. By that logic, he’s also obsessed with meteors - he discussed those more than once, even!

That aside, let’s look at what he and Rose actually said, starting with Rose’s because it came first chronologically.

Removing the lid signals the moment your life becomes a great whirling batshit pandemonium, somewhat resembling the chaos of an especially ethnic wedding. Somewhere, a soused uncle deliberately shatters china on the floor. Muddy livestock is decorated, and then lost track of. The question “Who’s mule is this?” at times can be heard over the din.

Coming from a Jewish writer, I could accept this as a bit of self-deprecating humour. Hussie is not Jewish, and has a track record of at best tone-deafness and at worst actively cruel mockery of minorities. To my non-Jewish eyes, this doesn’t even look like the correct offensive stereotype. Intentional shattering of crockery is a Greek stereotype, not a Jewish one. As for Dave...

TG: im feeling pretty friggin MATRIMONIAL all a sudden TG: take a look down by your foot see that little bottle TG: stomp on that shit like its on fire TG: noisy ethnic dudes are flipping the fuck out and waving us around on chairs til someone gets hurt TG: im your 300 pound matronly freight-train TG: and my gaping furnace is hungry for coal so get goddamn shoveling

This is at least vaguely like a Jewish stereotype, but again, this comes off like an outsider mocking others’ traditions. He didn’t even get them right - in every case I’ve seen it’s been a drinking glass that gets stomped on, not a bottle, and Googling doesn’t turn up anything about bottles being used. I also note neither of them used the word “Jewish” at any point, but used “ethnic” - a word which implies, at least to me, an out-group that the speaker is not in.

This aside, human religion of any kind is never discussed again except idiomatically, until Rose compares the story of Adam and Eve to splitting the atom, in a scene where she’s supposed to come off as a rambling drunk. Then, we get the other scene usually cited for the Strilondes’ Judaism, the wedding.

This is a much stronger point, but when you look at this there’s a level of nastiness beneath the surface. Rose and Kanaya both look discomfited and surprised, not happy, implying they either didn’t suggest this or are nervous about being picked up and shaken around or both. There’s a Jake face in the background looking shocked and appalled, and he’s just copy-pasted from the Trickster pages but this implies we’re supposed to think this is weird. Worse, the characters doing so are in Trickster Mode. Trickster Mode’s entire deal was the characters acting irrationally and impulsively, had a whole long spiel from the author insert about how it’s a horrible idea, and is portrayed as more or less analogous to drug usage. This is not giving me the impression that we’re supposed to think the chair-lifting is anything but something to be mocked.

Finally, they set up a planet-wide society in which no human religions exist anymore, including Judaism. I can’t find the quote anymore but Dave in the epilogue specifically states dismissively that only troll religions exist on Earth C and even those aren’t popular. If it was so important to them, why didn’t they keep it and tell others about it?

This ties into a general pattern of how religion in general only comes up in the comic to be made fun of or portrayed as a disaster. The kids make idiomatic references to God, but never display any signs that faith means anything to them. John refers to Jesus as “an adult bearded human who was magic”, which is more like how an alien would describe Jesus than anything that comes out of the actual aliens’ mouths/keyboards. Rose specifically brings up Adam and Eve when she’s drunk and babbling. No one celebrates any religious holidays except for Jade and Dave setting up Christmas-in-April with the shittily drawn decorations which is supposed to be them fucking around and pretending to get the presents Jade never got before, not actually finding meaning in a Christian holiday. Gamzee’s religion veers between a reason to mock him and a reason he’s dangerous, and it hasn’t escaped my notice that his theme song of a sort is “Miracles”, by a rap duo who are very spiritual with a Christian influence in their personal lives, and it’s used to make Gamzee look like even more of a dumb stoner. Karkat and Sollux have an exchange about how “MIRACLES ARE POOP STAINS ON GOD’S UNDERWEAR” and “makiing fun of people’2 reliigiion i2 the be2t thiing two do”. And the kids don’t have any qualms about themselves being worshipped as gods in the new world. I am not personally very religious (best I can say is I don’t disbelieve) but I’m familiar with how religious people think, and if the kids were religious in any way, they would not simply throw out their views when something supernatural happened. People who believe in God would be more likely to, from my experience, consider themselves tools of the “real” God behind the scenes and spread the word about the God they worship, not want to be worshipped themselves. They’d consider themselves extremely powerful tools, yes, but still tools, not the ultimate wielders. Not all religions or subsects of Judaism believe in a literal god, just in codes of behaviour and historical connections, but if it was at all important to them, they would at least think about how their faiths connected to what happened to them. The fact that they seem so blase about supernatural happenings in general is probably a sign of clumsy genre switching - it went from “parody of adventure games with characters as stand-ins for the player” to “philosophical rambling with characters in their own right” - but there sure as hell isn’t any canonical support for them practising religion of any kind either way, or even being aware it exists except when they want to make a weird metaphor.

#homestuck #dave strider #rose lalonde #antisemitism #Inappropriate humour

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Why do we feel so guilty all the time?

The long read: Food, sex, money, work, family, friends, health, politics: theres nothing we cant feel guilty about, including our own feelings of guilt

I feel guilty about everything. Already today Ive felt guilty about having saidthe wrong thing to a friend. Then Ifeltguilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing Id said. Plus, I havent called my mother yet today: guilty. And I really should have organised something special for my husbands birthday: guilty. I gave the wrong kind of food to my child: guilty. Ive been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty. Im taking up all this space in a world with not enough space in it: guilty, guilty, guilty.

Nor am I feeling good about feeling bad. Not whensophisticated friends never fail toremind me how selfinvolved, self-aggrandising, politically conservative and morally stunted the guilty are. Poor me. Guilty about guilty. Filial guilt, fraternal guilt, spousal guilt, maternal guilt, peer guilt, work guilt, middle-class guilt, whiteguilt, liberal guilt, historical guilt, Jewish guilt: Im guilty of them all.

Thankfully, there are those who say they can save us from guilt. According to the popular motivational speaker Denise Duffield-Thomas, author of Get Rich, Lucky Bitch!, guilt is one of the most common feelings women suffer. Guilty women, lured by guilt into obstructing their own paths to increased wealth, power, prestige and happiness, just cant seem to take advantage of their advantages.

You might feel guilty, Duffield-Thomas writes, for wanting more, or for spending money on yourself, or for taking time out of your busy family life to work on improving yourself. You might feel guilty that other people are poor, thatyour friend is jealous, that there are starving people in theworld. Sure enough, I do feel guilty for those things. So,itis something of a relief to hear that I can be helped thatI can be self-helped. But, for that to happen, what I must first understand is that a) Im worth it, and b) none of these structures of global inequality, predicated on historical injustices, are my fault.

My guilt, in other words, is a sign not of my guilt but of myinnocence even my victimhood. Its only by forgiving myself for the wrongs for which I bear no direct responsibility that I can learn to release my money blocks and live afirstclass life, according to Duffield-Thomas.

Imagine that: a first-class life. This sort of advice, which frames guilt as our most fundamentally inhibiting emotion, takes insights from psychoanalytic and feminist thinking and transforms them into the language of business motivation. The promise is that our guilt can be expiated by making money.

Its an idea that might resonate especially in the German language, where guilt and debt arethe same word, schuld. One thinks, for example, of Max Webers thesis about how the spirit of capitalism conflates our worldly and heavenly riches, on the basis that what you earn in this world also serves as a measure of your spiritual virtue, since it depends on your capacity for hard work, discipline and self-denial.

But what Weber calls salvation anxiety within the Protestant work ethic has the opposite effect to the self-help manuals promise to liberate entrepreneurs from their guilt. For Weber, in fact, the capitalist pursuit of profit does not reduce ones guilt, but actively exacerbates it for, in an economy that admonishes stagnation, there can be no rest forthe wicked.

So, the guilt that blocks and inhibits us also propels us to work, work, work, to become relentlessly productive in the hope that we might by our good works rid ourselves of guilt. Guilt thus renders us productive and unproductive, workaholic and workphobic a conflict that might explain theextreme and even violent lengths to which people sometimes will go, whether by scapegoating others or sacrificing themselves, to be rid of what many people considerthe mostunbearable emotion.

What is the potency of guilt? With its inflationary logic, guiltlooks, if anything, to have accumulated over time. Although we tend to blame religion for condemning man tolife as a sinner, the guilt that may once have attached tospecific vices vices for which religious communities couldprescribe appropriate penance now seems, in a more secular era, to surface in relation to just about anything: food, sex, money, work, unemployment, leisure, health, fitness, politics, family, friends, colleagues, strangers, entertainment, travel, the environment, you name it.

Equally, whoever has been tempted to suppose that rituals of public humiliation area macabre relic of the medieval past clearly hasnt been paying much attention to our life online. You cant expect to get away for long on social media without someone pointing an accusatory finger at you. Yet its hard to imagine that the presiding spirit of our age, the envious and resentful troll, would have such easy pickings if he could not already sense awhiff of guilt-susceptibility emanating from his prey.

It wasnt meant to be like this. The great crusaders of modernity were supposed to uproot our guilt. The subject ofcountless high-minded critiques, guilt was accused by modern thinkers of sapping the life out of us and causing ourpsychological deterioration. It was said to make us weak(Nietzsche), neurotic (Freud), inauthentic (Sartre).

In thelatter part of the 20th century, various critical theories gained academic credibility, particularly within the humanities. These were theories that sought to show whether with reference to class relations, race relations, gender relations how we are all cogs in a larger system ofpower. We may play our parts in regimes of oppression, but we are also at the mercy of forces larger than us.

But this raises questions about personal responsibility: if its true that our particular situation is underpinned by a complex network of social and economic relations, how can any individual really claim to bein control or entirely responsible for her own life? Viewed in such an impersonal light, guilt can seem an unhelpful hangover fromless selfaware times.

As a teacher of critical theory, I know how crucial and revelatory its insights can be. But Ive occasionally also suspected that our desire for systematic and structural formsof explanation may be fuelled by our anxiety at the prospect of discovering were on the wrong side of history.When wielded indelicately, explanatory theories can offer their adherents afoolproof system for knowing exactly what view to hold, with impunity, about pretty much everything as if one could take out an insurance policy to be sure of always being right. Often, too, thats as far as such criticism takes you into a right-thinking that doesnt necessarily organise itself into right-acting.

The notion that our intellectual frameworks might be as much a reaction to our guilt as a remedy for it might sound familiar to a religious person. In the biblical story, after all, man falls when hes tempted by fruit from the tree of knowledge. Its knowledge that leads him out of the Gardenof Eden into an exile that has yet to end. His guilt isaconstant, nagging reminder that he has taken this wrongturn.

Illustration: A Richard Allen

Yet even within that source we see how mans guilt can bedeceptive as slippery and seductive as the serpent who led him astray. For if man has sinned by tasting of knowledge, the guilt that punishes him repeats his crime: with all its finger-wagging and tenor of I told you so, guilt itself comes over as awfully knowing. It keeps us, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, in thrall to that boring and repetitive voice inside our head that endlessly corrects, criticises, censors, judges and finds fault with us, but never brings usany news about ourselves. In our feelings of guilt, we seemalready to have the measure of who it is we are and whatit is were capable of.

Could that be the reason for our guilt? Not our lack of knowledge but rather our presumption of it? Our desperate need to be sure of ourselves, even when what we think of ourselves is that were worthless, useless, the pits? When we feel guilty we at least have the comfort of being certain ofsomething of knowing, finally, the right way to feel, whichis bad.

This may be why were addicted to crime dramas: they satisfy our wish for certainty, no matter how grim that certainty is. At the beginning of a detective story, were conscious of a crime, but we dont know who did it. By the end of the story, ithas been discovered which culprit is guilty: case closed. Thus guilt, inits popular rendering, is what converts our ignorance intoknowledge.

For a psychoanalyst, however, feelings of guilt dont necessarily have any connection tobeing guiltyin the eyes of the law.Our feelings of guilt may be a confession, but they usually precede the accusation of any crime the details ofwhich not even the guilty person can be sure.

So, while the stories we prefer may be the ones that uncover guilt, its equally possible that our own guilt is a cover story forsomething else.

Although the fall is originally a biblical story, forget religion for a moment. One can just as well recount a more recent and assuredly secular story of the fall of man. Its a story that has had countless narrators, perhaps none finer or more emphatic than the German Jewish postwar critic Theodor Adorno. Writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Adorno argued famously that whoever survives in a world that could produce Auschwitz is guilty, at least insofar as theyre still party to the same civilisation that created the conditions for Auschwitz.

Inother words, guilt is our unassailable historical condition. Its our contract as modern people. As such, says Adorno, we all have a shared responsibility after Auschwitz to be vigilant,lest we collapse once more into the ways of thinking, believing and behaving that brought down this guilty verdict upon us. To make sense after Auschwitz is to risk complicity with its barbarism.

For Adorno too, then, our knowledge renders us guilty, rather than keeping us safe. For a modern mind, this could well seem shocking. That said, perhaps the more surprising feature of Adornos representation of guilt is the idea expressed in his question whether after Auschwitz you cango on living especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there couldhave been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of himwho was spared.

For Adorno, the guilt of Auschwitz belongs to all of western civilisation, but its a guilt he assumed would be felt most keenly by one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed the Jewish survivor of the second world war.

Adorno, who had left Europe for New York in early 1938, was probably attesting to his own sense of guilt. Yet his insight is one we alsoget from psychologists who worked with concentration camp survivors after the war; they found that feelings of guiltaccompanied by shame, self-condemnatory tendencies and self-accusations are experienced by the victims of the persecution and apparently much less (if at all) bythe perpetrators of it.

What can it mean if victims feel guilty and perpetrators areguilt-free? Are objective guilt (being guilty) and subjective guilt (feeling guilty) completely at odds with each other?

In the years after the war, the concept of survival guilt tended to be viewed as the byproduct of the victims identification with their aggressor. The survivor who may subsequently find it hard to forgive herself because others have diedin her place why am I still here when they are not? may also feel guilty because of what she was forced to collude withfor the sake of her survival. This need not imply any incriminating action on her part; her guilt may simply be anunconscious way of registering her past preference that others suffer instead of her.

On this basis, then, it may be possible to think of survivors guilt as a special case of the guilt we all bear when, aware or unaware, were glad when others, rather than ourselves, suffer. Obviously, thats not a pleasant feeling, but neither is ita hard one to understand. Still, there remains something deeply uncomfortable about accepting that survivors of the worst atrocities should feel any guilt for their own survival. Instead, shouldnt we be trying to save the survivor from her (in our view) mistaken feelings of guilt andthus establish, without smirch or quibble, her absolute innocence?

This understandable impulse, according to the intellectual historian Ruth Leys, saw the figure of the survivor emerge in the period after the second world war, alongside a shift in focus from the victims feelings of guilt toward an insistence on the victims innocence. This transformation, Leys argues, involved replacing the concept of guilt with its close cousin, shame.

The difference is crucial. The victim who feels guilt evidently has an inner life, with intentions and desires while the victim who feels shame seems to have had it bestowed from outside. The victims of trauma consequently appear to be the objects rather than the subjects ofhistory.

Shame, then, tells us something about what one is, not what one does or would like to do. And so the effect of this well-intentioned shift in emphasis may have been to rob the survivor of agency.

It may be tempting to assume that survival guilt is an extraordinary case, given the abject powerlessness of the victims of such traumas. But, as we will see, attempts to deny the validity of the guilt of others often have the similar effect of denying their intentions as well. Consider the case of liberal guilt, the guilt we all love to hate.

Liberal guilt has become a shorthand for describing those who feel keenly a lack of social, political and economic justice, but are not the ones who suffer thebrunt of it. According to the cultural critic Julie Ellison, it first took hold in the US in the 1990s, on the back of a post-cold-war fragmentation of theleft, and a loss of faith in the utopian politics of collective action that had characterised an earlier generation of radicals. The liberal who feels guilty has given up on the collective and recognises herself to be acting out of self-interest. Her guilt is thus a sign of the gap between what she feels for the others suffering and what she will do actively to alleviate it which isnot, it turns out, a great deal.

As such, her guilt incites much hostility in others, not least in the person who feels himself the object of the liberals guilt. This person, AKA the victim, understands only too well how seldom the pity he elicits in the guilty liberal is likely to lead toany significant structural or political changes for him.

Rather, the only power to be redirected his way is not political power, but the moral or affective power to make those more fortunate than he is feel even more guilty about the privileges they are nonetheless not inclined to give up.

But just how in control of her feelings is the guilty liberal? Not very, thinks Ellison. Since feelings arent easily confected, her guilt tends to assail her unbidden, rendering her highly performative, exhibitionist, even hysterical. In her guilt, she experiences a loss of control, although she remains conscious at all times of an audience, before whom she feels she must show how spectacularly sorry she is. Her guilt, then, is her way of acting out, marking a disturbance in the liberal who doesnt know herself quite as well as her guilt would haveher think.

The idea of guilt as aninhibiting emotion corroborates the common critique of liberal guilt: that, for all the suffering it produces, it fails completely to motivate the guilty subject tobring about meaningful political change.

But what if the liberals guilt actually has another purpose, to allow the liberal respite from the thing she may (unconsciously) feel even worse about: the lack of a fixed identity that tells her who she is, what her responsibilities are and where these come to an end.

If anything can be said to characterise the notoriously woolly liberal, guilt may be it. Liberal guilt suggests a certain class (middle), race (white) and geopolitical (developed world) situation. As such, despite the torment it brings to those who suffer it, it might, paradoxically (and, again, unconsciously), be reassuring for someone whose real neurosis is that she feels her identity is so mobile and shiftingthat she can never quite be surewhere she stands.

If this is what chiefly concerns her, then one might envisage her guilt as a feeling that tells her who she is, by virtue of telling her who she is failing to be for others. Who is the liberal? She who suffers on account of those who suffer morethan she. (I know whereof I speak.)

This may suggest why, in recent years, there has been mounting criticism of the liberals sensibilities. To her critics, the liberal really is guilty. Shes guilty of a) secretly resenting victims for how their sufferings make her feel, b) drawing attention away from them and back towards her, c) having theaudacity to make an exhibition out of her self-lacerations and d) doing practically nothing to challenge the status quo.

For critics of the guilty liberal, in other words, feeling guiltyis part of the problem, rather than the solution. And yetthis criticism is itself subject to the same accusation. Giventhat criticising someone for feeling guilty is only going to make them feel guiltier, guilt has, asweve seen, proved atricky opponent one that its various modern combatants have yetto defeat.

Once again, therefore, in the case of liberal guilt, we encounter a feeling so devilishly slippery that it repeats the problem in the course of confessing it. Because there is, of course, aform of guilt that does not inspire us to act, but prevents us from acting. This type of guilt takes the uncertainty of our relations with others (and our responsibility for others) and turns them into an object of certainty and knowledge.

But since the object in this case is our own self, we can see how liberal guilt, too, mutates guilt into a version of shame.Shame, infact, could well be a more accurate appellation for what motivates the guilty liberal in her public and private self-condemnations.

However, before we declare the liberal guilty as charged as in guilty of the wrong kind of guilt its worth reminding ourselves of the survival guilt that has likewise been viewed by many as guilt of the wrong kind. For as we observed in that case, in seeking to save the victim from her guilt, the victim becomes deprived of the very thing that might distinguish herfrom the objectifying aggression that has assailed her: asense of her own intentions and wishes, however aggressive, perverse or thwarted these might be.

For this reason, then, its vital to preserve the notion of survivors guilt (and, despite obvious differences, liberal guilt) as that which could yet return to the survivor (or the liberal) apower of agency such as must be absolutely necessary if sheis to have a future that isnt bound, by the resolving or absolving of her guilt, to repeat the past ad infinitum.

If religion often gets the blame for framing man as sinner, thesecular effort to release man from his guilt hasnt offered much relief. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that subjective innocence belongs to a bygone age, the age of the tragic hero. Oedipus, for example, is someone whose objective guilt (parricide, incest) is matched by the subjective innocence of the man who acts before he knows. Today, however, says Agamben, we find the opposing situation: modern man is objectively innocent (for he has not, like Oedipus, murdered with his own hands), but subjectively guilty (he knows that his comforts and securities have been paid for by someone, somewhere, probably in blood).

By falsely promising a tabula rasa bound to his historical and intellectual emancipation, modernity may not only have failed to obliterate mans subjective guilt, but may even have exacerbated it. For what many a modern man is guilty of is less his actions than his addiction to a version of knowledge that seems to have inhibited his capacity for action. As such, the religious assignation of man as sinner a fallen, abject, endlessly compromised, but also active, effective andchangeable creature begins to look comforting bycomparison.

Such a view also shares much in common with a certain psychoanalytic conception of guilt as a blocked form of aggression or anger toward those we need and love (God, parents, guardians, whomever we depend on for our own survival). But if guilt is the feeling that typically blocks all other (buried, repressed, unconscious) feelings, that is not initself areason to block feelings of guilt. Feelings, after all, are what you must be prepared to feel if they are to move you,or if you are to feel something else.

Main illustration by A Richard Allen

Adapted from Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum, which will be published by Yale University Press on 19 October at 18.99. To buy it for 16.15, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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