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Jean-Claude Milner: Remarks on the name Jew and the universal

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Notes

  1. English translations of isolated chapters from other of his books are available online through S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, Volume 3 of which is dedicated to his work: lineofbeauty.org/index.php/s/issue/view/6.

  2. In his review of Penchants criminels, Claude Lanzmann (best known as the director of Shoah) likened Milner, in view of his intellectual ‘courage,’ to a military ‘sapper’ (Lanzmann, 2004).

  3. I would be remiss not to mention here Milner’s deeply fascinating (and disturbing) interpretation of the answer Spinoza gives, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, to the Jewish question (Milner, 2013).

  4. The entire journal is now available online: cahiers.kingston.ac.uk. Selected articles from the journal are available in English in Volume 1 of Concept and Form (Hallward and Peden, 2012); Volume 2 contains interviews (including one with Milner) and essays about the journal.

  5. See ‘Les pièges du tout,’ in Penchants criminels (Milner, 2003b, 17–26); an English translation is available online: ‘The Traps of the All,’ S 3 (2010): 22–39; see note 1.

  6. Ellipses in brackets indicate text that I have chosen to omit; ellipses presented without brackets are to be found in the original. All footnotes are mine, added merely as a convenience for the English reader.

  7. The literal translation of quelconque (borrowed from Deleuze) would be ‘anything whatsoever.’ Translating the phrase nom non quelconque literally would amount to an act of violence against English; the point seems to be that the difficult universal prevents one from treating names as ‘interchangeable’ words.

  8. See Milner (1983).

  9. ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism,’ in Ecrits (Lacan, 2006, 174).

  10. Translation from Sartre (1964, 255).

  11. See Regnault (2002).

  12. See Milner (1978, 174–197).

  13. The correlation between science and Christianity, seemingly assumed here without further ado, actually alludes to Alexandre Kojève’s thesis in ‘L’origine chrétienne de la science moderne,’ in Cohen and Taton (1964, 2.295–306). Milner comments on Kojève’s thesis as well as Lacan’s counter-thesis in ‘Lacan and the Ideal of Science,’ in Lacan and the Human Sciences (Leupin, 1991, 27–42).

  14. See now, L’Universel en éclats (Milner, 2014).

  15. See Milner (2011b).

  16. Parler politique is an idea that Milner develops as part of his project to define politics ‘such as it is spoken’ rather than ‘practiced’ (Milner, 2011c, 8). Thus, he posits: ‘There is politics when it is materially possible and legally permitted to speak politics’ (Milner, 2011c, 9).

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  1. Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

    Robert S Kawashima (Translated by)

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Kawashima, R. Jean-Claude Milner: Remarks on the name Jew and the universal. Postmedieval 5, 320–335 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.22

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