The Arab was figured as the Jew’s inverse, absolute subjection against newfound military strength.

Evidence

What are we to make of this encounter between these military and militaristic, yet human figures (here created and perfected in response to a history now perceived as a history of passivity and weakness) and these “tatters of human existence”? How are we to read those “wretched villagers … revealed in their nakedness, impoverished, shriveled, and stinking” represented by the Arab shepherd, this singular being-if it is one- “only a miserable nothing, a subdued shriveled creature, a mask wrapped in a cloth, someone shrunken and stooped like a worthless sack, frightened, dissolving into nothingness” (309/H107)? Who is this subjected and submitted and vanishing ghost of a religious persuasion, this barely organic remnant, this figure of absolute subjection and of “faithful resignation” to violence and a “death by apoplexy”-a death that seems to have escaped its victims’ own knowledge? And who are these “dim, human forms”? Who are the Jews here? Arid who are the Muslims? In what follows, I will try to argue that the rudiments of an answer have long exhibited themselves as the history of a word, a genealogy of a figure of absolute subjection. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 591

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Anidjar poses the exchange where the Arab’s abjection mirrors what Jews were, and the answer lies in a genealogy of a word-figure.