The conceptual Jew was cast as the viscosity resisting modernity’s order.
Evidence
As this brief survey of the long list of Jewish incongruities shows, there was hardly a single door slammed on the road to modernity in which the Jews did not put their fingers. From the process which brought their emancipation from the ghetto, they could not but emerge heavily bruised. They were the opacity of the world fighting for clarity, the ambiguity of the world lusting for certainty. They bestrode all the barricades and invited bullets from every side. The conceptual Jew has been, indeed, construed as the archetypal Viscosity’ of the modern dream of order and clarity; as the enemy of all order: old, new, and particularly the desired one. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 168
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘viscosity’ — the ambivalent substance that resists the modern drive for order/classification — as Bauman’s term for the proto-Other.
- XREF: Viscosity is the reusable analytic that later reading on the dehumanized Other (Muslims, colonized) will exemplify. — connects to: The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131; The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 134; Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169 (+2 more)
Related
- The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity (similarity 0.87)
- The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter (similarity 0.81)
Broader Connections
- Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured
#expands(0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169 - The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity.
#expands(0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 82 - Contact with a Jew can trigger tactile delirium and compulsions to wash
#exemplifies(0.72)