Unreadable indistinguishability between Jew and Muslim persists as an unresolved event.

Evidence

The theological explanations whereby “the Messiah has not really become a Turk; rather he is now ever a Jew” thus correspond precisely to the evacuation of significance of Islam in the case of the Messiah and in the case of the Muslim, the Muselmann—the Jew, the Arab. More importantly, it corresponds to the evacuation of the theological dimension, “the divine spark” to which Primo Levi testified. That this testimony articulated the absence of the divine can in no way be translated into an absolute, as if it, too, had disappeared “without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory.” If the law, that is to say also the theological, has become “absolutely indistinguishable” from life, the meaning of this indistinguishability remains to come. It is an event that occurs-if it occurs-in a zone of indistinguishability and that “arrives at not arriving … manages not to happen.” It may also and at the same time be the story of “how something has really happened in seeming not to happen.” Between the Jew and the Arab, between politics and theology, no more than the messianic remains, no more than a “small displacement that seems to leave everything intact.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 780

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The messianic structure of ‘arriving at not arriving’ as an event that happens in seeming not to happen is a dense conceptual knot resisting easy summary.