The Transmission of Hatred and the Hatred of Transmission: The Psychopathology of a Murder and an Anatomy of a Silence. The Nobody’s Name: A Contemporary Symptom

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to address the psychopathology of antisemitism, anti-Jewish aggressions, and more specifically of present-day denials of the Real, a version of “ negationism ” or “ denialism, ” which has always been consubstantial with it. As a starting point, I will use two particularly savage murders, which were committed in France ten years apart (fifteen targeted attacks having taken place in the meantime). In 2007, a young man named Ilan Halimi, precariously employed as a sales assistant in a cell phone shop, was kidnapped as a Jew (hence supposedly likely to raise a huge ransom). He was tortured for twenty-four days and finally murdered, the persistent denial of the antisemitic nature of the act tragically hampering the conduct of the investigation. In May 2017, a sixty-seven-year-old Jewish woman employed at a kindergarten and living in a low-income Paris neighborhood was tortured for a whole night in her home by a twenty-seven-year-old man whose Muslim family, including himself, had been insulting and threatening her for months. She was finally murdered and thrown out of a window. Her name was Sarah Halimi. The anatomy of the act itself, as well as the resounding silencing of its antisemitic nature by intellectuals, politicians, and the media can truly be interpreted as a contemporary symptom. I will be concerned here with exploring the mass-psychology characterizing antisemitism, together with the genealogy of the culture underlying it, which presents itself as a meeting point for Christian radicalism, the ultra-left, an expression of the return of a Paulinian repressed, and Islamic totalitarianism. The to