"Why Do You Pretend to Be So Detached from Your Jewish Feelings?": Toward an Affective Reading of Jewish Diaspora

Abstract:Through a comparative reading of Chris Kraus's novel Torpor (2006) and Philip Roth's novel The Counterlife (1986), this essay develops a theory of Jewish affect that privileges negative feelings as key to articulating counterhegemonic political and ethnic Jewish American identities. Drawing, in part, on the work of Benjamin Schreier and other scholars who have sought to broaden the field of Jewish American Literary Studies, this essay argues that affect also permits the inclusion of a writer like Kraus whose fiction might otherwise be dismissed as insufficiently knowledgeable about Jewish religious or linguistic experience. The writings of Kraus and Roth engage with the question of the primacy of Jewish identity in late-twentieth-century America, posing negative feelings as anarchic but ultimately central to a contemporary Jewishness that does not seek to ally itself with power. The essay argues both that Jewish American Literary Studies would benefit from a deeper engagement with affect theory, and also that negative or "minor" affects are particularly significant as vectors of political meaning-making in a Jewish American context.