One could imagine a game of intellectual “telephone.” It would be like the kind that children play, wherein one child whispers a phrase to another and so on down the line—until the utterance arrives at its final destination where the participants are delighted to discover what has changed and what has remained the same. But in our game it is the whisper of ideas across the centuries and not a tongue twister around the table.

It would start in the late fifteenth century with Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola and his oration “On the Dignity of Man.” Pico would whisper of the creation of the world and of the place of “man” in God's grand schema:

Man was indeed assigned a place in the “Great Chain of Being” but that place was not fixed. By means of God-given intellect and through the pursuit of philosophy, man created as indeterminate form could transform and ascend into the higher natures which are divine.

Centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel heard this as indicating the transformative nature of humankind that could change over time via negation and in accordance with the march of Spirit; that is, through History. Man's place was no longer assigned in a “Great Chain of Being” so much as it was tied to the development of Spirit in its voyage to Absolute Knowledge or Reason.

But this is a teleological journey culminating in the reconciliation of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, of the Universal and the Particular, and in this regard there is no question of “ascending” or “descending” according to one's actions but of keeping up with the dialectical, at times violent, movement of History. And on this march of History some people were to be included and others left behind.

Friedrich Nietzsche took this emphasis on transformation, negation and evolution, unbound from the “Great Chain of Being,” to indicate that this malleable, reasoning human being was no longer coupled to a God-creator or a definitive end. “Whither is God?” Nietzsche's madman asks. “We have killed him— you and I . . . How shall we the murderers of all murderers comport ourselves? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?”Footnote ³ Unchained from God or History the possibilities for humankind are limitless; there is no longer “up or down,” “backward or forward,” but a “plunging continually.” In this empty space only the “human” remains and it will be up to man to choose how to live.

In the early twentieth century, Alexandre Kojève heard this to mean that Hegel's supposition about the transformative nature of the human subject need not rely upon the pull of Geist or the power of God but in fact was predicated on man and his essence as a “negating-negativity.” “Must not we ourselves become gods?” But man could only come to realize this potential in the confrontation with death that manifests in the “master–slave” dialectic and specifically through the slave who

From the distance of a few years, not decades or centuries, Maurice Blanchot understood this all to place the emphasis on “negation” and specifically the role and place of negation in language. Blanchot was heard to say that

For Blanchot, man as “negating-negativity” meant man the name-giver in the sense that the naming of a thing negates the particular essence of that thing, leaving only the universal concept to remain. Straining to hear Hegel in Kojève, Blanchot pondered the way that “real death is announced and is always present in my language. My language wants to say that that person who is there right now can be detached from herself, subtracted from her existence and from her presence, and plunged into a nothingness of existence and presence.”Footnote ⁶ But far from an impasse, the paradoxical conflict between the singular and the communal is the basis for the ambiguity that is the essential character of writing literature.

Jacques Derrida, near the end of the line, took this to mean that the transformative and seemingly self-creating philosophical man of humanism was actually bound to language not to God, Geist, or History. Listening to Blanchot and casting a glance back at Nietzsche, Derrida turned to literature as a work that eschews Hegelian constraints and remains ambiguous and unfixed as concept, thus conserving its singular, though not essential, nature. “Poetry and literature provide or facilitate ‘phenomenological’ access to what makes of a thesis a thesis as such. Before having a philosophical content, before being or bearing such and such a ‘thesis,’ literary experience, writing or reading, is a ‘philosophical’ experience.”Footnote ⁷ The literary is the philosophical where both the particular and the universal are conserved. This is because the singular enters language as repeatable, but, as literature, it is also inexhaustible, the realization of the impossibility to negate, and thus outside History.

One might mistake this game of philosophical telephone for a historical account or a history of ideas but I assure you it is not. Continuities can be gleaned by looking at the texts but this parable lacks historical substantiation or coordination. Did any of these thinkers even read Pico? It is a fiction: a literary imagining inspired by Stefanos Geroulanos's and Sarah Hammerschlag's recent and exciting books on modern French thought and intended to demonstrate certain continuities between Pico and the thinkers who followed him as well as the changes and transformations. Specifically, the continuity in the way that Pico's emphasis on the malleability of the human, which he insisted as constituting “dignity,” actually anticipates the post-World War II criticisms of essentialist presentations of the human addressed by Geroulanos and Hammerschlag in their respective works (though these criticisms were often phrased in Hegelian or Nietzschean terms). But the story also highlights the change that occurs when the emphasis on transformative malleability takes on a decidedly linguistic or literary character over time. This parable holds another purpose as well but we will turn to that at the end of our game of intellectual telephone.

In An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, Geroulanos argues that competing discussions of “humanism” in the years before and after World War II actually led to the demise of “humanism” as a conceptual apparatus. In The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought, Hammerschlag chronicles the ways that postwar thinkers (Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and, later, Jacques Derrida) were able to conserve what she designates the “trope” of the Jew employed by anti-Semitic thinkers in order to revalorize the characteristics assigned to the “Jew” as positive attributes.

The two books cover similar temporal trajectories: while Hammerschlag's book actually begins in the late nineteenth century the emphasis is squarely on postwar French thought, ultimately bringing her analysis to bear on recent publications by Alain Badiou. By contrast, Geroulanos's book begins by gesturing to the rise of “anti-humanism” in the second half of the twentieth century before returning to focus on the first half in order to better understand the later development. The two books overlap on the figures of Blanchot, Sartre, and Levinas, and, interestingly, on the relevance of the thought of Hegel. But both works also overlap in their presentation of postwar French thought as a post-theological (though not anthropocentric) enterprise where human agency is reclaimed, though shorn of human mastery or the idea of necessary progress. The specifics of each book are, of course, quite different and in what follows I will try to treat each work on its own terms before bringing them back together to explore this possible overlap.

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Geroulanos's project is, from one perspective, a revisionist account of the rise of what has been termed “anti-humanism” in the second half of the twentieth century—most often chronicled through the ascent of structuralism and post-structuralism, two interrelated intellectual discourses that came to take the mantle from the fallen hero “humanism” in the aftermath of World War II. Geroulanos seeks both to enrich and to complicate the story by articulating the ways that competing arguments for humanism were also critiques of humanism and thus contained the intellectual seeds of what would later and inappropriately come to be termed “anti-humanism.” Geroulanos focuses on the role and place of “atheism” in humanist thought before and after World War II and the ways that what he terms the “anti-foundational” definition of the “human” eventually emptied this category of meaning, leaving only atheism to reside in the postwar intellectual projects. The book is organized into two chronological parts, “The 1930s” and “After the Liberation,” with two-thirds of the book devoted to the former. However, it might have been better organized into three sections of roughly a hundred pages each: the first section detailing and defining anti-foundational realism and the proliferation of competing humanisms, the second section chronicling the impact and influence of these two factors on French thinkers before World War II, the final section addressing the evolution of this trend in the postwar era.

What is truly novel in Geroulanos's account is his presentation of the ways that the cracks in the edifice of “humanism” were “attested to by the sheer polysemy of the term, that is to say by the dependence of different ‘humanisms’ on competing political ideologies with very different conceptions of modernity” (100). On Geroulanos's account, communists, Catholics, and non-conformists all attempted to rehabilitate “humanism” by wielding a sharp critique of older variants as well as those proffered by their contemporaries. By utilizing the texts of thinkers such as André Malraux, Jacques Maritain, and Thierry Maulnier, Geroulanos demonstrates the ways that the claims of each undercut the other, creating increasing distrust of the term and its efficacy, and in this way he provides a strong case for the demise of humanism. At the same time, it is noteworthy that the main steps in the creation of “anti-foundational realism” occurred before the proliferation and most significant contest of humanisms discussed here, which climaxed in the later 1930s and—as Edward Baring has recently shown in these pages—recurred in the mid-1940s.Footnote ⁸

In the following chapters Geroulanos attempts to articulate the impact of anti-foundational realism and the results of this proliferation of competing humanisms by exploring the texts of thinkers he believes were formed by these trends either before or after the war. The chapter on Kojève is especially interesting in the ways that it both supports and detracts from Geroulanos's larger argument. In the full chapter on Kojève, Geroulanos provides a strong reading of Kojève's lectures on Hegel in the 1930s that enriches our understanding of these legendary sessions through his informed commentary on Kojève's confrontation with Saint Paul, his use of the theological philosophy of Vladmir Soloviev, and the role and place of Nietzsche and Pierre Bayle in Kojève's thought. He has certainly cast new light on the Hegel lectures and one emerges from this section with a good sense of how Kojève used Hegel to present “man” as a “negator” and “transformer” of nature and existence who thus “recognizes his status as (temporally finite) God” (132). But the section also serves to muddle his larger argument somewhat when he suggests that his findings will also demonstrate the “complex system on the basis of which Kojève arrived at these conclusions” and how these conclusions “affected his contemporaries’ perception of the modern human condition, and offered an antihumanism” (134). It is not that this is not a fair assessment of what Geroulanos does in his analysis of Kojève, but that it conflicts with his earlier argument about the ways that the proliferation of humanisms and the rise of atheism led to the emptying of the category and announced a new thought that is not “anti-humanist” but an atheism that is not humanism. This reader was left unsure as to whether Kojève was an anti-humanist or a “negative anthropologist.”

Geroulanos's book covers a great deal of ground casting forward and back in an attempt to navigate the twists and turns of these proliferating “humanisms” in a way that does justice to the legacies of such thinkers as Hegel and Nietzsche but also to the contributions of his chief subjects such as Heidegger, Kojève, Bataille, Blanchot, and Jean Hyppolite. But I think it also important to note the absence of Pico from this study. I kept arriving at the same question as I worked through the argument: “what was this humanism and who were these humanists that provoked this revolt?” Geroulanos tells us that “humanism can be defined as a foundational concept of man” (14) and later that it indicates a “fixed nature” (288). But he also admits that, given the complexity of the term, he would be hard pressed to give any one definition. In a way I found this “revolt against humanism” akin to H. Stuart Hughes's “revolt against positivism” in Consciousness and Society (2002) (not bad company to keep). In Hughes's work the “revolt against positivism” became the basis for his investigation into intellectual production at the end of the nineteenth century—though one would be similarly hard pressed to identify the monolithic “positivism” that had European thought in its grip prior to the alleged revolt. Geroulanos's “humanism” seems to possess the same characteristics as that positivism and thus Geroulanos's argument is presented largely in terms of the movement away from this sort of humanism. By contrast, Pico's humanism shares fundamental attributes with Geroulanos's “anti-foundational realism” and thus may have provided some interesting continuities with the past. On Pico's reading, “man” is malleable and transformative, albeit bound to the Great Chain of Being, placing him between the animal and the divine. On Geroulanos's reading, for thinkers such as Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, and Sartre (following Kojève) “man” was equally malleable and transformative and also bound, though to the material conditions of his existence from which there is no escape. For these later thinkers, man was not bound to the “Great Chain of Being” but to the great chain of “being-in-the-world.”

Thus an investigation into the ways that some of these thinkers conserved such fundamental aspects of “humanism” may have helped to explain how thinkers such as Sartre, Blanchot, and Levinas could imagine that there was still the possibility that humanity could change for the better even in the face of their harsh historical reality. I think this is especially the case for Levinas and that this could have been made more readily apparent had Geroulanos expanded his investigation of Levinas to include some of his later texts as well as his earlier ones. Indeed, as Geroulanos notes and Sarah Hammerschlag also indicates, the article from which Geroulanos draws the title of his book is a piece by Levinas criticizing some aspects of Blanchot's thought and, by extension, all of the thinkers who proffer an “atheism that is not humanism.” For Levinas, “humanism” is a category worth conserving even if, as for Pico, it is in and of itself insufficient.Footnote ⁹

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Levinas's critique of Blanchot turns out to hold weight for Hammerschlag in her exploration of the intellectual relation of these two thinkers and their influence on Jacques Derrida; but to her mind the key to understanding this critique and this relation is the figure of the Jew. The thrust of Hammerschlag's elegant and erudite argument is to recount the ways that anti-Semites, philo-Semites and even some Jewish thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries utilized the “trope” of the Jew as rootless, homeless, and estranged from history in order to demonstrate how thinkers after World War II (Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida) were able to resignify and revalorize these tropes as positive attributes in a philosophy predicated on rootlessness. The account is reminiscent of Amos Funkenstein's category of “counterhistory,” a specific genre of history “whose function is polemical” where the “method consists of the systematic exploitation of the adversary's most trusted sources against their grain—‘die Geschichte gegen den Strich kämmen.’”Footnote ¹⁰ But whereas in counterhistory the tactic is an attempt to distort the adversary's self-image, Hammerschlag demonstrates the ways that Bernard Lazare, Charles Péguy, and later Sartre and Levinas were able to mine the most “trusted sources” of anti-Semitism in order to convert the negative attributes into positives and ultimately to invert the privileging of a philosophy of rootedness in favor of one that valorizes rootlessness, homelessness, and the estrangement from history: “an ideal that could be differentiated from both nostalgic nationalism and the rhetoric of universalizing humanism” (18).

But the real payoff for Hammerschlag is the literary nature of this resignification as deployed by Blanchot and Derrida and then read back onto the work of Levinas. “It is at this point that the figural element in the postwar French portrait of the Jew becomes crucial,” she writes, in order to “articulate the way in which Blanchot's theory about the nature of literary language, articulated at the same time that he is developing a figural representation of the Jew, might provide resources for ensuring that the revalorization of the figure of the Jew always entails a self-critical operation”—such as that later employed by Derrida (18, original emphasis). As it turns out, it is precisely the literary nature of the claim that allows the figure of the Jew to resist the nostalgic nationalism and universalizing humanism that Hammerschlag configures along the poles of particularism and universalism. This is a particularly strong and provocative claim especially as it requires a rethinking of the work of Levinas, wherein the ethical force or “moral valence” of his understanding of the other does not rest on either philosophical or theological grounds but on the literary quality of the figural representation of the Jew as metaphor or as trope.

Like Geroulanos, Hammerschlag presents Hegel as a towering figure in modern French thought, but her emphasis is on the way that, for Hegel, the Jews figure as “an uprooted people, alienated from nature.” The Jew is presented as outside the march of history and excluded from the teleological progress of Geist that ultimately leads to the reconciliation of the particular and the universal in Absolute Knowledge. Hammerschlag's diagnosis of the Hegelian trope of the Jew as “outside history” is crucial to her analysis of Sartre and then Levinas. What had been read as the sign of the historical irrelevance of Judaism, “the Jew's position outside the dialectics of history,” becomes for Sartre the source of Jewish significance in his later writings. In the section on Sartre's controversial Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), Hammerschlag reaches the conclusion that the book marks the “turning point” in the history of the Jewish question in France when the negative characteristic ascribed to the Jew takes on a positive value (or at least as positive a value as can be ascribed to the category of unhappy consciousness). But more important for her larger argument is Sartre's later admission that his portrait of the Jew was a “projection,” thus disentangling the idea of the Jew from real Jews, which allowed for the idea to function as a metaphor for the outsider and “thus for Sartre an ideal” (73).

The conclusions of the Sartre chapter allow Hammerschlag then to turn to Levinas as a truly positive philosophical engagement in which Sartre's presentation of the Jew as a “figure of human alienation” is refigured as the essence of ethical subjectivity (121). Levinas takes the Hegelian deficit and “building on Rosenzweig's presentation of Judaism in The Star of Redemption, suggests that it is its exclusion from Hegel's model of history that allows Judaism to function as a judgment of the political, a judgment that the Hegelian interpretation of history disallows by its very structure” (145). For Levinas, in Hammerschlag's presentation, deracination becomes the condition for ethics and the exclusion from history the basis for a nonhistoricist judgment. Thus Hammerschlag returns to the tropes of the Jew articulated in the first section of the book to show how Levinas is able to exploit them to present a “Jewish particularism that provides for its universalism.” Levinas describes the position of the Jew as one of “election” and by “establishing the other person as the site of election both in his discussions of Judaism and in his ethics, Levinas is able to escape the very difference between the two” (141). But for Hammerschlag there is a danger that “Levinas will raise Judaism up as a kind of exemplary model of justice, a model that in its very insistence on its exemplary status would betray its most basic insights” (164). Turning to Blanchot and Derrida, she asks whether Levinas's own thought provides the resources to avoid slipping back into exemplarism. Her answer is yes and no.

If the Hegelian legacy is of prime import for Hammerschlag's analysis of Sartre and Levinas, her presentation of the trope of the rootless Jew as “ambivalent and paradoxical” is equally so for her analysis of Blanchot and Derrida. It is precisely the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of the trope of the Jew that allows it to reside in between the poles of particularism and universalism, but it is the literary nature of the trope that is the key to conserving the strategy of resistance. Citing Blanchot's critique of Levinas's frequent claim that Judaism can provide the way forward for a new universalizing humanism, Hammerschlag presents Blanchot's counter, according to which “the only way to be true to the ideal of Judaism is to approach it by way of literature, understood as antimyth, as the force that disrupts the impulse toward social fusion” (167). Conveniently, Hammerschlag has prepared us to reread Levinas's work in precisely this light by recounting the way Levinas links the practice of reading to his understanding of Judaism in Beyond the Verse (2007): “It is through reading that references take on reality; through reading in a way, we come to inhabit a place. The volume of the book can provide the espace vital!” (157). But the move only provides the cover Hammerschlag desires if we return to Levinas through the work of Blanchot and Derrida where the book is a literary site, a site of writing, and not the theological site of revelation that Levinas might prefer.

In the end, Hammerschlag follows Blanchot's reading of Levinas which makes of his treatment of “ethical subjectivity a thinking that would dismantle subjectivity of any sort, transforming the inauguration of the ethical subject through the call of the other into an operation of depersonalization” (187, original emphasis). In doing so she marks the moment where her own analysis shifts from the identification of tropes in anti-Semitic and philosophical discourse to the deployment of the trope as critical discourse. I found myself uncomfortable with this shift because whereas the earlier sections of the book are grounded on an interdisciplinary analysis of the history, philosophy, and literature of the milieu, the latter sections teeter on the brink of a literary imperialism wherein everything becomes a mode of writing or literature:

It is because of the non-coincidence between the thing and the representation, which obviates exemplarism, that the representation can speak of election without succumbing to it—in essence, “being” the thing without actually being it.

It is also this slippage that allows Hammerschlag to revisit the slogan of 1968 “Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands” in a way that, on her reading, does not rob the living Jew, such as Alain Finkielkraut, of his identity. Instead, it points to the way that the audacity of the claim makes clear “the gap between who they were and what they claimed to be” (198). It is this non-coincidence of identity, an essential ontological rootlessness, that is the guarantor of what Hammerschlag sees as Levinas's most basic claim best exemplified in the work of Jacques Derrida.

There is, ironically, an exemplarity about the work of Jacques Derrida in Hammerschlag's argument in favor of anti-exemplarism. He hovers over the other chapters as an interpretative spirit seemingly guiding the argument towards its literary denouement. The earlier sections on ambivalence and paradox in the trope of the Jew cry for a deconstructive reading, which is, of course, to come, as the same is true of the section on exemplarism in Levinas. But the figure of Derrida is of interest as well because, unlike Blanchot (who ascribed a metaphoric and thus nonracial or religious significance to the figure of the Jew), Derrida was Jewish. “What separates Derrida from Blanchot is the way in which his relation to his own Jewish past colors how he handles those marks that allow ‘actual’ Jews to claim insider status” (205). A cynical reader might be inclined to believe that Derrida had found a way to have his cake and eat it too by establishing himself as Jewish both in the sense that Freud and Levinas differently suggest and also in the tropological nonracial/religious register formulated by Blanchot. Thus while Derrida refers to his own biography in establishing Judaism as an essential part of his background and identity (essentially credentialing himself as actually Jewish), he can also point to the tropological presentation of Judaism/Jewishness that establishes the Jew as a paradigm of the noncoincidence of identity that thus avoids essentialism, exemplarism or universalism.

A more generous reading could, of course, focus on the viability and possibilities of the latter point. This is the route that Hammerschlag follows and in her meticulous and well-crafted reading of Derrida's texts on Judaism she demonstrates how his work manifests the revalorization and philosophical deployment of the literary trope of the Jew:

Thus, on Hammerschlag's reading, the fundamental tensions and paradoxes inherent in the trope of the Jew are marshaled by Derrida to generate a discourse that calls into question both a particularist politics of identity and a discourse of political universalism or humanism.

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Here, the analysis of Hammerschlag and that of Geroulanos coincide, for both books arrive at a conclusion that necessarily dispenses with the category of “humanism.” For Hammerschlag, this is because “humanism” represents the sort of political universalism that entails total assimilation and the eradication of particular differences. For Geroulanos, this is because the category has been eviscerated from within, leaving the anti-foundational nature of the human exposed.

In both cases, the authors articulate the ways that “man,” lacking any particular or definite identity, is ultimately an unsupported construction. From here, the leap to man as a literary category is the next logical step, as, in Geroulanos's formulation, the “literary appropriation of antihumanist tropes came to express and echo in broader terms what philosophical, scientific, and critical thought claimed” (306). Once all identity is identified as a literary construct it can also be deconstructed. Geroulanos's book concludes with “man in suspension” and this coincides with Hammerschlag's conclusion that the trope of the “Jew” is a category that resists incorporation into either particularism or universalism. They each imply an aporetic moment that resists incorporation and thus remains, for both authors, permanently and productively in question, be it as “Jew” or as “human.”

But in this state of suspension, both authors are also able to avoid some of the more thorny issues of structure and agency that a deconstructive strategy brings to the fore. As humans are rendered “humans” and Jews become “Jews,” the figural register creates a distance between the literary application of these terms and their historical or ontological origins in actual actors, and they thus lose sight of the relational nature of the analysis. This is to say, both works leave unthematized the relation between “Jews” and actual Jews or “humans” and actual humans. Hammerschlag uses Derrida to assert that “all poets are Jews” but does not seem concerned with the corollary question as to whether all actual Jews are thus poets. Geroulanos states that there are distinct political ramifications as a result of the shift away from humanism but never directs us to actual political events.

It is certainly the case that both Geroulanos and Hammerschlag do wonderful work in providing a reading of the thinkers chronicled in their respective books that overcomes anthropocentrism without reverting to theology or metaphysics. In this light both works can be described as “post-secular.” They allow a return to theological and metaphysical themes, displacing the “human” as the key category, but do so in a manner devoid of religious or transcendent implications. This is more readily apparent in Hammerschlag's presentation of the “Jew” as a literary trope devoid of any religious or transcendent implications, but I would argue that the same mechanism is at work in Geroulanos's account of “humanism.” The strategy gives the reader purchase to decipher such notoriously difficult works as Blanchot's The Most High (2001), where the lead character, Henri Sorge, is ambiguously and paradoxically both man and God, but perhaps most importantly a literary device.

Yet one may be less satisfied with the results of such a strategy for understanding the life and work of Levinas, who expected more from Judaism than another form of literature. What this “more” is or how one might achieve it is a very difficult philosophical, theological and historical question and one that is linked to Levinas's own attempt to escape the rule of humanist reason that to his mind led to atheism and ultimately the catastrophic events of World War II. Hammerschlag and Geroulanos are both on target assessing the ways that Levinas identified “humanism” as overly full of itself, thus placing all emphasis on the self at the expense of the other. But Levinas was unwilling to sacrifice the category of “humanism” even as he acknowledged it as necessarily insufficient. For Levinas, man was seduced by reason, but the key question remains how to escape to a transcendence that is beyond reason without being seduced by irrationalism, mysticism, or paganism. How does one return to God and reason/humanism without repeating the previous mistakes? For Levinas, this is not a literary question.

If we placed Geroulanos and Hammerschlag at the end of our game of intellectual telephone, we might conclude that Pico's initial articulation of “man” constructed as an indeterminate transformative but bound actor was indeed conserved—but not as the creation of God. Hegel's presentation of self-consciousness was addressed but no longer as the agent of Geist. Nietzsche's “overman” appeared but did not actually come. And Kojève's atheistic and god-like man is not in and of himself an essentially transformative “negating-negativity.” Following Blanchot and Derrida, they are all rendered literary figures. At one level, this development opens these thinkers and themes up to new fruitful analyses and it is a testament to the innovative work of Geroulanos and Hammerschlag that they are able to both challenge and inform their readers.

But on another level, the deployment of this strategy presents problems for each of these authors. In Hammerschlag's book, it is often difficult to discern where the tropes begin and where they end or whether we are talking about Jews or “Jews” and the significance of the relation between the two. In Geroulanos's work, one has the sense that he begins his investigation at the end of the game of intellectual telephone without sufficient attention to the initial iterations. But when children play telephone, their pleasure is not determined solely by realizing what has been gained at the end of their game. It is derived from knowing the connection between what was gained in relation to that which was lost. Perhaps the same holds true for intellectual telephone as well.