ABSTRACT
One of the markers of critical accounts of antisemitism and the Holocaust is their location within the context and praxis of modern emancipation as it is manifested socially, politically and juridically. In this essay, I offer an examination of four works that illustrate this location: Nietzsche, Sartre, Lyotard and Agamben. This choice is far from arbitrary. Without in any way diminishing their differences and distinctions, underpinning them all is a common idea: antisemitism arises from a ressentiment brought into being through the presence of an ontological loss or absence. This loss or absence is, in turn, treated as being inherent within the very praxis of modern emancipation. For Nietzsche, that loss is of an inherent human freedom; for Sartre, it is the loss of community; for Lyotard, it is the loss of ‘the ethical’; whilst, for Agamben, it is the loss of ‘the natural’ or the ‘mystery’ of life and of birth.
