This chapter examines discursive developments in twentieth-century European thought with respect to the question of the reality, metaphoricity, and exemplarity of Jewish displacement. Throughout the centuries, the Jews have been the epitome of the displaced, wandering, and exposed stranger, the rootless intruders, or an example embodying the forfeiting of fixity, dominance, and ownership associated with territorial emplacement. In modernity, Jewish exile, beyond being a theological, historical, and political issue, became a discursive theme, a literary motif, and a loaded philosophical concept. As an embodiment of discreditable rootlessness, it appears in the antisemitic depictions of the wandering, homeless outsider rejected from the nations of the earth. The chapter considers the views of European thinkers such as George Steiner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Celan regarding displaced Jews.
The Poem, the Place, the Jew: Emmanuel Levinas on Paul Celan
