The Spectre of Prehistory : Jews and Christian Melancholia

Melancholia can be seen not as grief but as a false triumph, an imagined resolution of and victory over a past that has merely been forgotten and repressed. What is disowned does not disappear but lives on and continues to plague the present. Melancholia, Noam Pines reveals, is not only a private affliction but a historical condition – the predicament of whole cultures, in fact – and Christianity is its emblematic case.

Because Christianity claimed to have superseded Judaism, Pines argues that it could never fully escape the past it denied. The Jew therefore became the shadow of that disavowal, haunting a civilization that imagined it had moved beyond its origins. The Spectre of Prehistory creates a constellation out of texts like the Odyssey and The Merchant of Venice, thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Sigmund Freud, and history that spans medieval blood libel and contemporary replacement theory rhetoric to reveal a hidden pattern. Through this exploration Pines charts the Jew as the embodiment of what the dominant order has absorbed but cannot contain – the past it claims to have overcome yet continually seeks to expel.

The same melancholic configuration is at work in today’s politics as rumours of the deep state and fake news summon a hidden enemy to legitimize the deployment of authoritarianism. The Spectre of Prehistory reveals the buried past as the ghost that drives us ever further toward extremes.