The White Auditorium: On Hyperrationality and Social Perception

Do you speak Arabic?
On Husserl’s “Hyperrationality” in the Context of Antisemitic Experience and the Irrationality of Social Perception

I am attending a conference on philosophy and antisemitism. It is being held at one of those presentable German universities where the budget still suffices for a white auditorium—one that has neither been spontaneously painted by students nor smells musty. Instead, the room resembles the cloister of a cathedral: high arches, a great deal of white, a great deal of dignity, and acoustics suited for things that are meant to carry significance.

Everything is there that an important topic requires: venerable rooms, venerable professors, and a good dozen early-career scholars who are earnestly trying to grasp antisemitism conceptually in such a way that, in the end, it can be demonstrated in Voltaire, Agamben, Husserl, Critical Theory, or in the methodological misunderstanding of whichever other discipline.

At the front, the question is raised as to where Voltaire succumbed to delusion, and whether this can be recaptured deconstructively at all. It is considered whether Critical Theory is a match for analytic philosophy, or whether analytic philosophy is not quite a match for Critical Theory. It is examined whether racism and antisemitism are the same from a philosophical perspective, not the same, or only the same under conditions that themselves would require a separate panel.

Thinking is taking place. And so thoroughly that some contradictions seem to dissolve by virtue of their own complexity. What cannot be explained causally may not exist at all. And what does exist must first be differentiated until it has the decency to appear in a conceptually clean form.

Perhaps it is precisely this methodological compulsion that made Freud consistently sceptical of philosophy. He mistrusted its inclination toward closure—toward those worldviews in which the abyssal appears only once it has already been pacified conceptually.

As a psychoanalyst, one sits at such a conference in a kind of mild exile. Freud did not make a good name for himself in philosophy, and at this conference, I do not even have a name tag. I am present, in a sense, but not entirely authorised.

While the presentations continue, a doctoral student in one of the back rows turns around toward me. I do not know her personally, but I have heard of her. It is not the kind of familiarity that creates closeness; rather, it is that diffuse prior information that surrounds a figure with a faint unease even before she speaks. As I know, she is working on a talk titled Husserl’s ‘Hyperrationality’ in the Context of Antisemitic Experience.

She holds out a sheet of paper to me and asks whether I can read Arabic.

At first, it is one of those sentences that arrives so abruptly that the irritation comes a moment too late. Why me? On what assumption? Does she know me? Does she know who I am? Since I am not wearing a name tag, the question can hardly relate to my profession, even less to any prior acquaintance. It must hinge on something else: an impression, an attribution, my face.

Apparently, my irritation was visible, because she immediately adds, almost placatingly: yes, I’m just asking because Israelis can sometimes do that.

The remark falls into the background of a conference on antisemitism. Perhaps it is precisely this constellation that gives it its peculiar quality. For in that sentence there was, in condensed form, precisely that mixture of half-knowledge, projection, and ethnic improvisation that theory usually treats in a much more cumbersome way. First, there was the matter-of-factness with which, based on my appearance, I was assigned a linguistic competence. Then the peculiar correction: not simply Arabic, but Israeli-Arabic, as it were. And finally the “sometimes”—that small rhetorical loop in which the stereotype is already disguised as an exception and thereby considers itself harmless.

No one in my Israeli family speaks Arabic—at least no one I know of. There is that one uncle whom, for reasons of family dramaturgy, everyone would like to imagine engaged in something half-secret, so that at family gatherings there might at least be a hint of a spy series drifting through the living room. Otherwise, what prevails in this regard is a plural, post-Soviet mixture from the beautifully green mountainous landscapes of the Caucasus, blended with the Sabra identity with a hint of diasporic sensibility, what would be called Migrationshintergrund in Germany, of the second and third generation.

In any case, the decisive point was not the factual accuracy of the assumption, but its form. Perhaps in her gaze, I was neither clearly German nor legibly Ashkenazi in the familiar way that often silently functions as the Jewish norm in such milieus. It was precisely here that the racialising element of the scene lay: I was not addressed as a concrete person, but assigned a competence through appearance, physiognomy, and presumed origin. The question about Arabic was not a question about my knowledge, but about my legibility. It presupposed that my appearance already provided information about which languages, regions, and affiliations I could presumably be assigned to.

At the same time, the scene did not exhaust itself in this racialising dimension. If the speaker herself was Jewish without being Israeli, the remark acquired yet another, more elusive colouration. Then what spoke through her may not have been open hostility, but that crudely philosemitic form of half-educated internal familiarity that is not uncommon in politically and academically sensitised milieus. As if one somehow moved within the same symbolic space and could therefore take shortcuts: Israelis, Jews, the Middle East, Arabic—these then belong together in some imprecise conceptual association. And therein lies the imposition. Not every reduction presents itself as hostility; some appear as ill-fitting proximity.

The milieu in which such sentences are uttered does not protect against them; it sometimes produces them. Where much is said about identity, history, and discrimination, the illusion easily arises that one has already earned the necessary precision through the right attitude. Sensitivity then becomes sovereignty, knowledge a license to ascribe. One considers oneself reflective and, precisely for that reason, permits oneself the imprecision one would immediately criticise in cruder minds. The other appears not as a person, but as the bearer of a context one believes one somehow already knows.

Perhaps that is also why the scene resists being neatly subsumed under a single category. It was not unequivocally antisemitic in the strict sense; for that, it was too diffuse, too sustained by a presumed familiarity. But it was by no means innocent. For the sentence, ethnicized, typified, and assigned me to an imagined competence. It showed how effortlessly racialization and philosemitic coarseness can merge: not as a grand affect, but as a small, casual social technique.

While the front of the room was still reflecting on whether antisemitism and racism can be systematically distinguished, the audience had already demonstrated how easily different forms of attribution can intertwine in a single address. That was the almost elegant irony of the moment: in a space devoted to the critique of resentment and projection, precisely that form of gaze was at work in everyday social interaction—a gaze that does not perceive people but assembles them from signs. The hyperrationality under discussion did not prove to be a safeguard against the small irrationalities of social perception.

Perhaps this is not a marginal note to the event, but its hidden commentary. For academic spaces tend to underestimate how much their concepts rely on the fiction that knowledge has already emerged once a subject is discussed with sufficient complexity. The more uncomfortable insight would be that theory does not leave its object behind. It sits in the room. It does not wait for the panel. Sometimes it does not even speak. It simply turns around and asks whether one can read Arabic.

In the end, what remained less was the memory of the presentations than of this small scene behind the rows. Perhaps also because, in a single gesture, it revealed what so many debates lack: not education, not differentiation, not moral resolve, but that elementary discipline of perception that does not immediately turn the other into a cipher.

Later, I thought the auditorium resembled a cathedral—not only because of its arches and its whiteness, but because here, too, the sublimity of the space occasionally conceals what people actually do within it.