Power, Politics, and Personification: Toward a Critique of Postone’s Theory of Antisemitism

Abstract This essay offers an immanent critique of Moishe Postone’s theory of antisemitism. It argues that his account of modern antisemitism as a form of fetishistic anti-capitalism contains a decisive ambiguity. Postone oscillates between two distinct conceptions of anti-capitalism: explicit and implicit. These conceptions are conflated when Postone draws a line from his paradigm case of modern antisemitism to recent anti-imperialist criticism of particular nation-states. This conflation also allows him implicitly to suggest that anti-communism is a form of anti-capitalism. More attention to the differences between these senses of anti-capitalism could have led Postone to a richer theoretical account of the place of abstraction in the distinctively political dangers that obsessed modern antisemitism, which might, in turn, have drawn his attention in the present toward contemporary Islamophobia, rather than criticism of the US, as redolent of certain aspects of the modern antisemitic imaginary.