SOURCE: “Ecriture judaique: Where Are the Jews in Western Discourse?” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, edited by Angelika Bammer, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 182-201.

In the following essay, Shapiro argues that, in “Heidegger and ‘the Jews,’” Lyotard replaces “actual Jews” with a universal category.

In the dominant discourse(s) of the Christian/West¹ the Jew has been located in a place that defines and fixes “his”² identity stereotypically.³ Both in explicitly Christian discourse and in discourses derived from and influenced by it, the Jew has been figured in negative terms as that which lacks legitimacy or value.⁴ This negative figure (the Jew as the “Other” of the Christian/West) has been embodied in the trope of “the Jew,” and it is through this tropic lens that actual Jews have been seen. For example, the figure of the wandering Jew represented the punishment of the Jew exiled from...