Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada — PART 3 of 3

Jacques Derrida

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Dada and Deconstruction as Jewish Attack Vectors

A final destructive legacy of Dada, and one which merits more attention, is how its anti-rationalism prefigured Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a Jewish intellectual movement arrayed against Western civilization. The parallels between Dada and Deconstruction have been noted by numerous scholars. Robert Wicks observes how strongly Dada resonates “with the definitively poststructuralist conception of deconstruction advanced by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s.”[i] Pegrum likewise notes the “strong link between Dada and postmodern artistic theory, the most obvious point of contact being with the work of Derrida.”[ii] The literary critic Frank Kermode also traces deconstruction back to Dada influences, while Richard Sheppard regards the poststructuralists “as more introverted, less politicized [a dubious assertion], and less carnivalesque descendants of their Dada daddies.”[iii]

For the Dadaists, European civilization consisted of “an alienation-generating amalgam of rationalistic thinking, science, and technology that adhered to the preservation of order, systematicity, and methodicality.” They believed firmly that “European cultural values were not worth preserving.”[iv] Tzara once stated that “logic is always false,” and a core concept in his thought was “as long as we do things the way we think we once did them, we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society.”[v] The Dadaists famously “spat in the eye of the world,” replacing logic and sense with absurdity and defiance.[vi] Even the word ‘Dada’ itself, suggesting basic drives and childlike behavior, was self-consciously absurd, even self-mocking, and a subversive anthem of resistance to more fully instrumentalized speech and disciplined rationality. It ridiculed Western confidence in the “autonomy of the rational ego and the efficacy of reason.” Dadaists denounced the post-Renaissance Western conception of reality which “assumed that the world was organized according to humanly intelligible laws,” and “condemned ‘bourgeois cultures’ deadening determination to stabilize and categorize all phenomena.”[vii]

The Dadaists even criticized the “rationality and excessive formalism” of Cubism, particularly during its analytic period.[viii] In May 1922, at a mock funeral for Dada, Tzara proclaimed: “Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions.”[ix] Dickerman notes how: “Resistance to fixed meaning” remained a key feature of Dada.[x] Godfrey likewise observes that: “At the heart of Dada was an implicit critique of language as supposedly transparent.”[xi] Dada acted as a bridge between the modern and the postmodern in anticipating Derrida’s deconstruction and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power, which, like Dada, attacked the notion of objective truth which had been the cornerstone of Western thinking and knowledge production since the Enlightenment.

In order to deconstruct Western culture, Derrida had to identify a fundamental fault with it — which he decided was its “logocentrism.” By this he meant Western culture privileged speech over the written word (a dubious assertion), and that it is founded on the false belief that the world really is as our concepts describe it (i.e., in accordance with philosophical realism). Like Barthes and Foucault, Derrida used nominalism (the view that concepts are nothing more than human artifacts that have no relation to the real world) to deconstruct and subvert Western realism. In doing so, he mimicked the approach of the Dadaists:

It followed from their rejection of the belief in progress, in tamable nature and rational man, that the Dadas should cast doubt on the power of language, literature and art to represent reality. The information which the senses communicated to men was misleading, even the ideas of the individual “personality” and the external world were elusive and incoherent. How then could language, by definition an instrument of public communication, do other than deform and betray life’s authentic character as a discontinuous sequence of immediate experiences? The Dadas answered that words were mere fictions and that there was no correspondence between the structures of language and those of reality. Thus the belief in order which the power of a common, inherited language inculcated was illusory.[xii]

In order to attack Western realism Derrida and the Dadaists borrowed from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure the notion of “différence” — which Saussure used to denote the arbitrary nature of language signs. It does not matter what signs we use to mean “night” and “day;” what matters is that we use signs to signal a certain difference, and this structural property was, for Saussure, the true carrier of meaning. The French différer also means to defer, in the sense of put off, and on this coincidental etymological basis Derrida decided that that Saussure had definitively proven that meaning is always deferred by the text.

The consequence is that the process of meaning is something that never gets started: or rather, if and when meaning starts is an arbitrary human decision. Texts do not have a single authoritative meaning: rather, there is a “free play of meaning” and anything goes. Consequently, we are liberated from meaning. Moreover, the text is “emancipated from authorship.” Once written, the author disappears and a text becomes a public artifact. It is for us to decide what the text means, and we are free to decide as we please, and since “all interpretation is misinterpretation” no particular reading is privileged.[xiii] Sheppard notes that: “Derrida, dynamizing Saussure’s model of the sign, sees humanity caught in an endless flow of textuality where signifieds and signifiers perpetually fracture and recombine anew. Consequently, he concludes that there is nothing outside the text.”[xiv] Under Derrida’s deconstruction “a new text thus gradually begins to emerge, but this text too is at subtle variance with itself, and the deconstruction continues in what could be an infinite regress of dialectical readings.”[xv]

While Derrida posed as a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist, he descended from a long line of crypto-Jews, and explicitly identified himself as such: “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.”[xvi] Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were crypto-Jews who retained their Jewish identity for 400 years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition. Derrida changed his first name to the French Christian sounding ‘Jacques’ in order better blend into the French scene. Furthermore, he took his crypto-Judaism to the grave:

When Derrida was buried, his elder brother, René, wore a tallit at the suburban French cemetery and recited the Kaddish to himself inwardly, since Jacques had asked for no public prayers. This discreet, highly personal, yet emotionally and spiritually meaningful approach to recognizing Derrida’s Judaism seems emblematic of this complex, imperfect, yet valuably nuanced thinker.[xvii]

Derrida was a crypto-Jew until the end, even instructing his family to participate in the charade. Kevin MacDonald notes the obvious reason: “Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception.”[xviii]

In his notebooks, Derrida underscores the centrality of Jewish issues in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” His experience of anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. He was expelled from school at age 13 under the Vichy government because of official caps on the number of Jewish students, describing himself as a “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends.”[xix] Later, in France, his “suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared. … But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else.” These experiences led Derrida to develop “an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals.”[xx] Caputo notes how Jewish ethnic activism underpins Derrida’s deconstruction:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. … The idea is to disarm the bombs… of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, … all of whom… are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death of Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit.[xxi]

Derrida’s sociological preoccupations (and suggested solutions) replicated those of Tristan Tzara. Sandqvist links Tzara’s profound revolt against European social constraints directly to his Jewish identity, and his anger at the persistence of anti-Semitism. For Sandqvist, the treatment of Jews in Romania fueled the Dada leader’s revolt against Western civilization. Bodenheimer notes that:

As a Jew, Tzara had many reasons to call into question the so-called disastrous truths and rationalizations of European thinking, one result of which was the First World War — with the discrimination of Jews for centuries being another. … He came from a background in which jingoistic and anti-Semitic arguments had long reproached Jews for using impure, falsified language, from early examples in the sixteenth century… all the way to the arguments of the Romanian intellectuals in Tzara’s time, who attacked Jews as “foreigners” importing “diseased ideas” into Romanian literature and culture.

[Tzara consequently] seeks to unmask language itself as a construction that draws its value, and sometimes its claim to superiority, from an equally constructed concept of identities and values. In themselves, all languages are equal, but equal in their differences. This claim to the right of equality while upholding difference is the basic Jewish claim to a secular society. But the European peoples, be it first for religious or later for nationalist reasons, have never managed to actually understand this right, let alone grant it to minority societies.[xxii]

One of the catalysts for the dissolution of Dada in Paris was Surrealist leader André Breton’s concern that Dada’s nihilism posed a threat to the “process of intellectual sanitation” that became necessary with the rise of fascism.[xxiii] Obviously, one needs a criterion of truth grounded in realism to combat fascist ideas.  Boime likewise claims the Dadaists in their “assault on the Enlightenment and bourgeois liberalism in Zurich and then in Berlin eventually played into the hands of the Fascists and right-wing nationalists. Although these latter groups condemned Dadaist spectacle and modernist thinking, Dada’s rejection of parliamentary politics and democratic institutions helped pave the way for Nazism’s direct assault on humanitarian ideals.”[xxiv]

Derrida has been similarly criticized by some Jews because his writings “lead to ‘nihilism,’ which threatens, in their denial of the notion of objective truth, to ‘efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism.’”[xxv] However, Derrida’s writings have certainly not had any effect on the power of the Holocaust Industry, and indeed, some of Derrida’s biggest backers were intellectual Holocaust activists. This strange state of affairs may be explained by the fact that for some Jews, like Derrida, acknowledging the possibility of objective truth is dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be arrayed against the “other.” Similarly, for the Dadaists, the principles of Western rationality “were held to be highly problematic, because of its instrumental connections to social repressions and domination.”[xxvi] Consequently, a world where truth had been deconstructed is very much a desirable world. As Kevin MacDonald points out in Culture of Critique:

Such a world is safe for Judaism, the prototypical other, and provides no warrant for the universalizing tendencies of Western civilization — what one might term deconstruction as de-Hellenization or de-Westernization. Minority group consciousness is thus validated not in the sense that it is known to be based on some sort of psychological truth, but in the sense that it can’t be proved untrue. On the other hand, the cultural and ethnic interests of majorities are ‘hermeneuticized’ and thus rendered impotent — impotent because they cannot serve as the basis for a mass ethnic movement that would conflict with the interests of other groups.[xxvii]

When the Frankfurt School established itself in the United States, it made a conscious effort to give its Jewish intellectual activism a “scientific” veneer by gathering “empirical data” (such as that which formed the basis for The Authoritarian Personality) in order to challenge existing scientific theories seen as inimical to Jewish interests (such as Darwinian anthropology). Derrida and the poststructuralists instead sought (like the Jews within Dada) to discredit threatening concepts by undermining the notion of objective truth underpinning all Western thought. Like the Dadaists, the poststructuralists decided, if you dislike the prevailing power, then strive to ruin its concepts. Dada used nonsense and absurdity to achieve this goal, while Derrida developed his methodology of deconstruction.

The cover of a 2005 Jewish hagiography of Derrida

Fostering subjective individualism

Despite the tactical differences, a Jewish ethno-political thread runs through Tzara’s Dada, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Each attempted to foster subjective individualism to disconnect the non-Jewish masses from their familial, religious and ethnic bonds — thereby reducing the salience of the Jews as the prototypical outgroup, and thus weakening the anti-Semitic status quo within Western societies.

This attempt to foster radical individualism (at least among Europeans) through critiquing the logical basis of language was an explicitly stated goal of Dada, with the early leader of the movement Hugo Ball declaring that: “The destruction of the speech organs can be a means of self-discipline. When communications are broken, when all contact ceases, then estrangement and loneliness occur, and people sink back into themselves.”[xxviii] Dickerman notes how the Dadaists’ use of abstraction in the visual arts and language “work against structures of authority communicated through language” and that the Dadaist “assault on ‘language as a social order’ would counter sociality itself, producing instead a productive form of solipsism.” The Jewish Dadaist Hans Richter declared the abstract language of the Dadaists “beyond all national language frontiers,” and saw in Dadaist abstraction a new kind of communication “free from all kinds of nationalistic alliances.”[xxix]

The Jewish Dadaist painter Arthur Segal expressed a similar view, contending that “the compositional principle of equivalence is an attempt to abolish hierarchies so that dominant and subordinate forces would no longer exist.” Hockensmith points out that: “Abstraction thus provided Segal with a means of theorizing a world without authoritative force, one in which people and things would stand in free relation to one another.”[xxx] Tristan Tzara similarly affirmed that: “Dada proposed to liberate man from all servitude, whatever the origin, intellectual, moral, or religious.”[xxxi] This is precisely what Derrida attempted to do with deconstruction, where “All that remains thereafter is the subject who can choose what to think, what to feel and what to do, released from external constraints, and answerable to nothing and to no one.”[xxxii]

Walter Serner (Seligmann)

In his book The Jewish Derrida, Israeli academic Gideon Ofrat relates how in 1990 Derrida took part in a symposium in Turin, Italy, on the theme of “European Cultural Identity.”

Having imbibed into his very being the European culture in which he had been raised, the Algerian Jew now set about defining “Europeanism” by reference to the horrors of World War II and Nazism, and to a survey of the present day, with its “crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or national fanaticism.” It was probably this archive that prompted Derrida to come up with his somewhat paradoxical definition of European cultural identity: “The characteristic of a culture is not to be identical with itself;” in other words, one’s cultural identity lies in separation from oneself. Moreover, a knowledge of your own cultural identity is contingent upon knowledge of the culture of the Other. … [Derrida is] simultaneously proposing a fundamental alteration in thinking about Europe, in terms of non-European Otherness. Europe will know itself as Europe if it advances toward that which it is not. … Here your identity lies in your own self-denial, in your death (in identity). Moreover, Derrida points out a basic contradiction between the pursuit of universality by European culture, and, by implication, the sense of exemplariness: an individual national arrogance, setting itself apart from the rest of the world. It is the contradiction between the message of values designated for the whole world, and one society’s claim to a monopoly of that gospel. Derrida puts forward a different concept: opening up Europe to Otherness, to the other, the aliens, as recognition of the Other culture and its adoption into society overall — possibly a proposal for the deconstruction of Europe, that is, a study of the Other root of the European essence, and its substitution by a pluralism of heterogeneity[xxxiii]

Clearly, deconstruction was a Jewish intellectual movement that was a post-Enlightenment (indeed postmodern) manifestation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Inevitably, as with the other Jewish intellectual movements discussed in Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, the solution to all social problems lies in convincing Europeans to commit racial, national and cultural suicide by embracing the Other through acceptance of racial and cultural diversity. All Jewish intellectual roads lead to mass third-world immigration and multiculturalism.

Also inevitably, as with the Frankfurt School, Derrida’s deconstructive scalpel is never turned on the Jews themselves, or Israel, who are always outside the culturally critical frame of reference. Thus the “pluralism of heterogeneity” is never recommended as a way of opening Israel to Otherness and thereby helping Jews to better understand their identity “by advancing to what they are not.” Why? Because the whole point of this intellectual exercise is to cook up specious, morally universalistic rationales of enough persuasive force to convince White people to become complicit in their own racial and cultural self-destruction — thereby furthering the unstated goal of eliminating European anti-Semitism and making the entire Western world safe for Jews.

Derrida’s exercise in Jewish ethno-politics was, of course, primarily concerned with deconstructing Western culture and the belief systems that had sustained European civilization in the past (e.g., Christianity, nationalism) and those which could be deployed to save it now and in the future, such as race realism and evolutionary theories of the ethnic basis of cultural conflict in the West. By contrast, the chauvinistic Jewish beliefs that have sustained Jewish societies and culture for millennia escaped Derrida’s deconstructive attack.

Regarding poststructuralism generally, Scruton notes that, from Foucault’s analysis of knowledge as ideology of power to the “deconstructive virus” released into the academic air by Derrida, “this culture of repudiation may present itself as ‘theory,’ in the manner of the critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas, developing ponderous ‘methodologies’ with which to root out the secret meanings of cultural works, to expose their ideological pretensions, and to send them packing into the past.” Nevertheless, the aim of the poststructuralists “is not knowledge in the post-Enlightenment sense, but the destruction of the vessel in which unwanted knowledge has been contained.”[xxxiv]

Poststructuralism and deconstruction rapidly infested Western academia during the seventies and eighties, becoming stock approaches in literary criticism, the humanities and social sciences. This critical approach was presaged by the Dadaists who, in response to the First World War and the persistence of anti-Semitism, gradually morphed their movement into a disgust at rationalism as a defining feature of post-Enlightenment European culture. The Dadaists were keenly aware of the paradoxical nature of their revolt against logic and reason. Robert Wick notes how “self-contradictory phrases sprinkle themselves across the Dada manifestos — phrases which proclaim that everything is false, that Dada is nothing, that there is no ultimate truth, that everything is absurd, that everything is incoherent and that there is no logic. They are phrases that present themselves in the manifestos as being true, meaningful, coherent, and logical, while they deny all truth, meaning, coherence, and logic.”[xxxv] The Dadaists recognized that they were trapped inside a “double hermeneutic” in that they were compelled to use the forms of bourgeois society to mount a critique of that society. In an analogous way, Foucault and Derrida attempted to develop an “ontology of the present” that would enable them to “abstract” themselves from their cultural surroundings.

The paradoxical and self-invalidating nature of this endeavor did not, however, limit the immense influence that poststructuralism and deconstruction exerted. The logical flaw at the heart of the entire poststructuralist intellectual edifice is simply ignored—this being that same logical fallacy perpetrated by Nietzsche when he expressed the view that there are no truths, only interpretations. Either Nietzsche’s position is true—in which case it is not true, since there are no truths, or it is false. Derrida’s and Foucault’s central arguments amount to the same point made less brusquely, and while they presented their arguments in opaque pseudo-profound language to conceal the paradox, it nevertheless remains.

Foucault and Derrida owe their inflated intellectual reputations to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. Those who point out the obvious flaw in Foucault’s poststructuralist analysis of power and Derrida’s deconstructionist analysis of language — namely, that a rational critique assumes precisely what they put in question — are simply accused of aligning themselves with the oppressive, hegemonic forces of the Eurocentric bourgeois patriarchy through assuming the frame of reference that this group has normalized. Indeed, they are told that the very belief in neutral enquiries is not a neutral belief, but rather the expression of the hegemonic worldview most in need of deconstruction. There is, therefore, no position from which deconstruction can be critiqued. If there were such a vantage point, it would be founded on rational argument; but rationality itself has been deconstructed.

Deconstruction is therefore self-vindicating, and provides the culture of repudiation with its spiritual credentials, the proof that it is “not of this world” and comes in judgment upon it. Of course that subversive intention in no way forbids deconstruction from becoming an orthodoxy, the pillar of the new establishment, and the badge of conformity that the literary apparatchik must now wear. But in this it is no different from other subversive doctrines: Marxism, for example, Leninism and Maoism. Just as pop is rapidly becoming the official culture of the post-modern state, so is the culture of repudiation becoming the official culture of the post-modern university.[xxxvi]

In poststructuralism and deconstruction, the spirit of Dada extended far beyond what had been hoped for by its most messianic propagandists like Tristan Tzara and Walter Serner. For the British historian Paul Johnson: “Dada was pretentious, contemptuous, destructive, very chic, publicity-seeking and ultimately pointless.”[xxxvii] Johnson is wrong on the last score. Dada had far-reaching intellectual and cultural consequences — in revolutionizing art, undermining trust in the notion of objective truth, and in pioneering a vector of attack on Western civilization subsequently taken up by Jewish intellectual activists like Derrida.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here.

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[i] Robert J. Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 11.

[ii] Mark A. Pegrum, Challenging Modernity: Dada between Modern and Postmodern (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 269.

[iii] Richard Sheppard, Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1999), 365.

[iv] Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism, 9-10.

[v] Beitchman, I Am a Process with No Subject, 29.

[vi] Irwin Unger & Debi Unger, The Guggenheims — A Family History (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 354.

[vii] Short, Dada and Surrealism, 12.

[viii] Loredana Parmesani, Art of the Twentieth Century — Movements, Theories, Schools and Tendencies 1900-2000 (Milan: Skira, 1998), 36.

[ix] Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art, 191.

[x] Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 33.

[xi] Godfrey, Conceptual Art, 44.

[xii] Short, Dada and Surrealism, 17.

[xiii] Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1994), 478-9.

[xiv] Sheppard, Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism, 363.

[xv] Roger Poole, “Deconstruction,” Alan Bullock & Peter Trombley (Eds.) The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 203.

[xvi] Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” In Jacques Derrida, Ed. G. Bennington & Jacques Derrida, Trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 170.

[xvii] Benjamin Ivry, “Sovereign or Beast?” Forward, December 1, 2010. https://forward.com/culture/133536/sovereign-or-beast/

[xviii] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2001), 198.

[xix] Derrida, “Circumfession,” op. cit., 58)

[xx] Jacques Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, Trans. P. Kamuf et al (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 120—21.

[xxi] J.D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 231—2.

[xxii] Alfred Bodenheimer, “Dada Judaism: The Avant-Garde in First World War Zurich,” In: Gelber, Mark H. and Sjöberg, Sami. Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde: Between Rebellion and Revelation, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110454956

[xxiii] Malcolm Haslam, The Real World of the Surrealists (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1978), 93.

[xxiv] Boime, ‘Dada’s Dark Secret,’ Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, 102.

[xxv] Benjamin Ivry, “Sovereign or Beast? Jacques Derrida and his Place in Modern Philosophy” (The Jewish Daily Forward, December 1, 2010.  http://www.forward.com/articles/133536/

[xxvi] Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 154.

[xxvii] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2001), 205.

[xxviii] Dickerman, “Introduction & Zurich,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 29.

[xxix] Hockensmith, “Artists’ Biographies,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada, 482.

[xxx] Ibid., 486.

[xxxi] Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess, 176.

[xxxii] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, 479.

[xxxiii] Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 30-1.

[xxxiv] Roger Scruton, Culture Counts — Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), 70.

[xxxv] Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism, 10.

[xxxvi] Scruton, Modern Culture, 138.

[xxxvii] Paul Johnson, Art — A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 669.