Humanity Lost: Alterity and the Politics of a Melancholic Anthropology

SUMMARY Anthropology's approach to the study of difference has been marked by dramatic shifts defined in political terms. Nonetheless, the accompanying historical trajectory of the discipline's theorization of politics hasn't substantially changed, and has focused less on what constitutes politics, its terms and concepts, and more on how to do politics, often with the assumption that this politics should be in solidarity with the victims of unequal relations of power. In so doing, anthropology has often reinforced humanist assumptions about the human, based on the liberal subject of European modernity. An analysis of Jewish‐Israeli political identifications puts into question such humanist assumptions. I show how an analysis of two examples from my fieldwork in Israel calls into question concepts of community and identity, including that of the human, as the foundational ground on which anthropology's analyses of politics often rest. Drawing on Freud's concept of melancholia, and on a Levinasian concept of alterity, I suggest the notion of a melancholic anthropology as the study of difference which acknowledges the inhuman within the human, and the impossibility of a common humanity. This article thus builds on recent discussions about how anthropological investments in doing politics have consequences for understandings of responsibility, ethics, and the human itself. [Israel, Jew, alterity, politics, anthropology, human].