On the contrary, literature's suspension of judgment is itself a morality: a relativistic and individualistic morality that gives substance to the idea of human rights by portraying a plurality of autonomous characters who cannot be reduced to preexisting truths, conceptions of good and evil, or objective laws. 1 In this essay, Kundera defined modern literature as “the territory where moral judgment is suspended.” 2 This suspension of moral judgment does not make literature immoral, Kundera argued. Steering away both from the secularist maxim that what can be offended must be offended and from the mandate to avoid giving offense in the name of liberal tolerance, Grunberg's work, I argue, provokes its readers to reflect on the question by what exactly we should feel offended.įour years after the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), novelist Milan Kundera published an essay, on what has come to be known as the Rushdie affair, with the apocalyptic title “Le jour où Panurge ne fera plus rire” (The day when Panurge will no longer make laugh). But I also read Grunberg's novel as a profanation that seeks to undermine sacralizations of literature that place literature in a special zone governed by a supposed (Western, secular, liberal) social contract not to take offense. I read The Jewish Messiah as a profanation that seeks to counteract sacralizations of Adolf Hitler's book as the “Bible of Evil” in Western European secular societies such as the Netherlands and Germany, where the distribution and translation of Mein Kampf has been legally proscribed. In this article, I borrow Giorgio Agamben's conception of profanation to analyze Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg's novel The Jewish Messiah (2004), whose grotesque plot includes a translation project of Mein Kampf into Yiddish.

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