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hurling every possible anti-Semitic calumny at her and demanding
that that Jewess be got rid of.” 46
This is a fi ne example of a reactional phenomenon. In order to
react against anti-Semitism, the Jew turns himself into an anti-
Semite. This is what Sartre presents in The Reprieve, in which
Birnenschatz fi nally acts out his disavowal with an intensity that
borders on delirium. We shall see that the word is not too strong.
Americans who go to Paris are amazed to see so many white women
accompanied by Negroes. In New York, Simone de Beauvoir went
for a walk with Richard Wright and was rebuked in the street by
an old lady. Sartre said: Here it is the Jew, somewhere else it is
the Negro. What is essential is a scapegoat. Baruk says nothing
different: “Release from hate complexes will be accomplished only
if mankind learns to renounce the scapegoat complex.”
Fault, Guilt, refusal of guilt, paranoia—one is back in
homosexual territory. In sum, what others have described in the
case of the Jew applies perfectly in that of the Negro. 47
Good-Evil, Beauty-Ugliness, White-Black: such are the char-
acteristic pairings of the phenomenon that, making use of an
expression of Dide and Guiraud, we shall call “manicheism
delirium.” 48
Seeing only one type of Negro, assimilating anti-Semitism
to Negrophobia, these seem to be the errors of analysis being
committed here. Someone to whom I was talking about this book
asked me what I expected to come of it. Ever since Sartre’s decisive
essay, What Is Literature?, originally in Situations II, literature has
been committed more and more to its sole really contemporary
task, which is to persuade the group to progress to refl ection
and mediation: This book, it is hoped, will be a mirror with a

46. Baruk, Précis de psychiatrie, pp. 372–373.
47. This is what Marie Bonaparte wrote in Myths de guerre, No. 1, p. 145: “The
anti-Semite projects on to the Jew, ascribes to the Jew all his own more or less
unconscious bad instincts. . . . Thus, in ridding himself of them by heaping them
on the shoulders of the Jew, he has purged himself of them in his own eyes and sees
himself in shining purity. The Jew thus lends himself magnifi cently to a projection
of the Devil. . . . The Negro in the United States assumes the same function of
fi xation.”
48. Psychiatrie du médecin praticien (Paris, Masson, 1922), p. 164.

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