DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY AND COUNTER-EDUCATION
EDUCATIONAL FUTURES RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE Volume 48
Michael A. Pe...
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DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY AND COUNTER-EDUCATION
EDUCATIONAL FUTURES RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE Volume 48
Michael A. Peters University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Miriam David, Institute of Education, London University, UK Cushla Kapitzke, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne, Australia Mark Olssen, University of Surrey, UK Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Linda Tuahwai Smith, University of Waikato, New Zealand Susan Robertson, University of Bristol, UK
This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods, including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual policies and examples.
Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education By Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (Author/Editor) University of Haifa, Israel
SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / BOSTON / TAIPEI
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-6091-362-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-94-6091-363-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-94-6091-364-8 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands http://www.sensepublishers.com
Cover photograph by Talia Peretz
Printed on acid-free paper
All rights reserved © 2010 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microf lming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specificall for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
PARTICIPANTS
Zygmunt Bauman is a Professor of sociology at the University of Leeds and since 1990 emeritus professor. The author of many influential books and a leading voice in current modern-postmodern discourse. Jonathan Boyarin is the Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His most recent books include Jewishness and the Human Dimension (Fordham University Press) and, with Martin Land, Time and Human Language Now (Prickly Paradigm Press). Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Utrecht University, founding director of the Centre for Humanities and Honorary Visiting Professor in the Law School at Birkbeck College, London University. Her books include Patterns of Dissonance. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994; Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming Polity Press, 2002 and Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, 2006. Ignacio Götz is Lawrence Stessin Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New College, Hofstra University. He is the author of many books, including Conceptions of Happiness (1995), Faith, Humor, and Paradox (2002), and the forthcoming Jesus the Jew (Strategic). Ilan Gur-Ze’ev is Professor at the Faculty of education, University of Haifa. Among his recent books: Toward Diasporic Education; Destroying the Others Collective Memory; Pedagogies of Exile; Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education. Yotam Hotam, Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of Learning, Instruction & Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, Haifa University, Lecturer at the Beit-Berl Academic College, and Editor of “Tabur: A Yearbook for Central European History, Culture, Society, and Thought”. (Hebrew)
[]
PARTICIPANTS
Arie Kizel lectures at Oranim Academic College and teaches at the Department of Learning, Instruction and Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa. His most recent book was published in 2008: Subservient History: A Critical Analysis of History Curricula and Textbooks in Israel, 1948–2006. (Tel Aviv: Moffet) (Hebrew). Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History in the University of Exeter, United Kingdom and the co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno Political Studies. He is the author and editor of ten books among them, The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine (2006) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007). Michael A. Peters is professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and adjunct professor in the School of Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is the executive editor of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory and editor of two international journals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning. His interests are in education, philosophy and policy and he has written over fifty books and three hundred articles and chapters, including most recently: Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy, with Simon Marginson and Peter Murphy (Peter Lang, 2008), Saying and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher, with Nick Burbules and Paul Smeyers (Paradigm, 2008), Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of the University (Sense, 2007), Building Knowledge Cultures: Educational and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism, with Tina (A.C.) Besley (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Cornel West, the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, has been called “one of America’s most provocative, public intellectuals.” Newsweek heralded him as an “eloquent prophet with attitude.” In his latest book, Hope on a Tightrope, he offers courageous commentary on issues that affect the lives of all Americans. Themes include Race, Leadership, Faith, Family, Philosophy, and Love and Service. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers Race Matters, which won the American Book Award, and Democracy Matters. West has won numerous awards and has received more than 20 honorary degrees. He also was an influential force in developing the storyline for the popular Matrix movie trilogy. Tzvetan Todorov, born in 1939 in Sofia, Bulgaria, has lived in Paris, France, since 1963. He worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique between 1967 and 2005. Among his many books on literature and society the last titles are, in English, Hope and Memory, and in French La peur des barbares.
PARTICIPANTS
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan (D.Phil. Oxon) is Professor of English at the University of Haifa, and the Editor-in-Chief of Haifa University Press. She is the author of Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers (Macmillan, 1988), Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford University Press, 1991), The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Oxford University press, 1999) and numerous articles on literary Modernism and on the work of M.M. Bakhtin. Her current work is an interdisciplinary study provisionally entitled Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject.
It was a short while before my 16th birthday when I changed my family name. I changed it from Vilcek to Gur-Ze’ev. At that time I was an active patriot in the Beitar youth movement and it was very important for me to manifest to myself and to the world that our family and more generally Jewish existence finally saved itself from endless nomadism by returning “home”. Not less important at that period of my life, however, was to ensure the continuation of the family. So, I made two decisions: one was to translate the Slovak into Hebrew and not to bring about a new family name, and the other: to give birth to many children. Totally naïve and unaware of the dialectic tension that I brought about, I translated Vilcek (little wolf or wolf cub) into )זאב- (גורGur-Ze’ev, having in mind the charismatic “wolf” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the legendary Zionist leader. In so doing I established within myself and in the family identity an enduring painful tension between homecoming and Diasporic existence. A tension which is in the center of this book as both a general philosophical but also a most intimate dilemma; these two connect here the immediate and the eternal, the most individual and the most universal toward a higher challenge: Gur-Ze’ev—or Vilcek? Israel—or Diaspora? And on another level: Love of Life and universal moral responsibility as a Diasporic Jew—or as a cosmopolitan nomadic human? I encountered this tension as a challenging existential experience—not as a mere abstract question, last year at the Jewish cemetery of Levice. I returned to this Slovak birth place of my 89 year old father, Robert, to actualize our remembrance of family members who were murdered during WWII and had no graves, no signifiers and of course no children. For me it was a rebirth amid a non-ethnocentric-oriented homecoming; back to the roots of the Vilcek family; returning to the actuality of Jewish Diaspora, to Jewish destiny as a dangerous universal creative co-poiesis. The terrible-wonderful trip of the father from Slovakia and his son from Israel rebounded us; reunited me with the rich roots and with the demolished promise of my family as well as with the unavoidable horrible toll of enduring rich Jewish Diasporic existence. At the same time, however, it also reconnected me with a mature togetherness with conflicting kinds of Diasporic life and rival attempts for “homecoming” as selfforgetfulness of humanity. It also enabled a wonderful reunion with another survivor of our family catastrophe, Jan Vilcek and his wife Marica whom I later met in New York. The reflection upon the totalistic commitment to destroy the spirit of Judaism by annihilating Diasporic life of actual Jews and the memory of Diasporic creativity, innovation and love of our fellow humans became inseparable for me, not only at the old cemetery of Levice. It became inseparable as the impetus and as the guiding spirit of this book. This book is dedicated to the two survivors of the Vilcek family, Robert and Jan; to the many who did not survive the slaughters inflicted on them by their own neighbors and the Nazis, and to the larger family of Diasporic humans who all around the globe devote their lives and love to the bettering of this world.
[8]
CONTENTS
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
Introduction
11
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
The nomadic existence of the eternal improviser and Diasporic co-poiesis today
29
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
Diasporic philosophy, homelessness, and counter-education in context: the Israeli-Palestinian example
47
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic philosophy, negative theology and counter-education Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
Beyond peace education: toward co-poiesis and enduring improvisation Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
Diasporic philosophy, counter-education and improvisation
59 83 119
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and Daniel Boyarin
Judaism, postcolonialism and Diasporic education in the era of Globalization
127
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and Cornel West
Diaspora, philosophy and counter-education in face of post-colonial reality
141
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and Jonathan Boyarin
The possibility of a new critical language from the sources of Jewish negative theology Zygmunt Bauman
Education in the world of Diasporas
171 193
[9]
Rosi Braidotti
Nomadism: against methodological nationalism Tzvetan Todorov
The coexistence of cultures Ignacio L. Götz
Vignettes of ambiguity Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
Language, identity and exile Michael A. Peters
Wittgenstein as exile
207 223 233 251 259
Ilan Pappe
Diaspora as catastrophe, Diaspora as a mission and the postcolonial philosophy of Edward Said Arie Kizel
Homelessness, restlessness and Diasporic poetry Yotam Hotam
271 285
Ecology and pedagogy
301
Names index
315
Subject index
317
10
Introduction
Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education is the fruit of mounting intellectual unease, moral turbulence and a unique meeting with a non-sentimental intimacy. It is the outgrowth of continuous discomfort with fashionable critical educational theories and their grotesque address of the exile of holiness of the humanist killing of God and the loss of any genuine worth in human existence in each of us each moment anew. It is the outgrowth of embarrassment. Embarrassment with the critical reaction to the exile of the absolute, to the exile of the very possibility of grand endeavors and ideas, to the banishment of greatness and intimacy—traded shamelessly for inevitable, pleasurable/effective dullness; the desolation of the preconditions for simple intimacy with the truth of Life, the ridiculing of the very possibility of a mature dwelling and total identification of the human with the mission of his life and surely of that which is greater than individual life and can offer it and its obliteration an aim, direction, value or love. Unease with the loss of the general picture of life, a dynamic multi-dimensional world-view, or even of the possibility of a serious gaze upon the inevitability of the impossibility of a general perspective, a non-grotesque address of the disparity between thought and Being. Anxiety in face of the victory of dullness in the post-metaphysical world, where pleasure and power have inherited holiness and offer ghostly life empty of value, greatness or mature overcoming of both these promises and their ethereal, frail, substitutes in light of a worthy Diasporic existence. In this collection I have tried to address the downfall of the promises of the Enlightenment and the triumph of the current inviting hospitality to return “home” to the whole-appeasing totality of nothingness. More yet, however, this collection is an expression of growth, love and edification of remnants of hope that in the last generations were mocked, deconstructed and transformed into part and parcel of the post-modern culture industry. Here I try to tackle the impossibility of a mature Love in this world; a world that has lost its innocence and aim in the sense of commitment to worthy life and even in the sense of mere life. A world that has abandoned its quest for intimacy, its very drive for transcendence and Love of Life as courageous creative edification which gives birth and elevates against alterity toward the supreme and enables more than mere continuum. A world which does not insist on that which is beyond the grasp of facts, away from the tyranny of the given rules and the aims, ahead of the victorious tendencies and their borders, much farther than the capricious imperatives of the sequence of time or the omnipotent spectacles of the post-modern Moira. The postmodern play of markets, of fashions, and the reactions [ 11 ]
introduction
of the oppressed, has become the aether of our generation; horizons of present-day immanence which in many respects drives us back to the lost total intimacy that was (already only dialectically) possible in the world where human consciousness and alienation presided. It is a kind of a return of the innocent dwelling in unity within Being; as if intimacy has returned and made expendable the quest for transcendence (which existed already in the Garden of Eden) and its Diasporic Odyssey that maybe now is entering its conclusion, realizing its “homereturning” cycle only to rest, again, in nothingness. For the last twenty years my intellectual life has been in thrall to the spiritual Eros of the Frankfurt School thinkers, influenced by the poststructuralist critique and quasi-divine intimacy offered by its realization efforts within radical feminist, queer, multicultural and postcolonialist prisms and practices. I experienced the light of its explicit political and educational realization as an inviting shining sacred work, entering all the depths, corridors and drives of my becoming. It was an enduring catharsis. A continuous catharsis very similar to that which governed my youth as a member of the Beitar ultra-fascist youth movement. Its mantras, rhetoric and emotional dimensions touched the bottom of my soul and stoked its Dionysian fire and its Apollonian quest for a renewed Tower of Babylon. As light and fire, and as symbols and prayers, they enhanced meaningfulness; they were swallowed by my anxiety, offering a specially protective self-forgetfulness. They deceived my thirst for an enduring birth-giving courage; a seriousness that addresses the meaning of the exile of rich certainty; a powerful non-dogmatic commitment to a philosophy that would become a leading power, an educational guide, a concrete, individual, intimate presence which grows into actual artistic creation, political involvement, physical realization and moral actuality in the deepest personal sense; descending to the deepest roots of my psyche and rising to the heights of an erotic yet ironic presence which could become not solely mine but my-self. And so, for many years I tried to live in Israel as a critical educator and as an involved intellectual in troubled times deprived of self-irony, even if with an ongoing uneasiness about the critical emancipatory project itself. This collection reflects my Diasporic awakening. A painful ironic arousing, which defends the gate against a million suggestive wings of deception that offer an appealing alternative positive Utopia and tell us that they have the magic formula for emancipation, true meaning, genuine “critique” or other attractive powers which offer awakening-proof recipes for perfect self-forgetfulness. In moments of weakness it seemed to me that the enduring slumber of my critical friends was nothing but a blessing of Fortuna: enabling them to commit themselves to the ecstasis of selfforgetfulness, as I did for so many years within the framework of Critical Theory. Of special relevance for making possible this deep and fertile sleep were the recycling of the old dogmas on the one hand, and the post-modern relativistic-oriented Dionysian feast on the other. The post-modern cannibalistic feast had in my world two main pillars: one, a pleasure machine which is essentially individualistic; post-tragic-nihilism running toward consumerism, open Net-like multi-dimensional creativity in kaleidoscopic 12
introduction
realities as an ecstatic pantheistic hospitality. This nomadic-oriented anti-Diasporic path is the heart of consumerism in globalizing capitalism. This is the soul and the impetus of the quest for identification and self-forgetfulness in the McWorld which is veiled so successfully by the McDonaldization of post-modern reality. The other pillar of the present post-modern cannibalistic feast: an ecstatic surrendering to the new anti-Semitism in its various prisms, versions and degrees for defeating the Father, the monotheistic God, the West, the Empire, the Judeo-Christian immanent colonialism and its oppressive realizations. More so is the synthesis between the two, while hoisting the flags of “difference”, “Net-not-hierarchy”, “contingency”, “epistemic relativism”, “resistance” in the name of “heterogeneity” and educating for the “liberation of the victims of Judeo-Christian colonialism”. These two branches of the post-modern eating the heart of the humanist killing of God and his holiness are in constant struggle yet fundamentally cohesive. United in the promise of a concrete, earthly “solution” to the challenge of Diaspora which begins with the conscious life of humans in face/as part of Being and their addressing the question why not affirmatively responding with a gigantic “Yes!” to the tempting invitation to return “home” to the harmony of nothingness after the disillusion with all promises for creating—by human and supra human powers alike—a worthy alternative harmony all along the history of the human race and especially in modernity? Why continue life in an unworthy, fundamentally frail and disoriented Diaspora in an era that has lost even the holiness of killing-God-each-moment-anew, an historical moment within which intimacy has become an unattractive mockery, a mere commodity in the capitalist dreams market or has reappeared as an enjoyable mutation in realityTV programs? The philosophy of Diaspora has been neglected for too long and at too heavy a price. In recent years, however, the abandonment of Diaspora as a philosophical tradition and as a special way of life has become a prospect for a serious reflection. It is a celebrated challenge to “our” present, a challenge which actualizes itself within existential, cultural, political and educational arenas, dimensions and prisms, as well as in their fruits, disciples and enemies. These should be courageously addressed. An awakening means here responding. Responding in the sense that will strive for nothing less than self re-birth. Enduring self-rebirth each moment anew. Enduring self-rebirth each moment anew with others with and against the alterity of their otherness. If true to itself, it is a response to the invitation to return “home” to nothingness. The forms of this “home” hide it and cover it in countless masks and voices: collectivism of all forms, calls for a “return to the fundamentals”, radical feminism, queer theories and rebirth within the framework of post-colonialist purifying “resistance” and “critique”. Such a dangerous “home” is the redemptive alternative of post-modern nomadism in an hybridic-kaleidoscopic matrix where mega-speed replaces holiness, pleasurable self-forgetfulness inherits fulfillment of an ever higher mission, transgression overcomes transcendence and Thanatos finally conquers Eros. Genuine Diasporic self-rebirth, in contrast, is conditioned by acknowledging the power of post-modern nomadism and the suggestive powers of the quasi-Diasporic 13
introduction
philosophy of the day; the post-disenchanting wonders of ever more dynamic quasiimprovisational co-poiesis. When true to itself, Diasporic counter-education should acknowledge, respect and challenge other Diasporic alternatives and certainly the powerful post-modern one. At the same time it should insist on Diasporic existence that does not surrender to the triumphing temptations for post-modern nomadism and for the re-enchantment wonders of post-colonial ecstatic violent creations and their redemptive power. It should not surrender to the democracy of the continuum and the immanent—but quite the opposite: it should challenge the continuum, the sleep, the “radical” self-indulgence as well as the nihilist-pragmatic and anti-pragmatic escapes. Diasporic awakening is not democratic. It is an awakening that is aware of its impossibility. It gazes into the eyes of the absence and not solely of the given totality and its democratic fragments. It is a kind of gaze that pays respect to the hospitality of improved utopias, dystopias and nomadism as part of the pantheistic feast and its pleasures. It is a deep and enduring religious will. A religious act of a neverconcluded self-constitution and re-positioning which is also aware of its moral, aesthetic, bodily, cultural, political and educational fruits, abysses, threats and gates to new beginnings. The aim of this collection is to become part of such an old-new beginning under the new skies of “our” Fall. To become at least an entrance to self-preparation, dislearning and counter-education that will groom us to become more attuned. Maybe more courageous and richer in Diasporic life possibilities, in face of the new, post-tragic, challenges which await us with mounting impatience. And indeed we face demanding old and new impatient challenges; challenges which presently are becoming more acute than ever before in the history of human Diasporic existence. As Anaximander already knew in the seventh century BC, Diasporic existence is born at the moment of the destruction of nothingness, and surely with the very beginning of human existence. The human is thrown into facing the abyss in light of the loss of nothingness and facing Being in, but also beyond, the infinity of the moment. The book of Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve were in Diaspora already in the Garden of Eden, and symbolically humans have certainly been in Diaspora since the destruction of the Tower of Babylon and the beginning of philosophy. It is the abyss between the continuum of the homogeneity of immanence and its destruction by life and planned productivity which is conditioned by destroying intimacy and by growing alienation. This abyss is also a tearing of the human’s heart and his relations with his fellow humans and the other members and parts of the cosmos, not solely his mind. It is a point of departure for self-consciousness of a human who meets the tragedy of his otherness, of his very individual existence, of the tumultuous presence of conflicting infinite moments, hopes and alternatives which demand action, order, constructive power, self-restraint and oppression which conditions civilized progress, as Freud so brilliantly shows us in his work. Civilized dwelling in this world is conditioned and sanctioned. It is sanctioned by the heavy toll of paving what seems one’s own way in life or realizing one’s destiny. A path that offers a priceless deception: the human who surrenders to collectivism and in 14
introduction
return regains at least a particle of intimacy with the lost totality of nothingness. Didn’t you smell the smell of home in such moments when Thanatos’ agents knocked at your door and were friendlier than anyone else? Among the particularly prolific deceptions offered by normalizing education is the promise to constitute a meaningful hospitality of a collective or individual “homereturning”, the sworn promise of a successful flight from the given reality or its edification and an enduring nomadism in eternal rewarding exile. The assured reward for these quasi-Diasporic alternatives could be intellectual, bodily, moral or aesthetic. It might be extremely individual or collective, fragile and momentary or historically enduring; still, it is deceptive in its very promise to be rewarding, compensating, calming or “solving” any crisis, “correcting” wrong doings in the world. Traditional Diasporic philosophies are no less productive: monotheistic religions and Western metaphysical traditions offer Diasporic philosophies as a gate to hope of “homereturning”. Alternatively, sometimes they also offer a meaningful eternal Diaspora as a point of departure for addressing the irreparable destruction of intimate unity with the world, with the Other and with the totally other. This is the case of Jewish tradition. Judaism has traditionally offered hope for one of two opposing possibilities. In the first, it proffered a worthy nomadic existence within the acknowledgement of the temporality of Diaspora and its dynamic development toward emancipation, redemption or appeasing synthesis. In the second it offered unredeemed life as a courageous affirmation of eternal Diasporic life in face of negative dialectics, the God who is exiled of himself or human being as essentially thrown into existence which is Diasporic in its very essence. The manifestation of Life in the form of colliding holy powers gave birth to Diasporic philosophies, their aporias, comfort and love. It watered the flourish of the quest for wonders, miracles and meaning; the edification of the beauty and worth of otherwise painful, meaningless Life. The struggle between rival rich Diasporic powers offered hope; even if not hope for an immediate Tikun Olam, for a speedy correction of the wrong in this unredeemed world as a manifestation of the punishable destruction of harmonious nothingness. It offered, however, various kinds of hope. Hope for a renewed intimacy—even if only a strong negative intimacy—as the closest human possibility for re-uniting himself with Being at its best: intimacy with nothingness. Unity whose loss was never appropriately compensated by the fruits of civilized life, a loss which demanded ever more energetic constructions, elevations and wars between collectives and within the “I” and the “not-I”. It also enabled education for responsibility and progress toward meaningful individual and worthy collective life in eternal Diaspora just as the ahistorical existence of Judaism offered until its negation by the Zionist alternative of returning into normality and becoming like all other people who dwell in the historical dimension of Being. The project of Enlightenment was a titanic attempt to negate and overcome the Diasporic situatedness of humanity. It destroyed the futile Diasporic “homereturning” education via redemption by “the One”: challenging the deceiving compassion, the anti-humanistic morality and the wrong intimacy with the lost totality. The 15
introduction
monotheistic path to regaining intimacy with the world and toward meaningful loss, pain and hopes, was replaced by a grand anti-Diasporic alternative. It positioned the human as a citizen of the earthly city, a dweller in a rational progressive project toward “emancipation” and fulfillment of human potentials, aims and dreams. Diasporic existence was partly preserved, however, within the framework of killingGod-each-moment-anew via the conscious destruction, stopping or intolerable dragging feet of secular holy progress toward the realization of Utopia. Diasporic presence was kept simultaneously in individual respects, in microscopic arenas and in the sense of a gap between Man and the truth, the just, and the beautiful as part and parcel of the realization of Objective Reason—and in the existentialist rebelling against it. Humanist education worked hard to constitute an alternative holiness in respect of the seemingly different tendencies of growing alienation on the one hand and growing integration within the immanence on the other. The demolition of metaphysics following Kant was titanic challenge and the critical alternative undertook to offer an alternative to the loss of self-evidence, unproblematized intimacy and the holiness it imparted to life. In “our” post-metaphysical era this humanist holiness is effectively ridiculed, parodized and deconstructed. Even the hopes for it are deconstructed or swallowed by the system in face of a refusal of an explicit alternative Utopia that will solve Diasporic existence once and for all. Parallel to the intensification of movements and the initiation of mega-speed changes in all spheres of life, education today faces the absence of any unquestioned legitimation apparatuses, authority that will offer meaning to effort, aim or worthy suffering. Diasporic existence is transformed, again, but without the promise of an alternative savior, redemption or meaningful aims, worthy suffering or valuable pleasure—not even a heroic tragic response to meaninglessness! Intimacy, holiness and transcendence have not been exiled—they have been consumed and swallowed in a functional manner in the suggestive magic of the ecstasis produced by the omnipotent simulacra-recycling of the post-metaphysical pleasure machine. With the progress of killing-God-each-moment-anew, another change of major importance has developed: a move from human modern existence shaped by fast movements and changes to a human existence controlled by arenas of mega-speed and deconstruction of transcendence, holiness, greatness and intimacy. As I try to show in this collection, this change of major importance offers a new phase in the history of the anti-Diasporic education of humanity. It is a new human positioning indeed. And it contains an imperative: a worthy response to the new realization of the anti-Diasporic “homereturning” quest. The Diasporic dialectics between Being and nothingness is about to negate itself in a nondialectical manner; inflicting an End to heterogeneity, dialectics and Life itself. The play between Diasporic existence, homereturning and dwelling in self-forgetfulness, against the storms created in the ocean where titanic rival holy powers collide with each other, is rushing to its End and it beckons you to join the party. Thinking, copoiesis, improvisation, techne and very existence must offer a worthy addressing of the new dimensions of life in “our” dull yet re-enchanting post-metaphysical era. In the enchanted world in which holiness dwelt, intimacy was present in all dimensions 16
introduction
and on all levels of life. In the post-modern re-enchantment of the world, intimacy is replaced by magia offered to the non-erotic, ecstatic, human as a quasi-spiritual nomad within the framework of a fabricated co-poiesis suitable for the cyborg, the citizen of hyper-media and cyberspace. Ghostlike life to intimacy. As Diasporic humans, we are called upon by that which we can never properly acknowledge or control: for you, what is so novel in the present historical moment in the history of the destruction of nothingness? What is relevant for you in the current shift in the history of the reification and the exile of intimacy? Nothing less than the essential turning point in the biography of this planet. Unavoidably, it transforms the positioning of what Levinas calls the ethical I, it transforms the stance of Life and of Thinking. Objectively, Being no longer contains its endurance. The endurance of Life becomes less and less probable. Here we do not face a certain truth claim, holy power, individual or collective on earth. Much more than that: at stake are timespace relations, which affect all possible human perspectives of time and the very possibility of conscious existence. The future is threatened, conditioned, transcended into its negation in face of the presently approaching probability of the End. Human progress is actualized today by the objective looming possibility of humans’ destruction of all Life on earth and the potentials for love. This fact reintroduces the richness of Diasporic philosophy, which traditionally has been so close to the tension between redemption and Fall, the call for “homereturning” into the Garden of Eden (or one of its many realizations/alternatives) and the edifying call for spiritual rebirth, political emancipation or other forms of universal death. The present approaching of the End is unique in the eschatological tradition and in the history of solving Manichaean existence. It comes along with the deconstruction of the preconditions for transcendence, holiness and thinking. At the same time it invites pre-modern reactions. These enhance much devotion to hate, fearful courage, brute honesty and the will to use post-modern technologies to bring an end to Western hierarchies, the West’s self-proclaimed moral superiority and oppression on the path to ending all other manifestations of life itself. Diasporic philosophy is a neglected important philosophical tradition and a current worthy response to the challenges of the present historical moment. It is a committed self-positioning as well as a nameless, unacknowledged counter-educational spirit. It is, however, bodily embedded, aesthetically oriented, morally committed and politically struggled for within specific, historical, constructed material conditions. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, Diasporic philosophy tackles an impossible dilemma concerning its diet. How should it treat the invitation of the deceiving fruits to dwell in some exclusive “home”, and nomadism itself in the era of the near probability of the End of all life and the deconstruction of the struggle between the disciples of the holiness of God and the disciples of the alternative, “mature” holiness within the humanist project of killing-God-each-moment-anew? And how do you decide in a non-naïve manner who is “God” and who is “the snake”, what/where is “the garden”, what is “hell”, and whose voice speaks through your “I” or “not-I”, anyway? The deconstruction of the self-evidence of any possible truth, and the destruction of the truth of any possible self-evidence, unite. They unite in the desolation of 17
introduction
simplicity as truth and intimacy as “home” that did not begin with globalizing capitalism and the intensification of speedy changes and movements, yet presently it galvanizes other historical changes. As a dynamic, complex, synthesis it transformed human existence and inflicted a dramatic change on the history of humankind. The post-holy historical moment is also the era of the triumph over the quest for overcoming Diasporic existence by establishing on earth the genuine Garden of Eden. It is a celebrated gate to transgression of all quests, borders, branches and aims, as a returning to the lost immanence; a nomadic indulgence in the deconstructed intimacy in the form of mega-speeds and realization of the infinite in the form of the postmodern pleasure machine which claims to offer the perfect transformed intimacy. It is a unique tiger’s leap. A leap in a deterritorialized space-time-imagination arena that is incubating mega-speeds and punctual time; replacing seriousness, confidence and holiness as shaping a worthy way of life which transcends contingency and has a prevailing mission which awaits the human. This replacement is a surrendering to contingent language games, ecstatic drowning in mere power-relations, fashions and the exile of prominence. The celebration of life in the aether of post-modern nomadism is a celebration of reaching the old Greek concept of godly heterogeneity in a “flat” reality which has no mysterious secrets beyond the stars of its darkest skies. Life in hybridic, contingent, kaleidoscopic mega-speed arenas is actually the overcoming of the holiness of Diasporic existence via the celebration of its post-modern Diasporic disillusioned nomadism. This achievement is the victory of the immanence over transcendence, victory of the quest to return “home” to nothingness over the erotic power as birthgiving to strong, rich and holy creation and grand counter-educational possibilities. This triumph is the impetus of my search, one that here searches for evaluating and edifying itself in the form of this collection. This collection aspires to achieve a twofold endeavor: first, to reconstruct the Diasporic philosophical tradition that until now, true to its nature, has been nameless and unacknowledged even in face of the recent growing postcolonialist interest in the various aspects of Diaspora, exile and nomadism. To a certain degree Diasporic philosophy is redeemed by presenting the claim and reconstructing Diasporic aspects and implications of well known philosophers and respected traditions, by special attention to central past Diasporic philosophers and by presenting some of the most important present-day Diasporic thinkers. The second aim of this collection is to address the special relations between the possibilities opened by current Diasporic philosophies and the challenges of counter-education, in face of the technological and philosophical readiness for total destruction of all life on earth by humanity itself, accompanied by the technological possibility of ensuring satisfaction of all fundamental needs in health, security, education and occupation, for the first time in human history. In this collection I have not tried to continue my critical work along a new path. For me, this collection is a form of preparation for an invitation; a sacred work of the kind that acknowledges the power of evaluating the killing of God and the exile of the holiness of killing God as well as the Diasporas it could enhance. This 18
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collection is an exploration of a new philosophical path as well as a reconstruction of an unnamed, forgotten philosophical past: the Diasporic tradition that has overcome the temptation to offer salvation, redemption, emancipation or “solution” of any kind, yet remains Messianic. Accordingly, the collection is constructed to represent current Diasporic philosophers, to elaborate on central Diasporic perspectives and issues and their relevance to the field of education, and to present my own Diasporic work in recent years—in search of a worthy counter-educational response to the exile of humanist holiness and the deconstruction of the preconditions for overcoming meaninglessness and replacing it with mere power or mere pleasure as comforting forms of post-modern nomadism and a worthy Diasporic hospitality. Present-day Diasporic philosophers such as Bauman, Braidotti, Todorov, West and myself address here from different perspectives the challenge of Diasporic philosophy and the conflicting conceptions of Diaspora, exile and nomadism in light of post-modern and post-colonialist realities. Other Diasporic thinkers joined in a Diasporic dialogue and together we tried to address the challenge of countereducation and Diasporic philosophy in our recorded discussions. These conversations with Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Bauman, and West were nothing less than unique intellectual experiences for me. Ilan Pappe reconstructed the Diasporic philosophy of Edward Said and its relevance for the prospects of a liberated, hybrid, kaleidoscopic-oriented ultra-post-colonialist Palestine. Michael Peters introduced Wittgenstein as a Diasporic philosopher and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan reflected on the poet Avot Yeshurun as a Diasporic poet and on his Diasporic contribution to challenging the Zionist negation of Jewish Diaspora and Diasporic existence. Ignacio Goetz addressed the issue of Diaspora and ambiguity. Arie Kizel reflected on the symbiosis between poetry and Diasporic existence, and Yotam Hotam addressed the theological dimensions of ecological education and the relevance of Gnosis and Diasporic philosophy to current environmental challenges. The invited contributions, the dialogues with some of the richest present-day Diasporic thinkers, and my own Diasporic writings are aimed at contributing, jointly, to the search for counter-educational possibilities. These are neither conceived by me as an alternative critical language, a more effective “resistance”, a first step toward a “genuine revolution”, nor are they envisaged here as an easy-going nomadism of a post-tragic nihilist who is liberated from the quest to find meaning or holiness. These conflicting possibilities belong to the same dream humanity has to be awakened from, in light of the successful disenchantment and the fundamentalist counter-violence that goes along with it together in a post-metaphysical era. Diasporic counter-education, in this respect, is an attempt to present the possibility of thinking and of responsible improvisational co-poiesis in an era which deconstructs, ridicules or fetishizes holiness and the kind of respond-ability which conditions transcendence from ecstatic sinking toward some-thing to becoming some-one who is rich and free to the degree of refusing the temptation to return “home” into the continuum of an aimless symbolic and direct emancipating violence or, alternatively, to the harmony of nothingness as presented by the suggestive powers of capitalist “success” and other powerful drugs. In this sense, Diasporic education has something valuable to say. 19
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The collection tells the reader that a genuine Diasporic attempt is conscious of its impossibility and that it has neither an antitoxin nor an emancipating mantra to sell. It has no safe haven, no spiritualistic moral nor any unsuspecting guide to facilitate the hospitality of a cloud of self-forgetfulness which will become a condolence strong enough to appear as liberation or even as conceited skepticism or compassionate, appeasing nomadism. The reader will not find here more than a Diasporic attempt, an unfinished, never fully deciphered invitation. This collection conceives itself living in Diaspora in relation to rival vitalistic products of “our” culture industry. It does not attempt, however, to empower, to join or to emancipate from any of the present conflicting beginnings to establish a serious Diasporic discourse. Acknowledging the strengths of the dullness of “our” historical moment, this collection is in search of its own path, while reflecting on the alternative counter-fashions and the triumphant attempts of liberation, destruction and rebirth which are presently celebrating under the flag of the discourse of “Diaspora”, “nomadism” or “exile”. Until recently, the concept of Diaspora was not quite a dweller in any of the philosophical agoras, pantheons or hells. It did not even have the arrogance of presenting itself as a consistent tradition or position, or even as a silenced-marginalized narrative. Faithful to its truth, it continued its invisible Diasporic existence. Today, however, to its shame, when not true to itself it faces growing recognition; it encounters growing acknowledgement as a serious philosophical challenge, along with concepts such as nomadism and exile. Conferences celebrate it as a central question to be addressed. Journals call for papers on Diasporic themes, and freedom activists are fast to liberate, ban, or crucify their interlocutors under its flag. To survive in a post-metaphysical moment as a possible way of life and as a philosophical gaze/position, even only to enable its mere visibility within the ever more competition among rival cultural and emotional commodities, the Diasporic alternative must strive to become a fashionable commodity in the global market. These embarrassing preconditions for acknowledgement and visibility are in sharp opposition to the essence of a genuine Diaspora. Diaspora today exists in three main rival arenas which enable and determine its positioning, its acknowledgement and its respected truth value. 1. Traditional religious monotheism. 2. Modernistic-oriented positive utopianism 3. Postmodern anti-transcendentalism. All these three versions have their unique political and educational agendas, which my understanding of Diaspora cannot join. As I try to show in this collection, the current academic Diasporic discourse and much of the progressive political discussion of various aspects of Diaspora, nomadism and exile prosper in the framework of post-colonial thinking enhanced by post-structuralist philosophies. Here Diaspora is not only acknowledged as an historical psychological, social and cultural reality to be addressed in face of post-colonial migrations, inequality, new forms of openness and coexistence, aside from new forms of oppression; it is also transformed into a celebrated postmodern Utopia: an ecstatic overcoming of the home-return temptation in the form of universal social solutions, objectively justified interests, universal truths and ideals 20
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for emancipating all humanity, moral hierarchies and the quest for homogeneity/ order/purification. It offers an invitation to a nomadic richness that is hard to resist in face of the deconstruction of Objective Reason, absolute truth, universal truth claims, forgetfulness of the killing of God and deconstruction of transcendentalism; a nomadic richness within the infinity and endless diversities of the immanence. It offers life in the flourishing infinity of the moment and punctual time as an alternative to monotheistic linear time and the moment that is never self-satisfied, always under the tyranny of the grand picture and the omnipotence of mysteries of “the program” of the almighty, whether it is the imperative of God, the laws of history or the logic of production relations. The post-holiness moment offers immanence as richness that holds out eternal Diasporic existence as the home for the post-metaphysical Utopia of nomadism, unending openness and free creativity in face of the desolation of hierarchies, universal and objective claims and frozen dogmas and routines. As I will try to show in the following, the desolation of the preconditions for serious commitment to intimacy with one’s way of life, for responsible edification of the good, was not left without an educational reaction. Post-modern normalizing education offers a strong reaction: it offers mega-speed heterogeneity, energetic diversities and rich disoriented openness within dullness; but it has also introduced ecstatic creativity, and dancing in the flames of cannibalistic feasting on the heart of humanism. An essential part of the post-modern disenchanted danse macabre is the transformed return of Magia and the mythical world. What we face here is the enduring human obsession with the loss of nothingness and the trauma of deconstructing even its substitute intimacy. In the post-holy world we face a post-traumatic reaction to the deconstruction of the striving for intimacy and the quest for unity with being as “home” with no windows and gates after the terrible success of the disenchantment project and the exile of holiness. In the name of greatness Nietzsche longed for the end of the quest for truth, yet we received deconstruction of intimacy with greatness and of intimacy as such. Magia replaces the quest for Diasporic intimacy and enables the forgetfulness of responsibility for overcoming the deceptive invitation to dwell at home and forget Diasporic responsibilities for counter-self-education. Magia and disenchantment return as vengeance in human progress as the product of this success along with the near probability of bringing an End to all life on earth. The return of magia and the reintroduction of the omnipotence of suggestive powers of symbolic exchange are presently a reality and not supra-human. They threaten, however, the very probability of enduring life, inflicting weakness and lack of unifying will, preventing a focus that will enable greatness, master signifiers and responsibility to save the planet and rescue worthy life. Not mere life. The new magia reaches every corner of the soul using effectively its two wings: the one that is reintroduced is an omnipotent pleasure machine. The other is new anti-Semitism. The danse macabre in the flames of the suggestive power and the post-holy ecstasies of consumerism and innovation converse with the post-colonialist ecstasies of “resistance” to the Judeo-Christian Spirit—another agent of Thanatos and the quest for “homereturning” and death. They meet each other in an unconscious life21
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and-death struggle: against a genuine Diasporic existence that might offer the human an alternative openness to the one the postmodern aether is committed to: that of Diasporic intimacy with the unredeemed world: Diasporic intimacy that challenges the post-holy unification which produces at the same level the non-metaphysically grounded rights of the client and the rights of the victim. This leveling is orchestrated within the magic suggestive alternative which praises hybridity, contingency, inventive productivity, dynamic consumerism and speedy deterritorialized nomadism. These two seemingly different alternatives to the Jewish Diasporic spirit inherited holy confidence in grand truths, greatness, transcendence, skepticism, tender gaze and genuine improvisation. Punctual time replaces linear time, Network with infinite links replaces hierarchical value sets and rational analysis, suggestive rhetoric replaces dialogue and holistic alternatives replace Western dualism and its phallocentric, monotheistic, Jewish oppression of the otherness of the Other. These tendencies bring much of the postmodern nomadic vitalism into a fearful collision with pre-modern and modern Diasporic projects. For a growing public the new anti-Semitism is becoming the relevant meta-narrative and the birth-giving power of postmodern Diasporic philosophies and their actualization in the horizons shaped by capitalist globalization. What is the grand secret of the new anti-Semitism which makes it under the postmysterious sky so fertile a womb for postmodern Diasporic alternatives? The new anti-Semitism symbolizes a quest for an omnipotent quasi-spiritual alternative to the Judeo-Christian Spirit. It strives for an alternative intimacy or at least quasi-intimacy of the kind which has shaped Western civilization for the last two millennia. On the occasions when these rival holy powers meet it is the remnants of the Jewish spirit which are deconstructed or shamefully run into compromises, adjustments and loss of self-respect. When the Jewish spirit is true to itself, however, beyond Western Enlightenment’s universalism or Zionist particularism, it offers health, growth and self-containment, which are an unmatched threat to the post-metaphysical aether and its anti-erotic catharsis. The two faces of the post-metaphysical aether are threatened to the death by genuine Jewish Diasporic existence which when true to itself transcends Judaism and becomes universal counter-education. These two faces are threatened by The Jew. Fundamentally, even if only latently, it is committed to destroy The Jew, or even more ambitiously, the spirit of Judaism and its concept of Diasporic life on the one hand, and the Jewish negation of postmodern Diasporic life on the other. It cannot be satisfied with anything less than total destruction of “the Jewish spirit”. No wall will be of much use here. The flourishing of the new anti-Semitism is conditioned by the capitalist (asymmetric and oppressive) prosperity on the one hand, and by the immanent risk and disasters of globalizing capitalism on the other. In contrast to the old antiSemitism (which is today so vivid even in places where there are no Jews or no Jew has ever been seen such as Japan) the new anti-Semitism is propagated by structural risk, prosperity, high-tech and mega-speeds in “flat” existence which is in a desperate search to re-introduce value into life or its ecstatic substitutes such as non-linear 22
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mega-speed forms of life. It cannot breathe outside the post-modern aether. It is conditioned by the diverse, speedy-rich dullness of the post-holy matrix. The old anti-Semitism, in contrast, was conditioned by the ecstasies of its master-signifiers and the unchallenged holiness of the truth of its God. How may we understand new anti-Semitism as the most vital anti-erotic co-poiesis within the dullness of the aether of the post-holy era? Why should new anti-Semitism become the metanarrative of progressive Western thinking? And why is this nomadism so atrocious when colliding with the spirit of Judaism and its ideal of Diasporic life on the one hand, and when it clashes with the negation of Jewish Diasporic spirit in the form of the State of Israel, on the other? And is it only a coincidence that so many Jewish intellectuals inhabit the frontage of the new anti-Semitism? An orderly and systematic address of these questions is beyond the pretensions of this introduction. I hope the various chapters of this collection will offer at least the beginning of a serious reply. But this we can say already here: the arch-enemy and the constitutive element of current post-colonial thinking and its concept of Diaspora is Jewish Diaporic philosophy on the one hand, and its negation, the Jewish state, on the other. This might be difficult to understand at first, since for many the State of Israel, or the Zionist project, represents the diametrical opposition of the concept of Diaspora as realized in traditional Judaism, as I myself have never tired to stress time and again. In this light I even articulated Zionism as the barbarization of Judaism and I have certainly contributed my share to the enhancement of the new anti-Semitism within the framework of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy. Rabbinical Judaism conceives Diasporic existence neither as punishment nor as a temporary historical situation to be “fixed” by the advance of a specific emancipatory project or by Divine intervention. For the central trends in Jewish history, Judaism is all about living in eternal Diaspora, while redemption and the end of Diaspora is preserved as a regulative idea of Messianism without a Messiah. Diasporic life within this framework is enabled by responsibility for ahistorical life; sacredness amidst the presence of the secular, the Godly City amidst and as against the Earthly City in Christianity; refusal to participate in the secular power games, struggles and promised victories or any low triumphs which do not serve worthy Diasporic existence as the highest good, Sabbath in but not against the other days of the week. It constitutes life as a realized prayer; a unique presence which challenges the “normal” relations between time and space, between the human, the world and God. Its uniqueness is realized not by power of the kind anti-Semites accuse Jews of striving for, but on the contrary by its responsibility to refuse injustice and to accept the hospitality of a nomad in the sense of the eternal interpreter. For Diasporic life as idealized in Judaism (and never fully actualized) even God, surely no rabbi or interpretation, is the last authority. This is in contrast to Christian dogma or to postmodern fashions and democratic-consumerist-oriented public opinion polls. Not even God Almighty. Diasporic existence as constant (re)interpretation is figured in the letters צע, an acronym that you will find in so many places in the Talmud after a long discussion among the rabbis. צעappears after the conclusion of a discussion on the right interpretation of the law. It means that the upshot of the debate over 23
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the issue is not yet finalized. The ontological openness of the Word, any serious symbolic exchange, is eternally in Diaspora and demands further elaboration, eternal interpretation. So that no conclusion or deliberation is closed in principle even when the elaboration does not end with the reference “is in need of further elaboration” ()צע. This is a major Diasporic concept since it does not call for unrestrained relativism, or for aporia as the guiding angel of a worthy deliberation, or a dogma, God’s mysterious will or a never-deciphered caprice of Moira to terrorize human life. This is the uniqueness of Jewish Diasporic philosophy, that it accepts the law (Halacha) and God (Almighty) and yet its highest concept is the holiness of Love of Life as an eternal interpretive dialogic sacred work. A unique wandering togetherness, best symbolized by the Orcha as one might meet in the convoy of camels, humans, belongings and values crossing the deserts of the Land of Israel when holiness was still simply present. Sacredness of eternal life in Diaspora which acknowledges that every consensus, routine or fear is under צעerects an abyss between Diasporic humans and humans who dwell in the conventions, fears, dogmas and fashions of this world. It is of utmost importance to make clear that Diasporic life is very different from postmodern nomadism, openness and tolerance. “Openness” for the postmodern nomad or a cyborg is conditioned by the exile of holiness, while the openness of Jewish Diasporic ( צעin need of further elaboration) as part of the enduring wandering of the Orcha manifests holiness. This inevitably creates an unbridgeable gap between the Diasporic and the non-Diasporic (whose most extreme form is that between Zionist Jews and Diasporic Jews), a sharp division between “us”, sacred people with a special responsibility and unending suffering in eternal Diaspora, and “them”; it is a surrender to the total commitment to Diaspora which creates a moral and intellectual difference between the two fundamentally different ways of life in this world. This difference challenges the strivings, achievements and value of the existence of all non-Diasporic people and their low kind of otherness. Diasporic self-positioning places the others in an embarrassing relation with their challenged otherness and with the otherness of the Jew. By his very Diasporic existence the Jew threatens to transform their otherness into quasi-otherness, part of the continuum of the Same, of thingness itself. This embarrassment has led all down Western history to constant victimization of the Jew, to his demonization (The Jew) and to continuous actual discrimination, humiliation, torture and murder of Jews on a mass scale as part of its intimacy with holiness that still speaks to the genuine human, namely to the genuine Christian. The history of Western culture is the history of its challenging its Jewish genesis, spirit and telos as its “not-I”, as challenging the presence of holiness in the form of the threatening Other as a moral mirror. The treatment of The Jew is not only a moral mirror for the West: it is at the same time a constitutive element of its becoming. The Jew is a moral mirror and a constitutive element on a global scale, all the more in the post-holy historical moment in which the spirit of Judaism is conceived not as its Other but as Western essence and impetus responsible for its immanent oppressive nature, in its rush toward the End. 24
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The aether of the post-modern matrix is enabled by the exile of the killer of God-each-moment-anew. This quintessential dimension is today threatened. It is threatened by its arch-rival: the fundamentals of monotheism and its Jewish essence. It presents itself not as an anti-Semitic opposition to Jewish Diasporic telos but as a moral defense of heterogeneity and democracy against the Jewish more often then against racist-totalitarian-oriented quest for moral superiority and control by totality misrepresenting the essence of Judaism, its concept of Diaspora and its co-poiesis. In contrast to the claims of current new anti-Semitism a genuine Diasporic co-poiesis is enabled by responsible enduring improvisation that is committed to the law, to the Minyan and to the Sabbath but these do not destroy interpretation, freedom and improvisation but rather enable it since they conceive themselves in eternal Diaspora. The universal dimension of the Jewish spirit could today be released from the remnants of its ethnocentrism on the one hand, and from the remnants of its “homereturning” quest on the other. In the era of the exile of the killer of God, Jewish Diasporic essence finally might be universally universalized and globalizing capitalism and its pleasure machine might serve a worthy counter-education, even unwillingly, and universalize Jewish Diasporic existence. Counter-education here meets rival universalizing powers which pretend to offer alternative spirituality which trades worthy co-poiesis, Eros and holiness for ecstasies of an unequal suggestive powers. The post-modern aether is committed to destroy what it conceives as Jewish moral elitism and ethnocentric arrogance. But more than anything else it is committed to overcome Judaism as a rival concept of Diasporic existence and genuine nomadism. It introduces an anti-Jewish “non-dogmatic”, hybrid, contingent, epistemological relativism, moral pluralism and kaleidoscopic nomadism. These are celebrated as the genuine, universally valid, anti-hierarchical and post-elitist existence. The new antiSemitism promises that here no “homereturning” project becomes a gate to arrogance, moral superiority and racist-patriarchal holiness. Its deconstruction of any holiness and all quests for transcendence is a gate to its anti-transcendental, “horizontal” quasi-religious ecstasies. Such a worldview and its material pre-conditions cannot but go into a life-and-death struggle with traditional Jewish Diasporic essence and with current counter-education that will universalize worthy Diasporic existence, which will be open to individuals of all cultures, countries, classes, races, ethnicities, gender or age. This is because the Jewish Diasporic spirit is universalist-oriented as well as individualist-oriented in its essence. It is relevant more than ever in a multicultural world of countless diasporas, the post-modern culture industry and globalizing capitalism. This is exactly because it is transcendental, anti-dogmatic and Erotic in a way that deconstructs deconstruction. It challenges the post-modern quest to be swallowed in the immanence, its desire to return to homogeneity within the world of “difference” where there is no difference which makes a difference. To the degree that Jewish Diasporic spirit overcomes Judaism and becomes universalized it must be very clear about the difference which make a difference, as Judaism has always been clear on this matter: the difference which makes a difference is the difference between the holy and the unholy, between life as part of the Orcha and life as dwelling in “your” fears, conventions and death strivings. 25
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Another branch of the post-structuralist influence enhances the post-colonial project of liberation, giving voice to the silenced ones and empowerment of all victims of Judeo-Christian civilization. Here Diasporas are acknowledged in their geographic, cultural and political manifestations. Their significance is elaborated in face of the history of colonialism, the threats of globalizing capitalism and the migrations and multiculturalism it imposes. It constructs multicultural realities and Diasporas not as an unusual, perverse actuality but as the normality of life in global capitalistic reality. Diasporas, as Bauman, Boyarin, Pappe, Peters and Daphna Erdinast-Vulkan show us in this collection, also open new possibilities for post-colonial realities and for more symmetrical co-existence. Still another level of the influences of “our” postmetaphysical moment is the new sensibilities and the new codes and ideals. These stretch from caring about the fate of bears and nature in general to the honor, well being and the future of all unfortunate, marginalized, victims and fellow humans as fundamentally equal. Respect for the moment as an alternative to Judeo-Christian imprisonment in grand idealized historical dynamics is part of the new delivery. Yes, within the given “flat” moment that is re-enhanced by postmodern magia. The anti-historical, contingent, hybrid, de-territorialized mega-speedy dynamics in the post-modern aether urges new-age spirituality and its covenant with neo-liberalism. It also enhances ecstatic flourishing and celebration of the immanence and the circular and punctual richness of its “flatness” within the post-modern pleasure machine as a substitute for both the lost Garden of Eden and the rival anti-Diasporic quests for “homereturning” to the Garden of Eden after Gog and Magog’s grand battle or the opposite way of deifying humanity and establishing a humanist-Enlightened heavenly Jerusalem on earth. And yes, there is even “room” for the ethics of care, fairness and pragmatist-oriented good life within the given, the contextualized, the momentary, as a wonder-full Diaspora which does not call for any “homereturning” project, and has no suspicion of any call for redemption or “genuine revolution”. In their more developed forms these are elements of the new anti-Semitism which celebrates anti-holiness, and antiEroticism, anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-transcendentalism. The new anti-Semitism praises Diasporic existence as a post-modern pleasure machine on the one hand, and the new ethos of post-colonialist “resistance”, “critique” and “liberation” on the other. A special role is reserved here for resistance to Western colonialism in its most extreme realization in the form of the State of Israel as a manifestation of an antiDiasporic philosophy which has to be destroyed by all means. This is to destroy the preconditions for the universalization of a genuine Diasporic existence and eliminate its essence as well as its particular realizations. The ethics of postmodern Diasporic philosophy collides with The Jew. It collides with the spirit of Judaism more than with the actual Jew while it articulates itself in the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of progressive thinking and praxis. This collection tries to problematize the quest of the “progressive thinkers” in the framework of a Diasporic, ahistorical worldview which if true to itself cannot offer “progress”, “redemption” or “emancipation”, not even a gradual modest “progress” 26
introduction
or Tikun Olam. For this reason progressive thought is in desperate search of a non-linear, binary, universal redemptive catharsis. In face of the deconstruction of transcendence and the triumph of the immanence it desperately needs “flat”, nontranscendental quasi-purifying ecstasies. This is where post-colonial “resistance” is introduced as an alternative to holiness and transcendence of the kind offered by Jewish monotheism and its present possible universalization beyond the borders of Judaism. The more political and multicultural aspects of postmodern Diasporic philosophy, within the framework of postcolonial praxis, collide with “Israel”. They collide with “Israel” as both the diametrical opposition of the Jewish spirit and as its transformed realization. For postmodern Diasporic philosophy within the framework of the new anti-Semitism The Jew represents in his commitment to transcendence and total negation of the facts of history and its power games a Diasporic existence which is too demanding and unavoidably exclusionist, hierarchical and racist. It should be religiously “resisted” since it is a Luciferian entity with which no compromise is possible. “Israel” as the incarnation of Western colonialism in its most direct and aggressive form should be totally destroyed under the flag of post-metaphysical reworked universalism. The possibility of the universalization of Jewish Diasporic spirit in face of countless growing diasporas and the unsolvable crisis of identity formation and its telos in a post-modern reality terrifies the new anti-Semites. They fear the Love of Life and the refusal of the quest for Thanatos-oriented “homereturning” that genuine Diasporic philosophy offers today, and they react violently with much self-hate. The commitment to destroy the colonialist essence of the West/America/Empire as a universalist-oriented, homogenizing, hierarchicalist project centers the essence of Judaism as the arch-enemy that has given birth to an anti-universalist “homereturning” project such as Zionism and modern “Israel”. Epistemic relativism and the concept of difference within and among competing narratives stop here. Here postmodern Diasporic philosophy in both its wings is united to delegitimize one single narrative. It is committed to destroy solely one “difference” while abandoning any claim of an unproblematic criterion, a meta-theory or universally valid set of values. It cannot avoid making a selection after all. And in the present-day selection, again, the Jews are the chosen ones, to be de-legitimized, de-humanized and destroyed. Within the post-colonialist selection the “Jew” on the one hand, and its negation in the form of “Israel” on the other, are presented as the two faces of the arch-enemy of prosperous multicultural humanity where an infinite number of Diasporas coexist peacefully one beside the other. “Critique”/”resistance” and the quest to be swallowed by the pleasure machine in a post-metaphysical reality here unite with the logic of the globalist market. Their coalition offers us educational challenges and implications that most of us have not yet begun to address: how do we meet the needs of an alternative to meaning, transcendence and holiness in an era that exiled even the holiness of the killer-ofGod-each-moment-anew? If in the name of genuine Diasporic existence we are committed to destroy Jewish Diasporic philosophy and its Western realizations 27
introduction
such as Enlightenment and humanistic education, how will we face the dullness of a post-metaphysical historical moment the moment after such a victory? What will replace the productivity of such self-hatred and the ecstasis it can offer us within the framework of the new-anti-Semitism? As I try to show in this collection, the excitement of mega-speeds, the deconstruction of transcendence and the exile of holiness are instrumental for the establishment of a the current various and conflicting attempts to overcome Jewish Diasporic existence and its realization in Western civilization. With the help of friends and colleagues, I have made here a first attempt to reconstruct the hopes, the quests and the educational agendas attempting to offer post-modern Diasporic alternatives as well as the various attempts to establish an anti-Diasporic educational agenda in “our” dull historical moment. This coalition cannot be founded or safely rely on Jewish Diasporic philosophy, or on any other for that matter, in light of the new realities on the one hand, and the limits of Jewish Diasporic philosophy on the other. Diasporic existence today should begin anew, in light of the omnipotence of the postmodern aether and the possibilities of universalizing and transforming Jewish Diasporic essence. Acknowledging the situatedness of current Diaspora should not lower our spirit and have us to give up the truth of Diasporic (counter-) education. This collection is nothing but an invitation. An ironic, impossible invitation, for all humans to address in a responsible manner the uniqueness of “our” End as a gate to a worthier Diasporic existence: intimacy after “critique” and despite the success of modern disenchantment—and its Fall. As I try to suggest in this collection, this is the mission of counter-education within the eternal walk of the Orcha as a manifestation of Diasporic, responsible, improvising co-poiesis; the wandering of Love.
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THE NOMADIC EXISTENCE OF THE ETERNAL IMPROVISER AND DIASPORIC CO-POIESIS IN THE ERA OF MEGA-SPEED
The possibilities for Diasporic nomadism and counter-education are ontologically grounded yet they are historically realized. They are historically advanced and threatened within rich enduring conflicting relations between Eros and Thanatos; between the transcendence from nothingness and a quest for “homereturning” to the totality of thingness. This dialectics between immanence and transcendence, homogeneity and heterogeneity, stand-still and movement is today gravely deconstructed. After such a long and dramatic struggle between the God of creation and the Gnostic god it seems that we have finally reached the triumphant moment of the quest for “homereturning”: nothingness, finally, having the upper hand (GurZe’ev, 2009). The history of transcendence and nomadism in face of the call for “homereturning” is renewed in each era. Its rebirth is celebrated in each moment: in each human, and maybe in each creature anew yet, it has a specific Genesis: the beginning of Life. Its presence is constantly evaluated and contested in face of hope, on the one hand, and the possibility of “homereturning” into nothingness, on the other. It is the history of humans as well as the history of their relation to the sacred, to the religiosity of life as holy transcendence, of difference which enables life and makes a difference as against mere change or determinism. This history is marked figuratively by four mile stones: 1. The “era” of immanence and dwelling in total harmony as a manifestation of self-sustained holiness. 2. The “era” of relating to holiness by mediation of God, especially in the monotheistic religions. 3. The “era” of killing-God-eachmoment-anew as a path for regaining contact with holiness in the process of human Enlightenment’s progress and the deification of humanity. 4. The “era” of the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the holy imperative of the progressive deification of humanity and the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew. These four mile stones are paralleled by growing changes and speeding of (de)constructions as part of the de-positioning of the human as dweller of this world or, alternatively, as a genuine Diasporic nomad. Slow movement and no essential changes accompany the human’s dwelling in the immanence. The exit, or the fall toward literacy, historical memory, agriculture, urbanism and monotheism parallels a “homereturning” impulse in the form of a quest for redemption and transcendence which were enabled by a God whose omnipotence is enabled in a civilization characterized by slow changes and low speed. The change in the human existence in face of the negation of the monotheistic “homereturning” project and the desolation of the promise of redemption and the exile of Spirit is actualized in modernity by a transformation in the [ 29 ]
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concept of transcendence (Gur-Ze’ev, 2002). The quest for revolution/transcendence toward the just, the beautiful and the true present a change in experiencing holiness: from a monotheistic into a homocentric zeitgeist; the killing-of-God-each-momentanew becomes the sacred work; a path for (secular) salvation, within an era of ever faster movements and rapidly growing changes in all levels and dimensions of life. The current change in the history of human’s search for itself, its meaning and it’s telos is realized in an historical moment of change: from rapid changes into an arena of mega-speed, an era in which the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew is replaced by the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the humanist’s telos within the immanence of the present dull anti-metaphysical moment within which the relations between space and time are transformed; both the quest for redemption/ homereturning and the call for revolutionary progress and human’s self-edification are forgotten, ridiculed, deconstructed and swallowed into the post-modern-neo-liberal system. Linear time and the quest for transcendence are overwhelmed by punctual time, end of historical consciousness, quasi-nomadism and the possibility to solve all human responsibility and shortcomings by plugging-in-to the pleasure machine. In the present order that is governed by forgetfulness of the creative quest for the aim of human Life, human beings sink into ever more intensive recycled meaninglessness, Being is forgotten, and the Dionysian “life” of thingness is glorified and idolized. The symbols themselves are reified and no longer refer to the transcendent (Baudrillard, 1993) like in the case of a “heavenly new Mercedes”. Within the framework of the present order reification becomes “spiritual” and the world becomes, again, an inviting “home”, or, at least an arena from which narcissistic-oriented “homereturning” projects become meaningful within the framework of current realization and productivization of global capitalism and instrumental reason. The present reality and the omnipotent suggestive powers it allocates, symbolizes the imprisonment of the human in the hospitality of the drive for “homereturning” to the lost wholeness and its holiness/immanence. Within these horizons human “normality” and its potentialities are produced, re-produced and consumed. The organization, control, distribution, and consumption of current normality need to be veiled. It must become a secret. It is of vital importance that its essential qualities will not be questioned, identified, or challenged from a Diasporic point of view. The importance of this grand secret is in its need to reproduce itself without being perceived as anti-transcendental all the way toward the end of Life. One should differentiate here between the various utopian humanist-oriented “homereturning” projects that were defeated in the 20th century by their national or fundamentalist-oriented religious rivals and the Diasporic tradition of refusing to be swallowed by nihilism. Today the humanistic-oriented “homecoming” project (or the project of establishing on earth the genuine Garden of Eden) is not defeated: in fact it is almost completely manipulated, reintroduced and domesticated as a possible individual reified pleasure. The current capitalistic-oriented utopia is conditioned, constituted and justified by a reality that contains a system of codes of behavior which offers transcendence and quasi-meanings, passions, interests, fears, and dreams of 30
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which motorized road and mega-speed electronic exchange of information are but few manifestations of. Within this order human beings are manipulated, activated, and destroyed in a productive manner in all dimensions and levels of their private and public existence, and the illusion of liberation is one of its most needed symbolic energy focuses. This mirage is not an illusion that activates people; rather it is a material dynamic in the network and appears objectively as a commodity that is manufactured, distributed, marketed, purchased, and consumed. It has its market price, and, currently, in the present system, what can be more “real” and objective than that? What is at stake here is the transformation of human beings and their relative autonomy, the deconstruction of their dialogic essence and the rational-industrialized destruction of their bodies. On the roads, specifically, it is realized in two seemingly antagonistic manners: on the one hand, participation in the traffic flow, privately and publicly enjoying its fruits, while on the other hand, suffering its evils and limitations to the degree of threatening public prosperity and destroying the individuality of her singularity. It is worth pointing out the destructive element of the productive dimension of motorized traffic and other manifestations of speeding movements and changes in all spheres of human life; emphasizing the overall rationality and productivity of the human’s destruction, which is deciphered, in the case of traffic “accidents”, as one aspect of a rich and productive process (Gur-Ze’ev, 2006, p. 162). Here a greater integration between the public and the private spheres is provided, to the degree of the complete elimination of the private sphere. In other words, it annihilates a potentially spiritual and emotional autonomous realm in which the human’s dialogic nature and hospitality of co-poiesis (Ettinger, 2005, pp. 703–713) in what I call “derech-eretz” enable him or her to criss-cross the conditions of the negation of the conditions for realizing his nomadic telos. What is at stake here is not his or her self-realization but the prevention of his struggle to diasporically challenge the conditions determining his or her limitations, possibilities, and even the courage to hope. In face of the transition from fast movements and the holiness of killing-God-each-moment-anew into mega-speed and the exile of the killer of God and human’s forgetfulness of their responsibility to create their own telos meaning is actualized in pleasure machines such as the cyberspace and in excitements such as pleasurable nomadism in fast planes, cars and virtual reality games. Diasporic existence is prevented by ensuring or at least enhancing the illusion that the current world is the human’s world in which she is to make every effort to prepare herself to be swallowed by the regulations and truths of the pleasure machine that in “our” post-metaphysical moment is the actual Garden of Eden. Nomadic Diasporic existence in the era of the exile of the killer of God is a great challenge to the truth of the present historical moment offering a concrete refusal to human integration with thingness. Love of Life, responsible nomadism, creativity, worthy suffering, reflection, and transcendence are vital elements of nomadic existence (Braidotti, 2009) even in the current post-modern moment. Existentially, economically, technologically and philosophically it is still an open possibility. 31
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The current global sophisticated sterilization of transcendence, on the other hand, protects the constitution of a one-dimensional immanence and one-dimensional life possibilities in a realm in which, ideally, everything would be automatized and rationalized with no “external” threat, with no transcendental axis that would challenge the self-evidence and the factual. Under such circumstances the antagonistic Diasporic energies of love, happiness, reflection, transcendence and creativity are reconstructed and transformed into productive elements improving the efficiency of the present system. The current “homereturning” safeguards the unproblematic retreat of alienation into integrated myth, of the disintegration of the abyss of Life into unified thingness, of the transformation and integration of the human subject into an object in an omnipotent, closed, wholeness within whose immanence dwells the gay forgetfulness of the reified, quasi-nomad post-modern human. The return of the immanence deconstructs the possibilities of the presence of the totally other, of transcendence, of Diasporic existence. Why should we within this order, challenge the present quasi-nomadism through counter-education? What is wrong with a deceiving, pleasurable, hospitalizing Diaspora as an alternative to ethnocentrist-oriented forms of togetherness? Why should we hunt for our genuine Diasporic existence by searching for alternative, microscopic and general realities: improvised experiences, concepts, moral strives and actions which can ultimately change the system and its cultural, social, gender, and ethnic formations? Why should we train ourselves for eternal improvisation in the co-poiesis of the Orcha? The reduction of the subject into a “subject” and the development of a contingent, multicultural, fluid, local and temporal identity, lead to knowledge and value forms that are part of the general reification of the current globalization of capitalism. Within the present culture industry that represents and serves this order, “the individual” is hailed purely in terms of her status as a consumer/producer (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 25). Free choice and democracy are expressions that find themselves celebrated purely within a rhetoric that serves the reproduction of this anti-humanist meaninglessness which manifests the void left by the exile of the killer of God and the dissolution of holiness and transcendent meaning. The current social and cultural conditions within the framework of ever speeding movements and changes erode the possibility of struggling for self-reflection, radical cultural critique of the existing system, and its rational transformation in the Kantian sense. It includes reducing the possibility of reasoned and solidarian acts of changing the system and its cultural, social, gender, and ethnic formation. As part of this circular dynamic, the hegemonic system effectively distributes an illusion of a liberated consciousness that serves as an agency to improve its own reproduction. In light of its deprivation of human dialogue and reflection potentialities, it might be called false consciousness. Today’s speeding movements and changes take place in a context of transformation of the traditional relations between space and time, human and world. Already now, even before full dwelling in the hospitality of mega speed “vertical” movement, transcendent, religious, movement of the homeless creative individual toward 32
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the veiled mysterious; all these manifestations of human’s deification imposed pre-conditions which deconstruct the holiness of killing-God-each-moment-anew (Gur-Ze’ev, 2009) and replacing the “homereturning” project with the transformation of reality into a genuine Garden of Eden. These conditions actually disappeared as well as the linear time, historical conciseness and the other manifestations of the “phalocentrism” or the “immanent colonialism” of the JudeoChristian educational impulse and its present “empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2000). “Horizontal” movement within the immanence of the one-dimensional framework of “the same” is no longer looked upon as limited, hard, and slow. Nor is it presently conceived as the victory of the platonic cave over its prisoners. Motorized traffic as well as the electronic transmission of symbols, strives and merchandize in the cyberspace does not represent a mere technological change. It represents a totally different metaphysics of movement and different human possibilities. “Speeding is precisely elimination of expectation and duration...Shifting the soul this time from the brain to the motor will free man from apprehension about a future that no longer has any raison d’etre, since everything is already there, here and now, present and over at once, in the instantaneous apocalypse of messages and images, in the great old joke at the end of the world!” (Virilio, 1995, p. 92). Motorized traffic is necessarily a movement of a new kind, a kind that is presumably unlimited and borderless. The (inevitable) absence of limits to this movement has a twofold manifestation: in speeding ability and in the ability to drive almost anywhere while disregarding the challenges of purpose and meaning, and establishing a promise for immanent transcendence within the given reality; not as its overcoming but as its realization. The ability of getting rapidly anywhere overthrows the traditional concept of movement, a concept that received its meaning in light of its purpose according to and within physical hardships, borders and limitations as well as practical ambient factors and the slow moving nature of locomotion prior to technological acceleration. The new speedy mobility is unique by being represented and conceived as an expression of self-constitution, independence and nomadism: drivers are supposed to drive their vehicles as a perfect expression of their free will and sovereignty. The realization of free will, creativity, determination in care for the self, and the ability to improvise are here conceived a worthy hospitality to the nomad after freeing herself from both the sacredness of God and the holiness of killing-God-each-moment-anew. At any given moment such speedy-”flat” freedom might direct itself upon others as cooperation in the mall, cyberspace or on other walks of life, but also as an inescapable disaster; it may come about in the form neutral, anti-metaphysical understanding and anti-solidarian cooperation with them, as a way of demonstrating that they are genuine nomads after all and that antimetaphysical nomads are in control of motorized vehicles, namely that they control Life itself. The Garden of Eden is instrumentally regained not in heaven but rather on earth, not in a mysterious future but in actual present. Within this process of post-modern nomads speeding the changes between space and speed, the human, the world and the not-I in the self is even more dramatic in the changes it inflicts at the edge of the entrance into mega-speed realities: here there is no more room for the
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quest for transcendence, for love, for reflection and for genuine Diasporic nomadism. Immanence overwhelms transcendence, homogeneity (rich in “differences” and “multiculturalism”) triumphs over heterogeneity, and totality takes over dialectics, alienation, rebellion and Diasporic life. Thanatos deconstructs and swallows Eros. Prayer, playfulness, responsibility and love become part and parcel of quasi-nomadic total improvisation which hospitalizes human spirit and puts it asleep in an immanent ecstasis as a “genuine” homereturning into the continuum of meaninglessness. This process brings humans even more safely back “home” and much more effectively hospitalizes quasi-co-poiesis when entering the gate of what we see in the cyberspace as “exit” into mega speed realities and hipper realities: at this “home” there is no more space for transcendence, reflection and love. There is no mysterium/ disenchantment or edification. The very possibility of nomadism is challenged. Immanence, in mega speed, overwhelms transcendence. Totality overwhelms dialectics, alienation and creation. Thanatos triumphs over Eros. Metaphorically speaking we can say that in arenas of slow speed and modest social changes traffic mobilized men and women and their assets linearly within a recognition of its limits and its passion for an erotic movement which is essentially different from that characterizing the daily round of life where “everything is the same”. The essential movement in pre-motorized traffic was driven by an erotic power for transcending Man from daily life, from the limited and the defective toward the good, the beautiful, and the right, the real and the eternal. The location of the present hospitality within speeding of Life is the endless desert of the post-metaphysical moment, a dull moment of erotic silence; an absence that reproduces the continuum of the totality of thingness in ever growing speed. In the present of ever growing speed of recycling of self-evidence within “punctual time” the phenomenon of “the same all the time” (as part of the postmodern sensitivity for “diversity”, “multi-culturalism” and “difference”) is recruited into the dialectic within “horizontal” movement in the realm of space within which speed inherits the realm of time (eternity)—a dialectic that characterized the quest for (“vertical”) transcendence and the possibilities of redemption. Today, in face of the exile of God and the forgetfulness of the mission of the killing of God, the narcissistic being enclosed within the fast car—the human who was transformed into ‘the client”, “the driver” and so forth—identifies herself with the illusion of overcoming time and of controlling external space. The motorized vehicle as a locus of semi-religious “excitement” and quasi-transcendence in the “thousand plateaus” of the kind Deleuze (Deleuze, 1987) is offering us not only replace religious ecstasy, the traditional quest for eternity, and the Enlightenment’s devotion to autonomy and reflective capacities: even more, they seem to realize the Utopia within the dullness of the post-metaphysical moment and the very possibility of ecstatic Diasporic nomadism and the quest for genuine transcendence even in face of the exile of holiness and the deconstruction of “Spirit” (Horkheimer, 1985, pp. 345–357). The illusion of controlling a humanmade machine in a completely self-created and self-controlled environment is today’s Tower of Babel. It is far different from controlling an animal in the service of human needs. It avoids addressing the challenge of the absolute, his laws, and the problem 34
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of not being a God or being exiled from God, meaning, aim, and Diaspora. But the realm of human creative fulfillment that the original Tower of Babel builders tried to construct was a religious act of refusing all projects of “homereturning”; it was an alternative to the heavenly enterprise, indeed its foundation, and it was Diasporic in the sense from which today’s counter-education should learn much when it articulates its refusal to be integrated in today’s world order of things. Speeding human life creates a cathartic illusion of vitality, creative tempo and Dionysic-oriented nomadism. False nomadism produces total identification with the world as “home” by ensuring false libertarian consciousness. Here, driving functions as a myth that enables one to see the road networks and the regulation dynamics of present society as the antithesis to the penetrating force of the system in the private sphere. The driver functions as a eunuch, protecting the public and the private spheres from being penetrated by new, vivid, and young myths on the one hand, and from the Diasporic alternative on the other. The current world order is defended against the rough winds of a new realm of common self-evidence that is about to overrun and conquer the aging, Western realm of self-evidence that is under pressure. The castration of the erotic essence of movement in a world where motorized traffic was unknown and Instrumental Rationality did not rule might be seen as productive. It is productive from the point of view of the capitalistic commodities market. Under these conditions, there is much need for Life as an abstraction, for virtual creativity, and for false nomadism. Within this framework the “normal” or “average” driver is born. Every insurance company realizes this possibility. This “normal” driver who identifies with the fast driving myth is the one who surrenders himself to the systematic castration that the present capitalistic society imposes on its followers. The struggle for freedom and transcendence has no place. There is no room for a struggle for freedom and transcendence in a reality where the human conceives of himself or herself as one who might be with himself as a driver, as one who “controls the business,” and as someone who “acts in a right manner”, according to rules which he cannot avoid, even for a moment, with no danger of capital punishment. In ages when instrumental reason did not reign as sole monarch fast movements and changes had a different character. It was a manifestation of the gap between the ideal and the present situation, from the viewpoint of the exiled person from the absolute, truth, or God. It was conceived as mobilizing and instructing in a Diasporic reality that is essentially transcendent. See, for example, Ecclesiastes 2: 3, “My heart conducting itself with wisdom, how yet to lay hold on folly,” or Lamentations 3: 2, “He hath led me and caused me to walk in darkness but not into light”. Today, when traffic and transportation are viewed with an anti-ontological and non-dialectical eye, traffic is conceived as self-regulated movement in an alternative unlimited reality that is self-sufficient, an aim in itself within the framework of an omnipotent immanence only within which is there room for transcendence. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is one of its best manifestations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). The Deleuzian concepts of nomadism, life as a dynamic work of art, and transcendence are vital for any reflection on today’s driving and surely for understanding 35
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its relation to other modes of anti-Diasporic movement, such as that which cyberspace is offering for cyber feminism and cyberpunk (Gur-Ze’ev, 2007, pp. 185–206). This is because in its ultimate anti-humanistic axis Life becomes “the active force of thought”’ and thought becomes “the affirmative power of life”. “Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 115). The comprehension in fashionable conventions and in dominating and repressive administrative procedures of automatic movement that present-day traffic represents is taking the place of the erotic quest for absolute truth that traditional forms of transportation have represented since the collapse of the Tower of Babel. Even the Enlightenment’s vision of the human being in the world, traveling within this framework, still held on to some essential elements of the Judeo-Christian realm of self-evidence. Today the system manifests itself through agents and dynamics as exemplified by drivers and passengers in traffic, and there is no other or greater reality or absolute idea outside or beyond it. In opposition to this trend Diasporic philosophy does not claim that human beings are mere representations and agencies of the systems that create, activate, imprison, and control them. Dialectic between ontological and historical dimensions is unveiled in light of Diasporic philosophy. Historically, there are various symbolic and extra-symbolic opportunities and limitations for human beings to transcend the system and its limited horizons. Ontologically, it is important to emphasize the forgetfulness of the wholeness of Being and its openness to the not-yet-realized, the dimension of potentiality, of the totally other as represented in the Principle of Hope. However, even within the framework of Diasporic philosophy, the transcendence and the overcoming of limitations and hegemonic strategic attitudes, symbolic, and extra-symbolic dynamics, are concrete, specific, and historically and locally contextualized. That is why the anti-humanistic and anti-Diasporic-oriented tendencies in the relatively prosperous West are so effective. The world of ever faster changes and mega-speed is a place where Diasporic humanistic potentials have no environment in which to be realized and developed. The constant noise of the engine, the density of the traffic, and the impossibility of a certain, determined attitude to the environment—that is both spiritually and ecologically balanced—contribute to the constitution of the dynamic and the speedy intersubjectivity that are an arguably logical and political imperative. Psychologically, the speeding and the quest for speed can be characterized as a “quest for danger” and sometimes as a healthy “stress backing”. I am conceiving it as an ontological sign of the success of Ge-stell, which hides the uncontrollable. We must search for the unobservable that traditional Western art and tekhne, in the Greek sense of the word, brought into the light of everyday reality out of the realm of mystery, as something that is autonomous in this daily reality and not as part of it. Under such circumstances, human possibilities and limitations were different from the ones confronting the new man of today. Today’s speedy, quasi-nomadic dwelling in the cyberspace as well as exciting driving as a mystic experience, as quasi-poiesis in the sense of seeking the limits of the (im)possible, rather than as an expression of the manipulation possibilities of the present system, is a manifestation of stolen 36
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freedom and false revolt within a totality where there is no relevance to the concepts of estrangement and repression. Such an earth has no room for trying to rebuild the Diasporic humanist enterprise, as exemplified in the projects of the builders of the Tower of Babel, Socrates, Buddha, Moses, Erasmus, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Adorno. In life which suffers the transformation of traditional space-speed relations (Bauman, 2005, pp. 91–129) as produced in the cyberspace and reproduced in globalizing capitalism and its logic quazi-nomadism and quazi-improvisation prosper as never before. In this era of the exile of the killer of God a person realizes the forgetfulness of Diasporic existence (Gur-Ze’ev, 2004, p. 114) as a fast driver, a citizen of the cyberspace or a nomad in a capitalistic-oriented globalization. As such the human that did not yet become a cyborg leaps the abyss between immanence and transcendence in the new totality that becomes “home” and enforces irrelevance on all philosophical and social impasses. According to the degree of “success” of his/her relative effectiveness in representing himself as one who is “successful”. To a large extent the driver is recognized according to the car that he or she has or does not have. He drives a vehicle that simultaneously enables him both to manifest “success” and to rebel against his/her stolen uniqueness and freedom in the ocean of rules, regulations, and control apparatuses that manifest and hide the essence of the logic of the present world order. From the “outside” a reaction will be identified on a scale ranging from “dangerous driving” to “madness”. This is a false rebellion because it is planned and controlled by the matrix, constituted on the private and collective repression and guilt consciousness of a supposed primordial sin practiced daily in the earthly hell of normality. Diasporic philosophy might offer strong sensitivities, central concepts, passions and worthy impasses for the nomads of the current historical moment, to maybe become worthy Diasporic counter-educators. Here I will refer only to the concepts of Orcha, homereturning, derech eretz, love, respond-ability, counrer-education and improvisation (Gur-Ze’ev, 2007, pp. 13–38). The Hebrew term derech eretz (the way of respect) contains vital importance for Diasporic nomadism in the era of high speed (Gur-Ze’ev, 2006). It exceeds and completes the traffic issue. In Judaism there is a unique synthesis between Torah (the Jewish written law) and Torah Shebe’al-peh (the Jewish oral law) as a reflection of the dialectic of the earthly life and the heavenly world, nature and man. In Judaism the heavenly world does not reduce earthly life and material things such as the body to something of a lower degree. The written Torah proclaims the sanctity of the ways of this world and the sanctity of the human soul, the body and its passions and needs. That is why Judaism praises human worldly ways of conduct as an autonomous dimension that is not of a lower degree and is never totally separated from heaven, as in principle the written Torah and oral tradition—Torah Shebe’al-peh—cannot be separated. These worldly ways and man’s conduct in earthly matters are not to be separated from God’s imperative, from the truth of the Torah and its heavenly eternity. In this sense, while having its history, different interpretations, educational and political manifestations (Broier, 1987), derech eretz delineates a religious dimension. While representing 37
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the earthly dimension in human life, derech eretz manifests the redemptive aspects in our daily life. As such, it also represents the general utopian axis of humanity’s enlightenment as developed by figures such as Schiller, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. They represented a mature conception of derech eretz in which acknowledging the absence of the traditional God does not negate utopia or the moral value of daily matters and the acknowledgment of different ways of life. As written in Talmud tractate Derech Eretz Zuta, 71, 2: Kol derachecha yiheyu leshem shamayim (Let all your ways be for the sake of heaven) (Frizker, 1950, p. 19). Diasporic counter-education would enhance the possibilities of counter-education if it will develop the concept of derech eretz into a central sensibility and ideal for Diasporic nomadism. The concept of derech eretz on the roads has two main aspects: one of knowledge and one of action. Each is contained in two different contexts: private and public. In the public sphere, derech eretz is conditioned by the recognition of an epistemological system that is conceived as legitimate and makes possible knowledge concerning relevant codes and norms in the current public sphere. Unlike mere politeness, behavior manifesting derech eretz is conditional not only on the act being conceived as polite, but on other men and women being trained to behave in accordance with it. This is because it is conditioned by knowledge; it is not a matter of making people behave “properly” (which would leave open the issue of repression) but of a real educational enterprise. Under this interpretation, derech eretz is not just an epistemological issue, and it cannot be realized only as a concrete moral, obligatory, conscious action. In this sense, derech eretz is conditioned by a special sort of knowledge, one that is morally oriented, namely courteous behavior shaped by acknowledgment of the other’s identity, needs, rights, hopes, and limits, and ultimately directed to a common transcendence. From this perspective countereducation in respect to derech eretz on the roads of life might be realized only as the politics of overcoming the Purpose Principle, which constitutes the heart of instrumental reason and capitalist practice (Marx, 1971, p. 114) and in close relations to improvisation, Orcha and Diasporic responsibility. Derech eretz on the roads of life is of a unique stance in the present historical moment, the moment of the dissolution of holiness and the exile of the-killing-ofGod-each-moment-anew, which is also the moment of transcending from high speed into the edge of mega speed in hipper reality in arenas such as the cyberspace. This nowhere land is the dwelling locus of the important ideal of Orcha. In the Hebrew language “Orcha” means a convoy of camels and humans with their belongings moving in an endless desert towards their destiny. The Orcha is an improvised movement that is to find/create its own destiny. But, what is the essence of the destiny of the Orcha? The essence of the Orcha turns, potentially, every moment each “desert” into an oasis. This is the truth of the movement of the Orcha as an improvised co-poiesis. This is the truth of its destiny. The very movement, the very rich existence of the convoy in the eternity of time and the endlessness of the desert is its genuine aim. It relates to time when deserts where “endless” and had their own tempo, essence and telos of which the Orcha is part and parcel of. Strong ties connect Orcha and derech eretz. 38
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The Orcha worthy of its name is a moral momentum. As such it is historically situated, influenced by social and cultural conditions. It has no meaning beyond specific material conditions and space-time relations. It transcends itself, however, at any particular time, and it is much more than what it is in any specific location each moment anew. It is a living, improvised co-poiesis: it is a unique, nomadic hospitality which overcomes the colonization drive and the quest for “homereturning” into the thingness by eternally opening itself to the infinity of each moment anew. The Orcha is never totally determined by territorial sovereignty, not even by commanding knowledge and people. It is a kind of togetherness-in-movement, a moral momentum which transgresses borders, limits, expectations and material conditions. It realizes the promise of togetherness of Diasporic existence and the hope of nomadism. It is the specific manifestation of Diasporic dialogical morality. The maturity of the eternal improviser and co-poiesis join within it and become a homeless hospitality. Its nomadism is neither a punishment nor a mistake or underdeveloped stage to be corrected tomorrow. What kind of hospitality is it if it does not represent the “homereturning” drive? It is the hospitality of the response. The response to an invitation for Diasporic life. It is committed to not being at “home” at all cost; refusing becoming swallowed by the self-evidence. Refusing any identity thinking (Adorno, 2000, pp. 54–78) or any positive Utopia is here actualized ontologically, epistemologically, ethically, existentially, and politically within the co-poiesis of the Orcha as a dynamic togetherness which is simultaneously in the infinity of the moment which is very much within the framework of the historical moment and its material/political specific arenas and dynamics. This runs counter to the historic tension between the concept of Diaspora and the concept of Redemption, which traditionally were conceived within a framework of a promised synthesis, “salvation”, or “solution”; even if in the form offered by Pyrrho the skeptic, who insisted on a concluding, total, silence; or Philipp Mainlander, who asserted that the act of suicide of entire humanity and the destruction of all the world will invite a renewed pre-creationist harmonious nothingness (Mainlaender, 1996). The Orcha as a Diasporic togetherness with the cosmos, with the otherness of the Other and with the not-I within the self is an open possibility in a post-metaphysical moment and overcomes the demolition of holiness and mysterium (Gur-Ze’ev, 2009a). It is a “Positive” dimension within a consistent Diasporic existence in face of the exile of the killer of God. As such it offers a possibility of transcendence. By reintroducing Love, itenables responsibility and strives for religious creativity. At the same time, the Orcha refuses all forms of positive Utopia in theory and practice. It overcomes any theoretical or political “home”, self-evidence, truth, selfcontent, nirvana, and all other manifestations of Thanatos. In this sense it insists on consistent negativity as a form of Life. It is a negativity, however, which transforms itself and turns “deserts” into “oases” of togetherness and love. It is an education for love. As the Orcha shows, Diasporic Philosophy accepts difference as central, yet it does not conceive “critique”, “deconstruction”, the “counter-violence of the victims or suicide bombings “as its “oasis”, neither makes it a foundation for relativism nor a 39
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pillar of “deconstruction” in face of “our” dull historical moment. It offers co-poiesis as a togetherness which is “objective” in a pre-metaphysical sense: an improvised continuation of friendship as an alternative to deterministic-mechanistic continuum; it seriously faces immediacy in its intimate relation to eternity, meaninglessness, violence, and historical productivity. At the same time, however, its endless paths, gazes and creations are manifestations of love which is eternally in-between “desert” and “oasis”; improvises-enables religious existence, poetic creativity and courageous nomadism. Within the Orcha improvisation enables religiosity and holiness even if face of the killing of God, the exile of the killer of God and high speed. This is because when true to its Diasporic essence improvisation overcomes the separation between space and time which deconstructed holiness of human dwelling on earth before the constitution of monotheism and alienation between God, human and the world. This utopia of hospitality, open for the true nomad was introduced to the Hebrew language only relatively late, after the conclusion of writing the Holy book. In the Aramic period, the Hebrew word for place: atar ( )אתרwas introduced alongside immediacy within time, lealtar ( )לאלתרand the miracle of the intimacy of time and space became possible. Improvisation, iltur ( )אִלתּורwas enabled historically and conceptually along Diasporic life as a Jewish, and therefore as a universal telos, as a Orcha worthy its name. It calls for a responsible self-constitution and reflection as one of the manifestations of human uniqueness in an infinite cosmos that is present in eternity as well as in the totality of each and every moment. It is focused on the presence of the not-yet, the potential, the totally other, and its wholly-presence in a Life which, ultimately, is not to be totally represented, controlled, or predicted. Within the Orcha the Diasporic nomad, as part of the infinite openness of Being, is essentially free because she is lost; she is lost in the eternity of the desert of cosmos as an endless richness. This loss cries for rebirth and improvisation each moment anew. The destiny transcends “the way” and it is always beyond the given reality in face of the Utopia of improvisation as a Diasporic worthy nomadism. As such it is in the state of becoming-toward-the-world and becoming-in-the-world which overcomes the separation between immanence and transcendence, eternity and the moment, space and time. Hospitality for the homeless becomes possible. In the Orcha, love, as the opposite of violence, stands along with hope, imagination, and improvising creativity in contrast to fear, self-forgetfulness, greed, and conquest. Diasporic Philosophy represents Orcha as a kind of hospitality in face of homelessness that is opposed to the self-forgetfulness manifested in the quest to be swallowed in the immanence and “homereturning” into the nothingness. The Diasporic nomad knows: contradiction, negation, and tension are not in opposition to Love. On the contrary, according to Diasporic Philosophy Love is manifested in Life; and there is no Life but amid, within, and against contradictions, abysses, dangers, and self-constitution amid suffering, meaninglessness, and dialectical dynamics. Love of Life is love of creativity from, against, and towards difference, plurality, impasse and contradiction; yet it represents being-towards, becoming, and transcendence. This is why counter-education, as a manifestation of love, transcends meaninglessness and insists on alethea (Heidegger, 1988, p. 58); 40
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unconcealedness as creating meaning, aim, and alternative togetherness with the world and Others. Precisely because homelessness is its home it enables (negative) intimacy with the world and its realities and with the Others without a false promise of final reconciliation that actualizes nirvana, successful post-colonialist education or other powers of the “homereturning” call. Opposing this drive Erotically and not under the guidance of Thanatos is the gate to counter-education that enhances genuine creativity. Creativity that is fertilized by sensitivity to suffering, imagination, hope, and commitment to self-constitution and transcendence. Here creativity is an erotic experience that is essentially religious and manifests Love of Life that might become poetically meaningful, good, and beautiful because like the Orcha, it has no final point for the “homereturning” project nor any “solution” to meaninglessness, suffering, and loneliness. Love of Life, here, accepts Life as the friendly rich presence of the absence, the absence of the absolute, the endlessly new manifestations of the “not-yet”, the potential. This is why the Diasporic human, as a loving, creative, nomad is actually an eternal improviser. Today, in a post-metaphysical era, in light of the near-possibility of the end of Life to be soon inflicted by the human progress itself, the hospitality of the Orcha and the realization of derech eretz on all walks of life are of special relevance. The “desert” is more demanding and its infinity today, more than ever before, is so close to the realization of the quest for “homereturning”. This nearness opens for Diasporic humans a gate for hope, without which the co-poiesis of the Orcha becomes a mere fata morgana. Here, in light of a never-ending struggle for overcoming any “home” and collectivism, new possibilities are opened. New prospects are given birth not solely for the self-constitution of the eternal-improviser as a genuine nomad: new leeway is opened for genuine solidarity and for new kinds of togetherness. The new kinds of togetherness are not committed to the imperative of normalizing education to destroy the otherness of the “ethical I” and the otherness of the Other. Derech eretz and the infinite expressions of Love of Life might enable a kind of togetherness with the cosmos and all other Life manifestations on new paths that the Orcha will pave. Like the Orcha in the desert this new, Diasporic, togetherness with the otherness within the “I”, the Other, and the world might crisscross “the moment”, “history”, and “eternity”. Such a self-positioning amid and against Being might enable a better eavesdropping to the call, when and if it comes. It might enable a worthy response in the right moment toward and with other Diasporic humans in derech eretz that will give birth to a new, Diasporic, friendship. Diasporic philosophy and counter-education today should address these modern as well as the postmodern forms of nomadism and exile and their history. They might reconstruct and reflect on the unique and new possibilities opened for some of us (not for all, since they are very selective and rely on the foundations of structural inequalities, selective distribution of loss and suffering and asymmetrical reach into reflective knowledge, intimacy and responsibility) in the era of globalization, quasinomadism and quasi-improvisation. But they cannot be content with mere conceptual analysis and “critique”. 41
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Counter-education that addresses seriously the challenge of loss, Orcha, exile, derech eretz and the deceiving “homereturning” projects on the edge of the era of mega-speed accepts that there is no positive Utopia that awaits us. In the postmodern “desert” of mega-speed there is no room for a non-dehumanizing telos or life possibilities to be realized by effort, suffering, innovation, courage and “the right religion/theory”. On the edge of entering mega-speed arenas no positive Utopia awaits us as “truth”, “genuine life”, “worthy struggle”, “pleasure” or worthy/ unavoidable self-annihilation. The richness, suffering and edifying potential as well as the meaninglessness of the “desert” are not to be recovered or compensated; not for the individual nor for any kind of “we”. And yet, Love of Life as the tension between the “desert” and the “oasis”, the ehical I and the moral I, the self and the co-poiesis, is the Orcha of the Diasporic in the Socratic sense of Eros as an attracting absence of the beautiful as a new friendship with Being and with the Other and with meaninglesness. Counter-education should invite the Diasporic nomad to the hospitality of Love of Life. Such hospitality challenges the absence of non-consensual creativity: it calls for overcoming conventional morality and the other imperatives of ethnocentric-oriented “we”, its self-evidence, its normality, its counter-resistance of the oppressed and its normalized patriotic citizenship. The determination for Diasporic life within the Orcha and the possibilities opened by Diasporic counter-education is always ironic. It is never at home. It gives birth to something at all times immensely more important than the individuality of the Diasporic individual as in the relation of the artist to her great creation. It is a “magmatic”-religious-Godless creation. A symbol of Love of Life as creation that always transcends herself to the otherness of the Other as the feminine to the Masculine and the born baby as an act of genesis, as Eros to the not-yet, as the totally other to the infinite not-yet fertilized potentials of each moment. The heart of improvisation is this movement within co-poiesis (Ettinger, 2005, pp. 703–713) given hospitality by Love of Life, of giving birth to the totally new and wholly unexpected as a form of non-instrumental playfulness that manifests erotic responsibility to Life at its best. This dimension of improvisation reminds us of Levinas’ saying that “woman is the category of the future, the ecstasy of future. It is that human possibility which consists in saying that the life of another human being is more important than my own, that the Other comes before me, that the value of the Other is asserted before my own” (Levinas, 1993, p. 9). As such it is a conjunction of a special “knowledge”, a non-dominating, pre-rational dialogical knowledge, experience and aesthetic form that is also a pre-ethical positioning. It is a part of an improvised-courageous facing the dangerous waters of the river of fear of ambivalence, rival “truths” and strivings; the fear of landing in the demanding never-satisfied banks of loss. It is not rational/irrational in the sense established by hegemonic philosophical and political discussions, nor is it ethically justifiable in normalized paths. It is pre-rational and pre-ethical yet it has a form, it is aesthetically “justified”, enabling ethics and rational deliberation. It is also beyond “negative” and “positive” Utopia. And yet, improvisation does represent hope and manifests the possibility of the totally other on the path toward worth Diasporic existence. 42
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Diasporic friendship with Being is a “Jeish” co-poiesis. It is actualized in the dynamics of improvisation, does not call us to return home into sentimentalistethnocentristic-oriented collective alternatives nor to anti-humanist mechanical “solutions” and compensations for the loss incubated by departing from nothingness, “homeland” or “the one”. Diasporic improvised co-poiesis manifests the dialectics of response-ability and respond-ability. It is not “constructive” nor is it merely “negative”. It is far from a manifestation of “resistance” to oppression or suffering and loss. In the context of Diasporic counter-education it plays a special role as part of Love of Life and co-poiesis that challenges the matrix of whose manifestations traditional Critical Pedagogy is part and parcel. This new kind of friendship represents a creative-speculative attunement, a different kind of gaze and response-ability that enables responsibility that offers co-poiesis in the infinity of the moment, each moment anew. It involves a kind of intimacy with the richness of the cosmos and its inviting dynamics, impulses, drives and meaning-creation. Here, hospitality enables creative compassion where the alterity of the otherness of the Other is an unavoidable partner in creative realization of playful Love of Live as transgression. It offers Diaspora as a gate for an alternative togetherness. Diaspora as an openness and uncontrolled mutual creativity that is responsible and generous toward the otherness of the Other and reaches out to give birth to the unknown and to self-overcoming as self-constitution; without an egoistic-oriented “I” initiating the colonization of the Other, the response to the otherness or the self-sacrifice of the victimizing kind. The otherness of the other, the insecurity, the non-consensual and refusal of the self-evidence and other manifestations of the invitation to the “homereturning” project, back to nothingness, is here of vital importance—not a threat in the light of which one runs away back “home”, to well established conventions, to the lost Gemeinschaft or to alternative Platonic caves. Diasporic counter-education for love challenges the tempting ecstasis of the new anti-semitism. It actualizes dancing with the otherness of Others who are partners, with the alterity of the not-I within the “I” as well as with the Other that is not “within me”. Diasporic-oriented Life here challenges the traumatic-phalliccolonialist-oriented attitude to Life as represented since the Socratic project and the beginning of the history of Monotheism. It offers a kind of co-poiesis that is transsubjective; it transgresses intersubjective relations that are formed by linear subjectobject dichotomies. Diasporic co-poiesis offers nomadic relations to central dimensions of Life and to central concepts and realities such as “touch”, “gaze”, “attunement” and responseability/responsibility. In the form of improvisation it enables an attempt to re-unite or at least rearticulate the relations between (pre-rational) thought and action, spirit/psyche and body, “I” and the otherness of the Other in a manner that transcends traditional Western relations between space and time. It also rearticulates the relations between the bodily and spiritual touch and infinity, and readdresses the relations between the moment and eternity. It enables that which has been so difficult for Western thought 43
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and human life since departing from Orphic poetry and primitive nomadism: totally being in the infinity of the moment, totally dwelling in Love of Life. And it does it—or it does not—in the most concrete, embodied, deep-rooted manifestations of improvised co-poiesis: lealtar—the Diasporic togetherness which unites time and space and offers holiness in face of meaninglessness, mega-speed and the near actuality of The End of Life. Love and the End finally meet again. REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1998). Critical Models. Translated by Henry Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. (2000). Negative dialectics and the possibility of philosophy. In Brian O’connor (Ed.), The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Alexander, H. (2001). Reclaiming Goodness—Education and the Spiritual Quest. Notre-Dame Ind. University of Notre Dame Press. Baudrillard, J. (2005). The Consumer Society—Myths & Structures. London: SAGE Publications. Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Braidotti, R. (2010). Nomadism: against methodological nationalism. In Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education. Rotterdam: Sense Pub. Broier, M. (1987) (Ed.). Persons and Roads. Tel Aviv (Hebrew). Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, London: Althone Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, London: The Althone Press. Deleuze G. and Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Buchchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Ettinger, B. (2005). “Co-poiesis”, Ephemera 5 (X), 703–713. Rabbi Frizker, A. (1950). Masechtot Derech Eretz. Tel Aviv: Bitan Hasefer. (Hebrew) Freud, S. (1971). “Totem and Tabu”, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1996). The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2002). Martin Heidegger, transcendence and the possibility of counter-education. In Michael Peters (Ed.), Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 8–65. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2003). Destroying the Other’s Collective Memory. New York: Peter Lang. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2004). Toward Diasporic Education. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Heidegger, M. (1998). Parmenides. Translated by Andr’e Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1996). The end of philosophy and the task of thinking. In David F. Krell (Ed.). Martin Heidegger—Basic Writings. London: Routledge. Horkheimer, M. (1985). Was wir ‘Sinn’ nennen, wird verschwinden. Gesammelte Schriften VII. Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 345–357. Levinas, E. (1987). The ego and totality. Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff.
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THE NOMADIC EXISTENCE Levinas, E. (1993). Time Is the Breath of the Spirit—In Conversation With Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Translated by Joseph Simas and Carolyn Ducker, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Levinas, E. (1996). Is ontology fundamental? In Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Eds.), Emmanuel Levinas—Basic Philosophical Writings, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man. London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (December 1967). Die Zukunft der Kunst. Neues Forum, 863–870. Marx, K. (1971). On the Jewish Question. Early Texts. Translated by David McLellan. Oxford: Blackwell. Petri, R. (2003). The meaning of Heimat (1859–1945). In Ron Robin and Bo Strath (Eds.). Homelands. Brussels: Peter Lang, 307–332. Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Virilio, P. (1995). The Art of the Motor. Translated by Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zizek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real—Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew)
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DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY, HOMELESSNESS, AND COUNTER-EDUCATION IN CONTEXT: THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN EXAMPLE
JUSTICE AS A THREAT TO THE VERY EXISTENCE OF ISRAEL The Israeli condition has already begun to display this hard truth: after more than a hundred years of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence the Jews cannot avoid paying in the coin of worthy life to safeguard their mere existence. In other words, even if the structure of the State of Israel survives it will endure, most probably, only in the form of Sparta of the wicked (Gur-Ze'ev, 1998, pp. 73–80). It is so painful and hard for me to face this reality, as I am as much the grandson of Keyla Goldhamer, who barely survived the 1903 Pogrom of Kishiniev, and whose stories and lessons are so meaningful for me until this day, as the son of Robert Vilcek, who lost almost all his family in the Holocaust and was spared the Nazi death industry only after being thrown into the mass grave from which he literally emerged all on his own, and the son of Hanna Vilcek, who lost her marriage to her first husband as her share in the Holocaust; all these experiences are formative for my Diasporic horizons. Yet I think all of us, even the Zionists among us, should today rethink our old conceptions about Jewish life and the Jewish mission in Israel and in the Diaspora. Perhaps a good beginning would be to rethink central conceptions such as “Diaspora”, “homeland”, and “homecoming”. Such an elaboration presents us with nothing less than the present day Jewish telos and our responsibility toward its fulfillment as well as toward the overcoming of its fulfillment and of what we presently are. It is of vital importance to conceive Diasporic human possibility as rooted in Judaism only as part of richer and deeper roots of human possibilities that transcend Judaism and overcome Monotheism, Western concepts of light-truth and triumphant patriarchalism, even in the form of radical feminist alternatives in the McWorld. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, to my mind, the current historical moment already enables us critically to summarize the last hundred years’ attempt to turn away from the Diasporic Jewish goal by the Zionist barbarization of the Jewish Spirit within the projects of “annihilating the Diaspora”, “homecoming”, and “normalization”. Under current historical conditions, as Israelis, Jews are structurally almost prevented from facing the possibility of living in light of the Messianic impetus, as the world’s universal moral, intellectual, and creative vanguard. This special Jewish mission was made possible by the Jews’ unique homelessness—a Diasporic existence as a realized ideal of a community that is not a collective. Diasporic life is ultimately a kind of life in which the yahid (individual, not found in liberal terminology) is [ 47 ]
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afforded, as an erotic way of moral life, an existence that allows a universalistic moral responsibility and intellectual commitment to overcome any dogma and content with the world of “facts” and to reject the promises of mere power, glory, and pleasure. All this has changed in face of the successes of Zionist education and its political realizations. It is no wonder that there is no Israeli Ibn Gavirol, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, or Jacques Derrida. One can experience the immanent violence and the insipidness of Israeli life just by driving on the roads. One can meet its devoted anti-humanist values and passions by facing Limor Livnat’s (former Minister of Education) attacks on the, elitism, inefficiency and lack of patriotism of the Israeli universities. Another example might be the silence of the current culture heroes and the popular satisfaction by which the cuts in funding for high culture are accompanied. Still another example could be the unchallenged crusade against the high court and the ideal of a rational, open, free, and equal public sphere. And this is before facing the brutal realities of the treatment of foreign workers, or the structural repression of the Palestinians. I write this with great pain, not because Israeli society is among the cruelest or the intellectually poorest of all societies on earth. At this very moment there are so many worse examples that the politically correct bible forbids us to address, in favor of concentrating moral, political, and armed attacks on Israeli society. The ongoing genocide in southern Sudan, the daily Russian assaults against the Chechen people; the Beijing human-organs-industry based on taking the parts from spiritual and political dissidents before systematically killing them on a mass scale; the uprooting of the Tibetan people; the oppression of Christians and the conditions of women, homosexuals and other minorities in Saudi Arabia; or the subjugation of the Russian minority in Estonia are only a few examples of today’s lack of courage and widespread dishonesty in the treatment of Israel. At the same time it is true, and one should face it, hard as it is to acknowledge, that Israel has become a space where there is less and less room for genuine creative spirit and for social justice. Israel has become the ultimate Diaspora of the Jewish Spirit. Here, more then anywhere else, there is no room for “the Jewish heart”, or for Jewish intellectual independence and avant-garde creativity. It is a sad actuality, but I cannot avoid, must not avoid, facing it even if it is so hard for me to acknowledge: there is no room for a just State of Israel. St. Augustine knew this was so for all manifestations of “the earthly city” (Augustine, 1984). In the case of Israel it has become so clear that unreserved siding against injustice inevitably endangers the very existence of Israel, not solely its current policies. The latest example of this is the Second Lebanese War. Israel, as a normal state that is committed to its security and sovereignty, had to adopt terrible means to ensure not only social and economic stability on its northern border but its very existence, in light of the explicit Iranian-Hezbollah commitment to annihilate the Jewish state on religious grounds. So Israel had to respond in a harsh manner to the consistent unprovoked missile attacks on its northern cities while being condemned by world media and public opinion for a “disproportionate” reaction. The postcolonialists see Israel’s insistence on Lebanese sovereignty and 48
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on Lebanon’s responsibility to ensure no private army will bombard Israeli cities at will) as another manifestation of its immanent brutal colonialist existence. On the one hand these are unjustified denunciations, based on misinformation, pragmatic interests in the Arab world, founded, reflecting and realizing the old and the new anti-Semitism. On the other hand, Israel did commit terrible acts, so many terrible deeds, during that war, some by mistake, some intentionally. Given the military methods of the Hezbollah militia, which systematically uses villages in southern Lebanon not only to hide but actually to launch missiles against Israel, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) was faced by dilemmas such as the following: identifying a present-moment launch of a Katyusha or a Zelzal II toward an Israeli city from the roof of a house in a southern Lebanese village, should it bomb the house and save the Israeli victims while killing at an instant an entire Lebanese family (even if the mostly Shiite population of southern Lebanon normally enthusiastically welcomes the Hezbollah militia on its terrain) or should the Israeli army be morally committed to avoid any killing of Arab civilians, even at the cost of its own civilians’ lives? Is it morally right to discriminate against innocent Israeli civilians in favor of Lebanese civilians? In such instances should we morally go into the question of proportionality, namely what number of innocent Lebanese civilians killed justifies the prevention of the killing of innocent Israeli civilians? And so on. Should we, when faced with such dilemmas, go into questions such as the amount of unlimited cooperation and support by the civilian Shiite population in southern Lebanon for Hezbollah as a partial criterion for a decision on the immediate question of firing or not firing on a civilian house and its inhabitants to prevent the killing of Israeli civilian population targeted by a terrorist organization that uses civilian installations and ground for attacking the Israeli civilian population? Should moral considerations impel us to consider questions of the degree of separation and the measure of responsibility between Hezbollah and the southern Lebanese farmers, who in many respects are part of the Hezbollah organization, and sometimes also of its military organization and operations, taking part in the military attacks against the Israeli civilian population across the border? Even if the answer is affirmative, how do you actually reduce the degree of cooperation with a terrorist organization to degrees of responsibility, and how do you reduce the degree of responsibility to a specific order to the pilot in the warplane who needs to know if he should bomb the house or abort the attack? Such moral dilemmas were not an exception but the general rule in the practice of the military operations in the Second Lebanese War (August 2006). And the Second Lebanese War, how unfortunate, is only a microscopic example for the very existence of Israel in the region as a moral dilemma. As anti-determinists, we should understand the present historical moment as open, since inevitably it also contains the possibility of a radical shift toward a more humane, rational, and moral existence in Israel, as well as in Palestine. Referring to the most recent example of the Second Lebanese War we might ask: why should we not be optimistic as to the possibility of an imminent peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon, if there are no fundamental border disputes between the two countries, joint economic interests can lead to cooperation and mutual prosperity, 49
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and a broad consensus in Israel (which includes even the extreme political right) favors cooperation and peace with Lebanon? Why should not the interests of postFordist economy, if not a humanistic vision of mutual respect and cooperation, lead us to a better future of creativity, prosperity and peaceful coexistence, stronger and more relevant than the fanatic religious and ethnocentric agendas? Addressing such a question beckons us into world politics, the interests of emerging regional powers such as Iran, and the specifics of Lebanese cultural and political realities. These might show us that in effect Lebanon is not a state in the modern sense of the word. But we will not go there. Instead, let us elaborate more on some central trends in Israeli reality. When even for a moment, or to a certain degree, the direct threat to the very existence of Israel decreases (or in the spaces where it is actualized) the plurality, openness, creativity and pragmatism of the McWorld have the upper hand. Yet in Israel the world of Jihad threatens not only beyond the border: it is a vital part of the constitution of the new Israeliness. In face of partial, deep post-idealist and anti-ethnocentristic-oriented tendencies most major politically organized powers in Israel manifest stronger ethnocentrism and weakening of democratic and liberal values, with very little interest in education for a mature humanistic, reflective, moral, coexistence. The rival groups and the separatist agendas are, as in Lebanon, and unlike the dominant tendencies in Palestinian society, which is speeding toward a fundamentalist consensus under the guidance of the Hamas educational-political leadership, unable to come up with a consensus about “the common good”. They are certainly incapable of agreeing on a specific educational program aimed at a worthier reality. In face of this we may ask: What has gone wrong with the State of Israel? To answer this question we should return to the Zionist constitutive idea of “homecoming”. WHAT HAS GONE WRONG WITH ISRAEL? The Zionist negation of Diaspora is a turn away from Jewish moral destiny. History corrects this deviation not without inflicting such enormous loss and suffering, which includes a threat to the soul and physical existence not only of the largest Jewish collective in the world but also—as September 11 manifested so clearly—of the entire world. A century on, Zionist education has lost its naivety, and its optimism is doomed. In retrospect it has become clear to me that from its very beginning Zionist education failed in its major mission: to give birth to a durable grand truth and to its mastersignifiers. Its genealogy shows that it was never equipped with the “right” violence, nor was it ready to be inhuman to the degree that would vouchsafe Jabotinsky’s dream of “geza gaon venadiv veachzar”, or a genuine realization of the myth of the Sabra, who, like the Sabra fruit, would be “coarse” on the outside yet “sweet, soft, and moral” in his innerness. Promising spiritual and moral Zionist alternatives, such as the project of Ahad Ha’am, were pushed aside, even if today some are still being 50
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followed in Israeli reality. The violence of Zionist normalizing education did not contain an enduring birth-giving vitality: it was not strong enough to actualize its constitutive idea, the idea of “the new Jew”; it was not effective enough to purify the Israeli, the Sabra, of the Ghetto mentality. It was not sufficiently potent to constitute a non-patronizing Jewish generosity that would extend its hand to the Arab world. Nor was it at peace with itself about conquering Palestinian space in a relentless storm that would erect Jabotinsky’s “Iron wall” against Arab fear, hatred, and violence. Today it is actually impossible for disillusioned educators to look into the pupils’ eyes and honestly say: “I promise you, dear children, soon it will be so much better”. Secular mothers and fathers are unable to extract meaning from the fears and suffering of their children. Many of them are rethinking even the standard answer they have given themselves and their children in the last two years: “If only we harden our hearts and be more brutal and apply less moral restraints, we will win after all, and you, my child, will have a safe future in Israel”. The Israeli formal and informal humanist educational apparatuses face rapid degradation. In today’s Israel, in face of the spirit of global capitalism on the one hand, and of the Israeli-Palestinian violence on the other, the prospects are gloomy for an effective recruitment of the soul for protecting, cultivating, and enhancing at all costs the ideals and practices of secular humanistic-oriented Zionism. Postmodern post-Zionists and humanistic-oriented anti-Zionists alike are united in their understanding that there are no prospects for a democratic reality in Israel (Ram, 2006). Some are close to revealing the bitter truth that the prospects for a Palestinian democracy (in a future liberated greater Palestine or in any other format) are much worse. The two strongest, spiritual and politically growing rival forces are the projects of establishing a Jewish Spartanicoriented theocracy on the one hand, and an Islamist militaristic theocracy on the other. Even if the Israeli middle class is still stronger than its enemies, and is not as racist as its victims and rivals claims it is, it is rapidly losing its fragile liberal tier, its vitality, its self-confidence, its life-impulse, and surely its Jewish heart. In face of this dynamic actuality I must say: Can’t you see that the time has come in Israel for a counter-education that will prepare for a self-initiated Jewish displacement and for a Diasporic way of life? TOWARD SELF-INITIATED ISRAELI DISPLACEMENT In its narrower sense Diasporic education should prepare our children for worthy life in eternal exile. Counter-education should provide Israeli youth with tools that will enable them to avoid being pushed to the economic, social, and cultural margins of the techno-scientific and capitalist arenas to which their self-initiated displacement will impel them. It should facilitate the second Israeli exodus, to take them into homelessness as their home, to the possibility of finding home everywhere, to life as ecstatic, unsecured, open, creative, moral, life-loving citizens of the world. Linguistic competence, intellectual and artistic creativity, improvising sensitivity and courageous border-crossing of existential, cultural, and philosophical differences 51
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become central to such counter-education. Unlearning hegemonic education becomes of vital importance here. It is important, indeed very important, to stress this: the self-initiated displacement of the Jews from Israel is a dialectical project. On the one hand, in order to secure “effectiveness” in terms of changing the fate of the Israelis as doomed victimizers, there is a need for an institutionalized, collective, counter-educational effort. The Israeli self-initiated evacuation of Israel is conditioned by many levels and dimensions of successful violent distorting, manipulative politics, and normalizing education, which will make possible productivity, consensus, concerted effort, and relative stability, or peace. On the other hand, genuine Diasporic philosophy is never to be reduced to any kind of collectivism, and as a counter-education it cannot avoid being nothing more than an open possibility for the individual, solely for the individual and by the individual. Diasporic nomadism is open always only for an individual as an erotic, creative improviser, in the sense of the one who gives birth to and is enabled by tefilat hayahid (the individual-improvised prayer, as against the institutional prayer of the collective, the Minyan). This openness is a possibility whose realization is to be struggled for every moment anew and is never a secured “home”. It is an invitation to a never guaranteed but always dangerous and costly possibility. Diasporic philosophy is relevant for counter-education in current Israel as a dangerous attempt at creative improvisation with the Other and the given “facts”. It is of vital importance for the enhancement of new beginnings that are also unpredicted and never controlled responses to the present possibilities and “calls of the moment”. At the same time, however, it is part of reclaiming, negatively, the lost intimacy with the cosmos, with the law, and with tradition and togetherness. In other words, it is not one of the conflicting alternatives. It is other, it is essentially different from the various attempts to transcend all versions of normalizing education, cultural politics, and other manifestations of imposed consensus. As a genuine dialectical realization of Diasporic philosophy, counter-education in Israel cannot become instrumentalized, cannot become a collective self-imposed mass immigration, as so many of my postcolonialist friends would like me to suggest. It is not solely a moral-political concrete dilemma facing us nowadays; it is fundamentally a philosophical and existential antinomy. Ultimately, it begins and ends in and by the individual, who is willing to overcome his or her self and to open the gates to the nomadic existence of a brave lover of Life and creativity. But as a historical, political, and collective project, the self-initiated new exodus, which gives a new meaning to the Exodus from Egypt to Israel and to the subsequent exiles of Jews to the Diaspora, is very hard for another reason. There is no way to guarantee a deluxe exile: discrimination, marginalization, and victimization await the exiled Israeli Jews. The postcolonialist new anti-Semitism most probably will not be content with the destruction of Israel as a victory of its coalition with the world of Jihad. Already now the postcolonialist “anti-Israeliness” goes down to the roots of criticizing the essentials and the telos of Western culture and monotheism. Following here the young Marx, and today’s postcolonialist heroes such as Chavez 52
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and Ahmadinejad, the Jewish return to its Diasporic existence and cosmopolitan nomadism will probably face fresh forms of exile as well as young, postcolonialist, forms of discrimination and exclusion, if postcolonialism is to maintain its consistency. THE EXODUS FROM ISRAEL AND FROM JUDAISM TO DIASPORIC WANDERING The new exodus is from Israel and the Zionist nation-building project as a presentday “Egypt” as a home. It is an exodus from a distorted concept of Diasporic life, from the concept of “Egypt” in the form of all versions of “homecoming” and a monotheistic way, to rebuild or go back to the Garden of Eden. It is an exodus to “Zion”; not in the sense of a national sovereignty imposed on a certain territory violently controlled, but to the infinity of the entire world of human existence and transcendence as the genuine “Zion”. This too is only to be transcended into an ecstatic, totalistic, creative, existence within which Diaspora signifies the abyss of existence, meaninglessness, suffering, and the presence of the absence of God as a transcending impetus. The Jews at this historical moment are given this actual present as a tragic universal mission, which is fundamentally religious and cosmopolitan, in a Spiritless post-modern world. Individuals of all nations must be invited to join this anti-religious, anti-collectivist telos of overcoming Judaism and monotheism in all its forms, in order to preserve and struggle for the realization of the essence of its creative truth. The condemnation and oppression of the Jews might increase under the new historical conditions in two levels: 1. As an assault against the Jews in the traditional sense. Here it is worth mentioning the present prosperity of the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in places such as Japan, Venezuela, Pakistan and Egypt. The last-named recently opened its new national library with a central display of this ultimate modern anti-Semitic piece, while simultaneously prohibiting the screening in Egypt of films such as Schindler’s List. 2. As an assault against the new Diasporic human, the cosmopolitan nomad of our generation that will be both homeless and at home everywhere, even in the infinite dimensions and levels of existence in McWorld, cyberspace—in other words in the new historical era wherein he will exile. As a Diasporic who is not at home in the current historical moment, yet takes responsibility, he or she will most probably be attacked by traditional humanists and patriots, by fundamentalists, by postcolonialists, and surely by the logic of the system. Genuine Diasporic humans are never welcomed. They are the ultimate Other, they are “the Jews” of the postmodern era. They, the Diasporic humans who challenge both “colonialist” and “postcolonialist” dogmas and their respective violences, are the ones to be redeemed, emancipated or destroyed, even before the total purification of Palestine of all Jewish presence and forms of Israeliness. The evacuation of all our “homes” and territory of Israel is in a certain sense a victory of the Palestinian narrative and the postcolonialist agenda in more general 53
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terms. As such it is only part of the future suffering which awaits the Israelis in their future fields of exile. Growing anti-Semitism impatiently awaits its new stage of development. But traditional and new anti-Semitism is only part of the suffering that a self-initiated displacement might bring about. It might create new forms of suffering in light of individual evacuation of all kinds of “homes”, by individuals of various nations, cultures, and faiths, who decide to struggle for their edification and Love as the impetus for rhizomatic creation and worthier intersubjectivity. Humans of all walks of life might meet, as Diasporic persons who have overcome monotheism, if they are genuinely to meet as creative nomads who take a different approach to responsibility, meaning, togetherness, creativity and self (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005, pp. 7–34). As Diasporic individuals they will have to overcome even the progressive idea of the Jewish Minyan: in face of the absence of God, of the absence of a temple constituted by a self-evident dogma, and in the absence of a relevant, binding Halacha as a manifestation of laws interpreting-directing all walks and levels of life, they create a new kind of togetherness by repositioning themselves toward the totally other in face of the historical moment and relevant traditions. Their prayer is avodat kodesh, whose essence is not its fulfillment but the possibility of the individual’s being transcended by it: the essence of the prayer is the possibility of prayer. This kind of prayer, this tefilat hayahid (the individual’s prayer—not determined by any text or conventional code of the community), invites a different concept of responding to a Diasporic existence and a different kind of togetherness with the world and with the Other. It is a precondition of philosophical life as presented by Plato and a precondition for a non-ethnocentrist community. As partners in such a community of individual de-territorialists, humans might meet each other in the presence of the absence of the otherness of the totally other. The two kinds of prayer represent the two opposing conceptions of Diaspora and “homecoming”. The conventional, institutionalized, collective prayer in the Minyan in the form of tefilat harabim maintains a positive “homecoming” attitude. It is very much connected to the attitude to the law. Genuine Diasporic humans do not disregard the law and the importance of tradition. The other kind of prayer, tefilat hayahid, is fundamentally spontaneous and improvisational, of the kind that pre-assumes Life as an unbridgeable creative abyss. The law and the improvisation, tefiilat harabim and tefilat hayahid, have their depths and heights and are very much connected. There is no meaningful improvisation and creativity without responsibility, tradition and laws. Traditional Judaism emphasized the importance of the Law yet maintained the tension between the Halacha, tefilat hayahid, and freedom of interpretation, as a manifestation of responsible improvisation and Diasporic Life. Diasporic life in a post-modern condition might be called to continue the Diasporic freedom of the responsible improviser as a Diasporic human. This, however, is far less than a satisfactory precondition for genuine Diasporic life since in Judaism this freedom of interpretation, nomadism and improvisation was fertilized and enabled by the uncompromising commitment to religious law, the Halacha and the Jewish tradition even if as an object of alterity and edification. This fruitful tension constituted, enabled, and activated the Jewish concept of law as a relevant, religious director, to 54
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live in all its aspects, levels and dimensions. It was certainly a constitutive element for the fruitful tension between the Jewish law and the living art of interpretation for Diasporic moral avant-gardism. But how is this kind of Diaspora, nomadic life and eternal-improviser possible in a post-modern era? How is such a rich dialectics of commitment and improvisation possible in face of the absence not only of God and Godly truths, but in face of the absence of Torah and Halacha? How possible might become responsible improvisation and Diasporic life, or genuine responsibility as such, in face of the absence of monotheism and the exile of the concept of Halacha, in face of multi and hyper presence of rival infinities, conflicting gods, bibles, codes, laws, temples, quests, emancipatory projects, pleasures and Diasporic alternatives? In Judaism both tendencies are free of any optimism about “homecoming” or “bridging narratives”, and as such it manifests universal religiosity much more than normally permitted by institutionalized Diasporic sensibility in monotheistic religions. As such, Diasporic individuals become a universal community of creative, solidarian, humans, who create in the infinity of the present moment ever new, yet connected, responding, and dialogical, possibilities. Diasporic life is made possible by Being as Diasporic becoming. Being is ontologically exiled of itself, and human beings are never genuinely “at home” with their telos, with their essence, with the truth of Being. Most philosophical, religious, and political projects are “homecoming” calls that enable humans to forget their exile, sometimes by becoming devotees of false, collective, dogmatic, domesticating versions of Diasporic philosophy, and sometime by forgetting their forgetfulness of Diasporic existence. In epistemology it is signified by the unbridgeable abyss between a question and “its” answer, by the unbridgeable abyss between concepts and things, language and world. In ethics it is represented by the infinite gap between the ethical I and the moral I. But Diasporic existence is to be reduced neither to an epistemological challenge nor to a question concerning the possibility of ethics in a postmodern world. Being as Diasporic becoming makes possible philosophical discourse—it is not one of its manifestations. It allows and conditions human existence and its moral essence. Diasporic individuals are made possible, not threatened, by unending displacements and boundless manifestations of creationism and clashes with the imperatives of the law and the “facts” of the historical moment. It is here that redemption and Diasporic existence meet. But “why should they do so?” one might ask. “Why should a bodily, psychologically, morally, aesthetically, and intellectually productive and prosperous, fully domesticated person respond to such a call for transformation that might entail loss of security and pleasurable self-forgetfulness?” At another level one might articulate this question differently: “Why should the Israeli people go into a self-initiated displacement as long as militarily, economically, technologically and socially they are not yet defeated by the Palestinian violence and by the world’s disgust, and morally they are not overcome; and the new antiSemitism of the postcolonialists and the disciples of the world of Jihad awaits their self-imposed exile only to oppress them morally (as eternal, unredeemed victimizers) and politically in ways currently prevented by the very existence of the State of Israel?” 55
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Still, it seems to me that history insists already now on self-initiated displacement as a nomadic way of life for the better-off Israelis who can afford to flee, accompanied by big capital and relevant education for the McWorld. One of the most astonishing experiences in the last war was the sense of insistence on staying in Israel and willingness to fight for it even in light of the fragmentation and privatization processes. There is still room for the illusion that somehow things will take a turn for the better and “we” will not have to evacuate “our home”. Its justification is ultimately grounded not in practical individual or collective gains and losses. It is here that the Jewish Diasporic idea and its moral vanguard telos oppose Zionist education and clash with the reality of Israel as the Sparta of the wicked. Worthy life, or transcending mere life as the aim of life as a Jewish telos, is what is here at stake. This is the impetus of Diasporic life as an imperative. COUNTER-EDUCATION IN LIGHT OF DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY Counter-education in light of Diasporic philosophy should not be limited to the preparation of self-initiated evacuation of Israelis from Israel. In it's broader and deeper sense it is not an exclusive Jewish mission. It should become a universal alternative for individuals, always and only individuals, that is existential, philosophical, aesthetic, moral, and political in its realization. As such it should overcome the Christian claim to realize the Messianic essence of Judaism. It should disprove Christianity and all other forms of monotheism by realizing among the nations the idea of Diaspora, or the presence of the absence of the redeemer, as an infinite, negative, Utopia: an endless moral, creative, philosophical way of life beyond immanence and transcendence, in a Godless, unredeemable, holy cosmos. Such a counter-education is part and parcel of an attempt to transcend monotheism, not Judaism exclusively. Monotheism in all its manifestations, even in the form of humanism: to transcend the quest for the appropriate, unquestionable, static, “meaning”, collectivism, and an orderly, rationalized, consensual “home”. It is a preparation for homelessness as a manifestation of ecstatic Love of Life, of creative meaning formations, of courageous intellectual life against the conventional manifestation of solidarity and truth, and of a dialogical relation with the otherness of the Other, even in face of his insistence on being part of the “we” against “them”. As the realization of the Jewish ideal of Diasporic life it is an affirmation of the danger and happiness of endless new human possibilities in face of infinite responsibility regarding injustice, regarding ongoing fabrication by the system of truths, dreams, quests, and even of the self. It should prepare humans, all humans, for tefilat hayahid, in a Godless world as partners in a transformed Minyan—to meet the world as creative, moral nomads, as truly religious human beings, who are liberated: exiled lovers of Life, displaced from any dogmatic passions, ideals, and practices of a certain “religion” as their “homeland”. This means that this counter-education should also prepare Diasporic life for those people, like myself, who insist on living in Israel at all costs, even as it becomes before my eyes a Zionist Sparta of the wicked. This means that the interconnectedness between Gola and Geula (Diaspora and redemption) 56
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should offer a very specific, concrete, and detailed counter-education in current Israel, for preparing not only the exodus from Zionism and the State of Israel but, what is even more important, the possibility of Diasporic life in Israel itself. DIASPORIC LIFE IN ISRAEL As the unification of an ongoing moral struggle for the realization of the essence of Judaism, and transcending it into a universal alternative human existence, and as a courageous, creative, Love, such a counter-education might open the gate to new possibilities to challenge concrete existential, moral, psychological, economic, and political manifestations of the present Israeli condition. It might edify, even in face of the exile of Spirit in a post-modern world, the old-new Jewish mission by overcoming it and realizing it as a universal human telos. It does not search for redemption as transcendence into the lost Garden of Eden or the establishment of an earthly positive utopia such as a strong, prosperous state. It is a telos which challenges the institutionalized and instrumentalized monotheistic religiousness, on the one hand, and the reified “secular” symbolic and non-symbolic commodities and passions of the post-modern culture industry on the other. It should not be satisfied by introducing quests and tools for unveiling the manipulations of normalizing education, of the structural injustice of global capitalism on the one hand, and Israeli and Palestinian nationalism on the other. It should not limit itself to criticizing Instrumental Rationality and the reduction of the human subject from some-one to some-thing. In the present moment, under any conditions, it must open the gates of love and affirmation, of creativity and responsibility, in face of the omnipotence of the current production of meaninglessness (which appears as truth, as desired objects of consumption and representation, or as hopelessness). It must enhance the possibilities for improvising in the totality of the moment without abandoning historical consciousness, without disregarding the Other’s unfinished saying/need, without abandoning the utopian quest for creating new concepts, possibilities, and wanderings. As such, counter-education becomes a potential “redemptive” element even under almost impossible philosophical, cultural, and political conditions. By transcending the truth of Judaism it becomes relevant for all homeless humans: for all truly religious humanists, who affirm Life, Love, creativity, the danger of unending self de-territorialization, and moral responsibility for the otherness of the Other and for the otherness within the self. In current Israel, counter-education of this kind might culminate into a bridge for Jews and Palestinians. They might enter a non-violent dialogue only as partners in worthy suffering and Love of Life, as homeless, as Diasporic persons, who are committed to overcome all versions of ethnocentrism and all projects of “homecoming”, at all levels and dimensions of life. A new way is opened for rebuilding “Yavne”. Building the “New Yavne” is inescapably contradictory: to be true to itself it cannot be restricted to any specific place, mission or memory. It must be universal, 57
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and be realized in all dimensions and levels of human life. As such not only might it be realized even without the evacuation of Israel: it can never be reduced to mere geographic displacement. It must transform itself into a universal nomadic, creative, everlasting, way of life, without a Torah or a sacred truth but Love in the totality of every moment, which contains infinite possibilities in the infinite terra that is not merely the “innerness” of the individual, or the “exterior reality”. It is the nowhere space, the Utopia, the space that is not “in between” the “I” and the Other, “innerness” and “external reality”, “true meaning” and “meaninglessness”. It is this special mode of creative self-constitution that makes possible a non-”linear” focused, instrumental, gaze, hearing, production, and representation. It offers a different existence, an erotic self-constitution that is also a totalistic, holistic, ecstatic, manifestation of the world. Only within the framework of a transcending Diasporic philosophy can one enter this ever-unfinished, creative, effort at dialogical self-constitution with the otherness of the Other and with the infinite richness of the cosmos as a worthy Diaspora. But such an Odyssey cannot take place outside a form, disregarding what Judaism calls Halacha. The tension between Halacha and tefilat hayahid or between the Ethical I and the Moral I is not solved by Diasporic philosophy and counter-education. In Israel all we can do today is nothing more then address it with no “solutions”, “recommendations” or “relevant curriculum”. As a negative utopia for and of Diasporic humans it fosters a genuine new partnership between “Israelis” and “Palestinians”. Both are called upon. They are called upon to overcome the violence of the power-relations within which, and by whose productive manipulations, their collective identities have been violently reproduced by normalizing education in the last hundred years. They are called upon to overcome the negation of the Other, the commitment to destroy, exile, or re-educate “them”. As Diasporic persons, as individuals who are responsible for the Other, Israelis and Palestinians are called upon to enter this dialogic, dangerous, totalistic way of life and transcend both Palestinian national identity and Israeliness, Islam and institutionalized Judaism, narcissism and self forgetfulness. But will they respond before it is too late? REFERENCES St. Augustine (1984). Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. Ttranslated by Henry Bettenson, London: Penguin Books, 593–597. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1998). Before we become Sparta in Kapotott. Panim (4), 73–80. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2005). Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy today. In: Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.) Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today—Toward a New Critical Language in Education, Haifa: Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, 7–34. Ram, U. (2006). The Time of the ‘Post’. Tel-Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew)
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ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER: DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY, NEGATIVE THEOLOGY, AND COUNTER-EDUCATION
CRITICAL THEORY AS A MANIFESTATION OF DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY From today’s perspective, the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers can be considered the last grand modern attempt to offer transcendence, meaning, and religiosity, rather than “emancipation” and “truth”. In the very first stage of their work, up to World War II and the Holocaust, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer interlaced the goals of Critical Theory with the Marxian revolutionary project. The development of their thought led them to criticize orthodox Marxism and it ended with a complete break with that tradition (Gur-Ze’ev, 1996, p. 115), as they developed a quest for a religiosity of a unique kind, connected with the Gnostic tradition and emanating, to a certain extent, from Judaism. This religiosity offers a reformulated negative theology within the framework of what I call “Diasporic philosophy” (Gur-Ze’ev, 2003; Gur-Ze’ev 2004, p. 3). As I have tried to explain elsewhere, Diasporic philosophy represents a nomadic, hence “Diasporic”, relation to the world, to thinking and to existence (Gur-Ze’ev, 2004, p. 9). Its starting point is the presence of the absence of truth, God, and worthy hedonism. Diasporic philosophy is positioned against any secular and theist philosophical, existential, and political projects that represent positive utopias and reflect “homecoming” quests. While thus calling for the creativity, Love of Life and responsibility of the eternal improviser it is also committed to rejecting all dogmas and other forms of closure and sameness, it also refuses all versions of nihilism and relativism. In my view, later Critical Theory was in its essence such a Diasporic philosophy, as an existential self-positioning and counter-educational erotic endeavor that opens for us the possibility of non-repressive creation, happiness, responsibility, and worthy suffering that is most relevant to our life in face of global capitalism. This is especially so in face of contemporary postmodern rhetoric and fundamentalist calls for worthy homelessness and a reestablished Garden of Eden. The present constitution of the “risk society” and the McWorld that is being celebrated all over as part and parcel of the capitalist globalization, its culture industry, its technologies and logics, also open new possibilities for Diasporic existence and counter-education. These material conditions and their ontological foundations present new possibilities for counter-education in the most concrete and specific terms and realizations. Improvisation, as one example, here becomes part and parcel of a nomadic existence of today’s Diasporic human; and within the framework of counter-education, improvisation in its Diasporic-critical sense may [ 59 ]
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be developed, thought, edified, and implemented as a new self-positioning and deterritorialization in the spirit of Adorno and Horkheimer’s religiosity. CRITICAL THEORY’S ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY END In establishing Critical Theory as a Diasporic philosophy, Adorno and Horkheimer articulated a unique interpretation not only of the Enlightenment and Marxism, but also of religion and monotheism more generally. Judaism was of special importance for them, as a manifestation of a non-dogmatic and non-violent existential and philosophical possibility. In this respect, they continued the interpretation of Jewish pre-monotheistic nature as developed by thinkers such as Theodor Lessing (Lessing, 1924) and Jakob Klatzkin (Klazkin, 1925), who brought into Jewish thought some of the central conceptions of Nietzsche and Ludwig Klages (Klages, 1951). In their later work Adorno and Horkheimer came to regard Marx’s project as a positive utopia, which by then both had rejected. Horkheimer explicitly declared this trend away from the Marxian thought to that of Schopenhauer and the tradition of philosophical pessimism (Horkheimer, 1985, pp. 339–340). By then his thought was plainly anti-revolutionary. It is the nature of the revolutionary, every revolutionary, to become an oppressor (ibid., p, 418). In his view, every revolution, especially a “successful” one, is a manifestation of power. And justice, when it becomes powerful, is realized only at the cost of its transformation into oppression (ibid., p. 341). Adorno had very similar articulations: “civilization itself produces anti-civilization and increasingly reinforces it” (Adorno, 1988, p. 191). Adorno understood that “moral ideas […] are directly derived from the existence of the suppressors” (Adorno, 1999, p. 184). Likewise, the early conditions for mature independence, by which every free society is predetermined—are already set by the powers and dynamics of the reality of the absence of freedom (Adorno, 1971, p. 135). In contrast to the Marxian tradition, it is now conceived that as long as even some remnants of freedom survive violence will flourish (Horkheimer, 1989, p. 247). In the end, whatever hopes Marx did hold on behalf of true society, apparently they seem to be the wrong ones, if—and this issue is important to Critical Theory—freedom and justice are interrelated in mutual opposition. The more justice there is, freedom will diminish accordingly. (ibid., p. 340)
For both thinkers this truth is ontologically and not historically grounded, and sometimes Adorno articulates it in the language of the Gnostic tradition: “space is nothing but absolute alienation” (Adorno, 1970, p. 205). For him this is the framework for viewing the whole historical reality of advanced technological society, in which everything has become a commodity, and life, with all its layers and dimensions, is nothing but “a fetish of consumption” (ibid., p. 243). In their Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer are not content to target the capitalistic logic and its realization in itself, or representations of totalitarianism 60
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such as National Socialism and Stalinism. Ultimately they target the essence of culture itself: Culture has developed with the protection of the executioner […] All work and pleasure are protected by the hangman. To contradict this fact is to deny all science and logic. It is impossible to abolish […] terror and retain civilization. Even the lessening of terror implies a beginning of the process of dissolution. (Adorno, 1988, p. 255)
The conception of revolution and Critical Theory within the framework of historically progressing human emancipation is conceived here within a double-layered philosophy of history, one layer linear, the other circular. From the viewpoint of the circular conception of time there is no room for progress in the Kantian, Hegelian, or Marxian sense, and there is certainly no room for a genuine revolution. According to Benjamin, there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of a barbarity (Benjamin, 1972, p. 696). For Adorno and Horkheimer all substantive levels of “progress” manifest an oppressive regression. In this sense Adaptation to the power of progress involves the regression of power. Each time anew ‘progress’ brings about those degenerations. They manifest not the unsuccessful but successful progress to be its contrary (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1988, p. 42). On the other level of “progress”, the explicitly historical one, unless an unpredictable interference occurs the good intentions and progressive talents of educators devoted to revolutionary education are of little use in halting the enhancement and sophistication of barbarism: actually they are its manifestation. In such a reality there is no room for non-repressive “progressive”, positive, utopianism, or for an objective, justifiable, education and praxis for resisting and overcoming the present reality (Horkheimer, 1947, p. 26) Adorno warns us against the drive of emancipatory education to culminate in an anti-mature human positioning (Adorno, 1971, p. 147) of the kind that present Critical Pedagogy only too often is driven into, in the name of “emancipation”, “critique”, and “the victims’ justified counter-violence” (GurZe’ev, 1998, p. 484). Adorno and Horkheimer gave up the Marxist conception of progress, and in this sense their optimism as to a social revolutionary change, and even the goal, and to a certain degree also the means, of critique. But they did not abandon Utopia and the essential imperatives of Critical Theory as a counter-education and political emancipatory praxis. However, their definition of emancipation and the stance of realization of intellectual autonomy as praxis changed dramatically to become more in line with its early Jewish eschatological sources in the Qumran sect and other Jewish and Christian adherents of the Messianic tradition. In Horkheimer’s work the change from a Marxian Critical Theory to a Diasporic philosophy is paralleled by an articulation of Critical Theory as a new, Jewish, Negative Theology. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics follows the same path, attempting to present what I call “counter-education” as a worthy addressing of the present absence of the quest for transcendence and meaning, and as a Diasporic form of awaiting as a self-education for the human stance of readiness to be called upon. It is 61
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a central dimension of “counter-education” (ibid.) within the framework of presentday Diasporic philosophy. This is so in the sense that while refusing any dogma it reintroduces the exiled seriousness about that which is called “redemption” in Christian theology. “’It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-owner’, Nietzsche already wrote in the Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Adorno, 1999, p. 39). This is where the Diasporic dimension is so central to the mature thinking of Adorno and Horkheimer. The refusal to dwell in peace in the present order of things, the negation of the “facts” of the actuality, are but a manifestation of the rejection of metaphysical violence and of all kinds of “homes”, dogmas, and self-satisfaction in a world of pain, injustice, ugliness, and betrayed love. Since they refused a positive Utopia, their mature thought could not promise a better world as a justification for resistance to normalizing education and the quest for pleasure, “success”, and hegemony. Homelessness and the moral importance of suffering are here grounded ontologically and become a religious way of life. In this they followed Benjamin’s lead: it is a kind of religiosity which is Messianic without a Messiah (Benjamin, 1972, p. 203). As a counter-education it holds out no promise of salvation or of redemption. But it might offer a Messianic moment, which will overcome the violence of the governing “now-time” (Benjamin, 1971, p. 701) and open the gate to an alternative way of life, an alternative thinking in which challenging Spirit is reclaimed and the de-humanization of humans by the manipulations of the system is resisted as part of the regeneration of Life and its redemption from the all-celebrated triumph of “Spirit” and its cannibalistic-oriented offspring such as Instrumental Rationality. In this counter-education, Love becomes possible, again, as different from the codes, passions, and ideals which are set by the omnipotence of the ruling culture industry. Within the framework of this counter-education the otherness in the self is reclaimed, the otherness of the Other becomes not only legitimate—it becomes an indispensable element in a new kind of Life, in which nomadism is realized on the intellectual and social levels, paralleled by infinite responsibility—with no God, dogma, or party central committee to guide the individual to “the good”. The totally other bursts in—or does not—and refutes the consensus, unveils the accepted truths, values, passions, and the other manifestations of the self-evidence. It is a Diasporic, ecstatic, dangerous way of life, within which new possibilities are opened but no guarantees are available; no optimism, no room for assured overcoming of the suggestive power of the self-forgetfulness of the human. This does not mean that the human is doomed to passivity. Even if the actuality of the totally other is not to be guaranteed, and it is never an object of manipulation, there is still so much to do in order to prepare one’s ears to listen to the unfamiliar music of the presence of the totally other. Here the Diasporic philosophy of Adorno and Horkheimer is of much relevance for this self-preparation, self edification, self-reflection, responsibility, and creativity within the framework of a present-day Diasporic counter-education.
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AGAINST EDUCATIONAL OPTIMISM To my mind, while the first stage (the revolutionary-optimistic) of Critical Theory became the foundation of todays Critical Pedagogy, the second stage is a brilliant manifestation of counter-education, committed not only to criticize, but also to overcome all versions of normalizing education. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s later work offers a framework for counter-educational praxis whose religiosity is fertilized by the alarming recognition of the impossible realization of the imperative of human “homecoming” to God, or domesticating absolute Spirit or Reason; the establishment of a genuine “home” or “homecoming” to the advancing true knowledge of genuine human interests and realization of their potentials is here a constitutive element of philosophy and politics. The current work of Slavoj Zizek, who writes that “the paradox of self-consciousness is that it is possible only against the background of its own impossibility” (Zizek, 1993, p. 15), is very close to this later work of Horkheimer and Adorno. In this sense the later Critical Theory writings, which I consider essentially Diasporic in the sense that they try to overcome the quest for “homecoming” in all its manifestations, became prima facie counter-educational, even if the word “education” is rarely mentioned and schooling is hardly tackled at all. The big challenge for the critical mind and for humanistic education is the disappearance of (the consciousness of) alienation within the totality, which is governed by Instrumental Rationality. This quest for alienation and the challenges of the exile of critical Spirit and Love of Life in a post-metaphysical moment mark the difference between a critique of orthodox Marxist ideology and Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s conceptions. Governing Instrumental Rationality leaves no room for non-efficient and non-pragmatic considerations, and drives out the concepts, ideals, and traditions that allowed speculation and critique of the self-evident, and offered transcendence from the oppressive practices of all master signifiers. Instrumental Rationality is responsible for the current reality, in which the more progressive the processes of de-humanization become, the more efficient becomes the concealment of the oppression by present Culture Industry (Adorno, 2000, p. 233). The exile of Spirit and Love of Life, and the bridging of the abyss between substance and subject, existence and meaning, creation/work and aim, Diasporic self-positioning and quests for “homecoming”, are trivialized, and Spirit is again presented as relevant; but only as a commodity that has lost its connection to its use value and functions primarily as a violent symbolic interchange, as part of what I call “the pleasure machine” that normalizing education is so quick to celebrate as “reality” (Gur-Ze’ev, 2003, p. 2). Reified consciousness (Adorno, 1998, p. 200) which is fabricated with less and less antagonistic dimensions (or as part of dynamic recycling of “diversities” within a mega-speed totality where there is no difference that makes a difference) by the present culture industry reaffirms “spirituality” and “spiritual education” as a power of anti-Love-of-Life, and occultists are celebrating their victory all over Western culture, especially when it presents itself as the redemptive Diasporic power at the present historical moment (ibid. p. 244). 63
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According to Adorno and Horkheimer there is no stable ground or anchorage to moor optimism or even the very premises of Critical Theory. Under this sky a philosopher worthy of the name must become what I call “a Diasporic human being”. The seeming political freedom, free opinion, and tolerance within present Western society conceal and actually serve the process of totalistic de-humanization. Not only does the mind mould itself for the sake of its marketability, and thus reproduce the socially prevalent categories. Rather, it grows to resemble ever more closely the status quo as its “home” even where it subjectively refrains from making a commodity of itself. The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter […] It leaves the individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, performs it more and more thoroughly, cuts it off as it were from the possibility of differentiating itself as all difference degenerates to a nuance in the monotony of supply. (Adorno, 2000, p. 198)
The critique of traditional Marxist ideology cannot be of much use here since culture itself “has become ideological” (ibid., p. 206). “Today”, Adorno says, “ideology means society as appearance […]” (ibid., p. 207). However, since ideology is no longer conceived as a socially necessary appearance which veils the “facts”, critique of ideology can no longer offer an emancipatory deciphering of “reality” and cannot claim to empower humanistic-oriented resistance to social oppression and to manipulative representations of histories, identities, and realities. Adorno offers a view that does not allow this kind of optimism, since Ideology today is society itself in so far as its integral power and inevitability, its overwhelming existence-in-itself, surrogates the meaning which that existence has exterminated. (ibid.)
Horkheimer is on the verge of acknowledging that there is no longer justification for a Critical Theory. In a personal letter to Adorno (May 26, 1960) he says that nowadays “reflection [has become] senseless. Actually the world to which we saw ourselves as belonging is destroyed” (Horkheimer, 1960, p. 511). Elsewhere he writes that serious talk itself has become senseless and that those who refuse to listen—to the attempts to save meaning—are not totally wrong (Horkheimer, 1978, p. 129). Truth in this context is not absent; it is rather revealed in, and swallowed by, the present reality. It can, however, offer only technological and scientific advance—not meaning, direction, or responsibility to resist injustice. The issue at stake here is not solely truth or justice but the very quest for truth and the commitment to justice, or, in other words, the possibility of transcendence (Adorno, 2000, p. 85; Adorno, 1999, p. 65) from meaninglessness and from “sameness” (Adorno, 2000, p. 236)—or what Levinas calls the Same (Levinas, 1987, p. 55)—from the mere thingness of Being. Addressing the absence of the foundation for the quest for transcendence and facing its infinity as negative utopia is an ontological sign of Diaspora that Critical Theory offers as an impetus for a possible present-day counter-education. In the work of later Adorno and Horkheimer, two very different conceptions of truth emerge. One is the hegemony that is established on the existing world of facts, which ultimately represents “power” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1988, p. 236). Here human existence in its essence is revealed at its full price: practical involvement, 64
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within which ideals transform into oppression (ibid.). The implicit negation of any optimistic positive emancipatory educational project of the kind that standard Critical Pedagogy is presently actualizing is mercilessly manifested here. Within the framework of Critical Theory Adorno offers an alternative. He positions his philosophy against the fundamental assumption of all positive utopias and all “homecoming” philosophical projects: the assumption that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real (Adorno, 2000, p. 24). In regard to an alternative concept of truth, homelessness and Diasporic existence are here connected to Adorno’s central conceptions, among which a special role is reserved for dialectics, non-identity, negation, and reflection. For him The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a reminder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy […] It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. (ibid., p. 54)
In light of the centrality to Adorno’s later thought of the concept of nonidentity, it is of vital importance to state that for him what I call “Diaspora” is not a merely epistemological dimension. It is even much more than a way of life, and surely it is not a temporary punishment of humans by God only to be overcome by redemptive “homecoming” to a cosmic harmony and non-alienated human existence. As in the Gnostic tradition, Adorno’s rearticulated “exiled good God” is present as an absence in the reality of the evil God of historical existence and creative reality. This is why for him, while dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity it also assures the impossibility of any stable ground for a “standpoint”—not only the “wrong standpoint” (ibid.). The aim of Adorno’s Diasporic philosophy is Diasporic selfreflection, and self-overcoming, which will make possible transcendence, with no ground, ultimate end, or appeasing nihilistic pleasure, rational conclusion, totalizing synthesis, or any other kind of “home” or redemption. In an imaginary conversation between the philosopher—an implicit reference to the masters of Critical Theory themselves—and the practical man, the philosopher is the one on the defensive, not his practical interlocutor. The genuine philosopher is introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer not as a promising educator but as a neurotic, who manifests his refusal to be cured when insisting on continuing his project of curing normal, realistic-oriented, sane, people (Adorno & Horkheimrt, 1988, p. 255). Facing these conclusions one should ask, what, if any, is the justification for Critical Theory and for Critical Pedagogy as emancipatory education in action, under conditions in which “serious philosophy has come to its end” (Horkheimer, 1985, vol, VII., p. 404)? One may ask if there is a secure or insecure yet worthy nonreligious “home” even for counter-education, if Adorno is right in saying: Whatever wants nothing to do with the trajectory of history belongs all the more truly to it. History promises no salvation and offers the possibility of hope only to the concept whose movements follow history’s path to the very extreme. (Adorno, 1998, p. 17)
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CRITICAL THEORY AS A JEWISH NEGATIVE THEOLOGY The later Horkheimer presents mature Critical Theory as a Jewish Negative Theology. This change carries major educational implications hegemonic Critical Pedagogy has not yet dare to address until now and much less in the present era of the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of the progressive circles. Following Benjamin, it was for him of vital importance that Judaism did not present God as a positive absolute. The negativity of this utopianism is constituted of two elements: the first is rejection in principle of the possibility of a positive realization of any Utopia. Horkheimer refuses to imagine a positive picture of future society prior to its realization (Horkheimer, 1985, vol. VII., p. 382). The second is his commitment to confront Critical Theory with its own negativity and its own impossibility. This is a challenge worthy of a Diasporic philosophy that cannot satisfy itself in a concluding synthesis, not even in its essential homelessness or negativity. It is this challenge that opens the gate to counter-education, and in many respects it is the gate itself. In Adorno’s words The plain contradiction of this challenge is that of philosophy itself, which is thereby qualified as dialectics before getting entangled in its individual contradictions. The work of philosophical self-reflection consists in unrevealing that paradox. Everything else is signification, secondhand […]. (Adorno, 2000, p. 60)
As genuine Diasporic philosophers, both Adorno and Horkheimer refuse any philosophy that leads to consensus, synthesis, and the end of dialectics and worthy suffering. Yet at the same time they refuse to abandon the quest for the Messiah or human emancipation. The quest, as a Messianic tension, is central here, not its “successful” fulfillment. The messianic quest so often is interwoven in a positive Diasporic philosophy that it makes possible the institutionalization of religion and normalizing, repressive, religious education, which challenges genuine religiosity and authentic Diasporic existence. Adorno and Horkheimer are careful to position in the center of their counter-education a different Diasporic attitude to Messianism, reflection, and transcendence. In his Minima Moralia Adorno concludes that The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. (Adorno, 1999, p. 247)
That is why Judaism was so important for Horkheimer. He saw in it “a nonpositive religion”, “a hope for the coming of the Messiah” (Horkheimer, 1988, p. 331). Judaism, within this framework, is not a reality but a symbol for—nonviolent—solidarity of the powerless (ibid., p. 40), in sharp contrast to the general 66
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conceiving of Judaism by present day progressive, post-colonialist thinkers. As a Jewish Negative Theology, Critical Theory expresses, in his view, “a refusal to recognize power as an argument for truth” (ibid., p. 139). Horkheimer’s contribution to the Diasporic perspective is here crystal clear when he identifies “Judaism”, as a “non-positive religion”, with Critical Theory. Adorno too understood the refusal of power, effectiveness, and domestication in the “Same” of the world of facts as a precondition for genuine counter-education that would challenge the present reality (Adorno, 1971, p. 147). The conception of being in the continuum of ontological Diaspora on the way to transcending the continuum was vital for presenting late Critical Theory as a Jewish Negative Theology. The uniqueness of Judaism lies in its permanent demand for justice, emerging out of a hope with no real historical anchor: “Jewry was not a powerful state, but the hope for justice at the end of the world” (Horkheimer, 1978, p. 206). The idea that the demand for justice essentially cannot obtain power, and that justice can be realized only at the cost of its transformation into its opposite—injustice, is central to the educational implications of this version of Critical Theory. In my mind it implies that counter-education must not attempt to transcend negativism; it is committed to anti-dogmatism and it must resist any manifestation of the self-evident, even that of the oppressed and the persecuted. It must resist popularization and political victories. At the same time its Messianism is directed to resisting actual injustices in the present reality as the only manifestation of the quest for truth and justice. This version of Negative Theology as a mature Critical Theory in Horkheimer’s thought complies with Adorno’s concept of Negative Dialectics. It was not in opposition to the view of the philosopher as a neurotic who refuses to be cured, but in compliance with this vision that Adorno articulated the “categorical imperative of philosophy” (Adorno, 2000, p. 54). There he concludes: “it does not hold the key to salvation, but allows some hope only to the moment of concept followed by the intellect wherever the path may lead” (ibid.). Yet Adorno’s Diasporic philosophy is not consistent enough with itself, and actually Adorno presents Critical Theory as a path to salvation after all. This, however, is within a negative framework that leaves no room for any positive Utopia or actual salvation in the sense that traditional positive utopias or optimistic-oriented Critical Pedagogy can promise its disciples. In most of his educational texts Horkheimer too is short of consistent Diasporic philosophy and he offers optimism on the possibility of a worthier education—at the expense of counter-education, which if genuine must be truly Diasporic and refuse any optimistic version of normalizing education. The explicit philosophical texts of these thinkers in their second stage of development represent a much more consistent Diasporic philosophy. Regardless of its impossible situation, according to Adorno philosophy has not concluded its mission. However, it does not have any foundation, self-evidence, social strata, or pain on which to establish its critical education: “Philosophy offers no place from which theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is suspected of, now, as before” (Adorno, 1999, p. 55). Adorno, in accordance with 67
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Benjamin and Horkheimer, presents another kind of dialectics that stands in contrast to the orthodox Marxist concept of dialectics and its version of Ideology Critique (as an emancipatory overcoming of alienation and false consciousness, and as a precondition for a revolutionary praxis). As a genuine counter-educator he refuses any concept of dialectics that promises victory, emancipation, or peace. According to Adorno’s ontology, human’s homelessness is neither a temporary situation nor a punishment, and ontologically it is rooted in the infinite rootlessness, in what Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 294) or “the rhizomatic”, that opens the gate to nomadic existence. Adorno and Horkheimer are united here in refusing any manifestations of the absolute, the totality, the truth, or a positive justice on earth. Adorno is very much aware of the contradictions at the heart of his project. His Diasporic project rests here, on these contradictions precisely, as a way of overcoming meaninglessness and self-evidence of various kinds, including the revolutionary kind. “The work of philosophical self-reflection consists in unraveling that paradox. Everything else is signification, secondhand construction, pre-philosophical activity” (Adorno, 2000, p. 60). What then remains for philosophy to do? Is there still a mission it can devote itself to—without transforming itself into its negative and become a new, sophisticated, version of normalizing education? Adorno, like Horkheimer, constituted his utopian thought on his philosophical pessimism, so Negative Dialectics became the last way to challenge the self-evident and to transcend meaninglessness. To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of Negative Dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification, which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection. Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning.(ibid., p. 63)
In this sense, and solely in this sense, “philosophy can make it after all” (ibid., p. 60). Adorno’s Diasporic philosophy in this respect becomes the only way to resist the process of destruction of the autonomy of the human subject (Adorno, 1998, p. 5). It becomes the only manner of resistance to being overwhelmed by the one-dimensional functionality and thingness of the system (Adorno, 2000, p. 234) and its deceiving message of freedom in accordance with the laws of the market and the current world of facts (ibid., p. 198). As such, within its negativity, it incubates an alternative to the hegemonic educational message propagated by the Culture Industry: it offers nomadic, creative, religious existence and love via the possibility of refusal of the present process of subjectification; resistance to the reality of constructing the dehumanized agent. As such Diasporic philosophy offers a kind of thinking which allows hope of overcoming the current educational reality (Adorno, 2000, p. 238) of which today’s Critical Pedagogy is an important part. Diasporic philosophy enabled Adorno and Horkheimer to not only effect a radical critical reconstruction of the present historical moment but to go further into offering 68
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an existential-philosophical counter-educational refusal of all manifestations of power in the present culture and society. The Diasporic philosophy they constructed was actually a non-positivistic and anti-optimistic alternative; as in the Gnostic tradition, it was a call to overcome the omnipotence of the presence of “the evil God”. Such an alternative opened up when they insisted on transcendence, and (against the deceiving call for relativism, nihilism, or pragmatism) on love, meaning, responsibility, and creativity, which are not a mere echo of the hegemonic powergames of the totally administered world. Critical Theory here becomes an introduction to a renewal of poiesis and ecstatic religiosity without becoming a new dogmatic religious, philosophical, or political “home”. At the same time, however, dogmatic and institutionalized religion comes to have special relevance for the Frankfurt School thinkers: they struggled for the very possibility of Diasporic sensitivity to the pursuit for the totally other. Only within this Diasporic philosophy and its counter-educational alternatives are we to understand its refusal to abandon the imperative of responsibility to the yet unrealized human potentials. To this imperative, as to the presence of hope out of suffering, they offered only one possible way: that of religious negation. The message here has its origins in the Jewish messianic impulse, the commitment to transcendence from any consensus, and from any manifestation of the self-evident and the Same; it is a call for a struggle to overcome meaninglessness in a Godless world. In this sense, here any possible educational “implication” should be negative, if it is to be true to itself. At the same time, as genuine counter-education it is a manifestation of love and a concrete realization of joy and creativity, tikun olam (Gur-Ze’ev, 2003. p. 9). In this sense later Adorno and Horkheimer are so important in any attempt to keep alive the quest and the actual appearance of counter-education as a concrete Utopia of education for love in a postmodern condition. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the transcendental dimension and the concept of the horizon as a limit that does not have the last word determine the frame of struggle which constitutes the “genuine” human—a position that comes close to mystic tradition. According to Adorno, and here he is very close to Heidegger, from whom he and Horkheimer were so concerned to distance themselves (Adorno, 2000, p. 75), what is incubated, that which awaits in the objects themselves needs such intervention to come to speak, while acknowledging and within the framework of the perspective that the exterior forces inflict, offer and mobilize “outside” […] (Gur-Ze’ev, 2003a, p. 29). This dimension is made especially clear in Horkheimer’s unpublished works. In every single thing, he wrote in a private note, a higher aim dwells, which is channeled to external infinity, which transcends it. The negative utopia of Diasporic philosophy is expressed here, on the one hand, by the deeds of the genuine philosopher, which manifest openness and readiness to be called on, geared to a total negation of the given reality as the actuality of “truth, beauty, and goodness” (Horkheimer, 1988, p. 162). Horkheimer’s starting point, however, includes the acknowledgement that these dimensions reflect the absolute, which will forever remain concealed, unreachable, and misconceived. One must clarify the status of this yearning, a clarification that 69
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Horkheimer himself avoided and Adorno did only very little to address. Here we come up against the limits of their mature Critical Theory even when it becomes an implicit rich Diasporic philosophy. With Horkheimer, as with Adorno and Benjamin, the struggle for the possibilities of transcendence from the boundaries of the horizons of the hegemonic reality transforms this praxis into prayer, a holy deed. Here too, holiness is not conditioned or determined by the level of its “success” but by openness and possibility. In Franz Rosenzweig’s views on prayer too, The question is not asked here whether the prayer will be answered and fulfilled. The context of the prayer is its fulfillment. The soul prays […] for the capacity for prayer [...] this ability to pray is the highest gift given to the soul in revelation. This gift is nothing but the capacity for prayer. But by being superior it already passes the boundaries of the realm of capacity. For, with the ability to pray given, the necessity to pray is also included. (Rosenzweig, 1970, p. 215)
In prayer, the yearning for a dialogue between the human as an infinite challenge to her finitude, and “God” as a representation of infinity, is realized. The central force, here, in my opinion, is not in the establishment of an unproblematic meeting with “God” but in the Diasporic facing up to his absence and in the meeting of the existential moment where Sisyphean overcoming of mere (pleasurable/painless/ ”successful”) human life is the aim of human life. A self-contained, domesticated, human subject cannot make possible a true human, since he or she is essentially Diasporic; the human is conditioned by transcendence and challenging the totality of the immanence. The traditional concept of prayer (Drensner, 1970, p. 24) represented this idea in a manner still valid, especially in face of the absence of God. As happens so often with love, happiness, and creativity, prayer too, when instrumentalized and institutionalized, negates its own essence and becomes a devoted slave of the reality it is committed to transcend. Even in order to address the idea of the autonomous subject, the human is overwhelmed by inhumanity: a desire for power—a desire for “home” in the swallowing presence of the absolute immanence. Unless Diasporic counter-education is offered, no emancipation or redemption awaits but nihilism and disintegration of human culture. Within counter-education the Diasporic community enriches itself by actualizing improvisation in all spheres of life in light of the presence of the absence of the absolute. This negative presence, the presence of the absence, might reconnect us with the essence of religiosity that is so often misrepresented by the institutionalized religions that constitute the false quest for Diasporic existence as a prelude to “homecoming” to the lost Garden of Eden, nirvana, ultimate pleasure, or other positive utopian versions of human’s self-forgetfulness. Counter-education as opposed to the hegemonic Critical Pedagogy and the other manifestations of normalizing education does not call for “effectiveness”, success”, or “homecoming”. It identifies and challenges the Instrumental Rationality in Critical Pedagogy, radical feminist pedagogies, post-colonial education, and all other critical optimisms about the emancipatory dimensions of the cyberspace, 70
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radical democracy, and post-colonial alternatives as advocated by critical educationalists such as Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Douglas Kellner and Patti Lather. As an alternative it can only be edified into a prayer. This kind of prayer, however, is articulated as a concrete way of Diasporic life where the eternal-improviser actualizes her relation to the otherness of the Other in all dimensions and levels of Life. Here counter-education makes nomadism possible and facilitates the posing of new philosophical questions, a lust which gave power to martyrs at the stake, to monks confronting ancient parchments as absent truths, or to women confronting the systematic oppression that was inflicted on them by the ever-growing sophistication of Western phallocentrism (Gur-Ze’ev, 1999, p. 42). The desire for the totally other as impetus of Love and authentic creativity made possible the reality in the system while challenging it. It allowed transformation, transgression, and bordercrossing from one system of self-evidence but also the “homecoming” project and the commitment to “victory”, nirvana, closed “truth” and borderless nihilism. It was not only co-opted for the reproduction of the order of things: it also was a power of change and altered systems on the existential level of every individual as well as on the level of the rises and falls of entire cultures and empires. CRITICAL THEORY AS A PRAYER IN A GODLESS WORLD As an expression of Diasporic yearning for the totally other, prayer was traditionally also a gate to the infinite Other, a gate to overcoming its quest for a positive “home”, to the absolute. As such it made possible the birth of young ears that were able to respond to the wordless invitation to Diasporic existence. Prayer, when true to itself, incubates the religious quest, the existential readiness, for such an openness to infinity. As such, prayer also includes a type of special knowledge, and it already represents, in this world, a genuine remnant of the moment of creation. As Rabbi Moshe Sofer (Hatam Sofer) said: “The lamentation over the destruction is itself the building”. This knowledge with which we are dealing is close to Gnostic knowledge—or rather the struggle for knowledge in the Gnostic sense of the word (Jonas, 1963, p. 32). Gnosis was the struggle for the knowledge of “the good exiled God”, the understanding of which was unattainable, hence its noble Diasporic position. Adorno and Horkheimer viewed the “understanding” of the given reality as stipulated in connection with the absolute; an affinity which is viewed as a certain type of knowledge, or conditioned in a specific type of knowledge, which is different from that which is reproduced in the hegemonic realm of self-evidence. In this manner even they, in their Diasporic philosophy, like gnosis, sought after metaphysical knowledge, which can be defined as the “knowledge of the secrets of the universe”. Only in this sense can a human hope to achieve salvation (ibid., p. 284). Within the framework of Critical Theory this is the quest for the secrets of the universe, inasmuch as it is a human universe. Today we are faced with the fact that at best it is an anti-humanistic-oriented world that is rapidly going toward self-destruction of all life on the planet as a manifestation of human progress. 71
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Horkheimer’s Negative Utopianism as prayer and as Diasporic existence has three aspects. The first is the advent of an ideal Diasporic, anti-ethnocentristic-oriented community in which one can attempt to see levels of religion, or an established cult with a special jargon, rituals and gestures, common enemies, similar societal background, etc., within this Diasporic philosophy. Negative Utopianism is also an invitation to the Diasporic community as a sort of “praying congregation”, present in writings of Rosenzweig, as well as the method of establishing this community. To a certain degree, this type of community already exists. The second aspect is the establishment of the religious ecstatic dimension of this Diasporic philosophy in relation to the absence of the absolute. According to Heschel, the purpose of prayer in Jewish mysticism is to recall God to the world and to establish in it his kingdom (Heschel, 1954, p. 61). In this respect, prayer is the ladder up to the perfection over the horizon. With Horkheimer, the resting point of this ladder is Diasporic existence and the awareness of the absence of the absolute. “The longing for heaven, where he will never enter” (Horkheimer, 1978, p. 212) relies on the existence of the absolute and supersedes it—and at the same time constitutes it. Horkheimer’s endeavor as prayer is very close to that of the Kabbala concerning the relationship between mystical prayer and divinity. According to Moshe Idel, one of the Kabbala texts illustrating this belongs to Rabbi Elazar of Worms: Let there be the sound of prayer of Israel—for prayer travels upward towards the heavens above their heads and travels and rests on the head of the Almighty and becomes for him a crown [...] for prayer rests like a crown […] Human prayers are transformed by their relation that they are transcended and become part of the divine escort: Divine Presence, a wreath on the head of God, and ‘like the crown’. (Idel, 1988, p. 372)
Idel sees the composition of a “wreath” by means of prayer as a “crowning of a king”. From this aspect he continues, “one can see the Kabbala not only as caring for the garden but also caring for the gardener himself” (ibid., p. 197). Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic projects are not very far from the essence of kabbalistic yearning—the yearning of the homeless for the totally other than the totality of the immanence of the present reality as the manifestation of Being; the yearning for what Levinas calls “the infinite Other”, which is a condition for prayer, and at the same time its fruits. With regard to the affinity to the absolute, the Diasporic project itself appears as a prayer of an eternal nomad, who refuses any positive God, refuses any of the positive utopias and all alternative kinds of “homecoming” projects to the lost Garden of Eden or to its worldly realization. As such there is no place in it for prayer as a separate activity. This is based on the Gnostic view of true prayer: “prayer as a type of higher communication with supreme reality must be quietness” (Mortley, 1987, p. 37). The third aspect of this Diasporic philosophy is the establishment of the “genuine individual” in the ideal Diasporic community. The ability of the true individual (the philosopher) to send the invitation to the critical conversation—where lies the 72
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possibility of the struggle for salvation of the soul—is also the moral duty which Horkheimer imposes on the Diasporic philosopher, and maybe on himself: Both prayer and romantic love have a common past. Today both are fading, and there is no better manifestation of it than the propaganda taking place in their name... the praise and the condemnation, the sanctions against the skeptic. If he remains purely negative, he contributes to the validity of regression. To be devoted one to another as man intended, in the past, to do with the assistance of prayer, even though the impotence of prayer and the insignificance of man became a well known thing; to transform into much love... to drive aside the skepticism whenever the social and psychological conditions were exposed and understood and from awareness to them: to drive aside the skepticism without forgetting what these skeptical matters brought about—this is the only resistance the individual can offer in face of the vain progress. It will not cease the decline; it will, however, bear witness on the right thing during the period of darkness. (Horkheimer, 1978, p. 206)
This responsibility of the Diasporic, religious, human, who has no dogma, collective, pleasure, “truth”, “revolution”, Garden of Eden, or God to enslave himself to, is born out of an the existential decision—similar to the Kierkegaardian “Either-Or”— which creates dislearning and manifests Love of Life. Adorno and Horkheimer’s anthropology understands existence as dependent on that which is beyond it, hence the erotic commitment to transcendence above any given reality or above life as the ecstatic aim of life. THE DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY OF ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER When we elaborate on the religious aspects of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic philosophy it is appropriate to distinguish three terms: religion, religiousness, and theology. The relationship between Critical Theory and theology, especially in the later Adorno and Horkheimer, is quite clear. First, many of their foremost peers were declared theologians. Second, they presented theology as a basis for a moral alternative and for a critique of the present as a whole, and as dealing with historical research and philosophical judgment of the connection to a God in different religions. Third, they use much theological jargon: “martyr”, “the resurrection of the dead”, “original sin”, and “the burning bush”. Fourth, Horkheimer defines his Critical Theory and that of Adorno as “negative theology”. Fifth, their work fits the theological category, at least by definition of the members of “radical theology”. And sixth, their work became important for many theologians—those who did not consider themselves “radicals”, and those who not only enriched their theological matters, but also saw the texts of Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer, and even of Habermas, as theological work per se (Arenas, 1982, p. 379). Much more problematic is the definition of religion. It is difficult to decide if one should see Adorno and Horkheimer’s projects as religious. A clue can be found in the comments which Horkheimer wrote for himself one day in March 1969, and did not 73
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publish. In these writings he refers to his project as a bona fide religious undertaking, and he plans the last articles of the writings with the purpose of illuminating various aspects of new religiousness. Horkheimer wishes to express four ideas: solidarity; the love of the Other as equal to the integration of theology and science; the basis of fanaticism; and a non-violent solidarity. These four ideas were supposed to be passed on through these essays: “Our homeland—the Planet”; “He—Like you” (a distortion of the Hebrew usually rendered “Love your neighbor as you would yourself”); “On Output”; and an additional essay which was planned, but never written, supposedly inspired by the condition of Jews in the Diaspora. He sums up the project: “These four ideas must be formulated in such a manner that they will lead to [the advent] of a new praxis which unifies science and religion” (Horkheimer, 1988, p. 140). Since the concept of religion seems to us problematic and this connection is not meant to be decided through such an intricate problem—a problem to whose clarification neither Adorno nor Horkheimer devoted proper attention, we shall concentrate on a different kind of problematic: religiousness. The Diasporic religiousness, which I credit to Adorno and Horkheimer, is similar to the existential religiousness that I find in Kierkegaard—something Adorno clearly states when speaking of Kierkegaard. Adorno and Horkheimer’s religiousness is nothing but an interpretation of reality which becomes an ecstatic way of life that not only transcends the historical reality but even transforms the historical moment itself in the sense that it reveals its self-negation in face of the infinite Diasporic essence of Being itself. As a way of life Diasporic philosophy is not religiousness based on the fear of life but on the affirmation of life, while facing meaninglessness, suffering, and the rejection of all other calls for “homecoming”. This refusal makes nomadism possible as a religious way of life. It gives life justification, not through purposefulness of the kind from which the concept of oppression is constituted. This justification is a manifestation of Love of Life and is a Sisyphean one, in the sense of the religion of the Greeks according to the Nietzschian interpretation. The Diasporic human, then, like the Nietzschian super-human, may be truly happy (which is in opposition to satisfaction by the furnishing of phony needs) through this tragedy. The Greek hero, Nietzsche’s super-human, and Horkheimer’s philosopher all affirm Life despite their suffering and meaninglessness, but still more out of meaninglessness, suffering, and the absolute absence of the Other. The Diasporic identification of the possibilities for transcendence from the tyranny of the facts of the present reality is also present in Nietzsche’s Dionysianism. While opposed to conventional religion, this nevertheless is “the road towards life”, which is essentially “religious”, a tragic-”holy” struggle, an “aim” that overcomes “God” and redeems Life and “earth” (Nietzsche, 1075, p, 978). Horkheimer, for all his criticism, sees Nietzsche as a thinker who symbolizes a will and a way to salvation (Horkheimer, 1985, vol. XIII., p. 254). The Diasporic religiousness to which we refer to is not stopped by the awareness of “death of God”; on the contrary, the death of God is its starting point. Of this may be said what Victor Nouvo said of radical theology: “a new liberty 74
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is formed from the recognition of the death of man and the death of God. It is radical theology which opens the way to this new liberty” (Nuovo, 1966, p. 25). Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic philosophy does not lack a belief in the deity: it turns the overcoming of the belief in all forms of “God”, the absolute or the positive, into a starting point of a re-articulated Gnostic counter-education for love. As such it abides well with the dealings of modern critical theologians who express true religious tension, which is dependent on “waiving the concept of God as the basis for work”, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoffer (Bonhoffer, 1965, p. 191). This disbelief is close to the religiousness of Karl Barth, who states that today “[true] religiousness is disbelief” (Barth, 1932, P. 327). Even so, the denial of belief should not be seen as a forgoing of the absolute. It is this denial of dogmatic belief which makes possible a burst of vital, absolute belief which wills a life of wandering upon the skeptic. The holy deeds of the skeptic form the totality of his existence and the permanence of his Diasporic community. Historically, this is the difference between weak-spirited skepticism, which is pragmatic or carries the suffix “post”, and skeptical religiousness, which enriches that same major religion—one which usually produces power and at the same time promises new eroticism. This Diasporic skepticism is the burning bush of the kind out of which God spoke to Moses (Exodus III, 4). This call out of the burning bush will never be easy to identify as other than the echo of the governing power-games and an effect of the immanence of the symbolic exchange. It will never be totally deciphered, classified, or evaluated; it will always remain beyond, other, an abyss, as understood by the deep religiousness of Moses, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Levinas. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic religiousness is closer to the Gnostic tradition than to atheism. In light of the loss of the relevance of the traditional religions as a manifestation of the overcoming of the bad God over Life, or over the primordial, exiled, God, they sought to give “theism a new meaning [...] from within atheism itself” (Horkheimer, 1988, vol. III., p. 185). This is in order to save the “Judeo-Christian” Utopia of “unification of truth, love and justice, as expressed in the Messianic idea” (Horkheimer, 1988, p. 186). Central to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic philosophy is Negative Utopianism. This is Negative Utopianism geared to the human field of struggle over the realization of its potential for being different, and in a sense more, than merely directed by the system. However, it is not the attainment of power that is here stressed but the Diasporic acknowledgement of the impotence of justice and of the human who challenges injustice. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic religiousness calls for “unification of religion and philosophy in the realm of true solidarity” (Horkheimer, 1985, vol. III., p. 223). This type of solidarity is supposed to include science as a central element and to perceive it as a threatening enemy. This is not the concept of utopian science which we find in Marcuse’s “principle of the new reality”, whose maximal utopian version is supposed to be realized in the future society. Within the framework of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Diasporic philosophy the given reality is not in the realm of “the absolute”, nor is it the place that one can 75
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decide in connection with this reality itself. Both thinkers came out against “dogmatic atheism” on the one hand and against dogmatic theism on the other (Horkeimer, 1988, p. 238). Utopianism is vital for all versions of Diasporic philosophy, and Negative Utopianism is quintessential for Adorno and Horkheimer. They stress it with special clarity when treating the implicit predecessors of Diasporic philosophy. That is why Horkheimer went so sharply against “Schopenhauer’s dogmatic atheism”, in which, in his opinion, the idea of “the nil” is no less subjective than the idea of “God”, which he refuses to present in a positive manner, in line with the hermetic tradition, Master Eckhart, and Nicolas of Cusa’s De Docta Ignoratia and its Negative Theology (Nicholas of Cusa, pp. 84–85). His existential decision enabled him to relate to holiness in the era of the exile of Spirit; holiness which is also an endless well of hope enables, against all realities and facts of history. This is also a source of respond-ability to (negative) Utopia. No argumentation can offer such fruits. It is the light. It is the holiness, surviving in its exile enables the burst-in of hope for those Diasporic humans who still refuse to be swallowed by the anti-Diasporic truths and functional facts. The only argument which can be found for this is a moralistic one: a refusal to acknowledge the reality of evil, which characterizes this world. In this context he explicitly speaks of “belief”—belief which is capable of unifying in a moralistic manner the community that holds that the terrible reality in the world will not have the last word. In other words, in some respects this is a yearning for “true” reality—that intended by the utopian tradition and the tradition of religious redemption. Thus we conclude that ultimately, despite their important contribution to the history of Diasporic philosophy, Horkheimer and Adorno are not consistent in their Diasporic philosophy even in the second stage of their work. As against this element in their thought it is important to stress that from a consistent Diasporic point of view the Diasporic essence of Being and human essential homelessness when true to itself is the possible arena for dancing with the immanence of the absolute. Only when overcoming the limits of their own work might Adorno and Horkheimer offer us such a transcending dance; a religious counter-education that will insist on transcendence from mere power-relations and meaninglessness. This will be within the framework of Negative Dialectics and nomadism as a way of life. It will be a mode of existence that develops special relations with the Jewish concept of an absent God and traditional Jewish anti-dogmatism and the rejection of any call to establish a national, intellectual or moral “home”. This refusal of any attempts at domestication and normalization is the terra to which the negation of the present reality is anchored. Eternal and infinite Diaspora as the manifestation of the absolute makes possible the grand refusal and empowers the overcoming of the call to reconcile with the reality and Being swallowed by the historical moment. But what is the non-contingent framework or foundation of “the last truth” or of the negation of its production? Horkheimer’s answer is: “the religion” (Horkheimer 1988, pp. 238–239). Here the struggle for the salvation of religiousness appears to him synonymous with the struggle for realizing the essence or the aim of Western culture.
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DIASPORIC EXISTENCE, JUDAISM AND COUNTER-EDUCATION Even if only implicitly, Adorno and Horkheimer accept the Diasporic essence of Being and human life as a starting point for their mature, religious-oriented Critical Theory Adorno, 1970, p. 137). This enables them to insist on their critique and on their reconstruction of the omnipotence of power and meaninglessness (namely the apparatuses that produce meanings, values, and drives) in current life, on the one hand, while insisting on transcendence from the present reality and devoting themselves to creativity and moral responsibility on the other. They refuse both the quest for Zionism (and all its alternatives) on the one hand and the “post-colonial” project and its predecessors, on the other. They insist on the essence of Jewish Diasporic impetus which avoids optimistic internationalism yet holds on to its genuine cosmopolitanism: We must all be unified by the yearning, which takes place in this world, injustice and horror will not be the final word, what was the other... what is called religion [...] the idea of infinity, which was developed by religion—we must need it and not give up on it. (Horkheimer, 1985, vol. VIII., p. 343)
The second idea comes to light in the commandment of Jewish religion not to present a positive description of God (ibid.), an idea diametrically opposed to the Marcusian utopia as a whole and that realizes the Jewish commandment “Thou shall not make a statue or mask” (Marcuse, 1969, p. 11). These are at the foundation of the Diasporic great refusal, which contains the same special knowledge that is included in the criticism in the laws of prayer; this is a privileged knowledge, an erotic response to the sudden possible—break out—of the totally other. Already, the first phase of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s contemplation includes a Diasporic recognition that one must not establish the truth value of values and goals and it is impossible to prove objective truths; that already here is the existential decision to believe; that only from the act of deciding to believe can the countereducational project spring. The criticism that positions this decision as an experiment to save the moral must still explain rationally how it is possible to see the preference of this move over remaining in relativism or subjectivism or replacing a specific belief system with one of its rivals. The absurd in the decision of Adorno and Horkheimer is that in the absence of the possibility to validate their decision rationally, the project takes place in the realm of struggle for the salvation of Enlightenment—which they criticize in an extreme manner as an expression of power and oppression. Their decision exists within the realm of their own religiousness, and only it can be used as a systematic base, just as it provides a utopian purpose as well. But is it a decision, an act of free choice—or the reaction to the persuasive power of the arbitrariness of the voice of the totally other, that forced itself on them and made possible their “free” choice to believe? And in what sense is this arbitrariness and power essentially different from the deceiving power of present-day Sirens that counter-education directs us to overcome? The explicit purpose of Adorno’s and 77
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Horkheimer’s Diasporic religiousness in the second phase of their thought is no longer a revolution, but a struggle for “the autonomy of the individual” (Horkheimer, 1985, vol. VIII., p. 341). In the struggle for salvation, Horkheimer’s animal symbolicum overpowers mere reality and continues on the paved way of the Cabbalists while he sees himself as continuing the position of Schopenhauer. According to this position reality is essentially not absolute and Life is not governed or reduced to “facts”, but the product of the mind, symbols and allegories, objects for infinite creative interpretations. Each thing which turns into a symbol has the ability to bring us down into a gutter which cannot be described, to the aspect of nil. In all things and every phrase in the world a concealed brilliance of hidden life manifests itself for the Cabbalist, infinite life glows inward [...] It is possible to say that the whole world and all acts of genesis are nothing but style of speaking, as a symbolic expression of that layer of what the thought cannot afford, from it a post or a corner of each building which can be achieved by thought. (ibid., p. 227)
The place of Diasporic hope in Horkheimer’s thought also matches its understanding by the theologians of salvation within genuine religiosity: salvation is, first and foremost, a promise that “its realization might remain no more than a hope” (ibid., p. 224). His “practical optimism” is not attuned to cosmic salvation. It is not even expressed in response to a utopian invitation to an ideal dialogue; within the Diasporic project, on the basis of the hope which it generates, the purpose and the end result of counter-education. Then, and only then, is there room for “practical” optimism in relation to the text and the Other as partners to a responsible, creative, loving, nomadic way of life. In other words, the “optimism” spoken of is found in the context and expresses a dimension of its action, and it is not a force or external condition which establishes this religiousness, which, in the long run, is devoted to an existential decision, which molds a way of life which, in the eyes of the believers, is moralistic. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Diasporic project expresses first and foremost yearning and belief which do not require approval and cannot be negated by the present reality and its logic. What the new Diasporic philosophy that Adorno and Horkheimer offer us is of the kind traditionally Judaism offered to the world. Today, however, it is offered to us under the evil conditions set by the coalition between global capitalism, the world of Jihad, the postcolonialist agenda and new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of progressive thinking. This coalition currently develops along new destructions also new possibilities for counter-education and active cosmopolitanism. Of special importance is here the old-new justification for acting in light of the (absence) good and the new psychological, philosophical, political and educational potentials for co-poiesis and improvisation as a Diasporic way of life. This new cosmopolitanism transforms the Gnostic and Messianic traditions in face of postmodern and pre-modern fundamentalist-oriented postcolonialist alternatives and reintroduces the Diasporic abyss as a challenge to be presently addressed. This Messianic moment, even as a potential, is normally distorted, misused, or forgotten. 78
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But in face of a cultural, economic, political, and, ultimately existential crisis, it awakes. When and if awoken, it might become an impetus for counter-education exactly against the exile of Spirit, the instrumentalization of reason, and the reification of the human relations. In opposition to the optimists, who establish great hopes for “the chosen ones”, “the oppressed”, “the client” or even for all humanity in the cyberspace, in the post-colonialist liberating struggle or on the foundations of globalizing capitalism (Beck, 2004, pp. 234–235), I offer a Diasporic reconstruction of our historical moment: it is the same globalizing capitalism which rationally sends entire populations into a “flexible job economy”, rationalized starvation, structurally guaranteed poor health, and loss of self-respect in the margins of the affluence of “the risk society”, which also opens the door for the instant, global, visibility of suffering, for universal needs and values, and for new possibilities for creative, loving, responsible, improvising counter-education and a Diasporic way of life that transcends ethnocentric solidarity, political borders, and contextual pragmatism and cynicism (Gur-Ze’ev, 2004, pp. 179–202.). Their work is an important manifestation of counter-education in the Gnostic sense. As such it manifests a Diasporic Philosophy that refuses all calls for “homecoming”, to God, to the Garden of Eden, to the Patria, to truth, or to mere-pleasure and practical nihilism. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s negative theology, while addressing the relevance of Jewish traditional anti-dogmatism and anti-collectivism, offers us today, more then ever, a goal, meaning, and love—without being swallowed by any “pleasure machine”, “truth” or “we”. As Diasporic humans we are called upon by their counter-education to insist on transcendence, to actualize love in creativity and in a kind of togetherness that is dialogic and refuses any collectivism and all dogmas. In other words this is the moment of birth of the eternal-improviser. In the era of the exile of the killer-of-God-each-moment-anew responsible improvisation is to be religiously thought, cultivated and actualized in all spheres of public and individual life experiences. It is a precondition, as well as the manifestation, of genuine creativity that transcends the Same. Transcendence here is an ethical act of the eternal-improviser, the Diasporic nomad. The transcendence of the eternalimproviser, as in the case of the genuine hacker, is a non-reified creativity; and even in a post-modern arena it is an open possibility. As Levinas shows us in Totality and Infinity the transcendence of the otherness from the continuum of the Same is an act of self-constitution that resists even the philosophical logos. The Diasporic philosophy should become a source of dislearning and alterity as well as a gate for authentic religious, creativity and Love that counter-education will develop in the most concrete and specific ways. Improvisation has many aspects that are to be thought, developed, edified and actualized: breathing, reclaiming forgotten and repressed voices, responding to changing situations while holding on to a Gnostic remembrance of (pre)history and the responsibility to the cosmos and eternity each moment anew are vital for today’s ethical I, who opens herself to the poiesis of Godless religiosity within troubled Life. As such, the later work of Adorno and Horkheimer makes a genuine contribution to counter-education, which is so much needed in face of the recent success of the violence of capitalism, postmodernism, 79
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and postcolonialism. One of the first steps of current counter-education should be the synthesis of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of Western society and the logic of capitalism with present day analyses of capitalist globalization processes within the framework of “risk society” that at the same time opens for the eternal-improviser new possibilities for Diasporic existence and new realizations of nomadism of the kind that a re-articulated Gnosis might make relevant. Such a counter-education should not abandon the critical tradition, yet it should insist on Love. It should develop new connections between the aesthetic and the ethic, the intellectual and the physical, the political and the religious dimensions of life of a non-dogmatic creator. How ironic it is that global capitalism, while exiling human spirit and enhancing the omnipotence of the creative “evil God”, also opens new possibilities for new forms of Gnosis and for new Diasporic individuals and communities. REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1988). Critical Models. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (1988). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer. Adorno, T. (1970). Gesammelte Schriften X., Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, T. (1970). Gesammelte Schriften III., Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, T. (1971). Erziehung zur Muendigkeit. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, T. (1999). Minima Moralia—Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso. Adorno, T. (1999). Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. Adorno, T. (2000). The Adorno Reader. Brian O’Connor (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Adorno, T. (1998). Criticak Models—Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry Pickford: New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. (2000). Culture industry reconsidered. In Brian O’Connor (Ed.) The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Arenas, E. (1982). Kommunikative Handlungen—Die Paradigmatische Bedeutung der Geschichte Jesu fuer eine Handlungstheorie. Düsseldorf. Barth, K. (1932). Kirchliche Dogmatik I., Zuerich, 1932. Beck, U. (2004). Risk Society—Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter, London: Sage. Benjamin, W. (1971). Zur Kritik der Gewalt und Andere Ausaetze. Frankfurt a. Main: Surkamp. Benjamin, W. (1972). Gesammelte Schriften 1.2, Frankfurt a. Man: Suhrkamp. Bonhoffer, D. (1965). Widerstand und Ergebun. Muenchen. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus—Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Mussumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press. Dresner, S. (1970). Prayer, Humility and Compassion. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1996). The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1998). Toward a nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy. Educational Theory. 48(4), pp. 463–486.
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ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER Gur-Ze’ev, I. (Fall, 1999). Cyberfeminism and education in the era of the exile of spirit. Educational Theory 49(4). Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2003). Destroying the Other’s Collective Memory. New York: Peter Lang. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2003a). Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and the possibility of counter-education. In Michael Peters, Colin Lankshear, and Mark Olssen (Eds.) Critical Theory and the Human Condition. New York: Peter Lang. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2004). Toward Diasporic Education. Tel-Aviv: Reseling. (Hebrew). Heschel, J. A. (1954) Man’s Quest for God. New York: Scribner. Horkheimer, M. (1985). Gesammelte Schriften VII. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. (1985). Gesammelte Schriften XIII., Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. (1988). Gesammelte Schriften XIV. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. (1985). Gesammelte Schriften VIII. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. (1988). Gesammelte Schriften III. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. (1989). Gesammelte SchriftenXIII. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp. Horkheimer, M. (1947). Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M. (May 26, 1960). Max Horkheimer Archive VI., 13. Horkheimer, M. (1978). Dawn & Decline—Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969. New York: The Seabury Press. Idel, M. (1972). Kabbalah—New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jonas, H. (1963). The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press. Klatzkin, Ya’akov (1925). Shekiat Hachaim. Berlin: Eshkol. (Hebrew) Klages, Ludwig (1951). Um Seele und Geist. Muenchen: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag. Lessing, T. (1924). Untergang der Erde am Geist (Europa und Asien). Hanover: G. Meiner. Levinas, E. (1987). Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987. Marcuse, H. (May, 6, 1969). Marx, Freud und der Monotheismus. Herbert Marcuse Archiv, 241.00. Mortley, R. (1986). From Word to Silence, II., Bonn: Hanstein. Nicholas of Cusa. (1990). On Learned Ignorance. Translated by Jasper Hopkins, Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press. Nietzsche, F. (1975). Goetzen/Daemmerung. Werke II. Muenchen: Carl Hanser Verlag. Nuovo, V. (November 1966). Some critical remarks on radical theology. Union Seminary Quarterly Review XXII (1). Rosenzweig, F. (1970). The Star of Redemption. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. (Hebrew) Zizek, S. (1993). Tarring with the Negative—Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press.
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BEYOND PEACE EDUCATION: TOWARD CO-POIESIS AND ENDURING IMPROVISATION
WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEACE EDUCATION? Peace education is currently going the wrong way: it is unwilling to address the questions concerning its path, its telos, the challenges of its goals and the relevance of its critiques. Its popularity is growing by the day precisely because of its irresponsibility, banality and good-natured disorientation. It receives at once acknowledgement and appreciation by all in an embarrassing manner. There is, however, a chance for a turn—not for peace education as such but in life possibilities themselves. The gate to other life possibilities is not locked and can never be totally sealed or eternally forgotten. Such a new way, nevertheless, is far from becoming “an alternative peace education” because of its philosophical responsibility and its unconditional commitment to eternal improvisation and Love. Yet it is of vital importance for such counter-education to challenge the false promises of presentday peace education; to face up to the existential, philosophical and political settings which make possible current peace education and the kind of power relations that threaten the very existence of the planet, an order which current peace education enables, serves, conceals and glorifies (Gur-Ze’ev, 2007, p. 302). Peace education is currently enjoying anonymous support. It is praised and paid tribute to by most theoretical orientations, political establishments and the so-called radical movements. Who today dares courageously to challenge this idol or offer a systematic negation of the very principle of peace? Totalitarian states such as Cuba, China, Sudan, Libya or Syria are quick so sign the relevant US declarations, as are other anti-humanist regimes such as the Shiite-controlled Iran or the Sunni-controlled Saudi Arabia. We have to go beyond the fields of cynicism and the arenas of the grotesque in search for the meaning of texts such as The Yamoussouko Declaration of 1989 that called on UNESCO to construct a new vision of peace by developing a peace culture based on the universal values of respect for life, liberty, justice, solidarity, tolerance, human rights and equality between women and men.
The year 2000 was declared by the UN as the year of “Culture of Peace” and 2001– 2010 were determined as the international decade for culture of peace and nonviolence for the children of the world (UNESCO, 2008). Already in 1945 the nations of the world declared that [ 83 ]
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. (UN 1945)
Enlightened modernists and “soft” postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists, critical thinkers, conservatives, and liberals all ardently participate in celebrating the new fashion with such devotion that it makes us wonder what terrible secret lies hidden in the form of such a devotion to self-forgetfulness in this feast. The challenge of peace education stretches beyond the conflict between its commitment to “a culture of peace” and its banality, dogmatism and apparent support by murderous totalitarian regimes and fanatical organizations. It transcends the opposition between its obvious modernist (humanist) ideological commitment to “a culture of peace” and its explicit support by pre-modern anti-humanist ideologies and regimes such as that of Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Iran on the one hand, and by postmodern revolutionaries and postmodern anti-West/colonialist/whiteness/phallocentrist NGOs on the other. These contradictions might be explained by “normal” political manipulations and cynicism which rules the standard UN rhetoric and the identity politics. Much more of a challenge, however, are the philosophical pre-assumptions and argumentations within the peace education theories and researchers. Is it possible that the essence of peace is negated in peace education? And is it possible that even against its own will peace education calls for the negation of its negation? On our way to unveil what peace education conceals we come upon stiff difficulties. In peace education as a field of research, until this very moment no serious attempts have been made to elaborate its most central concepts. “Pacifism”, “violence”, “counter-violence” and “emancipation”, “culture of peace”, among others, have still not been probed. This harsh assertion is unfortunately valid not solely in respect to the analysis of the central concepts and ideals of peace education. The synchronic drabness of this field of research is followed by its diachronic poverty. Sadly this also holds for the self-reflectivity of peace education. To date no space has been reserved for a critical historical perspective of the relation of current peace education to the dramatic history of the socialist peace movement, nor to the rich and long pacifist tradition in antiquity, in medieval times and in modernity, nor yet to the present complex postmodern neo-liberal, fundamentalist and other politics of peace. The theoretical stance of the field, actually, calls for questioning the very justification of “peace education” as a distinctive, well-defined, self-reflective field of research and as a specific, theoretically justifiable educational practice. It is worthwhile mentioning that analytically, the reciprocity of its two fundamental concepts—the concept of “peace” and the concept of “education”—are hardly ever philosophically analyzed (Gur-Ze’ev, 2001). Up to the present, peace education theoreticians have not bothered to elaborate on the relation between “power” and “violence”. Neither have they addressed the fruitful tension between “peace” and “freedom” in principle and in the local arenas of conflict, more especially in the present neo-liberal world order. It is as if “freedom” does not negate “peace”, at least in a pre-emancipated world. It seems 84
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that it did not even occur to the protagonists of peace education that “peace” in a less then a perfect world is a terrible human condition, to be morally and practically challenged—and that overcoming such an immoral human condition might justify even violent resistance to “peace”. Most, if not all, disciples of peace education will probably agree that violently resisting the kind of “peace” National Socialism worked for was legitimate. Others, such as consistent Christian pacifists and disciples of Gandhi, will insist on no violence whatever the circumstances; even in face of the victims of the realization of a Nazi kind of “peace”. Even this most extreme test case is problematic. Surely it is a complex challenge in cases such as the stance of peace education activists in face of the violence of the 1789 French Revolution, the 1956 Budapest uprising, the 1959 Congo uprising against colonialist Belgium, the 1968 student revolt or the 1987 Palestinian intifada. Not less of a challenge is the dogmatic-aggressive-racist spectacle of much of the peace movement in the 2001 UN anti-racist conference in Durban. In this light, we might ask this question on a synchronic level, not solely on a diachronic level: how do peace education theoreticians differentiate between violence, counter-violence, structural violence and metaphysical violence? The surprising answer is that the first steps towards self-reflection and philosophical analysis of the central concepts and orientations within the framework of peace education have not yet even begun to be taken, and the most advanced elaborations on these issues are still the old texts of Galtung. So far, their wide perspectives and vigor have not been followed by generations of new peace education researchers, educators and theoreticians. Let’s look closer at a specific case to test some of the foregoing examples of the relations between the concepts of “freedom” and “peace” among (in)equalities amidst the dialectics between “violence” and “counter-violence”. That such an analysis seriously relates to the differentiation between power, violence, counter-violence, revolt, defiance, insubordination and passive disobedience is of utmost importance. Here we cannot go into it, and we have to be content with making explicit the framework and the context of such a future critical reconstruction. Some critical thinkers do not see the capitalist order and its realized “peace” as much better than the Stalinist, the Khmer Rouge or the Nazi promised “peace”, or at least see them as different stages on one and the same level. It was none other than Marcuse who claimed in a 16 August 1944 personal letter to Horkheimer that the victory over Nazi Germany was not yet the victory over the actual powers of Evil. Certainly, many progressive thinkers and peace education activists see themselves as humanists or “leftists”. As such they advocate and even admire the 1968 generation and its revolt. How then may they justify their version of peace education in the absence of a philosophical elaboration in face of the 1968 violence/counter-violence/ revolt/insubordination/defiance? The 1968 students’ and workers’ rebellion was actualized in a rich range of activities. From teach-ins and love-ins at “liberated” campuses to paralyzing the public sphere, active support of the Vietcong war effort, to using explosives to bomb the centers of capitalism and murder a prime minister and innocent rich victims. So 85
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should the 1968 revolt be considered peace education-in-action—or its negation? Should we differentiate between specific manifestations of the1968 violence and evaluate them accordingly? And if so, according to what criteria and values should we enter this terra incognita for current peace education? If we go here onto the path of peace education that theorists have not dared to enter we will begin our Odyssey by distinguishing three different paths of analysis and reflection: 1. Analysis of the central conceptions, perspectives, values and ideals of peace education. 2. Analysis of the rival utopias and agendas that the various kinds of current peace education address. 3. Analysis of the relevant alternatives to the fundamental spiritual, intellectual and political strives, values and ideals that govern the various central trends in today’s peace education. Some theoretical work on this direction has been done by Ben-Porath (BenPorath 2003, 2006), Page (2004), Pappe (1997, 1999), Reardon (2001), Salomon & Nevo (1999) and Grewal (2003). These attempts, however, are but first steps toward a serious conceptualization and reflections concerning the fundamentals of the field of peace education. Until now there has been no more then very modest and preliminary attempts in this direction. Salomon offers us the most systematic attempt to analyze the various trends and the central concepts of peace education: Peace education has many divergent meanings for different individuals in different places. For some, peace education is mainly a matter of changing mindsets; the general purpose is to promote understanding, respect, and tolerance toward yesterday’s enemies… For others, peace education is mainly a matter of cultivating a set of skills; the general purpose here is to acquire a nonviolent disposition and conflict resolution skills…for still others, particularly in Third World countries, peace education is mainly a matter of promoting human rights. (Salomon, 2002, p. 4)
According to Maxine Cooper, there is no one clear agreed upon definition of peace education. Authors such as Harris (2004) and Vriens (1997) Staub (2003) and Thompson (2003) have defined peace education in a variety of ways. This multiplicity of definitions has led to theorists such as Ben Porath (2003) and Gur-Ze’ev (2001) stating that current definitions of ‘peace’ are too wide and nebulous. (Cooper, 2005, p.2)
James Smith Page writes explicitly that one intriguing and lingering lacuna within the critical literature has been the failure to develop and expound systematically the philosophical foundations of peace education. (Page, 2004, p. 4)
A reflection shared by theorists such as Ben-Porath, according to whom contemporary approaches to peace education incorporate a wide range of responses to a variety of forms of violence, including coping and sharing skills among peers, the need for recognition of the ‘other’ and the development of care. The field entitled ‘peace education’ is in fact so broad that authors disagree on the description of the problem they wish to address and correspondingly on
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“What is peace education?” Salomon and Nevo courageously ask the right question. “What is the core of peace education, its defining attributes? What, if anything, distinguishes its most prototypical instantiations from other, similar fields?” They reply: Numerous programs are called ‘peace education’, ranging from violence reduction in schools to learning about war and peace, and from democratic education to the cultivation of self-esteem. Subsuming all of these under the category of peace education tends to blur important distinctions, such as between the kind of peace education that is carried out in areas of conflict, such as northern Ireland, and programs designed for more peaceful regions. Similarly, too wide a category tends to lump together programs designed to cultivate universal peaceful outlook with programs aimed at promoting a peaceful disposition toward a particular group, race or nation to replace collective sentiments of hatred, discrimination, and hostility. (Salomon & Nevo 1999: 5–6)
In his 2002 paper “The nature of peace education” Salomon concludes that “neither scholarly nor practical progress can take place in the absence of clear conceptions of what peace education is and what it is to serve” (Salomon, 2002, p. 3). It is of vital importance for peace education as a field of research and as a praxis to go into this unknown land. Here I will be content with an introduction and the first step of an elaboration on the relations between “peace” and “education”, and I will concentrate on the first category. I will question the relations between peace and freedom, and I will try to elaborate the philosophical preconditions, assumptions, traditions and fruits of each of these concepts and question the very possibility of peace education. IS PEACE DISTINGUISHABLE FROM VIOLENCE? The hegemonic trends in peace education are anti-Life, even when explicitly committed to a positive Utopia and to fantastic visions of the future as a guide for changing the present reality by peace education. Even as such, as in the case of the promises of redemption by the medieval Church and the ancien régime it is but part and parcel of the reality it pretends to change. At best, it strengthens the hegemony, its powerstructures and the representation apparatuses that ensure the invisibility of the structural violence and the productivity of its silencing methods. The social manifestation of the relation between peace and violence is enabled by a philosophical structuring that peace education contributes so effectively to camouflage. Contrary to the popular assumption among peace education theorist and practitioners, it is my claim that the division between peace and violence (or conflict) is not unproblematic. The kind of differentiation between the two determines one's preferred version of peace education, yet the whole project should be able to justify its preference for peace. 87
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The justification of the preference for peace and its appreciation as worthier than free creativity, responsibility and loyalty to self-edification, and creative, dangerouspoetic life of individuals and collectives should be seriously addressed. Current peace education does not dare to address the challenges offered by some of the greatest philosophers, such as Heraclitus, St. Augustine, Hamann, Schelling, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Benjamin and Derrida, and poets, and writers such as William Blake, Lentz, Shaftsbury, Klinger, Schiller and Allen Ginsberg on the one hand and Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus on the other. As an ultimate goal, the justifications common in current peace education not only serve the current hegemony (Schmidt 1968) and various violences that threaten genuine responsibility, freedom and creativity: peace education, actually, is one of the most advanced manifestations of these violences and is a serious threat to human edification. CONFLICTING CONCEPTIONS OF “PEACE” IN CURRENT PEACE EDUCATION The poverty of attempts at conceptualization of the concept of “peace” and the unsatisfying attempts to analyze this central concept of the field of peace education are typically manifested in the latest and most advanced effort of the American academic left to address this challenge. In her Citizenship Under Fire (Ben-Porath, 2006) Ben-Porath assembles all the different trends and traditions in the field of peace education into two opposing categories: the “holistic” approach on the one hand, and the “conflict resolution” approach on the other. Summing up the “holistic” understanding of “peace”, she writes that its proponents aim for no less than the elimination of all forms of violence, including inequality of rights and class (as a structural form of violence). In their more radical form, they conclude that peace is never an attainable option, or more radically, that peace is not a better option than war. (Ben-Porath, 2006, p. 66)
This analysis does not relate at all to two of the most important camps in the field of peace education (that are mistakably positioned by many as total opposition): the modernists and the poststructuralists. This classification too is extremely problematic and we should work to articulate more refined and compound differentiations. But even within this taxonomy Ben-Porath’s attempt fails to offer an orderly reconstruction of the various trends/philosophies/philosophers who in their work put peace education forward as a specific academic field of research. Her analysis lumps poststructuralists, neo-Marxists and pre-modern religious thinkers together as a common “holistic” unified “position”. She does this even in face of the poststructuralists’ persistent claim that they have no “position” and they treat most seriously differences, localities, borders, and transgressions, and certainly resist and avoid totalities and holisms of any kind. This attempt at analysis does not constitute a serious effort to understand the “holistic” alternative which it creates, and the reader is left in the dark concerning the 88
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specific assumptions, claims, modes of argumentations and the different conclusions of the various philosophies assembled here together under the flag of a “holistic” concept of “peace”. These different philosophies seem to be evoked only for rhetorical purposes—to be compared with, put together with, and rejected altogether jointly with, the “too narrow” option of the “conflict-resolution” version of peace education (Ben-Porath, 2006, p. 74). To my mind, not all proponents of educational alternatives, reduced by Ben-Porath to “holistic peace scholars” actually argue what she tells us they argue. I think I am entitled to articulate such an argument, at least concerning myself, since I am presented in her book as one of these “holistic” thinkers. I can only restate my consistent claim that not only do I not share this positive Utopia and have no such aims, strives or ideals, but to the contrary, as I will show in the following, these ideals, quests, programs and their philosophical presumptions are to my mind a great danger, part and parcel of normalizing education to be challenged by counter-education (Gur-Ze’ev, 2007). The post-structuralist philosophies that Ben-Porath reduces to this “holistic” position are too far from any positive Utopias; and others, such as St. Augustine, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin, with whom I share some of my arguments on this issue, are also far from being “impractical”. Nor do they claim that “peace is not a better option than war” as Ben-Porath wants the “holistic” thinkers to assert. Ben-Porath, like so many other good-seeking peace education theorists, misses also the modernists’ project in the field of peace education when she relates to their “too narrow” view of the concept of peace. This misunderstanding manifests itself with special clarity in the case of John Galtung’s elaboration of the concept of peace. His work clarifies the limits of the modernist-postmodernist dichotomy, as well as “holistic”-”narrow” dichotomies and those offered by Salomon, who proposes that we distinguish between peace in the sense of harmony and the absence of tension and conflict on the individual, micro level, and peace in the sense of the absence of war, armed conflict or violence, on the collective, macro level. (Salomon & Nevo, 1999, p. 6)
Other scholars, such as Reardon, identify peace with reconciliation and the prospects for achieving peace through conflict resolution (Reardon, 1988, p. 69) and education for reflection grounded in shared values (ibid., p. 72). This trend is also manifested in UNESCO’s 1998 declaration on the occasion of World Teachers’ Day. Teachers are presented as peace builders who shape the future within a positivistic conflict-resolution orientation: Building the foundations for peace is as much a challenge for teachers as it is for those who sign peace treaties. Conflict resolution and the implementation of peace settlements feature regularly in the news, but today on World Teachers’ Day, we should ask ourselves how much such peace efforts would achieve without the unheralded contribution of the world’s 50 million peace teachers? Day after day and year after year, teachers build the very fabric of peace. They transmit the knowledge, values and attitudes, the skills and behavior which ensure that peace is not just the absence of
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Note that while accepting Galtung’s positive concept of peace (Galtung, 1975, p. 29) and even when relating to the social context and its structural violence (ibid., p. 251), the UNESCO declaration conceives peace as an absence of conflict that is to be achieved by solving “social injustice” through the teaching of conflict-resolution skills. This declaration conceives peace and social justice as positive and desirable, in contrast to violence and “injustice”, which are conceived as undesirable. According to the UNESCO’s declaration, this is the aim of teachers as educators, and this is actually what teachers actually universally do in their daily work. It is precisely the work of the fifty million teachers referred to by UNESCO that contributes most effectively to the main mechanisms of perpetuating violence and injustice. This is not because they are doing such a poor job, but on the contrary, because around the world teachers, together with the other manipulators of normalizing education, are doing so well. The current human reality is to be challenged by a critical address of the fundamentals and the context of the concept of peace that these teachers/educators are committed to, and certainly not by a search for new routes for improving their present “achievements”. Within this trend there is a strong positivistic conviction that conflict resolution skills are a matter of professional knowledge and good didactics. A belief exists here that these skills, fundamentally, might be taught along with the quest for justice, in the most concrete and specific manner (Chetkow-Yanoov, 1996, pp. 12–28). Some positivist writers within this trend even see peace education as a successful conflictsolving process in which the decline of violence is to be detected by a measurable promotion of schools’ efficiency and productivity (Harris, 1996). As the UNESCO declaration shows, not all neglect the social context and the challenge of actual power relations within which peace education and its rivals are produced. Winch, for example, is a peace-education thinker who rejects the conception of positive peace. Winch stresses the inevitability of social conflict and suggests that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but entails “learning to live with conflict in a constructive manner” (Friesen & Weiler, 1988, p. 51). Within this framework personal fulfillment is essential for world peace, or in Ross’s words, “the individual must be helped to develop his full potential for constructive, peaceful living” (ibid.). Peace education within the multicultural discourse emphasizes diversity as a precondition for peace, in contrast to the concept of reproducing shared values and a homogeneous kind of reflection towards universal solidarity and responsibility as praised by liberal peace educators and most of the theorists of civil education. Kristi Rennebohm-Franz’s statements are paradigmatic in this context: With multiple versions of ways of coming to know our world as well as multiple versions of presenting and sharing understandings, we begin to weave an educational tapestry that reveals the complexities, diversities, commonalties, and interconnectedness of many human experiences.
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BEYOND PEACE EDUCATION Understanding multiple versions is the beginning of learning how to weave a global multicultural peace tapestry rich in many colors, textures, and styles. (Rennebohm-Franz, 1996, p. 266)
Many peace-education theorists in the postmodernist multicultural and postcolonialist framework, such as Peter McLaren, Ward Churchill and Ilan Pappe, support the explicit violence of the oppressed and present it as legitimate counter-violence that ultimately will bring peace. Effective violence of the oppressed is actually presented as peace education-in-action. Effective manipulation of the representation of events, or clashes between the various narratives, legitimates here lies, fraudulence and deceitfulness. In the USA, in the case of Ward Churchill, and in Israel, in the case of Muhamad Bachry and Tedi Katz, there was strong support in the leftist peace movement for the right of the oppressed to dishonesty and moral irresponsibility, not solely to counter-violence. The call for violence and dishonesty as a manifestation of peace education in action has strong theoretical support in face of the influence of poststructuralism on postmodern multiculturalism, postcolonialism and some of the postmodern radical feminists on their way to “peace”. Multicultural peace education is explicitly founded “on postmodernist theory” as against “modern national education” (Pappe, 1999, p. 233). It is conceived as a precondition for a worthy peace education (Pappe, 1997, p. 221). The new, postmodern methodology, in the service of peace education, is founded here on two assumptions: (1) negating the natural sciences as a model for human sciences, and (2) doubting the objectivity of the researcher. For Pappe, reality is a representative and interpretative issue. The historian, therefore, is allowed to represent it as he or she wishes…the historian should give freedom to the sole quality which gives him the power to write about the past—imagination. Not the kind of imagination which supports a reliable representation of the past as modernists understood this conception but rather imagination of the kind that will enable the historian to produce aesthetically the history, according to the known styles in comedy, tragedy and farce. (Pappe, 1999, p. 235)
This is to occur in the service of the silenced and oppressed voices in a multicultural society (ibid: 236). Peace education is made possible here by means of this new methodology for giving voice to silenced ones on the road to “peace”, which is conditioned by the deconstruction of the hegemony and its structural violence. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, such a multicultural peace education will be realized by the de-Zionization of the Middle East and deconstruction of the State of Israel by the Israelis themselves and their recognition of their responsibility for the Palestinians’ suffering as a precondition for a construction of a bridging narrative and a rich, multicultural reality in a peaceful future (Pappe, 1997, p. 236). Freire, Rivage-Seul, and many other critical educational theorists such as McLaren and Giroux tried to give voice and place to the perspective of the marginalized, to empower those whose voices have been silenced. Rivage-Seul tries to develop an alternative peace education based not on the hegemonic perspectives 91
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and their interests, but on the contrary—on the silenced, based on Freire's concept of moral imagination, which will hopefully transcend “the bounds of technical thought” (Rivage-Seul, 1987, p. 160). However, peace education within this traditional Freirerian framework is universalistic and essentialist, and at bottom conceives hierarchical relations between teacher and students as a precondition for educational progress (Gur-Ze'ev, 1998a, p. 463). Emancipatory-oriented modernist writers who are committed to developing the possibility of the oppressed raising their voice conceive the actualization of the victims potential for the universalization of knowledge and the articulation of the facts as a precondition for an emancipatory peace education. This line of thinking is very much present also in some current multicultural discourses which affirm difference, contingency, and anti-fundamentalist-oriented pedagogy. Here again, the very possibility of a postmodern dialogue among differences and of border crossing overcoming ethnocentrism is ultimately founded on modern universalistic conceptions of the good. The relation between peace and human rights and the potential tension between multiculturalism and humanism is identifiable also in major UNESCO declarations that consistently miss the point. Here the United Nations’ commitment to self-determination and the independence of states is covered by an explicit, uncompromising commitment to a humanist conception of universal human rights. In UNESCO’s Medium-Term Plan for 1977–1982 we read that the General Conference “condemns all violations of human rights as a threat and contrary to its very spirit”. The struggle for peace, and action to promote human rights, are recognized as inseparable. Their linkage “constitutes a coherent conceptual framework”. UNESCO (Brock-Utne, 1983, p. 62) states in this spirit that There can be no genuine peace when the most elementary human rights are violated, or while situations of injustice continue to exist; conversely, human rights for all cannot take root and achieve full growth while latent or open conflicts are rife… Peace is incomplete with malnutrition, extreme poverty and the refusal of the rights of people to self-determination… The only lasting peace is a just peace based on respect for human rights. Furthermore, a just peace calls for the establishment of an equitable international order, which will preserve future generations from the scourge of war.
Already in the 1960s Galtung challenged the then excessive weight given to peace as the presence of the absence of direct violence. In his peace theory he included the concept of structural violence and offered the conceptions of “positive peace” and “negative peace”, notions that are richer and philosophically more challenging than most conceptualizations in current peace education. According to Galtung, two concepts of peace should be distinguished: negative peace, defined as the absence of organized violence between such major human groups as nations, but also between racial and ethnic groups of the magnitude that can be reached by internal wars; and positive peace, defined as a pattern of cooperation and integration between major human groups. (Galtung, 1975, p. 29)
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In light of his understanding of “positive peace”, preceding the traditional positive Utopia projects, Galtung understood that he had to develop a vision of this harmonic future of humanity but also a well defined theory of violence. He had to address the role of violence in furthering progress in history. An attempt to understand the nature of violence is a precondition to making sense of the concept of “positive peace” as a realization of human potentials and its freedom. Accordingly, Galtung tells us that violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realization. (Galtung, 1969, p. 168)
While developing an historical perspective and claiming that “the needs perspective has been used as an instrument of the human right tradition” (Galtung, 1994, p. 107), Galtung includes in peace education the commitment to rights such as “the right to sleep”, “the right to co-existence with nature” and “the right to be free to experiment with alternative ways of life” (ibid., p. 104). He concludes that peace education should relate also to ecological challenges and cultural colonialism while challenging the invisibility of cultural violence and structural violence. From his utopian prima facie modernist project he treats in a rich and challenging manner the problematic set by neo-Marxists and poststructuralists of his day such as Marcuse, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, who are less than satisfied with the standard liberal conceptions of violence and peace, as still manifested in much of today’s peaceeducation research. These diverse conceptions of peace are united in conceiving “peace” as desirable. They also manifest the constitutive idea of peace education: the reduction or even complete elimination of violence in human society along the realization of human potential for free and just intersubjectivity. But why should we join in this party to begin with? Why should we be committed to an idealist philosophy, and why should such a philosophy be centered on eliminating violence and not on enhancing freedom, creativity, Godly love or total annihilation of all life and a return back home to nothingness? The war between rival conceptualizations of peace Within the framework of monotheism, especially in pre-modern arenas, “peace” obtains its meaning in light of the tension between exile from the Garden of Eden and the open possibility of redemption in a Godly teleological history. When you conceive yourself as a true disciple of the omnipotent God, “peace” as the conclusion of history and the realization of cosmic telos is very different from modern mundane conceptions of peace, and surely of postmodern deconstructions and utopias of peace, quasi-peace, grotesque-peace, anti-peace and any of their serious alternatives. Antiquity, had many alternative conceptions of peace, ranging from disregard to heroic refusal of the vision of “peace” as can be seen in the Homeric heroes and Greek civilization in general, which 93
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV was dominated by a conception of life which was essentially warlike. Whatever the event, whatever the change, conflict in one form or another was always close at hand. Religion often assumed violent overtones. (Zampaglione, 1973, p. 18)
The negation of the idea of tranquility is very much present in the cosmology of Anaximandrus and in the philosophy of Heraclitus, who was so influential and meaningful for Nietzsche, Stirner and Heidegger and is still so relevant for present poststructuralist philosophy. He tells us and all humanity that One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are (so) ordained. (Heraclitus, 1987, p. 49).
Contradictions, eternal fluidity and antinomies are essential to this worldview, in which heterogeneity and war are not a godly punishment to be corrected or an historical stage to be recovered by progress within history. Plurality, diversity, heterogeneity and conflict are ontologically founded as the eternity of matter. In this sense there is no use in peace education since there is no history—neither actual progress nor redemption: [For, according to Heraclitus,] it is not possible to step twice into the same river, nor is it possible to touch a mortal substance twice in so far as its state (hexis) is concerned. But, thanks to (the) swiftness and speed of change it scatters (things?) and brings (them?) together again, [(or, rather, it brings together and lets go neither ‘again’ nor ‘later’ but simultaneously)], (it) forms and (it) dissolves, and (it) approaches and departs. (Heraclitus, 1987, p. 55)
The heterogeneous, anti-homogeneous pantheistic alternative of antiquity is of utmost relevance here. The Gnostic challenge to both monotheistic and pantheistic alternative conceptions of peace is relevant for our present day too. Each of these three traditions (1—the promised total harmonious state of affairs articulated as “peace”, 2—the quested worthy heterogeneous, dangerous, heroic pantheistic vision of life, and 3—the Gnostic opposition to these two alternatives) offers an implicit alternative concept of peace and “peace education”. In their secular transformations they reappear in modernity and in postmodernity, and they still shape much of the present rival concepts of peace. And yet, modern concepts of peace and peace education are also distinctively different from those enabled within the framework of a Godly absolute who enables, even directs, collective, historical redemption, or, personal telos toward salvation and “peace”. In modern philosophies peace is conceived in different levels of argumentation and in various and conflicting visions. All, however, are enabled by the killing of God and the celebration of his death. The killing of God is more fruitful then his death. His death might be overcome and he can rise up and return, but the act of killing God, the act of giving birth, or at least being hosted by the critical spirit, is irreversible. It can only be challenged. And one of the forms of challenging the critical spirit that killed God is the deconstruction of the Spirit itself, leaving us hugged by “critique” that has no love. 94
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Modern philosophies offer different and conflicting articulations of the exile or killing of God, as we see in Descartes, Kant, Marx or Nietzsche. Some, in line with Kant and Descartes, will reserve some room for a god. But never for God. Never for the sole true subject; never for the absolute as the Almighty; never for the total dialectical negation of humanity; only for partial or conditional negations of humanity as the true absolute/subject/God. These modern philosophies have secularized theology and have much in common with the pre-modern concept of God as it is revealed in their teleological, progressive, concept of peace as a kind of overcoming the religious version of exile and the ontological and existential presence of shortage and fear. These seemingly oppositional traditions are united in their challenge to the central philosophical precondition of “homereturning”. The presumption of the human telos as “homereturning” is replaced by a vision of destroying the historical destruction of exile that begins metaphorically with the “Fall” from the Garden of Eden and eating of the tree of knowledge. The telos of philosophy and the nature of human progress meet here in a grand positive Utopia: the vision of a future harmonious state of affairs, which as in Marxian theory will secularize the eschatological religious vision and will offer a tiger-like leap from “prehistory” into “history” (Marx, 1997, p. 1) or “peace” as an earthly Garden of Eden. Positive Utopianism (Gur-Ze’ev, 1996) made possible by human heroism as a feast of eating the flesh of the “Leviathan”/”father”/ God and edifying the deification of humanity is a magical spectacle which transforms natural and historical realities. This feast has sensual and physical positive-historical dimensions: the reality of progress, revolution and peace in face of a Godless world where there are no metaphysical truths, mysterium or hell—only the fruits of human beings’ manipulations and “flat” realities. The “flat” realities are symbolic. They manifest different aspects and dynamics of the totality of the immanence that our post-Nietzschean era understands has no gates, no depths and no mysterious peaks to “seriously” address. Accepting that we live in a post-metaphysical era is the only seriousness that is seriously possible for us. The concept of progress as the historical realization of central ideals of humanism such as freedom manifests the fundamentality of the “homereturning” project to Western tradition, a tradition whose impetus is fear of nature, of bestiality, of thingness, of shortage, of meaninglessness. It is dramatically manifested in the philosophies of Condorcet, Hegel and Marx, and it pays tribute more to the importance of fear in Jewish monotheism than to the Greek attraction to a belligerent life as a constitutive ideal for generous, worthy life, for arete. According to Condorcet, humanity is under eternal self-rebirth and paves the way for itself to truth and happiness, by constantly relying on human reason and “the facts”. This Utopia is possible, since nature has placed no limits on human self-edification (Condorcet, 1955, p. 4). According to these philosophies, in its total fulfillment, within the framework of the ideal of freedom, humanity realizes peace in the form of effective total violence against external and “internal” nature and all forms of stagnation, borders, unchallenged power and the various manifestations of peace/consensus/truth. The idea of freedom as an eternal journey and restless, burning, birth-giving overcoming, 95
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demands total control of human existence and unrestrained effective manipulation of nature. Total rational control and effectively silencing any opposition is taken as “peace”. Philosophers and poets, but more so workers, women, colored people and immigrants, have during the last three centuries been brutally faced in different forms and on different occasions with the naivety, futility and hopelessness of the humanistic-oriented “homereturning” project. They have met the fruits of the various and conflicting modern attempts to reestablishing, on earth, the Garden of Eden in the form of replacing total naivety, intimacy and integration with total control of nature in all its dimensions. In the case of Nietzsche, Spengler, Camus, Adorno, Levinas and Derrida, this encounter offered an alternative to the quest for “peace” and to the presumptions, frameworks and telos of the various “homereturning” projects in the form of Diasporic philosophy, eternal tragic heroism and enduring nomadism (GurZe’ev, 2004). Is it the end of the idea of peace? Not at all. The absence of peace as promised by Judeo-Christian monotheism and by their secularized political theologies is the gate to a Diasporic peace. Diasporic peace is determined by Love amid suffering, meaninglessness and nomadism within the eternal struggle between the quest for Life and the drive to Nothingness as two rival “homes” demanding the end of human eternal exile in the kingdom of ambivalence. Diasporic peace represents hope and makes improvisation possible. It provides the courage to hope for responsible Diasporic, improvisational peace: peace with a restless mind and ever-agitated reality and (anti)self assurance or self-sacrifice/ constitution. It is fundamentally opposed to the positive, collectivist-oriented Utopias promised by the great social thinkers of modernity and Enlightenment from Thomas More to Marx, Lenin, Dewy and Marcuse. In the post-metaphysical era peace is realized in the changed stance of the human subject, knowledge and communication between world and human, reality and fantasy; peace is made possible in the framework of the disappearance of the killer of God in hypereality and the exile of death itself in the era of simulacra (Baudrillard, 2007, p. 9). Simularum is essentially an ontological peace between the sign, the signifier and the signified—no more correspondence, alienation and life-and-death struggles in the field of representation. The Eros-Thanatos tension, along with God and its humanistic substitutes that promise revolution and final-eternal peace, becomes irrelevant. The post-modern era as the era of transcendence being swallowed in immanence is the era of continuum without redemption, ultimate end or “meaning”. Nothing, not even the human subject, transcends the continuum and differentiates itself from the totality as difference. Death and violence as well as meaning/lessness, destruction and (re)birth are not to be distinguished in the strong sense of the word. They are distinguished only from a partial, naïve “position” that itself is subject to endless deconstruction, repositioning, transgression and de-territorialization. From the same point of view, however, death is everywhere: but solely in the sense that makes differences possible as long as they are of the kind that do not pose a difference that makes a difference. Peace, in this respect, governs already presently, and there is no use of Utopias or eschatological visions of any kind. Peace 96
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is already now the almighty: it rules everywhere and everything in the continuum of the immanence and its total harmony. Of course, only mountains, trees, rivers and animals “know” it in the form of their intimacy with the totality of thingness. Humans who are so aware of their partial context and reflect on their suffering and meaninglessness have to be educated to it. The postmodern pleasure machine becomes the greatest peace educator. The only thing you have to do is honestly look at our own children in the affluent West and you will see the face of peace. Now, do you honestly still wish for “peace”? The fruit of this neo-liberal culture-industry is violence. This postmetaphysical gift is currently given to us: in the form of consuming objects as co-poiesis that is the “home” of the postmodern human and in the form of ecstatic struggle over recourses and positions for producing objects. Objects that will revolt and position themselves as agents of Life, mediation for a process that becomes hyper-subject; making possible the subjectification of humans as agents, symbols and statistical references. And as such they are religiously consumed along with the intimacy and communication with other agents of the system that will cynically, namely peacefully, consume these narcissistic-oriented humans as parts of its own peaceful, post-Fordist, reproduction of meaninglessness. In face of the ecstasies of globalizing capitalism and the quasi-poetic change in the stance of knowledge and existence, new forms of “peace” emerge. The neoliberal life-and-death battle as the truly “equal”, “just” and “beautiful” realization of peaceful human existence is emerging and is widely accepted. This neo-liberal post-idealistic, post-ideological, post-metaphysical reality is conceived by many as the McDonaldized Garden-of-Eden-on-earth, where peace is realized in actuality and not in a fantastic dream or fanatic-dogmatic ideology of one kind or another. Peace is actualized in the very working of the McWorld: “No country with a McDonald outlet has ever gone to war with another”, James Langton assures us (Langton, 1996) as he looks to the future of globalizing capitalism. This is because “countries can support a McDonald’s only when they have reached a sufficient level of economic prosperity and political stability to make war unattractive to their peoples” (ibid.). Of course the peace promised and actualized in the McWorld is very different in kind from the peace conceived and struggled for in arenas dominated by the dream of humanity’s killing of God and the promise of positive Utopia as a humanist deification. Surely it is very different from the universalistic yet ethnocentristicoriented pre-modern conceptions of peace as propagated by Islamic fundamentalism in the framework of the world of Jihad (Barber, 1996). Its uniqueness is rooted in its assumed disregard for the presence or absence of God as the focal point and utopian axis of all human telos and of the possibility of “peace”. Essentially different within this framework are the relations between peace as a promised future human condition or as an illusion to overcome and the possibilities of freedom, overcoming/realizing effective violence, responsibility, creativity, self-constitution, love and relations with the law/border/abyss. In the poststructuralist tradition two main manifestations of conceptualizing “peace” are to be reconstructed. According to one, “peace” as a quest, as Utopia, as 97
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value, is produced, reproduced, represented, distributed and consumed as a symbol and as a cultural good that is nothing but an echo of the contingent power-relations and a productive illusion governing a specific context. According to the other, peace is an ideal worth struggling for. Poststructuralist theory should be a medium and a path for empowering a political, cultural and educational effort for bettering our world in face of racism, gender discrimination, colonialism and ecological threats, tell us Stuart Hall, Cornel West, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, bell hooks and Peter McLaren. Such efforts, however, should overcome the Eurocentric, phallocentristic and racist presumptions that made possible Whiteness, patriarchy and colonialism, which until now have directed traditional (humanist-oriented and Christian-motivated) peace education. Alternative concepts of peace-violence relations One of the shortcomings of present hegemonic peace education as a practice, as an ideology and as a field of academic research is the missing elaboration of relations between peace and violence, peace and counter-violence, peace and power, peace and revolt, peace and defiance, peace and insubordination, and peace and passive disobedience. Any attempt to conceptualize the practice of peace education and to critically reconstruct its practices and agendas should go into the analytics, evaluation and rethinking of these relations. If violence is seriously to be questioned it should be evaluated and addressed in face of well classified ends. The possibility of justice as a relevant ethical framework and as a manifestation of overwhelming unjust power is not to be disconnected from the potential challenge of a worthy facing the presence of effective violence. Violence that enables a specific order with specific borders, limits and conditions facilitates effective silent consumption and transformed reproduction of fruitful normalization processes. These normalization dynamics produce stable virtual “illusions” concerning the “reality” of harmony, tranquility and peace. In post-modern arenas peace is a precondition for reproducing productive self-forgetfulness, surrendering and enhancement of the “not-I” in the “I” as a loving, protected, edified human agent. Violence celebrates having the upper hand in the form of “peace” and “normality” and makes possible the invisibility of normalizing violences. This understanding calls on us to address the essence of violence and its truth. This is why it is so important to listen to Walter Benjamin when he tells us that the task of a critique of violence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice. For a cause, however effective, becomes violent, in the precise sense of the word, only when it bears on moral issues. (Benjamin, 1978, p. 277)
The challenge of violence is properly addressed in relation to the truth of peace in its proper context. And the contexts vary historically and analytically. There are important differences between (1) the context of a religious perception of a pre-redeemed world controlled by anti-Christ, (2) the context of a revolutionary tradition that relates to a not-yet-emancipated order of things, and (3) the context 98
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of the McWorld as a post-utopian arena. Peace–violence relations in the McWorld represent the human being as it is swallowed by total immanence. This is but a partial manifestation of immanence where capitalist globalization has the upper hand and plays the role of “the absolute”, traditionally reserved to God, universal reason and the authentic “I”. The McDonaldization of reality, in other words postmodern normalizing education, realizes “peace” as an omnipotent, unchallenged, “neutral”/ absolute-moral(ess) totality that organizes, represents, consumes/destroys, recycles Being in its particularities. Faced with an ever-disenchanting-hiding position, the truth of violence, with its tempting-fascinating ends and fruits, varies according to whether it is enacted/ conceived in a pre-redeemed world, at a pre-liberated historical moment, or alternatively after its realization as peaceful diverse-dynamic-hybridic-ecstatic postmodern hyper-reality. It differs dramatically when it is in the service of redemption/ emancipation or, as a realization of its opposite, in the form of a conservative, imperialist, dictatorial or “Luciferian” presence, to be met with morally justified (counter-) violence. “Peace education” in such a context could be realized, according to present postcolonialists such as Peter McLaren, Ilan Pappe and Howard Davidson, in education for resistance and struggle for a future peaceful, harmonious, postrevolutionary reality. Totalitarian good-natured postcolonialists presently extensively long for it in the academic ivory towers or in million-dollar roomy-tranquil apartments in prosperous suburbs. This kind of peace education in the form of education for resistance might be realized in diverse forms: from direct and open war to defiance, insubordination and disobedience of various kinds: this is a difference that makes a difference. This line of conceptualization studies violence in relation to sharp binary dichotomies such as justifiable-unjustifiable ends. It addresses the question of requirements for defined preconditions, limits and yardsticks for maintaining power in the form of law and order of the kind that makes peace possibe. Here power, as Hannah Arendt claims, is not a synonym for violence but its opposite. Power makes possible the res publica, the public dimension, peace. Violence, on the other hand, bursts out in the absence of power, so according to Arendt the amount of violence at the disposal of a given country may no longer be a reliable indication of that country’s strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power. (Arendt, 1969, p. 2)
Still, in the first place it is violence, effective violence, that makes possible and constitutes the stability of power; the kind of power that forms law, order and official representations of justice and lawful executions; lawful destruction or re-education of “the violent ones” who threaten “peace”, “law” and “order”, within which is the kind of vita activa that Arendt presents as a civil virtue. A serious philosophical elaboration of peace education cannot be content with socio-historical reconstructions which confirm the conceptual relations between peace and violence and represent “peace” as an extreme and highly effective manifestation 99
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of violence that hides its origin and telos in the form of lawfulness, security and peaceful normalization. If we could rest in face of such manifestations we would have “only” to evaluate and determine the preferable violence according to the higher and more valuable aims which justify this violence on the path toward harmony, peace, or nothingness. Peace education, however, cannot be satisfied even with such a titanic mission. Its challenge is even greater, more demanding and traumatic and far more dangerous if it is to be worthy of its name and true to its responsibility. Recognition of the intimate relations between peace, as an absence and as a reality, and (different kinds and degrees of) violence is present in the cosmogony of many cultures that have faced the challenge of Being and nothingness, existence and suffering/meaninglessness. In the most fundamental sense, the very creation of the world, its very existence as a destruction of nothingness or the unlimited, as Being as an opposition to nothingness, is an offense against peace and justice, against the harmony within nothingness. According to Anaximander, the unlimited (apeiron) is both principle (arche) and element (stoicheion) of things that exist, being the first to introduce this name of the principle. … it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other unlimited nature, from which all the heavens and the worlds in them come about; and the things from which is the coming into being for the things that exist are also those into which their destruction comes about, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice (dike) and reparation to one another for their offence (adikia) in accordance with the ordinance of time (Anaximandrus, 1982, p. 29).
The Gnostic tradition addresses seriously the challenge of peace and violence. It offered an alternative from its early beginnings in the 1st and 2nd centuries in the Middle East to the 19th-century romantics and 20th-century philosophers, poets and political thinkers to the present new-age spiritual alternatives. Of special importance for us here is the Gnostic conception that nature and history are the embodiment or the arena of the rule of an evil God. It is the God of creation, of nature, of the body and psyche, of history; it is a wrathful God of peace-war, law, limits, productivity and history into which the human is thrown. The Other, the God of love, does exist, but is present only as an exile. The human who is aware of his or her living on earth in Diaspora acknowledges that the triumph of the God of the Bible is, however, never complete. Diasporic life is still an open possibility—even in face of the ongoing triumph of the violence of the Evil God. This is because the exiled God is still traceable, and a leap into worthy existence is, despite all, possible in the life of the pneuma, the truly spiritual, undetermined, not-to-be-controlled human dimension. The psyche is mobilized by ethics and the body is controlled by physical law; these constitute false “peace” and adored-frightening violence that are responsible for the constitution of what Schopenhauer understood as “the Maya curtain” in human existence. Normalized humans who are overwhelmed by effective education, physical needs and political manipulations forget their forgetfulness and cooperate with the exile of 100
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the true God. They disregard the possibility of Gnostic knowledge and the possibility of transcending existence that is ruled by the false dichotomy between peace and violence, good and bad, law and unlawfulness. However, Pneumaticos, the spiritual human, as already the excommunicated heretic Christian Gnostic Marcion thought in the 2nd century, might liberate himself and live beyond good and evil (Harnack, 1990). Here moral struggles are articulated in opposition to the hegemonic traditions, and in extreme cases of this tradition “peace” or “peace education” is conceived as a manifestation of fundamental violence. Within this framework peace is violence. But violence, even the worthiest, does not strive for “peace” or for any other religious “homereturning” project. Any of these projects offers redemption and is necessarily reigned over by the Evil God. It is present in nature, in history and in the “body”, which the pneumatic human should do his or her best to transcend in the framework of ontological Diaspora. This position with various modifications and alterations does not apply only to the first centuries in the Middle East. It is a constant challenge to Western thinking and politics to this very day. It is of special relevance for Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and present-day post-structuralist philosophy, to which current peace education is in debt much more than it is aware of. Another “pre-modern” challenge to the presumptions, conceptions and goals of present-day peace education comes from another version of Diasporic philosophy, which offers an alternative view of the relations between violence and peace. This challenge understands the relations between peace and violence by totally negating the Gnostic dualistic scheme. Here too, “peace” is a manifestation of evil. Yet the Gnostic Evil God is conceived here as the true God. His kingdom, as the universe after the exile of the God of love, is for the Gnostics “the Godly city”. The true believer is conceived, however, as exiled in the “earthly city”. I distinguish two branches of mankind: one made up of those who live according to man, the other those who live according to God. I speak of these branches also allegorically as two cities, that is, two societies of human beings, of which one is predestined to reign eternally with God and the other to undergo eternal punishment with the devil. For at the very start, when the two cities began their history through birth and death, the first to be born was the citizen of this world, and only after him came the alien in this world who is a member of the city of God, one predestined by grace and chosen by grace, one by grace an alien below and by grace a citizen above. (Augustine, 1957, p. 415)
For St. Augustine the preference for peace is to be decided not in a neutral way and not under any conditions. On the contrary, only under very specific conditions is “peace” desirable and a value whose realization is to be striven for as an ultimate, justifiable end: solely in the framework of true belief in the right way of the redemption of humans and the world. In this sense this conception of peace is opposite to the one praised by most secular peace-education activists. For in their mind earthly peace means homogeneity, harmony and human self-realization in this world as the perfect, or at least the best possible, “home”. For Christian theology as represented by St. 101
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Augustine peace, genuine peace, is only possible by transcending the “earthly city” and by dwelling in “the Godly city”, its opposite. Here St. Augustine follows the Socratic tradition and connects redemption to the possibility of transcendence as attaining the light of the true knowledge. This is one of the preconditions for the totalizing dimension of Western education and its being swallowed, reproduced, and re-presented in the service of hegemonic violence. Present peace education has lost its theological sources and its theological conceptualizations. It has lost also its humanist orientation, as well as its total commitment to the imperatives of reason and to the revolutionization of the general human condition toward its full emancipation. But it has not lost its commitment to the fundamental “homereturning” project and the kind of fear of Apeiron, ambivalence and Life; of being situated between transcendence and immanence in eternal homelessness that cannot be calmed or appeased. While speaking the language of moral politics, present-day peace education fails to submit non-contingent justifications for its claims, practices, and hopes for a state of peace. It cannot offer foundations, claims and aims that transcend mere contextual violent/stable, political constructs. It fails to offer a relation of peace and violence that is self-evident, nor a peace philosophy that is sacred and transcends the endless productivity/futility of mere language games. In the present-day postmodern condition there is no naïve-nostalgic-grotesque room for a serious challenge to the hegemonic claim to knowledge by the totally other. Present-day reality destroys any vivid Spirit. The McWorld has no room for a new Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Marx, nor for a new Hitler. In the present modern and pre-modern conditions, the otherness of the Other is terrorized while proclaimed as evil, or as a dangerous epistemological gift. This is a hopeful situation where there is room for love, prayer and struggle. But what room is left for hope, love and struggle in the post-modern arenas? In cyberspace the otherness of the Other is ridiculed, presented as a grotesque or even internalized in the global pleasure machine as a mere “attractive” “link”, “site”, “item”, or an “experience that can make it for you”, namely as an ornament or a plaything to be consumed for a passing moment in a context where there is no transcendence or escape from immanence, namely from meaninglessness; not even a tragic exile that incubates a worthy-redeeming waiting. Peace, how terrible, here has here the upper hand. This conception is immanently committed to totalizing information and to purging the threatening gift or “saving” humanity from its danger by all necessary means. Inseparable here are the procedures of purging the Other of his or her epistemological otherness, structural violence, and the “direct” individual and collective violence. This is the Lebensraum of normalizing education. One of our aims should be to unveil the relation between the success of these violences and their invisibility as a manifestation of mental health and collective stability, order, law, and “peace”. Within the framework of counter-education we are called to question beyond “critique” the present order of things and its “bettering”. Such dichotomies prevent countereducation, which is beyond functionalism, critique and fear of Apeiron and Life that drive Western education toward “homereturning” projects. As manifested today by 102
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Levinas, within the Diasporic alternative peace is not an earthly stable power-relations with no effective opposition or “the return of the multiple to unity, in conformity with the Platonic or Neoplatonic idea of the one” (Levinas, 1996, p. 162). However, within history, for St. Augustine it is impossible to conceive “the city of God” disconnected from “the earthly city”: they are always to be envisaged in their mutual relation. Moreover, while real peace is only to be conceived in “the city of God”, its rival city strives for peace too. The division is not only, as in current peace education, between a state of peace and a state of violence (or conflict), but in parallel also between two essentially different states of peace. One might also say between two different sets of violences, one secular, the other sacred violence, namely “peace”. “The earthly city” is in constant “pursuit of victories that either cut lives short or at any rate are short-lived” (Augustine, 1955, p. 425). Yet as the manifestation of triumphant violence, these victories contain also goods, albeit only “the lowest kind of goods”. Among these “lowest kinds of goods” attained by warfare St. Augustine counts “earthly peace” (ibid.). The point that is important for St. Augustine, which is forgotten by today's peace education, is that (earthly) peace is only attainable by warfare: Thus to gain the lowest kind of good it covets an earthly peace, one that it seeks to attain by warfare; for if it is victorious and no one remains to resist it, there will be peace…(ibid.)
According to St. Augustine there are higher goods than earthly peace; these “belong to the city above, in which victory will be untroubled in everlasting and ultimate peace” (ibid., p. 427). This other kind of peace is totally other than the peace that is tenable in the “earthly city”, and it is even conditioned by transcending from the peace that the “earthly city” and its victories can offer. St. Augustine offers us two levels of analysis: on one level he represents a Western philosophical tradition which after being secularized by Kant, Hegel, and Marx could lead to a kind of universalism within which idealists, pragmatists, and even (very) “soft” postmodernists could share peace education. In peace education, as developed by pragmatists, feminists, multiculturalists, and certainly by positivistic-oriented functionalists who strive for social stability and free, prosperous national and international markets, all trends relate to human rights and resist direct and explicit violence in the name of universal rights such as freedom from persecution or exploitation. Here the division between peace and violence is clear-cut, and the very commitment and quest for peace is left unaddressed and unproblematized. On the second level it is St. Augustine, more than present-day peace-education theorists and practitioners that follow his essentialism, who seriously addresses the issue of peace and problematizes the quest for peace in relation to the essence of the human and her ultimate goal. In Augustinian terms the ideal and the reality, which peace education strives for, is the “earthly city” in its most stringent form. For St. Augustine this is something unavoidable in this world, yet it is a challenge to overcome if redemption is to be realized. 103
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We see St. Augustine's doctrine and the educational attitude he represents in Western thinking as not solely, but part of, violent control of Western consciousness and a manifestation of epistemological violence enacted against its disciples. At the same time, however, it is worth acknowledging its dialectics and its transcendental element. It contains an antagonism to the whole order, of which “peace” as a desire, as an ideal, and as a reality, is but a part. As such, it is a constant challenge to this order, while being part of it, and it contains an important emancipatory potential. This dimension of challenging the hegemonic realm of self-evidence and the imperative to overcome philosophy and existence is surely missing from the concept of peace which functions in the various trends in current peace education. Following St. Augustine, we claim that what in the political arena is called “peace” is one of the extreme manifestations of successful terror. Levinas sees the seed of this condition already in “Greek wisdom” and pinpoints its violent light— human peace is awaited on the basis of the truth: Peace on the basis of the truth—on the basis of the truth of knowledge where, instead of opposing itself, the diverse agrees with itself and unites; where the stranger is assimilated… Peace on the basis of the truth, which—marvel of marvels—commands humans without forcing them or combating them, which governs them or gathers them together without enslaving them, which through discourse, can convince rather than vanquish… (Levinas, 1996, p. 162)
This totalizing concept of peace in its relation to true knowledge allows effective de-humanization of humans and their formation into collectives. At its peak it makes possible and secures consciousness, which is committed to “true” solidarity. It creates and generously awards the willingness of the individual to sacrifice herself for the collective, its security, ideals, values, and horizons. As such it is part and parcel of the violence which produces borders, wars, and Others as objects of education, destruction, redemption and emancipation. Yet it is a concept of peace conditioned by abandonment of reflection and transcendence. It is a manifestation of one’s being swallowed or constructed by the ruling realm of self-evidence. With the assistance of good parents, devoted teachers, supportive friends, beautiful texts, and endless other ways it produces brave warriors to protect its fears and destroy its internal and external enemies. As such, it actually manifests human forgetfulness of Diasporic love. It enhances domestication; empowers tranquilization that reflects the victory of normalizing education. It is peace as “repose among beings well-placed or reposing on the underlying solidity of their substance, self-sufficient in their identity or capable of being satisfied and seeking satisfaction” (ibid., p. 163). This concept of philosophy, which was dominated by the Platonic quest for light and love of truth, is embarrassed and feels guilty in current Western thought. It finds it hard to recognize itself in its millennia of fratricidal, political, and bloody struggles, of imperialism, of human hatred and exploitation, up to our century of world wars, genocides, the Holocaust, and terrorism; of unemployment, the continuing poverty of the Third World. (ibid.)
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Modern peace education is very much influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and its visions of a future perfect world. In light of the exile of God and the overcoming of superstition, and with the power of rational critique, scientific reasoning and social progress in education, science and technology, it promises deification of humanity and eternal peace. Lessing, Kant, Condorcet, Rousseau and the false promises of the rosy future awaiting humanity after the beheading of Louis XVI are impossible to understand disconnected from the transformation of the idea of progress: from a religious teleological “homereturning” project to the secular Garden of Edenlike redemptive fulfillment. The secular “homereturning” project in the form of revolution or peace education becomes possible only by overcoming the promise of Godly redemption, but still in the framework of “homereturning” metaphysics. In its revolutionary and educational formats, it offers human progress as the manifestation of the advance of earthly freedom, which inherits the religious metaphysical quest for transcendence and its victory over anti-Christ, Satan, or other manifestations of “the earthly city”. Franz Rosenzweig presents a very different version of an alternative to the hegemonic peace-education concept of “peace” as the antinomy of “violence”. He challenges any attempt to present mundane politics as the genuine, appeasing, Garden of Eden, refusing to accept “emancipation” as the historic realization of the human potential totally to control nature, social reality, the mysterium and Fortuna. Rosenzweig goes farther than St. Augustine. He offers not just a different concept of historical progress toward peace and redemption but actually an alternative conceptual apparatus for the centrality of exile, nomadism and Diaspora. This apparatus offers a different kind of religiosity and hospitality: the hospitality of Diasporic life; an alternative co-poiesis amid nomadism, which replaces “peace” as standstill in the form of continuity with peace as the hospitality of love of an enduring improvisation of the one who actualizes eternal creative moral responsibility every moment anew (Peretz, 2003, p. 17). At the same time, however, Rosenzweig stands with St. Augustine against the Enlightenment’s concept of progress and the promise of rational peace in the framework of secular history. His rejection, however, does not end up as a religious mirror-picture of humanist arrogance and violence. He presents a very different kind of Diaporic poiesis, poiesis which becomes co-poiesis; an alternative to the secularrevolutionary and Christian-positive-redemptive Utopias alike. He offers the position of Judaism concerning the responsibility of the Jew. According to Rosenzweig, Judaism stands detached from history, refusing to become part of the normal power-game, its rules, strives and goals. The Christian, Rosenzweig tells us, anchors his belief to the past, to the beginning of the road, to the first Christian. “Although the center is only center between beginning and end, its main stress nevertheless moves towards the beginning” (Rozenzweig, 2005, p. 368). Rozenzweig nevertheless emphasizes that the Christian, when true to himself, is essentially Diasporic. This is because when “he thus turns alone toward the Cross, he may forget the judgment”—but he remains on the way, in eternal Diaspora, even if on the wrong homereturning path: “the Christian consciousness, absorbed entirely in faith, pushes toward the beginning of the way, to the first Christian, to the Crucified 105
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one (ibid., p. 368.). It leads Christianity to “expansion into everything, simply into everything outside” (ibid., p. 369). While Jewish consciousness, “rooting into its own innermost” (ibid.: 369), “gathered entirely in hope, toward the man of the last days, to David’s royal shoot” strives toward the future (ibid., p. 368). Jewish history is a separate history (ibid., p. 427), the history of a relic. If the Messiah comes ‘today’, the remnant is ready to receive him. Jewish history is, in defiance of all world history, history of this remnant” against “power as the fundamental concept of history” and against “All worldly history [that] is about expansion”. (ibid., p. 427)
The Jew is therefore essentially and not temporarily or partly a Diasporic human, witnessing universal history while always within himself. The universe in its wholeness is his home, for all time in the nowhere, in the in-between: dwelling as an eternal nomad between the word and its meaning(lessness), between this world and the world-to-come; he forever “awaits salvation”, eternally “on the shore” (ibid., p. 428) of transcendence as something “put into our blood at birth, toward the future coming of the Kingdom” (ibid.). Diasporic counter-education does not annihilate itself in the form of a belief and praxis for paving the way to the Messiah/deliverer/genuine revolution within the framework of a positive Utopia, “peace”. Here messianism is true to itself by refusing any vision of a future peace, resisting any positive Utopia and any worldly, stable, appeasing “home”. It insists on eternal Diaspora which negates its negation by realizing the ideal of transcendence from this world to the world-to-come: every day, every moment, is a flash-eternity of a possible change, an open gate for the appearance of the totally other. It is the Messianic relic. It is present in the form of the unique day of change eternally to be waited for. As such it is realized in facing the presence of the absence of peace as a worthy gate for the relation to the law of the Torah (ibid., pp.428–429). Facing redemption as an eternal Messianic awaiting is actualized in the eternal anti-dogmatic reinterpretation of the text, rearticulating our relation to Life and the further study of the Torah which refuses any call to participate in the violence that promises “progress”, redemption or “peace”. At the same time it commands responsibility and worthy addressing of any form and occasion of injustice. As in Stefan Heym’s Achashverosh, The Wandering Jew (Heym, 1983), God is freedom (ibid., p. 227 and the Jew is in eternal Diaspora, wandering as an eternal critic, an eternal nonconformist, an eternal responsibility for Tikun Olam, an eternal Other to any king, priest and prophet. And as such he will never know, neither will he bring, homogeneity, consensus or “peace”. The strive towards death in peace education Peace education actually challenges the essence of dualism, dialectics, heterogeneity and Life itself in a post-metaphysical era. In face of the absence of God it is a celebrated project. As Jean Baudrillard shows us, this is because the representations 106
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and symbols are replaced not by iconoclasts and killers of God, who redeem humanity from Christianity and Judaism or from monotheism itself. They are not substituted by Communism or other versions of emancipating humanism but by mere pragmatism, hyper-reality, simulacra and cynicism. In essence, peace education is an attempt to challenge not this or that violence, not even structural violence in face of belligerent violence, but the very human transcendence of the continuum and selfconsciousness, alienation, individuality and meaning-searching. Peace education is a rescue attempt from the spatial-time factuality of suffering, even worthy suffering, and from silence, especially contemplational silence, by offering another kind of silence, that of “peace”. The silence of the consensus strives to plant its roots deeper, in search of a new accommodation in the pre-conscious, pre-individual magmatic forms of (pre-) Life. In this sense it strives for liberation from all “homereturning” projects, while fulfilling its telos in the eternal harmony of nothingness. Hamann, Yaacoby, Herder, Shelling, Schopenhauer and Bergson offer powerful alternatives to great modern believers in progress, freedom and peace such as Condorcet, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Thomas Mann. We cannot simply disregard their critique of the modernization and the ideals of humanist education. These thinkers challenged the Enlightenment’s strive for progress toward homogeneous, universal “freedom”, “equality” or even “edification”, in which a prominent role was reserved for education. The very idea of a positive universal law, Utopia or homogeneity was suspect to these critics of universal reason and scientific emancipatory powers. Sorel advanced these anti-rationalist tendencies in light of the teaching of Lenin toward the accepters of the centrality of violence as a manifestation of Life, vitality and the individual’s possible overcoming of any law, border and shortage of all kinds. The Homeric Greeks symbolized for him the healthy society, as it was before Judaism in the form of Christianity inflicted on Europe the illness that finally brought modernity, capitalism and democracy. He admired the Greeks’ affirmation of Life in the form of refusal of any “homereturning” project. He educated to affirmation of courage, greatness, generosity, self-edifying violence and freedom. These offered a breathtaking alternative to the various projects and hopes for an ultimate “home” within the revolutionary moment. It opened the gate for the ecstasy of the rebirth within violence as the greatest creative flame, in which Life destroys all forms of “peace” and stagnation, overcoming the quest to address the magic power of shortage, fear and suffering with tranquility, appeasement, death. Violence is legitimized by liberals and Socialists alike, as long as it is directed to the fulfillment of the promise of their respective positive utopias. Violence as such is not negated, only reactionary or non-rational violence, in light of their concept of freedom realized in history as collective and individual progress. Sorel is very firm in his resistance to the critique of violence, when he writes against the many legal precautions against violence… our education is directed towards so weakening our tendencies toward violence that we are instinctively inclined to think that any act of violence is a manifestation of a return to barbarism. (Sorel, 1999, p. 175)
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Sorel opens the way for human regeneration not by gradual, rational, institutionalized educational and political efforts but by the rebirth powers of a new kind of violence that will open the gate to the new stage in the history of humanity. Violence, holy– secular violence, will offer transcendence beyond transformation, what no shift of ownership of capital from the individual to the state could do. This is why his kind of education should lead the proletariat to use Violence enlightened by the idea of the general strike. All the old abstract dissertations on the socialist system of the future became useless. (Sorel, 1999: 251)
Sorel’s concept of the creative power of violence is not very different from the concept of the redemptive power of violence in the framework of Che Guevara's guerilla action that was a model type for education for love for generations of progressive pedagogues such as Paulo Freire (1972). The model is very close to the educational violence proposed by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and other proto-fascists who searched for a poetical politics; it is an alternative to the revolutionary faceless-rational violence offered by the orthodox Marxists and the Leninist-Stalinist Soviet empire and to its version of peace education. The aesthelization of politics here transcends “left-wing” and “right wing” dichotomies. It makes every effort to face the essence of life and death strives, to challenge the relations between fear-dwindling and loveopenness—yes, to challenge the quest to be swallowed by the immanence in the form of overcoming loneliness, alienation, suffering and the infinite abyss between the question, any question, the ability/unavoidability of a question and the infinity of an answer, any answer, namely the ability/unavoidability to be addressed and responsible to reply in light of right, just, beautiful and meaningful suffering. Violence becomes a suggestive-redemptive power that makes possible religious pathos even in face of the death of God and the absence of any metaphysical promise or of humanist substitutes that can promise peace, nirvana or collective happiness at the end of (pre)history. It is most relevant to show the resemblance of the concept of revolutionary violence and peace education in the so-called socialist states until 1989 to the present postcolonialist peace education. It was, after all, Lenin's peace and bread campaign during World War I that destroyed tsarist Russia and made possible Bolshevik state terror and its victories. All these are united in their resistance to the liberal version of the Enlightenment's promise of the bright sun of humanist edification and the “homereturning” historical movement in face of the apparent demolition of the sovereignty of the human subject. Yet Sorel, as well as the fascist Falange Espanola in 1930s Spain and Che's guerilla action in 1960s Cuba, Bolivia and Africa, had an additional dimension, an individualistic one, which begins from philosophical pessimism and mistrust of any grand theory, universal values and collective historical progress and strives for redemptive ecstatic-aesthetic-politics. It has intimate relations to Schopenhauer's understanding that this world is arranged as it had to be if it were capable of continuing without great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently,
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How is it possible, if at all, to save human sovereignty, creativity, self-constitution and meaningful suffering in a post-metaphysical era that has no supreme point of view and no transcendent judgment possibilities in face of rational institutionalization of hierarchy, rational inequality, structural violence and colonialism? Here we are faced with two different dynamics in the framework of peace education: one, toward a consensual, collective, homogeneity that swallows the alienated reflective, suffering human subject and strives to impose a new Garden of Eden. This dynamic is realized in two distinct versions: (1) modern and (2) postmodern. These two trends have conflicting yardsticks to measure the success of challenging the loss of human sovereignty and the victory of the false totality in the absence of any absolute or ladder to climb mere temporal, contingent reality toward the ecstatic mysteries of light, eternity, infinity and “the transcendent” itself. The educational implications of this homogeneous home-like quest stand in opposition to the quest for the indeterminate and the quest for eternal heterogeneity. In the second, individualisticoriented kind of the “homereturning” dynamic, acknowledgement of the exile of God as well as that of the killer of God (and of any absolute, universally valid values or grand theory/narrative) has opened the gate to new born quests for meaninglessness, suffering and loss of sovereignty. It is as if the post-modern condition celebrates emancipation from the enslaving tradition of emancipation. As if it overcomes the tradition of life in Diaspora in light of the various “homereturning” projects. As if the post-metaphysical context genuinely realizes Nietzsche’s hopes for a cultural rebirth in a genuinely Diasporic existence that acknowledges no metaphysical truths, no human “homereturning” projects into a promised “peace”—only never-peaceful co-poiesis with the cosmos as a challenging matrix. Here the central ideals are of enduring border-crossing and eternal trespassing limits as the truth of the core/less reality. Limits, antinomies and antagonisms are not conceived as the absence of peace. Limits, difference or conflict are not defined as opposition to peace or to core but as a positive Utopia-in-action. Such a philosophy does not necessarily end up in political neutrality. In many cases it ends up in a leftist emancipatory project “from the margins”, in the name of the contingent and as a manifestation of a poststructuralist ethics, as in the case of Spivak and Bhabha. The creative power of contingent contexts and aesthetic criteria have in the present historical moment the upper hand in offering a post-modern peace education. It is a kind of peace education that strives to become part and parcel of postcolonialism, radical feminism and queer theories, some of which give birth to new racism, antiwhiteness, anti-phallocentrism and new anti-Semitism. Both these trends assume an unproblematic dichotomy between good homogeneity and bad homogeneity. The very dichotomy, however, is extremely problematic. Diasporic philosophers, from Heraclites to Adorno and Derrida, resisted this “homereturning” into nothingness/peace, in different languages but united in 109
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vigor and courage. In his Negative Dialectics and in all their post 1944 writings Adorno and Horkheimer (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972) resisted any longing or even assumption of the possibility and desirability of positive Utopia and the quest for genuine revolutionary violence as well as the very idea of “peace”. Resistance to the category of “peace” concerns its ontological status, its existential dimension as well as its political status in history. Adorno and Horkheimer actually challenge the fundamentals and presumptions of “peace” as a possible existential moment and as a desirable political reality. They negate the presumption of a possible and desirable overcoming of contradictions and nonentity of the subject with himself and the quest for the identity of the symbol with the thing itself. Thinking, human existence, and communication face here much more than irreducible and never-ending “contradictions” or lack of non-violent consensus/peace: it is the positive appearance of what Derrida calls différance. Paul de Man, following Nietzsche, insists that it is impossible to suppress contradictions, inconsistencies and conflicting violences, and Foucault and Deleuze would deconstruct the very concept of the autonomous, sovereign human subject and “humanity”, which is supposed to be the crown of the telos of peace education. It is of utmost importance to remind peace-education theorists and activists, especially when they relate to human rights and emancipation, that their own most important neo-Marxists and poststructuralist heroes challenge the presumptions, the practice and the telos of peace education that is so dear to them. Counter-education and peace as responsible improvisation Fear and shortage are the impetus of the various trends in current hegemonic peace education. It is but a branch of Western spring of the vitality incubating its phallocentristic-orientation, colonialist drive and difficulty to laugh in face of suffering, shortage and conflict in a “flat”, post-metaphysical (infinitely-fragmented) totality, where no God, “father” or heavenly truth awaits us as a moral guide, punishment or mother-child-relations mediator toward worthy life. It is a horror since the human “naturally” needs safe ground, aims and self-evidence or at least a non-deciphered God that manifests himself by aims, gifts and awful punishments that ultimately make possible “interior” and “exterior” peace for the collective and for the individual. The absence of depths, heights and potentially non-shattered “meaning” in a postmetaphysical “flat” life alarms the human and challenges the limits of pleasure and of efficient cynicism; panic in front of the abysses of individual and conscious manifestations of Life and of being scattered all over infinity on the one hand, and being swallowed by the omnipotent vitality of a meaningless continuum on the other. Homelessness, nomadism and ambivalence have now become a threat. The authority, blessing and protection of a great “father”/absolute/monotheism that traditionally was conceived as a guardian spirit and “home” has been deconstructed, ridiculed or swallowed by the post-metaphysical system. The quest for “homereturning” into 110
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homogeneity was domesticated and transformed into what Freud called in his 1911 “Articulations concerning two principles of the psychic existence: the principle of reality as against the pleasure principle” (Freud, 1988, p. 179). Homogeneity that makes possible control was established as an ideal and as a drive in light of the memory and the promise of the metaphor of the Garden of Eden. The telos of Western thought is Utopian in its essence even after the declaration that God is dead and that our era is a post-metaphysical era. The positive Utopia of “peace” manifests that the great “father” is not yet totally consumed by the offspring even in face of cyberspace, the post-Fordist economy and the apparent victory of postmodern culture as a postphallocentrist network that has no depth, no heights and no grand secret beyond its horizons. It is still alive in the form of a teleological quest for “peace”, even in the postmodern version of “resistance from the margins” by oppressed groups in a postideological era in multicultural and postcolonialist settings. This presence of the quest for homogeneity or the enduring existence of “the father” should be seriously addressed by any counter-education worthy its name. Consistent counter-education should not become part and parcel of the drive for transcendence in the framework of the individual or collective “homereturning” project, neither should it pursue surrender to Thanatos and the quest to be totally/effectively/pleasurably/peacefully swallowed by the immanence. Eternal Diasporic repositioning, border-crossing and improvisation reflects its relation to Love as an impetus to its enduring responsibility and creativity. It is a way-of-life eternally open, always dangerous, and for all time individual. As such it offers not a quest for a perfect collective or a future redeemed humanity, nor a present emancipatory struggle that promises nirvana, peace, final solutions, ultimate justice or consensual meaning. It is precisely these philosophical, existential and historical presumptions and visions that counter-education must challenge and overcome when relating to “peace”. So, is there no room for “peace” in countereducation worthy the name? Counter-education is not a praxis, neither is it a given theory to be faithfully realized in order to establish the genuine heavenly Jerusalem. Peace for such countereducation is the fruit of normalizing education, as are “victories”, “fulfillment of the nations’ historical mission” and other manifestations of self-forgetfulness. At the same time it does not conceive, with St. Augustine, “peace” as an outstanding efficient realization of violence in a pre-redeemed world nor as a future possibility awaiting the chosen ones when they realize the true faith in its authorized interpretation. Peace as openness that steams out of Love and realizing responsibility to ones-self and to the world is of outmost importance for counter-education. This is because counter-education is not simply and abstractly “negative”. It cannot be content with critically reconstructing the manners by which the various kinds of normalizing education fabricate, reproduce, police and edify the conceptual apparatus, values and yardsticks to evaluate conflicting sets of values and representation apparatuses. For the ethical I peace makes possible becoming-toward-the-world, which enables the human to position himself toward-Life as a focus of Love; Creativity that gives birth to alternative togetherness, to openness and responsible improvisation 111
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(Gur-Ze’ev, 2005; Gur-Ze’ev, 2007a) evades the naivety of the political sphere and transcends history. As such he is materially, historically and locally situated in the immediacy of the moment. He is similar to yet very different from the positioning of the animals towards the cosmos on the one hand, and the positioning of the “true believer” before the death of God on the other—without enslaving himself to the substitutes offered intensively by the positive utopias of the 19th century. As such he can open himself to the possibility of happiness not solely as a struggle against injustice, laughing in the face of the disappearance of the various substitutes and adjuncts of the primordial-symbolic “father”. Mature, intersubjective happiness is not possible a moment before fear loses its constitutive role and the human is set free to improvise in a world occupied with the absence of God, disenchanted of the promise of disenchantment, filled with the richness of its non-Godly religious generosity that improvises-itself-to-life in peace. Peace is genuine, eternal improvisation. Genuine peace education is counter-education that is devoted to enrich eternal improvisation. As an eternal improviser, such a nomadic human is capable of giving birth to worthy suffering as part and parcel of happiness of the peace with oneself; peace of the improviser who is mature enough for co-poiesis that hosts the nomad in eternal homelessness. Peace in face of meaninglessness that successfully creates “truths”, “genuine interests”, “truly relevant pragmatically justified yardsticks” or “bridges between different narratives” and so many other modes of self-forgetfulness that produce violent ethnocentrism and other forms of “love” and “compassion”. Peace in face of the understanding that there is no appeasing consensus awaiting us “out there” unless it is the suggestive power of a “pleasure machine” or effective educational manipulations that will ensure the silencing of oppositions, deconstruction of antinomies and the collective memory of an alternative to the governing selfevidence. Peace in face of ambivalence, heteronomy, silence and suffering, not even equipped with an illusion about a redeeming homogeneity and saving pantheisticoriented heteronomy. The dance of peace on the planes of Negative Utopia, is of utmost relevance for counter-education. It is relevant in the negative sense as the unavoidable presence of the absence of “peace” and in the positive sense of responsible improvisation toward co-poiesis in a world dominated by meaninglessness, efficient violence and fruitful fears that make possible victories, history and even the cannibalistic “we”. Counter-education makes peace with the ou-topos; with the Utopian-no-place situatedness of the eternal improviser: between the false call for transcendence within the framework of the “homereturning” project and the suggestive call to be hosted by the immanence that swallows every manifestation of otherness, maturity and courage to transcend the quest back “home” to the thingness, to the Same, to eternal, metaphysical peace, namely to nothingness. Nothingness and false richness of the pleasure machine in the postmodern era meet each other as they are the same, the Same. This meeting is part of the ongoing human address of the call to return “home” to bestiality and its rewarding immanence (Bataille 2003). The echo of this invitation to return to nothingness 112
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is very much present in its smiling opposite: the call of culture back “home” to the heavens of eternal glories, truths, gods and the mysterium. Counter-education seriously addresses the presents of both calls, and makes peace with this gift. It is at peace with the calls of primordial harmonious totality that has not yet been disturbed by God, by creation, by thinking, or by the eternally suffering self-consciousness individual. It is at peace with the unredeemability of human transgression, co-poieses and non-ethnocentristic-oriented togetherness. It is in peace with eternal Diaspora as a precondition for Love—love as a worthy home amidst enduring homelessness. In her “Compassion and Com-passion” Bracha Ettinger tells us something of great importance: Compassion is intrapsychic, subjective and transsubjective. It works its way, like art does, by fine attunements that evade the political systems. When I say that the originry event of peace is compassion I address a kind of fragilizing subjective openness which is also a resistance, that the political level can’t handle or reach by definition, though there is hope that it will take it into consideration at the long run, and always indirectly. (Ettinger, 2008)
. Counter-education, in contrast to normalizing education, does not strive for any sentimental “peace”. Yet it is at peace with the Diasporic truth, so that in the absence of a non-manipulative consensus around the final ends, and in light of creative Love as the only end/home worthy nomadism itself, improvisation, becomes the goal. This goal religiously improvises itself in Love of Life. The mature Diasporic improviser erotically realizes this peace. He creates it eternally each moment anew as enduring ecstatic improvisation that manifests respond-ability and response-ability. This is the never-paved road toward mature improvisation. Counter-education’s relation to peace is in a sense immoral. Still, it negates all forms of nihilism. It is beyond hegemonic moral politics because it relates seriously to the possibility of an “Ethical I” as a Diasporic, eternal improviser. On the one level it relates primarily to response-ability. On the other level it relates primarily to respond-ability as a precondition for a worthy address of history and the presence of both institutionalized violence and peace education, which are two faces of one and the same coin. Counter-education presents response-ability as preceding respond-ability. Within counter-education worthy of the name, peace becomes not only problematized: it is experienced each moment anew, edified and creatively improvised as co-poiesis that hosts a new kind of togetherness and new realizations of responsibility in face of the apparent deconstruction of the humanist ethics and its universal value and truth claims. Response-ability is born each moment anew among the plants, among the animals, and in the birth of each new human baby…Response-ability is not only a potential: for the Ethical I it is a gate to being true to oneself, a way for self-constitution as some-one and not as some-thing. Response-ability is a potential transcendence that does not disregard the whole and the call to retreat into the infinity of immanence. It aims at transcending thingness. At the same time it is committed to overcoming the division between immanence and transcendence. It acknowledges this challenge as an ethical
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Peace for the eternal Jew, or the enduring improviser, is a condition of the one who found his way: an endless path of a nomad that has Love but no other “home”, dogma or quest for “homereturning” into thingness, the continuum or the Same. He will never find and never search for “peace” as an end of Diasporic existence and terminality of the suffering of the nomad. He will be at peace with his mission of avoiding history within history, of overcoming the temptation to be part of the collective “I”/consensus/pleasure machine/truth, and often he will be tired, ridiculed, punished or executed. But he will be also rewarded, each moment anew, for being at peace with his refusal of “peace”: he will be a freer and a richer improviser that actualizes his co-poiesis with the world, the Other, and he himself gives birth to Love. As such, the eternal improviser is mature enough to meet the alterity of other free nomads and Diasporic humans, as well as the gifts of other free-minded spirits. They too, as Nietzsche tell us in Allzumenschliches Muenschen # 638, feel at home on the mountain, in the forest, and within their loneliness (Nietzsche, 1999). But for the eternal improviser there is more and there is less than the rewards of the eternal Nietzschean nomad. This is so since the Nietzschean nomad is rewarded with presents and finally finds harmony in himself and the right path to the freedom of reason. The eternal improviser, however, is a more consistent Nietzschean than the Nietzschean nomad and is never appeased, domesticated or rewarded by any “home”. Homelessness, eternal Diaspora and improvisation worthy of the name cannot offer any “reward” or rest in the (right) paved way, be it “external” or “internal”, transcendent or immanent. Here counter-education reintroduces peace not as a manifestation of a rewarding Nietzschean philosophy of the morning that consumes itself in worthy loneliness, but as a realization of Love and worthy togetherness with the cosmos, with the Other, with worthy suffering and with ones self. Yes, peace as mature improvisation for counter-education begins as self-love. And there is so much we can learn and teach; so much we should unlearn concerning improvisation and love! REFERENCES Adorno, T. (2000). Negative dialectics and the possibility of philosophy. In B. O’Connor (Ed.) The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 54–78. Anaximandrus (1982). In J. Barnes (Ed.) The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 19–37. Arendt, H. (1969). Reflections on violence. Special supplement. New York Review of Books 12 (4), 1–25. Augustine, St. (1957). The City of God Against the Pagans. London and Cambridge: W. Heinemann. Barber, B. (1996). Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine Books.
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BEYOND PEACE EDUCATION Bataille, G. (2003). Theory of Religion. Hebrew translation by I. Basuk. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Baudrillard, J. (2007). Simulcres et Simulation. Translated by M. Ben-Naftali. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. (Hebrew) Benjamin, W. (1978). Reflections—Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Ben-Porath, S. (2006). Citizenship Under Fire. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Ben-Porath, S. (2003). War and peace education. Journal of Philosophy of Education. 37 (3), 525–533. Chetkow-Yanoov, B. (1996). Conflict-resolution skills can be taught.. Peabody Journal of Education, 71, 12–28. Condorcet, A. N. de (1955). Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Translated by J. Barraclough. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Cooper, M. (2005). Cultivating wisdom, harvesting peace. International Symposium on peace education. Griffith University. http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/mfc/pdf/symposium20005/maxine%20cooper. pdf Ettinger, B. (2008). Compassion and com-passion. http://underfire.eyebeam.org/?q=node/512 Freud, S. (1988). Culture and its Discontent, Translated by Areie Bar. Tel Aviv: Dvir. (Hebrew) Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Ramos-Bergman, M., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Friesen, J. & Weiler, E. (1988). New robes for an old order: multicultural education, peace education, cooperative learning and progressive education. The Journal of Educational Thought, 22 (1), 48– 59. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace and Research. Journal of Peace Research, 6, 167–184. Galtung, J. (1975). Peace: Research, Education, Action—Essays in Peace Research, I. Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers. Galtung, J. (1994). Human Rights in Another Key. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grewal, B. (2008). John Galtung: positive and negative peace. http://www.knowledgepolicy.com/ Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1996). The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1998). The morality of acknowledgement/not acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/ genocide. Journal of Moral Education, 27 (2), 161–178. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1998a). Toward a nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy. Educational Theory, 48 (4), 463–486. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2001). Philosophy of peace education in a postmodern era. Educational Theory 51 (3), 315–336. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2004). Toward Diasporic Education—Multiculturalism, Postcolonialism and CounterEducation in a Postmodern Era. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2005). Academe, the eternal improviser and the possibility of meaning in a postmodern world. In Gur-Ze’ev, I., (Ed.) The End of Israeli Academia? Haifa: Faculty of Education University of Haifa, 193–251. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I (2005a). Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and diaspora today: toward a new critical language in education (introduction). In I. Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.) Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today—Toward a New Critical Language in Education. Haifa: Faculty of Education the University of Haifa, 7–34. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2007). Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education—Toward Counter-Education and Enduring Improvisation. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
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ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2007a). Sport, politics and values. In Gur-Ze’ev, I. & Lidor, R. (Eds.) Sport, Values and Politics. Holon: Reichgold, 1–46. (Hebrew) Harris, I., M., ed. (1996). Peace education in a postmodern world. A special issue of Peabody Journal of Education 71 (3), 1–11. Harnack, A. von (1990). Marcion—The Gospel of the Alien God. Durham: Labyrinth Press. Heraclitus. (1987). Fragments. Translated by T. M. Robinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Heym, S. (1983). Achashverosh, the Wandering Jew. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Horkheimer, T. and Adorno, T. (1972). The Dialectics of Enlightenment. Translated by Cunning, J. New York: Herder & Herder. Langton, J. (1996). McDonald’s claims Nobel peace fries. Sunday Telegraph 15 December. http://www. mcspotlight.org/media/press/telegraph_15dec96.html Levinas, I. (1996). Peace and proximity. In Peperzak, A., Critchley, S., Bernasconi, R., (Eds) Emmanuel Levinas—Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marx, K. (1977). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Nietzsche, F. (1999). Allzumenschliches Muenschen. Muenchen: Taschenbuch Verlag. Page, J. S. (2004). Peace education: exploring some philosophical foundations. International Review of Education 50 (1), 3–15. Pappe, I. (1999). Educational implications of Israeli multiculturalism. In I. Gur-Ze’ev, (Ed) Modernity, Postmodernity and Education. Tel Aviv: Ramot, 233–251. (Hebrew) Pappe, I. (1997). Peace education toward the 2000s—New history, multiculturalism and postmodernism in service of peace education. In I. Gur-Ze’ev, ed. Critical Theory and Education. Special issue of Studies in Education 2 (2), 221–248. (Hebrew) Peretz, A. (2003). The Art of Teaching and Improvisation. MA Thesis, The Israeli Branch of the University of Leeds. http://www.improvcenter.co.il/texts/thesis/synopsis-english.html Reardon, B. A. (1988). Comprehensive Peace Education: Educating for Global Responsibility. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Rivage-Seul, M. K (1987). Peace education: Imagination and pedagogy of the oppressed. Harvard Educational Review 57 (2), 154–181. Ronnebohm-Franz, K. (1996). Toward a critical social consciousness in children: multicultural peace education in a first grade classroom. Theory into Practice, 35 (4), 258–275. Rosenzweig, F. (2005). The Star of Redemption. Translated by Galli, B. Madison Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Salomon, G. & Nevo, B. (Eds.) (2002). Peace education: The Concept, Principles and Practices Around the World. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Salomon, G. & Nevo, B. (1999). Peace education: an active field in need for research. Paper presented at a peace education conference, The University of Haifa. Schmidt, H. J. (1968). Peace research and politics. Journal of Peace Research, 5 (3), 217–232. Schopenhauer, A. (1966). The World as Will and Idea. New York: Dover Publications. Sorel, G. (1999). Reflections on Violence. Translated by Jennings, J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNESCO (2008). ‘Culture of peace’. UN resolution A/RES 52/13. In http://www3.unesco.org/iycp/uk/ uk_sum_cp.htm.
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BEYOND PEACE EDUCATION UNESCO (1989). International Congress on Peace in the Minds of Men, 26 June-1 July 1989, Yamoussoukro. In http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ulis/cgi-bin/ExtractPDF.pl?catno=92670&look=new& ll=1&display=1&lang=eb&from=&to= UNESCO (1998). Education for all by 215. World teachers’ day. http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ ev.php-URL_ID=27446&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html United Nations Constitution (1945). In http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm ampaglione, G. (1973). The Idea of Peace in Antiquity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Pres.
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DIASPORIC PHILOSOPHY, COUNTER-EDUCATION AND IMPROVISATION
Diaspora is a philosophical concept. It is an existential imperative. An a historicalpolitical reality. As such it is important to critically reconstruct it throughout human evolution, from the nomadic way of life before agricultural and urban civilizations to modern and post-modern forms of governmentality and quasi-Diasporic life arenas. Diaspora is to be reconstructed historically today in face of the disintegration of the welfare state and social and intellectual forms of stability; in face of the structural degeneration of the preconditions for ecological, national, ethnic, cultural and individual equilibrium, slow changes, and security; in face of the rapid disappearance of the preconditions for trust or even hope for objective-foundationalist epistemologies and justifiable ethics. Contrary to Wexler’s understanding of globalization or the postmodern condition as the era of “a mystical society” I am far from celebrating the present sophisticated mystification of Life and the cannibalism of the object that is directed against the subject. Of special importance to my mind is the diminishing room for an unsuspicious inner or exterior “voice” that will direct us, warn us or even remind us that at the end of the day there is meaning, there is a possible goal, there is something to be cherished or struggled for, and “I” am not a mere echo of contingent, dynamic power-relations. A serious critical reconstruction of these Diasporic dimensions of the unavoidably false reality should today ask about its meaning in face of fast de-territorialization and speeding capitalist-oriented life worlds such as cyberspace, which represent effective de-humanizing contingencies. It is not solely that the concept and the realities of Diaspora must change in face of de-territorialization and demolition of historical consciousness and time that has halted in its linear stream or in its cyclic movement, and currently races at a never-imagined speed in punctual, contingent, dynamism. It is the exile of Eros and the deconstruction of the preconditions for transcendence that make the historical difference in the nature, characteristics and potentialities of Diaspora today. Central to the aim of conceptual and historical analysis of Diaspora in its various forms is the reality of oppressed, silenced and displaced populations. In modernity, the era of national governmentality, suffering and loss relate to ethnic or political exiles under the weight of hegemonic groups in modern national conflicts, but also to other kinds of exiles. They also relate to individual and deeper kinds of nomadism in face of the Genesis or the downfall from the Garden of Eden or the beginning of human history or individual biography, self-consciousness, alienation and trauma; modern homelessness might manifest itself also in self-decided displacement and in [ 119 ]
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the powers of globalizing capitalism and its power of suggestion and re-creation of the “genuine autonomous self-constitutive individual” who, reduced to an efficient producer-consumer, “freely” decides to live as a strong, isolated, nomad in a globalized world. Diasporic philosophy and counter-education today should address these modern as well as postmodern forms of nomadism and exile without forgetting the importance of their history since the prehistoric forms of nomadism. Present day Diasporic humans might reflect on the new, dynamic, Diasporic possibilities opened for some of us. Not for all of us and never in the same form or with a similar potential. Each moment anew. These new possibilities are very selective. They rely on structural inequalities, selective distribution of loss and suffering and asymmetrical accessibility into reflective knowledge, intimacy and responsibility in the era of globalization, nomadism and improvisation. But they cannot be content with conceptual analysis: following Marx, they should develop the potentials, the skills the knowledge and the ideals of today’s modern victims of exile, oppression, marginalization and silencing; and here too, improvisation is of vital importance for a worthy and fruitful encounter with modern forms of exile and the challenges of life in Diaspora. Counter-education that addresses seriously the challenge of loss, exile, and the deceiving “homereturning” projects accepts that no positive Utopia awaits us as a non-dehumanizing telos or life possibilities to be realized by effort, suffering, innovation, courage and “the right religion/theory”. No positive Utopia awaits us as “truth”, “genuine life”, “worthy struggle”, “pleasure” or worthy self-annihilation. Loss is not to be recovered or compensated; not for the individual nor for any kind of “we”. And yet, Love of Life is the home of the Diasporic in the Socratic sense of Eros as an attracting absence of the beautiful. Counter-education should invite the Diasporic to the hospitality of Love of Life. Such hospitality denotes the absence of non-consensual creativity and calls for overcoming conventional morality and the other imperatives of the ethnocentric “we”, its self-evidence, its normality, the counter-violence of the oppressed and its normalized patriotic citizenship. Response-ability and respond-ability (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005, p. 26) toward noncollective, toward pre-subjective and existential kinds of homelessness, toward erotic Diasporic existence, might offer new beginnings and a kind of becomingtoward-the-world (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005, p. 32) as against becoming-swallowed-by-thematrix; an awakening. Flourishing out of Love of Life, it might make possible a call for awakening (never to deliver the awakening itself), which will open the gate not to “emancipation” but to a much more fundamental and much less political manifestation of the quest for life: transcendence. A difference as the abyss between day and night separates between the holiness of the actualization of transcendence and the endless various and conflicting “homereturning” projects and their complementary forms of “emancipation”, exile/exiling, nomadism and slumber dwelling. The determination for Diasporic life and the possibilities opened by Diasporic counter-education are always ironic. It is never at home. It gives birth to something at all times immensely more important than the individuality of the Diasporic individual as in the relation of the artist to her great creation. It is birth-giving. A symbol of Love 120
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of Life as creation that always transcends herself to the otherness of the Other as the Feminine to the Masculine and the born baby as an act of genesis, as Eros to the notyet, as the totally other to the infinite not-yet fertilized potentials of each moment. The heart of improvisation is this movement within co-poiesis as a togetherness offered by Love of Life. It gives birth to the totally new. To the wholly unexpected that the Diasporic human faces its hospitality as alterity and togetherness symbolized by the Orcha; a form of non-instrumental nomadic playfulness that manifests erotic responsibility to Life at its best. It is an invitation which offers hospitality, the notyet, not “home” but the Spirit of Diaspora that is not threatened by silence, by the absence of ethnocentristic-oriented dogma, rituals or psychic structure that is preorganized and demands surrender to playing by the rules. It is silence that hosts here, the self-educated gaze, the eye that meets, again, genuine religiousness and the responsibility that is realized with, in front of, and in preparation for the participation of the Otherness of the Other as a friend, as a companion, as a worthy rival, as an unanswered question, as an indispensible manifestation of the entire cosmos and its holy Diasporic life-toward-birth/end. As such, co-poiesis opens the gate to improvisation that is part and parcel of the most concrete, daily manifestation of the “femininity”, of the birth-giving spirit which is so different from the “masculine”, instrumental-victorious “homes”, companionships and their offsprings. This dimension of improvisation reminds us of Levinas’ saying: “woman is the category of the future, the ecstasy of future. It is that human possibility which consists in saying that the life of another human being is more important than my own, that the Other comes before me, that the value of the Other is asserted before my own” (Levinas, 1993, p. 9). As such it is a conjunction of a special “knowledge”; a non-dominating, pre-rational dialogical knowledge, experience and aesthetic form, which is also a pre-ethical positioning. It is part of an improvised-courageous facing the dangerous waters of the river of fear of ambivalence and rival “truths”, strivings, and the fear of landing on the demanding never-satisfied banks of loss. It is not rational/irrational in the sense established by hegemonic philosophical and political discussions, nor is it ethically justifiable in normalized paths. It is pre-rational and pre-ethical, yet it has a form; it is aesthetically “justified”, allowing ethics and rational deliberation. It is also beyond “negative” and “positive” Utopia. Still, improvisation does represent hope and manifests the possibility of the hospitality of the totally other each moment anew. A messianic dimension here becomes actualized, a holy togetherness, hospitality that gleefully affirms heterogeneity and dialogue—not yet another platonic cave. Diasporic togetherness as actualized in the dynamics of improvisation does not call us to return “home” to sentimentalist-ethnocentric collective alternatives or to anti-humanist mechanical “solutions” and compensations for the loss incubated by departing from nothingness, “homeland” or “the one”. Improvisation manifests the dialectics of response-ability and respond-ability (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005, pp. 26–30). It is not “constructive” nor is it merely “negative”. It
Co-poiesis is a concept first articulated by Bracha Ettinger. See: Ettinger, 2005, pp. 703–713.
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is far from a manifestation of “resistance” to oppression or suffering and loss. In the context of Diasporic counter-education it plays a special role as part of Love of Life and co-poiesis that challenges the matrix of whose manifestations traditional Critical Pedagogy is part and parcel. Improvisation represents a creative-speculative attunement, a different kind of gaze and response-ability that makes possible responsibility that offers co-poiesis in the infinity of the moment, each moment anew. It involves a kind of intimacy with the richness of the cosmos and its inviting dynamics, impulses, drives and meaningcreation as one can see in the Orcha. Only within the derech-eretz of the Orcha hospitality enables creative compassion, and the alterity of the otherness of the Other becomes an indispensable partner. It is a togetherness which shares the holiness of creative realization of playful Love of Life that never merely strives back “home” but eternally toward the not-yet, the unknown and the happiness or suffering of the Other as alterity and companion. This is how the Orcha addresses each moment anew its responsibility to its awful-wonderful origin and endures its responsibility to the life in-between, between eternity and the infinity of the moment, that can never indulge within itself and for one-self as a narcissistic-oriented “individual”. Improvisation, when true to itself, transcends any limited context, border, dogma, regulations, drives, habits and fears—dwelling in the infinity of the moment and the ecstasies of the here and now. It is essentially dynamic, overcoming itself and the immanence that makes welcome the drive for transgression; it offers holiness each moment anew. It is a mimesis of Genesis; it dwells within the erotic unknown, attuned to the music of the not-yet gazing at the manifestations of Life, playfully responding to it in the right manner before any rational calculation and regardless of the will or direction of any colonizing power/temptation. Its acknowledged-blessed homelessness transcends suffering and fear into worthy suffering and responsibility as creative Love of Life, peace that does not serve the victory of violence that has successfully silenced its victims. It offers Diaspora. Diaspora as a gate for an alternative togetherness. Diaspora as an openness and uncontrolled mutual creativity that is responsible for and generous to the otherness of the Other. It reaches out to give birth. To give birth to the unknown and to self-overcoming without an egoistic “I” initiating the colonization of the Other, the response to the otherness or the self-sacrifice of the victimizing kind. It edifies a creative respond-ability to the otherness of the Other, to uncertainty, to the non-consensual, to the refusal to the self-evidence and the other manifestations of the invitation to the “homereturning” project, back to nothingness. All these are here of vital importance—not a threat in the light of which one runs away back “home”, to well established conventions, to the lost Gemeinschaft, to suicide or total victory. Improvisation is not rhetorical, rational and ethical in the traditional Western concept of knowledge and intersubjectivity. It offers a pre-rational and pre-ethical quest for the true, the beautiful and the right in a manner that transcends Western binary subject-object, body-spirit, natural-human, human-Godly dichotomies. These separations parallel Western detachment of the aesthetic, the ethical, the intellectual, the bodily and the political—detachments that are reflected also in the 122
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saying of the psyche and in somatic silence. Diasporic counter-education introduces improvisation as cheerful playfulness that weaves anew the symbolic, the existential, the musical and the intellectual creative attunement; a reply of responsible-playfulness to alterity, to suffering and to anti-erotic pleasures as a serious play, as co-poieses; serious play as the wind of the wings of hope manifesting the concreteness of the presence of hope. It is an ahistorical moment—in a way an anti-historical moment as Judaism teaches us within its conception of exiled God. Within its never-set horizons art becomes a form of life in a specific, material historical moment that seeks or creates bodily conduct and genuine togetherness with the cosmos in its most specific, even microscopic, manifestations in the infinity of the instant. Improvisation “within” co-poiesis is a togetherness that is not pre-imposed or predicted-directed by someone or something: it is the manifestation of the spirit of freedom that meets the gate between silence and “voice”, between respond-ability and response-ability; It is Love of Life, not self-indulgence nor self-forgetfulness which here communicates joyfully. And self-forgetfulness and self-overcoming are so close to each other in their highest levels of realization! Improvisation accepts the invitation of alterity and of the not-yet; creates each moment anew, without being imprisoned in any predetermined model, interest, habit or fear. Love enhances here refusing all shekels and resisting any exterior limitation but not toward disharmony, irresponsibility or meaninglessness. Quite the contrary. Because it is not the fruit of subjectification processes, and since it is prior to “genuine intersubjectivity”, it makes possible happy, responsible nomadism as a worthy togetherness with the cosmos, with the otherness of the Other and with the telos of self-constitution. It opens the gate to nomadism of an individual who is beyond subjectivism in the sense of “self-fulfillment”. A nomad who is with herself as she is with the moment, dwelling in the cosmos in a de-territorialized and ahistorical experience that is beyond her subjectivity, calculations and interests. In improvisation, she is partner to compassionate hospitality of a non-ethnocentric togetherness with the cosmos and with the Other—the Other as a homeless being who does not try to reeducate to a new “home”, dogma or self-forgetfulness. It refuses any control and manipulation, yet it is never relativistic and certainly rejects any form of nihilism, hate or “emancipatory” counter-violence. While improvisation is uncontrolled and resists functionalist and “effective” realization, evaluation, representation and constitution, it is, at least partially, to be edified, cultivated, enhanced, improved, or at least called for. Self-constitution and self-education (which also includes much dislearning) meets here the role of teachability and learning with, for and from the partners. Here there is even room for the master as an important, serious challenge to address and overcome as part of a co-poiesis that facilitates transcendence. Improvisation facilitates transcendence from the quest to return “home”, back to the infinity of nothingness and to the suggestive power of the harmony of meaninglessness. It is not a medium, not a “function”, not (as so popular in today’s high-tech) an instrument that might offer big business and successful individuals 123
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“maximization of benefits”, nor is it a fascinating entertainment or a reliable method for self-forgetfulness. Improvisation actualizes dancing with the otherness of Others who are partners, with the alterity of the not-I within the “I” as well as with the Other that is not “within me” as a mere loss to be possessed, re-educated or “loved”. Diasporic Life here challenges the traumatic-phallic-colonialist attitude to Life as represented since the Socratic project and the beginning of the history of Monotheism. It offers a kind of co-poiesis that is trans-subjective; it transcends intersubjective relations formed by linear subject-object dichotomies. Diasporic co-poiesis offers different relations with central dimensions of Life and with central concepts and realities such as “touch”, “gaze”, “attunement” and response-ability/responsibility. In the form of improvisation it furthers an attempt to re-unite or at least rearticulate the relations between (pre-rational) thought and action, spirit/psyche and body, “I” and the otherness of the Other in a manner that transcends traditional Western relations of space and time. It also rearticulates the relations of the bodily and spiritual touch and infinity, readdressing the relations of the moment and eternity. It facilitates that which has been so difficult for Western thought and human life since the departure from Orphic poetry and primitive nomadism: totally being in the infinity of the moment, totally dwelling in Love of Life. And it does—or does not—do so in the most concrete, embodied, deep-rooted manifestations of the de-territorialized space shared with others. That is why it is of vital relevance to exile and to nomadism of various kinds, including the collective, historical, forced exile as we know it only too well in the 20th and the 21st centuries. Western tradition had difficulties with the body and with bodily touching the thing itself and the otherness of the Other away from the “home” of the traumatic “I”. The body has been conceived in various manners and degrees as the jail of the soul and a somatic treacherous rival to Spirit. Improvisation offers co-poiesis within which the somatic truths are re-legitimized toward serious playfulness with alterity. It calls us to learn to receive and reach out beyond the masculine-feminine dichotomies, giving hospitality and accepting hospitality of the otherness of the Other and the otherness of the not-I within the “I”; toward respond-ability in a home-less dwelling where Life offers impetus to human dwelling, which is very different from the various “homereturning” projects, dualistic-binary-linear manners of control, productivization and communication as we recognize them only too well throughout the history of Instrumental Rationality and monotheism. Improvisation, here, offers not only negativity: it offers (re)birth. It brings forth responsibility, a mature, speculative ear for, gaze at, and touch of the newly-born each moment anew. De-territorializationed “here” offers us within the endlessness of improvisation the most specific and most concrete “here and now”; the here and now that offer not a false “home”, “nirvana” or “pleasure”—it offers nomadic hospitality, Diasporic hospitality of the co-poiesis kind, (in)between the sacrificial Isaac, who is so compassionate, and his father Abraham, the sacrificer. A creative, compassionate relation that calls for the totally other in its most concrete, bodily, deep-rooted, immediate-eternal improvised realization. Such (re)birth is a concrete 124
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communicative creativity that has its roots in the nomadic ethics (Braidotti, 2006), within the techno-scientific realities of globalizing capitalism, in the pre-rational com-passion as offered by Ettinger (Ettinger, 2005) in the spirit of Levinas and the kind of togetherness that is to be educated to and trained by partners that show us/create with us new roads beyond the modern-postmodern struggle in education, assuredly beyond contextuality and the horizons of the powers that form our “self”; beyond the tradition of “critique” into the era of co-poiesis, improvisation and new forms of togetherness challenging the given reality and the presence of injustice and meaninglessness. Imagination, passion and response-ability meet here in a kind of togetherness that Unger comes very close to articulating for us: In the setting of our non-instrumental relations to one another, we come to terms with our unlimited mutual need and fear. This coming into terms is a search. It is a quest for freedom—for the basic freedom that includes an assurance of being at home in the world. The most radical freedom is the freedom to be, to be a unique person in the world as it is”. (Unger, 1984, p. 109)
Improvisation makes possible transcendence within the triumph of the violent arbitrariness of the context—not to manifest the omnipotence of the immanence and homogeneity but to open the gate to transcendence and responsible heterogeneity. It calls for the transformation of respond-ability into co-response-ability, of passion into com-passion, of quasi-poiesis into co-poiesis; a kind of togetherness that does not free any of us from Diasporic existence, or from the danger of selfforgetfulness, yet it opens the gate to serious playfulness with alterity in the Other and the “homereturning” quest within “our” self. It invites self-preparation and self-overcoming. It makes possible dislearning and self-education for focusing on and responding to the (possible, eternally awaited) appearance of the totally other; a challenge to the quest for the ecstasies of transgressions and embarrassment to sentimental “peace”—well beyond “critique”, “consensus” and other rich forms of affirming the “homereturning” invitation into nothingness. References Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions—On Nomadic Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ettinger, B. (2005). Coppiesis. Ephemera 5 (X), 703–713. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2005). Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and diaspora today. In Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.) Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today. Haifa: University of Haifa, 7–34. Levinas, E. (1993). Time is the Breath of the Spirit—In Conversation with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Translated by Joseph Simas and Carolyn Ducker, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Unger, R. M. (1984). Passion—an Essay on Personality. New York: The Free Press.
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Ilan Gur-Ze’ev in conversation with Daniel Boyarin
Judaism, Postcolonialism and Diasporic Education in the Era of Globalization
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev: Thank you, Prof. Boyarin, for enabling this conversation on the issue of Diasporic philosophy and education in the era of globalization. With your permission let us begin with your response to the following differentiation which I suggest in theological terms between Diaspora as a Godly or historical punishment, misfortune or unavoidable immigration, and Diaspora, and still more Diasporic existence, as a wonderful, dreadful, dangerous telos. Daniel Boyarin: Yes. It is precisely as you articulate it. To my mind, the differentiation between sovereignty and cultural identity is not to be located for the collective in the same arena. Here we have to say that Diaspora and what we call in Hebrew Galut are not exactly the same. There are very different nuances which we will talk about. Let me first define Diaspora. Diaspora is a cultural situation in which a group of people have a dual cultural alliance, dual cultural allegiance—to a cultural or cultures in the place were they are and to a culture or cultures in another place to which they are related by etiological memory, other strategies to read the past like shared values, shared religion, and so on. So Diaspora is a very precise term to describe a particular kind of culture in synchronic time. It does not necessarily have to be based on a particular history. The sense of dual cultural allegiance and dual cultural alliance…before a person, yes, there was a language and history and praxis in the place where she is and also an alliance with others somewhere else. That particular dual cultural situation is what I understand as Diaspora. It produces double consciousness, it is the first of the fruits: the ability to be critical. Critical not necessarily in a formal manner like, you know, the Frankfurt School but some sense of distance or some sense of reflection that comes between me and my identity. Simply by virtue of the fact that I have been dual and marginal, something Du Bois spoke about in The Souls of Black Folk… which is of course the paradigm of postcolonial identity: Diaspora becomes a living metaphor, a paradigm for postcolonial consciousness. Galut is a more existential situation that is not incomparable with Diaspora, but Diaspora is a description of culture and Galut is a kind of psyche… IGZ: How would you translate Galut into English? DB: Exile. Yes, exile. But exile in the sense Edward Said offers… Again, in the sense of being displaced, which we are all, we are all displaced. There are those who are such that they can imagine that we are not, and others who are led to forget who they are. Being a Jew in a situation where the dominant cultures are not Jewish is a way of constantly reminding ourselves that we are also in Galut. And it is too easy to forget that when you have a nation-state....I think half the French people should be [ 127 ]
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German, and half the Ukrainians should be Russian, and half the Russians should be Moldavian and, you know. It is heavy to have this course of self-determination which means that these five thousand square miles or whatever it is, these are Moldavia, they belong to Moldavians and every one who is not a Moldavian does not belong here. This is Romania, and anyone who is a Moldavian does not belong here. Aside from the enormous violence that is part and parcel of ethnic cleansing it is a disaster for culture as well. For our imagination of culture, for the end of thinking that cultures are bounded and pure, and are incompatible with each other. In fact, life for every culture has always been the interaction with other civilizations. IGZ: But what about exile as an ontological category and as a mission? DB: Yes. On the philosophical side. I have a sense of this notion…which comes straight from Jewish sources as well. Because of Galut Hashechina, the central notion that Galut is not only a political situation of the Jews, but a condition of the world, the condition of a broken world. So, it is the sense of brokenness, and broken heartedness. The Talmud says that all the gates can be closed except the gate of tears. I do not say we have to suffer… IGZ: In this light how would you articulate the idea of Galut as the universal message of Judaism? DB: Precisely in that sense of reminding ourselves of being in… a first reminder of the brokenness of the world. I am not saying that most Jews historically thought that way themselves. But it seems like one of the productive forces in the creation of what we understand as the historical, progressive, leftist tendency among Jews. IGZ: And yet you seem to find it an essential manifestation of Judaism all along Jewish history. DB: Yes. Except for the “essential”. What I see is a response to particular historical, material conditions. Therefore I tend to think we ought to maintain ourselves as much as possible in that historical situation, if you want that consciousness to continue. And it was not only the Ashkenazim. This is very important to say. Because there is a tendency to think “Oh, that was the Ashkenazim, the Ashkenazim, you know, communism….”. Half the Iraqi communist party were Jews, if not more, and the leaders were Jews. And in Tunis, in Morocco, there were Jews in the radical movements, particularly in the communist party. I spoke to an Iraqi Arab communist and he said, “We felt betrayed when half of the party picked up and left the country in 1951”. IGZ: Do you find a tension between Jewish monotheism and particularism—that special kind of particularism which is devoted to and calls for universalism as a manifestation of its ethnocentrism which is committed to redeem/colonize/destroy all manifestations of otherness? Could you, please, compare this kind of universalism to another kind of universalism, such as manifested in Jewish concept of Diasporic existence, which is to my mind actually essential to Judaism which understands exile not as punishment but rather as a mission, which is eternally and unavoidably located in between immanence and transcendence. How would you articulate your Diasporic thinking in face of this tension in Judaism between particularism and universalism, immanence and transcendence? 128
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DB: Universalism and particularism. These terms turn out to be traps. Almost every claim to universalism is the most vicious kind of particularism. At least, possibly there are places where a certain kind of particularism can actually be productive of the most significant universalism. Most universalisms make the following statement: “Some day you will be like me. We will all be together”. This is very obvious in Isaiah. What is the universalism there?—Everyone will come to the temple, everyone will acknowledge the God of Israel and so on. This is the universalism…It is even stronger in the Christian universalism derived directly from this Isaiaic statement. The Muslim values have very much the same phenomenon. This is universal. I do not see anything unusual theoretically in the Muslim discourse of universalism and even its violence in some fringes of Islam. It is as well to remember that there are a billion and half Muslims in the world. So a lunatic fringe can do a lot of damage. The lunatic fringe of the Jews is five thousand people, the limited fringe of the Muslims is five million. I am not an expert on the particular numbers but… So a lot more damage can be done, but the structures, the intellectual structures, that drive the violent fools of Judaism and the violent fools of Islam are very close. And Christians…sixty years ago the Pope was a Nazi collaborator and the present one a friend of Holocaust Deniers. So, for Ratzinger to mobilize racist popes from the Middle Ages again as authorities for his gross failures about Islam is disingenuous to say the least. So universalism and particularism are very problematic terms. What I have argued in several of my works is still to maintain—although I am older now and I am a little bit more cynical about it, about everything—but still I maintain that out of certain kind of particularism a genuine concern for others can emerge, and particularism of that sort allows the possibility that I can actually love the others whoever they may be. IGZ: Is this particularism a Diasporic one? DB: It is. IGZ: Necessarily? DB: Yes. Necessarily. Yes. Analytically. It…you know…that is the question. I am not saying it will not be possible to have it in Israel/Palestine. But Israel/Palestine will have to be so transformed in its political imagination before that can happen, whereas in the Diaspora it is close. I think that putting ourselves into a situation where we are forced to be at our best and not at our worst, where chances are very very straightforward as said by Hazal [the ancient Jewish sages]: Ein apotropus la’arayot [there is no guardian against unchastity]—you know? Don’t go walking next to a house of ill repute to prove how strong your self-control is—go ten blocks away. IGZ: Concerning the relation between your feminist approach and your Diasporic Jewish philosophy, Prof. Boyarin, which is explicitly both inseparably antiZionist and anti-oppressive: you are consistent in presenting Galutiyut, Diasporic existence, as an anti-phallic orientation. In this sense it is as fundamentally feminist as it is Jewish. Isn’t it an essential connection while you are committed to a nonfundamentalist position? DB: Yes. No… 129
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IGZ: I would like to proceed here with your permission… DB: But it is an essentialist definition! More than I can accept… IGZ: Yes… Yet, I will continue and insist that if there is after all such a line of division in your thought between your anti-Zionist-phallic-oppressive stance and your feminist orientation—then this is not a difference that makes a difference. To my mind it is a difference solely within the framework of the same tradition, the same stance toward Life as in the case of the concept of Arete. What I mean is the spectrum between Arete as the manifestation of worthy manhood of Achilles to Arete in its more sophisticated or higher sense as represented by Socrates and the ideal philosopher, on its path toward transcendence, toward that which is true, just and beautiful. In light of anti-phallocentric critique it is actually neither a tiger’s leap into new thinking nor an alternative human existence, but different stages and different manifestations of one and the same phallocentric, Western, tradition: the Socratic ideal is actually the developed myth of Achilles with his big, terrible sword, always on his way, eternally focused on being toward the next battle and victory; a development of a philosophical ideal which contains, like in the Olympic ideal, not only the unavoidability of struggle for victory and life as continuous combat but unavoidably also the exclusion of women, on the way toward the light, toward the truth, toward unification with the “one” or what have you. In both cases the path is oppressive, or linear, exclusive or territorialist-colonialist in its essence—not as a deterioration, mistake or deviation from the “genuine” path. In other words still, Prof. Boyarin, isn’t it so that here you are actually offering us two different ways to avoid genuine effort for worthy Diasporic life? DB: As for Plato—of course. Let us not forget that Socrates was considered a brave soldier. An integral part of his society. I have a lot to say about Plato. I am currently writing half a book about Plato. What is more to the point is currently the possibility of recovering essentialism. It is not that I claim that the ideals of the Jewish man are more feminine. My claim is that in a specific cultural condition within which manhood was articulated in a specific form, Jewish maleness was developed as resistance. Surely this is not a manifestation of the essence of Judaism. For example, I can see it also in the Indian discourse concerning maleness in very similar situations, namely in the colonial context. And surely it is not a feminist trend. This is because, as everyone can see, it relates to the oppression of women, albeit in a more gentle manner but no less harsh compared with romantic culture and romantic society. The form I was searching after (today I am less confident about it) was the very possibility of offering an alternative model. It is not even a search for a better model but the very presence of an alternative. The very existence of another model challenges the claim of the hegemonic model to be natural or self-evident. This why I call the Jewish model “the sub-dominant fiction”. It is no less of a fiction, no less dominant in its context; yet already in its difference and in its resistance to the hegemonic discourse it entails importance for critical thinking. This is my precise argument. Now, today, I am more attentive, I emphasize more strongly the violent dimensions of the Hazalic culture [traditional religious Jewish culture—IGZ] and the culture it gave birth to. Its reaction to relations between two men, hierarchy, 130
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and, of course, in relations between man and woman, and so on… I see much more the common ground between the Platonic dialogue—which is anything but nonhierarchical—and the Talmud. I see very similar operations of power and hierarchy. What interests me, then, is to see how in one way the Talmud undermines a reflection on something and then, taking that back to Plato, to see how we can see Plato’s texts also as at the same time enabling, and some of them also querying the operations of that which you called the phallocentric use of language. What Bakhtin calls the monological as opposed to the dialogical. So it is not as if I am saying that Plato is this and the Talmud is that. I am saying that in some ways they are very similar, for better or for worse. IGZ: Prof. Boyarin, what are the unique characteristics of the Jewish exilic, nomadic existence? What would be your response to my claim that the Jewish Diasporic existence is unique, even if not essentially, in the sense that even if it is contextual, influenced and manipulated by specific power-relations and so on, still, it is anti-dogmatic, committed to self-reflection and eternal edification, dialogical and anti-violent, even if specific powers and language games are among the preconditions for its very existence. Could you please elaborate more on the other, non-Jewish Diasporic alternatives? DB: Yes. I think the Indian culture which also in the context of British Colonialism articulated the female-like moral subject, again, not essentialist, but with respect to the definition of what the English in that case saw as masculine. Again, this should not be confused with feminism. Ramakrishna in the late 19th century called for Indian men to become women! In part, though, to save them from sexuality. Right after him, just about the same time, is his main disciple Swami Vivekananda, who makes a revolution and says, “No. We have to be men! We have to be Indian men”. And at the same time in Europe, in Western Europe, you have a movement for a muscular Christianity. So that sort of female/feminine way of looking at Jesus suddenly is replaced by, you know, these young Christian men, now being trained to be warriors of muscular Christianity. It is about the same time that Zionism develops a discourse opposed to the so-called feminization of Jewish men. IGZ: A Diasporic approach too might search for refuge in dogma. The Diasporic orientation is invited and is in danger of accepting the invitation to become closed, exclusionist, collectivistic-oriented, much like certain trends in radical feminism and in certain post-colonialist trends. Would it be improper to meet your feminist conception with a refusal of any positive utopia, resisting even a Diasporic philosophy which is positive, optimist and affirming the “homereturning” project on its philosophic, existential and political levels? How would you conceive in this sense the relation between Negative Theology and Diasporic Philosophy within the framework of your conception of feminism? DB: Oh-ho!! You demand from me so much theology! I am not a theologian. I am not claiming to be totally ignorant in terms of theology, but…what I would say is, again, the older I get the more critical of utopianism I become. I see Bloch as a kind of ideal thinker…and Benjamin also. Benjamin is somewhat less theoretically explicit than Bloch. But the opening to Utopia has been that which makes possible 131
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a progressive political stance. Today I am a little less convinced that the notion of Utopia is…less orientation to a particular notion of Utopia. It has more of a kind of pragmatic sense, which I partly learned from my friend Michel Warschawski. Even if we still have it in the background, we did not abandon it, it sort of faded away from me. He said to me, and I appreciate it a great deal: “If I can stop one young Palestinian boy from being tortured and beaten up then I am…” IGZ: But the origin, the foundation or the justification of such a responsibility cannot be purely pragmatic! DB: Why not?! Pragmatic I do not mean as opposed to ethical! What I mean is as opposed to a certain kind of Utopianism which is constantly in line with the statement that “It has to become worse before it gets better”, and “What difference does it make if it is this individual or that individual”, you know, the kind of discourse that leads to the supremacy of one group or another, or “We are the heroes of the revolution”, to ascriptions of “false consciousness” to oppressed people. In other words, seeing rather that it is no less radical to be engaged in everyday Utopianism. The commitment to that everyday Utopianism prevents some of the distortions that we see on the left, including the so-called Israeli left, you know, in which the workers in Dimona become a non-subject. You know we say, in English, the perfect is the enemy of the good. There is a way in which…But it has to be done without falling into a kind of liberal cynicism in which, you know… just some sort of moving deckchairs around on the Titanic. IGZ: Here you are actually inviting us to the next topic of our discussion, the characteristics of a possible Diasporic ethics. What is the ethics of your Diasporic philosophy, the ethics of the eternal nomad? In other words, is it the case that from the roots of anti-dogmatism, anti-ethnocentristic-collectivism, a non-parochial/ contextual ethics might be born, while refusing any God, any El Kana, any regulative idea that governs it? And still in this light, Prof. Boyarin, what is the sense of a Diasporic ethics in relation to responsibility toward the Other? DB: That is exactly what I was trying to explain in my book on Paul. The wager is that in some kind of full and rich appropriation of what is given to me as my own identity—is given to me—not chosen by me. This is part of what distinguished Jonathan’s perspective and my own from the issue of liberalism. We do not believe in universalist free choice. Freedom in the sense that identity is not just the quest of a free choice. It is also an obligation. We are given. And I mean that both as a phenomenological and as a normative statement: those of us who are born Jews and…almost do not have a choice but to act that out in one way or another and bear the heaviness of being Jews. In a prescriptive sense, I do not think it demands that one should run far away. Because when we run far away we simply run away into other particulars. The wager is that from the basis of a fairly articulated, rich in content, sense of identity, of proto-identity if you will, one can develop a position of solidarity with others in their own particularity. It is a way beyond multiculturalism and it leads to a kind of identification for which, of course, the flesh turns out to be the common denominator. So there are many ways to be human, there are thousands of ways to be human, but there are only a certain number of basic ways of the 132
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human body. That is one of the true connectors. It should be also developed from my own sense of particularity, of what it feels to be a particular and somehow to be able to develop our own identity in face of and with others. Every time I hear about a culture disappearing it pains me the way it pains other people, and myself included, when we hear about a species of bird disappearing. For me, the loss of a way that humans have found to be human is a disaster. Of course, all human beings have to change; I am not saying that eating people, beating wives, mutilation simply need to be “respected.” I am not getting into that kind of romantic culturalism that celebrates everything old and “authentic.” We also have to have a critique of each other’s culture. That is also part of solidarity. The sense of preciousness of every way of life, of every language, of every way that humans have found to enact being human is the gift that we can have from a Diasporic sensibility. That can be, I think, the basis for a non-vicious solidarity. IGZ: How do you reconcile the tension between the particular and the universal in your concept of interpretation and in your Jewishness? In other words, much in light of Levinas’ thinking, do you see a tension between the Ethical I who is unavoidably committed to the otherness of the Other and precedes all logical or collectivist-oriented consideration, justifications and commitments, and the Moral I that is constituted by deliberations, reflection and responsibility to the political, to the cultural and to the existential actualities and their imperatives, educators, poets and executioners? DB: I reject that whole dichotomy! I think it is an invidious dichotomy to start with, where “mere morality” is always the negative term of a binary opposition and the Jews here end up being the representatives of morality and the Christians end up being the representatives of ethics. I do not see any useful theoretical distinction between ethics and morals. There is no way to resolve the tension between universalism and particularism. It is irresolvable! IGZ: To your mind, what are the implications of this essential or unavoidable absence of a bridge between universalism and particularism? How is it possible to establish a non-capricious/naïve/contingent quest/claim to act morally in face of such an abyss? Is it possible to your mind to use this abyss as a gate for a new, Diasporic, morality? DB: I do not know. I do not know if we can do it in a way that will not be contingent. And yet there is a bridge. There is a bridge that is broken in the middle. IGZ: But Prof. Boyarin, please, tell us, where is that bridge? DB: It’s broken in the middle and we have to keep one man on each side of the way. I do not think it can be a result of a theoretical level. The difference, the distinction, between the universal and the particular. But I think most of our ethical grounds stay somehow beyond a solid theoretical justification. It is a very strange thing. IGZ: Would you agree to the claim that a particularist/contextual/ethnocentristic ethics is inescapably violent as long as I am the son of this historical moment, an agent of a specific culture or a disciple of this or that Rabbi, conscience, or flag, and therefore it is fundamentally immoral, while the Diasporic existence and its exilic 133
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philosophical sensitivity begins by acknowledging this positioning, acknowledging the fundamental deficiency of us as the children of a specific historical moment and as agents and victims of a specific context? This is why it is never at home, never a worthy disciple of any dogma or God, always between here and there, between the particular and the universal, wondering, improvising and infinitely responsible to overcome contextualism and approaching a kind of universalism that is much more of a co-poiesis than a manifestation of universal validity of a logical claim or a successful colonialist act of normalizing the victim. So, given the immanent violence of any contextual-ethnocentristic-oriented ethics here is my question: is it valid, to your mind, even concerning the justification of a possible Diasporic ethics? And if so, in what sense is it ontologically and morally Diasporic? DB: We make our own history but not in conditions of our undertaking. People forget that. They think of Marxism as being fairly determinist at the level of the individual. Even the most classic Marxism of Marx allows for a range of choices of action. Otherwise it is almost impossible to imagine historical change. So, we do have a certain amount of agency. At the same time we are very much conditioned. I can see things that are ethical wrongs that hundred years ago were not perceived by the best, by the best of humanity, as being wrong. And I am certain a hundred years from now people will look back at some or many of my practices and see them as barbaric, as I see the way that wives were treated in the United States…and I am not talking about Mongolia in the 11th century but about the United States in the nineteen-fifties. There is some kind of space for critique—of course, Marx ended up locating it in one special discourse that he called scientific, and in other words can be called false conciseness and we can be a bit more flexible—but still, imagine the idea that there is this space in which class can be transcended. It is one of the most important revolutionary thoughts and it came from aristocratic folks. Some, or as others will say many, revolutionary thoughts came from aristocratic roots. And Marx has certainly built into his theory, such a possibility. IGZ: What is it that enables this relative autonomy? DB: I do not know. But there is something that allows two brothers to grow up in the same economic conditions, in the same class, in the same discourse to take radically different political positions. Fortunately, not I and my brother. IGZ: And at the same time you claim that in the Diasporic condition or the Diasporic orientation enables the edification of this potential more than other conditions. DB: Conceivably. Conceivably. Certainly systematic resistance to any of the monologizing discourses of the nation-state. Yehuda Amichai once wrote “tipesh kadegalim”. That’s the metaphor—stupid as flags. IGZ: Yes…While being a committed Zionist… DB: Yes. Exactly. I am not getting into it at all. Poets are frequently smarter when they are writing poetry then when they are speaking about politics and other topics. They are smarter as politicians when they write poetry. I wish that somebody would convince Bouli just to write novels and stop making speeches. IGZ: This brings us closer to the topic of Zionism. How do you conceive Zionism not solely as the most effective negation of Galutiyut (exile) or Enlightened/romantic 134
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barbarization of Judaism but in comparison to other national movements that face deep endemic national conflict? DB: You knowChaim Weitzman said the Jews are like everybody else, only more so. So, Zionism is like everything else, only more so. For me Zionism is very much a part of the late end of the discourse of nationalism which is a 18th/19th-century phenomenon and I do not think that it is particularly worse than other nationalisms. It seems to me, however, that it is somehow more morally problematic to attempt ethnic cleansing against the indigenous—and they are the indigenous when you come from somewhere else—than the kind of ethnic cleansing discourse that takes place in conflict between ethnic groups who both in the sense of equal historical claim, have a pragmatic claim to indigeneity. Of course, indigeneity is also only a metaphor that constructs, but still, the difference between people who lived on this piece of land for hundreds of years and others, with a set of books around them who say: “No. This is really mine because I have got this book and you have to leave that piece of land because now it’s mine”. So, I am not one of those who think that everybody has a right to nationalism except the Jews. I am an opponent of nationalism, opponent of the notion of self-determination. Lenin was absolutely right on this. Not that I am a particular apologist for Lenin in general but I think that he got this one right. He went too far because he did not allow a Diasporic national culture but he was right in his opposition to self-determination. My anti-Zionism as a call for Diasporic transcendence is not just for Jews. Obviously not. It is not particularly directed against Zionism although it is especially focused that way because this is the matter that I am in. In other words, one of the most important ways for me being a Jew is to be an anti-Zionist. I have feelings about Chechen, Moldavian, Serbian and Bosnian and Croatian nationalism, part of which are derivative from my thinking about Zionism. But the primary focus of my anti-nationalist passion is in respect of this party. IGZ: What is your view of the discourse concerning the new anti-Semitism? Do you find this whole discourse a sophisticated-manipulative invention aimed at defending Zionism, or is it partly an apologetic attempt and partly also a development of a new racism, as one may claim concerning parts of the whiteness discourse, or some of the critiques of Western canon driven by the postcolonialist philosophical and political drives, concepts, practices and aims? DB: As one of the great American philosophers, Jack Parr, once said, even paranoids have enemies. I do not think it is necessary to go and search for this kind of anti-Semitism but I certainly do not think that WWII brought an end to genuine anti-Semitic nationalism. And you are right, it shows up in various ways in discourses that are very very much closely related to the anti-Semitic discourses around Marxism. Active anti-Semitic neo-Nazi groups in Scandinavia, which we are getting to know more and more about, come directly out of Nazi groups in Scandinavia that were there; similarly white Aryan resistance in the US and other groups, and still a great deal of Christian anti-Semitism. Still, a lot of Christian preachers speak about the Jews in classic ways and I think that partly the very legitimate anger and critique of the Zionist project has given permission to some 135
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of these very very classic versions of anti-Semitism to free themselves from certain kinds of restrains. If in the nineteen-fifties it was a strict taboo to express anti-Semitic views—I do not mean only Germany but even in the US, France, Denmark… Part of the change is due simply to the distance but also to a certain kind of availability of the Jew as Evil allows that. IGZ: I agree, Prof. Boyarin, with this part of your argument. But let us, please, go into the parts of the new anti-Semitism which are more influential, spread and challenging and challenge their theological, philosophical and political faces and fruits. I invite you to reflect on the contribution of the texts you and I find so relevant from Said and Guattari to Lyotard, Bhabha and Antonio Negri. How do you see the attempt to see the genuine Jew not in the flesh, the conscious or practicing Jew but rather the cosmopolitan nomad, the Diasporic human who every human, everywhere, any moment anew might join when choosing the great refusal to any “homereturning” project, entering an alternative togetherness and a transgressed and transcended co-poiesis? You might know about my theoretical attempts on this direction—but I am not alone and I think that a good part of what is sometimes called post-structuralist and postmodern thought is very close to the Diasporic philosophy that is so relevant all along history, but even more so in a globalized world and in a dynamic multicultural reality. Do you think that the genuine Jew is not the Christian, not the Palestinian and not the traditional Jew but the genuine Diasporic human that any human on the globe might become in a mature manner if he or she works courageously and tirelessly enough to rebirth himself or herself into? DB: I think not. My brother and I wrote explicitly against that. IGZ: Said, however, explicitly described himself as the genuine Jew, and the Palestinian people as taking over the historic avant-garde mission of the Jews, inheriting the Jewish mission, becoming the true Israel as they are the victims of the ultimate victim of the West. As such, namely only as the true Israel, they are encouraged by Said to open a dialogue with the Israelis who are about to acknowledge their historic role as victimizers who should go into self-decolonization, namely selfimposed de-Zionization, which will open the gate to a moral dialogue in which one side will hold the stock of total and eternal victim and the other party will remain the eternal victim that gains the possibility not of a pardon but the opportunity to transform itself and enter the position of being allowed to ask for forgiveness and eternal material and moral compensation so that the dialogue will have an eternal “homereturning” path and moral telos. DB: Yes. But it is not quite the same thing. The Palestinians are saying that the Palestinians are the Jews of the Middle East. That is an analogy. Said goes a little bit further to say that the Palestinians are the Jews. These are powerful metaphors or expressions…the way you phrased the sentence sounds like simple supersessionism and I think… IGZ: I referred to a well known interview he had with the Israeli columnist Ari Shavit in which he explicitly explains why the full realization of the history of the ultimate victim, the Jew, gives birth to the Palestinian tragedy/fate/Nakbah as the final victim of the ultimate victim… 136
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DB: Well, it’s not totally incoherent or incomprehensible. But that is not the same move that Lyotard makes, which is ahistorical, explicitly, something to take The Jew and apply it to anyone who is…to blacks, to women, to homosexuals, you know, that is not the same move that Said is making. Said is making a very specific historical existential claim that relates to particular history of particular peoples. It’s very particularistic in a sense. In some sense Said would not deny the reality of the Jews. It’s not an abstract move as some kind of philosophical move. Even Marxists claim that since the Jews are some kind of economic class it is not abstract in the way Lyotard and some of his epigones are… IGZ: And yet, in his “economic philosophic manuscripts” Marx writes about the Jew of daily life as against the Jew of the Sabbath. The Jew of the Sabbath is the Jew of the synagogue, of prayers, of the Talmud, while the Jew of daily life, the real Jew, is the Jew of the exchange. And for Marx the logic of ownership, of purchasing, of colonizing is the essence of Judaism and the capitalist market. The capitalist market is for Marx nothing but universal realization of the essence of Judaism and in this sense transcends the particular historical Jew. You see, Prof. Boyarin, Marx precedes Lyotard in universalizing The Jew but in a very different way, so that The Jew becomes the metaphor for everything that is wrong and Evil in actual history, as against Lyotard who universalizes The Jew as the Other of that reality. Said introduces in his postcolonialist theory the Palestinian as the genuine “Jew” that Lyotard offers, not The Jew that Marx relates to. The postcolonialist theory, I agree with you, begins in a certain respect with the particular Jew and the particular Palestinian but I disagree that it is sufficient itself in historical claims and concrete facts and it only relates to these in respect of, and within, its alternative political theology and martyrology which has a telos to universalize the Palestinians as the present-day crucified that incorporate and symbolize the suffering, the victimhood, and the call for justice of all non-Westerners and all the marginalized within the framework of Western (Judeo-Christian) colonialist machine. DB: Yes. To a certain extent. IGZ: When Marx writes about Bruno Bauer and the question of giving civil rights to Jews his reply to Bauer’s suggestion of giving full civil rights to the Jews is that Bauer poses wrongly the fundamental question of emancipation. The question is actually not the emancipation of the Jews but the possibility of the emancipation of all human beings from Judaism. Capitalism, for Marx, is the universal incarnation of the essence of Judaism and the challenge of universal emancipation is the question not of emancipating the Jews but rather the emancipation of humanity from the universalization of Judaism, namely from the principle of purchasing, of private ownership, of capitalism. Current-day postcolonialism makes the same move under the flag of colonialism with “Israel”, “America”, “whiteness” and “Eurocentrism”. And here Said is instrumental, as against Lyotard, whose universalization of The Jew is not part of the new anti-Semitism but rather part of the attempt to challenge it. In my view, two versions of Diasporic philosophy are here in conflict. One, which offers us new racism and new anti-Semitism reproduces the old concept of Diaspora as a temporary state of affairs toward “genuine” “homereturning” of some kind. The 137
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other, realizing the essence of Judaism insists on galutiyut, on eternal nomadism, improvisation and moral avant-garde, and refuses all invitations to be swallowed by this or that “homereturning” project and sees Diasporic life as a moral imperative and as a potentially elevating telos. What do you think about this conception of Diaspora as I articulate it in my work, as very much in tension with your concept of Diasporic life? DB: It’s interesting. Going back to Lyotard and Said, I think there is a real difference between Lyotard and Said. Said was interested in Jews as a real living reality. IGZ: Less in Israelis but surely in Jews. As we are dealing with Marx and Said I would like to ask, how do you position your Diasporic conception in comparison with Said and present day post-colonialists on the one hand, and Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer on the other? DB: I would not like to go into it. I am not philosophically trained… IGZ: But I must insist. You do offer us, if not a programmatic agenda, still a theoretical framework which goes well beyond the analysis of the discourse concerning the Jewish condition… DB: Yes. But I never read Adorno so how can I talk about Adorno! I find Adorno nearly impenetrable. I do not think it is a problem with Adorno but I have never been trained. I believe I would need to spend ten years reading Kant. I find it impossible to read Kant because I was not trained. I would not ask someone else to comment on the Talmud. IGZ: In your work you oppose Yavne to Metzada. DB: As two myths. IGZ: Yes. What are the implications of this tension between Yavne and Metzada for the current Israeli condition? DB: Metzada is still the dominant. True, with fewer rituals. But still, a sense which is the opposite of all rational reality: this is the last stand, the only place for the Jews, the only possible way in which Jewish existence can continue and therefore the only rational way to behave is to fight to the last man. Today people will not make a model in a gross way from Metzada as they did twenty years ago, but that sense that this is the last stand is still so common and so dominant. I think it is against any rational apprehension. I promise you that a Jew in Los Angeles is safer as a Jew than a Jew in Jerusalem today. I do not think that everywhere in the world it is equally safe. Of course not. And history does not tell us anything different. Jewish sovereignty in Palestine has been destroyed more than once at great cost in Jewish lives and somehow the Jews managed to continue. So Yavne provides in this sense an alternative model; when life in Jerusalem becomes unviable you slip out through the walls and you find somewhere to build a space for Jewish life. You do not want to stay and commit suicide metaphorically or figuratively. The other thing that people do not pay attention to very much about Metzada, that was systematically veiled, is that it was mass murder. It was not just a mass suicide. You know, before these men killed themselves they killed their wives and their children and I am not sure that we know exactly what their wives and children thought about this. Did any138
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body ask them, Do you prefer to somehow survive and grow up as a slave? Read the text! It is very critical of what they did on the moral, ethical and also pragmatic level. So, it is not an accident that the word Metzada was so forgotten that when the Jews in the Yishuv [Jewish Palestinian society before the establishment of the State of Israel] started using the name they spelled it with a sammech (“s”) because the name Metzada does not appear even once in Hazal! [the sayings and discussions of Jewish rabbinical discourse]. It does appear in Yosippun. The imperative of staying alive, not by whatever means necessary, but by so-called dishonorable means such as pretending, sneaking off…it is very much an alternative metaphor to the Metzada model. I was once present at a conversation between two academics about two models of literature. One Christian was speaking about the Jesuit priests who made oaths of allegiance to Protestant kings “con reservatio”—and stayed alive. The Protestant sitting there got furious: That is terrible! They should have stood up like men and allowed themselves to be killed and be martyred! I stopped them and I said “no”. I said, “The Talmud bans that kind of behavior as well, in most circumstances”. So, they responded “Yes—what could you expect, a talmudist between Jesuits”. So, as usual, some of the clearest things about Judaism come out of anti-Semites. I think they get their evaluations totally wrong but they do see a phenomenon… IGZ: Would you permit me to interrupt at this point for one moment? DB: Sure. IGZ: I would like to address another dimension of the dichotomy that you are suggesting. When you relate to Yavne vs. Metzada you are relating to a metaphor that refers to Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakay, who ran away from the rebellious Jerusalem [against the Romans] and he takes with him solely one thing, the most precious of all. What? Living beyond the nationalist, proud and fanatic rebellious Jerusalem he rescues only a text. A holy text. A copy of the Torah. What does he refer to? Not a longed-for national sovereignty, nor power, nor a promised collective final victory nor personal success, treasure or pleasure. What he tries to rescue is in fact the relation to the book, not to the holy book as such but to the text and to the unending holy work of interpretation, to eternal life of morally committed free Diasporic interpreters as an alternative to the “homereturning” project. Interpretation as an eternal Diasporic existence. How do you conceive the relevance of this alternative in the present historical moment? DB: To put it simplistically, the Jews who still claim to be saving the Jews do so by ceasing to be totally Jews in opposition to Yohanan Ben-Zakay who was not one of the Zealots. I think now that many people who oppose that which comes with sovereignty, and especially with kibbush [conquest of foreign territories] were called traitors, but most history of the Jews may prove them to be the ones who made it possible to enable Jewish existence. IGZ: And you say it exactly in opposition to the way Lyotard uses the category of The Jew! Now, Prof. Boyarin, in light of what you have just said, if we allow ourselves to think of a possible universalization of the Yohanan Ben-Zakay Yavne, how would you imagine present-day Yavne in the era of globalizing capitalism as a universal vision and maybe also as a universal call, as an universal moral imperative? 139
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DB: It is an interesting question. It is one that I thought of a lot. Here, again, at one level we have to move to globalization. Not the McDonald’s but a sense of human solidarity that absolutely transcends. And on the other hand, precisely the homogenization that comes with the capitalist globalization seems to be destroying the possibility of a new Yavne. The possibility of Yavne sages, of not necessarily that which historically came to be Yavne, but as a symbol, as a symbolic structure, the sense of the preservation and the development of the local in two senses of “local”—the geographical local but also the Diasporic local—in the context of solidarity seems to be the only possibility that we have. IGZ: Would you consider it as a possible guideline for a possible Diasporic education today? DB: I hope so! Obviously I hope so! I did not get thinking that through and making it not a solution but a direction. In America now there is finally a serious discourse about air, water, the environment, global warming. Even George Bush, yimach shemo, has to take it seriously. And it gets dismissed by so many Israeli columnists who relate to it as trivial, as a matter of political correctness, you know; they put it in the same category as smoking in restaurants. There is something bizarre about that, because the basis for global human solidarity at the very least, at the very most basic, will have to do with whether there is air, whether there is water, whether there is food. And this has to be a globalized discourse. Because I cannot say “oh, the air in California is going to be fine, but the air in Mexico is going to be impossible to breath”. So we are forced into some kind of globalization and there is something—assuming that Lapid is correct, taking his word—there is something about the structure of the Israeli discourse, again, grosso modo, that makes it be seen as some sort of trivial American fad. It is not more important than making sure that people are eating right now, or that the oppression of Palestinians stops; but it cannot be left as unimportant either. Because what good could it do to the Palestinians, if they finally free themselves of the occupation five years before the end of all human existence? IGZ: Prof. Boyarin, thank you so much for this conversation.
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Ilan Gur-Ze’ev in conversation with Cornel West
Diaspora, Philosophy and CounterEducation in Face of Post-colonial Reality
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev: Thank you, Professor West for agreeing to enter this conversation. Especially as I asked for your permission to talk on some of the more difficult aspects of the critical mind and the critical language we love to love in a way that might problematize some of our most important habits of justifying our optimism concerning Critical Pedagogy. By the way, did you receive the book I sent you? Cornel West: Oh, I did. I did. It’s a lovely book. IGZ: You did? CW: Thank you, you had some interesting things about Adorno. I look at the Adorno every day; you see that picture over there? IGZ: Oh…Adorno is a thinker who is of special interest for me. No, it is much more than having an interest in him. Even today I conceive him as a writer not to be very far away from; actually I did my PhD on Critical Theory and the history of pessimism. CW: Yes, I saw that, the footnote there about 1996 on the problem of pessimism was fascinating. Adorno was somebody who ought to be a constant companion. IGZ: Although, you know, unfortunately, most of the people that I meet normally relate to Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse only in their first period of critical thinking and they are very reluctant to approach the more mature, yes, even more sophisticated, and also more pessimistic and ambivalent texts of their later work. CW: Absolutely IGZ: After the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Prof. West, you are known in the world as a thinker who integrates different traditions, disciplines and practices in an improvisational-original way for a philosophy and practice which are critical. What for you are the educational implications of critical philosophy as an improvisational act which at the same time is the uttermost religious commitment? CW: And it’s already… let me begin, that I thank you for letting me be a part of this conversation, and saluting your own work in this regard, because I think that my own thinking is close to what you call a second stage of Critical Theory and I say that because you see I view myself first and foremost a jazzman and a bluesman in the world of ideas. What that means is that going back to Plato and the traditional quarrel of philosophy and poetry, which is really a fight of education, a fight of paideia, what is going to be the fundamental means by which we engage and profound ways in which we form a tension cultivates souls and mature souls, those three levels of paideia, and as you know, that Plato, for dialectic argument and the critique of the poem, but it could be the minigrame poet, who talks about forms of persuasion and [ 141 ]
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so forth. Now I believe that philosophers must go to school with the poets and poets must engage the philosophical reflection; that is why Benjamin is for me the great 20th century philosopher, because you know what Hannah Arendt said about him, he engaged in a poetic thinking that is philosophical, or he’s a philosopher who has a poetic dimension and therefore he fuses the philosophic, the poetic and of course the political, which is always already shown through both. So I think when I resonate with you most as one who takes jazz and blues as a starting point is to acknowledge that this fusion of the aesthetic, the poetic, the ethical, the political, the existential, the spiritual and the religious in a very special sense not in a institutional way of religion but in a sense of—as a subject matter of religion. IGZ: Yes. CW: Which is life and death, which is suffering, joy and so on. Now, at the same time I should say that ‘The jazzman’/ ‘The bluesman’ means then that you have a tragic-comic disposition, I mean one of the things that you and I would probably have not disagreed on is—I would accent and I see it relatively silent in your work—which is the fundamental role of Chekhov and Beckett. Beckett says try, fail again, fail or better, at page 59 in the last poetic or prose work of Samuel Beckett, which is for me an echo of Chekhov (you know that for my own work Chekhov is the figure to turn to). I already see Chekhov then,1904, figuring the kind of insights that he peels out of Adorno, making the dialectics and thereafter, or all kinds of negative theology and thereafter, which is to say that it trumps and forecloses all solutions, anarchies and so forth. And really, talking about the Sisyphean process by which we engage in critique, live lives of compassion and project something beyond the self, knowing that it is unattainable still lures us. And that is for me always the key in the work of Chekhov. Now what does it have to do with education? Well, it has much to do with education because it means that first, all sentimental forms of education that posit all good on one side and all evil on the other is called into question. It’s already called into question when you call [into question] positive utopia even among our left wing comrades. IGZ: This is the reason why when I read you, I told myself: here I have found a Diasporic philosopher. I am working now on articulating my own Diasporic Philosophy and on creating a Diasporic Philosophy collection which will also be an arena for a reconstruction of past Diasporic philosophies and philosophers. It is important for me to reconstruct this lost tradition from the pre-Socrates to presentday thinkers since we are entering the age of ambivalence and improvisation, of nomadism and deterritorializations, in which the presence of the absence of God and the transcendence become unavoidable to address and impossible for a worthy address. In other words, I think the history of Diasporic Philosophy has not yet written its last chapter and we have a responsibility to reply in a worthy manner to the Diasporic challenge. Already some of the pre-Socrates did… CW: Euclides IGZ: Heraclites is the foremost figure in this direction in my mind, and we should go into it presently. But even before that, please let me say that I consider you a genuine present-day Diasporic Philosopher. This is the reason why I would like to press you a little… 142
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CW: Sure. Let me just add this before you go on. I think that where we also have a very deep agreement is the way we understand Pascal and Montaigne. Because my Pascal and sensibility, and my fundamental allegiance to Montaigne’s aesthetical writing, but most importantly to his mature skeptical sensibility, require me sometimes to be skeptical about skepticism. He knows he has to live, he still has to love, he still has the doing and so forth, that when I see you for the second way of the Critical Theory invoking Pascal or Montaigne I say, this is someone of my spirit. So go right ahead. I just wanted to note those things to you, because you started with Heraclites and Adorno—well, there are those others in the middle. IGZ: Yes, of course. CW: …So very important to both of us. IGZ: Unfortunately there are not too many of them in the present day. CW: That’s true. IGZ: Especially among our friends in the left who coat a positive utopia with dogmatism and exclusion that they are committed to overcome. Now, this is exactly the reason why I would like to begin by challenging your own Diasporic Philosophy, because it is so important in my view. On the one hand, in your work, as I understand it, we all share a social responsibility and a moral commitment to resist injustice. I think your entire work might be understood as a contribution to this invitation, which is a moral imperative and an existential impetus like light for plants. At the same time, without having a direct voice from God, or a theoretical unquestionable foundation, what is the meaning and what are the preconditions of the morality of such a call for moral act in a multicultural reality and critical positioning of all inviting “voices”, gods, and theoretical “unquestionable” foundations? Isn’t the invitation to the moral act an existential impetus, a more sophisticated Platonic cave, that directs you and forces you and aims you? In light of your explicit anti-foundationalism, Professor West, and in the absence of absolute truths and objectivity, especially once you overcome the magic of the presence, and once you deconstruct the naivety of the “Platonic cave”, who or what might ensure, create or promise a precondition for the moral act or for the kind of response that will be more than manipulative, meaningless or violent as a precondition for what Levinas calls the Ethical I and the very possibility of the moral that is more than, or different from the sum of its contingent conditions and productivity of its contextual power-relations? In the absence of God who is not yet exiled, deconstructed, or ridiculed, what besides the productivity of violence, could promise or enable an un-naive commitment to social justice, to resisting injustice and to Critical Pedagogy? Now, in my reading of your work I see three solutions: one solution would be to talk through the viewpoint of the victim. Let’s elaborate more on your first solution. In order to see the victim, to acknowledge victimhood, as against victimization, we need a representation apparatus and a theory that relates to it and to the world represented. We cannot make it directly, in an unmediated manner because the victim and the presence of victimization are also always enabled, constructed, represented and distributed as an object of the organization of our passions, as a cultural commodity, and as a political function, by conceptions, by organizations of lives and by the social 143
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power-relations in a specific historical moment and so forth. Now, when you call us to identify the victim or accept as a yardstick for moral behavior the worldview/ viewpoint of the victim you do not offer an alternative to the exile of God. One reason for this is that in most human complex situations how do you decide in an unproblematic manner who is the victim and who is the victimizer? And is it so that the victim is always solely a victim and the victimizer is solely a victimizer? What happens when each of the two sides sees in the other the victimizer and itself as the victim, like in the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and each of the sides is a victim and a victimizer, theoretically, politically and educationally? As a Diasporic philosopher, what would your educational message be in face of this ambivalent reality? CW: I think that… first, I begin with that powerful moment beginning with Negative Dialectics. Adorno says that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. If you are actually and fundamentally committed to truth and justice, you follow it wherever it goes. And there is no doubt that there is suffering that cuts across barriers, lines—class lines, gender lines, racial lines, cultural lines, national lines and so forth. So that if you keep track of the suffering maybe different forms of suffering, maybe existential suffering, political suffering, economic suffering, psychic suffering and so forth, if you keep track on suffering, therefore are concerned about true speaking, then you are always going to acknowledge that there is never a kind of simplistic binary opposition between victim and victimizer. Already you have multi-layers of suffering in varying historical contexts, which does not mean that there are not going to be any asymmetric relations of power, let’s say [between] imperial power and colonies: but even there, it is still not as if there is no suffering on the imperial side. We know there is suffering on the colonized side but it is not as if the colonies are not agents that can in some sense bring power to bear on the imperial side and so forth. That is true of racialism, that is true of gender, that is true of the Middle East context and so on and so forth. So, from the very beginning, if you are going to be historicist, you cannot historicize without contextualizing and what you contextualize you pluralize and once you pluralize you keep track of the various forms of suffering. Victimizing and being victimized [are connected] in a variety of different levels and registers. And if that is true it means that it is never the case that there is some kind of homogeneous linear victim versus victimizer, so that when I say I am in solidarity with those who suffer, I am actually saying I am in solidarity with suffering wherever you find it in various contexts that cross various kinds of lines. IGZ: Could you say more about the various sufferings and the differences between them in light of the differences between various kinds of victimizers, and the too common presence of ambivalence between the victim and the victimizer and the truth of the victim who is at the same time also a victimizer? I present this ambivalence in order to face ambivalence, not to be swallowed by ambivalence, impasse and moral indifference. And we have not yet spoken even a word about the relation between the autopoiesis of the victimizer and the hospitality of Love as two opposing poles, two ecstatic alternative strives for co-poiesis: Life-Thanatos and Eros, or Christ and anti-Christ if you prefer that theological articulation. Ontologically, not solely 144
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existentially and historically, it is so difficult to differentiate the two. The difference is found, pronounced, distributed successfully normally only a posteriori, as part of the triumphal parade of the one who writes the history, the one who had the upper hand in establishing the hegemonic difference between the victim and the victimizer, who is strong or violent enough to establish the consensus or the false consciousness about the verdict on who is the true victim. Do you think we have something meaningful here to learn from the critical thinkers of the Frankfurt School? I would say: Yes. Suffering. Worthy suffering and its relation to the quest for truth and worthier Life. CW: Exactly. I mean, this part of… that is, again, what I love about Benjamin. Remember Adorno’s essay on Benjamin when he talks about the specific gravity of the concrete? This is a distinctive benchmark of Benjamin’s project, and I have always used it as a benchmark. Because if you take seriously the specific gravity of the concrete it means that all abstract narratives are called into question; because they are sentimental and they are ahistorical, they do not take context seriously enough. Now, you do not want to talk about this in such a way that just calls into question all talk of victimizing and victims, because on these different registers they are concrete. But if you lose sight of the concrete suffering you end up with these sentimental narratives that cast Victims all on one side (capital V), Victimizers on the other side (capital V), and you actually ahistorically make contention out of them. IGZ: I think this is a very important point of departure to reflect on the new anti-Semitism, which unfortunately stems from the tradition of resisting racism and anti-humanism. But before we go into that I would like to ask you about the collision and the conflict between narratives: whether we do not have a theoretical home from where we can place our arguments or establish our lenses, or telescopes as moral, responsible people, as philosophers and educators; whether we are currently, and maybe eternally, in an historical moment that is fundamentally contingent. What is our existential, philosophical, educational position there, in face of conflicting narratives, within a contingent context? And how should we position ourselves in front of, facing, within conflicting narratives? And what are the educational implications of such homelessness? CW: yes, I think that …almost like Dante … IGZ: And, as you said before, most critical thinkers who talk about conflicting narratives have a narrative that is “their” home, or cave, a Platonic cave, of which they are its echo, its victim, and also at the same time its enthusiastic agent; which means that their seeing, their judgment and their praxis represents their blindness that is conceived as light, genuine revelation or courageous resistance to injustice. CW: Absolutely. Like Dante’s Inferno, which begins in the middle, in the midst, and sometimes in the darkness. Or even in the woods, in the sense that Sondheim talks about it. In the woods—you’re in the middle and if you are always in the middle there is no home, or refuge or cave—a sure space that you have access to. That is what Rorty may call an Archimedes point… IGZ: Heraclitus, you remember, after he writes, even if in his deliberately obscure manner, puts his writings in the temple and runs away from the company of humans 145
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to the wood. As in face of too easygoing interpretations of his words, so in the quest for a mature nomadism in the woods or mountains Heraclitus resists the temptation of “homereturning” or of establishing a paralyzing “home”. He is in constant search, always in a state of awakening, never at home. But the mountains and the woods do not have to be physical and they are not necessarily “out there”; they might be part of us, within us, a kind of Diasporic autopoesis. Such sensitivity might become a starting point for a genuine Diasporic Educational Philosophy—especially for us today. Don’t you agree? CW: Yes. See, as a bluesman I recognize that we are always already in the middle, or how Beckett would call it—in the mass. Heidegger talks about being with mass. I agree with that, I would say the folk—like a bluesman. Now what does it mean? It means then that the best we can do is to somehow try to strengthen our armor on the Socratic level—which is we must have courage to engage in critical reflection on being in the middle, knowing that there is always a remainder for Adorno the stuff that theories can’t catch. It is the blind spots the wasted material. Remember page 151 in the Minima Moralia of Adorno, where blind spots and wasted material that the dialectics cannot catch, which is the saying that there is a humility in being in the middle and to think you gain access to pure spaces intellectual arrogance, which is blinding all the time and misleading. So, if you have a humility, which is not so much to come to skepticism, it is simply to say you would resist, you would transgress, you would continually try to transcend, you will fail, you will fall on your face, you would be inadequate, you won’t have the conceptual clarity and transparency associated with pure spaces—you are a bluesman. There is no way out. But it does not mean that you are not wrestling, it is more like Jacob in the 32nd chapter of genesis, you are wrestling in the midnight with angels of death, trying to emerge with something distinctive and new and novel—in that case that was a new name—god wrestler, Israel. But as human beings and subjects that are continually in process in formation, we first must have the courage to engage in a Socratic reflection, but most importantly, we are trying to master the courage of love, the courage to be companionate, the courage to be empathetic and those are for me inseparable, but they are not identical. You see, the courage to think critically can be separate from the courage to love and this is a problem. They have to be intertwined, connected. You cannot be a bluesman and you got your mind working and your heart is cold and your soul is frozen. IGZ: Unfortunately, it happens so much… CW: you got to be able to unite them in such a way that you are… it is a way of life. The third moment is the tragic-comic one, that is the blue note, the Sisyphean— you never get there. You are always already in the middle. You want to die in the middle, not the exact same place. But you are still in the middle. There is no end point that is pure. There is no origin that is pure. There is no Alpha that is pure. There is no Omega that is pure. You are betwixt and between. IGZ: But if we are not in the middle, but rather in nowhere place? What about living Diasporic life and being-toward-life as an enduring nomad? What about what I call living as an “eternal improviser”? 146
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CW: Nowhere is where to be in exile—that is still a place. It is not as if you can go in exile in the semi-Platonic space above time and space or in some surreal space of Plotinus, away from body, away from culture, away from language and so forth, but what Mayson, and you talk about the Nomadic here, which echoes in some sense—Deleuze, to be in space, both tied to and over again roots and you have to distinguish r-o-o-t-s and—r-o-u-t-e-s. The nomadic is the interplay between the roots which are always already inadequate, but they are there. They are language that you have. It means the baggage that you carry. Carry some roots—your first language… IGZ: Hebrew, for the Jewish mystic and it is still Hebrew for me as one who lost the Zionist negation of Diasporic life and its attempt to renew Hebrew as the language of concrete Life, genuine, concrete Life as if the Garden of Eden is not lost for us, embedded in secular history and power relations. This tension between Hebrew as the origin, the presence of God in immanence and Hebrew in modern, high speed progress and transcendence in face of the killing-of-God-each-moment-anew by modernist-oriented Utopia (which is nothing but secularized Jewish Theology) is an important gate for me: a path to sensitivity and responsibility toward “my” language that is neither “mine”, nor the total prison of what I am as against what I could have become. This tension is part of the greatness of hope the originality of language always contains, even when the original language becomes the kind of Hebrew and Israeliness that surrounds, reacts to and enables the Israeli condition within which I am trying to realize my Diasporic responsibility, co-poiesis and improvisational nomadism. CW: Hebrew. My first language is English. We can tell a story about Gur-Ze’ev’s brother, Cornel, as for what our roots are, even that we are very critical of them and our routes—the routes that we have taken which are probably connected to our roots. You may have gone to study Heidegger, or to Paris to study the Louvre and so forth, but you carried your roots with you while you were involved in your routes— the routes that you have taken, and therefore ended up in the kind of an exiling sensibility: a nomadic sensibility, or as a Diasporic philosopher. I mean I rather call myself a bluesman, or a jazzman, rather than Diasporic. I have nothing against that category; I am a little suspicious of the categories of philosophers, because I have more of a poetic sensibility, I tend to trust you a bit more, because you have a blues sensibility and you talk about Diasporic. Usually in philosophy you talk about categories that get frozen and also petrify; they are no longer dynamic and fluid and protean, you see. While as a bluesman, improvisation is built into the very way in which you think and love and laugh and live. IGZ: I think that in face of improvisation as an existential dimension it is not that you are detached from the responsibility to make a decision, to position yourself… CW: You have to … IGZ: But without the guarantees, the fears, or the dogmas that enable you as well as mislead you to think in a naive way that makes it logically possible or psychologically easier for you to choose and to position yourself, as well as to decide in favor of self-forgetfulness. No genuine guarantees are preconditions for responsibility of the 147
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kind that enables genuine improvisation, which means to act, to make a decision, to live dangerously, to address the invitation of poetic life in the eternity of each moment anew, that are at the same time also contextual and have their history and their political fruits. And yet, I refuse to reduce the one to the other. CW: Absolutely. The reason why you have to position yourself is that as a bluesman and a blueswoman of ideas—you still have to find your voice. You see, you cannot find your voice unless you have mastered the courage to think critically, the courage to empathize and love and the courage to wrestle the tragic-comic—which is to hope. So when you find your voice, why do you find your voice? In part, in order to try and be true to yourself and also because that voice might be empowering for others as they try to find their voice. IGZ: When I read you, Professor West, and now as I listen to you meditating about finding your voice and about finding the voice of the silenced once, I feel that there is here also a danger we should be aware of. This is the danger of identifying with the marginalized, with the victims and in such a unique manner that might actually inflict on them injustice. Here I relate to a kind of response on our part that will thrust them into self-forgetfulness in the form of narrow-mindedness and dogmatism. When you do not invite them to challenge their own self-understood dimensions, you empower the normalizing education of the marginalized; and actually, the emancipation is nothing more than the replacement of a hegemonic normalizing education with a marginalized normalizing education. And so many times the marginalized, as they are people, as they are humans—their quest is to be in the middle, in the center, to be the hegemon, to replace a passion, a quest, a will to power with love, compassion, respond-ability that represents response-ability and not its negation in the form of surrender to the will to power which is also the manifestation of Tanathos and self-forgetfulness which is edified by self-indulgence, by surrendering to the self-evidence and normalizing education. As I see it, the normalizing education of the marginalized is by no means more compassionate than the normalizing education of the hegemony: it is only less effective, at least temporarily. It is important for us to face not only its violence but also the enduring vitality and the telos of its violence: it has its own victimization practices and limitations—not as an historical misstep or blunder to be easily corrected, but as part of human existence in the present historical moment in the West. So where are the gates, if any, to open for us on the path of moral commitment to struggle against injustice and to identify with the marginalized and the silenced, and at the same time respond in a mature manner to the awakening from the illusion that the marginalized are morally superior, do not actually victimize the less powerful whenever it is possible or prepare themselves for the oppression “that is genuinely justified” against their former oppressors or their rivals? It happens so much in Critical Pedagogy that actually you replace one dogmatism with another, one normalizing education with its alternative. Critical Pedagogy itself becomes dogmatized and transformed into an oppressive tool, even against those proclaimed to be emancipated by the critical educators. CW: I would have to look at which passage did you have in mind, because my aim, my intention, is to keep the critical energy flowing, so that my critiques of the poor people, Puritanism, the provincialism of the black folk is pretty intense. 148
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IGZ: And I know so many people criticize you for that. CW: I am criticized within progressive groups and within the black community for being sometimes too critical of them. At the same time I do not want to lose sight of the parochialism and provincialism of the more powerful hegemonic discourses and practice and system that dominate the… IGZ: Please, tell me more about the secret art of finding or creating the right balance and the correct relations between the two. CW: I mean, it is a nomadic activity. You are moving to and from, continually trying to be true to yourself, which is the hegemonic element that is inside of us. There are a couple of hegemonic elements that we master, that we choose, and try to forever call into question—the kind of dogmatism, the kind of disposition, the kind of arrogant and condescending sensibleness that go hand in hand with the hegemonic process, so all those that are involved in this civil war that is inside of us, as well as the war of both positions and movement of ground you have talked about in larger society. That is why there are also passages that would give you an impression that I am not as critical as I ought to be of those poor people, or oppressed people, or victims and so forth. But as you know, there are right wing discourses out there that we have to be cautious about, that trivialize the suffering of the poor people, of women and gays and lesbians and workers and the people of color. And therefore, in responding to those it might give the impression that you are over-compensating and therefore not being as critical as the very folk that you are trying to defend. You see what I mean? IGZ: Yes. So now, as we see the problematic of being a nomadic moral human and a Diasporic person, I would like to present you with what I see in your work as three solutions, or three answers to this dilemma, and I would like you to help me to understand the tension between the three. One is that we do have a yardstick to choose a theory, ideology, or a tradition, or a way of life. We are not totally alone; we are accompanied by a possible theory, or meta-theory, that is capable of saving us from meaninglessness or naïve dwelling in “the genuine kingdom of truth and justice”, or at least of offering us a modest, conditional, partial, temporary yardstick to decide in a meaningful manner within and among rival language games. And yet, this efficiency that enables us to side with the disabled or help the marginalized is in your work essentially contextual, instrumental and pragmatist. This pragmatism of yours enables emancipatory action and resistance to oppression and other manifestations of injustice, yet it does not come without the price tag of constant danger of replacing one normalizing education with another. The second path that I see in your work is the absence of God that speaks to us: there is no objective universal reason, or human Spirit that can lead us actually in an unproblematic sense. We can only rely on rational critical argumentation of good hearts to ensure “disenchantment” and emancipation from illusions and oppressors. Getting your hands on the Maya Curtain is a possible emancipatory act that Critical Pedagogy should prepare us for. We cannot be content with the act of alethea, we cannot feast on the “body” and “spirit” of this leviathan of oppression and false consciousness. The essential pre-assumption here is that the rational “critique” is able to do the trick. 149
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In other words, ideology critique can do what only Baron Munchhausen succeeded in doing until now: to take us all out of the mud by hauling out our hair strongly enough with our own hands. This “disenchantment” trick is very problematic and extremely complicated because, again, if what we said about the absence of absolute truth is not valid solely about knowledge, but also about yardsticks for choosing and evaluating conflicting sets of values and argumentations, then the yardsticks too are constructed, manipulated and contingent. From what terra santa, then, is it possible for us to offer a spring of rational decisions and critical theorists which are not victims or mere echoes of a specific set of effective manipulations, a resonance of a contingent code or dynamic in “our” contingent context? The third path that I see in your work is that looking at argumentations, conflicts, theoretical discussions, ideologies and so on and so forth on a meta-level, or from the poetics, that as music Pythagoras understood that it is not only that two and two are four—the numbers have their relations and meaning also in a cosmological essential sense and manifest sacred harmony, the worthiest music. This is where he comes from, establishing a theory as a religious way of life. Religion here is a bonding of the ethical, the aesthetic, the bodily, the intellectual and the political dimensions, which integrate with each other in the absence of the original intimacy towards the cosmos. Actually, what you are suggesting here, Professor West, is a Nietzschean way out from meaninglessness. A Nietzschean path in the sense that we will choose this or that, we will courageously create what might manifest our creative power while guided to make the right decision in the absence of God, or in the presence of the absence of all absolutes. In the absence of anything essential, absolute or transcendent we still have an impetus, a criterion, a telos, or an exclusive drive, and that is—what vitalizes life more then anything else—the power of creativity, the power of overcoming narrowness and shallowness, dogmatism, anything freezing or encouraging fear. This principle is something very different from criteria such as revolutionary efficiency and so on and so forth. Now, how do you relate to the tensions between these very different solutions in your work? And are we called to understand this tension as a bridge—or as an abyss? CW: Well, you got a lot on the table there. Let me begin with the point about ideology critique, because you see I accept the later Frankfurt School critique of ideology. IGZ: And also its dogmatization and paralyzing sacred institutionalization by its dogmatic easygoing followers? CW: That’s right. I do not believe we ever have transparency or pure illusions versus pure reality. So the marks of a German ideology have got to go. Now that does not mean—here I am closer to Gordimer than Nietzsche though—I do believe in the need to overcome the perennial process of what we are becoming, and that might sound almost Sisyphean or Camusean—Albert Camus, or Nietzsche, but that is closer to Gadamer, that is to say, I do believe critical questioning matters—that is to say that because you reject transparency of ideology critique, it does not mean that every view is the same, every ideology is the same, every social system is the same and so forth. Fascism is different than a democratic project; authoritarianism 150
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is different than democratic law. But like democratic law it still has ideology, it still has various ways in which power operates and circulates and so on. Now, what I am saying is this—when I say I am closer to Gadamer than to Nietzsche it means that we are still always already in a historical context in which we do not have access to Archimedean points and pure spaces and so forth. All it means is, you have a thoroughgoing falliblism in which you’re never going to get it right, ever. You see, that is very Jamesian, that is Dewey, and that comes from American pragmatism. That does not mean that all views are the same. Relativism, Nihilism—they are to be refused, rejected; at the same time you have falliblism, or historical contextualism, that in some ways calls into question a lot of the Nietzschean projects, in which it looks as if you are locked into a certain kind of relativism if not nihilism, passive or active, in this sense. So, I would not want my work or project to be associated with the first stage of ideology critique in the Marxian tradition at all, nor would I want it to be associated with some kind of dogmatism. Now, let me say this about dogmatism—a very important point to make and there is a sense in which I think that I detect in your own work. That reminds me—you know Robert Unger, you know Unger’s work? You know his recent self awakening? IGZ: No. CW: Oh, it is a major stereotype, it is very popular. It is very similar to your work. This is very much about transcendent, transgression, a world of meaninglessness, relative to defining some plenitude of meaning of the various ways in which we are bound to a certain kind of failure; at the same time we must master the will to empathize, the Love of Life that you talk about—very close to Unger’s work here. And he and I took a course at Harvard Law School and we fight over this, because, again, I am closer to Chekhov, that is... it is more of a… I remind you of certain late romantic tragic sensibility, where as Chekhov is in a different space, he is not either one of those; and what I mean by this is this—that there are ways in which an obsession would not be dogmatic itself before it becomes dogmatism. Why? Because what happens is that you begin to downplay the role of various narratives and philosophic maneuvers that you have already viewed as dogmatic, that might contribute to the Love of Life, that might contribute to the emancipation, contribute to the transgression, because they are dogmatic. Now, see if, we will say if you want to be skeptical about skepticism, or what John Dewey calls the difference between retail skepticism and wholesale skepticism. There is a retail dogmatism and wholesale dogmatism—if you are up for wholesale dogmatism you are just parasitic on foundationalism, you see what I mean. IGZ: Well…. CW: There are moments I think in your text when you seem to be so preoccupied with not being dogmatic that it is not clear that you are willing to make wise judgment of how certain narratives that you think are dogmatic are actually promoting some of the similar things that you are after, without being affirmation or positive utopias without of being… you see that… IGZ: Take for example the Israeli-Palestinian situation. When I am asked this question I say look, in one sense I am Diasporic and I understand Zionism as the 151
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barbarization of Judaism and its commitment to truth and challenging injustice in a cosmopolitan framework, in light of negative Utopia and the quest for love. On the other hand the Israeli state is a historical reality, real people live there, they have their happiness, their hope, their, suffering, their responsibilities and so forth. On the other hand, I feel I should become a Diasporic person and live as an eternal improviser in Israel too. Yes, in Israel, even more than anywhere else! On the one hand I call in Israel, and it is not very easy you know, for self-inflicted immigration of the Jews and for educating our children to be honest and justice-striving persons, to prepare themselves for life in an eternal and endless Diaspora. I am trying to articulate an educational framework and a detailed program for inviting, preparing and training young people to live Diasporically and become nomads in the convoluted world of ambivalence, globalization, ethnocentrism and constant symbolic bombardments from rival pleasure machines which aim to seize their autonomy and rob them of their responsibility, happiness and fury. On the other hand, it is not only that practically such education is resisted by all and is very difficult to develop and to actualize there—it is so difficult a challenge also since my relation to Israel is far from one-dimensional. I do not hate Israel, and as you said, I am also connected and enabled by Israeliness, whatever that means. So when I offer counter-education, and I offer it both to Israelis and Palestinians, I articulate it not from the sources of hatred and scarcity\. Too many of Israel’s leftist critics do. And when relating to detailed and concrete historical controversies I do not agree Israel is the most anti-humanistic society, as it is so often represented by some of my best friends on the left; nor is it the agent and arch-manifestations of modern colonialism. As a Diasporic countereducationalist I feel I should relate to the sources of the fear and hatred of Israel as the Jew among nations, especially among my friends in the left. This is the reason, as an example, for my resistance to the call to boycott Israeli universities, an activity which positioned me in confrontation with my friend Ilan Pappe. This is why no network is ready to recycle and distribute with much seriousness or interest my understanding of counter-education and the challenge I… CW: A very courageous thing. IGZ: Sometimes I am called the Jewish anti-Semite, don’t ask… On the other hand, taking seriously the Diasporic position enables me to be a Diasporic person in Israel too. Being a Diasporic person in Israel, as a Jew and as an academic improviser, is quite a challenge in face of the crisis, suffering, ongoing trauma and quest for total “solutions”. Therefore I call for the establishment of the new Yavne. You know the migration of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakay and his pupils from Jerusalem to Yavne, with only the Torah as a treasure worth saving from burning, defeated Jerusalem. It is of utmost importance that when the Romans captured the Temple, Rabbi Yochanan takes out, saves, one thing only, a book. Not weapons, not money, not a beautiful lady in the form of Helen who caused a clash of civilizations in another part of the globe: only a book. One book. He rescues the Torah and goes to Yavne, where he establishes a new beginning. In this new beginning Jews do not strive for political sovereignty but for life in the infinite horizons of the holy book, as a home. A geographical homeland and political sovereignty are not the actual 152
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homeland. Homeland is redefined as a self-positioning, as a becoming-toward-theworld-of-eternal-interpretation and moral action. This is because God doesn’t tell us in an unproblematic manner what is the religious truth. In face of overcoming ethnocentrism and reification, interpretation too has a context, a concrete arena, and it is the absence of God and the presence of the law, the Halacha. So, I see the current reestablishment of Yavne in a globalized world and identifying with the victims and going against injustice, while understanding the shortcomings of every Critical Theory as a possible Diasporic position in Israel. This is one of my replies as to positioning yourself on different levels simultaneously, because we have ourselves as an “I” and as such we hospitalize also the “not-I” in ourselves; we have our beloved ones and co-poeisis while we know the victims are also enthusiastic candidates to become, or are already, actual victimizers; we have humanity and law, and we have the cosmos that we should reopen ourselves to, identify with, be responsible for, and respond to in manners that education for sustainability has not yet addressed…. CW: Now you see—I think what you have there though, and I appreciate that response, but I think what you just said now I totally agree with, because it is a highly new understanding of “home” versus “Diaspora”, of the ways in which on the one hand you are very critical of any “home”, but recognize that even the nomadic exilic Diasporic philosopher is engaged in a context. Now, when it comes to normalizing education versus second way Critical Pedagogy—the same kind of nuanced reading is required. The ways in which even a normalizing education, like the hegemony of the first stage of Critical Pedagogy, there are elements there that you can ascend in a positive way even if you bring critique to bear a basic assumption and presupposition. Now, if you in any way suggest a kind of an economy that becomes frozen, which does normalizing education and second way Critical Pedagogy, right. Then people begin to think—what god, are you really come here all on your own, are you reproducing? and replicating a certain pure marginality, opposition, transgression, quest for transcendent within a meaningless world—that is a danger! So that in the example you gave the Israeli thing, I said yes, that is new. I can go with this cause. That is Chekhovian. That is Beckett-like. Because you are in the mass. Whereas there are moments in the text where two elements become so oppositional that you lose that rich, concrete, existential entanglement. So that all of us have normalizing education right through us and at the same time here comes your courageous thing— loving an aesthetic way of life that is critical of the normalizing education inside of you, inside of me, inside of our students and so forth, and that is in part the point I… IGZ: This is why I see, even in McLaren’s work very important relevant elements for me. Even if I am critical of his understanding of Critical Pedagogy, not to mention his love affair with Hugo Chavez’s postcolonialism that I understand as a manifestation of the new anti-Semitism. Today you can see the streets of Caracas are full with slogans such as “Jews outside”; time and again the police burst into the Jewish school and Synagogue “in search of weapons” and kill demonstrating students on the campus, and so on and so forth. I ask postcolonialist supporters of Caves, Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah and Ward Churchill: you are for democracy, I know. 153
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So, how is it possible that these are your heroes and that anti-Semitism-violenceand-silencing opposition is the flagship of your dearest friends? CW: I think I ought to reply in terms of my own relations with Hugo Chavez; you let him know that you stand for, what I call a deep democracy. You let him know that you resound with his attempt to empower poor people economically and socially and you let him know that therefore you remain a nomadic bluesman, with your own distinctive voice of vision as you acknowledge that convergent, in terms of the oppositional American imperial court present, court manipulation and you let him know your opposition to his attempt to in any way to become an autocratic authoritarian. But you make that stance not just on the stage; I made that stance in Caracas, in my speech in front of thousands of people; IGZ: It is very important. CW: And with him. Absolutely. Because everywhere we go—in Israel, I am in an American empire, there in Venezuela where there is Oligarchic orientation of the economy autocratic practicism when it comes to the political elite, or cross ideology. IGZ: Yes. So, how do you approach from here toward dialogue, as an alternative to such autocratic manipulations? How do you understand the very ideal of dialogue? Maybe I should phrase it differently: How do you relate to the concept of dialogue, and how do you see the possibility to educate for dialogic attitude in a multicultural world, in a world where we understand that we have no universal, no meta-narrative to decide between conflicting narratives or language games, where the human subject is instrumentalized and manipulated and his/her voice is actually so many times the voice of something or someone that speaks for itself through her/him? How is it possible to educate for a dialogical way of life in the absence of a guiding God, or in face of successful deconstruction of all meta-narratives and the central values, symbols and criteria? What could be the building material of a possible dialogue that is not an alternative manipulation? CW: It is a difficult question. First, let us just begin with this notion of dialogue, though. If you look at some of the great philosophers in the 20th century—Martin Buber, Gadamer, R.G. Collinwood, they are Socratic and dialogical, when you think of Bakhtin and the early criticism, but what they are really after—and this is where I think the jazzman metaphor cuts deeper—what they are really after is the polyphony of voices with improvisational style, but with body that carry history. You see, the problem of dialogue is that by taking it back to Socrates, the inimitable founding father of so much of Western culture, who we build on. But he has his limitations—he never cries. He never loves. Which means his body is subordinated. Whereas in jazz, dialogue is transfigured into voices that bounce up against one another, that are tied to their body and their histories and their cultures; but there is a mutual respect that mediates those voices. Well, you see, dialogue can become so tied to the cerebral, where bodies drop out. They are being on—body has been extended. So that as much as I like Dialogue, because I am a big democrat, as a jazzman I do not trust it, even my dear teacher, who just died, I remembered the other day, Richard Rorty—I used to tell him all the time: “Prof. Rorty, conversation and dialogue, especially for black 154
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people, whose bodies have been so debased that their voices are not what we are listening to at all. So he would say: “Let us just talk about polyphonic voices with bodies in spaces of equality and respect. So that we agree that we are never going to fully agree, but we can also agree that in disagreeing we do not dominate one another”. And this is not how I am seeing historic and free communication—no, no, no, not at all—it is very different, you see. So that for me a starting point in talking, dialogue has to be transfigured with this jazz-like orientation. IGZ: As a modernist I would say that dialogue is connected so much more to the concept of transcendence and jazz, as the logic of jazz demands, to immanence. The different preconditions for transcendence on the one hand, and immanence on the other, brings me to the tension between these two dimensions in your work. As someone critical of Enlightenment yet as someone who values so much Enlightenment’s negative, I will tell you why I think it is so important to go there: because in your work one might find a different kind of dialogue, a Diasporic kind of dialogue, that has no truth, no defined, fixed and coherent truth awaiting somewhere for the Odyssey to come to its conclusion and grasp the truth as a worthy-wayfor-self-annihilation. But your work is even more complex than that. On the one hand, you are in so many places against the transcendental dimension. On the other hand, in your understanding of the later thinking of Adorno and Horkheimer you do accept, and I do share your understanding of the importance of the totally other. And this is a very important point, because if there is no presence to the totally other, even if only in a manner we do not have any control of and we can never manipulate it, and we cannot predict if at all or when it will come, we cannot know what the true interpretation of it is, and so on and so forth. And sometimes what we see as the totally other is actually one of the manifestations of the Same. From a Shpinozist point of view this is since we are both part of the whole and a specific, eternally concrete particle that acknowledges its particularity. And yet, the category of the totally other enables a difference that makes a difference; enables, actually, Life. There is no Life without the presence (even in a negative manner) of the totally other and the preparation for it or the reaction to it or to its absence. Love is conditioned by the totally other and there are no fruits of love, no creativity, no children, no pupils, no artistic presentation without it. CW: Or repetition without a difference. IGZ: For having even a specific, particular, contextual ‘Bereshit’, you need ‘Beria’. You need genesis for rebirth, because with no genesis or reappearance of genesis in the appearance of the totally other there is no Life, even if there is repetition, continuum and reaction. So we need that category of the totally other as a manifestation and precondition for transcendence. And here I come back to your work, Professor West: if we overemphasize the context, namely if we give prominence to immanence, we might lose homelessness, and this is too much of a loss. There is no room for the jazzman if he is overwhelmed and domesticated by the suggestions of the presence, and if he abandons his dialogue with the not-yet, with the unexpected, with the potential that is not yet awakened. There is no homeland and there are no transgressions without the totally other. If you give too much emphasis to the 155
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context, to our roots, to our countrymen, even to the present actual and truly important needs, you might end up in surrender, in granting the upper hand to contingency and violence, to meaninglessness—not to Love of Life. In order to genuinely challenge the facts of this world, really criticize them, actually clash with them, or in order to religiously address them as Diasporic humans, we ought to address the totally other; we must seriously tackle the possibility of transcendence without forgetting the facts of our worldlife and the presence of the context. “the jew CW: These are very good questions. Two quick things though. One regards the distinction between a live immanence and a dead immanence. A live immanence is always predicated on some notion of transcendence. A dead immanence is just that recycling that you talked about. Now, I am always up for the former. The former has to do with acknowledging, no matter how much you talk about context. It never exhales the self, or the subject or the agent. There is always already some striving, that is what Unger would call “context transgressing” and “context transcending”— live immanence. Dead immanence, any such a philosophy, has nothing to do with it. Now, why is that so? Now, for me, again, as a jazzman, you begin with courage. Courage is the most enabling virtue for any human life, you have to start with the ways in which you fortify your energy in order to transact with environment, to live and love. IGZ: Cornel, isn’t it so that there are different kinds of courage? Because so many Nazi soldiers, Stalinist NKVD members or Khmer Rouge soldiers, as well as the American soldiers fighting the Nazi army were very courageous. The Muslim suicide bombers today are also very courageous. And surely you will agree that the courage for self-overcoming or self-awakening is essentially different from the one soldiers of various armies manifested in battle. CW: But courage is not an ideologically promiscuous virtue. That is why it is an enabling one; it depends on what kind of moral content, political consequence, you apply that courage to. But at this point we are just talking about human life! That to live is to exercise courage. To have no courage is dead immanence. Now then: but that is why I call it enabling virtue—you need more than that. I mean for me it is compassion, love, right? And to love—the life of the mind—truth: Socratic. To love—conquers human beings: Judaic. Leviticus, 19: 18—“Love thy neighbor”. IGZ: So what would be the relations or the difference between vital immanence and transcendence? CW: That you would have to acknowledge that there has to be some inseparability between a vital, live immanence and a transcendence that is never attained, never reached, never fully conformed to. Now, I want to comment about your remark about jazz though, because you see—jazz is the art form of vital immanence. That has a lot of love supreme, that is not in any way a dead immanence, at all. But it recognizes that you know—we got clay feet, that we are all human beings in space and time, or what Kafka calls The Death Sentence in space and time. That is what a bluesman is aware of, right? You carry around death with you every day. On the other hand, you are continually trying to transcend, knowing—you are never going to get it right. That is why in being in an improvisational art you know there is no such thing as de156
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defining of interpretation of this musical composition and so forth. So I think here, we are agreeing actually, that I mean this is one of my problems with Deleuze, that there are times that he talks about immanence as so anti-transcendent that it does not have the vital kind. I had a wonderful debate with a dear friend and brother—Badu. We had a fascinating dialogue. IGZ: About this? CW: About this very issue. I brought him to Princeton and then we were having another one at the New-School, you know it would be nice to have you there. You know Simon Critchley’s work? IGZ: Yes. CW: Because he has got a new book now and we were having—we were actually having a huge discussion for Simon and myself and—here… infinitely demanding, that the book that we are going to be talking about, but we are also reading these two as well. But I mention that because these same issues have been hammered out with these other two, and of course I have got my own distinctive twist on this thing, but I do think that there is a sense in which jazz as an art form, especially the great dead musicians, would be in full agreement with your conception of the Nomadic and Diasporic regarding vital or live immanence, or transcendence, the danger of altering one or the other to become severed, absolutely. IGZ: You speak about the importance of one’s enrollment in the struggle against elitism and injustice and the importance of education for courage. But what or who is the sovereign of such decisions even in pragmatic settings? I remind us of Foucault, who wrote so much about resistance as the manifestation of liberty. But when I ask his disciples today, ‘So who is the sovereign of this decision of the “I”? Surely it is not the subject as such, because then you go into fundamentalism and essentialism. So is it an exterior master or the wrong central committee of the party?’—it turns out that the rules of the system are the sovereign since they constitute, determine and limit the resisting subject. So in this sense, how can we ensure, or what can we say about, a non-naïve, non-sentimental courage—not, again, in the language of authenticity? It turns out that we need another, a new critical language to talk about courage. CW: Well, I mean I think that there is a way of using Shakespearian language of being “true to thyself”, said by Polonius to his son, in Hamlet, without falling into the pitfall of authenticity. Because to be true to yourself is to engage in what Habermas would call “a critical self inventory”, in which by examining yourself, you see history, society, culture deposited throughout. And therefore we are not talking about a pure subject, we are not talking about a pure identity, political orientation; we are talking about the stuff which you must come to terms with, critically wrestle with, and then decide to act in a fallible self-critical manner; that is what it means to be in the middle. That is what it means to be in Beckett’s mass. Therefore, you ought to be constantly changing and maturing your hope, even though changing and maturation are not the same. So that you are going to be acknowledging the ways in which you fell on your face, but also acknowledging some of the insights you might have learnt, but there is no—I do not think there is any authenticity, or any authentic 157
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starting point here at all and when you see such gestures and vote, you ought to be highly suspicious, because they tend to be associated with autocratic authoritarian politics. IGZ: When you insist on this self critique… CW: Yes, self critical, yes. IGZ: And it is so important for me, because so many of our critical friends do not wrestle with self-critique. Surely they are not ironic. So many times they are very far from self-critique, self-evaluation and a critical point of view. And here I have to say, Cornell, that I really appreciate your distance from the language of authenticity. At the same time, however, I would like to add something about one dimension of the language of authenticity. This dimension is vivid also in some other philosophical traditions and is of vital importance for Diasporic philosophy as I understand it. In other philosophical traditions, however, it is transformed, manipulated, deconstructed or silenced. I refer here to religiositaet as against religion. I use here religiositaet (datiyut—in Hebrew) in the sense that potentials of the human are connected to the understanding that we cannot completely overcome the conditions, facts, rules of the enabling language-game that we are prisoners in, the power-relations of “our” horizons. We never have a pure choice. We do have, however, hope, in the sense that we are hopeless, not only to the referent of hope—which of itself is normally exiled (sometimes even replaced and confused with optimism); the hope bursts in from the outside—the transcendent dimension. One example is taken from Plato. In the Platonic cave, when the people are there shackled in chains, chained to their impotence and false consciousness, suddenly, one of them awakes in the sense that he struggles his way out. Note that Plato’s text says in Politea 7: 515: “suddenly”. “Suddenly, one of them was freed of his chains”. It was not so that this prisoner decides that it is wrong to be enslaved—mentally, intellectually, or physically, raised and forges his way “to the light”. Why? I think I can tell you why. Because he did not choose freedom. Freedom chose him. So there is a sense of arbitrariness that enables the very possibility of struggle for freedom. At the same time, he could, like so many others before and after him, disregard this invitation or misinterpret it in the service of self-forgetfulness, but he did decide, he did enable self-awakening. It is not a simple either-or. Neither is it a simple “this—and that too”. It is the combination of the two. This understanding is of special importance for me as a Diasporic thinker, in order to avoid the language of authenticity, that promises us that the self can free herself, that we are heirs to God, the actual God, the Nietzschean alternative to God. The understanding that the human situation is that each of us has a chance to emancipate, or to transcend, but that we cannot do it totally alone is here of vital importance. How do you see this dimension? CW: You see, I have a big difference with you here though. I mean the difference, one fundamental difference, between Chekhov and Plato is that Plato is writing from the point of someone who is outside of the cave. He already conceives of himself as a lover of wisdom, the philosopher who has broken the chains, he is no longer a poet; he burns his poems, he followed Socrates. He has a clarity, so writing the text, he is not writing from the vanish point of those in the cave. Now, I am with Chekhov—I 158
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am in the cave, which is to say that I do not accept the binary position of the clarity outside and the darkness of the cave. We are in the mass, we are in the middle. But if we are stuck in the middle then there is going to be an element of choosiness, there is going to be an element of self-overcoming and a courageous attempt to break from various narrow assumptions, so that human effort and agency have to make a difference. IGZ: But isn’t it so that there are not two possibilities solely: “outside”, and “inside”? There is a third possibility of acknowledging that there are infinite Platonic caves and that we are persuaded and obliged to replace one with another and so on and so forth, a recycling that might include waving the flags of emancipatory education or Critical Theory. The Diasporic person as I understand him is the one that is not freed from the Platonic Cave, neither is he the emancipated hero of rationalist critical thinking or the authentic act of liberation. He is not there in their naïve manifestations—”We are free!” “We are struggling for or on behalf of the right ideology, so we are permitted to do this or that!” He knows that there is no pure path out of any Platonic cave, there is no neutral or clean space to arrive to. He cannot simply go back into the naivety or the homeland he left behind. And yet, he struggles for transcendence and at best he is everywhere, as a nomad, and nowhere. He is in the middle as you say—and this is a third space, the nowhere place that is everywhere. Making up your mind, deciding, here, is very different from the possibilities of coming into terms with yourself and making a decision in the two extremes you referred too. Courage is of a very different kind in the third possibility, compared to the first two. Because if truth or God are not exiled and you are with the truth, or you believe you have the truth in your possession then, courage is something of one kind. It is more of the kind of courage manifested by brave soldiers in battle (even if here too it has its complications). On the other hand, if you believe that you do not see the violence of Normalizing Education, because it is so effective that it enables the practice of camouflage that ensures its invisibility, then courage in the form of patriotism becomes a challenge to overcome. Diasporic courage is the courage of self-awakening, of addressing in a mature manner the temptation to nihilism and self-annihilation as well as the other kind of self-forgetfulness, that of enrollment in a ready made dogma, fashion, “inclusive” collectivism and easygoing emancipatory/critical alternatives that forget Love. We agree that we are able, in principle, to address these manipulations, to struggle for the possibilities for a mature addressing of them—while acknowledging that there is no escape or liberation that might offer in history the totally other as a continuous, factual reality. No pure space awaits us, and no courage, wisdom or critical education is capable of ensuring our entering the reworked Garden of Eden. Of special importance I see here is the courage to become an improvisational, and at the same time a moral, responsible, happy, solidarian person. I think that in your work, Cornell, the seeds of such a new language for critical education are already planted. And yet, I think you should give less emphasis to the context. Of course, we are always enabled, limited, players in a specific historical moment and in specific material conditions. I say here: Acknowledge and give honor to your body, but also to your needs and 159
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limitations, even to the suggestions and manipulations that urge you to surrender to self-forgetfulness. They are also part of the richness of the cosmos. And yet, I say: Do not give the context the last word! CW: But I’m not, see—I never gave the context the last word that my conception of the tragic-comic that sits at the center of the blues sensitivity means. I mean can you imagine the bluesman ever giving context the last word? If you gave the context the last word there would be no voice, there would be no song, there would be no melody. In the end it’s like Capriccio, Strauss’s Capriccio—his last big opera 1941. It is the human voice. It is like the Beethoven’s ninth symphony—it is the human voice that has the last word in my project. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that tragic-comic puts the premium on the radical incongruity, which is a little different than the ironic. You see, the ironic can actually perceive without compassion, whereas the comic, in its deeper sense, is always tied to compassion. That is Beckett. That is Chekhov. That is the blues, you see. There is no Chekhov without compassion. He is not ironic. No. He is deeper than that—he is comic. He is tragic-comic—the same is true about … Gadoe, I mean this is not detached from feeling, emotion, passion, poesies, ecstasy and so forth; you see what I mean? So, I would want to argue that in fact my stress on the context is done precisely in order not to end up enervating the voice, the body, the resistance, the transgression, so they go hand in hand. Now, why is that important? I mean it is very important precisely because if you end up talking about the tragic-comic it means in the end that you cannot distinguish hope. All optimism goes, but hope and hope against hope is still out there. IGZ: Yes. That is very important, this distinction between optimism and hope. CW: Fundamental. IGZ: So, in the absence of the totally other in a globalizing world, or in it’s a… CW: I’m thinking, my brother, it might be on that hope–optimism thing, only because I have noticed three… IGZ: So, in the world of globalization, and standardization, where on the one hand it seems as if there is no serious politically articulated opposition, humanist or spiritual, that is not part of the same system that it challenges, or is supposed to challenge, at times when on the one hand there is the fundamentalism as the totalistic alternative and on the other the post-colonialist, which would be sometimes problematic, in this context, love is so important in your work. Following actually Plato, in the symposium you acknowledge the multiphase and many natures of love in the present historical moment. Its not only that there is earthly versus heavenly love, but there is also patriotism, there is also love of lust, there is also love of selfhatred and there is also love in the Christian messianic tradition. Acknowledging the different preconditions and dynamics for distinction between the various kinds of love within this framework, how is it possible to sustain love and educate for edifying the kind of love that is concrete yet not of the kind of this world that your understanding of love should overcome or challenge? CW: First, let me start with my own Christian baggage, that for me the breakthrough of Jerusalem, which is to say the break and the Judaic breakthrough, was one of the 160
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great moral moments in the history of the human race. Because—and I understand Christianity as a rich footnote to prophetic Judaism, so you really are talking about what it means to conceive of the prophetic, and here the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, for me a talented figure in this regard, that what you really have is love for the concrete person. You see, Plato talks of the ladder of love in his Symposium; it is a love that ascends away from concreticity to the abstract, whereas the prophetic conception that comes out of Judaism has a transcendence of the totally other that breaks into time and space, but it lures us as it connects us to the concrete other and that is the quality of a different conception of love. So that Leviticus 19: 18, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” that the first generation of a Palestinian Jew named Jesus talks about and invokes—and of course that Jesus means much to me as a Christian. But he himself, he is not just Jewish, but he is part of this rich prophetic Judaic tradition that is talking about love in a very different way than Plato and Aristotle and the others. So that the prophetic, which is a Jewish creation, it is a Jewish invention, and therefore is to be understood as this grand heritage of humankind, rooted in the legacy of Jerusalem. Christianity will come, Islam will come and so much of the secular world would be a response to it, the Judaism and the Christianity and so forth. There is no Nietzsche without Christianity and Lutherism and so forth. So, why is it so important? It is important because it means, again, for a bluesman like myself, that the way of love is a kind of way of the cross, not a sadomasochistic way, but a way in which you never win in space and time, but you are willing to give your all in order to keep alive this legacy and because of your love to the concrete other, responding to the totally other. So, they are inseparable as horizontal in terms of the concrete Other, but it is transcendent with the immanent connection. The totally other telling you—you must embrace and you know Levinas’ infinite responsibility whose Slavophilic love of Christ and the Christian tradition is all different versions of that Judaic revolution in the moral history of human kind. Now, that is my starting point. Now, there are secular versions of it—like the negative dialectic of Adorno, you see, and of course the later Horkheimer as you pointed out—is just more explicit about the Judaic roots of it, in his negative theology, but he has gone through some earlier moves that he begins to reject. I do not think you have to go to Schopenhauer, that you needed that… IGZ: But isn’t it so that on the one hand we are unavoidably positioned in a specific historical moment, in a specific body, overwhelmed by specific drives or dreams under certain and concrete material conditions, and at the same time we are eternal travelers; we are in face of the absence of God and the truth, we address the absence of the lost language of the builders of the Tower of Babel, which was destroyed by God’s fear of a human race that was truly united in the quest for Love, which is not Godly or dogmatic? CW: Or the absent god, the god that withdraws, who exiles himself. IGZ: Globalization that sells love and passions and pseudo-erotic moments in speedy-dynamited life makes transcendent love impossible. As if there is so much of that in the market already, because in the market there are infinite differences that do not create/offer a difference. So how do you establish the exclusiveness and the 161
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uniqueness of the kind of love in such a market that levels down every alternative and reifies all differences and plurality? CW: Now I think you are right. When Camus used to say that the future is the last transcendent, in a world without God, and one could say that the selling of love is the last structure of meaning. In a world without the totally other, impinging upon with creature—human creatures—in time and space. This is to say that it is precisely the radical insecurity of the market driven society that seduces people into love as a carrot, as a structure of meaning, given a pervasive meaninglessness, or the nihilistic conditions that are generated by this market bonbon—buying, selling, mending, promoting, advertising and so on. It is understandable. It is inexcusable— but it is understandable, you see. So, then the question becomes, Well then how do we stand the yearning for love? Now, you talk in the terms of the Love of Life. In some ways I am more Jewish and Judaic than you. Because you got influenced by love in the 19th century, who talks about life, Love of Life. But that still had some Athens and Greek and Platonic elements to it. Whereas for me the Judaic one is not so much the Love of Life, but it is the love of the human beings who are living and dead. So it is a more concrete embodiment of love and that is part of the chance, you see. IGZ: For me the Love of Life is important because the love of human beings is only part of love of other dimensions of life, like animals and even the mysterium and human beings are such an important part of Sein—of Being, human beings and Being. Being is so much richer than what is revealed and concealed in the human, and yet, it is wrong to overemphasize this separation from the very beginning. CW: I think that is true. IGZ: But, Cornell, you did not relate to the challenge in such an age of establishing the uniqueness and preserving the exclusiveness of the kind of love that is so important to you as against its alternatives. Could you, please, say more about competitive loves and struggling alternatives to Love in our era, alternatives that are so attractive to many of our children? I would go even further than that. Many of the progressive critical thinkers draw an abyss between the positive utopia and the evil kingdom of capitalism, without distinguishing with enough sensitivity the promise and potentials that are opened by the same dehumanization process of the post-Fordist empire. The same historical moment enables in the cyberspace different kinds of Eros and different forms of creativity and maybe even new possibilities for love. To establish too sharp a differentiation between the two is so difficult if you are not dogmatic. But then how do you differentiate between the love on the Internet, or in cyberspace more generally, which is supposed to be part of the kingdom of evil, and the Christian love that you talk about, the one that is part of the messianic tradition? Is it still possible to differentiate in a meaningful, or in a promising, manner between the two? CW: Those are good questions. I mean, there is a certain irony here because first in relation to Love of Life and love of the concrete human beings, you are absolutely right that life is much broader and deeper than just human beings. But then, again, I am more Jewish and Judaic than you are. You have got Heidegger and others in the backdrop. When you actually get this Dasein and this embrace of all in which human 162
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beings are beings, but you have got other things going on. I am much more Judaic. Which is more homocentric, or humanist, in that way. And I think that I would have to learn more from you there. On the other hand when it comes to newness and novelty and new possibilities, you are more American than I am. Because America is the land of newness and novelty and innovation and invention. Whereas for me, I am a little suspicious of the talk about new loves, or new human beings. Following Chekhov and Beckett and the blues I tend to think there is not a whole lot of new under the sun, to invoke Ecclesiastes, and what I mean by that is that it does not mean, again, that we do not look for new possibilities and novel breakthroughs and so forth. But the language of newness and novelty, which America has colonized, is a very dangerous language, as we know that we ought to be in search of some form of newness, some forms of novelty. So when I hear new love—I mean I love your conception of “pleasure machine”, I mean my God, it’s a wonderful formulation, but you know pleasure has been around long time. IGZ: But this is exactly the reason why we should insist on it! Remembering that it is so easy to fall and to be swallowed by the jargon of the Bill Gates supporters and their associates. But, at the same time, still as people—and here we share I think a common ground, as people who share the importance of the messianic tradition and the Diasporic tradition. How do you search, or struggle, for the continuation of this tradition in the cyberspace, only to mention one arena as an example? In one of my books I study the hacker as a Diasporic human who continues this tradition. Of course there are many kinds of hacker communities and so on, but some do represent the kind of refusal and the kind of search for transcendence that is part of this Diasporic tradition where Love, happiness, and creativity are celebrated with religiously serious devotion as art, as an artistic, religious, way of life. Within this framework the religious impulse, not the institutional religion, is so much in the center, not as a gate for fanaticism and dogmatism, but, on the contrary, as a blooming of love of Life. Here, I think, critical thinkers should do much more. CW: Oh, now I agree. What I affirm in your work, I mean even the essay on driving, and understanding the fluent traffic and so forth, that to me was just fascinating, because that is what thinking against the grain and thinking as a adventurer and taking a risk is all about. I agree. It’s just that for me it’s going to be a matter of being very careful of trying to tease out the deeper forms of newness and novelty than the more superficial forms that the market is continually colonizing and recasting their sale and promoting. I know that you are very aware of that, because I would never want to engage in any analysis of an institution in a homogeneous way. IGZ: But educationally… I saw you this afternoon with the kids here at the nearby school, with these young men and women, very young. They need guidance. They need the presence of the call. At the same time there are so many “guiding voices” struggling for relevance in imposing or reworking the youths’ lives. How do you establish the exclusiveness of what you are saying? Of love, in face of creative violence and the actual de-humanizing powers of this culture industry? CW: I had a conversation… maybe you were so kind to be a part of that. But I had that convention where I attempt to show that the Socratic energy and prophetic 163
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witness and tragic-comic blues like sensibility that I tried to represent was already in some ways immanent in their culture, so I joined them as a human who is involved in Socratic questions, all the songs, the common songs—who really loves you? And I was deeply involved, wasn’t I? Not just your mom, but in your larger culture—what is your relation to them? Why is it that the most popular ones that they all acknowledge tend to be more superficial, market driven and so on? So that they began to see after I am gone that I am not just some isolated individual, or icon, who comes in from on high with all of these goodies. You see I am a big democrat. I reject that model. I come in, in the mass, in the middle along with them, but older, who thought longer and had more experiences, had more failures, maybe more breakthroughs, you see, and say: “Let us think together critically, democratically, religiously, but also hopefully”. You want to leave them with another hope in that sense and I would say the same thing of the analysis of the cyberspace. If I knew as much as you do about cyberspace I would say—there’s got to be some immanent possibilities there that are new and novel that we are to access, absolutely. Now, whether that is tied to new human beings, or new Love that is where I would say—well I am not sure about that, Ilan, I need to be maybe more open. I do not like “new human beings” talk at all, even though you and I talk regeneration and rebirth that are being part and possible in being humans. I talk with them about learning how to die in order to live, which is Montaigne. Which is Socrates and others. But the sense of new others, new love, that I am suspicious of… Because in the end, you know, the human condition in the beginning and when it comes to an end, as new and novel our circumstances and conditions may be, when it comes to love, when it comes to death bound, creatures aware of it. I am probably more with Kafka than I am with you. Now, I could be wrong so I want to be fallibilistic about this. Okay, go right ahead. IGZ: Let’s address other new possibilities and vocabularies maybe you favor more. What are the benefits and the prospects of post-colonial education? And what are the dangers or the shortcomings of post-colonialist education? As I see it, some of it actually promotes reverse racism, ethnocentrism, dogmatism and new antiSemitism. How do you articulate a kind of post-colonial education that will avoid these temptations towards new kinds of ethnocentrism, dogmatism and reversed racism? CW: I mean, one, is that I never accepted the term post-colonial. Now my dear friend, comrade Spivak, 15–20 years ago we had a long discussion, I was telling her I do not accept the term. It is a backward-looking term and I tend to look forward. And secondly, I see so much of the persistence of the colonialism in various forms, but it is true to post-modern. I do not like this term because I think so much of the post-modern has a late-modern element shot through it, you see. So I do not really like the term post-colonial at all. Now, given the fact that we have a category where critics write and so on, I don’t think Said ever accepted the term either, because he is an old style humanist, but I say that because there is no doubt that narrow parochial versions of universalism went hand in hand with dominant versions of Enlightenment in Europe and Romanticism in Europe and so on. They needed to be demystified; they needed to be deconstructed, demythologized. The 164
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danger of course is that you simply re-inscribe new parochialism in the name of the critique of the proto versions of universalism, you see, and for me, because I think we are all in a continual quest for a certain kind of universalism that we will never attain, it behooves us to be both actually humble, but also to be much more historically contextual in the stories that we take. If you are humble it means that any self-righteous claims, any arrogant claims that you finally got it right, or somehow your universalism is better than someone else’s by a rhetorical fiat—I just don’t take seriously, you see. So I find a lot of the work under the rubric of postcolonialism. I’m just content to hold it at arm’s length. Even though there are deep insights there, in terms of the demystifying side, the constructive side I just do not see too much energy. So there I think I do accept much of your critique of the post-colonial side. At the same time I never want to downplay the gravities of the white supremacies, the male supremacies, the imperial arrogance, the gentile-centered narrative that were told against marginal others: people of color, gays, lesbians, Jews, Arabs, whatever it is. So the question is: how do you walk this tightrope, because you do not want to fall into any of the parochial traps whatsoever, and unfortunately there is not a lot of space on that tightrope right now. Because things are so polarized in academy, and things are so Balkanized, the end of culture that you end up very nomadic and so on. These are the conditions under which us intellectuals work, who are committed to the kind of Diasporic vision. I do not think there is any escape from it. IGZ: How do we proceed from here to your attitude towards the new antiSemitism? More than once it is a label twisted by anti-critical or non-critical Israelis who search for escape in this formula for avoiding self-critique. At the same time there are, unfortunately, other reasons to use this term, reasons that make it much more relevant and more important for all of us today. The new anti-Semitism positions the State of Israel as The Jew among nations, similar to, yet essentially different from, traditional anti-Semitism that placed the Jew as the ultimate Other of Christian Western civilization. Some of the political articulations of this post-colonialist agenda present Israel as the Nazi state of our day, or as today’s Apartheid-oriented South Africa, and actually target not Israel and its policies. It targets not the Other of Western culture but rather its essence and its most extreme and actual colonialist manifestation—“Israel”. The category “Israel” manifests here at the first level the essence of colonialism, and sometimes it is replaced with “the American Spirit” or “whiteness”. At the deeper level it treats “Israel” as the most extreme actualization of “Monotheism”, “homogeneity” and “phallocentrism” that serve as the impetus and birthland of colonialism in all its varied forms and arenas. “Israel” therefore, should be overcome, exterminated: “we” should not only criticize or distance ourselves from it, nor is it enough to exterminate “Israel”. Post-colonialist education directs us to purify ourselves of the “Israeliness” or “colonialist” dimensions of our identity; and what could be a better start than to begin this crusade by treating the facts about “Israel” according to our agenda of moral purification and emotional/political liberation from its colonialist manifestations within ourselves? This brings many responsible post-colonialists not only to side with anti-humanists, to dishonestly present the reality or offer vicious interpretations; it offers the wrong path for 165
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Westerners and third world intellectuals and educators in treating the history of their relations and the present moral obligations of each of us. What is your opinion? CW: I read your last chapter in your book and it was a very powerful and challenging piece. Because you try to be fair to the persons who are trying to keep track of justice for the Palestinians’ battle, even as you are aware, and ought to be, of the means for security of the Israelis, who include both Jewish and Israeli, Jewish and Arab citizens. At the same time the double standards are too often applied when it comes to the practice of Israel, recently the practice of other countries. It needs to be acknowledged and addressed and also the acknowledgement of the danger of engaging in characterizing critics as anti-Semites, as an excuse of not coming to terms with injustice in Israeli society, Jewish community and so on. All these are elements that need to be very delicately, but also firmly encountered. That is what I liked about your essay. It is a unusual thing to find, because it requires a level of a kind of honesty, but is also painful, very painful, because sometimes we find it in our own souls. And you see my view is this—I think that anti-Jewish hatred, antiSemitism itself, is somewhat of modern construct, because you’ve got anti-Judaic hatred coming out of Christianity, you’ve got anti-Jewish hatred that compounds that and those beyond it, what we call anti-Semitism linked to the pogroms and on to the Holocaust, or the Shoah. That it is one of the deepest and most visceral forms of bigotry. Certainly in Western civilizations and spills over beyond it. So it is one of the reasons why the point I am making about a Jewish brother who’s sitting in America thinking—this is the promised land, the way Weimar Germany was, the way Alexander’s Egypt was, it is just not true. Wherever there is Christianity you are going to find diverse anti-Semitic realities and potentialities, that is, in the West. Now whereas Islam—this is even more complicated and it is actually becoming more vicious in the Islamic world than before, it was more vicious in the Christian world than in the Islamic world. Things have changed. So the question becomes, how do we keep track of all those elements that are at work in your essay and still remain nomadic, still remain prophetic, self-critical? And I think that there is no formula, there is not even a general principle. It is going to be a matter of what Aristotle called practical wisdom. What kind of judgments are we making in a context that ensures that we will keep in track of anti-Jewish hatred, subtle or not so subtle? And of course that calls for hatred across the globe—anti-Arab hatred, anti-black and so forth. But on that issue of new anti-Semitism, it is a very complicated matter. Because you see here in the States, as you know, it is the conservative Jewish establishment that makes it difficult for talented Jewish intellectuals—Tony Jad, Anthony Grahft and we can go on and on, Michael Lareno, Sharlene Wallen, my own Thesis advisor and we’ve got a whole list, we can go on and on. These are just talented Jewish intellectuals, who are progressive, who are prophetic, some secular, some religious, self-haters and haters of other Jews. You have seen the same things yourself and you have got your own examples. Now we say, wait a minute—how can the conservative Jewish establishment so effectively cut these folks off, when that same conservative Jewish establishment played such a crucial role in the civil rights movement in the sixties and such a crucial role in highlighting forms of prejudice, but not all. It is a very very 166
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difficult… and I would include not just a Commentary magazine in this country, like you got The New Republic, they got electo-philism on all the democratic positions when it comes to domestic issues. But when it comes to this issue it is like Socratic reflection—just collapses. So you see, for me the question is of the next generation; to get them to see, you know what? That I am as committed to keeping track of anti-Semitism new and old, as I am of any other form of bigotry. But at the same time I am as committed to the quest for truth and justice and compassion as I always was before. It is tough, tough. But I think things are shifting, and in some ways the American Jewish intelligentsia in all of its variety are influenced by the discussion of yourself and others back in Israel, because you all are further ahead than we are on this issue new anti-Semitism, old anti-Semitism and so on, you see. I mean, a lot of it has to do with the kind of guilt that so many Jewish Americans have toward Israel, that all the hell that Israelis are catching from suicide bombers and so on. You can appeal to that as a way of supporting the state uncritically, narrowing the dialogue in the States. Because the Jewish suffering and Israeli suffering is real. But Israel knows the occupation is real, and it is ugly too. How do you keep both ideas in your head at the same time? It is a challenge for my Jewish brothers here in the States. IGZ: Now let’s go into something very similar. Critical Pedagogy, in order to be effective politically, more than once avoids going into self-critique and becomes dogmatic and canonizes an untouchable set of formulas and heroes, without naming them here in a list; we’ve got … So how should Diasporic philosophy, in your mind, help reformulate Critical Pedagogy and enable a newer or reworked critical language in education? CW: I think the first thing we have to do is take what you call the second stage, or what I call the second wave, of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy, and for me though that has to do with certainly late Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, but it also means—and there is a wonderful sentence in your text, when you talk about those other Diasporic voices, which are non-Western, as well as those on the margins of the West, so that when you actually look at the kind of dialogue you have with feminist pedagogy and the way some of them move off to the private experience and identity claims and so forth, in ways others engage your issues, but also keep track of the misogyny and patriarchy. I would say the same thing about the white supereminence or realities and intellectual traditions that wrestle with that idea—the W. B Deduieses the Cily Jamses, the Richard Rightses, the Raphelases, the James Borns—we can go on and on, the bell hooks and what have you. That there has to be a polyphonic exchange of voices or dialogue between these pillars, but not to reach some kind of center and not to translate it in the praxis overnight and push up buttoning and you have got penance for all the suffering—no, no, no! But there has to be a process by which this polyphonic set of voices can come together and see where there is convergence and to see where there is divergence, but we are in the same progressive space. IGZ: Yes. CW: Where James is beginning to do that. I mean that you have got to help open up a space in terms of getting the second wave. But then, beyond that, I think that we 167
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have to engage publics, we cannot remain just in the academic public. The academic public is very important, but it has got to go to the popular publics; in a variety of places. From, you know, popular Internet to popular music to popular arts and so forth and so on. See, once you democratize, you have got Socrates, who takes philosophy from heaven to earth and then Montaigne actually takes it to everyday life, in a more concrete existentialist, you know the self being and creation—Emerson and other great footnotes to Montaigne in that regard. Whereas in William James you take it to the streets and he says that pragmatism is a philosophy that goes to the streets. And what I try to do, or Richard Rorty tries to do in democratizing philosophy and intellectual life, is you take it to the folk. You take it to the mud and the stink and the stench. Now, Beckett was already there. He is already there in the mass. But Beckett, as we know, he resists. When it comes to the traditional chord I would start it with Wordsworth and poetry; he has very little tolerance for philosophy. He reads it but he has not got the tolerance for it. I think you need to linger on it a bit more. You see what I mean? And doing that, the kind of discussion in the second wave, in the second stage of Critical Pedagogy, may generate some things that are unbeknownst to us. IGZ: And you are doing so glowing, working in such a worthy manner towards this goal. I could see it clearly this afternoon, in your meeting at school with these young people that came from very diverse backgrounds and areas in America, and were so fascinated by your call—attracted, overwhelmed, actually. Attracted to what? What was it that invited them in such a rich presence? I think they were there in the infinity of that moment. They were there in such a rich manner, indeed, responding to an invitation to transcendence. They were there for love. They were there for addressing self-forgetfulness, namely for self-responsibility that you offered them. But at the same time I would like to ask you something little different yet connected to this fascinating educational meeting with the children, and we will conclude our conversation with that. At the same time that you were so meaningful for these girls and boys, more publicly, because you succeeded so much in offering responsibility and love and critique to much wider audience, you have also become an icon, a label, one of the products of the cultural industry. How do you, for your part, respond to this challenge of becoming an icon on the one hand and still insisting on seriousness and on the Diasporic position on the other? Is it so that the Diasporic human must become silenced, marginalized or undeciphered? Is it so that if he becomes very relevant and even acceptable, it must be only at the expense of his Diasporic stance and his integrity? CW: It is a tough question, because it is a tension. And you have to live in the tension and it is either destructive of creativity and it is a stage-by-stage, momentby-moment process. I mean in one sense, of course, my ending aim is to use what ever status, or form of intellectual political weapon, I have, to engage in a Socratic reflection bearing love and justice and preserving hope; or at least keeping some hope available to people. On the other hand, you easily get caught within the celebrity machine that reproduces a hierarchy and the seductions and the spectatorship or the spectacle. And you continually have to try and shatter that, even as you are always 168
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already put in it. Because you cannot just jump outside and say I am no longer a celebrity. IGZ: And the very challenge of how can a critical Diasporic thinker be successful….? CW: That’s right. IGZ: And I think as I saw you this afternoon, you do succeed, although it is most probably a very demanding position. CW: Because on the one hand it gives you a platform, or stage, or certain kind of potential, but if it is for the wrong reasons and generates the wrong consequences, your critical voice is not heard. Now, in the end I think Rosenzweig is right and I want to end on him. Because Rosenzweig, as you know, he is not just one of the greatest philosophers of Dialogue, along with Buber and Gadamer. IGZ: One of our most distinguished colleagues in the History of Diasporic philosophy. CW: I think Rosenzweig is the greatest Jewish philosopher. I think Spinoza is a philosopher who happens to be Jewish; but for Rosenzweig it is witness, you see. And witness for him is not just praxis in the narrow secular Marxist sense. It is prayer as a species of both gift and yearning, but also of martyrdom. The text begins with death. Epistemology, neo-context—what are you going to do with death? And then he has read some Kierkegaard, but he has come to his own conclusion. And martyrdom is nothing but an intensified form of witness. And in the end the only way I ultimately shatter the celebrity status is to bear witness at the deepest level, which in the end means dying for what you believe in. And that witness is that which has fertilized the very soil, legacy, tradition and heritage that is Rosenzweig’s bequest, not just for the Jews but to all of us, because—in terms of being part of the same effort to engage in what you call Diasporic thinking. But I do not think that my celebrity status could ever be used, applauded, mobilized in such a way that it is called into question and it points to something bigger than itself, in that quest for transcendence, transgression, responsibility, love, ecstasy and justice. IGZ: Professor West, thank you very much for this unusual day.
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Ilan Gur-Ze’ev in conversation with Jonathan Boyarin
The Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources of Jewish Negative Theology
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev: Thank you Prof. Jonathan Boyarin for making this conversation possible. If we may begin on a personal note: do you consider yourself a Jew? And if so, in your view, why should one identify oneself as a Jew at this historical moment, when according to some texts we read, and according to some of the realities in the post-modern condition, there is no difference that makes a difference? Why insist at such a historical moment on being a Jew? Jonathan Boyarin: It never strikes me… There is no moment I can recollect when I had the feeling that I was not a Jew. Or that I was something other than a Jew, that there are other primary identifications, besides human beings. For now I put brackets around “other than a Jew”, which is more important. I mean, I will admit that on visits to friends, for example, it suddenly struck me that in some ways I am an American. But this was thinking, “Oh, I’m an American” when it never struck me before that it mattered that I am an American, and I don’t think I ever thought like this before: I am an American and it’s more important than being a Jew. But what I have to get in first, before you say anything else, in response to your question is that for the last several years I have become more and more aware that by saying “I am a Jew” I know what that means, but I do not assume there is any particular objective correlative… It is a statement, but it’s more a performative kind of iteration than a description of some self that exist outside of the statement that I am a Jew. IGZ: So you are not positioned, and you are not (re)positioning yourself like Franz Rosenzweig, who asks himself, should I continue to be a Jew? Should I become a Christian, and overcome my Jewishness? JB: I never thought of becoming a Christian. There was a point in my adolescence that I saw American suburban Judaism as being so empty that I thought, “Oh, it’s a shame, after 3000 years it ends in this”, but certainly it ends… IGZ: You see “it” as an end? JB: I saw it as an end. And then I was removed from that everyday contact, so I was still very Jewish although alienated. I was really in a place where there were not a lot of Jews around. Suddenly I started thinking of myself as being always-already more Jewish than the realm of my own self determination. So it became a question of what am I going to do with it? How do I make a Jew? IGZ: As part of your refusal to further problematize your actual identity, or, as the realization of your philosophy? JB: I wish my friend, Martin Lance, one of my dearest friends in the world—and part of the reason I am here in Jerusalem now is just to visit him, he lives in Baka [ 171 ]
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[neighborhood in Jerusalem] now—because he was together with me in college. We became very close partly because we felt the intellectual atmosphere in seminars, in a very demanding liberal arts college. I was very much troubled by seminars where I still felt that the assumption was that what was being discussed in the humanity seminars was something other than real life. That there is this realm of learning and it has its own value, but it is not to be confused with real life. And I had a feeling even then, as a 19–year-old, that this was not how I understood learning. And so I started to conceive of my own dissatisfaction as being Jewish. I called that “the origins of negative identification”. There is something in the atmosphere, some element of a cultural atmosphere, that I need to breathe that I am not getting here. I associated that with Jewishness in a very general way, in saying, “OK, I sense a lack here, it’s a part of me that’s not being nourished—how do I then go on to inform that?” But it was not a sudden religious inspiration in any traditional sense, and partly because it was associated with, I thought of myself as a Marxist in college. I wrote a senior thesis about Marxist anthropology, so sort of the Yiddish focused, and secular tradition was the easiest for me to begin with. And also a sense that my Jewishness was shaped by growing up in an intimate community of Jewish chicken farmers that was dissolving during my early childhood, so the sense of a sort of communal, familiar Yiddishkeit and its loss, as a very early experience, that might give a sense of what Jewishness was. IGZ: You take the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School so seriously in your writings, and Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer are so central for your thinking. In their last years Adorno and Horkheimer understood Critical Theory as Jewish negative knowledge, and they saw the importance of Judaism very much in the sense that Judaism was at the center of their philosophy, or at the center of the theological dimension of their thought. It was no longer the proletariat. Judaism for them was the actual manifestation of the claim for justice—through the consistent historical injustice that was inflicted on the Jews. And the anti-dogmatism of Judaism, of 17 “ואלוהי מסכה לא תעשה לך” שמות ל”ד, which to my mind is the starting point of any Critical Theory that refuses dogmatism and ethnocentrism of any kind. This message of Jewish monotheism today terrifies many post-colonialists, who offer us a new anti-Semitism in the name of the lost Polytheism, hybridity and heterogeneity. But we’ll certainly come to that later as a manifestation of current conflicting modes of criticism. In the meantime let us return to Horkheimer, who says in light of what he conceives as Critical Theory as Jewish negative theology: when a claim for justice acquires power, it can realize itself only at the cost of its transformation into its opposite and of self-destruction. Maybe this is the paradox of Zionism as a negation of exilic Jewish existence, perhaps this is the Original Sin of any Jewish state. How do you see this concept of the fundamentals of Judaism as a center for any genuine critical education and as a starting point for a possible rebirth of a critical language that is true to its mission, namely to its Diasporic origin and to its Diasporic telos? JB: I can’t give a global answer to the question. First of all I respond to the way you lay out this problem with one question of my own, which is naïve. So do not think it is obnoxious. The way you describe Horkheimer and Adorno on Jewishness 172
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as negative theology—how do you differentiate that from the way Herman Cohen identifies the essence of Jewishness with Kantian rational universal ethics as described by Derrida? IGZ: In one sense, it is a continuation of the same trend, namely understanding Judaism as the impetus of negativism. Negativism that affirms Love of Life yet rejects positivism and institutionalized successful violence as part of this Enlightenment’s tradition that Herman Cohen is so fundamental to. At the same time, Herman Cohen was still an optimist, not solely an Utopist. Following the Jewish Prophets and the Enlightenment’s secularization of Jewish theology, he offered the idea of progress of rationality toward human universal redemption. The academic ideal of universal realization of academic freedom is a complementary vision of the realization of secularized Jewish theology in light of the vision of a successful “homereturning” project that will bring to its conclusion Diasporic existence. These two projects meet and integrate, and yet they are in conflict with each other, and each within itself, between the germ of eternal Diasporic life and the quest for ending Diasporic existence. As against these two modes of universal realization and overcoming of Judaism, Marx offered a third: capitalism as the realization of the essence of actual Judaism and the prospects of universal revolution and communist existence as an ultimate emancipation of humanity from the violence and oppression of Judaism. As I try to show in various places, present postcolonial philosophy further develops today this positive utopianism within the framework of a new racism and a new antiSemitism. In contrast, late Adorno and Horkheimer understood that rationality is instrumentalized and becomes irrational rationality. Instrumental rationality becomes implemented in ever more sophisticated manners; it enables and actually ensures efficient dehumanization, and even threatens the very existence of all life on the planet. Of course, it destroys the vision of Kant, Herman Cohen and Enlightenment in general, but at the same time it is part and parcel of the same secularized political theology, of the same world view and its material, social and cultural preconditions, symptoms and expressions. And from there they proceed to understand rationality very differently from the way Herman Cohen and Kant conceived it on the one hand, and Marx and present post-colonialists on the other. In what sense? In the sense that in opposition to Marx, who tried to overcome Judaism and its consistent Diasporic Love of Life and responsibility via universalism, and to present post-colonialists, who try to realize this very aim by turning to heterogeneity and “diversity” against the Judeo-Christian/whiteness colonialist-oriented homogeneity complex, the Frankfurt School thinkers insisted on a consistent Diasporic philosophy, on eternal, responsible co-poiesis and improvisation; in other words, on Diaspora as the worthiest form of human existence. JB: I had as my dissertation advisor at the New School an anthropologist named Stanley Diamond, who was a very smart and a very difficult man; an important thinker in Marxism and anthropology. He published an article in late fifties called “Kibbutz and shtetl: The history of an idea”. He actually did his first field work on an actual kibbutz in the late fifties, never published much, but in that article he talks about the social structure of the kibbutz as the reflection of the notion held 173
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by the vatikim [veterans of the Zionist settlement project] of the pathology of the social structure of the shtetl [a Jewish small town in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust), which for me was a very important idea in understanding that Israel is both a continuation and a concentration of the Jewish patterns and the fundamental rejection of Jewishness. Even today a lot of well educated Jews and people who care very much do not understand the extent to which the whole notion of Zionism was a rejection of Jewishness. But when I was working with Stanley Diamond and working on Yiddish and starting to wear a kippa [skullcap] around, he was very concerned that I should not become a Jewish chauvinist. Because, he said—in conversations, and you can also see it in his writings, for him the only positive value of Jewish identity is the marginal stance vis-à-vis civilization that it affords someone who is conscious of that identity; so that if you clothe it, it is not naked anymore and it is not as sensitive. Whereas I said—I don’t know if I ever said it to him, but my response in my own head is that if you don’t build any kind of structure around the marginal space, it collapses. IGZ: Let us dare to rethink it; let us give it a second thought. Let us think again about the essence, the telos and the fortune of Jewishness as religiosity in the absence of the strong state and its institutions; Jewishness as religiosity, not solely as a religion. I will offer you an idea and you will tell me what you think about it. Jewishness as a religious, ecstatic co-poiesis: an experience of the absence of the presence of God. Education for a worthy facing of the absence of God, or— actually—of any positive absolute. Any dogma might give birth to responsibility and love (and there are complex and rich relations between these two) which is universal, global, existential; which precedes ethics and intellectual constructions, routines and safeguards. From Yavne onwards neither the sovereignty of the Jewish state nor the sacredness of the Temple represented Jewishness; nor did a certain religious dogma and its representatives. The Torah, text and textuality, as an object for overcoming and transcendence. It is an unrestrained imperative not to sanctify any interpretation or interpreter, but rather to overcome, to transcend while being responsible, living within the framework of the Halacha and the infinite horizons of interpretation, improvisation and love of Life. Deciding to live outside secular history and its power-relations, refusing national sovereignty and devoting the self to prayer in the Minyan, Accepting the counter-rule of the Shabbat or the neverconclusive-interpretation-of-the-text, of living-toward-the-not-yet. For the Jew these, not the borders of the sovereign state, become the relevant realm. It is a Jewish, therefore a Diasporic, imperative, which is not merely pre-intellectual: as copoiesis it precedes ethics and establishes a fundamental obligation to the otherness of the Other and to yourself as a promise, as a potential part of togetherness with the Other as a concrete challenge, abyss and focus of responsibility, and with the world as well as a concrete, bodily, historically situated human. Co-poiesis and being a partner to a Minyan, or Shabbat, offer so much more than loneliness on the one hand, and being swallowed by the bestiality of dogma, by the harmony of total surrendering oneself to constraints, or to the magmatic traces of ethnocentrism, on the other. Living as a responsible nomad in eternal exile in face of the absence of the 174
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absolute. Becoming a Diasporic human opens all ethnocentrist, dogmatic and ethical realms of self-evidence and closes, overcomes, at the same time, all temptations to “the worthy” project that offers “homereturning” and “peace” of all kinds. It is a great responsibility, a burden that does not offer compensation and rewards, only heavy, rich, Diasporic hospitality. So as a Diasporic human, on the one hand you are extremely aware of your being contextualized within political frameworks and specific power-relations that always come together with their limits and possibilities as enabled/inflicted by the historical moment; and on the other, you position yourself in face of these in light of your facing Diasporic religiosity. In this sense Critical Theory is so relevant today and not solely as an intellectual possibility: as a way of life of individuals, of committed people, who choose to experience the religious tension and responsibilities within, and in face of, globalizing capitalism, rising chauvinism, nationalism and ethnocentrism in all their versions. In this sense, would you agree that Jewish thought as a new form of Critical Theory is very much relevant for today’s creative nomadic life possibilities? JB: Absolutely. For me this is one of the key… but I would be hesitant myself of formulating it in even quite that assertive way. Because it is very easy to say, “We’ve been around so long and we’ve suffered so much—we know more than you do”. I guess I understand the moral aesthetic that you are trying to articulate and I think you’re right that sometimes I tried to follow it. In simple terms, it is very difficult to be assertive without being triumphant. I think also Heschel said, concerning the Sabbath, “The Jews live in time. They do not live in space”. I don’t claim that it is right, because I think first of all, that it means to focus only on the Minyan and not on the kitchen also. It is also to say that when we say The Jew we mean men. IGZ: But “the kitchen” can actually be built anywhere—not solely nor first of all in Israel. JB: Sure. But it means that everywhere you are there is a sense that you’re fully shaped by that place, that you’re not fully absorbed in it. IGZ: Very much so. But is it so that it is fully… JB: Maybe not, but it is not trivial. IGZ: Okay, I’ll share with you for a moment the poststructural concept… JB: It is not trivial, because otherwise kibbutz galuyot [the return of all Jews around the globe to Israel] would be a much more straightforward matter but then everybody would come to Israel and basically get along and marry each other. IGZ: Isn’t it so that the kibbutz galuyot idea and the melting pot agenda, and the establishing of a strong Israel, are ultimately a barbarization of the essence of the idea of Judaism in the sense of destroying not only Jewish Diasporas but the very ideal of Diasporic existence? JB: I don’t like telling five or six million people that they’re doing the wrong thing. I take a somewhat more modest view. I can understand why people like being in a place where most of the other people are like them. I don’t share that, but I can understand why people would feel that way. I cannot sanction trying to guarantee the perpetuation of that majority through the structure of the state. That is a matter of practical politics and constitutionality and democracy. 175
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IGZ: Isn’t that what collectivism is all about? The constitutive idea of collectivism and surely of this dangerous ill health, of nationalism? JB: No. The US is not a state based on an ethnic or religious definition of citizenship. In a fundamental respect, Israel is problematic in exactly the same way that all liberal democratic states are problematic. It has territorial boundaries, it is not fixed, but it is in principle a territorial state. And that in itself is highly problematic. The fact, the sensibility of whether it is a loss for everybody to be gathered in one place—I feel it is a loss, I feel that it is a part of the continuing disaster of the 20th century. Yet it’s the easiest and best way for me to explain why I like being Jewish. Being Jewish connects me to so many different people in so many different places over such a long period of time that it is the strongest thread that is available to me to allow me to be a specific person connected so much to humanity in general; to the extent that there is a concentration and a regularization of where and what and how Jewishness is—that is diminished. For the same reason, in this respect, I find Habad Lubavitch and their tactics very problematic. When my wife Alisa went to school here in Jerusalem in the seventies, she lived in Katamon [a neighborhood at Jerusalem] and worked with the neighborhood kids there, she was outraged that Habad disciples were going to children of religious Moroccan parents and telling them that their parent’s home is not kosher, or telling them that the way they gathered was wrong. It really is a kind of cultural imperialism. IGZ: Would you agree that the connectedness that is still important to you might become a soporific power that will put you asleep or that will lower your sensitivities intellectually, morally and aesthetically? Isn’t it so that while you negate the concept of home, of homeland, of the negation of the negation of Diaspora by Zionism, you replace this “homereturning” project with an alternative “homereturning” project? Here I refer to another kind of “home” that I find you are committed to in your writings—longing for a “home” that is not territorial yet committed to the suggestive power of a deep human sleep, of human forgetfulness in the form of an alternative collectivism, while one of the worthiest trends in Judaism, which is especially important in my eyes, is the overcoming of the temptation of any kind of collectivism. Judaism offers togetherness as an alternative to collectivism and nationalism, which is committed to construct history and have the upper hand. It offers a commitment to another kind of togetherness—cosmopolitan togetherness, which you found, it seems to me, in radical feminism. JB: Here I have to tell a story, I have to describe the situation. My brother started reading literary theory before I did, and in the summer of 1987 he went and spent the summer in the School of Criticism and Theory, which is in Dartmouth College, a summer institute every year. And he said, “You have to go, Jonathan”. So I convinced Alisa to let me go the next year. IGZ: How long was it? JB: Six to seven weeks. And in that institute every year, at least then, there were four seminars that ran the whole time, and I took two of them. Edward Said was reading lectures that were the chapters of his book called Culture and Imperialism, and Nancy Miller was teaching the subject of feminist theory, you know. I am a 176
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critical anthropologist so I am very interested in cultural questions of anthropology, imperialism and colonialism, and I guess I had already found something in the Jewishness that I was trying to make. And through my reading of—especially my reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, you are right, is a more important book for me than my writing reflects…. The critique of the enlightened imperial subject spoke to me very strongly as someone who wanted to be a radical graduate student in anthropology; and to try to think about the relations between philosophical imperialism and the Enlightenment and modern Jewish history in Europe predisposed me to finding very useful reading: Judith Butler and other feminist theorists, who were talking about the autonomist subject as a modern male, a European construction, and in my mind a Protestant construction. So really the piece I wrote called The Impossible Internationalist, which you are thinking of, grows out of being in the situation of being the host in seminars with very strong seminar leaders, and with certain people, women in the one case, people from the third world in the other case, who were empowered to speak there, and with me, appearing as an orthodox Jewish man with a kippa, not particularly authorized to speak in either seminar, and I did speak, of course. It was very frightening. I am not complaining about it, but that’s what really pushed me to try to make those particular articulations. The other thing I wanted to say, in terms of the question of cosmopolitanism, which is not a term that I am opposed to, is that Diaspora is not only an intellectual state, not necessarily collective but communal, in the sense that I try to keep a very broad definition of Diaspora now that the business of deciding that certain groups of people are not diasporists… To me, one of the things that make the notion most vital is the possibility and the cultural technology of generational continuity in the absence of a majority. So yes—it is true that there is always a danger of sentimentalism, and what for me serves as a more or less effective check against over-indulgence in that sentimentalism—to the extent that I continue to participate, or participate more or promote the continuity of traditional forms like the synagogue—is that I am also aware that this is the only life I have. I do not want to be wasted, melting into a communalist. Because in some ways that is as much an abandonment of life as sitting around watching soap operas on TV. At the same time, I think it is also useful and defensible to say there are certain things we do because that is what Jews do. And you don’t have to rationalize everything. I’m not saying “law”, I’m not saying “because that is what God told us to do”. It’s not a matter of faith necessarily. I think that a great deal of post-Enlightenment terror, both in the sense of individual terror, and eventually organized violence, has to do with the inability of an isolated organism that is aware of its own mortality to achieve some kind of equanimity with the fact of its own mortality. And I think that one of the key driving forces of the symbolic aspects of almost all human cultures until now has been to strengthen a real, not just a sentimental force, in structuring identificatory practices such that the organism does not, in the first instance, understand existence as starting with its birth and ending with its death, but almost in the first instance understands existence as being a continuity and a cycle, inflicted by its own mortality. IGZ: But determined as well by both its hopelessness in effectively defending itself and its incompetence in colonizing the Other. While some trends in Judaism, 177
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also in your view as I understand it, as well as in certain trends in radical feminism, conceive women and Jews not only as one of the not very many manifestations of humans victimized by the hegemon or suffering from the phallocentristic-oriented history of the West, but also as committed in the first place to give birth to love, to solidarity, to responsible improvisation and co-poiesis, and less to the success, gains, victories and triumphs as offered by normal patriarchal history and current logic of the market. You see, in some respects Jews, women and other Others—and according to some of the feminist trends today, actually solely women of the right radical feminist politics and philosophy—continue where Jewish thought did not dare to proceed and elevate itself: insisting on the centrality of cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and on being very precise and concrete and very much in the totality of the moment on the other. How would you respond to the claim that the radical feminist philosophies and politics that you identify with are actually not offering only an agenda that Judaism today is short of offering us, but actually in a way are presenting an alternative to Judeo-Christian thinking, to Western colonialism and to phallocentristic-monotheistic-oriented love?—A commitment to negativity, a commitment on the one hand to resist power and success, which are patriarchal, colonialist, or committed to the absolute/homogeneity/universalist-frozenoppressive ideas; or on the one hand to the idea of progress, and at the same time to being very much connected to the moment, to the concrete, to giving birth to the hybrid unexpected. Not as a mere idea: giving birth to a new child is actualizing genesis. It is realizing philosophy and being committed to the totally other, as a possibility. Of course, normalizing education and all the powers will at the same time begin their work and normalize the child and the mother and so on. But the very commitment to give birth, as well as the commitment of traditional Judaism to the transcendence, are two alternatives to the macho-ist or the colonialistic-oriented idea of overcoming, of victory, of the principle of ownership. In Hebrew you say [ בעלותownership] and [ בעילהintercourse]: the man —בועלmakes-his—the woman, and בעלותsignifies becoming that owner of a property, making the Other yours, your property, as the main road to negate the otherness of the Other. How do you see this rival-symbiotic relationship between radical feminism and Judaism? JB: I won’t pretend to answer that. Again, I find I am answering a lot of your questions with anecdotes. And I must say, the kinds of things I am starting to write now are different than the common themes, than what I’ve always done, so that conceptual questions bring to me anecdotes and bits. One bit is this last Shabbat I was in New York and I went to… I go to several different schuls in the neighborhood, and sometimes if I get up early on a Shabbat morning I go to the Shabbat Minyan at 7:00. Why is there a Shabbat Minyan on 7:00? Because when it was established 50–60 years ago it was for the guys who had to go to work. Now it is just because it is a quick Minyan, there is no ceremonial speech and it’s very nice. But I see there sometimes one older man whom I like very much, and he picked me out a long time ago as somebody who he could tell stories about Jewishness to, but also about the world. And he said to me, almost a propos of nothing—he said, “The human is in God’s image” האדם נעשה בצלם. This is a very important principle, which we forget 178
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about all the time now. So yes, there are hints that you have to listen very hard for. There are hints that what you are describing as a critical, almost a humane ideal was once a much more vigorous part of an integrated communal—not just a cosmopolitan and academic—Jewishness. I think also that some of the aspects of internal humor, internal critique, in Yiddish culture are resources for a kind of openness and sense of contingency. So that goes to one of your things, a sort of a vigorous pessimism, but the one I was thinking of was actually “a klein folk, ober a baise” [Yiddish]: “a small nation, but a nasty one”. Now you can sentimentalize that too. Of course, you can say we can laugh at ourselves but we can also… I always have had a very hard time telling the difference, trying to interpret—Walter Benjamin thought he could tell the difference between political sense of history and nostalgia. And I have never been quite as confident. I think that there are places in the Jewish world where people are working very hard to address questions about women’s rights, which are not questions that you ask me, but to address them without a sense of “Okay, we’ll make it up in ways that are convenient to us”. And this is not a redemptive moment, but I think it is creative. And that’s at the margins of what we call orthodoxy. IGZ: With your permission, Prof. Boyarin, I will go to another topic which is so central in your work: postcolonialism. How do you see the relation between Judaism and postcolonialism—on the one hand as two important manifestations of negativism, and on the other hand in relation to the possibility of postcolonialism as an alternative to the Jewish monotheistic and immanently colonialist-oriented moral and cultural telos? JB: Well, first of all, I think of it as a kind of strategic coalition, in that if you understand that a notion of a disinterested social critique is not only a fiction, but a fiction that serves certain ends of powers and therefore it is important to situate critique, then it is obviously vitally important to situate critique in as many places as possible; and for that discussion to be based on as agile a notion of identity as possible. Jewish critical discourse, like the post-colonial discourse, is always working a balancing act to avoid on the one hand reifying itself in turn, which is also related to nostalgia, and on the other hand dissolving itself, cutting off its own legs from underneath it. For instance, when I addressed Jean Luc Nancy, who had a very appealing, but a very abstract—and I think he acknowledges it—explicitly postChristian notion of community and strategy to addressing the desire for universality without engaging in imperial fantasies, I responded from a very particular situation, which leads to a more general suggestion of thinking about fragmentary communities rather than an aporia, rather than conceiving community as an aporia. IGZ: Here I would like to challenge you a bit. In your writings you sound, to me at least, quite optimistic about the likelihood of establishing such a coalition between the marginalized: a prospect of going into a dialogue, a peaceful, inclusive dialogue between the marginalized and the oppressed as against the oppressor and its hegemonic narrative. I ask myself, isn’t this optimism about the prospects of these coalitions and dialogues among the marginalized in fact anti-Diasporic? Anti-Diasporic in the sense that if we accept the postmodern delivery—and it is my understanding that you do in fact gladly accept it as anti-fundamentalism or as a refusal of fundamentalism, as 179
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resisting the concept and the longing for transcendence, as rebuffing the possibility of grand theories and universalistic-oriented values and so on, then actually, we are left with no valid yardsticks and with no erotic impetus to transcendence, to responsibility, to seriously committing ourselves in light of, within and between conflicting moral alternatives. Abandoning or being left without God, Torah, or a universally valid Critical Theory, are we not left to the mercy of contingent symbolic violences, rival representation apparatuses and other manipulations? Would you agree that the deconstruction of the various realms of self-evidence, which include monotheism and the utopian quest, has ended up in the exile of Spirit itself? If indeed we are left without either responsibility or poiesis, or seriousness about universalistic valid yardsticks to evaluate the conflicting sets of values and agendas, are we emancipated solely from “whiteness”, “phallocentric Monotheism” and “humanist colonialism”? Or by the same token, are we also exiled from co-poiesis, transcendence and the very possibility of prayer, Eros and religiosity? The post-colonialist reply might be “Okay, we don’t have a universally valid idea or yardstick, but we do have a principle to guide us: ‘always side with the victimized, at all cost give more weight to the interests and to the self-evidence of the oppressed and not to that of the oppressor’.” Professor Boyarin, what would be your response to the claim that what we end up with here is not emancipation from monotheism, Judeo-Christian colonialism or Western ethnocentrism—not at all, but unfortunately with nothing less than an alternative ethnocentristic world view, with just another triumph of the self-evidence, with victory over Diasporic existence and over critical-creative-erotic humanity? JB: I think that’s probably right. I think of myself probably as always having been very keen when I wrote what I wrote last year… and I also think that I only get older, I don’t know if I get wiser. But I also think that things get worse and worse. I remember thinking, “Oh God, if Ronald Reagan gets elected to the presidency of the USA I’m leaving, that’s it”—and it continues to get worse and worse. I don’t have much of a notion now that I know who the oppressor is, in a collective sense, and I’m much more inclined toward an almost social-biological view or an anthropological view in the sense of viewing us as a species, which uses language as a particular adaptive mechanism, and say on the one hand, from a biological standpoint, that we are right now a very successful species because there are a lot of us, we are all over the place. It looks like we are creating a situation in which there would be not very many of us, because we are using it up. And so I tend more lately to think in terms of how well organized are we as a species? Not who has the power? Who doesn’t have power? Who is the source of oppression and who is the source of liberation? Are we going to pull through? And the only way to pull through is to be organized much better. So to me it’s not an emancipatory project anymore. It’s a project aimed at survival and rescue. IGZ: If I proceed in light of your present articulation would you accept also my assertion that the present historical moment deconstructs not only the preconditions for emancipatory education, it even deconstructs the preconditions for Diasporic existence—in two conflicting ways: one is the enhancement of Instrumental Rationality which in a neo-liberal context contributes to the hegemony of the McWorld 180
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and to the McDonaldization of reality. In the present global market as well as in cyberspace there is no room for transcendence, there are no preconditions for a tragic or a heroic response to the exile of Spirit and to the deconstruction of the Absolute, be it God, human spirit or reason. The second is the counter-violence, the reaction of the oppressed and New Age spirituality, which offer a new educational vitality, new and renewed positive utopias that contribute their share to the destruction of cultural, economic, technological and political conditions for Diasporic philosophy and for Diasporic education. These two conflicting trends are in conflict with Diasporic co-poiesis and responsible improvisation since they are united in enhancing the philosophy of life as the aim of life, mere life. Diasporic philosophy and countereducation as conceived by myself are conditioned by overcoming this narcissistic concept of the human. On the other hand I might reply that this impasse is the only genuine gate to a Diasporic philosophy which is true to itself. JB: Yes and no. Because Diaspora does not come about as the result of… even if we do accept Diaspora to some extent as a chosen condition, not as a punishment. Historically it is accurate to say most voluntary diasporas are trading diasporas, they are commercial diasporas, and Diaspora is not an altruistic situation, it is also an alternative strategy of survival. IGZ: For survival, or for worthier human life and mature responsibility? JB: At this point, the most worthy project of survival in the global sense is survival itself. And that is why, as I was saying to you, I now pose this question of extinction and difference. Let us take seriously for half an hour the notion that it is rational to hypothesize what are we, all of us: we are using up our planet so quickly. Now, how does the discourse about human difference now seem? And I have to say that I have not really articulated an answer to that. But it does allow me to be even more vigorously anti-chauvinistic than I made myself be before. IGZ: Because then even the “we” is different and it should be re-articulated. Who are the “we”? Who is included in the “we” and who or what is excluded? Should we include all citizens of the cosmos? Animals and plants too? JB: “We” the Jews. Let us bring it back to that one. Here is I think a good hypothetical question that gets you to these issues, and I think you could debate this point either way. I have my notion about which side of the debate I prefer to take. But here is the question for the debate. Proposition: because one third of the Jewish people were annihilated in the middle of the 20th century, Jews have the right to have more children than other people do. I am not prepared to say right away the answer is “No, of course not”. In other words, I am still interested in this tension between particular forms of humanity and in humanity in general because it is still the case, and it will always the case, that there is no “humanity” in general. And we will always have to figure out technologies and procedures and regulations for balancing sameness and difference. But we always face that project as long as we survive. So that is why in some sense it is survival and not emancipation that becomes the horizon of all cultural questions of politics, and politics of identity. IGZ: Is it possible, in your view, to offer a concept of existence which is neutral, which is indifferent to conflicting values, truths and yardsticks for preferences and 181
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choosing alternative sets of values and conceptual apparatuses? According to what criteria or values or language game are we allowed to enact our responsibility or even respond to the call, to the invitation, to the imperative of going into action, and surely the right practices, that will guarantee the very existence of the world and our lives as citizens of the world? Is it rational, is it pre-rational yet unavoidable, to expect to face this global threat without seriously going into the challenge of philosophical, political and educational preconditions? JB: I certainly do not think we can do that. I don’t imagine that we could ever be able to do that in any sustained way. The reason that I propose we try doing it even for a little while is because I think that people are thinking for the future. I think that our thinking about identity now toward the future is hobbled. And I mean even someone like Homi Bhabha, by a taboo against failing ultimately to invoke hope. And that is why I said to you not just optimism, but hope, is a problem. That people feel it is not responsible to be realistic, or that if you won’t say, “I’m going to think about what 50 years from now will be like, and I’m not going to do it with hope”. And I think that since culture and language and projection are the way of human beings in the world, then we will only survive if we do it successfully. And there really is some measure of rationality, because as much as we shape the world through out consciousness of it, and our concepts of it, if we are not alive we do not have the chance to do that. And why did I become an anthropologist? Not just because I wanted to learn Yiddish, but because I’d love this thing that human beings have, which is—you asked me about feminism before, and in Donna Haraway’s book Primate Visions she has an appendix to it—which is a song that my teacher, Rina Rapp, taught to her daughter Mira, when Mira was a little girl, and it ends with “Welcome to culture, my darling daughter, it is the greatest show on earth”. I think human beings are the most interesting animal there is in the world. I can conceive that 50 years from now if there were no human beings, and the world would otherwise be as it is, there would be all the other animals, all the lions and tigers and bears, well I could live with that, but חבל, a shame. It really would be a loss. There is a sense in which the end of our being even able to have a discussion like this, or anybody having a speculation or argument—that is in the same category as the loss of a Native American language. Multiply it, because it is the whole typecast of the phenomenon, and as long as two people can keep doing it there is a possibility of further diversification and reinvention. But when that stops something is lost in the universe. Part of the value of the universe is a possibility of a consciousness other than God’s to appreciate the Indians. IGZ: You pose here again preconditions for Diasporic life in face of problematic economic, cultural, technological and political realities. These are very important, of course. I don’t question it. I think, however, it is impossible to disconnect these from other preconditions for Diasporic existence. I mean preconditions for the possibility of doing good or resisting injustice, which are presently also preconditions for sustainability. In this sense Diasporic counter-education and the agenda of education for sustainability meet. The other Diasporic preconditions I prefer to relate to are the possibility of living within and in face of the tension between diasporic existence and the “homereturning” quest; within this tension in this nowhere land the human as a 182
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caring citizen of this world is realized as a partner to the shared arena, community or (in)human condition. And they also relate to the invitation to refuse to become at home in this present order of things, to overcoming the temptation to become part of any collective, dogma or self-forgetfulness. It is a tension between becoming of this world in specific realities that demand our response and responsibility, and being Diasporic within some or even most of its realities. This tension is dangerous and demanding, of course. However, where there is tension and conflict there is Life and air to breath for Eros. Where there is Life, human life as an eternal Diasporic becoming, there is hope, which in opposition to optimism is beyond “our” present horizons and its realities. It is never to be explained or called upon by facts, realities and theoretical reductions. This is because it is a dimension of the possibility of the appearance of the totally other. It is a call we could, and one might say we should, respond to. To be awakened by and encouraged to become genuine Diasporic humans who dwell in co-poiesis and actualize each moment anew responsible improvisation. Because to be(come) an optimist is to refuse Diasporic life. Optimism is an invitation and part of the acceptance of the invitation to dwell within the reality as a “home” whose rules we could play by more efficiently and be successful more or less. To my mind it is actually a way to return to thingness, to the Same, to the mentioned-before; it is a manifestation of self-forgetfulness and a retreat back “home” to the continuum of meaninglessness, to the “home” of thingness. To be(come) Diasporic within this reality and in face of these preconditions is to be part of and at the same time to refuse to be part of this historical reality, to become a serious nomad, a responsible exile, a Diasporic human that as such has not abandoned the responsibility, togetherness and creativity in favor of the negativism of Diasporic life since she has an alternative; or maybe you would prefer to say genuine kinds of togetherness with herself, with the Other, with the world, togetherness that precedes ethics and intellectual constructions and transcends historical realities while acknowledging the specifics of historical, social and educational situatedness. In this sense, the very Diasporic existence is a call to overcome mere continuum and sustainable human life as the purpose of Life. This is what Diasporic co-poiesis is all about. JB: And I think it is useful in terms of the predicament of the future that I’ve been talking about now, isn’t it? It’s not so new—to keep on going although you don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run. IGZ: Would you agree that Diasporic existence is much more a call and an open possibility for the individual than for a collective? On the one hand it is the individual who is reconnecting herself or himself to the cosmos, to infinity and to the totality of the moment. Solely the individual, if it is possible at all. When it is a collective act, then, unavoidably, like in a discotheque or Fascist parades, it is a ceremony of de-humanization, of running back “home” to the Same, to the thingness. The Jewish Minyan, in this sense, is its opposite, is a manifestation of Diasporic togetherness. But you don’t agree, do you? JB: That distinction never occurs in its pure form. So the answer—you know, we’re talking for the Journal of Philosophy of Education. This is what I want to fill Jewishness with. What I want to be the resources of Jewishness… 183
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IGZ: May I interrupt you with a short… I think that in our conversation we have now reached the turning point. In other words, we’re facing the moment at which Judaism is a challenge for Diasporic existence. A challenge that counter-education, Diasporic counter-education, if true to itself, should transcend. In traditional vocabulary it is possible to suggest here a more Spinozan attitude of relating to the world, to nature, to the cosmos as a totality and refusing all Diasporic narratives that are still connected to its ethnocentric birthsigns, or to cosmopolitanism that is still attached to the narrative of the fall from the Garden of Eden. So as a consistent Diasporic human, why should you personally and philosophically insist on Judaism? Don’t you see that you have reached a point in your Odyssey at which you cannot run away from deciding which is more dear to you: Judaism or genuine Diasporic existence, and that it is impossible to prolong your present pleasant condition in which you can comfortably have them both? JB: The only reasons, for me, are what I decided. I don’t insist on anything. I decided, at a certain point I crystallized, but quite rapidly, so it felt like discovering the truth, that I had already been shaped more than I knew, by the name, in the sense of the name in Jewishness. That what I was in the world was already very much determined by this. And therefore, rather than try to transcend that, and make myself individual in some… I can be an individual in an abstract sense. How can each person be unique? There is a very serious demand in the Enlightenment that everybody has to be an individual. And again, a lot of terror and confusion comes from that. So already then it made sense to me to…. What this means, I will have to spend my life finding out. The more I know about what it has meant along the way—what other people in other situations have embroidered around that word, the stronger a combination of situatedness and autonomy I can have. And that is in a sense that how all of my writing is like the hard shell that a snail uses behind himself… IGZ: But the very concept of autonomy is problematic for you. JB: Freedom, call it something like freedom, yes, the ideal of autonomy… IGZ: Is very problematic for you. JB: Yes. So let me call it responsibility. IGZ: But even if we think about responsibility and we give up for a moment the concept of autonomy or relative autonomy in the spirit of Enlightenment, in face of some of the concepts of post-structuralism, I would have to have to raise this question: is the concept of responsibility still defensible within your conceptual framework, if subjects are merely objects of manipulations and of subjectification processes of which humans are merely the products, effects, agents and echoes; and if these manipulations differ in kind from the monotheistic tradition, which Hegel or Marx explains to us in terms of the absolute, namely the objective and universal realization of historical laws, and subjects are essentially fragmentary, contextual and immanently contingent in the sense than you cannot seriously speak of the responsibility of the subject. This is because the subject you refer to does not have the preconditions for response-ability. The subject you describe and adore so much is not sovereign or autonomous. Not even potentially or as a constitutive ideal. Your subject is neither the owner of nor the rebel against his or her subjectivity: she has 184
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not God nor the absence of God nor an erotic impetus, nor ecstatic co-poiesis, nor the freedom or a reason to actualize as part of her self-constitution and elevation. Even her narcissism and sophisticated cynicism are mere simulacra. As such, he or she cannot be Diasporic, of course. In this sense I would suggest that the concept of responsibility that you offer instead of freedom is part and parcel of the contingent effects/affects, an echo or reaction which is part of the immanence or mechanical continuum which is deterministic on the one hand and chaotic on the other; yet either way meaningless. Again, to your mind, in what sense is it possible to maintain the possibility of responsibility and Diasporic existence when there is no transcendence, not even as an open possibility? No part or glimpse of authentic otherness or any possible manifestation of the totally other; not even the Greek Moira playing with us, playing “us” in a way which talks itself to us/through “us” as if there were a genuine “I” who is invited to respond and enact responsibility. JB: First of all, we are not an echo of mere contingency. But we are also structured as subjects. And in fact, no matter how much we understand that we are constructed as subjects, there are strict limits to the extent that we can deconstruct ourselves and still get around every day. So we certainly continue to live “as if”, and in a very important sense live this paradox at the abstract level. It is perfectly analogous to the fact that while I have a very strong feeling that our whole world is falling apart, I’m putting away as much money as I can into a retirement account, you know. And also part of the answer is that it is the greatest show on earth. IGZ: The show of whom? Whose show is it if we are permitted to pose such a question against the omnipotence of the meaninglessness which creates us, the question and the possible replies and reactions to it as different parts of its immanence? Is it a self-defeating—or even worse a self-ridiculing question? Maybe I can find a better articulation: is it possible to challenge the rules of the game and its very existence as the self-manifestation of the immanence? Or are we allowed to challenge, or to abandon our responsibility to challenge, this game and our preconstructed position/role in it, be it as dwellers, disciples or rebels? This nowhere land between immanence and transcendence, between the philosophy of the omnipotence of God/meaninglessness/the rules of the game or, alternatively, the supremacy of human free will and agency, this no-man’s-land, this Diasporic deterritorialized yet specific arena is the locus of my question which I repeat now: whose game is it, Jonathan? JB: I say it is the greatest game. IGZ: But who or what is the creator? And who or what is the one or the dynamic multiplicity/chaos who is to make sense of this game and its fruits? Are we actually sovereign, or partially sovereign, autonomous players in this game? Or is it that we are merely a plaything, agents or media of a mechanism, continuum or immanence that is beyond our will, control or even our understanding, and we cannot make sense of this wholeness or of our existence solely as its product, echo and devotedstupid agents? JB: There is a thinking always going on, whether or not there is a self thinking it. There is a thinking always going on. And it works especially hard in dreams. I 185
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had dreams, so many dreams that I am traveling some place with a group of people. We’re trying to establish a community somewhere, and often there are odd problems: you can’t drive through the snow, all of a sudden you don’t have a car, you’re falling of a cliff, and sometimes I’m afraid to go to sleep. Because I know that I’m going to go to these weird places while I am asleep, and I have absolutely no control over it. Of course I’m going to fall asleep, I really… I’m losing control, I’m going to have these exhausting adventures and there’s nothing I can do about it. And then—it happened to me a couple of nights ago—I said to myself, but that’s what your life is, why should you be especially afraid when you go to sleep? IGZ: Normalized life conventions are conceived mostly as self-evident projects. In terms of mental health, social stability and philosophical reasons they are set by the system as an aim of education and of human existence; the system reproduces reality, the apparatus of representing reality, and interpretation of reality, in a sense that makes people function more or less “successfully” and “efficiently”. Of course there are sanctions and rewards and so on for successful/unconventional participation in organized social life within any collective. Would you agree, Prof. Boyarin, that this normality/success is nothing but the chains of the prisoners in the Platonic cave that normally are replaced by “emancipation”, which offers nothing but another Platonic cave, alternative self-forgetfulness that the Diasporic counter-educator challenges less via the fruits of the plantations of “critique” and much more by crossing the normalities, awakening by and within responsible improvisation, co-poiesis and counter-education that is aware of its mission in a Godless world? JB: Okay, so what I am saying is that up until now, the 20th century, you have a situation where most people can be doing that and some people may be more reflective, and Plato can say it is not worthwhile that way. And I can say, “But yes, there is a certain value. There is a great deal of value in human life in itself. Just as there is a value in any other creaturely life, and it is not so absolute as that”. I’m saying that now we’re reaching horizons where the combination of being able collectively to manipulate our environment, and to do that while being asleep at the wheel, has led to situations where we threaten to obviate the continued existence of whatever it is outside our consciousness that allows us to continue to breathe and to be conscious. It’s almost like the old question: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, did it really fall? So years ago I said, “Look, there are so many unemployed philosophers: go create a government program for them, we’ll station them around the forest and we’ll make sure that every time a tree falls in the forest someone will hear it, so we won’t have that problem anymore.” I am not saying that it doesn’t matter whether you call it autonomy or responsibility or whatever you call it. Judith Butler is very clear on that and was helpful for me. She is saying in the book Bodies that Matter—she came back and she said, “Look, just because it’s constructive doesn’t mean it’s not real”. So she was talking about how gendered subjects get created, she was responding to people who said, “Well, if you say it’s all constructed, how can we have any feminist critique?” And she said, “Yes, it is constructed. But it is real”. And I guess what I am saying now is, I’m not in a position to say whether or not unexamined life is or is not worth living. I’m inclined 186
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to say that unexamined lives are also very much worth living and examined lives maybe fundamentally neurotic, but in a collective sense, as a species, we have to examine better the ways we’re organized in the various systems of the life-world or it will just stop. It will not be there anymore and the whole game ends. IGZ: I have a problem with your articulation. Because I am not satisfied at all with the reply of Judith Butler that you find so helpful, according to which if it is constructed it does not mean that it is not real. An unavoidable question in this case will be: A. What kind of “reality”? and B. In what sense is it “real”? Here Judith Butler actually follows Michel Foucault, her teacher, and I have the same problem with Foucault. Following Foucault and Butler you still insist on emancipation, Prof. Boyarin, on the omnipotence of contingency by the same token. As I understand your work, you are still firm in refusing injustice. You seriously relate to the realization of concepts such as emancipation and peace. But on the other hand you emphasize the omnipotence of contingency and power relations. Here, you see, I have a problem with your work, as well as with Butler’s and Foucault’s. Because I would ask, who is the sovereign of this resistance? Who or what is the voice that talks itself through us to us and to others as if it is the self when we give a lecture about agency and resistance and categories such as freedom, peace or justice for the oppressed? Again, if there is no otherness of the Other or of myself in the sense of transcendence, if there is no potential transcendence, if there is no sacred or secularized holiness, if there is no room for co-poiesis and erotic creativity in the sense of the love of the subject that is not totally constructed—very much constructed yes, but not totally constructed—then with what are you left with? How do you establish seriousness toward responsibility? JB: This is where I think Eric Santner in his recent work…he talks about… he doesn’t know Hebrew so he doesn’t do it very clearly, but he reads it through Rosenzweig. He’s talking there about the difference between what he calls “law” and ”“מצווה, commandment, because there is a speaker… IGZ: As in תפילת היחיד, the prayer of the individual, even without a text or any regulative ritual, and תפילת הציבור, the public prayer, which is a defined, regulated public ritual. JB: Yes. And again, an anecdote. That same older man who I like very much that said to me last week ”“( “זה האדם נעשה בצלםthe human was created in the image of God”): a couple of years ago I said to him, “I had a fantastic experience in schul last week”. They sent me up to daven Minha [offer the Afternoon prayer], and I was davening [praying], and it just didn’t matter where I was, when I was, the fact that I was born, the fact that I was going to die. I just was not worried about all that”. And he said, “Don’t you understand? A person davens for 40 years hoping to have an experience like that once”. Well, what’s funny, I can’t give you a satisfactory answer. All I can think is that… IGZ: Prayer in its best is actual transcendence. If your post-colonialist ideology leads you to the conclusion that there is no transcendence, then you have to accept also that this fashionable postmodern package you just received includes the ridiculing of, the impossibility of, ontological Diaspora. And in this sense while 187
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there might be many Diasporas in a globalized world there is no room for Diasporic humans. No genuine possibility for prayer that you just described as one of your more important experiences. Because if we understand prayer in the sense of Rosenzweig, according to which the essence of prayer is not its fulfillment but the possibility of prayer as transcendence, then you have to face otherness in the form of the face of the Other in the language of Levinas, or the totally other in the language of Adorno and Horkheimer. In any case, you cannot be satisfied with a declaration of the omnipotence of contingency, difference that does not make a difference, and mere contextual power relations. I think that facing this challenge is a starting point for Diasporic counter-education. JB: I agree. I would say that for me, the stronger the awareness of contingency the less anxious I am about having to rationalize or authorize for myself a desire for justice. Because instead of standing up for justice in the name of what is written in the Torah or something like that, it feels more like a consciousness that happens to be in the world and senses justice as a good thing and welcomes justice. I do not have to grind it out of myself. IGZ: But Adorno and Horkheimer that we spoke about in the fist part of the conversation understood justice in a negative way. Namely, facing injustice or using injustice is the possibility of doing good, the only possible manifestation of justice is its negation, injustice. Justice is not a positive category but rather a negative one, and this, to my mind, is a very important Diasporic consistent position. It is conditioned, however, by the possibility of reflection, or by the possibility of preparing ourselves for reflection, transcendence and overcoming our limits, as one might find in the example of a worthy prayer or in the case of the very few who risked their lives and their families’ lives and saved Jews or Gypsies during the Holocaust. JB: But I’m not talking about justice now. I’m talking about justice being sensed as a good in the same way that sunlight is sensed as a good, and I’m not talking about the impulse to self-sacrifice for activism. In terms of any conventional activism I think that we are so globally far gone that the best thing I can do, the most useful thing that I can do, is to say, “Stop hoping [for other] people. Think about how we can save ourselves”. This sense in me is pushed further by the last lecture of George Bush. It is not just because a regime in an empire which is a dying empire—but as I was saying 20 years ago, a dying dragon could do a lot of damage if it waves its tale around. That is what we are doing now. But all of the people who would have energies directed toward saving ourselves collectively are now desperately trying to hold on to the bits of separate things, all of which are important, but none of which can happen by itself. Even then I said [leave] the impossible international, so there was negativity there. I was talking about an almost nostalgic longing for something, right? I almost have a sense that separate struggles dissipate our collective chances. IGZ: What would be your new position towards postcolonialism, politics of identity and other struggles in the name of the marginalized and the hybridized and the deconstructed? In other words, what is your response to the shift from the quest and struggle for emancipation that was founded on unity, wholeness—or the quest for a renewed totality that will rebuild the Garden of Eden on earth, to the 188
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current emancipatory agendas which are founded on ever growing fragmentation, difference, relativism and hybridity which it seems go in quest of eternal Diaspora and nomadism and not of nirvana, total redemption and eternal-universal “peace”? JB: I would say people should keep organizing. They should keep trying to articulate their collective interest. They should keep trying to articulate group interests with other group interests. But they should not kid themselves that if they shout loud enough it will help to form a great new world. The value of doing these things is not measured by whether or not the dreamed goal would be the outcome. IGZ: In what sense does Judaism have a special role in this agenda? JB: Given this concept of Diaspora, and what you are saying to me altogether, my answer is not any different from what I have worked from ever before. The human species is always characterized by difference, by blend of—not irreducible differences in the sense of eternal differences, of course, but irreducible differences in the sense of masses of differentiation among human beings; being an irreducible part of how human beings are in the world. Jews in the Diaspora have figured out one of the most durable ways of sustaining difference with relatively the least access to the monopoly of violence of any group I am aware of. And in that sense it is an extraordinarily successful model of sustaining difference within humanity. IGZ: So in this sense, why not to offer a Judaization of culture more generally as the aim of (counter-)education in order to allow all humans Diasporic life as cosmopolitically oriented individuals? To be consistent with your understanding of the mission of Judaism I would ask: why should Judaism limit itself to its deteritorialized marginality, and not offer this nomadism and eternal-improvisational creative existence as a cosmopolitan human existence for all humans, for all potential fellow nomads? And as we are all united by our potential overcoming “homereturning” normalizing education and ethnocentrism, why should such counter-education enclose itself within the horizons of Judaism? I pose this question in light of the understanding that most people normally will insist on collectivism, ethnocentrism, fear, routine and dogmatism of various and sometimes rich kinds, and will resist the invitation to become individuals, to live the dangerous life of a nomad who is in self-chosen eternal Diaspora. JB: I do not think it necessarily should be, otherwise I would respond to people like Lyotard and Nancy: you cannot allegorize the Jew. And I have said that. I have criticized the allegorizing, because I think in many cases, and I think of Lyotard particularly now, because he allegorizes the Jew in ways that not of necessity evacuate all of the specificity of Jewishness. But I am certainly not opposed to the notion of not generalizing, but diffusing, the notion of a textual existence: for example, the idea of a textual homeland. Part of the reason that I am very cautious about it is that, to the extent that we identify Jewishness with the textual homeland, it is to offer a very elitist and a very masculine notion of what Jewishness is. And I think another part of the reason why I am hesitating is that I am more used to thinking why do I valorize it at all than to thinking about why don’t I generalize it further. So I am thinking about this anew. But one thing that I would have to think very hard that makes it interesting is that you are doing it in the context of otherness. There is an 189
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old story, I think it is in a collection of Yiddish stories called Royte Pomeranzen. A guy from a shtetl goes to America and he does very well. He makes a lot of money. And 20 years later, in the 1930s, he’s so rich that he decides to take a trip back to Europe to see the old town. So he takes the ship, he gets off the ship, he gets on the train, and off the train, he hires the Balegule [coachman] to take him 15 miles to his town, and he talks to him and he says, “You know, I have been away for a long time. How many Jews are there in town?” The carter says, “About four thousand”. And he says, “How many goyim [gentiles]?” “Two thousand”. And the coachman starts interviewing him: “You’re from New York city. In your city how many Jews are there?” “About a million”. “And how many goyim?” “Six million goyim!” There is a kind of ethnocentrism that is part of the technique of Jewishness, and it can be very ugly. I think it is not so much about should or should not. This is also part of the problem with a generalization or even diffusion: it means that people are going to want to know what it is and how you do it. And they are going to want an Idiot’s Guide to Jewishness. And the problem with it is so complicated. It is so sophisticated that I can’t simplify it. Part of it is that it is all of these things that we do. Part of it is about not just reducing to essences or what is more useful of thinking about a generalization per se… Take for example an issue in the Talmud the rabbis are talking about: if you see your neighbor’s cow, [ רעךyour neighbor] means a Jew, no question. You see, it’s not just the 19th century chauvinism that you have to return it to the Jew. But if the cow is of a goy [gentile] you can keep it. There is clearly ethnocentrism there. But it is examined. And they tell stories about it and they have to justify it. And it is problematic. IGZ: Would you agree that the universalization of some of the central ideas of Judaism should overcome this aspect of Judaism towards living Diasporically in face of the presence of the absence of the truth, the absolute or the promised land? JB: Yes. And that is why I said that for me the possibility of doing it, the value of doing it, has to do with a sense of my being responsible for the Jew that I make of myself. Now you came at me and said, “How can you do that if things are so contingent?” IGZ: If they are totally contingent. JB: The best answer I have is: we have to act as if they are not, as if there is a projector that I am grasping and making work. A wonderful book by Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons where he just really breaks down, and shows how artificial is, the notion that I was a child, I was that child, this happened to me when I was a child. Analytic philosophy cannot break that apart in a number of ways. But we cannot stop acting as if, and I do not think it is entirely necessary, but [better] the more we are aware that we’re doing that, that we’re acting as if, and that we’re creating our world in a world which ultimately does resist that. When I say “transcend”, the horizon that I am proposing is the limits of our collective species for its existence, and we bump up against that limit when we are so active on our life world to make it capable of supporting us. It is like in the movie The Truman Show: if he gets to the end he goes through, and there is a real world outside. What we’re doing is we’re reaching that painted horizon and when we burst through it 190
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we’re going to find out that it’s just a bubble, and it’s going to collapse on us, there’s nothing… IGZ: What would be the mission, the commitment or the agenda of a Diasporic counter-education today in face of this situatedness of the human? JB: In a crude sense—which is the best answer I can give for now, to provide young people with a sufficient sense of the tremendous excitement of what it has meant to be human; either in general or in specific ways. Specifically in the Jewish way, but understand that that it is also a way of being human, that they understand first of all that the greatest thing that we can do is to make it possible, to keep it going. And secondly, that it is enough and more than enough to make their own lives worthwhile and to be able to bear and accept and ultimately valorize their own mortality, that there is so much of a heritage of human consciousness and creativity that it can be explored for much more than one lifetime.
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Cities, and particularly mega-cities like London or Barcelona, are nowadays dustbins into which problems produced by globalization are dumped. They are also laboratories in which the art of living with those problems (though not of resolving them) is experimented with, put to the test, and (hopefully, hopefully…) developed. Most seminal impacts of globalization (above all, the divorce of power from politics, and the shifting of functions once undertaken by political authorities sideways, to the markets, and downward, to individual life-politics) have been by now thoroughly investigated and described in great detail. I will confine myself therefore to one aspect of the globalization process—too seldom considered in connection with the paradigmatic change in the study and theory of culture: namely, the changing patterns of global migration. There were three different phases in the history of modern-era migration. The first wave of migration followed the logic of the tri-partite syndrome: territoriality of sovereignty, ‘rooted’ identity, gardening posture (subsequently referred to, for the sake of brevity, as TRG). That was the emigration from the ‘modernized’ centre (read: the site of order-building and economic-progress—the two main industries turning out, and off, the growing numbers of ‘wasted humans’), partly exportation and partly eviction of up to 60 million people, a huge amount by nineteenth century standards, to ‘empty lands’ (read: lands whose native population could be struck off the ‘modernized’ calculations; be literally uncounted and unaccounted for, presumed either non-existent or irrelevant). Native residues still alive after massive slaughters and massive epidemics, have been proclaimed by the settlers the objects of ‘white man’s civilizing mission’. The second wave of migration could be best modeled as an ‘Empire emigrates back’ case. With dismantling of colonial empires, a number of indigenous people in various stages of their ‘cultural advancement’ followed their colonial superiors to the metropolis. Upon arrival, they were cast in the only worldview-strategic mould available: one constructed and practiced earlier in the nation-building era to deal with the categories earmarked for ‘assimilation’—a process aimed at the annihilation of cultural difference, casting the ‘minorities’ at the receiving end of crusades, Kulturkämpfe and proselytizing missions (currently renamed, in the name of ‘political correctness’, as ‘citizenship education’ aimed at ‘integration’). This story is not yet finished: time and again, its echoes reverberate in the declarations of intent of the politicians who notoriously tend to follow the habits of Minerva’s Owl known to spread its wings by the end of the day. As the first phase of migration, the [ 193 ]
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drama of the ‘empire migrating back’ is tried, though in vain, to be squeezed into the frame of the now outdated TRG syndrome. The third wave of modern migration, now in full force and still gathering momentum, leads into the age of diasporas: a world-wide archipelago of ethnic/ religious/ linguistic settlements—oblivious to the trails blazed and paved by the imperialist-colonial episode and following instead the globalization-induced logic of the planetary redistribution of life resources. Diasporas are scattered, diffused, extend over many nominally sovereign territories, ignore territorial claims to the supremacy of local demands and obligation, are locked in the double (or multiple) bind of ‘dual (or multiple) nationality’ and dual (or multiple) loyalty. The presentday migration differs from the two previous phases by moving both ways (virtually all countries, including Britain, are nowadays both ‘immigrant’ or ‘emigrant’), and privileging no routes (routes are no longer determined by the imperial/colonial links of the past). It differs also in exploding the old TRG syndrome and replacing it with a EAH one (extraterritoriality, ‘anchors’ displacing the ‘roots’ as primary tools of identification, hunting strategy). The new migration casts a question mark upon the bond between identity and citizenship, individual and place, neighborhood and belonging. Jonathan Rutherford, acute and insightful observer of the fast changing frames of human togetherness, notes that the residents of the London street on which he lives form a neighborhood of different communities, some with networks extending only to the next street, others which stretch across the world. It is a neighborhood of porous boundaries in which it is difficult to identify who belongs and who is an outsider. What is it we belong to in this locality? What is it that each of us calls home and, when we think back and remember how we arrived here, what stories do we share? Living like the rest of us (or most of that rest) in a diaspora (how far stretching, and in what direction(s)?) among diasporas (how far stretching and in what direction(s)?) has for the first time forced on the agenda the issue of ‘art of living with a difference’— which may appear on the agenda only once the difference is no longer seen as a merely temporary irritant, and so unlike in the past urgently requiring arts, skills, teaching and learning. The idea of ‘human rights’, promoted in the EAH setting to replace/complement the TRG institution of territorially determined citizenship, translates today as the ‘right to remain different’. By fits and starts, that new rendition of the human-rights idea sediments, at best, tolerance; it has as yet to start in earnest to sediment solidarity. And it is a moot question whether it is fit to conceive group solidarity in any other form than that of the fickle and fray, predominantly virtual ‘networks’, galvanized and continually re-modeled by the interplay of individual connecting and disconnecting, making calls and declining to reply them. The new rendition of the human-rights idea disassembles hierarchies and tears apart the imagery of upward (‘progressive’) ‘cultural evolution’. Forms of life float, meet, clash, crash, catch hold of each other, merge and hive off with (to paraphrase
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Jonathan Rutherford, After Identity, Laurence & Wishart 2007, pp. 59–60.
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Georg Simmel) equal specific gravity. Steady and solid hierarchies and evolutionary lines are replaced with interminable and endemically inconclusive battles of recognition; at the utmost, with eminently re-negotiable pecking orders. Imitating Archimedes, reputed to insist (probably with a kind of desperation which only an utter nebulousness of the project might cause) that he would turn the world upside down if only given a solid enough support for the lever, we may say that we would be able to tell who is to assimilate to whom, whose dissimilarity/idiosyncrasy is destined for a chop and whose is to emerge on top, if we only were given a hierarchy of cultures. Well, we are not given it, and are unlikely to be given it soon. Culture in the Diasporic Setting We may say that culture is in its liquid-modern phase made to the measure of (willingly pursued, or endured as obligatory) individual freedom of choice. And that it is meant to service such freedom. And that it is meant to see to it that the choice remains unavoidable: a life necessity, and a duty. And that responsibility, the inalienable companion of free choice, stays where liquid-modern condition forced it: on the shoulders of the individual, now appointed the sole manager of ‘life politics’. Today’s culture consists of offerings, not norms. As already noted by Pierre Bourdieu, culture lives by seduction, not normative regulation; PR, not policing; creating new needs/desires/wants, not coercion. This society of ours is a society of consumers, and just as the rest of the world as-seen-and-lived by consumers, culture turns into a warehouse of meant-for-consumption products—each vying for the shifting/drifting attention of prospective consumers in the hope to attract it and hold it for a bit longer than a fleeting moment. Abandoning stiff standards, indulging indiscrimination, serving all tastes while privileging none, encouraging fitfulness and ‘flexibility’ (politically correct name of spinelessness) and romanticizing unsteadiness and inconsistency is therefore the ‘right’ (the only reasonable?) strategy to follow; fastidiousness, raising brows, stiffening upper lips are not recommended. The TV reviewer/critic of a pattern-and-style setting daily praised the New Year’s Eve 2007/8 broadcast for promising ‘to provide an array of musical entertainment guaranteed to sate everyone’s appetite’. ‘The good thing’ about it, he explained, ‘is that its universal appeal means you can dip in and out of the show depending on your preferences’. A commendable and indeed a seemly quality in a society in which networks replace structures, whereas the attachment/detachment game and an unending procession of connections and disconnections replace ‘determining’ and ‘fixing’. The current phase of the graduated transformation of the idea of ‘culture’ from its original Enlightenment-inspired form to its liquid-modern reincarnation is prompted and operated by the same forces that promote emancipation of the markets from
See Philip French, ‘A Hootenanny New Year to All’, The Observer Television 30 December 2007–5 January 2008, p.6.
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the remaining constraints of non-economic nature—the social, political, and ethical constraints among them. In pursuing its own emancipation, liquid-modern consumerfocused economy relies on the excess of offers, their accelerated ageing, and quick dissipation of their seductive power—which, by the way, makes it an economy of profligacy and waste. Since there is no knowing in advance which of the offers may prove tempting enough to stimulate consuming desire, the only way to find out leads through trials and costly errors. Continuous supply of new offers, and a constantly growing volume of goods on offer, are also necessary to keep circulation of goods rapid and the desire to replace them with ‘new and improved’ goods constantly refreshed—as well as to prevent the consumer dissatisfaction with individual products from condensing into the general disaffection with consumerist mode of life as such. Culture is turning now into one of the departments in the ‘all you need and might dream off’ department store in which the world inhabited by consumers has turned. Like in other departments of that store, the shelves are tightly packed with daily restocked commodities, while the counters are adorned with the commercials of latest offers destined to disappear soon together with the attractions they advertise. Commodities and commercials alike are calculated to arouse desires and trigger wishes (as George Steiner famously put it—‘for maximum impact and instant obsolescence’). Their merchants and copywriters count on the wedding of the seductive power of offers with the ingrained ‘oneupmanship’ and ‘getting an edge’ urges of their prospective customers. Liquid-modern culture, unlike the culture of the nation-building era, has no ‘people’ to ‘cultivate’. It has instead the clients to seduce. And unlike its ‘solid modern’ predecessor, it no longer wishes to work itself, eventually but the sooner the better, out of job. Its job is now to render its own survival permanent—through temporalizing all aspects of life of its former wards, now reborn as its clients. The solid-modern policy of dealing with difference, the policy of assimilation to the dominant culture and stripping the strangers of other strangehood, is no longer feasible, even if considered by some as desirable. But neither the old strategies of resisting the interaction and merger of cultures is likely to be effective, even if considered preferable for people fond of strict separation and isolation of ‘communities of belonging’ (more precisely, communities-of-belonging-by-birth). ‘Belonging’, as Jean-Claude Kaufmann suggests, is today ‘used primarily as a resource of the ego’. He warns against thinking of ‘collectivities of belonging’ as necessarily ‘integrating communities’. They are better conceived of, he suggests, as a necessary accompaniment of the progress of individualization; we may say—as a series of stations or road inns marking the trajectory of the self-forming and selfreforming ego. François de Singly rightly suggest that in theorizing the present-day identities the metaphors of ‘roots’ and ‘uprooting’ (or, let me add, the related trope of ‘disembedding’), all implying one-off nature of the individual’s emancipation from
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See Jean-Claude Kaufmann, L’invention de soi: Une théorie d’identité, Hachette 2004, p.214. Les uns avec les autres, p.108.
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the tutelage of the community of birth as well as the finality and irrevocability of the act, are better abandoned and replaced by the tropes of casting and drawing of anchors. Indeed, unlike in the case of ‘uprooting’ and ‘disembedding’, there is nothing irrevocable, let alone ultimate, in drawing the anchor. If having been torn out of the soil in which they grew, roots are likely to desiccate and die out so that their (very unlikely) reviving will be verging on miraculous—anchors are drawn hoping to be safely cast again elsewhere; and they can be cast with similar ease at many different and distant ports of calling. Besides, the roots design and determine in advance the shape which the plants growing out of them will assume, while excluding the possibility of any other shape; but anchors are only auxiliary facilities of the mobile vessel that do not define the ship’s qualities and resourcefulness. The time-stretches separating the casting of anchor from drawing it again are but episodes in the ship’s trajectory. The choice of haven in which the anchor will be cast next is most probably determined by the kind of load which the ship is currently carrying; a haven good for one kind of cargo may be entirely inappropriate for another. All in all, the metaphor of anchors captures what the metaphor of ‘uprooting’ misses or keeps silent about: the intertwining of continuity and discontinuity in the history of all or at least a growing number of contemporary identities. Just like ships anchoring successively or intermittently in various ports of call, so the selves in the ‘communities of reference’ to which they seek admission during their life-long search for recognition and confirmation have their credentials checked and approved at every successive stop; each ‘community of reference’ sets its own requirements for the kind of papers to be submitted. The ship’s record and/or the captain’s log are more often than not among the documents on which the approval depends, and with every next stop, the past (constantly swelled by the records of preceding stops) is re-examined and re-valued. An Insight Into Possible Future Just to make it somewhat clearer what the postulated re-shaping of our commonly used cognitive frames would need to involve and what obstacles it is likely to face on its way, let’s have a closer look at the recent intellectual adventure of a group of researchers from the Zoological Society of London who went to Panama to investigate social life of local wasps. The group was equipped with the cutting-edge technology, which it used over 6000 hours to track and monitor the movements of 422 wasps coming from 33 nests. What the researchers found out, has turned upside down their and ours centuries-old stereotypes of the social insect’s habits. Indeed, ever since the concept of ‘social insects’ (embracing bees, termites, ants and wasps) was coined and popularized, a firm and hardly ever questioned belief was
As reported on 25 January 2007 by Richard Jones, in ‘Why insects get such a buzz out of socializing’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1997821,00.htm/
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shared by the learned zoologists and the lay public: that the ‘sociability’ of insects is confined to the nest to which they belong—the place in which they have been hatched and to which they return every day of their life, bringing the spoils of their foraging ventures to be shared with the rest of the hive’s natives. The possibility that some working bees or wasps would cross the boundaries between nests, abandon the hive of birth and join another one, a hive of choice, was seen (if it was ever contemplated) as an incongruous idea. It was axiomatically assumed instead that the ‘natives’, the born and therefore ‘legitimate’ members of the nest, would promptly chase the maverick newcomers away and destroy them in case they refuse to run. As all axioms, that belief was neither questioned nor tested. The thought of tracing the traffic between nests or hives did not occur either to ordinary folks or to the learned experts. For the scholars, the assumption that the socializing instincts are limited to the kith and kin, in other words to the community of birth and therefore of belonging, ‘stood to reason’. For the ordinary folks, ‘it made sense’. Admittedly, the technical means to answer the question of inter-nest migration (electronic tagging of individual wasps) were not available—but they were not sought either since the question as such was not considered worthy of being asked. Instead, a lot of research energy and funds were dedicated to the question how social insects spot a stranger in their midst: do they distinguish it by sight? By sound? By smell? By subtle nuances of conduct? The intriguing question was how the insects manage what we, the humans, with all our smart and sophisticated technology, only half succeed to achieve. That is, how they succeed in keeping the borders of ‘community’ watertight and to protect the separation of ‘natives’ from ‘aliens’—that is, of ‘us’ from ‘them’. What passes for ‘reason’, as much as what is taken to make ‘good sense’, tends however to change over time. It changes together with the human condition and with the challenges it posits. It tends to be praxeomorphic. What is seen as ‘standing to reason’ or ‘making sense’ takes shape from the realities ‘out there’ seen through the prism of human practices—of what humans currently do, know how to do, are trained, groomed and inclined to be doing. Scholarly agendas are derivatives of mundane human practices. Problems encountered in daily human cohabitation decide the ‘topical relevance’ of issues and suggests the hypotheses which the research projects seek subsequently to confirm or disprove. If no effort is made to test the received popular wisdom, it is not as much for the lack of research tools, as for the fact that common sense of the time does not suggest that such a test is needed. The research escapade of the London Zoological Society team hints, if such a hint is needed, that this may not be a case any longer. Something happened to common human experience that cast doubt on the ‘naturalness’ and universality of the ‘inborn’ limitations to sociality… Contrary to everything known (or rather believed to be known) for centuries, the London team found in Panama an impressive majority, 56% of ‘working wasps’, to change their nests in their life time; and not just move to other nests as temporary, unwelcome, discriminated against and marginalized visitors, sometimes actively persecuted but always suspected and resented—but as full and ‘rightful’ (one is almost tempted to say ‘ID card carrying’) members of the adoptive ‘community’, collecting 198
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food and like them feeding and grooming the native brood just like the ‘native’ workers did. The inevitable conclusion was that the nests they researched were as a rule ‘mixed populations’, inside which the native-born and the immigrant wasps lived and worked cheek-to-cheek and shoulder-to-shoulder—becoming, at least for the human outsiders, indistinguishable from each other except with the help of electronic tags… What the news brought from Panama reveal is above anything else the astonishing reversal of perspective: beliefs that not so long ago were imagined to be reflections of the ‘state of nature’, have been revealed now, retrospectively, to have been but a projection upon the insects of the scholars’ own human, all-too-human preoccupations and practices (though the kind of practices that are now dwindling and receding into past). Once the somewhat younger generation of scholars brought to the forest of Panama their own (and ours own) experience of the emergent life practices acquired and absorbed in the now cosmopolitan London, that ‘multicultured’ home of interlocked diasporas, they have duly ‘discovered’ the fluidity of membership and perpetual mixing of populations to be the norm also among social insects: and a norm apparently implemented in ‘natural’ ways, with no help of royal commissions, hastily introduced bills of law, high courts and asylum-seekers’ camps… In this case, like in so many others, the praxeomorphic nature of human perception prompted them to find ‘out there, in the world’ what they have learned to do and are doing ‘here, at home’, and what we all carry in our heads or in our subconscious as an image of ‘how things truly are’… How could that be?!—asked the Londoners baffled by what they found, hardly believing at first the facts so different from what their teachers told them to expect. When they sought a convincing explanation of the wasps’ of Panama bizarre ways and means, they found it expectedly in the warehouse of tested and familiar notions. Wishing to accommodate the unfamiliar in the familiar worldview, they decided that the newcomers allowed to settle ‘could not be truly aliens’—strangers no doubt they were, but not as strange as the other, genuine strangers: ‘they joined the nests of closely related wasps—cousins, maybe…’ Such explanation put anxiety to rest: after all, the right of ‘close relatives’ to visit and to settle in the family home was always a birthright. But how do you know that the alien wasps were ‘close relatives’ of the native? Well, they must have been, mustn’t they, otherwise the insiders would’ve forced them to leave or killed them on the spot—QED. What the London researchers clearly forgot or failed to mention, is that it took a century or more of hard work, sometimes sword-brandishing and some other times brain-washing, to convince the Prussians, the Bavarians, Badenians, Würtenbergians or Saxons (just as it takes now to convince the ‘Ossis’ and ‘Wessis’ or Calabrians and Lombardians…) that they were all close relatives of each other, cousins or even brothers, descendants of the same ancient German stock animated by the same German spirit, and that for those reasons they should behave like close relatives do: be hospitable to each other and cooperate in protecting and increasing shared welfare… Or that on the way to the modern centralized nation-state and to the identification of nationhood with citizenship, the revolutionary France had to include the slogan of fraternité in its call addressed to all sorts of ‘locals’ now appointed les 199
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citoyens—to people who seldom looked (let alone moved) heretofore beyond the frontiers of Languedoc, Poitou, Limousin, Burgundy, Brittany, Guyenne or FrancheComte… Fraternité, brotherhood: all Frenchmen are brothers, so please behave as brothers do, love each other, help each other, make the whole of France your common home, and the land of France your shared homeland… Or that since the time of French Revolution all movements bent on proselytizing, recruiting, expanding and integrating the populations of heretofore separate and mutually suspicious kingdoms and princedoms, have the habit of addressing their current and prospective converts as ‘brothers and sisters’… But to cut a long story short: the difference between ‘cognitive maps’ carried in their heads by the older generations of entomologists, and that acquired/adopted by the youngest, reflects the passage from the ‘nation-building’ stage in the history of modern states to the ‘multicultural’ phase in their history; more generally, from ‘solid’ modernity, bent on entrenching and fortifying the principle of territorial, exclusive and indivisible sovereignty, and on surrounding the sovereign territories with impermeable borders—to ‘liquid’ modernity, with its fuzzy and eminently permeable borderlines, the unstoppable (even if bewailed, resented and resisted) devaluation of spatial distances and the defensive capacity of the territory, and an intense human traffic across all and any frontiers. Indeed, human traffic… It goes both ways, frontiers are crossed from both sides. Britain, for instance, is today a country of immigration (even if the successive home secretaries go out of their way to be seen as trying hard to erect new barriers and stem the influx of foreigners); but also, according to the latest calculations, almost million and a half born Britons are currently settled in Australia, almost a million in Spain, several hundred thousand in Nigeria, even a dozen in the North Korea. The same applies to France, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Spain; in one measure or another, it applies to any bordered-off territory of the planet except a few remaining totalitarian enclaves that still deploy the anachronistic Panopticon-style techniques designed more to hold the inmates (state subjects) inside the walls (state borders) than to keep the aliens outside. Population of almost every country is nowadays a collection of diasporas. Population of almost every sizeable city is nowadays an aggregate of ethnic, religious, lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ is a hotly contested issue; while the right to draw that line, to keep it intact and make it unassailable, is the prime stake in the skirmishes for influence and battles for recognition that follow. Most of the states have passed by now and left behind their nation-building stage and so are no longer interested in ‘assimilating’ the incoming strangers (that is, forcing them to shake off and forfeit their separate identities and to ‘dissolve’ in the uniform mass of ‘the natives’); and so the settings of contemporary lives and the yarn of which life experience is woven are likely to remain protean, variegated and kaleidoscopic for a long time to come. For all that matters and all we know, they may keep as well changing forever. We are all now, or fast become, like the wasps of Panama. But more exactly, it has been by chance the lot of the wasps of Panama to ‘make history’, as the first 200
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‘social entity’ to which the emergent, precocious and waiting-to-be-recognized-andendorsed cognitive frame was applied; a frame derived from our novel experience of increasingly (and probably permanently) variegated setting of human cohabitation, the fuzziness of the line separating the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’, and the daily practice of mixing and elbow-rubbing with difference. What had been predicted more than two centuries ago by Immanuel Kant (that designing, elaborating and putting in operation rules of mutual hospitality must at some point become a necessity for the human species since we all inhabit the surface of a spherical planet) now turns into reality. Or it becomes rather the most seminal challenge of our time, one that calls for the most urgent and most thoroughly considered response. The composition of the over two hundred ‘sovereign units’ on the political map of the planet is increasingly reminiscent of that of the thirty-three wasps’ nests investigated by the research expedition of the London Zoological Society. When trying to make sense of the present state of our planetary human cohabitation, we could do worse than borrowing the models and the categories that the researchers in Panama were obliged to deploy in order to make sense of their findings. Indeed, none of the nests they explored had the means to keep their borders watertight, and each had to accept the perpetual exchange of its population. On the other hand, each seemed to manage quite well under the circumstances: to absorb the newcomers without friction and suffer no malfunction because of the departure of some older residents. Furthermore, there was nothing in sight remotely reminiscent of an ‘insect centre’ able to regulate the insect traffic—or, for that matter, anything else amenable to regulating. Each nest had to cope with the life-tasks more or less on its own, though the high rate of ‘personnel turnover’ probably assured that the know-how gained by any one nest could and did travel freely and contributed to the survival success of all other nests. Moreover, London researchers seem, firstly, not to have found much evidence of inter-nest wars. Secondly, they found that the inter-nest flow of ‘cadres’ appeared to compensate for the locally produced excesses or deficits of nest populations. Thirdly, they realized that the coordination and indirect cooperation among social insects of Panama have been, it seems, sustained without either coercion or propaganda; without commanding officers and headquarters in sight; indeed, without centre… And whether we admit it or not, and whether we relish it or fear—we, the humans scattered among more than two hundred ‘sovereign units’ known under the name of ‘the states’, also manage for some time now to live without a centre—even if the absence of a clear, all-powerful, unquestionably authoritative and uncontested global centre is a constant temptations for the mighty and the arrogant to fill that void or at least to try to fill it. ‘Centrality’ of the ‘centre’ has been decomposed and the link between previously intimately connected and coordinated spheres of authority has been (perhaps irreparably) broken. Local condensations of economic, military, intellectual or artistic powers and influences are no longer (if they ever were) coinciding. Maps of the world on which colors of political entities mark their relative share and importance in—respectively—global industry, trade, investment, military power, 201
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scientific achievements or artistic creation, would not overlap. And to make such maps serviceable for any length of time, the paints we use would need be applied sparingly and easy to wash off, since the current rank of any land in the pecking order of influence and impact is by no means assured to last. And so in our desperate effort to grasp the dynamics of planetary affairs, the old and hard dying habit of organizing the mental image of global power balance with the help of such conceptual tools as centre and periphery, hierarchy, superiority and inferiority, looks ever more as a handicap rather than, as before, an asset; as blinders rather than search lights. The tools developed and applied in the research of Panama wasps may well prove much more suitable for this task. Teacher-student Relation in the Liquid-Modern Setting On the origins of one of his remarkable short stories, ‘Averroes’ Search’, the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges said that in it he has tried “to narrate the process of failure”, of “defeat”—like those of a theologian seeking the final proof of God’s existence, an alchemist seeking philosophical stone, a technology buff seeking a perpetuum mobile or a mathematicians seeking the way to square the circle… But then he decided that “a more poetic case” would be one “of a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to others, but is to him”. That was the case of Averroes, the great Muslim philosopher, who set to translate Aristotle’s Poetics, but “bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy”. Indeed, “without ever having suspected what theatre is”, Averroes would have to fail when trying “to imagine what a play is”. As a topic for a wonderful story told by great writer, the case finally selected by Borges proves indeed “more poetic”. But looked from the less inspired, mundane and humdrum sociological perspective, it also looks more prosaic. Only few intrepid souls try to construct a perpetuum mobile or find a philosophical stone; but trying in vain to understand what others have no difficulty of understanding is an experience we all know only too well from autopsy, and learn daily anew. Now, in the 21st century, more than our ancestors did in the times past… Look at just one example: communicating with your children if you are a parent. Or with your parents, if you still can… Mutual incomprehension between generations, “old” and “young”, and the suspicion that follows it, have a long history. One can easily trace symptoms of suspicion in quite ancient times. But inter-generational suspicion has become much more salient in the modern era, marked by the permanent, rapid and profound changes of life conditions. The radical acceleration of the pace of change characteristic of modern times allowed the fact of ‘things changing’ and ‘being no longer as they used to be’ to be noted in the course of a single human life: the fact that implied an association (or even a causal link) between the changes in human condition and the departure and arrival of generations. Since the beginning of modernity and through its duration, age cohorts entering the world at different stages of continuous transformation tend to differ sharply in the 202
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evaluation of life conditions they share. Children as a rule enter a world drastically different from the one which their parents were trained and learned to take as a standard of ‘normality’; and they will never visit that other, now vanished world of their parents’ youth. What by some age-cohorts may be seen as ‘natural’, as ‘the way things are’, ‘the way things are normally done’ or ‘ought be done’, can be viewed by other as an aberration: as a departure from the norm, bizarre and perhaps also illegitimate and unreasonable state of affairs, unfair and abominable. What to some age cohorts may seem a comfortable and cozy condition, allowing to deploy the learned and mastered skills and routines, might appear odd and off-putting to some others; whereas some people might feel like fish in the water in situations which made others feel ill at ease, baffled and at a loss. The differences of perception have by now become so multidimensional that unlike in the pre-modern times the younger people no longer are cast by the older generations as ‘miniature adults’ or ‘would be adults’—not as the ‘beings-not-yetfully-mature-but-bound-to-mature’ (‘mature into being like us’). The youngsters are not hoped or supposed to be ‘on the way to becoming adult like us’, but viewed as a rather different kind of people, bound to remain different ‘from us’ throughout their lives. The differences between ‘us’ (the older) and ‘them’ (the younger) no longer feel as temporary irritants destined to dissolve and evaporate as the youngsters (inevitably) wise up to realities of life. In the result, the older and the younger age cohorts tend to eye each other with a mixture of miscomprehension and misapprehension. The older would fear that the newcomers to the world are about to spoil and destroy that cozy, comfortable, decent ‘normality’ which they, their elders, have laboriously build and preserved with loving care; the younger, on the contrary, would feel an acute urge to put right what the ageing veterans have botched and made a mess of. Both would be unsatisfied (or at least not-fully-satisfied) with the current state of affairs and the direction in which their world seems to be moving—and blame the other side for their discomfort. In two consecutive issues of a widely respected British weekly two jarringly different charges were made public: a columnist accused ‘the young people’ to be ‘bovine, lazy-arsed, chlamydia stuffed and good for nothing’, to which a reader angrily responded that the allegedly slothful and uncaring youngsters are in fact ‘academically high-achieving’ and ‘concerned about the mess that adults have created’. Here, as in uncountable other similar disagreements, the difference was clearly between evaluations and subjectively-coloured viewpoints. In cases like this, the resulting controversy can hardly be ‘objectively’ resolved. Ann-Sophie, a 20–years old student of the Copenhagen Business School, said in response to the questions set by Flemming Wisler: ‘I don’t want my life to control me too much. I don’t want to sacrifice everything to my career…The most important thing is to be comfortable…Nobody wants to be stuck in the same job for long’. In other words: keep your options wide open. Don’t swear loyalty of a ‘till death do us
See The Guardian Weekend of 4 and 11 August 2007. See ‘The Thoughtful’, in fo, January 2008, p.11.
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part’ kind—to anything or anybody. The world is full of wondrous, seductive and promising chances; it would be a folly to miss any of them by tying your feet and hands with irrevocable commitments… No wonder that on the list of basic life skills which the young are prompted and eager to master, surfing towers high above the increasingly old-fashioned ‘sounding’ and ‘fathoming’. As Katie Baldo, guidance counselor of the Cooperstown Middle School in the New York state has noted, ‘teens are missing some major social cues because they are too engrossed in their iPods, cell phones, or video games. I see it all the time in the halls when they can’t voice a hello or make eye contact’. Making an eye contact and acknowledging the physical proximity of another human spells waste: dedication of precious and scarce time to ‘going in depth’—a decision that would interrupt or pre-empt surfing of so many other inviting surfaces. In the life of continuous emergency, virtual relations beat easily the ‘real stuff’. The off-line world prompts young men and women to be constantly on the move; such pressures would be however to no avail were it not for the electronically based capacity of multiplying inter-individual encounters by making them brief, shallow and disposable. Virtual relations are equipped with ‘delete’ and ‘spam’ keys that protect against cumbersome (above all, time-consuming) consequences of in-depth interactions. One can’t help recalling Chance (a character played by Peter Sellers in 1979 Hal Ashby’s film Being there), who having emerged into the busy town street from his protracted tête à tête with the world-as-seen-on-TV, tries in vain to remove a discomforting bevy of nuns from his vision with the help of his hand-held pilot… For the young, the main attraction of the virtual world derives from the absence of contradictions and cross-purposes that haunt the off-line life. Unlike its offline alternative, the on-line world renders the infinite multiplication of contacts conceivable—both plausible and feasible. It does it through the weakening of bonds—in a stark opposition to its off-line counterpart, known to find its bearings in the continuous effort to strengthen the bonds by severely limiting the number of contacts while deepening each one of them. This is a genuine advantage to men and women whom a thought that a step taken might (just might) have been a mistake, and that it might (just might) be too late to cut the losses it caused would never stop tormenting. Hence the resentment towards everything ‘long term’—be it planning of one’s life, or commitments to other living beings Evidently appealing to the young generation’s values, a recent commercial announced the arrival of a new mascara that ‘vows to stay pretty for 24 hours’, and commented: ‘Talk about a committed relationship. One stroke and these pretty lashes last through rain, sweat, humidity, tears. Yet the formula removes easily with warm water’: 24 hours feels as already a ‘committed relationship’, but even such ‘commitment’ won’t be an attractive choice if not for its traces being easy to remove… Whatever choice will eventually be made, shall be reminiscent of Max Weber’s, one of the founders of modern sociology, ‘light cloak’ which one could shake off one’s shoulder at will and without notice, rather than of Max Weber’s ‘steel casing’,
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offering effective and lasting protection against turbulence but also cramping the movements of the protected and severely tapering the space of free will. What matters most for the young is the retention of the ability to re-shape ‘identity’ and the ‘network’ whenever a need to reshape arrives or is suspected to have arrived. The ancestors’ worry about identification is increasingly elbowed out by the worry of re-identification. Identities must be disposable; an unsatisfying or not-sufficientlysatisfying identity, or an identity betraying its advanced age, needs to be easy to abandon; perhaps bio-degradability would be the ideal attribute of the identity most strongly desired. Interactive capacity of the Internet is made to the measure of this new need. It is the quantity of connections rather than their quality that makes the difference between chances of success or failure. It helps to stay au courant of the latest talk of the town—the hits currently most listened to, the latest T-shirt designs, the most recent and most hotly talked about parties, festivals, celebrity events. Simultaneously, it helps updating the contents and redistribute the emphases in the portrayal of one’s self; it also helps to efface promptly the traces of the past, now shamefully outdated contents and emphases. All in all, it greatly facilitates, prompts and even necessitates the perpetual labours of re-invention—to the extent unachievable in the off-line life. This is arguably one of the most important reason for the time spent by the ‘electronic generation’ in the virtual universe: time steadily growing at the expense of the time lived in the ‘real world’. The referents of main concepts known to frame and map the Lebenswelt, the lived and lived-through, the personally experienced world of the young, are gradually, yet steadily transplanted from the off-line to the online world. Concepts like ‘contacts’, ‘dates’, ‘meeting’, ‘communicating’, ‘community’ or ‘friendship’—all referring to inter-personal relations and social bonds—are most prominent among them. One of the foremost effects of the new location of referents is the perception of current social bonds and commitments as momentary snapshots in the on-going process of renegotiation, rather than as steady states bound to last indefinitely. But let me note that ‘momentary snapshot’ is not a wholly felicitous metaphor: though ‘momentary’, snapshots may still imply more durability than the electronically mediated bonds and commitments possess. The word ‘snapshots’ belongs to the vocabulary of photographic prints and photographic paper, which can accept but one image—whereas in the case of electronic ties effacing and re-writing or overwriting, inconceivable in the case of celluloid negatives and photographic papers, are most important and most resorted to options; indeed, the only indelible attribute of electronically-mediated ties… But let’s also remember that the bulk of the presently young generation never experienced real hardship, long and prospect-less economic depression and mass unemployment. They were born and grew in the world in which there could shelter under socially produced and serviced water—and wind-proof umbrella that seemed to be there forever to protect them against inclement whether, cold rains and freezing winds—and in a world in which every next morning promised a day sunnier than the last and more lavishly sprinkled with pleasant adventures. When I write these words, 205
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clouds gather however over that world. The happy, sanguine and full of promises condition, which the young came to believe to be the ‘natural’ state of the world, may not last much longer. An economic depression (threatening, as some observers insinuate, to be as deep if not deeper than the crises experienced in their own youth by the parents’ generation) may linger just after the next corner. So it is too early to decide how the ingrained worldviews and attitudes of the present-day young will eventually fit the world to come, and how that world would fit their ingrained expectations.
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Nomadism: Against Methodological Nationalism “Something in the world forces us to think.” Deleuze & Guattari (1994, p. 139)
The subject as multiplicity, process and becoming The theoretical core of a nomadic philosophy of the subject consists of a firm stand against the traditional image of thought and the pedagogical practices that assume a unitary vision of the self. This humanistic subject claims to be structured and ordained along the axis of self-reflexive individualism and scientific rationality, which are indexed on a linear and progressive temporal line. Nomadic subjectivity on the contrary moves beyond identitarian categories and it rests on a process ontology that challenges the traditional equation of subjectivity with rational consciousness and resists the reduction of both to a linear vision of progress. Thus, instead of deference to the authority of the past, we have the fleeting co-presence of multiple time-zones, in a continuum that activates and de-territorializes stable identities. This dynamic vision of the subject enlists the creative resources of the imagination to the task of enacting transformative relations and actions in the present. This ontological non linearity rests on a Spinozist ethics of affirmation and becoming that predicates the positivity of difference. I will return to this later on in the essay. The nomadic vision of the subject as a time continuum and a collective assemblage implies a double commitment, on the one hand to processes of change and on the other to a strong sense of community—of our being in this together. Our co-presence, that is to say the simultaneity of our being in the world together sets the tune for the ethics of our interaction. Our ethical relation requires us to synchronize the perception and anticipation of our shared, common condition. A collectively distributed consciousness emerges from this—i.e.: a transversal form of non-synthetic understanding of the relational bond that connects us. This places the relation at the centre of both the ethics and the epistemic structures and strategies of the subject. This vision of a collectively assembled, externally-related and multi-layered subject that acts in a time-continuum clashes frontally with the established view of the European subject of knowledge. Following the critical premises of poststructuralist critiques of humanism by Foucault (1966), Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980), Derrida (1991 ) and Irigaray (1977), nomadic thought questions the classical vision of the philosophical subject as the quintessential European citizen. ‘Europe’stands in this discussion for a tacit consensus about the self-evidence of the universalizing powers of self-reflexive and self-correcting reason. This flattering rendition of philosophical ‘European-ness’ transforms Europe from a concrete geo[ 207 ]
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political location and a specifically grounded history, into an abstract concept and a normative ideal that can be implemented across space and time, provided the right pre-conditions are met. Europe as the symbol of universal self-consciousness posits itself as the site of origin of reason and self-designates itself as the motor of the world-historical unfolding of the philosophical ratio. This titanic sense of entitlement rests structurally on the claim to universality and also on a hierarchical and dialectical vision of Otherness or difference. A binary logic of self-other opposition is at work in this oppositional model, which results in reducing ‘difference’ to pejoration, disqualification and exclusion. Subjectivity is postulated on the basis of sameness, i.e: as coinciding with the dominant image of thought and representation of the subject. Deleuze and Guattari offer the perfect synthesis of this dominant image of the subject as masculine/ white/heterosexual/speaking a standard language/property-pwning/urbanized. This paradigm equates the subject with rationality, consciousness, moral and cognitive universalism. This vision of the ‘knowing subject’—or the ‘Man’ of humanism— constructs itself as much by what it includes within the circle of his entitlements, as in what it excludes. Otherness is excluded by definition. This makes the others into structural and constitutive elements of the subject, albeit by negation. Throughout Western philosophy, Otherness has been constructed with distressing regularity along the intertwined axes of sexualisation, racialisation and naturalization (Braidotti, 2002; 2006). The others—women or sexual minorities; natives and nonEuropeans and earth or animal others—have been marginalized, excluded, exploited and disposed of accordingly. The epistemic and world-historical violence engendered by the claim to universalism and by the oppositional view of consciousness, lies at the heart of methodological nationalism or conceptual euro-centrism. On Accountability Nomadic philosophies have targeted this lethal oppositional logic for criticism and have called it to accountability. So have radical epistemologies such as feminism, environmentalism, postcolonial, race and critical legal theories. They are formulated as a response to concrete world historical events, such as colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust and communist totalitarianism, which exemplify some of the crimes that were committed in the name of Europe’s alleged universal civilizing mission. These historical events are set off against the self-aggrandizing narratives. The juxtaposition highlights new critical and creative modes of addressing subjectivity and ethics, which de-bunk methodological nationalism. Both the critique of a-historical Euro-centrism and the quest for alternative genealogies of thought express a form of ethical and political accountability that requires adequate understandings of one’s specific location, that is to say one’s embedded and embodied perspectives. Michel Foucault’s cartographies of power (1977) provide a conceptual and methodological example of this approach, as does Deleuze’s concept of radical immanence (1995). 208
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The feminist method of the politics of location is also central to this debate, in that it provides both the means to explore and the creative force to experiment with alternative representations of the knowing subject. The politics of location, first developed ( Rich, 1985) as a way of making sense of diversity among women within the category of gender of sexual difference, became the cornerstone of feminist situated epistemologies (Haraway, 1988). In its nomadic variable, it can be extended into a cartographic method of accounting for multiple differences within any subject position (Braidotti, 1994). These degrees of differentiation are explored and rendered as analyses of power-locations and power-relations. This method aims at achieving epistemological and political accountability by unveiling the power locations which one inevitably inhabits as the site of one’s subject-position. A cartography is a theoretically-based and politically-informed reading of the present. As such it responds to my two main requirements: namely, to account for one’s locations in terms both of space (geo-political or ecological dimension) and time (historical and geneological dimension); and to provide alternative figurations or schemes of representation for these locations, in terms of power as restrictive (potestas) but also empowering or affirmative (potentia). I consider this cartographic gesture to be the first methodological move towards a vision of subjectivity as ethically accountable and politically empowering. The practice of accountability (for one’s embodied and embedded locations) as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials is linked to two crucial notions: memory and narratives. They activate the process of bringing into discursive representation, that which by definition escapes self-representation and can only be disclosed by the active intervention of others. Accounts of these ‘politics of locations’ are cartographies of power that go beyond genealogical self-narratives and express a view of subjectivity that is relational and outside-directed. In nomadic philosophy, this vision is expressed through conceptual personae, or figurations. These are ways of situating and framing the subject position and its political and epistemological practices which produce an array of creative counter-images of the subject. Examples are: feminist/womanist/queer/cyborg/diasporic/nomadic/ native—as subject positions. These are figurations for specific geo-political and historical locations. To mistake them for mere metaphors would be to miss the point altogether. Figurations are forms of literal expression that bring into representation that which the system had declared off-limits. There are situated practices that require the awareness of the limitations as well as the specificity of one’s locations. A figuration renders our image of thought in terms of a decentered and multi‑layered vision of the subject as a dynamic and changing entity; as such it can be taken as a dramatisation of processes of becoming. This process assumes that identity takes place in‑between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past ‑ in the spaces that flow and connect such seeming binaries. We live in permanent processes of transition, hybridization and nomadization. And these in‑between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation, precisely because they are zig-zagging, not linear and process-oriented, not concept-driven. Critique 209
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and creation strike a new deal in actualizing the practice of conceptual personae or figuration as the active pursuit of affirmative alternatives to the dominant vision of the subject. In this critical perspective, to stress the situated structure of philosophical discourse—and thus reject universalism—also means to recognize the partial or limited nature of all claims to knowledge. The immediate consequence of this acknowledgment is both ethical and methodological. It requires a specific form of accountability for the production of philosophical ideas. The critique of both universalism and of liberal individualism are fundamental starting points to re-think the inter-connection between the self and society in an accountable manner. To apply this to the issue of methodological nationalism: a new agenda needs to be set, which is no longer that of European or Euro-centric identity, but rather a radical transformation of it, in a process of rupture from Europe’s imperial, fascistic and undemocratic past. If the fundamental question, as Deleuze teaches us, is now about who we are, but rather about what we are capable of becoming, then methodological nationalism must give way of self-criticism and self-transformation on the basis of accountability for our complex history. As Balibar (2001) and Bauman (2004) have argued recently, contemporary European subjects of knowledge must meet the ethical obligation to be accountable for their past history and the long shadow it casts on its present-day politics. The new mission that Europe has to embrace entails the criticism of narrow-minded self-interests, intolerance, and xenophobic rejection of otherness. Symbolic of this closure of the European mind is the fate of migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, who bear the brunt of racism in contemporary Europe. Multiple counter-definitions of cosmopolitan values constitute the site of resistance to this mind-set. This process-oriented vision of the subject is capable of a universalistic reach, though it rejects moral universalism. It expresses a grounded, partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity and relationally. The fact that “we” are in this together results in a renewed claim to community and belonging by singular subjects. This results in a proliferation of locally situated micro-universalist claims, which G. Lloyd called: ‘a collaborative morality’ (Lloyd, 1996, p. 74). One evident and illuminating example of this alternative approach is the brand of situated cosmopolitan neo-humanism that has emerged as a powerful ethical claim in the work of postcolonial and race theorists, as well as in feminist theories. Examples are: Paul Gilroy’s planetary cosmopolitanism (2000); Avtar Brah’s diasporic ethics (1996); Edouard Glissant’s politics of relations (1990); Ernesto Laclau’s microuniversal claims (1995); Homi Bhabha’s ‘subaltern secularism’ (1994); Vandana Shiva’s anti-global neo-humanism (1997); African-American spirituality, as bell hooks (1990) and Cornell West (1994) demonstrate, as well as the rising wave of interest in African humanism or Ubuntu, from Patricia Hill Collins (1991) to Drucilla Cornell (2004). Thus, the anti-humanism of social and cultural critics within a Western poststructuralist perspective can be read alongside the cosmopolitan neo-humanism of contemporary race, post-colonial or non-Western critics. Both these positions, 210
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all other differences notwithstanding, produce inclusive alternatives—locations and figurations—that enlarged and go beyond humanist individualism. Without wishing to flatten out structural differences, nor of drawing easy analogies between them, I want to stress the resonances between their efforts and respective political aims and passions. Western post-humanism on the one hand and non-western neo-humanism on the other transpose hybridity, nomadism, diasporas, creolisation processes into means of re-grounding claims to connections and alliances among different constituencies. They bring strong evidence to support the claim that methodological nationalism and theoretical euro-centrism are of hindrance, rather than assistance, in trying to redefine the cosmopolitan and inter-connected nature of the contemporary subject. This alternative vision of the subject combines critical elements, like the rejection of Euro-universalism, with creative elements, like the re-composition of a new ethical sense of pan-humanity. In both cases the transformative element is of crucial importance. On dis-identifications Transformative projects involve a radical repositioning on the part of the knowing subject, which is neither self-evident, nor free of pain. No process of consciousnessraising ever is. In post-structuralist feminism, this project has also been implemented methodologically through the practice of dis-identification from familiar and hence comforting values and identities (De Lauretis, 1986; Braidotti, 1994). Dis-identification involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and representation, which can also produce fear, sense of insecurity and nostalgia. Change is certainly a painful process, but this does not warrant the politically conservative position that chastises all change as dangerous. The point in stressing the difficulties and pain involved in the quest for transformative processes is rather to raise an awareness of both the complexities involved and the paradoxes that lie in store. Changes that affect one’s sense of identity are especially delicate. Given that identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that supports one’s sense of identity, shifting our imaginary identifications is not as simple as casting away a used garment. Psychoanalysis taught us that imaginary re-location are complex and as time-consuming as shedding an old skin. Moreover, changes of this qualitative kind happen more easily at the molecular or subjective level and their translation into a public discourse and shared social experiences is a complex and risk-ridden affair. In a more positive vein, Spinozist feminist political thinkers like Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens (1999) argue that such socially embedded and historically grounded changes are the result of ‘collective imaginings’—a shared desire for certain transformations to be actualised as a collaborative effort. Let me give you a series of concrete examples of how dis-identifications from dominant models of subject-formation can be productive and creative events. First of all, feminist theory is based on a radical dis-engagement from the dominant institutions and representations of femininity and masculinity, to enter the process of 211
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becoming-minoritarian or of transforming gender. In so doing feminism combines critique with creation of alternative ways of embodying and experiencing our sexualised selves Secondly, in race discourse, the awareness of the persistence of racial discrimination and of white privilege has led to serious disruptions of our accepted views of what constitutes a subject. This has resulted on the one hand in the critical re-appraisal of blackness (Gilroy, 2000; Hill Collins, 1991) and on the other to radical relocations of whiteness (Ware, 1992; Griffin & Braidotti, 2002). Specifically, I would like to refer to Edgar Morin’s account of how he relinquished Marxist cosmopolitanism to embrace a more ‘humble’ perspective as a European (Morin, 1987). This process includes both positive and negative affects: disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of Marxism is matched by compassion for the uneasy, struggling and marginal position of post-war Europe, squashed between the USA and the USSR. This produces a renewed sense of care and accountability that leads Morin to embrace a post-nationalistic redefinition of Europe as the site of mediation and transformation of its own history, which I discussed above. The positive benefits aspects of this dis-identification are epistemological but extend beyond; they include a more adequate cartography of our real-life conditions and hence less pathos-ridden accounts. Becoming free of the topos that equates the efforts for identity changes with suffering results in a more adequate level of self-knowledge and therefore clears the grounds for more adequate and sustainable relations to the others who are crucial to the transformative project. Methodologically, this vision allows us to replace linearity with a more rhizomatic and dynamic style of thinking. The basic method is that of creative repetitions, i.e: re-telling, re-configuring and re-visiting the concept, phenomenon, event, or location from different angles. This is akin to Spinozist perspectivism, but infuses it with a nomadic spin which establishes multiple connections and lines of interaction. The following factors are central to this methodological approach. Firstly, the notion of repetition as the internal return of difference, not of sameness. It is creative mimesis, not static repetition. Re-visiting the same idea or project or location from different angles is therefore not merely a quantitative multiplication of options, but rather a qualitative leap of perspective. This leap takes the form of a hybrid mixture of codes, genres, or modes of apprehension of the idea, event or phenomenon in question. One of the ways in which this can be accounted for is through an intensive or affective mapping of how each of us relates to and interacts with the ideas/events/codes as processes. I shall return to the affective element below. Ethically, each researcher or writer has to negotiate the often dramatic shifts of perspective and location which are required for the implementation of a process-oriented—as opposed to concept-based and system driven-thought. The key methodological feature that emerges clearly from this is an intense form of inter-disciplinarity, trans-versality and boundary-crossings among a range of discourses. More specifically, nomadic transpositions constitute a way of re-working the inter-relation among different axes of difference: sexualization, racialisation, naturalization. All these share a passionate commitment to dislodge ‘difference’ from 212
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its hegemonic position as an instrument of world-historical systems of domination, exclusion and dis-qualification, as I argued before. Linearity is especially problematic on the methodological front for radical epistemologies and marginal discourses. The question is how to implement a coherent but non hierarchical system of knowledge transfer and the transmission of the cultural and political memory of a past that is often not recognized by official institutional culture. A poignant example of this is the transmission of the cultural and political capital of a centuries-old movement such as feminism. Linearity is a very inadequate way of accounting for intergenerational relations among women who belong to different historical phases of the women’s movement. Nowadays, with a third feminist wave in full swing (Henry, 2004) it is difficult to avoid both the hierarchical oedipal narrative of mothers and daughters of the feminist revolution and the negative passions that inevitably accompany such narratives. It is not always easy to challenge the hierarchical relationships that are socially predicated on differences ordained along a chronological scale. The best antidote to it is an anti-oedipal approach to the question of inter-generational ethics. It results in the need to find adequate accounts for the zig-zagging nature of feminist intellectual and cultural memories, as well as their political genealogies. This raises methodological issues of how to account for a different notion of time—not Chronos, but Aion, the dynamic and internally contradictory or circular time of becoming. A nomadic methodology posits active processes of becoming: we need flows of empowering desire that mobilise the subject and activate him/her out of the gravitational pull of envy, rivalry and ego-indexed claims to recognition. What gets reasserted in this effort is the need to work towards social sustainability and social horizons of hope. Hope aims at change and transformations and it longs for mobility and becomings—that is to say, for sustainable changes. Resisting the present, while being worthy of it This argument about a creative approach to a critical redefinition of the subject and the quest for a balancing act between past traditions and present transformations through the method of dis-identification from dominant images of the subject engenders a paradox: how to engage both affirmatively and critically with the present? How to work towards the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing Critical Theory, which means resisting the present? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1992). The relationship between creativity and critique is a problem that has confronted all critical theorists and radical pedagogues, namely how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the necessary dose of negative criticism that is constitutive of oppositional consciousness. How to resist the injustice, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with the present in a productively oppositional and affirmative manner? Amor fati is not fatalism, but the awareness of a bond of profound intimacy between ourselves and the world, the space-time we are living in. It is an acknowledgment that ‘we’are in 213
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this together. Again, the ethical dimension underscores the methodological issues and points to a solution. Nomadic thought challenges the traditional equation between oppositional consciousness and resistance on the one hand and negativity on the other. The assumption that opposition is the same as a belligerent act of negation and even of destruction of present conditions has to be challenged. Whereas dialectical thought results in establishing negativity as a productive moment in the dialectical scheme which aims at overturning the negative conditions that produced it in the first place, nomadic thought proposes a change of perspective that aims at re-casting critique as affirmation. This shift of perspective rests on Spinozist premises like philosophical monism and the emphasis on an ethical and affective component of subjectivity. A subject’s ethical core is not his/her moral intentionality, as much as the effects of power (as repressive—potestas—and positive—potentia) his/her actions are likely to have upon the world (Deleuze, 1968). Given that in this view the ethical good is equated with radical relationality aiming at affirmative empowerment, the ethical ideal is to increase one’s ability to enter into modes of relation with multiple others. Ethics is about the cultivation of affirmative relations. Oppositional consciousness and the political subjectivity or agency it engenders must actualize this ethical urge in the sense that they labour to create alternatives by cultivating the relations that are conducive to the transmutation of values. In other words: opposition is not about negativity, but rather about the transformation of negative into positive passions and hence the production of affirmative alternatives. These do not emerge dialectically, ie: are not tied to the present by negation, but must be allowed to emerge out of a different set of premises, affects and conditions. In my terms, this is a project for social sustainability that aims at combining processes of radical transformation with the possibility of constructing sustainable futures. The sustainability of these futures consists in their being able to mobilize, actualize and deploy cognitive, affective and collective forces which had not so far been activated. How to assess and format these forces becomes a crucial issue for Critical Theory—in terms of an ethics of affirmation that is also an ethology of forces. These forces concretise in actual, material relations and can thus constitute a network, web or rhizome of interconnection with others. This is why Deleuze, paraphrasing Spinoza, argues that we have to learn to think differently about ourselves and we can only do so together. To disengage the process of subject formation from negativity and to attach it to affirmative otherness means that reciprocity is redefined not as mutual recognition but rather as mutual definition or specification. ‘We’ are in this together in a vital political economy that is both trans-subjective and trans-versal its force. Thus, oppositional consciousness is central to political subjectivity but it is not the same as negativity and that Critical Theory is about creation and strategies of affirmation. Political subjectivity or agency therefore consists of multiple micro-political practices of daily activism or interventions in and on the world we inhabit. As Adrienne Rich puts it the political activist has to think ‘in spite of the times’ and hence also ‘out 214
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of my time’, in tune with the present but resisting its murderous tendencies. This tension creates the conditions of possibility—of the future (2001, p. 159). Critical Theory is not about looking for easy reassurances but for evidence that others, here and now, are struggling with the same questions. Affect, memory and the imagination Nomadic methodology works by empowering creative alternatives. This philosophical creativity operates a shift of paradigm towards a positive appraisal of differences, multiplicity and complexity not as an end in themselves but as steps in a process of recomposition of the coordinates of subjectivity. This has some important methodological implications for the role and function of Memory and the Imagination. The cartographic accounts of the subject of complexity and becoming, which I described before, entail a sort of affective mapping of the thinker’s/reader’s interaction with others: texts, ideas, concepts or artworks. This perceptive and conceptual engagement with bodies of work, by-passes the classical binary thought. All radical pedagogies stress the crucial role played by the memory in the formation of politically active and ethically conscious subjects. Remembering the wound, the pain, the injustice—bearing witness to the missing people—to those who never managed to gain powers of discursive representation—is central to the radical ethics and politics of philosophical nomadism. Another important use of memory is connected to the affective dimension. Let me illustrate it with an example: what exactly is involved in ‘working from memory’ when one is writing commentaries on the history of philosophy or on other theoretical texts? The most notorious statement to this effect concerns Deleuze’s two volume study of cinema, in which he states that he did not watch again any of the movies he was to discuss. He just wrote from the memory of the first time he watched those films, which often was years before. Most of his literary citations, however, bear the same style: they are rarely verbatim repetitions of the original texts. Nor are they ‘close textual readings’, following the dominant mode of teaching philosophy in the academic world today, where the repetition of ‘his master’s voice’ is the name of the game. “Faithfulness” here equates flat repetition, or the replication of sameness. Writing from memory, or ‘by heart’ involves a number of precise methodological steps. Firstly, it means that one is exempted from checking against the original, at least during the process of writing the actual commentary. This expresses the conviction that the ‘truth’ of a text is somehow never really ‘written’. Neither is it contained within the signifying space of the book, nor is it about the authority of a proper noun, a signature, a tradition, a canon, let alone the prestige of a discipline. The authoritativeness of citation is discarded for an altogether different kind of accuracy. The ‘truth’ of a text resides rather in the affects, ie: the kind of outwardbound interconnections or relations that it enables, provokes, engenders and sustains. Thus, a text is a relay point between different moments in space and time, as well as 215
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different levels, degrees, forms and configurations of the thinking process. Thinking, like breathing, is not held into the mould of linearity, or the confines of the printed page, but it happens outside, out of bounds, in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts. The linguistic signifier is merely one of the points in a chain of effects, not its centre or its endgame. Secondly, and as a consequence of the above, ‘working from memory’ implies respecting the specific, non-linear temporality of this intensive process of thinking. The notion of ‘duration’ is of crucial importance here. The active, minoritarian or nomadic memory triggers molecular becomings and thus works towards affirmation. In order to do so, however, it constantly reconnects to the virtual totality of a continuously recomposing block of past and present moments. In a synchronization exercise, moments in time coincide in the ‘here and now’ of actualising processes of heightened intensity or becoming. When applied to the reading of theoretical, social and cultural texts, this means that one starts working from oral traces and affective imprints, i.e.: more viscerally. The focus is not on representation or citation, but on the affective traces, on what is left over, what remains, what has somehow caught and stuck around, the drags and the sediments of the reading and the cognitive process. This assumes that the focus does not fall on textual interiority and a detailed reproduction of the text’s intentions, meanings and conceptual structures. Equally inadequate is the weight of Oedipal tradition and the veneration of the authority of the past as a support mechanism for the habit of faithful textual commentaries. I prefer to think of this way of relating to memory in terms of nomadic transpositions, that is to say as creative and highly generative inter-connections which mix and match, mingle and multiply possibilities of expansion and growth among different units or entities. Transpositions require precision in terms of the co-ordinate of the encounters, but also a high charge of imaginative force. They may appear as random association to the naked eye, but in fact they are a specific and accurate topology of forces of attraction, which find their own modes of selection, combination and re-composition. Musicals scores function by transpositions, much as the transmission of genetic information ( Fox-Keller, 1983) : they proceed by leaps and bounds, but this is neither anarchical, nor chaotic. The coherence of this system is the result of the affinity and empathy that allowed for the preliminary selection to be made in the first place, resulting in the storage of the data in/as memory. There is no spontaneity at work here, but rather a careful dosage of forces, a process of selective affinities. The model for this is the quick glance of the painter that captures the ‘essence’ of a landscape or the precise quality of the light upon it, in a fleeting moment and which is wrongly rendered in terms of ‘insight’. It has nothing whatsoever to do with interiority, however, nor with inscrutable depths. It is rather related to external forces, their irresistible energy and mobility. Just like travellers can capture the ‘essential lines’ of landscape or of a place in the speed of crossing it, this is not superficiality, but a way of framing the longitudinal and latitudinal forces that structure a certain spatio-temporal ‘moment’. 216
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These multi-layered levels of affectivity are the building blocks for creative transpositions, which compose a plane of actualisation of relations, that is to say points of contact between self and surroundings. They are the mark of immanent, embodied and embedded relations. Capturing such forces is not dependent upon the supervising control of a conscious subject who centralizes and ordains the information according to a hierarchy of sensorial and cognitive data. Moments like that—when the self is emptied out, dissolving into rawer and more elementary sensations—mark heightened levels of awareness and receptivity. In spiritual practices like meditation what is labelled as concentration is represented by deep vacuum. You look through reality to focus elsewhere. In fact, you are focussing on the ever-receding horizon of else-whereness itself—that is, infinity. An intransitive gaze that marks the intensive state of becoming. What looks like absent-mindedness, on closer scrutiny reveals itself to be a qualitative leap towards a more focused, more precise, more accurate perception of one’s own potentia, which is one’s capacity to ‘take in’ the world, to encounter it, to go towards it. It is about respecting a creative void without forcefully imposing upon it a form that corresponds to the author’s own intentions or desires—it is an opening-out towards the geo-philosophical or planetary dimension of ‘chaosmosis” (Guattari, 1992). The form or the discursive event rather emerges from the creative encounter of the doer and the deed, or from the active process of becoming. This amounts to turning the self into the threshold of gratuitous (principle of non-profit), aimless (principle of mobility or flow) acts which express the vital energy of transformative becomings. If the activity of thinking is represented along these lines, it then follows that the more self-reflexive a posteriori process of theorizing this activity requires methodological skills other than the ones that are usually praised, rewarded and perpetuated in academic circles. Notably, the key habit of ‘faithfulness to the text’ and of citation as repetition of the author’s intended meaning, gets displaced. Instead what comes to the fore is the creative capacity that consists in being able to render the more striking lines, forces or affective charges of any given text or author. To do so, what one needs to be loyal to is neither the spurious depth of the text, nor the authors’s latent or manifest intentionality and even less to the sovereignty of the phallic Master. Loyalty is instead required to the intensity of the affective forces that compose a text or a concept, so as to account for what a text can do, what it has done, how it has impacted upon one according to the affective coordinates I outlined above. Accounting backwards for the affective impact of various items or data upon oneself is the process of remembering. In Bergson as in Deleuze it has as much to do with the imagination, that is to say creative reworking, as with the passive repetition of chronologically prior, recorded and hence retrievable experiences. Memory is ongoing and forward looking precisely because it is a singular, yet complex subject that is always, already in motion and in process. This memory has to do with the capacity to endure, to ‘sustain’ the process of change or transformation. Duration and endurance are also ethical categories to do with sustainability, not just an aesthetic one. Sustainability emerges (again) as the guiding principle of these intensive methods of analysis. 217
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Creativity is a nomadic process in that it entails the active displacement of dominant formations of identity, memory and identification. Becoming has to do with emptying out the self, opening it out to possible encounters with the ‘outside’. As Roy puts ir: ‘the pragmatic purpose was to introduce a ‘swerve’ or deviation in the plane of taken-for-granted assumptions by means of which a new experiment of thought could be inserted in the interstices that might help teachers get an insight into the generative possibilities of the situation” (Roy, 2003, p. 2). Remembering in the nomadic mode is the active reinvention of a self that is joyfully discontinuous, as opposed to being mournfully consistent, as programmed by phallogocentric culture. It destabilizes the sanctity of the past and the authority of experience. This is the tense of a virtual sense of potential. Memories need the imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject. They allow the subject to differ from oneself as much as possible while remaining faithful to oneself, or in other words: enduring. Desire as plenitude rather challenges the matrix of having and lacking access to recognition by Self and Other as transcendent categories. Becoming is molecular, in that it requires singular overthrowing of the internalized simulacra of the self, consolidated by habits and flat repetitions. The dynamic vision of the subject as assemblage is central to a vitalist, yet anti-essentialist theory of desire, which also prompts a new practice of sustainable ethics, which aims: “to open up the fastness in which thought takes refuge, provoking by that same parting novel, nonhumanist stirrings” (Roy, 2003, p. 1). Desire is the propelling and compelling force that is driven by self-affirmation or the transformation of negative into positive passions. This is a desire not to preserve, but to change: it is a deep yearning for transformation or a process of affirmation. Empathy and compassion are key features of this nomadic yearning for in-depth transformation. Proximity, attraction or intellectual sympathy is both a topological and qualitative notion: it is a question of ethical temperature. It is an affective framing for the becoming of subjects as sensible or intelligent matter. The affectivity of the imagination is the motor for these encounters and of the conceptual creativity they trigger off. It is a transformative force that propels multiple, heterogeneous ‘becomings’ of the subject. Affirmative visions As I argued earlier, the conditions for renewed political and ethical agency cannot be drawn from the immediate context or the current state of the terrain. They have to be generated affirmatively and creatively by efforts geared to creating possible futures, by mobilizing resources and visions that have been left untapped and by actualizing them in daily practices of interconnection with others. This project requires more visionary power or prophetic energy, qualities which are neither especially in fashion in academic circles, nor highly valued socially in 218
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these times of commercial globalisation. Yet, the call for more vision is emerging from many quarters in Critical Theory. Feminists have a long and rich genealogy in terms of pleading for increased visionary insight. From the very early days, Joan Kelly (1979) typified feminist theory as a double-edged vision, with a strong critical and an equally strong creative function. Faith in the creative powers of the imagination is an integral part of feminists’ appraisal of lived embodied experience and the bodily roots of subjectivity, which would express the complex singularities that feminist women have become. Donna Haraway’s work (1997; 2003) provides the best example of this kind of respect for a dimension where creativity is unimaginable without some visionary fuel. Prophetic or visionary minds are thinkers of the future. The future as an active object of desire propels us forth and motivates us to be active in the here and now of a continuous present that calls for resistance. The yearning for sustainable futures can construct a livable present. This is not a leap of faith, but an active transposition, a transformation at the in-depth level (Braidotti, 2006). A prophetic or visionary dimension is necessary in order to secure an affirmative hold over the present, as the launching pad for sustainable becoming or qualitative transformations. The future is the virtual unfolding of the affirmative aspect of the present, which honors our obligations to the generations to come. The pursuit of practices of hope, rooted in the ordinary micro-practices of everyday life is a simple strategy to hold, sustain and map out sustainable transformations. The motivation for the social construction of hope is grounded in a profound sense of responsibility and accountability. A fundamental gratuitousness and a profound sense of hope is part of it. Hope is a way of dreaming up possible futures: an anticipatory virtue that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful motivating force grounded not only in projects that aim at reconstructing the social imaginary, but also in the political economy of desires, affects and creativity. Contemporary nomadic practices of subjectivity—both in pedagogy and other areas of thought—work towards a more affirmative approach to Critical Theory. Beyond unitary visions of the self and teleological renditions of the processes of subject-formation, a nomadic philosophy can sustain the contemporary subjects in the efforts to synchronize themselves with the changing world in which they try to make a positive difference. Against the established tradition of methodological nationalism, a different image of thought can be activated that rejects Euro-universalism and trusts instead in the powers of diversity. It also enlists affectivity, memory and the imagination to the crucial task of inventing new figurations and new ways of representing the complex subjects we have become. The key method is an ethics of respect for diversity that produces co-synchronizations of the nomadic selves and thus constitutes communities across multiple locations and generations. This humble project of being worthy of the present while also resisting and of constructing together social horizons of hope and sustainability expresses an evolutionary talent that enables “us” to be in this together.
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References Balibar, E. (2001). Nous, Citoyens d’Europe? Les frontiers, l’etat, le peuple. Paris, Editions de la Decouverte. Bauman, Z. (2004). Europe, An Unfinished Adventure. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London and New York, Routledge. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora—Contesting Identities. New York and London: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA; Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cornell, D. (2002). The Ubuntu Project with Stellenbosch University. Available on the web at: http:// www.fehe.org/index.php?id=281 (accessed June 1, 2008). Deleuze, G. (1968). Spinoza et le problème de l’expression. Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1990) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1972). L’anti-Oedipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie I. Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1977) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking Press/ Richard Seaver. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie II. Paris: Minuit. English translation: (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1992). What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). L’immanence: une vie... In Philosophie, 47(3). English Translation: Pure Immanence. Essays on A Life. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Derrida, J. (1991). L’Autre cap. Paris; Minuit. English Translation: The Other Heading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Foucault, M. (1966). Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard. English translation (1980) The Order of Things, New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books. Fox-Keller, E. (1983). A Feeling for the Organism—The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock, New York: W.H. Freeman and Co. Gatens, M. & Genevieve, L. (1999). Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present London and New York: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (2000). Against Race. Imaging Political Culture Beyond the Colour Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Edouard (1990) Poetique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. English translation (1997) Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, Ann. Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Griffin, G. & Braidotti, R. (2002). Thinking Differently. A Reader in European Women’s Studies. London: Zed Books. Guattari, F. (1992) Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée. English translation: Chaosmosis. An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications.
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NOMADISM Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Feminist Studies, vol. 14 (3), 575–99. Haraway, D. (1997) Modest Witness@Second_Millennium—FemaleMan©_Meets Oncomouse. London & New York: Routledge. Henry, A. (2004). Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hill C. P. (1991). Black Feminist Though—Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York and London: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (1977). Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Minuit. English translation (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornel University Press. Kelly, J. (1979). The Double-edged Vision of Feminist Theory. Feminist Studies, vol.5, n.1, 216–227. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Colombia University Press. Laclau, E. (1995). Subjects of Politics, Politics of the Subject. In Differences. 7/1, 146–164. Lauretis, T. de (1986). Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lloyd, G. (1996). Spinoza and the Ethics. London and New York: Routledge. Morin, E. (1987). Penser l’Europe. Paris: Gallimard. Rich, A. (1985). The Politics of Location. In Blood, Bread and Poetry, London: Virago. Rich, A. (2001). Arts of the Possible. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Roy, K. (2003). Teachers in Nomadic Spaces. New York and London : Peter Lang. Shiva, V. (1997). Biopiracy—The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press. Ware, V. (1992). Beyond the Pale. White Women, Racism and History. London & New York: Verso.
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The Coexistence of Cultures
Prior to the discussion on the meeting of cultures, one should determine what is meant by “culture”—and this is no mean task. I wish to point out, first of all, that I will stick to a rather abstract definition, which will enable me to include extremely diverse phenomena: culture refers to common representations, thus shared by at least two human beings—mostly, however, by a far larger number of people. It is not the content of these representations that determine its “cultural” nature, but rather their spreading. Here, the collective is opposed to the individual. Culture, therefore, implies communication, of which it is one of the outcomes. These representations, as the word indicates, are an image, i.e. an interpretation of the world; possessing a culture means that one has access to a pre-organization of the world, a miniature model, a kind of map, which enables us to find our bearings. Culture is both common memory—we learn the same language, the same history, the same traditions—and the rule for living together—we speak so as to be understood, and we behave in accordance with the rules that govern our society. It is turned both towards the past and towards the present. If we start with this very general definition, two characteristics of culture stand out immediately: each individual exhibits characteristics of multiple cultures, and each culture is subject to change. Let’s look at the first one: any individual is part of a number of human groups; he, therefore, shares the culture of each one of them and is the bearer of multiple identities. Certain groups are included in others. For example, a French person always comes from a certain area—let’s say he is from the Berry. On the other hand, he shares many of his features with all Europeans. He is therefore a member of the Berry, French and European cultures. Other groups intersect: a person may identify with the Mediterranean, Christian and European cultures. Within a single geographical entity, there lie multiple cultural stratifications: there is the culture of the adolescents and that of retired people; of doctors and of street sweepers; of women and of men; of the rich and of the poor, etc. One may feel embarrassed at such a general use of the term “culture”, as it goes beyond its usual scope. However, no other word better refers to this multiple sense of belonging, which characterizes each individual. In most cases, the cohabitation of various types of culture within each of us does not cause any problem which, in itself, should be a source of wonder: just like jugglers, we handle this plurality with the greatest of ease! Plurality in space and mobility across time—cultures are always subject to change, although clearly, the so-called “traditional” cultures will do so less readily [ 223 ]
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and less quickly than the so-called “modern” ones. A host of reasons account for these changes; since each culture either includes or intersects with other cultures, its various ingredients generate an unstable balance. In addition to these internal tensions, there are external contacts, with neighboring or distant cultures, which also lead to modifications. Moreover, the evolution of other constitutive series of the social order—the economic, the political, and even the physical—also exert pressure. These changes are particularly easy since cultures—common memory, and shared life rules—are shaped through agglutination and addition, while they do not have the rigorous aspect of a system. In this sense, cultures resemble the lexicon of a language rather than the syntax: one can always add a new word, while another can fall into disuse. However, the clearest image is, once again, that of the Argo ship: each wooden plank, each rope, and each nail, had to be replaced, since the journey was so long. The ship that returns to the harbor many years later is totally different from the one that left, and yet, it is still the same Argo ship. The functional unit is stronger than the substantial difference; the same is the case with an entity such as “French culture”. If we keep in mind these two characteristic features of culture—its plurality and variability—we see to what extent the most common metaphors for it are confusing. For example, we say of a man that he is “uprooted” and we feel sorry for him; however, assimilating men to plants in this way, is illegitimate, because man is never the outcome of a single culture. (By the way, it is precisely because of its mobility that the animal world is distinct from the vegetable world). There are no “pure” or “mixed” cultures, but only cultures that acknowledge and value the fact that they are mixed, and others that deny or repress this knowledge. In this regard, the disdain in which realities have been held, by being labeled “halfbred” or “hybrid”, is very revealing. To give another example, people often speak of the “survival” of a culture—this time, the representations are humanized instead of man being dehumanized—the meaning being that it is being preserved as it was. However, it is precisely when a culture no longer changes that it is a dead culture. The expression “dead language” is far more sensible: Latin died the day it could no longer change. Nothing is more normal, more common, than the disappearance of the former state of a culture, and of its replacement by a new state. What is the use of culture? Based on one’s perspective, one can reply differently to this question. As I have already said, it functions as an image and as a key for comprehending the world, without which each one of us would have the feeling of being engulfed in a distressing chaos. It functions as a link with the community that shares it, and enables its members to communicate with one another. But it also functions at a totally different level. Man is not satisfied with a biological life alone; he needs to feel alive, and this can only stem from his insertion into a specifically human society. Man aspires to this insertion, both at the individual level—a child seeks his mother’s gaze, a woman in love, that of her beloved—and at the level of the group: I feel confirmed in my existence if I can say to myself that I am a student, or a farmer, or a Frenchman, i.e. if I can see myself as part of any group whose existence is undeniable. This is what is called the need to belong, or aspiring to a 224
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collective identity. This feeling is not atavistic in any way, but rather a constituent feature of human beings. Its presence introduces a tension which can never be fully overcome, between the need for stability and the need for change. The individual want to recognize himself in his group’s culture and receives confirmation of his identity and of his existence, by becoming integrated into it. In order to grant him these advantages, the group itself must maintain its identity. However, as we have seen above, this group culture is destined to change because culture does not exist in a vacuum, because there are many groups, and because there are many individuals in each group. Any change occurring in the culture is perceived by the individual as a threat, and causes him to resist. We can now take another step forward and ask ourselves as to what characterizes the present moment within the history of cultures. For a number of years, we have been witnessing a growing acceleration of contacts between cultures which, to this point, remained separated. This acceleration has been taking place, first of all, within industrial countries, where the ability to move, and to change profession, as well as milieu, is becoming a prerequisite for social success; where the middleclasses are gradually erasing the previous oppositions between the classes; and where the omnipresent media—particularly television—are broadcasting images of a similar lifestyle everywhere. However, we are also witnessing this acceleration taking place between countries, since news, as well as capital, consumer goods and cultural products, are more and more oblivious to borders. Although people do not move about freely everywhere, they do so more than ever, with charter flights rather than television functioning as the symbol of this relative freedom. In other words, there is an undeniable and multiform tendency towards homogenization, which is characteristic of modern societies, as opposed to traditional ones. Our knowledge of distant countries, which we have accumulated through these means, is not very deep; however, it is leading to an in-depth transformation in our ability to perceive and live geographic and cultural otherness. It is not necessary to go back to Antiquity or to the Middle-Ages, in order to feel the difference: in the first half of this century, it could still be claimed that our knowledge about others suffered from a lack of information; today, the dominant feeling is that it is our overflow of information which is preventing us from perceiving the others. Only two generations ago, if one wanted to familiarize oneself with the customs of the inhabitants of certain distant countries, one would read the tales of travelers who had ventured into these places; or one would attend an evening where color slides were projected and commented by the intrepid traveler who had brought them back. Today, in our small corner of the world, nothing can surprise a seven year-old child anymore: the most distant sites, stunning sceneries, and exotic populations have become familiar to him thanks to his steadiness in front of the television’s small screen; and his parents have already taken him on holiday to the four corners of the world. This superficial familiarity with the others does not mean we become all the same; however, it limits our ability to perceive differences and to reflect on them. The presence of these two facts—the need for collective belonging, raised earlier, and the weakening of traditional identities—are leading to a reaction of 225
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withdrawal and hostility. It seems as though the individuals, feeling threatened by the movement of universal homogenization, were drawn to quickly take hold of some identity, whether old or new. Indeed, how can I recognize myself as part of a community if this community itself has ceased to exist? The persistence of the great ideological split—“communism”/”capitalism”—could, for a while, serve as a refuge and hide this growing need. But since this refuge has collapsed, in the meantime, shadows from the past, which we believed had disappeared, are reemerging, or new communities are being recreated in the image of ancient ones: we are witnessing at the same time an explosion of cultural identifications, in the common sense of the word—national, religious, linguistic, and even racial. This evolution does not only take place in Third World countries, but also in disadvantaged areas in industrial countries—in the suburbs, where heterogeneous population groups meet. The fact that the traditional links are being erased—in France, this was symbolized by the weakening of the hold of the Catholic Church, and later of the Communist Party—is making room for new collective identifications. Indeed, within immigrant groups, one identifies oneself as Moslem, Arab, or as originating from this or that region. Across from them, in the welcoming group, a similar “tensing of the identity” is taking place, which takes on the shape of behaviors we qualify as racist or xenophobic, and which lead to the appearance of extreme-right movements. Most of the latter’s members are not recruited in the more traditional layers of society, but among those who feel most threatened in their social existence, i.e. the unemployed. When one lacks positive elements in order to build one’s collective identity (I am a worker, a farmer, a civil servant—and proud to be), the temptation is strong to hook on to negative elements—I am not like these immigrants who are physically different from me, who speak another language, and who have strange customs. My identity lies in rejecting them. Thus, the apocalyptic vision of a homogeneous humanity is faced with a no-less threatening vision—that of a planet inhabited by tribes at war with each other. One must admit that the relations between countries, or between civilizations, are seldom harmonious. Relations between nations, we have always known that, are based on strength rather than rights. Conquest missions, colonial empires, and the commercial expansionism of rich countries amount to incursions followed by the one culture imposing itself on another, rather than on dialogue. More obviously, people residing in France or in other European countries often feel that the tension is rising today between the various communities. This escalation is following a thorough chain of events, which nothing seems to be able to stop. One group in the population is set apart (its members share a different appearance, speak another language, and have their own customs) and depreciated (because they do not master fully the codes in effect in the global world, and that they are less successful than others); this group, in turn, interiorizes this negative singularity and shapes its behavior accordingly—we are all too familiar with this evolution as it takes place in individual psychology: keep telling a child that he is mean, and he will become mean); this behavior, which is perceived as aggressive, leads to repression on the part of the police force; this repression is then perceived as a provocation and leads the group that is discriminated against to riot. 226
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In the end, instead of harmonious integration, we find, on the one hand, a yelling minority, cut off from any social contract, convinced that it is the object of unjust persecutions; and, on the other, a majority convinced it is in the right, proud of its identity and averse to any mixing of cultures. It is not civil war yet, but the suburbs are ablaze at night with worrying fires, while one-sixth of the population in France votes for the xenophobic extreme-right party, and, according to the surveys, twothirds of the French claim to be at least “a little” racist. Thus, two gloomy visions face one another. On the one hand, one sees the approaching apocalypse in the wave of American popular culture, made up of chewing-gum, coca-cola and blue-jeans, of musical hits and soap operas, all of which erase the cultural differences that are critical for the survival of humanity; and on the other hand, a no less threatening vision—that of a planet made up of tribes at war with each other. Some things are true in both images; however, we should avoid oversimplifying. Both generalizations share the same defect: they turn one trend into an absolute condition, while neglecting the other trend to an excess. It is true that the new means of communication have a unifying effect, but behind these superficial similarities, we find persisting or new differences; the need to set oneself apart, to recognize oneself within a community is not deeply harmed by the American soap operas that are sold throughout the world. The diversification of humanity into distinct groups corresponds to the laws that govern life in common—it does not run the risk of disappearing, because of television or of faster transport; certain particular identities disappear, but others are shaped where one would least expect them to. The “McWorld”, as put by Benjamin Barber—that of the McDonalds, the MacIntosh, and MTV—that is present everywhere, does not contribute to an in-depth unification, while other reasons, far stronger than the simple lack of contact, account for the differences between the communities: collective identities are always shaped by contrasting with each other. On the other hand, cultural identification is felt as a need today, although the limits between cultures remain permeable, and conflict is not an unavoidable outcome. In a nutshell, the tension between the force of unification and that of differentiation seems to be a constitutive element in the history of humanity, while it is difficult to imagine that it will ever be resolved through the victory of one of the parties. On the basis of these general principles, I would like to turn to the double question which every European who ponders on the “meeting of cultures” is faced with: how can various cultures coexist within a single State? And how can a number of States come together within a single culture? In more concrete terms: what place should be allocated to minority cultures within a country such as France? And what place will French culture have within the European community which is being shaped? I purposely say “France” or “French”, since things are obviously different in a country such as Switzerland, which has always been founded on cultural plurality. Unfortunately, I do not know it well enough to evaluate whether it should be taken as a model for Europe; therefore, I reason hereafter, based on the French situation. The link between the culture of the majority and the culture/s of the minority/ ties can take the shape of either of two main models—the republican model and the 227
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communal model. What does “republican” refer to in this case? It refers to the fact that all individuals are considered citizens with equal rights, without any reference to their cultural belonging. In other words, in a country like France, which claims this is its model, the different cultures, in the sense of national or ethnic belonging, are not on the same footing—French culture is privileged. This is translated, among others, in the fact that the State is responsible for teaching the French language and that requests pertaining to maintaining other French traditions are more favorably received than those related to minority traditions. The advantage of this solution is that all the members of society are part of the same culture, which brings them closer together and unites them. Moreover, all have access to the same identity: on principle, no segment of the population is privileged, compared to others—as if its members, for example, spoke a more prestigious language. In other words, unity is what guarantees equal rights. Its disadvantage is that it favors the majority versus the minorities. In France, attempts are being made to try and overcome this disadvantage, by applying two additional principles: secularity—i.e. limiting religion to the private sphere only (the State should be adopt a neutral position concerning religions; it is not hostile towards them: it is not atheistic but secular); and tolerance, which means that, although the blossoming of regional languages is not encouraged, those who practice them are not discriminated against (teaching the Breton language is not forbidden in France, as teaching Kurdish is, in many Asian countries, or as teaching Indian languages was in the United States, barely some decades ago). There are, therefore, significant distortions, compared to the principle of absolute equality, but the underlying reasoning seems to be that, within a Sate, it is better to hierarchize cultures than people, and that a little hierarchy is better than a lot of war. The principle of equality which, for many centuries already, has been the moving force of modern history throughout much of the world, suffers from a number of restrictions, even limited to its implementation. This is probably why, in recent years, we have seen the rise of a demand for equal rights, not only for individuals, but also for groups, i.e. for minorities. This leads us to the communal model, which is rather weak in France, from an ethnic point of view, where the republican tradition is enjoying the approval of quasi the entire political class; however, it is much stronger at the level of professional communities, such as farmers, rail workers, and school teachers: each one of them would like to obtain certain rights and weigh on the common policy, as a group. Regarding this opposition, about which many volumes have already been written, I will only formulate a few general remarks. In order to get a better understanding of the present situation, a new distinction should first be introduced. I have spoken of the separation between the private and the public spheres: I can be a devout Christian in my private life, while public life follows the principle of secularism. At this point, however, I must distinguish two orders of public life—the legal and the social. The legal order includes not only laws, but also all the rules and even the institutions, in as much as the latter are like a sedimentation of the laws and rules. It is this aspect of public life which must be submitted to the demands of equality. Social life takes place in this legal framework, but in no way can it be reduced to it; and its principle is not at all equality—who would 228
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like to live in a society where are all similar?—but the acknowledgement, which one gets by being either more brilliant, more loving, more loyal, or more courageous than the others—in other words, by appearing superior rather than equal. What characterizes the liberal State, which modifies the republican spirit, is that this sphere of social life is not regimented solely by law, but constitutes an infinite negotiation, always starting anew, during which, as an individual and as a member of some group or other, I demand to be recognized by others and I recognize them (or not). In the social order, on the other hand, I cannot demand anything, at first, for fear of looking ridiculous; I can only hope or ask—can I, a writer, demand success? If I am in love, can I demand to be loved? If I am handsome, can I demand to be admired? Moreover, what I ask for is not equality, but distinction, gratification, the reward of exception. A sweeper and a doctor should have exactly the same rights; however, in a liberal society, nothing can prevent one from having more prestige than the other—nor, as a comforting compensation, that the other (i.e. the sweeper) be, for example, more handsome and less neurotic than the first (i.e. the doctor), and that he, therefore, have a happier love life… The question of the status of groups within a State, therefore, turns into the following: are groups answerable to the legal order or to the social order? Should their life be ruled by laws and regulations, or by negotiations and interactions? Culture and, therefore, each person’s collective identity, belongs to the social order, rather than to the legal order—this is where we uncover another one of its features. Does this mean that the State representatives become indifferent to the lack of respect towards disadvantaged groups or those that are unjustly accused of the worst evils? No, but they should act using “social” rather than “legal” means. A western showing (exclusively) how the brave cowboys exterminate the nasty Indians would not be stopped by law; it could, however, be cancelled by the state of mind of the population. It would then be a total commercial flop and its authors would go bankrupt. This is why the antiracist movements in France were right, I believe, to change the slogan “Right to be different!” to “Right to equality!” Cultural differences are a social given; civic equality is an ideal inscribed within a legal system. Any cultural or ethnic group within a State in which it is a minority, has more to gain from demanding to be treated like all the others—i.e. to demand the abolition of all discrimination—than by trying to obtain a specific legal status. On the other hand, at the social level, the State can intervene efficiently in favor of those who are the most disadvantaged. While the benefits of the legalization of groups, in accordance with the communal or with the multicultural model, are problematic, its perverse effects are easy to foresee. The countries in which the laws or the institutions, or even a very strong tradition, the separation of society into clearly delimited groups, are not very encouraging examples. When we think of the interminable vendetta going on between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; of the ever-increasing violence in the Basque country in Spain; of the difficult cohabitation of Israelis and Palestinians in Israel; or, at an other level, of the massacres between the Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi, the cohabitation of distinct communities within a single country is not easy. From the first explosion of social violence, the non-integrated minority 229
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group will be easily designated for the role of scapegoat. It may not be possible to eradicate belonging to groups; this, however, does not justify the attempt to reinforce it by legalizing it. One can prefer the example of South Africa, which has finally abolished apartheid, rather than dream of societies built on auto-segregation. One can criticize the legalization of communities inside States, from yet another perspective. From the first year of his life, a child is moved by contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he wants to be comforted, which means finding himself in a familiar physical and human environment—his room, his toys, his mother, and his father, all of these reassure him. On the other hand, he wants to be surprised: he wants to discover and appropriate himself of new postures of his own body, broaden his space through explorations, and familiarize himself with new people. A child seeking security exclusively would be a mentally and physically handicapped child; a child who would only know new things would be an unstable and tormented person. This need for balance is found among adults, although it may be less easy to observe: individuals seek to belong, as well as the confirmation of the identity they already have; however, at the same time, they are driven by curiosity, by the ability to be surprised and to admire, and by the desire to add on new areas and therefore “pull away” from their origin. These two ingredients of the human psyche are both equally necessary, and one should not choose between them, any more than one can settle the antinomy between determinism and freedom, or between unification and diversification. However, societies have often evaluated these two trends differently, and have assimilated them to political attitudes. Could it be said that a taste for appearance, for maintaining what is currently in existence, for repetition, is “right wing”, whereas a taste for reform, changes, and even revolutions, is “left wing”? This could have been claimed towards the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century, when defending belonging, praising the earth and the dead, the land and blood, when the fight against uprooting, were characteristic of the nationalist and antidemocratic right—in France, with Barrès and Maurras, and in Germany, with the Nazi ideologists. Today, however, it is less obvious, as the language of uprooting, the demand for a collective identity are curiously found together with traditionally “left wing” values. It would, therefore, be more correct, in this regard, instead of left and right, to speak of the opposition—which cannot be exceeded, since it takes place in each one of us—between conservatism and perfectibility, between the desire to maintain things the way they are and the desire to leave them for something better. In Europe’s political history, the effects of movements of particularization (nationalism, regionalism), and of the movements of universalization (world expansion, proselytism) have been sometimes positive and sometimes negative. However, this superficial similarity is not found at a deeper level. Nationalist movements, particularly in the 19th century, were able to serve the cause of freedom, by getting rid of an oppressive foreign guardianship. However, there is no guarantee that, once in power, the nationalists will establish a just society: national oppression can be replaced by religious or political oppression, of a class or a clan, far worse than the one before it. And it is in the name of their explicitly affirmed principle— 230
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preferring one’s own at the expense of the others, those who belong against those who do not—that the new injustice can be established. In the worst case, this policy leads to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, apartheid, to the submission of others, or to their expulsion; in less serious cases, it leads to the refusal for its own minorities of the rights they demanded when they were the minority within another majority. Today, the North Ossetians consider themselves persecuted by the Russian majority and demand independence; however, they refuse to grant the same right to the Inguches, their own minority, which feels oppressed by the Ossetian majority, and is demanding secession. A similar case is that of the Québécois inside Canada, and of Indian populations within Québec. When collective belonging is stronger than the principles of justice—i.e. equality and universality— danger is not far. This is one of the lessons drawn from the Dreyfus Affair, one hundred years ago, in the course of which the anti-dreyfusards claimed: “Even if Dreyfus is not guilty, he must be condemned, because his acquittal would be ill-fated for the French community.” The dangers presented by the universalistic policy are of another type. When one group believes it holds the supreme good, it can, if driven by a universalistic spirit, want to share it with all the other peoples on the planet. However, as it believes that men are lacking the light, it does not wish to wait for their approval and decides to impose it upon them, while they will discover the advantages of this at a later stage. In practical terms, this means that the superior nature of my ideals allows for, and even calls for wars of conquest. This is how an imperialistic policy is justified by way of the superiority of the Christian religion, in the 16th century; of the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, in the 19th century; of the Communist utopia, in the 20th century; or of Moslem religion today. By doing so, however, we violate the universal principle we claimed to draw from, since we decide that certain peoples, but not the others, have the right to choose their way of life by themselves. In other words, the goal— equality for all—is contradicted and cancelled by the means, which implies their inequality. In this regard, the universalists are less consistent than the nationalists, who remain coherent with their non-egalitarian program. The judgment I bear on these two strategies could be detailed, as follows: nationalism, or other forms of particularism, can serve towards fulfilling some generous goals, on a punctual scale, but it is dangerous in its principle. Universalism, can be punctually mislead and used to fulfill unacceptable goals; however, its principle remain liberating. It is for this reason that it has also been able to serve in order to eliminate its own perversions, such as in the ancient colonies’ struggle for independence or in women’s fight for equal rights. My conclusion is that, on a political level, the preference granted to collective belonging over individual freedom is poorly justified. The Nazis wrote the word “Jude” on the identity card of every Jew, forbidding him to forget his origins for a single moment. The political police in the USSR put you down forever in its files by the stigmata of your “bourgeois” origins, which you could never emancipate from. Should we also wish to reintroduce this obligation to belong? Indeed, if groups have a legal status, I belong to one of them, whether I want it or not, and I have no right 231
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to claim that I am out of the group. In addition, the more groups have rights, the less individuals do. It is true that we will never be able to set ourselves free from certain geneticallydetermined features: unless I undergo some complex surgery, I am bound to keep my sex, my race (in the sense of visible physical characteristics), and the individual configuration of my body. However, should these differences be granted legal status, as in the case of apartheid or, for social differences, in the Ancien régime? Moreover, should one include invisible, or even changing, features, such as place of origin, religion or social class? Sentencing an individual to remain locked up in the culture of his ancestors presupposes that culture is an unchanging code which, as we have seen, is empirically false: every change may not be good, but any living culture changes. It is not terrible for a person to lose a culture, if he acquires another one; it is having a language that is constituent of our humanity, not having a specific language. Communitarianism leads to a situation in which each individual is locked up inside his small cultural community, instead of having to come into contact with people who are different from him, the way the republican integration imposes it upon him—which is why “multiculturalism” is, in fact, inappropriate in this case. In a nutshell, if one has to choose between identity and dialogue, I prefer dialogue. It must be said, however, that the choice does not present itself in these terms: in order for a dialogue to take place, distinct voices must be heard; in other words, opening up to others goes via the affirmation of oneself. This conclusion can be transposed to the second question I formulated above, regarding the place of French culture as part of the European identity. Intuitively, we feel that Europeans share a common core; however, if we had to identify it precisely, if we had to draw the exact geographical boundaries of this Europe, we would be quite embarrassed. How are we to place European culture in relation to the NorthAmerican, South-American, Russian and North-African cultures? Let’s admit, however, that we manage to overcome this difficulty. For a national culture, such as French culture, what would be the most desirable state of affairs? If we were to apply the precedent principle to this case, we would have to conclude the following: the ideal, once again, does not lie in unity, but in dialogue. This remains true, particularly for activities pertaining to language (which are numerous): it is hard to imagine how they could tend towards unity. I would say, however, that for the entire scope of cultural behaviors, bilingualism seems to me preferable to Esperanto. The life of our contemporaries, whether in industrial countries or elsewhere, is threatened by various ailments, for which we all know today that there are no miracle cures. The inequality of the riches, political and religious persecutions, combined with the greater ease of communication, which characterizes the world today, mean that the migration of populations will be one of the most significant phenomena in the years to come. Will this be another difficulty, on top of the existing ones, or maybe a good thing? Nothing is predetermined, and the present evolution forbids the voicing of easy optimism. But this is why we must look attentively into these facts and patiently weigh the pros and cons. It is also up to us whether the new millennium will be one of xenophobia, ghettos and collective scapegoats, or one of dialogue between cultures. 232
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Vignettes of Ambiguity
It strikes me that our current situation, at war against terrorism, conjures up a number of questions whose answers are not easy to identify, much less solve. As I have meditated on them at some length, I find in them one characteristic that defines them all, though in a negative way. All the situations we encounter right now are ambiguous. They have about them this negative character, that they cannot be clarified completely, that they defy compartmentalization. The term “ambiguity” comes from Latin ambo (“both”) plus agere (“to do”), meaning to entertain or attend to two instances at once, at the same time; hence the quandary; and yet some of them, like tolerance and peace, are being proposed as antidotes to fanaticism and therefore as subjects that should be taught and learned in the schools. Therefore I have thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time examining ambiguity as it appears in various garbs. My intention is not to analyze in detail each ambiguous situation, but to explore the ways in which ambiguity appears in each and all of them. This examination does not claim to be exhaustive—by definition, ambiguity excludes completeness, but it should be enough to base upon it some conclusions applicable to our educational endeavors. Samson and the Terrorists One of the first ambiguities concerns terrorist acts. How does one evaluate the actions of a terrorist or a suicide bomber? During World War II the Allies conducted many terrorist activities against the Nazis, and these were justified in terms of the righteousness of “our cause.” Highly moral people were involved in some of these, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who participated in a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, and was apprehended and executed. Despite the violent nature of his act, Bonhoeffer became almost a cult figure after the war, and his books were eagerly bought and read. Today, the Palestinian families whose children sacrifice themselves call them “martyrs,” that is, witnesses. On the other hand, the Jewish and American families whose children are victimized condemn the same actions as murder. Thus the suicide bomber’s action itself becomes ambiguous from a political and moral point of view. Since ancient times, the case of Samson has been a paradigm, for it is claimed that Samson did not kill himself to kill others (his death was not voluntary), but,
The concept of ambiguity has been examined, among others, by Simone de Beauvoir (1948). See also Alexander Nehamas (1998), 15.
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rather, he destroyed others to avenge his humiliation and blindness at the hands of the Philistines—and in the process lost his life. Milton, in Samson Agonistes (line 1665), claims that Samson died, “Not willingly, but tangl’d in the fold/Of dire necessity,” a view compatible with Judges 16:28. This would make him, at least, a terrorist, though the stain of suicide would be removed. But how does one know the mind of Samson? Samson’s case makes clear the difficulty of interpretation: his story is told by his family and friends, but we do not know how the Philistines felt about his sporting with their women and his final terrorist act. In our times, we often have both sides of the terrorist’s story but no clear guidelines to interpret it—except, perhaps, its consequences. Even then, as Maritain showed, the moral nature of a physical act changes when the situation to which it belongs becomes so different that it can no longer be judged by the usual standards. Such is the case in repressive societies, concentration camps, states of siege, and ghettos (Maritain, 1961, pp. 71–75; Levi, 1989, p. 75). Does the case of the modern terrorist fall within these parameters? One must add that a major problem in understanding terrorism and violence is that violence is universal. It exists among the lawful and the unlawful, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, among those who seek to justify it (and themselves) and among those who do not (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, pp. xxxvi, 2). Eros and Psyche Apuleius, in his farcical novel, The Golden Ass, narrates the story of Eros (or Cupid, or Amor) and Psyche, my next exploration of ambiguity. I am trying to deal here with the ambiguity of research itself, the ambiguity of asking questions. Psyche was the youngest daughter of a king, and she so excelled her sisters in beauty and grace that she seemed like a goddess among humans, and Venus herself was deemed less beautiful, which did not please the goddess, especially as her temples began to grow empty and her festivals lacked pomp. Chagrined, Venus asked her son, Eros, for advice, and he suggested that Venus, through her divine powers, make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest monster alive. Venus, however, made the mistake of showing Eros an image of Psyche, and Eros fell madly in love with her—without telling his mother, of course. As a result, Eros made sure no one would fall in love with Psyche, and as her sisters had married, she pined alone, loveless and forlorn. Her father consulted the oracle of Apollo at Delphi (who had been apprized by Eros of his secret love), so his answer was strange but binding: let Psyche dress in mourning and be taken to the summit of a rocky peak, where her husband-to-be, a horrible winged serpent, would come to her and wed her. Attired for a funeral rather than a wedding, poor Psyche sat waiting for her intended when gentle breezes, instead, engulfed and lifted her and transported her gently to a grassy meadow where there rose a grand and palatial mansion. Soft voices guided her and unseen hands took care of her, bathed her, and laid her down to sleep. In the middle of the night her lover came, gentle and kind, and she felt him, touched him, and presumably made love to him, though she could not see him. In fact, she was forbidden to look at him, and as long as she obeyed, everything went well and she lived happy and contented in the sumptuous palace. 234
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One day, however, her sisters came to the craggy rock where they had left her, as they thought, to be destroyed by the monster. Psyche begged her lover to let her visit with them, and reluctantly he agreed. They were astonished at the things that Psyche told them, but, perhaps jealous of her good fortunes, they bred in her the suspicion that the prohibition against seeing her lover was due to his extreme ugliness, so they encouraged her to contrive stealthily to spy on him, and she agreed. When she went back to her castle, therefore, after their love-making, when her lover was asleep, she stole from the bed, softly lit an oil lamp, and returned quietly to the room and lo! there, on their bed, lay the most gorgeous youth, sleeping blissfully. She was so stunned by the vision of Eros, her true love, that the lamp in her hand tilted and a drop of hot oil fell on the youth’s shoulder, burning him and waking him up with a jolt. Disappointed at her lack of trust, Eros left her forthwith and sought his mother’s help in curing his wound. I won’t detail the travails Psyche had to endure to gain her lover back. My point here is the ambiguity of a relationship which thrives in darkness and dies with clarity, a relationship which endures only if its ground remains invisible and which crumbles if discovered. In other words, there is no way of sustaining the experience once one tries to ascertain it. …And Heisenberg This, I take, though in a metaphorical way, was the discovery of Werner Heisenberg, that we cannot measure simultaneously the position and the coordinates of any given system (“You cannot have your lover and see him,” or, more prosaically, “You cannot have your cake and eat it!”, which means that no measurement can ever be perfect. This is popularly known as “the uncertainty principle.” In a simplified fashion, the principle states that one cannot be certain of any event or reality one has measured because the act of measuring itself interferes with the thing or event measured, which, therefore, is not just itself any more. If one wants to see what it is, one will lose it, as Psyche lost her lover. This was the ground of Goethe’s criticism of Newton’s prism experiment. Newton had concluded that color is “rays differently refrangible” (Optics I,1,1, Scholium; Hutchins 1952, pp. 34, 389), (the color spectrum); but what Newton discovered, argued Goethe, was not the nature of light itself but only the nature of light as interfered with; for, Goethe said, once we have “seen” it, it is no longer light itself. Newton tried to get behind the phenomena, but for Goethe, going behind the phenomena left the phenomena behind, just as, for Psyche, throwing light on her relationship threw her relationship in the dark. In its ambiguity, reality presents to us this allure: “Investigate me,” it says, and when we do, we are tempted to conclude that what we found is the real thing, neglecting our perceptions of it. “How difficult it is,” wrote Goethe, “not to put the sign in place of the thing; how difficult to keep the being [Wesen] always livingly before one and not to slay it with the word” (Goethe, 1955, pp. 13, 452; Tolkien, 1965, p. 272).
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Kalyayev and the Grand Duke A similar kind of ambiguity, but at the social level, is developed again in Camus’s play, “The Just Assassins” (Camus, 1958). The play concerns the historical attempts of a group of revolutionaries in Russia to assassinate the Grand Duke Sergei in 1905. A major figure in the play is Stepan, a man who had once been apprehended by the police, tortured, and confined to jail, from which he had eventually escaped to Switzerland. Now he has returned to carry on his original revolutionary activity. But torture has turned Stepan into a fanatic. For him, there is no love. There are no limits, either. There is nothing forbidden if it may foster the revolution. He believes in the values he and his companions stand for even if it means forcing them down on complacent humanity. To those who disagree, he answers, “You don’t believe in the revolution, any of you” (Camus, 1958, p. 258). The taunt is addressed to all, though the focus is Ivan Kaliayev, a young poet who has joined the revolution because he loves life. He is charged with throwing the bomb when the Grand Duke attends the theater, but noticing the children in the company of their father, Kaliayev refrains and returns to the revolutionary hideout: killing innocent children is a limit he will not cross. Discussions ensue, passionate and philosophical, for the question is whether or not murder is ever morally justified. This is not an easy matter to settle. To kill another human being violates the ethics of respect for human life that should be—and is, at least theoretically—at the base of all revolutions. But to stand by while others debase, murder, and execute people is not just shameful, it makes one a collaborator, an accomplice. Kaliayev’s solution— kill only when absolutely necessary and then accept your own death as proof that murder is not permitted—may not appear reasonable or satisfactory to many. But in fact, that is exactly what happened historically: in his next try, Kaliayev did hurl the bomb that killed the Grand Duke, and then he stood by, without attempting to flee, while the police grabbed him and led him to jail. He was eventually condemned to death and hanged, and his death, his comrades felt, lifted the pall of murder from their act: they felt exonerated, justified. It should be clear, of course, that Kaliayev’s reason for joining the revolution is often the moral justification offered by suicide terrorists. And there is no reason to doubt it. It presents itself also as an alternative to fanaticism. Che Guevara, in 1965, gave expression to the same feeling: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality” (Gerassi, 1969, p. 398). This is, perhaps, a better justification of violence and terrorism than that offered in the name of the future and utopia: the justification of violence and terrorism by reference to the future is invalid simply because of the contingency of the future (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p. xxxvi). But the problem of means remains, and since revolt is necessary in order to ensure the humanizing of all societies, the problem is not likely to go away any time soon—unless we take pains to prevent fanaticism and extend the reign of love. AlGhazali has preserved for us a comment of the Prophet: on returning to Medina after a battle, he remarked, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.” 236
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When asked what he meant, he replied: “Struggling against the enemy in your own breast” (Al-Ghazali, 1992, p. 3, 14 in Murata 1994, p. 21). Exile and the Kingdom In his collection of short stories, Exile and the Kingdom (Camus, 1958), which eventually won for him the Nobel Prize, Camus enshrined a series of stories centered around similar themes of ambiguity. All of them, in one way or another, raise this issue at various levels of human life, especially with regards to our relation to social institutions. I choose three of them. The first, “The Silent Men” narrates an episode all too common in our modern life. A bunch of workers are on strike against the owner of their shop demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Except for the fact of the strike, they had all been on friendly terms with the owner, so the strike introduces an alienation in their relationship which they notice but cannot transcend. The issue comes to a head when the boss’s young daughter is taken grievously ill and rushed to the hospital, but though they all feel his pain and would like to commiserate with him, the facts of the strike prevent them from doing so. Their situation has been rendered ambiguous, as their allegiances, called into question, are no longer clear. Another story, “The Artist at Work,” makes the ambiguity of our situation in the world of others unmistakably clear. Jonas is a painter basking in the attention that the success of his work has brought him. But success has brought also a gaggle of admirers and sycophants who pester him day and night. Art critics begin to comment that his work is suffering, and that success has interfered with his creative genius. In desperation he builds a loft in his studio where he can take refuge from them all and do his work in some peace. Slowly he isolates himself more and more from the crowds, until he remains up in the loft at all times, aloof even from his wife and their infant baby. The climax of the story comes when he embarks on what he feels is going to be his masterpiece. For a week or more he works feverishly on a large canvas, until one day he collapses with exhaustion. His best friend, Rateau, climbs the ladder to the loft to see what he had wrought, and in the center of the large, otherwise empty canvas, he finds just one word scribbled, but so indistinct, that he could not tell if it read “solidary” or “solitary.” A third story, “The Guest,” brings ambiguity into the school. Daru is a school teacher in charge of a one-room school high in the desert mountains of North Africa. Snow had fallen and none of the pupils were around, so it was with some surprise that Daru greeted the police chief of the nearest village who had arrived unexpectedly with a prisoner. The man, the chief said, had killed another, and therefore had to be taken for trial to the provincial capital on the other side of the mountain. He could not take him: he was needed back in the village, so he was requesting that the teacher do it. Much against his will, Daru consented. The next morning he led the prisoner through the plateau where the school stood, and after several hours, they came to a place where the mountain sloped gently toward the plains. Here Daru stopped and spoke to the prisoner: “Look,” he said, pointing toward the east, “there’s the way 237
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to the city. You have a two-hour walk. There you’ll find the administration and the police waiting for you.” Then he pointed toward the south and said: “That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s time you’ll find the nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter you according to their law.” And he turned around and started on his way back to the school house. After a while he turned around and, in the distance, he could barely see the prisoner walking toward the city and the prison. He reached the school house in the middle of the day, sweaty and tired after the climb back in the sun. As he entered the classroom he saw, scribbled on the blackboard, the message, “You handed over our brother. You’ll pay for this.” To shift focus: who can claim that the status and life of the teacher are devoid of ambiguity? This is not a matter merely of the subject matter one teaches but of the very life one leads. To highlight one, we train ourselves to be critics of the system we train others to fit into. Like Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s play, Equus, we relieve children of their curiosity and adolescents of their passion and we turn them into “normal” people; we rob them of their dreams but are not able to provide them with new ones; we do all these ultimate, essential, irreversible things without knowing exactly what we do (Shaffer, 1974, pp. 124–125). Chuang Tzu and Descartes At a more abstract level, ambiguity assails us in the very act of knowing. Let me turn to an anecdote from the Taoist tradition. Chuang Tzu, the great master, narrates the following: Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. (Watson, 1968, p. 49)
This was, precisely, Descartes’s problem—or the problem he foresaw. He knew that he was: the fact that he was thinking proved it clearly and distinctly. But suppose he was dreaming? suppose he was really a butterfly dreaming he was? The criteria he had established, clarity and distinctness applied whether he was asleep or awake; in fact, he could envisage an all-powerful “jin” who might induce in him the illusion, or the dream, that he was: therefore he needed a guarantee that this was not the case, a guarantee that he was awake, and that he would not be deceived in this matter of his existence. The only way to have this guarantee was to have recourse to a God more powerful than any “jin” and also absolutely benevolent, so that by definition, it would be impossible for this God to deceive him. Therefore Descartes proved the existence of this God, the Anselmian God, “than which nothing greater can be conceived” (Anselm, Proslogium, p. 2) in order to minimize the ambiguities of his certainty. At the root of his irreducible certainty, at the center of the Cogito, Descartes uncovered the ambiguities of knowing and existing, even though he hurried to close off their temptation. 238
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II Now let me explore more directly some ambiguities connected with the educational enterprise. Again, this examination is not exhaustive; it represents, in some way, my own biases and concerns. “No child shall be Left Behind” In the current political climate much has been made of the fact that a new education reform act has been passed with the cooperation of both major parties. The shibboleth of this new legislation has been the President’s oft-repeated phrase, “No child shall be left behind.” More significant than the passage of this legislation, it seems to me, has been the fact that among the some four hundred or so supposedly well educated legislators and cabinet members, not one objected to the obvious stupidity of the statement. No child shall be left behind? What about the mentally retarded, the emotionally disturbed, the autistic, the migrant, the vagrant, the truant, the dyslexic, and those thousands unwilling to be taught? The unreality of this statement in the lips of a national leader, and the unquestioning acceptance by the leadership in Congress and in professional educational circles has stunned me. This lack of critical examination has appeared to me as another example of our callous approach to ambiguity; for, indeed, this is a major aspect of the educational experiment, that no matter what we try to do, a significant number of children will remain truly untouched by it, left behind, not because we have not tried to reach them, but because we have not reckoned with the natural facts of ability and talent, which are a major component of the enterprise. Plato’s Allegory of the Metals It is interesting that, when Plato was presenting his ideal system of education (paideia), he introduced a fable to help people understand the variations in natural endowment and therefore in attainment. This is the so-called “Myth of the Metals’ in Republic III. 414–415. The fable is not meant to deceive, but is rather a picturesque way of expressing what Plato believed, that his system would not produce “mathematically equal results,” because the variations in individual nature had to be taken into consideration (Jaeger, 1943, pp. 2, 235). We all, Plato says, come from the same earth and therefore are one, having the same Mother; but we have been fashioned by nature according to mixtures of “metals,” gold, silver, iron, and bronze, and therefore have a multiplicity of talents and abilities (Friedländer, 1958, pp. 3, 94) which explain the differences among us. Thus education is built on a dual basis of natural oneness and natural multiplicity. We are all created equal and different. There is a physiological root to our differences, and this root must be taken into account when designing an education and when evaluating it. There is, thus, a radical ambiguity to the process, one we neglect at our peril.
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…And the Swedish Experiment Not too long ago, Robert Erikson and Jan O. Jonsson brought out a book on the Swedish experiment on equal education (Erikson & Jonsson, 1966). Since the beginning of the 20th century, political leaders in Sweden have pursued the goal of diminishing a socially biased selection to Higher Education. “It was considered a grave injustice that a person’s life chances should be dependent upon circumstances to which she was born,” writes one of the authors (Ibid., p. 65). The elimination of dependency on social factors was seen as synonymous with the creation of equality of educational opportunity, defined as “the chance to attain a specific educational level rather than its actual attainment” (Ibid., p. 207, note 1). Therefore, and despite opposition, a series of reorganizations in the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education were implemented which, together with other welfare state provisions, strong labor movement, and other reforms, achieved a “substantial reduction of inequalities in income and other aspects of the level of living” (Ibid., p. 1). In fact, “poverty in an absolute sense was in practice eradicated in the 1970s” (Ibid., p. 66). These successes led the late Olof Palme to claim that “with further educational reforms it would be possible to ‘dismantle the class society’” (Ibid.). However, from the 1970s to the present, a series of research reports suggest that inequality of educational opportunity is still great in Sweden and may be even increasing. The pattern of inequality has remained essentially the same, though some equalization did occur, noticeably in the transition from secondary to Higher Education, making Sweden somewhat of an exceptional case when compared with other countries. A comparison with the U.S. shows that the two countries have approached equality of educational opportunity along different pathways. The Swedish path goes directly through existing class barriers, lowering them over the course of this century; the American path goes around them, expanding the system so much that classbased selection is irrelevant because so few students are mustered out until the end of secondary education. The direct comparisons in this report show that Sweden had stronger class barriers than the U.S.A. in the early part of this century but that recent Swedish cohorts have enjoyed more equality of opportunity than American cohorts born at the same time. (Ibid., p. 229)
Still, in the case of Sweden, as was mentioned above, equality of educational opportunity and of educational attainment have not been achieved. Why? Several factors were listed, among which mention was made of academic ability and the circumstances attending it, such as home environment, school environment, differences in health and nutrition, and the number of siblings. However, in the discussion, little attention was given to the genetic components of ability, for this was not thought to affect outcome in any significant manner. This is in contrast to the U.S., where since the late 1960s, a virulent discussion has raged regarding the role of genetics in intelligence and, consequently, in educational attainment (Jensen, 1969; Itzkoff, 1994; Herrnstein & Murray, 1966). It would seem that, as the authors themselves concede, “The greater the differences in ability, the greater will be the expected educational inequality” (Erikson & Jonsson, 1966, p. 10), and that therefore 240
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this factor, regardless of difficulties of its exploration, should have been researched and discussed in greater detail. One of the best discussions in the book is reserved for the issues involved in the rewards consequent upon educational attainment. The problem of “merit” is tackled by John H. Goldthorpe in Chapter 8, “Problems in ‘Meritocracy.’” The discussion takes its start from Michael Young’s “sociological fantasy,” The Rise of Meritocracy (Young 1958), whose formula, M(erit)=IQ plus effort, enshrined the perceived connection between innate talent (as measured by IQ) and social attainment and reward. But, as Golthorpe points out, effort is not always consequent upon talent, nor is attainment always rewarded equally (physicians and college professors with comparable talent, effort, and initial attainment receive outrageously different financial rewards, a fact which is indicative of the wide variations in the assignment of merit). Moreover, even the question of innate talent and ability is murky and ambiguous (witness the IQ controversy), and its introduction is likely to give rise to additional problems regarding attainment and merit. How meritorious, for example, is the attainment of those who are extraordinarily gifted? If inequality of talent is a fact, why should geniuses be rewarded since they did not earn their privileged starting points? Indeed, as Goldthorpe himself concludes: “no generally applicable answer to the question of what constitutes merit can in fact be given” (Erikson & Jonsson, 1966, pp. 280–281). The issue, clearly, remains ambiguous. To complicate matters one may ask, Why this concern with equality, since it can never be attained? What about justice? For despite the difficulty in ascertaining talent, people obviously are no more equal in talent and ability than they are in height, weight, and the color of their skin. Even so-called equality of opportunity must be provided to all according to their talents, abilities, needs, and expectations that is, according to justice. This is the case, too, in civil society at large, though we often forget it. In the U.S., Madison claimed in The Federalist, No. 51, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.” It cannot be otherwise in a nation with so many varied interests and needs, and a long history of discrimination. So why the headlong pursuit of equality?
Goldthorpe (in Erikson & Jonsson, 1966, p. 267) quotes John Rawls (1972, p. 104): “It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society.” The principle of justice may be stated negatively, to wit, that all should be treated equally unless and until there are relevant reasons for treating some differently. In Alasdair MacIntyre’s words (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 192), “Justice requires that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards.” This provisional uniformity may be at the root of those misunderstandings that look to equality per se as the goal of society. But the important thing to bear in mind is that such uniformity or equality is demanded by justice, and that where merit and desert are unequal, justice itself requires unequal treatment (Bedau 1971). There must also be among the people a general sense of the importance of justice and of its meaning, both in theory and in practice, something which we find lacking among ourselves today, and with dire consequences. As MacIntyre put it (MacIntyre 1984, p. 244), “When Aristotle praised justice as the first virtue of political life, he did so in such ways as to suggest that a community which lacks practical agreement on a conception of justice must also lack the necessary basis for political community.”
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The dream of equality is both mesmerizing and tantalizing, as the President’s slogan proves: it lures one on while remaining always unattainable; it promises an equal opportunity to fulfill every need without taking into account that need is never equal, and that what is therefore necessary is the just satisfaction of every legitimate, if unequal, need. Demagogues use equality to cover up their failure to be just. In the realm of fact there is no equality, which is why there is justice. Perhaps the pursuit of equality so strenuously engaged in by many today ought to give way to the pursuit of justice, for equality can never be achieved, while justice may be. It is, in fact, advantageous for inequality to exist, as in the case of genes, for diversity increases the chances for survival not only of the individual but of the whole genome. It can be said that justice exists because, in the concrete, in the context of complex societies, equality cannot be treated univocally, but only analogically. This is part and parcel of the ambiguity of social life. It may also be true that to seek justice without vision and, especially, without love is bound to lead any society to a wasteland. In fact, even the quest for justice may simply hide a failure to be kind. III Now, how are we to tackle the ambiguities presented so far (and others that may be uncovered)? What should we teach? Certainly, not tolerance and peace simpliciter, for these are ambiguous. And given the illness of ambiguity, what remedy should we prescribe? Marcuse and Toleration In a brilliant essay Marcuse (Wolff, 1969; Gur-Ze’ev, 2001) argued that the ideals of tolerance break down in the concrete lives of governments and societies. Tolerance today, he wrote, is commonly shown by people toward government and its practices, many of which are inhumane and unethical. Government, in turn, tolerates opposition to itself only within the established, traditional frameworks. Thus righteous citizens are made to tolerate evil so that the structure itself may be preserved; and by dissenting within the system they tend to become the system to the degree that they work within it. In other words, ideally, tolerance must be an end in itself, not subservient to any established order or disestablished opposition; otherwise it is always limited de facto. But, argues Marcuse, societies need to recreate constantly the conditions for a more humanized life. The problem is not one of realizing individual freedom within an existing structure, but of creating a structure that will not stifle individual freedom. In this task, the “pure tolerance” outlined above is of no use, for it is ambiguous: it tolerates error and evil as well as truth and goodness. In some ways, then, tolerance must become intolerant toward evil and error, for “the telos of tolerance is truth” (Wolff, 1969, p. 90). But how does one know the truth? Ideally, as a precondition, by having access to all sources of information; but this is de facto negated by our 242
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existing democratic structures. This is the reason why “pure tolerance”—the tolerance described above is itself a failure as an ideal. Not that one must therefore prefer fanaticism, but that “pure tolerance” is not an automatic antidote to fanaticism. And to complicate matters, there is the historical fact that some fanatical acts, condemned by some, are often considered holy by those in whose favor they were done. The teaching of tolerance, therefore, is not an unmixed blessing. Gur-Ze’ev and Saint Augustine “On the other hand,” as Tevye was wont to say, there is another perspective. St. Augustine structured his magnum opus, The City of God, around two major concepts, that of a celestial city and that of an earthly city. “Two cities,” he wrote in a famous passage, “have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God: the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self” (St. Augustine, City of God XIV, 28 in Hutchins, 1952, p. 397). By his own reckoning, the talk of “cities” is allegorical; he means two communities of people (City of God XV, 1 in Hutchins 1952, p. 398), two realms, not geographic, but, rather, distinguished by different spiritual orientations, leading two distinct though parallel existences; and the citizens of each have similar aspirations, though what they mean by them, and what means they use to obtain them, differ considerably. Thus, for example, the earthly city desires peace, but its peace is purchased by war, and though peace in general is a good thing and worthy of pursuit, it remains precarious, since the vanquished are always likely to upset the victors and fight, in turn, for their peace (City of God XV, 4 in Hutchins 1952: 399). The heavenly peace, however, the peace of the eternal city, the heavenly Jerusalem; or Shambhala, in the Buddhist tradition is indescribable and never to be lost once won. From this perspective, as Gur-Ze’ev points out, “the division is not only... between a state of peace and a state of violence (or conflict), but in parallel also between two essentially different states of peace. (One could also say, between two different states of violences, one secular, the other sacred, yet called ‘peace.’)” (Gur-Ze’ev, 2001, p. 325). The implication is that the earthly city’s peace is ambiguous, because it can eliminate fanaticism, violence, and terrorism only for a while, never eternally; and that by definition, the earthly city’s peace is limited by the limitations of the city itself: it is grandiose, enervating, selfcentered, profitable, endowed with a superficial wisdom, vain, and finally temporal, while the peace of the heavenly city defies description, though of it one can say, at least, that it is based on the transcendental wisdom and power of God. For in this other city, says St. Augustine, “there is no human wisdom, but only godliness, which offers due worship to the true God, and looks for its reward in the company of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men and women, ‘that God may be all in all’” (City of God XIV, 26 in Hutchins 1952, p. 397). To say this is, of course, to claim that no earthly peace will be forever lasting; it is to assert that any elimination of fanaticism and terrorism can only be temporary, never enduring, and never perfect, and that no amount of toleration learned in school will suffice to undo fanaticism. Even if one denies the heavenly dimension of Augustine’s argument, as many secularists do, still the historical evidence of the 243
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precariousness of all earthly achievements in this regard is overwhelming and gives witness to the truth of Augustine’s perspective. Freud, in his “Thoughts on War and Death” (1915) (Hutchins, 1952), made the case that the disillusionment experienced by all civilized people during World War I was based on the illusion that there could be perpetual peace and culture once people had reached a high level of civilization; it was based, in other words, on the illusion that the ambiguity of human existence could be transcended. But civilization is built on the control and/or suppression of powerful human instincts that are destructive in nature, and where the controls are flimsy, the façade is exposed as superficially strong and likely to collapse at the slightest provocation. Even if the controls are powerful and well coordinated, the instinctual forces may break through, especially where the masses are concerned. This is the nature of the state known as civilization, which can exist only at the expense of certain emotions and therefore is always on the brink of chaos, as a dam that is always near the point of collapse. No civilization can exist without its discontents. Rabindranath Tagore expressed this idea of the basic imperfection of all earthly endeavors in beautiful language and imagery: When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang “Oh, the picture of perfection! The joy unalloyed!” But one cried of a sudden—“It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.” The golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and they cried in dismay—“Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory of all the heavens!” From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy! Only in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper among themselves—“Vain is this seeking! Unbroken perfection is over all!” (Tagore, 1966, pp. 72–73).
Bernfeld and Vandenberg The conclusion seems to be that there is no perfect way to deal with ambiguity, and this is as important a thing to learn as how to deal with terrorism and fanaticism. One way of emphasizing this point is to highlight one of the essential paradoxes of education. There is in the entire approach to education as we know it today, a paradox that is unresolvable precisely because it is a paradox and precisely because this is what education is. It is the paradox of schooling and education, to take Vandenberg’s formulation of it. For him, education is a self-willed development, while schooling is a teacher-willed process. Education is what we do to ourselves when we want to grow intellectually and morally, which is the reason why, as Ortega claimed, to study an obligatory curriculum makes one cease to be a real student, for we study, then, the things that mattered to other people who discovered them and the things that matter to the teachers who teach them, not the things that matter to us to the point that we would think our lives wasted if we did not study them (Ortega y Gasset, 1960, Lesson 1). Vandenberg presents the paradox thus: “The pedagogic paradox 244
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is that the better schooling is, the less likely it is to have room for the pupil’s being toward his own destination” (Vandenberg, 1971, p. 102); that is, the better schooling gets, the worse it is. But this is what education is, and this is why we cannot undo the paradox. Bernfeld, in his own unique way, put it this way: “No theory of education can resolve the antinomy between the justified will of the child and the justified will of the teacher; on the contrary, education consists in this antinomy.” The ambiguity created by this paradox is something we need to learn to live with. IV Thought at the Meridian The conclusion of this survey of ambiguity in social, political, and educational life is that regardless of our disgust with fanaticism, there is no perfect way to prevent it. And yet, there is some consolation to be had. With profound insight, Ortega y Gasset commented that “all extremism inevitably fails because it consists in excluding or denying all but a single point of the entire vital reality. But the rest of it, not ceasing to be real merely because we deny it, always comes back and back, and imposes itself on us whether we like it or not” (Ortega y Gasset, 1962, p. 152). Caligula found this at the end of his life when he concluded that his freedom, by which he played at being almighty God, was not the right one (Camus, 1958, p. 73). Caesar must have glimpsed this when he was stabbed to death by his own adopted son; and Napoleon Bonaparte must have meditated on this truth whiling his life away in exile on the island of St. Helena. We do not know, of course, if they did, nor do we know what crossed the mind of Savonarola when he was burned at the stake by the same townspeople he had inflamed with his extremist rhetoric, nor what flashed in the mind of Malcolm X when he was cut down by the same extremism he had spawned and then refused. The truth, as all fanatics find out sooner or later, is that the whole world goes on living, loving, searching for happiness, while the fanatics pursue their puny dreams of grandeur in their postage-stamp-size quarter of the globe, and when the world finally notices them, it crushes them like an annoying gnat squashed between the pages of a book. In a way, blind faith, fanatical faith, is an exaggeration, a squandering of belief. It is grounded on the “all or nothing” position of a Father Paneloux who had given his all to God and therefore could have no friends, and would not call in a doctor when he was stricken with plague (Camus, 1948, pp. 206, 210). To oppose fanaticism amounts to saying that there are no ultimate answers, and that to pretend there are, even in the name of God or country, is to deceive oneself. In an interview in 1948 Camus commented that “according to Pascal, error comes from exclusion” (Camus, “Trois Interviews” in Quilliot, 1965, p. 379), an idea Camus summarized in a lapidary statement, “Nothing is true that forces one to exclude” (Camus, 1970, p. 165). Another way of stating this is that the essence of right belief is moderation. As an Algerian, Camus was aware of the fact that in the tropics, at noon, the sun leaves no 245
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shadows. This was the image he chose to represent this thinking that rejects nothing and which keeps its eyes open to all the riches of the universe. He called it “thought at the meridian,” or “noonday thought” (Camus, 1970, p. 153). It may be the only real antidote to fanaticism. …And the Schools As far as the schools are concerned, then, it may not be enough to speak of ambiguity as an antidote to fanaticism in general, one may need to be specific about the ways to administer the remedy under penalty of being deemed too philosophical. It must be remembered that the U. S. publishers of the first Harry Potter novel did not think Americans would go for a book with the word “philosophy” on the title, so they changed it to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” from the original, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (emphasis added). With this change was lost, too, any allusion to the long history of the human quest for “The Philosopher’s Stone.” At any rate, there are concrete things that can be done in the schools to prevent fanaticism and they all center, more or less, around the development of a healthy attitude toward ambiguity. Many of these things are obvious: help children clarify their values (and their parents’ values!) by following the usual techniques of values clarification. This may entail, besides questioning, the exposure to the history and cultures of various peoples, including their religious traditions. But the clarification of values is not enough. It must be accompanied by a determined effort to teach children the love for the truth that alone can save us all. I have long been impressed by the fact that that bastion of Christian orthodoxy, Saint Thomas Aquinas, used the arguments from Muslims, Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to bolster his own search for truth. It is as if he were saying, it makes no difference where the truth is found as long as it is found, just as it makes no difference where gold is found as long as it is gold. There are many ways to instill in children this love for the truth. One way is exposure to the ways of truth in the various traditions and cultures of the world. This may be done by the introduction of folk tales, myths, and other stories significant to the various cultures, for truth, as the Indians say of God, is one but wears many garbs. A Gujarati proverb has it that the Nameless sports many names. Rather than patronize other cultures from the point of view of our own, the point should be to learn to appreciate them all as purveyors of truth in the same way as we learn to value a diamond regardless of the diverse mountings it may be enshrined in. Another things is to help children understand the ambiguities of science itself. It seems to me unpardonable that students should be allowed to graduate from high school without being exposed to non-Eucledian geometries. A further point may be the learning of moderation. We live in a culture of exaggeration without regard for truth, where every new product is “the best,” every building is “the tallest,” every loan interest is “the lowest”, every sweetener is “the sweetest,” every flight “the fastest,” and so on, all claims made without regard for truth. From this point of view, as Camus claimed, we live in a culture of lies, because to lie is not just to say what is not true but, equally, to claim more than is 246
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true (Camus, 1956, p. 336). We need to remind ourselves of the old Roman saying, “modus in rebus” (moderation in all things) and of the Greeks’ pursuit of “nothing in excess” which found individual happiness in the harmony and balance among all of the person’s attributes and social happiness in the pursuit of justice. Furthermore, we must resist the tendency to oversimplify life. Walt Disney failed at this when in his movies he refashioned the traditional myths and fairy tales to exclude what he thought was the dark side of life, which he considered inappropriate for children to inspect. But this is tantamount to denying the essential ambiguity of our existence. More damage is done, probably, by the exclusion of these factors than by their inclusion, as happens with any view that denies the richness and complexity of life. From this perspective we must educate contra Disney. A contemporary example of the viability and success of this approach is the series of Star Wars movies where the reality, the allure, and the power of the “dark Force” is entertained to the fullest even if, in the long run, it is the “bright side of the Force” that emerges triumphant. In conclusion, if we want to prevent fanaticism and terrorism, we need to foster in children the feeling for the beauty and worth of human life, what Kant called “the beauty and dignity of human nature” (Kant, 1923, II., p. 257), a beauty that is not marred by the ambiguity that surrounds it. We achieve this by having schools in which respect for all the members of the community is warm and explicit, where teachers, pupils, parents, administrators, and staff treat each other with utmost care and consideration, so that such attitudes will become visceral in the children. J. Glenn Gray has claimed that “a happy person will never—or almost never— give way to the destructive passions of rage and resentment. On the other hand, the unhappiness that arises from the frustration of action and consequently thwarted self-realization and deprivation of freedom is nearly bound to be violent” (Gray, 1970, p. 29). The suggested corrective, besides creating conditions of empowerment and success, is taken from the work of Spinoza. In the Ethics, Part 3 (in Hutchins 1952), Spinoza maintains that if we imagine ourselves loving people, we will love them, and our subsequent actual love may destroy any hatred we may feel toward them. We make the latter action possible by means of the imagination. The imagination, in turn, is strengthened and made effective through action that, in a way, implements the affects we have imagined and entertained. Action may even give rise to the affects. Hence, as Aristotle had postulated (Aristotle, Nic. Ethics II, p. 2 [1103a 32–1103b 26]), it makes an enormous difference if we habituate children to act kindly, lovingly, respectfully, considerately, and truthfully, from their very youth, while supporting these actions with stories that exemplify them. Jesus did this when he appropriated Hillel’s lapidary summary of the Law, “Love God and love your neighbor,” and explained what it meant to be a neighbor through a story. A traveler was set upon by robbers who left him for dead. A Priest came by, and then a Levite, too, and neither stopped to help. A Samaritan chanced by and he took care of the injured man. Then Jesus asked, “Who was this man’s neighbor?” “The one who showed him kindness,” came the reply. Jesus added, “Go and do as he did” (Luke, 10, 25–37). St. Augustine understood what Jesus meant when he preached, “Love and do what you will’ (St. Augustine, Tractatus VIII in Epistulam; 247
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ML 35, 1978), and sixteen hundred years later the Beatles sang, “All you need is love!” Similarly, according to a hadith, one day a man came to visit the Prophet. When his name was announced, Mohammed muttered in disgust, “Oh, that shame of his clan it is, eh? That bad fellow?” But when he actually met the man, the Prophet was all smiles and dealt cheerfully with his visitor. After the man left, Aisha asked him to explain his behavior. Mohammed replied, “Why, Aisha, when have you seen me act grossly with people?” (Williams, 1962, p. 85). Finally, one must remember that the compassion of the Buddha Sakhyamuni is best exemplified in the bodhisattva, a seer who has attained Enlightenment but at the last minute, in a sublime gesture of love, refuses release and returns to earthly ambiguity to care for those who are still lost upon the way. Thus, in Kipling’s novel, Kim, the Lama finally attains the freedom he had sought so assiduously. His soul goes free, soaring like an eagle, until he merges with the universal All. His mind is open to a thousand meditations in a thousand years, passionless, aware of the Causes of all things. Suddenly, a voice cries out, “What shall come to the boy if thou art dead?” The Lama is shaken back and forth with pity for him, and he decides, “I will return to my chela, lest he miss the Way.” And so he does. He pushes aside world upon world for his sake until he is once again squatting before him. “Son of my Soul,” he says to Kim, “I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold of Freedom to free thee from all sin—as I am free, and sinless! Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance! Come!” (Kipling, pp. 411–413). The happy Teacher One last word: A major task for teachers is to learn to deal with ambiguity in their own lives and in the lives of their pupils, who need to learn this themselves. This is an awesome task and one fraught with great dangers, for if it is not done, the result may be fanaticism, the closing off of alternatives, even ambiguous ones. Added to this task is the fact that teaching is an activity where the outcome is always ambiguous: one never knows if one has ever really taught anything to anyone, and therefore what one set out to become, a teacher, is a project whose outcome remains always ambiguous. And it is an endless task. Like Sisyphus, teachers push their rocks up each year only to see them roll down each summer, while they ready themselves to push another rock as the academic year starts. But the doing of this must be deemed worthwhile. The meeting of people and minds, the merging of hearts, year after year, in the knowledge that we are all fellow travelers in quest of temporary abodes, is itself enough to fill the teacher’s heart. One must imagine the teacher happy (Götz, 1988, p. 78).
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References Al-Ghazali, M. (1992). Ihya ulum al-Din. 6 vols. Beirut: Dar al-Hadi. Beauvoir, S. de. (1948). The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Philosophical Library. Bedeau, H. A. (Ed). (1971). Justice and Equality. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Berenfeld, S. (1973). Sisyphus or The Limits of Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Camus, Albert. (1958). Caligula and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage. _____________. (1958). Exile and the Kingdom. New York: Vintage. _____________. (1946). The Plague. New York: The Modern Library. _____________. (1970). Lyrical and Critical Essays. New York: Vintage. Erikson, R. & Jonsson, J. (Eds.) (1966). Can Education be Equalized? The Swedish Case in Comparative Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. Friedländer, P. (1958). Plato. 3 vols.; New York: Pantheon Books. Gerassi, J. (Ed) (1968). Venceremos: The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara. New York: Simon & Schuster. Goethe, J. W. (1955). Werke. New York: Hamburger Ausgabe. Götz, Ignacio L. (1988). Zen and the Art of Teaching. Westbury: J. L. Wilkerson Publishing Co. Gray, J. G. (1970). Understanding Violence Philosophically & Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2001). Philosophy of Peace Education in a Postmodern Era. Educational Theory 51(3), 315–336. Herrnstein, R. & Charles M. (1994). The Bell Curve. New York: The Free Press. Hutchins, R.M. (Ed.). (1952). Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Itzkoff, S. W. (1994). The Decline of Intelligence in America. Westport: Praeger. Jaeger, W. (1943). Paideia: The Idela of Greek Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Jensen, A. R. (1969). How Much can we Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement? Harvard Educational Review 39(1), 1–123. Kant, I. (1923). Immanuel Kants Werke. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Kipling, R. (n.d). Kim. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. Levi, P. (1989). The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage. MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Maritain, J. (1961). Man and the State. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1969). Humanism and Terror. Boston: Beacon Press. Murata, S. & William C. C. (1994). The Vision of Islam. New York: Paragon House. Nehamas, A. (1998). In Praise of Uncertainty and Other Underappreciated Concepts. The New York Times, January 10, A15. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1960). Some Lessons in Metaphysics. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. __________________. (1962). Man and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton &. Co. Quilliot, R. (Ed) (1965). Albert Camus: Essais. Paris: Editions Gallimard. Rawls, J. (1972). A Theory of Justice. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Shaffer, P. (1974). Equus. New York: Avon Books. Slattery, P. & Maria M. (1999). Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics and Postmodern Ambiguity: The Assertion of Freedom in the Face of the Absurd. Educational Theory 49(1), 21–36.
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Language, Identity, and Exile Dedicated to the uprooted people of the villages of Ik’rit and Bir’am, in the Northern Galilee, Israel.
An essay on writing and exile should, I believe, be prefaced by a double apology. First, for the inevitable exclusivity of a perspective which shuts out the pain of millions of voiceless exiles, those described by Joseph Brodsky in a talk on “The Condition We Call Exile”: Turkish Gastarbeiters, Vietnamese boat people, Mexican wetbacks, Ethiopian refugees—those millions of uncountable and silent migrants, whose suffering, Brodsky says, makes it “very difficult to talk about the plight of the writer in exile with a straight face” (Brodsky, 1995, pp. 22–3). Taking our clue from this honest admission, we should say at the outset that writing about literature, identity, and exile requires a great deal of humility in the face of the real, concrete condition of deprivation, homelessness and longing. We must not idealize exile. The second part of my apologetic preface concerns the all-too-trendy equation of Modernism with Exile. The conception of writing in general and Modernist writing in particular in terms of exile, “extraterritoriality”, to use Steiner’s term (1972), has, I feel, been overused and to some extent abused. The exilic connection is undoubtedly there, as in the cases of Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov, and others, but this connection is in danger of being generalized to a point of triviality. If we are all in exile, there is no such thing as home. If we are all homeless, no one is an exile. One should, then, resist the seduction of pat generalizations and attend to the concrete and specific, allowing for a distinction to be made between various modes of exile in relation to literature: between writers who were exiled or had to flee, and those who could have stayed home but chose to exile themselves; And, more importantly, between writers who continued writing in their native tongue even at a distance, like Joyce, and those who—like Conrad—chose to write in another language, for another culture. These caveats notwithstanding, I believe that the relationship of writing and exile may still offer some valuable insights into the nature of language and identity. The more illuminated and illuminating side of exile has found expression in the work of Tzvetan Todorov, who left his homeland Bulgaria, then under an oppressive regime, and chose to live in the West. Having dealt with Todorov’s exilic sensibility elsewhere (Erdinast-Vulcan 2004), I would settle for a brief reference to the sense of “double exteriority”, the experience of the uprooted, de-territorialized subject (l’homme depaysee), which, Todorov argues, is a paradigmatic ethical experience of navigation between the relative and the absolute. The exilic mode of being, a living on boundary-lines, produces a constant relativization of one’s home, one’s culture, one’s language, and one’s self, through the acknowledgement of otherness. [ 251 ]
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It is a homesickness without nostalgia, without the desire to return to the same, to be identical to oneself. The encounter with the other which produces a “transvaluation” of one’s own culture (Todorov, 1991), is also the ultimately ethical experience of reading oneself in quotation marks (Todorov, 1996). But this exilic capacity is dearly bought, and it is the dark side of exile which I would like to address here. To understand some of the losses incurred acquiring this “double exteriority”, let us begin with the story of Eva Hoffman, who had emigrated as a young girl with her family from Poland and became an intellectual celebrity in America. Hoffman’s case is obviously a success story, but her memoir, written at the very height of her professional accomplishment, is all about the losses incurred in the process of assimilation in a new culture, which she describes as a labour of selftranslation. Reconstructing the experience of the immigrant child, she writes: Every day I learn new words, new expressions.... The problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signifieds. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. ‘River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold—a word without an aura. It has no accumulating associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke. The process, alas, works in reverse as well. When I see a river now, it is not shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodates it to the psyche—a word that makes a body of water a river rather than an uncontained element. The river before me remains a thing, absolutely other, absolutely unbending to the grasp of my mind. (Hoffman, 1991, p. 106)
This radical disjoining of word and thing becomes, for the exiled child, a “desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances—its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection” (Hoffman, 1991, p.107). It leads to the loss of interior language, the very sense of one’s subjective existence (Hoffman, 1991, p.108). The same sense of loss, the linguistic exile described by Hoffman, is experienced, albeit unconsciously and to a much lesser extent, by anyone learning a foreign language. When we learn our mother tongue there is no sense of mediation: it seems that the words are identical to their referents and express the world directly. When we learn a foreign language, we know that words are only representations, or—to use the Saussurean term—that signifiers are arbitrary, and their relation to their signifieds is purely a matter of linguistic convention. This experience, though common enough to become invisible, should cast some doubt on the currently fashionable Lacanian view of language itself as the form of estrangement. The acquisition of language, for Lacan and his followers, marks the child’s banishment from the seamless plenitude of the Imaginary Order (the dyadic relations with the mother), and the entry into the Symbolic Order governed by the Name-of-the-Father. I would suggest, however, that Lacan, who seldom lets ordinary facts stand in the way of his theorizing, ignores the psychic reality of the mother-tongue experience. A good illustration of my point 252
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would be the joke of the English Nanny who holds up a piece of cutlery for her little pupils to see: “in German”, she says, “they call this ‘ein Messer’, in French, they call this ‘un couteau’; and in English, we call it ‘a knife’, because that’s what it is”. The Nanny has apparently not read Lacan, but untutored, and naïvely chauvinistic as she may be, there is a more than a grain of truth in her confident claim. It is only our first language which offers this apparently unmediated correlation with reality. The mother-tongue experience is ontologically different. Going back to Hoffman, we can see that the meaning of exile in her case is precisely the loss of that formative contact with the first language, a loss which is total and irremediable. Even when one attains a level of proficiency in the foreign language, the translated self remains incomplete. It is the selfhood of someone who will never feel at home in her own skin. What it true for any exilic mode of being is infinitely more complex and fraught in the case of a people who, with a profound instinct for communal survival, has—perversely, absurdly, ingeniously—turned its prolonged diasporic existence into a home away from home through the vehicle of diasporic language itself. The phenomenon of Yiddish, which emerged in central Europe about a thousand years ago, is a cultural paradox: it is, on the one hand, a language of fusion, structurally open to its various linguistic environments, ever-ready to absorb foreign elements, and endlessly adaptable to various European settings. But it is at the same time “the cement of an extraterritorial enclosure which kept the separate social and religious network of the [European] Jews within its own possible world” (Harshav, 1990, p. xiii). It is, then, precisely that built-in hybridity of Yiddish which has turned it both into bridge of communication with the surrounding, often hostile Christian world, and into the Jewish lingua franca, an enclosure of communal subjectivity, “a junction, a noisy marketplace where ‘internal’ and ‘external’ languages and cultures met and interacted. It was the coherent floor of a schizophrenic existence” (Harshav, 1990, pp. 21–2). While we make take issue with Harshav’s designation of Jewish linguistic existence as “schizophrenic” with its denotation of pathology, the evident complexity of this phenomenon is compounded by the relationship of Yiddish—the language of “education, debate, preaching, community meetings, legal advice, court procedures, trade, storytelling, family life, and all other forms of oral communication” (Harshav, 1990, pp. 21–2)—and Hebrew, the “holy tongue”, the language of serious writing, of rituals and ceremonies, of learning and spiritual authority. Far from a mere handmaid to Hebrew, Yiddish was the language of life, affectionately nicknamed mame-loshn, the “mama-language” (not to be identified with “mother-tongue”), “a typical Yiddish compound of Slavic and Hebrew/ roots, connoting the warmth of the Jewish family, as symbolized by mama and her language, embracing and counteracting the father’s awesome, learned Holy Tongue.” (Harshav, 1990, pp. 3–4). It was thus not Hebrew—the language of sacred heritage—but Yiddish, the debased language of everyday, which became the imaginary, purely verbal homeland of an extraterritorial people: “The semiotics of Yiddish communication has a stable core captured in the ‘mythology’ of Yiddish forlklore and placed in that particular 253
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imaginary world of the shtetl which was projected in fiction by the founders of its modern literature and then reabsorbed into the communal consciousness”. Rather than the real background of all Yiddish speakers, the shtetl was their “proverbial, mythological ‘space’, ‘a collective locus of a network of social and ideological relationship wrought in the phraseology of Yiddish folklore and literature. Most modern trends of Jewish life, literature, and consciousness pushed away from the shtetl, abandoned it, despised it, or at least saw it in an ironic or nostalgic light. But Yiddish classical literature used the iconography of the shtetl, its mythological behavior and language, as a microcosm of Jewish nature.... [a] collective imaginary space…” (Harshav, 1990, p. 94). Tragically and perhaps inevitably, this unique cultural phenomenon has become nearly extinct at a time when the diasporic existence is no longer the only one open to the Jewish people. Of the extinction of the very core of Yiddish culture during the Holocaust, the great black hole of Jewish history, there is very little to add. But this is not the whole story. Beginning with the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskala, which generated both an assimilative and a nationalistic movement, and going on into the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Israel, Yiddish, the very instrument of communal survival, became the “externalized object of Jewish selfhatred” due to the internalization of anti-Semitic stereotypes: “there was an extreme emotional hatred of Yiddish—the ‘potato tongue’ of the poor, embodying all the weak traits of the subservient and parasitic ‘Diaspora mentality’—reinforced by the guilt feelings of a society created by young people who had abandoned their parents and the world of their parents in Eastern Europe to rebuild their own lives, the image of the Jews, and human society itself” (Harshav, 1990, p. 85). To the emerging Israeli nation with its passionate commitment to the recovery of strength, sovereignty, and dignity after millennia of exile, Yiddish was “a dead weight, the language of persecution and fear”, which it was determined to leave behind (Weinstein, 2001, p. 230). A benign articulation of this process is possible, of course. “Even in dying”, Weinstein lovingly writes, “this most practical of languages has a job to do: it allows Hebrew, the ancient, holy pre-Yiddish tongue, to be reborn. Yiddish gives up its life for its parent/child. What could be more Jewish-motherish, more harstik, caring, than that?” (Weinstein, 2001, p.5). But it could not have been an easy metamorphosis, and—like all birthgiving—had to be paid for in pain. Being a second-generation Israeli, the daughter and the granddaughter of the generation which had disowned its mame-loshn, I can vividly recall the distaste for the very sound of Yiddish, the derision of diasporic notes in discourse or behaviour, the determined denial and the ruthless excision of the despised umbilical cord. It is at this point that we should pause. Metaphors, one should remember, tend to solidify into truisms. And the metaphor of re-birth is no exception. Perhaps, then, it was not the severance of the umbilical cord which was at stake in the discarding of Yiddish, but a more crippling act of communal self-mutilation. Two millennia of homelessness have turned the Yiddish language into a home, a mame-loshn, a bond of diasporic intimacy (to use Svetlana Boym’s term in a slightly skewed manner) 254
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for a people who had no real foothold anywhere. It was, as Harshav astutely calls it, an “un-real-estate” which Jews could carry with them in their wanderings (Harshav, 1990, p. 21). Paradoxically and tragically, it was the homecoming, the return to Israel, the collective Zionist project of restoration, inspired by the need to recreate a national identity radically different from that of the exilic prototype, which turned the speakers of Yiddish into internal exiles. The Hebrew poet Yechiel Perlmutter (1903–1992) had named himself Avot Yeshurun (literally translated as “Fathers will see”), breaking seven years of silence (1942–1949) after the holocaust, during which his mother, his father, his brothers and his sister were all murdered, to write the most poignant poetic testimony of this self-mutilation: How does a man become Avot Yeshurun? The answer is—from the breakings. I broke my mother and my father, I broke their home for them. I broke their good-nights. I broke their holidays, their shabbat days. I broke their self-worth. I broke their chance to speak. I broke their language. I despised their Yiddish, and their holy tongue I took for everyday use. I made them despise their life. I left the partnership. And when the dead-end moment descended upon them, I left them inside the dead-end. So I am here. In the land. I began to hear a voice coming out of me, being alone in the hut, on my iron bed, a voice calling me in my home-name, and the voice from me to me. My voice coming out of the brain and spreading all over the body, and the flesh shivers, a long while longer, then I began looking for a way to escape and to change the name and the last name. In time I succeeded in Hebraicizing the names. It had the value of defense. In the presence of the voice, I awoke. I was afraid to fall asleep. (Lachman, 2000, p. 78)
Avot Yeshurun’s poetry is, as Lilach Lachman perceptively writes, an attempt to undo the break through its reenactment. His re-naming of himself, which ostensibly alludes to the Father is, in fact, an echo of the mother’s crooning tatelakh (little fathers), used as a term of endearment (Lachman, 2000, p. 76). Avot Yeshurun’s poetic Hebrew, brutally broken up, fragmented, deformed and mangled by Yiddish words, phrases, and syntax is, then, an attempted reversal of the initial break: “only by repeatedly breaking Hebrew can he compensate for his transgression [the denial of Yiddish, the mama-tongue] and address the other voices who come back to us as peculiar speech. By extending the limits of the new language to include the old one, he strives to redeem the initial breakage” (Lachman, 2000, p. 83), but “by emancipating the Yiddish that ‘sold hot doughnuts in Warsaw’s streets’ and spoke to him in the voice of Shekhinta de Galuta (divine presence in exile), he declares war on the new ‘father’s’ idiom. Reenacting the initial transgression, he in fact reverses the denial of his mother tongue” (Lachman, 2000, p. 84). But there is more to be said about this break. What we hear in Avot Yeshurun’s poetics is very far from that sticky fiddler-on-the-roof nostalgic invocation, or fabrication of stetl life, the imaginary space about which we often like get glibly sentimental. It is certainly not a longing for return. Nostalgia—the longing for home—is, in the case of Avot Yeshurun, reversed and coiled in upon itself. Yeshurun’s work—fragmented, broken…—is exilic in its bifurcation, or multifurcation of 255
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consciousness, the superimposition of the language of “there” over the language of “here”. His descriptions of Tel-Aviv, the white, modern, energetic emblem of the thrust to “make it new”, are oddly and imperfectly plastered over by images of dilapidated buildings, uprooted trees and rusty, dripping faucets. It is as though the poverty of a diasporic, displaced existence, has crept in and coloured over the façade of the new which, torn from within, is already showing its fault-lines and cracks. If “ ‘nostalgia is essentially history without guilt’”, to cite Kammen (quoted by Boym, 2002, p. xiv), Avot Yeshorun’s project is anything but that. Its longing for home does not yield to the consolations of kitsch or the retrospective colourings of an idealized “before”, and the anguish of guilt is its motor force. But if there is a mode of critical reflection which probes the relationship between subjective, private memory of longing and the collective memory of belonging, it may indeed offer a context for the reading of this complex work. This kind of “reflective” nostalgia, as Boym calls it, “explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones”. It “loves details, not symbols” (Boym, 2002, p. xviii). Yeshurun’s hybrid poetry with its bricolage of linguistic fragments and shards finds its materials in the debris of a dead culture. Enacting the return of the cultural repressed, the ghostly return of the sacrificed mame-loshn with all the pain, the love, and perhaps the inevitability of the repression, it does not seek to go back, to offer a remedy, or mend the rift (more bottomless than the eponymous Syrian-African geological one) with the exilic home-language. Rather more modest and infinitely more difficult, it is the labour of mourning that it undertakes. Yeshurun’s transgressive poetics begins with his mother’s letters from Yiddish into Hebrew, but what he does with these letters in Thirty Pages of Avot Yeshurun (1964) is a peculiar sort of translation: if the aim of the translator is to smooth out the differences, to make the translated text sound as though it were written in the target language, Yeshurun does the very opposite of that, transposing the Yiddish syntax and idiomaticity onto the Hebrew text, foregrounding its foreignness. The same strategy is deployed in later collection of poems, The Syrian African Rift (Yeshurun, 1974), and Chapel of Voices (Yeshurun, 1977), where Yiddish words, phrases and word order disrupt and unsettle the Hebrew text. The poignancy of his work, I would suggest, emerges from the failure of the act of substitution: not an ‘eye-foran-eye’ but an ‘I-for-an-I’, in his case, a fragile construct whose homecoming is so precariously built on an exilic undercurrent. What this poetry carries is, in other words, the very Jewish-diasporic conception of the impossibility of wholeness. And one can only hope that even if two wrongs don’t make a right, as the saying goes, perhaps two breaks can make a whole. But, in the words of that tragic Hassidic sage, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, it is, at the very most, the perfect wholeness of a broken heart.
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References Boym, S. (2002). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brodsky, J. (1995). The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh. (first pub. in 1987). In Grief and Reason: Essays. London: Hamish Hamilton, 22–34. Edinast-Vulcan, D. (2004). Things Pregnant with Words: What Todorov Learned from Bakhtin. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31. Harshav, B. (1990). The Meaning of Yiddish. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Hoffman, E. (1991). Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. London: Minerva. Lachman, L. (2000). I manured the land with my mother’s letters: Avot Yeshurun and the Question of Avant-Garde. Poetics Today, 21 (1), 61–93. Steiner, G. (1972). “Extraterritorial” in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. Harmonsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972, 14–21 Todorov, T. (1995). The Morals of History. Translated by Alyson Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yeshurun, A. (1964). Thirty Pages of Avot Yeshurun. Chadarim 12: 70–77. (Hebrew) (1977). Chapel of Voices (in Hebrew). Tel-Aviv: SIman Kri’a. (1980). The Syrian African Rift. Translated and with a forward by Harold Schimmel. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Weinstein, M. (2001). Yiddish: A Nation of Words. Hanover, NH.: Steerforth.
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Wittgenstein as Exile: Philosophical Topography The philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas Wittgenstein (Z § 455) I felt strange/a stranger/in the world. When you are bound neither to men nor to God, then you are a stranger. Wittgenstein (cited in Nedo et al, 2005: 11) If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture?... Modern western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees. Edward Said (1994: 138).
Exhilic Thought: Exiles, émigrés, refugees Exhilic thought is the thought and ‘education’ of the exile. It is a kind of uprooted thought developed away from ‘home’ under conditions of displacement and uncertainty, often in a different mother tongue, language tradition and culture. Exhilic thought is sometimes the self-imposed discipline of the ‘stranger’ who develops his or her identity as an ‘alien’ or immigrant against the conventions of a host culture and from the perspective of an outsider. The motif the exile-stranger in a foreign land finding his or her way about for the first time is fable-ized in ancient accounts of ‘first contacts’ and early cultural exchanges. This notion of the exile invokes the model of the anthropologist as ‘participant observer’, of someone perpetually looking in through the window of another culture, who is both observer and participant. At the same time ‘exile’ often marks a complex ambivalence to one’s own home culture and, therefore, also to questions of one’s own national, cultural and personal identity. Exile is one of the central and most powerful motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth century: it describes a profound existential condition
I began a very similar essay based on roughly the same theme in 1999 before attending a conference on ‘philosophy and biography’ organized by James Klagge at Virginia State University, where I presented a paper. The ‘exile’ paper was lost in my shift from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) to the University of Glasgow (Scotland) in 2000, not a shift that I regard as an example of ‘exile’ or one that ever produced ‘homesickness’.. This is true of the first oral-formulaic epic narratives in the western Homeric tradition including the Iliad and the Odyssey that strongly influenced Plato and was a basis for Roman education. It is also the case with Marco Polo’s travels in 1260 and his presence at the court of Kublai Khan. ‘First contact’ was later systematized in the emerging discipline of anthropology during the early era of European colonization and developed with the formalization of ‘ethnology’ and later ‘ethnography’, which while it had origins in the Florentine Renaissance (especially archeology) and grew out of philosophical anthropology concern principally with the nature of ‘Man’, took its modern form with Durkheim and Mauss (on primitive classification), and later, with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski.
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of cultural estrangement, and sometimes alienation that defines identity in terms of migration, movement, departure, homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought that is ‘nomadic’, formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. We ought to guard against the trivialization and romanticization of this condition for the experience of exile, voluntary or forced, is the fate of millions of desperate people who under the impact of globalization are driven to relocate themselves. This is the case for ‘illegal immigrants’ who suffer the indignities of resettlement camps, run the gauntlet of border patrols and risk their lives on a daily basis to find a place—legal or otherwise—in the first world. The condition of exile while a characteristic of a globalized late modernity has its diasporic roots in pre-Biblical times, defining Judaic religious identity. It has been revisited by each major ethnic and religious persecution down through the centuries. In an essay called “Being Jewish” from Infinite Conversations Maurice Blanchot, for example, argues that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience and of being Jewish is that: the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak (125).
Sauer-Thompson (2005) notes ‘Being Jewish affirms uprooting, the affirmation of nomadic truth, exodus, the exile. For Blanchot being Jewish is being destined to dispersion, to a sojourn without place, to a setting out on the road, a state of wandering, and not being bound to the determination of place.’ This metaphorical reading of Blanchot’s ‘nomadic truth’ that foreshadows Deleuze and Guattari’s notion suggests that we take the notion of thinking as a journey and education seriously. The forced journey requires continual readjustment under new and changing conditions without the security or familiarity of ‘home’ and thus, without the normal structures that anchor and prop up identity. Nomadic truth is borne of the traveler’s education, the exchange of ideas, and acquaintance with new landscapes of thought, borne of encounters of the Other with different cultures often producing new hybridities that are not simply the result of grafted cultural stock. Michael J. Brogan (2004) argues that the dominance of the question of ‘radical otherness’ in cultural and religious
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The United Nations Population Division estimates that some 190–200 million people, roughly three percent of the world’ population, live outside their country of birth for a minimum of one year.
See ‘Blanchot: limit-experience & being Jewish’ at http://sauer-thompson.com/conversations/archives/002836.html. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), nomads are characterized in opposition to the system of the State which is sedentary; nomadism is, thus, a revolutionnary alternative to the State. The nomad is the ‘outsider’ and nomadic thought is ‘outside’ thought (an expression borrowed from Blanchot). See also Delueze and Guattari’s (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine.
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theory is due in no small measure to the influence of Levinas’ ethics of alterity, which he puts alongside Blanchot’s reflections on ‘being Jewish’. Both Levinas and Blanchot emphasize themes that tie truth to an existential condition of Otherness; it is these very themes that have provided a series of metaphors for living and being in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Jewishness, Blanchot says, is ‘uneasiness and affliction’ which is not restored through exile so much as attenuated and becomes the condition for the intellectual. As Levinas says of Blanchot, his philosophy of art is a ‘call to errancy,’ a truth (or better, a ‘non-truth’) of ‘nomadism,’ an affirmation of the ‘authenticity of exile’ which ‘uproots’ the Heideggerian universe, this fundamentally Greek world which remains stubbornly indifferent or altogether deaf to the call issued by the Hebrew scriptures (cited in Brogan, 2004: 31).
The Jewish exodus, synonymous with freedom from persecution, serves to emphasize ‘nomadic truth’ of the exile against ‘sedentary truth’ of the homelander. (There is a necessary connection here between freedom from persecution and freedom of thought). Blanchot argues against Heidegger, and mobility and homelessness of the refugee against settled nationalism, against the notion of ‘roots’, ‘homeland’, and ‘belonging’ as a natural condition. To adopt this orientation is also to set up a series of less desirable parallels—the pilgrims’ migration to America, the Afro-American slave fugitives, the establishment of modern-day Israel—seeking the ‘homeland’ or the ‘promised land’. The notion of exile and ‘exhilic’ here refers to the origin and to ‘return to the origin’ as a source of identity and ethnic nationalism. John G. Cawelti (2001) makes the most general theological and existential case when he writes: ‘Exile is, perhaps, the central story told in European civilization: the human estate as exile from God, the garden of Eden, the homeland, the womb, or even oneself.’ He goes on to make the following pertinent observation: It may be true that exile is the central myth of European civilization, but it takes a twentiethcentury mind to make such an observation and to realize its full significance. Exile is both a central theme and a characteristic biographical pattern of artistic modernism. In all the arts, a surprising number of the central figures of high modernism were exiles from their native countries: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, Bela Bartok, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Pier Mondrian, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford,
He writes: “Blanchot finds the Levinasian meditation on radical otherness an invaluable corrective to a philosophical tradition marred by an ethically and politically insidious predilection for sameness. Like his friend, he regards the West’s suspicion and hatred of the Jew as paradigmatic of this fundamental allergy to difference and even implicitly frames his own thought as a kind of Hebraic reproach to the monistic metaphysics issuing from ancient Greece,” ‘Judaism and Alterity in Blanchot and Levinas’ at http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.1/brogan.pdf. Remember that Heidegger’s analysis of nihilism is that ‘man’ has lost all connections with beings and within the present technological enframing that represents the modern age (modernity) ‘man’ is homeless.
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‘Exile’, in the context of the postmodern, has the same theoretical legitimacy that ‘alienation’ had in the context of the modern. ‘Alienation’ in Marxist theory refers to the way in which human beings become estranged from the products of their labor under capitalism, the labor process and their own nature. (‘Work’ in this context is viewed in Hegelian terms as self-realization.) In On the Jewish Question Marx saw ‘alienation’ as originating in the Judeo-Christian problematic and the Christian accomplishment of the alienation of man from himself and from nature. Marx takes the notion of alienation from Feuerbach who shows the alienation of man from God. Thus, both concepts have their source in the Judeo-Christian problematic but where alienation in particular seems more wedded to an industrial age, exile is emblematic of the age of globalization with its problems arising from (often forced) human movement and its consequences: displacement, uprootedness, and homelessness— the effects of a space-time compression that both enables greater movement and also demands it. As Eva Hoffman (1999: 44) explains, ‘today, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse.’ Mark Taylor (1984), the postmodern theologian, describes the postmodern self as a ‘wanderer,’ a ‘drifter,’ ‘attached to no home,’ and ‘always suspicious of stopping, staying and dwelling.’ This ‘rootless and homeless’ self is no more than a ‘careless wanderer’ yearning for neither ‘completion’ nor ‘fulfillment’ and therefore is not unhappy. The figures of the exile, the refugee, the nomad, the stranger, the wanderer and the diasporic intellectual bring into play a set of concepts that politically help to define the major movements of romanticism, nationalism, and imperialism: ‘home’, ‘homeland’, ‘homelessness’, ‘roots’, ‘tradition’, and ‘national identity’. If anything, the experience of exile has intensified and taken on different political readings and nuances since 9/11 as stricter border controls and tighter national security regimes have become policy priorities for the U.S. and Europe. Multiculturalism defined against Kant’s universalism and ‘culture’ as the human capacity to will moral laws is an affirmation of the belief in the value of other cultures and of group belonging. In its radical pluralistic form it can also signal a belief in the incommensurability of different cultures and societies. In one sense as a late twentieth century ideal expressed in the notion of cultural diversity which the modern state can accommodate constitutionally it is not just ‘the politics of recognition’ expressed through the claims of nationalist movements, supranational
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Strangle he does not mention Wittgenstein. We take both sources from an excellent essay by Farhang Erfani “Being-There and Being-FromElsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile” at http://www.reconstruction.ws/023/erfani.htm.
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associations, ethnic minorities but also the cross-cutting and sometimes conflicting ‘multicultural or “intercultural” voices of hundred of millions of citizens, immigrants, exiles and refugees of the twentieth century’ (Tully, 1995: 2).10 In this sense we might argue figures of the wanderer, the stranger, the exile increasingly characterize the shifting metaphysics of identity in an era globalization and of ‘constitutionalism in an age of diversity.’ As Tully (1995: 11) puts it so forcefully ‘cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagines and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through interaction with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is, thus, aspectival rather than essential. The Philosopher as Exile In relation to exhilic thought we can usefully talk of the thought of the outsider, thought in its home context—its linguistic tradition—as against its bordercrossings and, not least, the globalization (and spatialization) of philosophy. How ideas travel and are received—the geography of ideas—is a philosophical trope of some significance, especially with the rise of global science the the international knowledge system. Philosophers increasingly have begun to pay attention to philosophy as biography and the influence of biography on philosophy such as with Ray Monk’s (1990) splendid biography of Wittgenstein. By contrast, they have paid little attention to the question of exile (or travel, movement, space), with the exception of Albert Camus,11 which has been left to poets, novelists and historians. Yet the theme of exile and stranger which emphasizes the relation between place and thought, its place in linguistic and cultural traditions, and, perhaps strangely, the materiality and geography of thought, is a philosopheme that characterizes the present age and calls out for further analysis.12 As Micheal Dummett (2001: 7) argues place does not only refer to a land. It also refers to what gives people an identity, which if ‘it is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create’. Place, ‘home’, is that which offers a grid for identity, not merely a spatialtemporal location which individuates, but a broad cultural milieu that frames our 10 Tully also mentions feminist and indigenous peoples movements in this light. 11 Camus’s collection of short stories entitled Exile and the Kingdom most of which are set against an Algerian and clearly involve a strong autobiographical quality (Camus was born in Algeria in 1913) and Camus construction of Algerian Arab as Other. Camus also write the novel L’etranger (The Stranger) in 1941 at the same point that he meets Sartre and the essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’which explore the futility of human existence in the face of its absurdity and absence of any rational structure after the ‘death of God’. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1957. 12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy? theorize the connection between geography and philosophy in ‘geophilosophy’, a term they neologize to analyze the flows, lines, grids, and spaces of our world. A Thousand Plateaus provided the basis for their ‘geophilosophy’ as a new materialism that employed many geographical terms (such as ‘territory’ and its processes).
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identities. The exile, the refugee, the émigré, thus is someone who becomes displaced.13 In this chapter I focus on the figure, the trope and the thought of exile—the wanderer and the stranger—in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein, both the man and his work, as a means to discuss its contemporary philosophical significance. Wittgenstein was a self-imposed exile; one might say a ‘refugee’ from the AustrianHungarian Empire. The bare bones and chronology of his movements tell a story of ceaseless mobility, of the stranger working and living in a foreign land, of a man who deliberately removed himself from his home, his family, his fortune, his country and his native culture. He left home early to enroll in the Realschule in Linz where he studied for three years beginning in 1903, before going to Berlin to get a degree in engineering. At nineteen years old in 1908 he moved to England to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. In 1911 he moved to Cambridge University to study the foundations of mathematics with Bertrand Russell. Later he went to live briefly in Skjolden in Norway with Pinsent where he lived in isolation in order to study logic. When war broke out in 1914 he joined the Austrian army to end the war in an Italian prisoner of war in camp Cassino. Released from detention he trained as a primary school teacher in Vienna under the Austrian School Reform Movement teaching for seven years in three mountain village schools in Austria. He gave up teaching, thinking he had failed in 1925, to take a variety of jobs first as a gardener’s assistant in the Hüsseldorf monastery near Vienna and later as architect of his sister’s mansion house near Vienna. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 where he remained until he resigned in 1947, except for a brief period as a porter at Guy’s Hospital (London) during WWII. During this period he returned to Norway in 1931 to work on the Philosophical Grammar and visited Ireland with Skinner in 1934. In 1935 he visited Russia and Dublin in 1936 with Skinner and again in 1938. In 1948 after his resignation he moved to Ireland; visited Norman Malcolm in the U.S. in 1949, and returned to Norway briefly in 1950 with Ben Richards, before his death from prostate cancer on April 29 1951. This is the chronology of Wittgenstein’s life and the bare bones of his movements but it belies the connection between his life, his movements and his philosophy. Wittgenstein did not draw a sharp line between personal and philosophical problems and his work is sprinkled with references and shot through with metaphors that detail the significance of the exile both for his work—as a fertile starting point for philosophy—and for him as a person. He referred and thought of himself as an exile—someone who belongs to another time and he employed the idea of the Other, of an individual located in another culture, as a constant working hypothesis not only 13 We owe this insight to Farhang Erfani in the excellent essay ‘Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile’ at http://www.reconstruction.ws/023/erfani.htm (accessed August 15 2005). Erfani, to whom we also owe the reference to Dummett, quotes Judith Shklar (1998: 57) as ‘one of the very few political thinkers who sought to understand exile” thus: there “has been rather little said [by philosophers] about exiles. They have been left to the historians and poets, and that is a pity. Perhaps their numbers and variety have discouraged philosophical inquiry. It is not easy to generalize about exiles, nor do they land themselves to abstraction”
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for his conception of ‘primitive’ language-games and, therefore, for the acquisition of language and culture, but also more broadly as a condition of being and learning, and of becoming a philosopher. As Michael Nedo (2005: 11) argues: Wittgenstein’s wanderings are the expression of a lifelong quest for his vocation, his place in the world. They take him from Vienna via Berlin to Manchester, Cambridge and Norway, then back to Vienna; and from engineering to philosophy
And he quotes Wittgenstein You first have to travel all over before you can return to your native land; and then you will understand the others (cited in Nedo, 2005: 11)
Consider some of the main movements of Wittgenstein throughout his life organized roughly chronologically, a kind of spatial analysis that can be mapped onto Wittgenstein’s thought: Vienna, Linz, Berlin Manchester (Glossop), Jena, Cambridge, Norway (Skjolden) Vienna, Vistula (river), Cracow, Galicia, Olmütz, Vienna, Asiago, Trento, Cassino Vienna, The Hague, Trattenbach, Puchberg, Cambridge, Vienna Leningrad, Moscow, Cambridge, Dublin, Norway (Skjolden), Cambridge, Vienna, Norway (Skjolden), Dublin Cambridge, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Cambridge, London, Swansea, Newcaste-upon-Tyne, Swansea, Cambridge, Swansea Dublin, Rosro, Cambridge, Dublin, Vienna, Dublin, Cambridge, Ithaca (NY), Cambridge, Vienna, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Norway, Vienna, Cambridge
For the era before and after the war, as can be seen, Wittgenstein travels a great deal, returning to Vienna, Skjolden, Cambridge and Dublin. Norway and Ireland are places of retreat for him where there is no noise and they provide a place for thinking. Vienna is of course his ‘hometown’ where his family is located and Cambridge, more often than not his place of employment. He becomes a British citizen in 1939 after much deliberation. He is keenly aware of himself as a wanderer, as a stranger, and as an exile. These metaphors—the Other or outsider—appear as major tropes in his work as do spatial, landscape and journey metaphors, for example, of finding one’s away around or where he compares language to a labyrinth (PI, 203) or an ancient city (PI, 8).
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Wittgenstein as Exile Exile as cultural isolation There are a number of senses of ‘exile’ in relation to Wittgenstein the man and his work. James Klagge (2005) reports in a footnote to a paper that considers “Wittgenstein in Exile” that ‘exile’ was a term that Wittgenstein used to describe himself and his condition of cultural isolation. As he writes, Upon contemplating a move to Norway in 1913 to continue his research, Wittgenstein was cited by his friend David Pinsent as follows: “he swears he can never do his best except in exile” (October 1st, 1913 diary entry, in A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man, ed. G.H. von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 85, and cf. p. 89).
What is interesting about this remark is the way it privileges Wittgenstein’s work rather than himself as an individual. It is almost as thought Wittgenstein is saying in this cryptic remark that he requires an isolation and insulation from normal or familiar conditions of work in order to focus his intellect. Klagge (2005) in the same footnote records two other occasions when Wittgenstein referred to himself in terms of ‘exile’. In his coded wartime notebook Wittgenstein wrote: “This kind, friendly letter [from Pinsent] opens my eyes to the fact that I am living in exile [Verbannung] here. It may be a healing exile, but I now feel it as an exile all the same” (Geheime Tagebücher: 1914–1916, ed. W. Baum, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1991, 26.7.16, p. 74). And also his comment in his diary: “In my room I feel not alone but exiled [exiliert]” (“Movements of Thought,” PPO, 9.10.30, p. 55).
Both these fragmentary thoughts highlight elements about Wittgenstein’s self-imposed condition of exile: first that the condition of exile may be healing or therapeutic for a writer or philosopher; and second, that exile does not necessarily mean being alone for one can indeed feel loneliness in a room full of people. Both of these features point to an aspect of philosophy as a chosen form of life for Wittgenstein—not only did he believe that philosophy required renouncement of wealth and trappings of privilege but also that it required a kind of distance from ‘community’ and an attitude that refused the comfort of belonging to a community. Clearly, Wittgenstein thought of himself as in exile and he also indicates in his letters that this condition of cultural isolation was necessary for his work. I want to argue that exile was a condition that Wittgenstein thought necessary to a form of life as philosopher. This idea took on a particular hue when Wittgenstein ‘returned’ to philosophy (at least in a formal sense) to focus upon cultural questions. It is as though Wittgenstein’s focus on cultural questions—on questions that stand at the heart of human culture—rather than questions of strict logic, required a simulation of the anthropologist’s ‘observer-participant’ attitude and sense of detachment in 266
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order to analyze ‘language-games’ and develop ‘perspicuous representations’. As Wittgenstein says in “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” (in Philosophical Occasions, p. 133): The concept of perspicuous representation is of fundamental importance for us. It denotes the form of our representation, the way we see things. (A kind of ‘World-view’ as it is apparently typical of our time. Spengler.) This perspicuous representation brings about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we “see the connections”. Hence the importance of finding connecting links. The philosophical work involved in describing our form of representation seemingly requires the cultivation of an attitude that demands cultural distance. Wittgenstein elaborates in the same passage, highlighting ‘similarity’ and ‘relatedness’ as an aspect of noting formal connections. But an hypothetical connecting link should in this case do nothing but direct the attention to the similarity, the relatedness, of the facts. As one might illustrate an internal relation of a circle to an ellipse by gradually converting an ellipse into a circle; but not in order to assert that a certain ellipse actually, historically, had originated from a circle (evolutionary hypothesis), but only in order to sharpen our eye for a formal connection. It is an idea he repeats in the Philosophical Investigations at §122 where he talks about getting “a clear view of the use of our words”, asserting, A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words —Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in “seeing the connexions.” Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases
Klagge’s interpretation emphasizes the cultural isolation of Wittgenstein which is not merely a matter of space or of traveling across territorial boundaries but rather a matter of historical time and change—and one that depends crucially on a distinction that Wittgenstein makes between culture and civilization. As Klagge (2005: 3) remarks, commenting upon the influence on Wittgenstein of Spengler’s reading of cultures as organic wholes that flourish and decline: Clearly Wittgenstein saw the era up through Schumann as the flowering of Western culture, and the time since, his and our own time, as deteriorating Western civilization (p. 3).
This thought Klagge traces in the personal note that Wittgenstein strikes in his forewords and letters: Ernest Gellner. Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Hapsburg Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 228pp., bibliog., index. $US54.95 (Hc.), ISBN 0–52163–002–9; $US19.95 (Pb.), ISBN 0–52163–997–2.
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This last book of Gellner brings together his two main passions in life—philosophy and anthropology. Drawing on his own rich East European heritage, Gellner locates the ideas of Wittgenstein and Malinowski in their respective cultural worlds. They all shared many of the Hapsburg Empire’s contradictions, such as a deep affinity with a local tradition or one’s ethnic roots as well as a sophisticated and fluent command of a universal culture. According to Gellner these influences shaped Wittgenstein and Malinowski resulting in their particular versions of a solitary individualism and a romantic communalism. In this cacophony of distinct and often strident voices, the Hapsburg Empire or Kakania as Robert Musil disparagingly referred to it, finally succumbed to the modern condition. This condition requires that subjects, hitherto willing to operate among distinct cultures, rationalise their lifeworld. This usually takes the form of insisting on the use of one language not only for everyday life but also for the affairs of the state and the nation. While this model did not apply even in the more developed nation-states such as France and the United Kingdom, the attraction proved irresistible for aspiring nationalists. The modern notion of culture, not necessarily in its strict anthropological understanding, as linking otherwise distinct individuals sharing a common political and social order was born. Furthermore, this culture was exemplary, prompting its members to achieve ever higher versions and expressions. Both Wittgenstein and Malinowski drew on this common heritage even if they developed it differently. According to Gellner, Wittgenstein began by stressing the role of the solitary individual radically comprehending the world through the formal concepts of logic, but then changed his mind and opted for an understanding based on particular life-modes or cultural frames. Both are extreme forms of cognitive autism since they reject anything outside their internal parameters. Malinowski combined these two polar opposites more charitably. While accepting that each culture contains within it a coherent and ultimately irreducible world, Malinowski insisted that individuals such as anthropologists had to distance themselves from a given culture in order to incorporate it within a broader view. This distancing was itself part of a cultural tradition which acknowledged that we all simultaneously inhabit different worlds. This cultural condition allows us to view one world from the perspective of the other. These dimensions raise complex questions for citizenship and nationality. They also open up possibilities for considering multiculturalism and transculturalism as explanatory concepts in the New Zealand context, in addition to biculturalism. Multiculturalism and transculturalism as, perhaps, the characteristic notions of culture in postmodernity finds support in Wittgenstein’s view of culture as shared practices. It permits an understanding of culture that recognises the fluidity, interaction and hybridisation of cultures today and provides a basis for emergent notions of multicultural and global citizenship. Wolfgang Welsch, draws on Wittgenstein’s notion of culture, tying it firmly to the notion of transculturalism. He [Wittgenstein] outlined an in-principle pragmatically based concept of culture, which is free of ethnic consolidation and unreasonable demands for homogeneity. According to Wittgenstein,
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WITTGENSTEIN AS EXILE culture is at hand whenever practices in life are shared. The basic task is not to be conceived as an understanding of foreign cultures, but as an interaction with foreignness. Understanding may be helpful, but is never sufficient alone, it has to enhance progress in interaction. We must change the pattern from hermeneutic conceptualizations with their beloved presumption of foreignness on the one hand and the unfortunate appropriating dialectics of understanding on the other to decidedly pragmatic efforts to interact. And there is always a good chance for such interactions, because there exist at least some entanglements, intersections and transitions between the different ways of life. It is precisely this which Wittgenstein’s concept of culture takes into account. Culture in Wittgenstein’s sense is, by its very structure, open to new connections and to further feats of integration. To this extent, a cultural concept reformulated along Wittgenstein’s lines seems to me to be particularly apt to today’s conditions (Welsch, 1999: 202–3).
Others have also recognised in Wittgenstein’s notion a concept of culture that challenges modern constitutionalism by criticising the underlying concept of a single unified culture (or nation)—internally uniform and geographically separate —and emphasising, by contrast, the view of cultures “as overlapping, interactive and internally differentiated…” (Tully, 1995: 9). Cultures overlap geographically; they are mutually defined through complex historical patterns of historical interaction, and they are continuously transformed in interaction with other cultures. Thus, James Tully (1995: 11) explains: “The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is thus aspectival rather than essential: like many complex human phenomena, such as language and games, cultural identity changes as it is approached from different paths and a variety of aspects come into view.” He goes on to argue: As a consequence of the overlap, interaction and negotiation of cultures, the experience of cultural difference is internal to a culture. This is the most difficult aspect of the new view of culture to grasp. On the older, essentialist view, the ‘other’ and the experience of otherness were by definition associated with another culture… On the aspectival view, cultural horizons change as one moves about, just like natural horizons. The experience of otherness is internal to one’s own identity, which consists in being oriented in an aspectival intercultural space … (p. 13).
The aspectival notion of culture is a view he ascribes to Wittgenstein and he suggests that Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides an alternative worldview to the one that informs modern constitutionalism. Let me end with what Tulley describes as a way of “doing philosophy and reaching mutual understanding fit for a post-imperial age of cultural diversity”: First, contrary to the imperial concept of understanding in modern constitutionalism … it provides a way of understanding others that does not entail comprehending what they say within one’s own language of redescription, for this is now seen for what it is: one heuristic description of examples among others; one interlocution among others in the dialogue of humankind. Second, it furnishes a philosophical account of the way in which exchanges of views in intercultural dialogues nurture the attitude of ‘diversity awareness’ by enabling the interlocutors to regard cases differently and change their way of looking at things. Finally, it is a view of how understanding
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References Blanchot, M. (1993) The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (‘Being Jewish’, pp. 123–130). Camus, A. (1989) Exile and the Kingdom. Trans. Justin O’Brien. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Cawelti, John G. (2001) Deleuze, G., And Guattari, F. (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine. New York, Semiotext. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Massumi, B. London: The Athlone Press. Dummett, M. (2001) On Immigration and Refugees. London: Routledge. Hoffman, Eva (1999) The New Nomads. In Letters of Transit, ed. André Aciman. New York: The New Press. Klagge, J. (2005) Wittgenstein in Exile. In Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, ed. D.Z. Phillips, Ashgate, at http://www.phil.vt.edu/JKlagge/WinExile.pdf. Monk, R. (1990) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Nedo, M., Moreton, G. & Finlay, A. (2005) Ludwig Wittgenstein: There Where You Are Not. London: Black Dog Publishing. Shklar, J. (1998) Political Thought & Political Thinkers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Mark C. (1984) Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1979) Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (Ed.) Rhees, tr. A. C. Miles, rev. Rhees. Brynmill Pr./Humanities Press.
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Diaspora as Catastrophe, Diaspora as a Mission and the Postcolonial Philosophy of Edward Said
There is a tendency to separate Edward W. Said’s theoretical work on literature and culture from his writings on Palestine. The two themes were dealt with in distinct books and essays where not only the content but also the style differed. In both fields, however, it is possible to trace a dialectical relationship between them. This is particularly true with regard to his writings on Palestine where he directs us to theoretical contexts when discussing particular issues connected to Palestine, but it is also there in his theoretical writings even where he does not mention Palestine specifically. He was both a Palestinian intellectual and a universal intellectual and both simultaneously. An illuminating example of this nexus is his anthology, The Politics of Dispossession (Said, 1994c). It is a collection of short interventions most of which are reactions to recent crises or junctures in the life of Palestine and the Palestinians. Each ponders not only the particular issue of Palestine but also the situation of the world in general. It is as if Said wished to contextualize every moment in Palestine’s history within a universal march of history. These interconnections, however, do not hide a contradiction between Said’s general ideas on culture and his practical address of the Palestine question. The former entail a sharp critique of nationalism while the latter had to be more tolerant—if not reverent—towards it. This may explain why so few other authors on Palestine employed Said’s paradigms. It may also account for the paucity of Palestinian historians who followed his lead. The reasons for this are complex and understandable, but it was not until the demise of the Oslo process and the unattractive manifestation of statehood under the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip that pioneering works began to de-nationalize history (Nassar, 2003; Hilal, 2003; Doumani, 1999, p. 2003). Paradoxically, post-Zionist scholarship in Israel did find Said’s paradigm immediately useful for understanding Palestine’s past and present. It did not quite de-nationalize history but, at the very least, it de-Zionized it or post-Zionized it— a process which was close to Said’s general postcolonial critique of culture and nationalism. Its vision of post-conflictual Palestine provides one possible bridge between Said’s universal criticism of nationalism and his commitment to the Palestine cause. Said referred to the crystallization of the contradictions that emerge in one’s latter stage in life (and he sensed, from the discovery of his leukemia, that he was indeed in that stage). I suggest that his search for a reconciliation can be viewed as a quest for a stable exilic intellectualism. The elevation of exile into a pristine [ 271 ]
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form of intellectualism defined not only a general philosophical stance vis-a`-vis the modern world, but also a particular position on the Palestine question. PostZionism, as an intellectual position, was more limited in scope and ambition than the search for exilic intellectualism but both fused into a joint orientation, indeed legacy, after Said’s death. They can be presented together as providing guidelines to Said’s ‘solution’ of the apparent contradiction between his general critique of nationalism and his devotion to the Palestinian cause. More importantly, they are a recommendation for the political future of Palestine. The universalized approach towards and, indeed, the deductive prism used in the study of Palestine did not, at first, win Said many followers in Israel. Academic work in Israel, until the 1990s, was primarily Zionist, or classical Zionist, comprising scholars who did not challenge the meta-Zionist narrative that the land had been empty, becoming a place only with the arrival of the first Jewish immigrants in 1882. Classical Zionist scholarship was also able to contain, for a while, the divisions within Israeli society that emerged after the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. However, after the internally disputed war in Lebanon and a bewildering first Intifada in 1987, this form of scholarship was challenged from the left, and a group of academics began writing critically on Israel and Zionism in the early 1990s. The Lebanon war and the Intifada led them to develop a critical, a-Zionist approach to the country’s past and present realities ( Khalidi, 1992a; 1992b). This became an intellectual movement that shook the social and human sciences in Israel. It began as a modest attempt to revisit Israeli historiography of the 1948 war—an attempt that was named at the time as ‘the new history’ of Israel—and it culminated in a scholarly internal Israeli deconstruction of the Zionist project from its beginnings to the present. It utilized theoretical and philosophical critiques that brought some scholars into the embrace of post-modernism, others to deeper Marxist convictions, while the rest remained loyal to liberal democratic notions with a hint of multiculturalism and post-colonialist deconstructivism (Doumani, 1999; Nassar, 2003). These scholars were challenged from the right by neo-colonialists who emulated the New Right and Neocons in the USA, and were even directly supported by them in their wish to represent the classical Zionist narrative in even more patriotic and nationalist terms. The inhibitions of classical Zionism disappeared in the works, published by a new research institute, Machon Shalem, and its journal Techelt (light blue—one of the two colours of the Israeli flag). They demonized Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and glorified the West, Jews and Zionism. They preached the takeover of the occupied territories and some indirectly advocated the transfer of the Palestinians, if need be. These three ideological orientations within Israeli academia—classical Zionist, neo-Zionist and post-Zionist—clashed in a relatively pluralist manner in the 1990s. The years of the Oslo process enabled the Israeli Jewish public to associate criticism with the attempt to reconcile with the PLO. This was how the post-Zionist approach was heard in public meetings, university seminars and in the media. The universalized approach towards and, indeed, the deductive prism used in the study of Palestine did not, at first, win Said many followers in Israel. 272
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The hegemonic establishment, consisting mainly of classical Zionists, fought hard to diminish and delegitimize it, but, because it was welcomed abroad—and outside views are highly important for ascertaining the validity and quality of academics in Israel—this campaign failed. Neo-Zionists were quite marginalized in the 1990s. During this time, it seemed that quite a few Israeli academics, media pundits and general literati could not resist Said’s desire, and ability, to engage with humanity. Said’s work and ideas were taken up and developed by critical Israelis affected and inspired by his thought. His impact can be detected in several major areas: in the analysis of Israel as an ‘Orientalist’ state, the examination of the dialectical relationship between power and academic knowledge within the local context, the introduction of the postcolonial prism into the study of the society and the critique of the present peace process and the adoption of an alternative way forward. With the collapse of Oslo in 2000 and the disappearance of the Israeli Left, however, the decade of post-Zionist impact came to an end as swiftly as it had emerged. Like the rest of Israeli society and the political scene, academia moved to the Right, namely to a neo-Zionist position of unwillingness to compromise in any significant way with the Palestinians or to allow any development of civil society that would improve the status and life of the non-Jewish, mainly Palestinians citizens. The voices of post-Zionism subsided and now are hardly present. Some of the group became neo-Zionist, most famously Morris (2004), and, while academia remained loyal to classical Zionist ideology, it allowed far more influence to neo-Zionism. The shift in the balance of power had an adverse effect upon Said’s influence on the local scene. Respect for his work, and the wish to interact with it, is directly connected to the fortunes of post-Zionist critique. The surviving members of the group inevitably became more critical and would be best described today as antiZionist. Yet post-Zionism also reflected the wish to look more empathetically at some of the Zionist achievements in the past and to include them in a future vision. The reality on the ground, since 2000, convinced the handful of remaining critical voices in the academy and in the cultural media that only a fundamental shift from Zionist ideology towards a civil state of all its citizens can bring an end to a Zionist century of dispossession of the Palestinians. The Question of Palestine and Historical ‘Truth’. Already in the early phase of post-Zionism, which focused on the 1948 war, Said’s influence could indirectly be traced. The ‘new history’ corroborated the major Palestinian claims about the 1948 war, notable among them the allegation that an ethnic cleansing took place in that year (Khalidi, 1992a). Some of the ‘new’ historians argued that their revisionist history was prompted solely by the emergence of new archival material. However. it is very clear that they were also influenced by the shift in attitudes towards non-Western historical perspectives to which Said, more than anyone else, contributed. The legitimization process meant accepting as professionally valid the Palestinian version, or part of it, while at the same time 273
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exposing aspects of Israeli historiography as ideological and polemicist. Even more directly, this work was inspired by Said’s The Question of Palestine, which appeared in Hebrew in 1984. Another example of a direct impact was Said’s presentation of the concept of a ‘historical document’. When moderating a meeting between Israeli and Palestinian historians in Paris in 1998, Said discussed the meaning and significance of what constituted a ‘historical document’ (Said, 1998). The Israeli historians expressed their belief that they were both ideologically and empirically just and declared that the only reliable sources for the reconstruction of the 1948 war were in the IDF archives and its documents. Said clarified that a report by a soldier from 1948 is as much an interpretation, and quite often a manipulation, of reality as any other human recollection of the same event: it was never reality itself. Through this, he pointed to the vitality and significance of oral history in the reconstruction of the past and also addressed the question of positionality. For example, the most horrific aspects of the Nakbah—the dozens of massacres that accompanied the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948—as well as a detailed description of what expulsion had been from the expellee’s point of view can be addressed only when such a historiographical position is adopted (Said, 2001b, pp. 273–7). Said wondered aloud how anyone could relate to the Nakbah’s real essence—as the most traumatic catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people—without showing even a modicum of solidarity with or sympathy for its victims. As he noted, Israeli historians would never have tolerated such a treatment of the history of the Holocaust. Said’s own particular interest in the Holocaust and the memory of the Nakbah contributed even more directly to the courage of researchers to follow his call for the universalization of the Holocaust memory, both as a critique of the Zionist manipulation of that memory and as a rejection of the Holocaust denial tendencies in the Arab and Palestinian worlds. This work won the admiration of Said himself. Both Palestinian and Jewish scholars expanded his basic ideas, aired for the first time in The Politics of Dispossession (1994c), which inspired many, myself included, to look into the dialectical relationship connecting Nakbah and Holocaust memories on both sides (Gur-Ze’ev & Pappe, 2003). As Said put it: What Israel does to the Palestinians it does against a background, not only of the long-standing Western tutelage over Palestine and Arabs... but also against a background of an equally longstanding and equally unfaltering anti-Semitism that in this century produced the Holocaust of the European Jews.... We cannot fail to connect the horrific history of anti-Semitic massacres to the establishment of Israel; nor can we fail to understand the depth, the extent and the overpowering legacy of its suffering and despair that informed the postwar Zionist movement. But it is no less appropriate for Europeans and Americans today, who support Israel because of the wrong committed against the Jews to realize that support for Israel has included, and still includes, support for the exile and dispossession of the Palestinian people. (Said, 1994c, p. 34)
Said foretold the future: ‘positionality’ became no less important than archival material or documents available. In 1998, more declassified information about 1948 274
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was revealed to the historians in the Israeli military archives. But also, at that very time, oral history and Palestinian archives of memory, almost at the last moment before living witnesses of the catastrophe passed away, emerged and far more importantly were relocated as a vital source, no less viable than military archives. Benny Morris (2004), with the help of the new material, depicted an even more systematic expulsion of the Palestinians than he had done in his early works. But he also became, or chose to reveal himself as, a neo-Zionist. His narrative of the catastrophe was now much closer to the Palestinian narrative: it looked more like an episode of ethnic cleansing during war than an expulsion. However, unlike in his previous work, Morris justified the cleansing and advocated it as a future means to save the Jewish state should the demographic balance disadvantage the Jewish majority. Said did, however, also find his way to other, less professional, but more committed Israelis who focused their energy and time on countering the denial and establishing the significance of the Nakbah. An NGO, Zochrot (Remembering), for example, began in the twenty-first century to record the catastrophe of 1948— through historical reconstruction based on memories as much as documents—and, with this, began to expose the abuse of its memory and relocate it constructively as part of a future Arab-Jewish dialogue, very much as Said—almost as a legacy—had recommended at the conference in Paris. The Orientalist State In its latter stages, the post-Zionist critique focused in particular on the state’s early policies towards the Palestinian minority and the Jews who came from Arab countries, the Mizrachim. These were two Oriental groups, analysed, marginalized and objectified by European Jews, scholars and politicians alike. Said’s influence can easily be recognized in the critical work that took the Mizrachim as its subject matter. There was an earlier attempt to deconstruct the state’s treatment of the Mizrachim and the Palestinian minority within academia, even before the rise of post-Zionist critique, by Marxist sociologists in the1970s. A decade later, the search into the plight of Arab Jews, as they were called by the more radical circles, took a more postcolonialist twist. The focus moved away from the economic means of production and social deprivation as explanation for the discrimination against the Mizrachi Jews to questions of ethnicity, race and nation, that is, the context became mainly that of identity. This re-examination began by looking at how Zionism affected the question of Jewish identity in modern times. It argued that the transformation of Zionism from a national movement in Europe, where a Jew was defined as a non-gentile, into a colonialist project in Palestine produced a new definition of a Jew: a non-Arab person. This new, Orientalist definition of a Jew in the context of Palestine owed much to Said’s claims in Orientalism that the Orient helped to define Europe, and the West, as its ultimate opposite in perception, in ideas, in personality and in experience (Gover, 1994). 275
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This reformulation of identity informed the Orientalist Israeli attitude to Palestinians wherever they were and created the biggest problem possible for the nascent Jewish state when one million Arab Jews were prompted to immigrate, as a result of the failure to bring enough Jews from Europe after the Holocaust. How would they be defined? The particular Orientalist Israeli praxis and discourse solved the dilemma by de-Arabizing those Jews. Some of the leading works on this process of de-Arabization owe much to Said’s thought and critique (Shohat, 1997, 2001; Shenhav, 2003; Shitrit, 2004). The Jewish immigrants from Arab countries were de-Arabized upon arrival in order to fit the Zionist dream of an ethnic Jewish state, but were, at the same time, pushed to the social and geographical margins of society. This explains the great paradox that has accompanied the lives of the Mizrachim ever since their arrival: although most of the right-wing electorate comes from these communities—and with it a very racist and hostile attitude towards everything Arab—they are still seeking their Arab roots in culture and tradition as the best form of protest against the Ashkenazi establishment that had perpetuated their deprivation and frustration (Shohat, 1997). Said also provided a clue to the role played by Israeli academia in this policy of abuse and discrimination. The ‘Orientalist’ paradigm needed not only policy makers but also experts. ‘The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—traffic between two’, wrote Said in Orientalism (Said, 1978, p. 3). Local academia, sociologists and anthropologists loyal to modernization theories and ‘experts’ on Arab affairs, together with the local Orientalists, provided the scholarly scaffolding for the aggressive and coercive policies towards Palestinians and the Jews who came from Arab countries. It seemed that it was not only the academy in Israel that developed an ‘Orientalist’ interpretation of reality, but rather that the state, as whole, also adopted this selfimage. The state sells itself, even today—and more so, after the American invasion of Iraq—as an agent able to decipher the secrets of the ‘barbaric’ and ‘enigmatic’ Middle East: secrets that are open to a state which is in the area but claims not to be a part of it. This presentation of the state is the principal explanation for, and the perpetuation of, its alienating existence in the midst of the Arab world. Common to these challenges was the underlying assumption that collective memory was constructed through the education system and the media. History and memory are acts of exclusion as much as they could be tools of inclusion Said’s insights into the issues helped these scholars to expose the role played by the academic establishment in the nation-building process at the expense of freedom of thought and self-criticism. This followed Said’s treatment of the symbols and manifestations of the Orientalist discourse in European culture: official texts, museums, ceremonies, school curricula, and national emblems drew the academic community’s attention to the way in which the dominant Ashkenazi group and its narrative has excised others from the national memory. In a proper Saidian manner, these works exposed the sociological, anthropological and historiographical discourses used in research on ‘Arabs’—whether Israeli 276
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Palestinians, neighbouring Arab states or Mizrachi Jews. The very grouping of Arabs, Palestinians and oriental Jews as one subject matter in scholarly research in Israel was a revolution. It could happen only if one adopted the critical paradigm of Orientalism offered by Said. In fact, for years, such a grouping or reification was taboo, as one of the first scholars employing such an approach—Ella Habib Shohat—learned when she was faced with the condemnation that forced her to leave the local academy (Shohat, 1992; 2001). In a fruitful dialogue with Said, Shohat debunked the Zionist myth that the Arab Jews were saved by Israel and opened up for examination the dominant discourse in academia that presented the Mizrachi and the Arabs in a similar way to that in which the Orient was introduced in the West through Orientalist discourse (Shohat, 1997). After Shohat, it became more common to come across work theoretically informed by Said and the road to a bolder definition of society as a whole as Orientalist became shorter (Shitrit, 2004). In the spring of 2002 a volume on postcolonialism was brought out containing articles by Israeli scholars (Shenhav, 2002). This was a difficult title for scholarship in a state that many believed was still colonialist. Thus, a brilliant deconstruction of the Israeli Orientalist world can still be seen as constituting a colonialist, rather than a postcolonialist, reality. The continuation of colonialist imagery can also be seen in local literature, poetry and cinema (Rimon-Or, 2002; Eyal, 2002). Postcolonialism seems to be a more apt categorization, when Jewish women and the Mizrachi Jews are the focus of this scholarly interest. Also appropriate is the connection Said made between cultural and postcolonial studies which illuminated one of the most important devices in making the state of Israel a state of denial. I refer here particularly to his notion of the possibilities of dialogue between colonizers and colonized as part of a restorative process of reconciliation. The first step in such a peaceful dialogue—and away from an alternative explosive violent clash over, and because of, history—was the question of the acknowledgement of past evils (Said, 1994a): an elementary observation which was totally ignored by all those powers and individuals who were involved in peace making in Palestine and who based their vision of peace on a total absolution for Israel for its crimes in 1948 and after. Said’s journeys into the juncture between cultural and postcolonial studies produced another intriguing echo in local studies in Israel. His interest, that comes to the fore most clearly in Culture and Imperialism (1994a), in locating the points of ambiguity where the oppressors and the victimizers are also oppressed and victimized, inspired the most original observation regarding the attitudes of the Mizrachi towards the Palestinians. From such a perspective, the social protest of Mizrachi Jews can be simultaneously supportive of, and subversive towards, the hegemonic Zionist discourse.This rather rough dichotomy between anti-colonialist tendencies in the critique and postcolonialist ones can be found in Said’s own reassessment of his work in retrospect (mainly in the new introduction written to Orientalism). The concept of Orientalism in the new version is both a concrete act of colonialist representation, anchored in a particular period, and a discursive practice, free of place or time. The latter is indeed the direction in which postcolonialist studies developed after, and as a criticism of, Said’s dichotomous approach, but is not part of this analysis. 277
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Said and the Exilic Intellectual The crystallization of Said’s universal humanism provided a common basis between him and post-Zionists in Israel. When this dialectical association matured, it allowed Said not only to elucidate even more forcefully than before, in political terms, his wish to bring an end to Zionist supremacy in Palestine but also to express a hope for a substitute far removed from the contemporary Arab nation-states around Palestine. This was helped by his growing critique of Arab politics. His disapprobation of Arab politics and politicians was connected in his mind with the Palestine tragedy a long time before his interest in Zionism, and particularly post-Zionists, in Israel was formed. When, in 1959, a friend of the Said family in Egypt, Farid Hadad, was murdered by the Nasserite security forces, Said divorced Arab radicalism from socialism. He continued to be dismayed by the more negative face of Arab nationalism and this discomfort was constantly linked to his vision of Palestine as a different political entity—different from Egypt as well as from Israel. This association is touchingly illuminated by the dedication of The Question of Palestine to Farid Hadad (Bayoumi & Rubin, 2001, pp. xxi–xxii). In 1999, Said’s friendly relationship with the Israeli academy reached a peak when he was invited, as keynote speaker, to the annual meeting of the Israeli anthropological society. He came out from that encounter with mixed feelings. On one hand, he witnessed how his deconstructive approach to Orientalism was gladly and enthusiastically employed by post-Zionist scholars. On the other hand, he realized that the post-Zionist critics found it easier to employ his prism with regard to the cultural reality of Israel than to adopt, in any meaningful way, his political vision for the future of Palestine. In other words, they shared his narrative on Nakbah and dispossession, but not his vision for a bi-national state to which all refugees would be allowed to return. In the last two years of his life, however, this situation changed. In a timely awakening, the more alert among the post-Zionists and political activists tapped into Said’s recurring theme in his frequent sorties into the history and essence of the Palestine question: that the Jews and the Palestinians have chosen each other for an almost insoluble conflict, a destiny that requires mutual understanding of tragedies, national traumas and collective fears. In those two years he talked directly to the Israeli public, first in a rare and long TV interview and then in an extensive interview in Haaretz. The questions in both cases were typically Zionist, and Said dealt with them easily and with great respect and honour, and, in the case of the television appearance, even with empathy and reverence. The running theme in the interviews—as in his memoirs which had been translated into Hebrew—was exile (Said, 2001a). Said ‘the exiled intellectual’ or, more precisely, ‘the exile intellectual’ was attractive to Jewish intellectuals far more than Said ‘the Palestinian’. The picture, however, was more complicated as this exilic, almost Jewish intellectual, was still the voice of Palestine in the West. He was still in those days, and until his death, the sharpest critic of Oslo and its follies. Said’s critical books on Oslo were not published in Israel, nor were they mentioned anywhere, and his criticisms were not 278
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addressed either in the interviews or his memoirs. The hesitant post-Zionist embrace thus did not solve the dilemma of the man who was both the Palestinian intellectual voice—employing a national discourse and presenting a national agenda—and the universal intellectual—marginalizing the importance not only of the nation but even that of the homeland. Abdul J. JanMohammed found for Said a special term, ‘the specular border intellectual’ (2001). There are two border intellectuals according to JanMohammed: the syncretic one and the specular one. In a very simplistic form one can say that the former is an intellectual at home in two or more cultures and thus busy fusing and combining hybrid influences. The latter is not at home with either, although he or she is quite familiar with them, and thus preoccupied with the deconstruction and critique of both (JanMohammed, 2001, pp. 96–120). We can inject into this definition Said’s own typology of intellectuals (Said, 1994b): first, in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin, the preference for the watch dog of the society over the articulator of its truisms; then the combination between the organic intellectual of Antonio Gramsci affiliated to a grassroot movement, such as nationalism, but nonetheless committed to the purest forms of freedoms of expression and thought, as proposed by Julien Benda (Said, 1996, pp. 183–4). The centrality of ‘exile’ as an epistemological construct is the product of time, and not only of principle. In his post mortem text, Said focuses on the theme of late style, ‘the way in which the work of some great artists and writers acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives—what I have come to think of as a late style’ (Said, 2004b). Said was aware he was coming to the end of his life and this is why his own work was transforming not only idiomatically but also thematically. And this is where the discussion of exile is so mature and ripe. What the latter process achieves, as becomes clear in Said’s last interview with Charles Glass, is the maturation of his contrapuntal dialectical approach to harmonious and complementary affiliations and values (Said, 2004a). He can tell Nubar Hovsepian that he takes a lot of luggage with him because he fears he will never return—a sad reminder of his 1948 experience— and yet he defines exiles like him, fortunate enough, unlike political exiles, to treat home as a temporary base which allows freedom of thought and spirit. As a Palestinian, exile, in the first instance, is traumatic; as a universalist intellectual, it is an asset. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there was no need to apologize for or to reconcile this contradiction (Hovsepian, 1992, p 5). But is it a circle closed? Has Said left us with a clear answer of how a society can be both wedded to nationalism and yet secure individual liberties and criticism? Whether from a Marxist or a liberal point of view, the critics of nationalism produced a dire picture of it; whether they treated it as an ideology, a construct or an interpretation of reality, they presented it as a reductionist mechanism of identity and interpretation that serves the ambitions of a few at the expense of the many. Said the refugee could not easily allow himself to join in the celebration of demythologizing nationalism. His Palestinianism, so to speak, had to coexist, uncomfortably, with his universalism. Time made this necessary coexistence an asset, not a liability, and this in fact was his political legacy for the future: Jews and Palestinians would have to 279
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reconcile to a similar existence as does the national intellectual in exile. Like Said himself, future society in Palestine would have to live on the border between two and more cultures (including national ones) a society that would represent alternative narratives to reality—instead of or next to the master national narratives—as part of a process of restitution. In fact he called for such a future, in a more abstract way, in his most ‘postmodern’ article titled ‘Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community’ (Said, 1981). But he shunned postmodernism and others took it from there and constructed similar visions, as ideal types, for future societies. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari defined these as ‘deterrritorialized’ societies built on the collapse of master narratives (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). Said would probably have lived more comfortably with a less postmodernist approach to deterritorialization, such as the one offered by Henry Giroux in his pedagogic attempt to reconcile modernist and postmodernist critique as part of what he termed the pedagogy of ‘Border Crossing’ (Giroux, 1992). If one projects Giroux’s view onto the political scene one could chart in postconflictual Palestine a society in which identity is fragile, dynamic and moves easily between origins, spheres and languages. The multifarious perspective on life is the one that is encouraged, as an existential, not moral, imperative and it will, precariously, survive in a dialectical connection with a democratic western political structure. Said’s Post-Conflictual Vision Said never went that far of course. He left us only with guidelines for where the intellectual, not the rest of the society, would ideally find herself. Indeed, where would such an exilic intellectual live, if he were a Palestinian refugee? In an ideal world, this would have to be a country that allows intellectuals to be both organic and paragon keepers of liberties. Or, at least, a political structure that would allow him or her to be a combination of Gramsci and Benda. But no nation-states of the kind that exist in the Middle East, nor the state of Israel, can guarantee even such a minimal existence. Even, or maybe obviously, the United States, as Said noted in one his last books, has in recent years rejected such intellectualism. But maybe we should not take the concept of the ever-inquisitive and critical exilic intellectual loyalty to his national identity as a rigid position vis-a`-vis cultures or political realties. After all, Said died while being engaged in dialectically, but not solving, the contradictions between being a Palestinian intellectual exile and a voluntary exilic intellectual. This dialogue, towards the end of his life, recommended, or at least allowed, unsolved situations and long pauses in ambivalent stations pending further thought and even, as Said so clearly says in his last interview, unsettled epistemological questions. Exile, therefore, is a very dynamic concept: you are both on the border between cultures, or options, but you are also leaving the border zones to either cultures or to one of two opposing realities (for instance, you can be silent about nationalism, criticize it or even embrace it in Palestine—no need, always, to look for a way of reconciling it with your universal outlook). 280
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In Said’s late style mode, the exilic intellectual was able not only to offer a path into a future liberated from both Zionism and Arab tyrannies, he could be more modestly a Palestinian refugee who returned to become a citizen in either a bi-national state—one which reduces Zionism and Palestinian nationalism to an ideological construct weaker than similar ideologies in nation-state situations—or in a state of all its citizens. Nationalism could be conveniently reduced if principles rather than political structures would form the basis for a solution. In other words, the political structures can become not an end by themselves but rather means for implementing some principal guidelines. I extracted three such guidelines from Said, which I term as the three ‘A’s: acknowledgement, accountability and acceptance. They are unbinding extrapolations of his writings. The first is a global acknowledgment of the Nakbah to be led and formulated by the few Benda-like intellectuals on the Jewish side and accepted by the organic intellectuals on the Palestinian side as an achievement greater and more important than statehood or independence. The second is Israeli accountability for the ethnic cleansing in the name of universal rather than national principles. This is a call for implementing the right of return as a human right and not a national issue. A return for the sake of nationhood would endanger other liberties no less valuable than repatriation. A return to the place of necessary co-living and sharing may preserve also the more exquisite traits of an exile—adaptability, tolerance and moderation. And finally an Arab acceptance of Jewish suffering as part of a newly bridged and written historical narrative, integrating the millions of Jews in Israel into both the future political structure and the Arab Middle East as a whole. This would be achieved through recourse to the two imperatives highlighted in Culture and Imperialism: constructive dialogue and opposition to an obssesive return to a past culture cleansed of foreign impact (Said, 1994a, pp. 17–/19). The first is the need to have a constructive dialogue between offenders and victims in a postcolonial era, one that can be supplemented by the recommendation in the Politics of Dispossession (1994c) of a dialectical recognition of the Holocaust and the Nakbah as formative chapters in shaping the present. Second, from Culture and Imperialism, the future relationship with the past can be based only on a consensual refrain from cleansing ideologies or what Said called the culture of ‘return’: the wish to cleanse your culture from the admixture the whole world is shaped by because imperialism was so encompassing in the last two centuries; the need to fuse rather than defuse the future nation of Israel/Palestine into a society where intellectuals could still annoy everyone, but will have to seek virtual, instead of real, diasporas so as to be loyal to the role Said accorded to them: constantly being near power, but sufficiently far from its corrupting lure and to be part of a group whose ‘main goal is to give utterance not to mere fashion and passing fads but to real ideas and values, which cannot be articulated inside the position of power’ (Said, 1996, p. 185). So maybe, instead of a crescendo, we reduce the vision, in the end, into a search for a political structure that would tolerate such intellectualism rather than intellectuals who will tell us what their ideal typical future would (or ought to) be. After 2000, many critical voices in Israel subsided and the academics who 281
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had produced knowledge relevant to the present political predicaments reverted to eschewing the consensual interpretation of reality. It is therefore difficult to assert how significant or unique is this chapter in the Israeli history of ideas and ideologies. It may prove to be a passing moment, as alas it seems so now, or the precursor to a more radical future, if we were to take a more optimistic view on the chances of peace and reconciliation in the torn land of Palestine (Pappe, 2002). Whatever the future entails, it is important to reaffirm these criticisms as they constitute the possibility for a different reality in Israel and Palestine. They are simultaneously a critique of the past and a vision for the future. Within this sober appreciation of their present in/significance, we can justifiably highlight Said’s important impact on the part of post-Zionism that developed as a local version of postcolonialist critique and even more so in affecting the concrete deconstruction of the Zionist and Israeli scholarly writings that helped to sustain the Jewish state’s control over space and time. References Bayoumi, M. & Rubin, A. (Eds.) (2001). The Edward Said Reader. London: Granta. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis University Press. Doumani, B. (1999). Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: writing Palestinians into history. In Ilan Pappe (Ed.) The Israel/Palestine Question. London & New York: Routledge, 11–40. Doumani, B. (Ed.) (2003) Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Eyal, G. (June 2002). Dangerous liaisons: the relations between military intelligence. Theory and Criticism 20, 137–/64. Giroux, H. (1992). Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge. Gover, Y. (1994). Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Hebrew Fiction. London: University of Minnesota Press. Gur-Ze’ev, I. & Pappe, I. (2003). Beyond the deconstruction of the other’s collective memory: blueprints for Palestinian/Israeli dialogue. Theory, Culture & Society 20(1), 93–108. Hilal, J. (2003). Problematizing democracy in Palestine. Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23(1–2), 163–72. Hovsepian, N. (1992). Connections with Palestine. In Michael Sprinkler (Ed.) Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 5–18. JanMohammed, A. R. (1992). Worldiness without-world, homelessness-as-home: toward a definition of the specular border intellectual. In Michael Sprinkler (Ed.) Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 96–120. Khalidi, W. (1992a). All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. The Institute for Palestine Studies. Khalidi W. (1992b). Palestine Reborn. London: I. B. Tauris. Morris, B. (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisite. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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THE POSTCOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY OF EDWARD SAID Nassar, I. (2003). Remapping Palestine and the Palestinians: decolonizing and research. Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23(1–2): 149–/51. Pappe, I. (2002). The post-Zionist discourse in Israel. Holy Land Studies 1(1): 3–20. Rimon-Or, A. (June 2002). From silence to voice: ‘‘death to the Arabs’’ in contemporary Israeli culture. Theory and Criticism 20, 23–56. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Vintage. Said, E. (1981). Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community. In H. Foster (Ed.) The/ AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Washington, DC: Port Townsend, 135–59. Said, E. (1984). Shelat Filastin (The question of Palestine). Tel-Aviv: Mifras. Said E.(1994a). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Said, E. (1994b) Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon. Said, E. (1994c). The Politics of Dispossession; The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969– 1994. London: Chatto & Windus. Said, E. (1996). Peace and its Discontents—Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Process. London: Vintage. Said, E. (May 1998). New history, old ideas. Al-Ahram Weekly 378, 21–7. Said, E. (2000). Orientalism. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Said E. (2001a) Aqur (Out of place). Tel-Aviv: Yediot Achronot. (Hebrew) Said, E. (2001b). The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Vintage. Said, E. (2004a). The Last Interview. Interviewer: Charles Glass, Icarus Films. Said, E. (2004b). Thoughts on late style. The London Review of Books 26(15), 5 August. Shenhav, Y. (Ed.) (Spring 2002). The postcolonial gaze. Special issue of Theory and Criticism 20. (Hebrew) Shenhav, Y. (2003). The Arab Jews: Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Shitrit, S. S. (2004). The Mizrachi Struggle in Israel: Between Oppression and Liberation, Identification and Alternative, 1948–2003. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Shohat, E. (1992). Antinomies of exile: Said at the frontiers of national narrations. In Michael Sprinkler (Ed.) Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 121–43. Shohat, E. (1997). Colombus and the Arab Jews: toward a relational approach to community identity. In B. Parry, et al. (Ed.s) Cultural Identity and the Gravity of History—Reflections on the Work of Edward Said. New York: Lawrence & Wishart, 88–105. Shohat, E. (2001). Forbidden Reminiscences—A Collection of Articles. Tel-Aviv: Keshet Ha-Mizrach. (Hebrew)
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Arie Kizel
Homelessness, Restlessness and Diasporic Poetry
The Diasporic individual, in exile from his ‘home’, any home, cannot escape by means of poetry from building one, but can use it to dismantle its confining walls, express solace, strive for creativity and discover love. Poetry may provide one of the most creative potential tools of Diasporic philosophy, love and creativity being its cornerstones (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005a: 13–14), but it can also be a destructive factor seeking to imprison the creative soul within a home with the solid walls of a rigid community. The Diasporic individual strives against the self-evident and thus does not seek a home, a permanent shelter. He turns against the existing order, does not cling to modernist nor other truths. He recreates himself. He does not merely react nor act on the spur of the moment, but, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, he makes “Something no nonbeing can hold” (Szymborska, 1998). The Three Oddest Words When I pronounce the word Future the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing I make Something no nonbeing can hold.
Poetry has dialectic elements; it may become either committed or Diasporic. It enables the undermining of all-pervading conformism, and through its crises generates the need to abandon the habitual dwelling for a nomadic existence, essential to prevent being drawn into a confining home. And yet it may, in an instant, turn into a warm space, pleasant, protected and even cuddling, simulating a source of creativity, but permeated by a pre-determined and restrictive ideology. In such situations it may lead to commitment, sometimes political and ideological. Szymborska expresses this stance well in her poem: “We Knew The World Backwards and Forwards…”
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ARIE KIZEL We Knew the World Backwards and Forwards… We Knew The World Backwards and Forwards— so small it fit in a handshake, so easy it could be described in a smile, as plain as the echoes of old truths in a prayer. History did not greet us with triumphant— it flung dirty sand in our eyes. Ahead of us were distant roads leading nowhere, poisoned wells, bitter bread. The spoils of war is our knowledge of the world— so large it fits in a handshake, so hard it could be described in a smile as strange as the echoes of old truths in a prayer. (Szymborska, 2001, p. 35).
Diasporic philosophy is opposed to making an effort to build a home, to violating the home of the Other or to returning home, in the words of Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (GurZe’ev, 2004: 180). Both Diasporic education and Diasporic philosophy aim first and foremost at an ethical-creative way of life, drawing on the idea of exile in Judaism, and leading to the birth of the improviser, actualizing the essence of Judaism in the cosmopolitan sense, as a possible life for all humans, not withdrawing to a territory, a collective or to Jewish tradition: “From the point of view of Diasporic philosophy, exile is a womb. Between the darkness of its infinity and the light of the principle of hope and only in the presence of the human, the self-evident meaning of thingness is born of the seeds of the ‘totally Other’ and being becomes gradually visible until it is transformed into the ‘problematic of ascribing meaning’” (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005b, p. 202).
The Jewish essence is manifested here in the messianic struggle for the redemption of the world, no longer in the sense intended by Hess and Marx or Cohen and Leo Beck (Gur-Ze’ev, 2004, p. 193). It is manifested through its nomadic nature, as an ethical dimension of life that is neither relativist nor nihilist. It refuses to give up responsibility and insists on taking a stand. The Diasporic individual’s responsibility lies above all in his acknowledgment of genuine exile, in confronting the existence of suffering and in becoming aware of the successful universal journey towards the dwarfing of humanity. Such responsibility is also directed towards the otherness of the Other and also towards the evasive otherness in the self as being-toward and constantly overcoming its normalization. Diasporic education cannot make moral consciousness or commitment obligatory or enforce it (Ibid, p. 194). Thus a Diasporic way of life, the product of Diasporic education, will be that of an improviser, who does not seek a home or fulfillment through tradition in a collective 286
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that would serve as a fortified rampart; on the contrary, he will break through the fences and become a trailblazer who paves the way. Thus the exile will be a person who is always paving new roads but not building homes. His life’s journey will be a constant dynamic search, while tearing down, branching off, setting out and not permitting entry. He will always be ‘paving-the-way-toward’ in a Godless world. Derrida invites his readers to think in travel or to ‘think travel’ (Malabou, 1999). Bauman explains “that means to think that unique activity of departing’ going away from chez soi, going far, towards the unknown, risking all the risks, pleasures and dangers that the ‘unknown’ has in store (even the risk of not returning)” (Bauman, 2000, p. 206). The element of ‘being away’ in the eyes of Derrida is, according to Bauman, perpetual exile or statelessness. “This did not mean, though, having no cultural homeland. Quite the contrary: being ‘culturally stateless’ meant having more than one homeland, building a home of one’s own on the crossroads between cultures… His ‘home on the crossroads’ was built of language” (Ibid). Can poetry be Diasporic? Can poetry free itself from the shackles of conformism? Can it be independent and divergent, and not seek a home? Is it capable of mustering its inner strengths and living without being enlisted by a collective that accords it power? Perceiving poetry as information, seeking to connect to social energy in order to fulfill its potential, confines it within the boundaries of human collectives, even if they are not political or inspired by an ideology. Bending poetry to obtain support from people supplying it with energy, stemming from their biological being or social, spiritual and even religious essence, will confine it and prevent it from wandering in exile. Poetry is essentially dialectic. It has little vitality without the presence of the Other, without interaction with him. However, it also contains independent, personal elements and reaches its peak through the individual’s anti-conformist activity and expression. Poetry, like language, enables us to view ourselves from outside, thereby fulfilling an important role, similar to language itself, and it is created by the individual’s alienation even from himself. Bauman describes it as “the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment—a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn” (Ibid, p. 207). Since the individual discovers the abstractness of language at an early stage, he turns it into a subservient tool and attempts to program it. Poetry, stemming from language, is yet another format of programming, like prayer, ritual, story, opera. Language appears as an ultimate alternative to death and it meets the constant need of pinning down the ephemeral about to disappear. Poetry is fundamentally affected by this need and so, apparently, it cannot exist except within a human environment, defined and confined, investing it with meaning. However, even though the individual supplies the energy to the tools he creates and also to the words he utters, poetry need not be dependent on energies that are political or able to fetter him. The concreteness of the words, the liberating power 287
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stemming from their movement disrupting conventional rhythms, and the divergent structure of poetry do not depend only on its connection to a palpable object, as promulgated during the Middle Ages by the nominalist school. The Diasporic approach proffers an alternative. It does not seek the concreteness of a home, and therefore language—rejected by Plato because its creations were not permanent— when in the form of poetry, makes divergence possible. Even if poetry is ephemeral and not eternal, while it exists it enables divergence from the concreteness of the here and now and lives as a dynamic independent entity. Indeed, because language is the human’s main tool and even though he turns his anger against the messengers of existence, i.e. language (Shechter, 2005, p. 215), poetry has the power to exist in its own right. All the humans’ illusions are born of the language given them; it is language that enables them to play about in this way: to exploit it and to renounce it. Information, language, enables the human to create places of refuge for himself—the next world. But there are also other places of refuge—dreams. Surely information about the universe, the universal language itself, plays a kind of hide-and-seek, appearing and disappearing, creating and dismantling. (Ibid)
The Diasporic poet will move constantly towards the all-pervading outer world, paving the divergent road. He does not destroy the homes of others, but he persuades them to set out with him along paths that sometimes prove new. The new path involves, through its very essence, the danger of becoming another home, and therefore the Diasporic trailblazer will remain a constant traveler, a philosophical nomad, the essence of his daily life consisting of search and exertion as an organic inner aspect of his creative life and its fulfillment in the love of humanity. The Diasporic poet, living in a “floating territory”, as Michel Maffesoli describes (Maffesoli, 1996), will always be asking questions, investigating and seeking a path and not always finding it. He will not lament that he has not found the final goal, since his life’s purpose will be creativity and improvisation through love, not the violent conquest of a target through instrumental means. He will be digging without unearthing the sought for objective, for the final aim is a home that he does not strive for. He will continue to confront the next obstacle, the next mountain, from which he will contemplate creativity, liberated from the shackles of a home and the restful but deceptive warmth of the family-collective-religious hammock. He will be homeless but also restless. The Diasporic poet’s basic approach to reality will be a questioning one—wonder and investigation. In her poem “Some love poetry”, Szymborska expresses it well and asks about the essence of poetry. She gives “a shaky answer” to that question, trying to cling to it to save her, but actually without succeeding.
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HOMELESSNESS, RESTLESSNESS AND DIASPORIC POETRY Some Love Poetry Some— not all, that is. Not even the majority of all, but the minority. Not counting school, where one must, or the poets themselves, there’d be maybe two such people in a thousand. Like— but one also likes chicken-noodle soup. one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf, one likes to prove one’s point, one likes to pet a dog. Poetry— but what sort of thing is poetry? Many a shaky answer has been given to this question. But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it, as to a saving banister. (Szymborska, 2001, p. 139)
Poetry may be hitched to ethnicity. Moshe Benarroch, writer, poet and translator, perceives himself as an exile. The Zionist home, the Israeli one, the existential situation at that particular historical moment and also the one preceding it, does not enable Benarroch to fulfill his destiny and to express the significance in its modern sense, and this makes him a poet of eastern exile in a country where the eastern narrative is already mainstream. He appreciates exile as a source of great cultural wealth. “On the way to the Zionist revolution we lost many positive features pertaining to our exile, because Zionism considered any such characteristics as negative. When they tell me that I am an exile, I do not feel offended. I am not at ease in Israeli society and therefore I also consider myself as Diasporic”. Benarroch would surely have accepted the opinion of Amnon Raz-Karkochkin, that the idea of negation of the Diaspora means negation of the memory of entire traditions perceived as Diasporic within the Israeli context (Raz-Karkochkin, 1993, p. 24). And in the poem ”I am a Moroccan poet” he expresses it very well:
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ARIE KIZEL Tamazgha, My Lost Country Tamazgha, land of the free people, Kahena El Dahyan, my queen mother jew and woman who fought the arab invasion in the eighth century My Amazigh name, Arous, Benarrous, Benarroch lost in centuries of wars intolerance in my country where christians, jews and pagans lived and believed by each other Rise my Amazigh people from the ruins of Rome the intolerance of Islam the decay of Europe Rise my Amazigh people and teach tolerance to this world where the forgotten are the right where the lost stone leads the light Rise Kahena, Queen of jews and Amazighs Raise for your memory this new world in this new millennium demands justice for all that is called past.
Benarroch’s exile is also exile from himself, not only in opposition to a specific political agenda, a narrative he rejects. It is an exile not characterized by comfort and well-being. It does not involve striving for a non-Diasporic existence, attempts to shake off the imprint of exile. It is homelessness, but a genuine human existence. And yet it is not a Diasporic life, since exile has become a safe home, facilitating the forging of a well constructed, confining ideology. Benarroch calls it “the deepest exile”. He does not bemoan exile, as does Bialik. He does not glorify the homeland like Uri Zvi Greenberg. He does not perceive himself, like Avigdor Hameiri, as a person with a national identity, whose rapport to the People of Israel and its fate constitutes the central pivot of his writing. Benarroch’s poetry enables him to leave the home he finds menacing, preying on him and ensnaring him. In his poetry he
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Amazigh means Berbers, who are the majority of people in Morocco and in the Maghreb. They are more than 50% of Moroccan population (some say 70%); yet their language is forbidden. The name of the Maghreb in Tamazigh.
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expresses unwillingness to withdraw behind the protective walls of ethnocentricity, he wants to break out of their tendentious confinement. According to Benarroch, a home is a factor stifling his spontaneity and his instincts, his creativity, and above all his love. In his poem “Coming out of the closet” he conveys domesticity not only in its technical, architectural sense, but also as an idea. This poem expresses the liberating element in writing poetry, creative language making it possible to abandon the self-evident and also any specific territory. Benarroch gives expression to exile from a critical stance towards Zionism. He displays his Diasporic nature best in his poem “The Enlightened Ones”, expressing overall criticism of Zionism, though merely by implication—his opinion that it is oppressing the members of his ethnic group. Since language, by dint of its essence, functions within transient situations, organizes energy and turns it into entities and then abandons them (Shechter, 2005, p. 32), it does not inherently contain the permanence of a home. Discourse between individuals is indispensable not only for the purpose of communication, but to produce tools and institutions; thus language itself is a creation, a group creation and its abstract nature “enables the human to take possession of an ever widening sphere of existence, but it also causes great anxiety and engenders the wish to return to more tangible entities (Ibid, p. 34). Poetry enables the individual to diverge from this path in that it does not seek to cling to the concrete world, but tries to speculate about its components and reshape them. Poetry is not egalitarian, and in a certain sense it enables the actualization of counter education, on which Diasporic philosophy is based. Not being egalitarian enables poetry—through its rhythms, structure, the way it is written—to depart from the familiar mainstream fabrications of poetic culture and from the existing cultural institutions, confining it to a home, classifying it under categories in symbolically violent way. Thus poetry enables the person, not wishing to belong to a collective or to become some kind of recluse, to assert his individuality. Diasporic poetry enables him to create in a totally private and personal way, preserving his fundamental stance against being enlisted, even at the price of renouncing becoming a celebrity. To give up cultural and social legitimization is not a simple matter, and the Diasporic poet is likely to suffer from anxiety, fearing extreme loneliness; however, at the same time, he benefits from the power gained, enabling him to enjoy the freedom he needs in order to live poetry. Poetry can invite responsiveness, open up the possibility of free choice, inevitably countered dialectically by a desire for the enriching experience of a nomadic life, worthy of the eternal improviser. Poets are indeed unique individuals, as in the words of Szymborska “there’d be maybe two such people in a thousand”. They are not supposed to be raised above the people, aloof and detached, but—if Diasporic—they must be rooted in exile. These are individuals insisting on their independent path by dint of an existential choice, while demonstrating solidarity with humankind. But these writers sense a constant danger of being driven into the reality of the historical moment. Then they will turn poetry into a home, will turn themselves into an instrument in the hands of the forces of the state, of society, the regime, 291
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the ideology, in the service of the wish for power, of the self-pity of the victimized individual. Their test will come during a political or national crisis. The steadfastness of an independent stance will also be tested when confronted by the need of social institutions to enlist poetry in the service of collective memory. This memory is preserved by myths and rituals greatly enhanced by committed poetry; they are the formal ‘tools’ of civil religion. Collective memory serves to define ideological groups, each fostering a different memory; therefore in the historical and political arena of power struggles, poetry is enlisted by the competing memories. Poets will be granted a superior status and thereby also various personal and other benefits by elected and non-elected institutions. Poetry contributes greatly to the building up of a collective memory, since, through its structure, it excels in lending the status of myths to violent practices and turning them into negotiable social property. Poetry has the power to enlist the young generation, in particular through building “the memory of a shared past, preserved by the members of a small or large group who had experienced the past” (Schuman & Scott, 1989: 259–381). It is a transformative tool facilitating the sifting through facts and reshaping the memory even to the extent of rewriting history. In joining in, poetry becomes negotiable and easily reproduced by the young through the media, highlighting its rallying power. According to Yael Zrubavel, collective memory is not a mere collection of facts; it mediates between the existing historical material and the current agenda, and the social and political order of priorities In contrast, history limits the inventiveness of collective memory. Thus collective memory may improvise, emphasize certain elements, suppress others and shed a light into dark corners, and in other cases relegate important events to obscurity (Kizel, 2008, pp. 153–170). While the framework is laid down by historical sources or any type of knowledge about the past, it is not necessarily the existence of knowledge or its lack that determines the memory’s components. Zrubavel therefore maintains that, when political debates about the nature of the memory intensify, history is enlisted in order to challenge the memory (Zrubavel, 1995). Poetry plays a central role in this context and may facilitate the sidestepping of historical and political facts. Gur-Ze’ev, on his part, points out that poetry can also expose the horrifying truth, that all the philosophical, existential, political possibilities as well as evading them can be defended and refuted by means that are also contingent on manipulation or self-forgetfulness, ending with a reconfirmation of the self-evident, of a vagueness determined by logical, existential, infinite and omnipotent inevitability (Gur Ze’ev, 2004, p. 194). Nevertheless, poetry has the power to create and to love. Indeed, it is because it sometimes seeks to avoid using the tools of political rhetoric—motivated by the paradigm of temporary power relations or a clash of identities in the era of multiculturalism—and is multi-faceted; it is responsive to the linguistic richness of life and its representation and has the potential to break out of boundaries. Poetry is destined to confront “aggressive, national totality, dispersed into endless dimensions of life, levels of existence and metaphysical compulsion” (Ibid). 292
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The poet, if he fulfills his destiny as an exile as Berthold Brecht did in “The Exile of Poets”, is not a committed person; he is subversive, unwilling to speak for established authorities, even though there is always the possibility that he may be swallowed up by them, as happened at certain historical moments to other poets, who were enlisted by the sources of power, drew upon it and extolled it. Poetry has additional Diasporic elements. It is a way of life expressing profound faith. It enables the poet—and also the reader—to overcome the limitations of his normative language that he absorbed in his home, the language that normalizes his perceptions and encloses him in the warmth of the familiar and the well-known, causing him to submit to them. It enables the poet to distance himself from mere reproduction and express unparalleled beauty, as well as scathing criticism of the social manifestations of injustice and of fallacious political consciousness. Language seeks to restrain the energy residing in the physical body that rebels constantly against the intentionality of language, but creative poetry serves as a means of revolt against the aggressiveness of language through its anti-hegemonic nature. Language becomes a substitute for territory, just as wars for abstract values come to replace it. Therefore Diasporic poetry does not seek to elevate values, such as that of birthright in the story of Cain and Abel. It does not wish to win in a struggle for flags, symbols and lands. It becomes the foundation of human creation, being an activity inspired by divergent energy, not by energy molding an identity; thus it is not motivated by human loneliness. Descartes wished that, in order to be certain of his identity and verify his existence, a person should not be dependent on interacting with another; in the same way Diasporic poetry seeks to become an alternative to informative language. Diasporic poetry seeks to turn words and language, external in essence, into an internal phenomenon, and thus devoid of magic power, nor serving as a tool in the hands of rulers; their role is to be anti-instrumental, reflecting desire. Heidegger perceived creative work and also poetry as establishing historical periods. He believed that poets are the true philosophers, but he distinguishes between the creation and the creator. According to Heidegger, the creator does not turn into a hero at the moment of completing his work; it is the creation that becomes a masterpiece establishing a period, and only after a certain time has passed (Mansbach, 1998, p. 92). In his book Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger also asserts that language dominates Man’s life and he lives within it. He also does not see language as creating value systems and institutions, i.e. a potential for connecting to physical existence; he perceives language as poetry. In his opinion masterpieces exist in their own right, and he emphasizes that the spontaneity of the artist and the intensity of his emotions are secondary to the role of the artistic creation as creating a world and truth. The significance of the existence of the artist, i.e. of the individual artist or philosopher, manifests itself after his creation is accepted in the course of time (Ibid., p. 93). Thus Heidegger considers it possible for poetry to transcend the limits of the time when it was written and to be exposed during a later period. Diasporic poetry contains within it an element of ‘disclosure’, i.e. it is exposed after being hidden (Heidegger, 1999, p. 184). 293
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Heidegger perceives language as a hiding place and a means of escape, and therefore it becomes a home. In contrast, the role of disclosure that he ascribes to poetry has an element of exile, since disclosure enables a divergence from the original purpose or the control of thought or the historical moment. This is how Heidegger distinguishes between language and poetry. Mansbach maintains that, according to Heidegger, language as the tool making poetry possible, is the essence of history, and therefore “the fundamental components that had once created a new world are inscribed in the linguistic creations of a nation, such as legends, sagas and traditions. In view of the new interpretation of these creative works, in turning them into a legacy through which they project their light into the future, nations can make a fresh start and discover the truth that bestows on them their distinctive place in history, both in the present time and in future” (Mansbach, 1998, p. 98). However, Diasporic poetry does not contain historical elements and it does not seek to become part of a legacy or enlisted for historical purposes. In his The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger points out that there is a danger in replacing a humanist subject by an aesthetic one (that will turn into a home, yearning for a home) and this will lead to surrender to subjectivism. He asks what it is that enables art to create truth and what enables works of art, among them poetry, to convey meaning and create a world, and thus preserve the continuity of authenticity. In his discussion of the essence of art and its products in The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger uses the concept of poetry or Poesie in the sense of the usual rhythmic poetic work, and the concept ‘Urpoesie’, ‘Urdichtung’ in the sense of the element found in any work of art, the foundation of all art” (Ibid., p. 93). According to Mansbach’s analysis, ‘Urpoesie’ enables works of art to create a space where the entities disclose themselves. It is ‘das Offene’ where they exist. Poesie makes it possible to incorporate them into the world, creating new connections with the other entities, thus producing a web of meaning. Poesie is produced through the process of creation, but since the only connection with the artist preserved in the artistic work is his intention that the work should exist in its own right, the poem is no longer dependent on its creator (Ibid). The poem belongs entirely to creation itself. It is an occurrence of truth as disclosure, and thus every masterpiece lets truth appear. Heidegger also calls ‘Urpoesie’ ‘Ursprache’, and asserts that “language itself is poetry in its essential meaning”, i.e. ‘Poesie’ (Ibid., p. 24). Heidegger was very interested in the 19th century poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whom he called “the poet of poets”. He also dealt extensively with poems by Rilke, Mörike and others. In his book The Way to Language he asserts that words create the human world. According to Heidegger, the contribution of poetry lies in its being “an act produced by the power of words and within it”, and as for its preservation of the disclosure, Heidegger adopts Hölderlin’s view, who concluded from the poem “Recall” that “what was preserved was founded by poets”, meaning that the poet’s language and its authentic nature preserve the entities as such. Hölderlin called it “the poet’s state of mind”. Not only mere objects are substantiated by language, so is Man. Therefore “the words of poets create the basis [...] in the sense of providing a stable foundation to 294
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Man’s being”, as expressed by Heidegger. And thus, he too perceives language as a home. Even though it is the poets who create the meaning, and they establish the firm foundation to Man’s being, he also does not believe there is hope for human thought to diverge through poetry. In this respect he does not provide an unambiguous answer about the essence of poetry as an active Diasporic existence. Heidegger deals with the role of poets as capable of transforming, exposing things as they are, and perceives poetry as a home. He even uses the expression ‘Gegend’, neighborhood, to describe the place inhabited by poetry and thought. He writes that poetry and thought are directed to the logos, and therefore they can be perceived as residing in the same neighborhood. “Their being neighbors means that they live opposite each other, that is how they have come to dwell, each seeking the other’s company” (Ibid., p. 127). According to Mansbach, the concept ‘neighborhood’ represents a place involving movement, an inn, providing a possibility for development (Ibid., p. 128). Heidegger relates to poets as though they were standing on the peaks of distant mountains and speaking above an abyss. He assigns them the role of preserving the ‘Ursprache’ and the home of Being. He grants poetry the power that does not pertain to a home, but is above it, a power expressing boundless mystery, the power of the creative destiny. In his own words: “The poet names the gods and all things […] poetry creates an entity by means of words […] when the gods are named and the essence of words is named, when the things are illuminated for the first time, human existence is firmly welded and founded” (Ibid., p. 150). Walter Benjamin in his essay ”About language in general and about the language of Man”, relates to the subject of poetry, but first discusses language. His approach is spiritual and he distinguishes between the language of God, the pure language of naming, and the language of the Garden of Eden: Man plays a limited role in the Divine Tongue, and in the language born with original sin there is no innocence; it becomes instrumental, a tool. Benjamin asserts that the meaning of language is that of a principle intended for conveying spiritual contents: Language does not manifest itself completely in the objects themselves. This sentence has a double meaning, owing to its borrowed and concrete significance: Objects do not have a perfect way of expressing themselves, they are voiceless. They are devoid of pure linguistic essence—they do not possess sound. They are able to communicate with each other only by means of a little or a great deal of physical interconnection. This interconnection is unmediated and infinite like all linguistic communication: It is magical (for there is also magic in matter). Human language is unique in that its association with objects is not physical, it is purely spiritual, symbolized by sound. This symbolism is expressed in the Bible in saying that God breathed the breath of life into man: life, spirit and language, all at the same time. (Benjamin, 1996, p. 289)
Here Benjamin goes back to the Bible and maintains that he does not base his philosophy on the Bible as a source of empirical revelation, but tries to discover what can be understood from the biblical text about language itself, including the 295
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language of poetry. He asserts that for this purpose the Bible is unrivalled as a source, since it perceives itself as a revelation and thus must disclose the basic facts about language. Benjamin follows the second version of the Creation that tells how God breathed life into Man and also that Man was created of the dust of the ground. In the whole story of the Creation, this is the only place where God expresses his will through matter, creating the world spontaneously. God created Man in his own image. He created conscious Man in the image of the Creator. His spiritual essence is language, through which Creation occurs. The world was created by the Word, and God’s linguistic essence is the Word. Human language is merely the reflection of that Word […] The seemingly endless possibilities of any human language are always limited and analytical in essence, in contrast to the endless, unlimited and creative possibilities of the Word of God. (Ibid., p. 290)
According to Benjamin, Man cannot transcend the limits of language, the limits of poetry as a home. Human language, and also that of poetry, is constrained and analytical, and therefore no transcendental option exists, in particular not after the original sin. The original sin is the moment when human language was born, within which naming no longer lives unblemished […] Words are supposed to convey something. That is indeed the original sin of the spirit of language: The words that convey from outside, a kind of parody of the Word, mediating explicitly, a parody of the explicitly spontaneous that is the Word of God the Creator, and the decline of the blessed language, Man’s language, standing between them. There is indeed a basic identity between the Word that knows, as promised by the snake, for good or evil, and the Word that conveys from outside. Getting to know the world stems from the naming, but getting to know good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegard perceives the word “chatter”, and it knows only one purification and one sublimation that has now also included the chattering, sinful Man: the sentence. (Ibid., pp. 292–293)
Benjamin distinguishes between the language of sculpture, of painting and that of poetry and maintains that “since the language of poetry is based not only on the human language of names but certainly also on it, so we may presume that the language of sculpture or of painting is based on certain types of languages of objects and involves the translation of the language of objects into an immensely higher language” (Ibid., pp. 294–295). According to Benjamin, the language of poetry is spiritual and it enables Man to express himself without any connection to a home, to a framework. He grants poetic language the status of a stream of consciousness, when consciousness transfers itself from the lowest being up to Man and from Man to God. Love is one of the main elements of Diasporic philosophy (Gur-Ze’ev, 2005a, p. 24). The language of poetry contains elements of the explicit revelation of Love, as it is manifested in the Song of Songs or in the Gospel according to John:
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HOMELESSNESS, RESTLESSNESS AND DIASPORIC POETRY These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends […] These things I command you, that ye love one another. (John, chapter 15, verses 11–14 and 17)
Poetry may save man from solipsism and it fosters anthropomorphism of the whole world (Meir, 2004). Since it has such qualities, it contains elements of love and it is a significant, fundamental component of exile and one of the components of creativity. Gur-Ze’ev sees in Diasporic education a deeply religious way of life: Profound faith with a male and female pole, God and Shekhinah (Divine Presence), ‘reality’ and utopia—as an impetus, as life space, and as an object to overcome. Diasporic education is counter education and becomes education for the Love of Life. It draws upon love for the joy and happiness arising from creativity, when life itself is a work of art, constantly reopening the gates of Being and the bolts of consciousness with all their wealth, levels and dimensions. The art of living involving suffering, compassion, love, joy and creativity, turns into religious belief, the message intended by Spinoza as the third, highest level of consciousness. The intuitive and spontaneous consciousness in the Diasporic ethic leads the eternal improviser to combat any manifestation of injustice, falsehood and ugliness. This consciousness is accompanied by the ethical stand of selflove stemming from the Love of Life and responsibility for the Other in a world where wisdom, justice, beauty and love are not all-pervading, but rather the means to overcome their denial and defilement. That is where we find mature, ironic joy, the close companion of the happy Diasporic man. (Gur-Ze’ev, 2004, p. 195)
Poetry can serve to extol Man’s ruthlessness, be confined, draw boundaries; it can contain, in its Diasporic manifestations, a call for revolt. It may, however, serve those who wish to avoid revolt, as Camus states in The Rebel: We can also say about these poets, who took off to conquer the sky, that in their desire to overthrow everything, they declared their desperate longing for order. By way of a total contradiction, they sought to derive wisdom from the irrational, turn the irrational into a method. These great heirs of romanticism claimed to make poetry the masterpiece and reveal authentic life in its most exhilarating aspects. They admired the sacrilegious and turned poetry into an attempt and means of action. And indeed, whoever claimed to influence events and people prematurely, at least in the west, acted on a rational basis. (Camus, 1999, p. 69)
Poetry is trapped between two dimensions. On the one hand, when displaying responsibility, it can be of a Diasporic nature, divergent, revealing, subversive, creative and loving. It can serve as a tool helping Man to overcome the longing ‘to return home’ and the apparent nirvana of the existing social-cultural conventions. It enhances the tension between the unbridled urge and the creative reaction, empowering the potential for taking an ethical stance. On the other hand, it can turn into a tool enlisted and trampled on in the service of collectivism and ideology. Under the seeming protection of its structured gentleness it may empower human 297
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ruthlessness and inhumanity to Man. If it is committed, relaxed, instrumental, as a tool in the hands of the regime or a home or homes (the building of a nation or a state, of nationhood or any other project), it contains the potential for a creative return home, involving compromises and the making of definitive and restrictive statements, drawing it into the historical moment to serve collective and individual power struggles. As Brecht wrote in his poem “The Exile of Poets”: Homer had no homeland, And Dante had to leave his own.... Lucretius went into exile, Like Heine, and so lies Brecht under a Danish roof of straw. (Brecht, 1978, p. 123)
References: Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, W. (1996). Reflections, Vol. II. Translated by David Zinger. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Brecht, B. (1978). The Exile of the Poets. Translated by H. Benjamin. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad. (Hebrew). Camus, A. (1999). The Rebel. Translated by Zvi Arad. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Heidegger, M. (1999). Articles—On the way to Being, Translated by Adam Tenenbaum. Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2004). Toward a Diasporic Education: Multi-Culturalism, Postcolonialism and CounterEducation in a Post-Modern Era. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Gur-Ze’ev, I. (ed.) (2005a). Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today—Toward a New Language in Education. Haifa: University of Haifa. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2005b). Academia, the eternal improviser and the possibility of meaning in the post-modern world. In: I. Gur-Ze’ev (ed.) The End of Academia in Israel? Haifa: University of Haifa. (Hebrew) Kizel, A. (2008). Subservient History: A Critical Analysis of History Curricula and Textbooks in Israel 1948—2006. Tel Aviv: Mofet. (Hebrew) Maffesoli, M. (1996). The time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society. London: Sage. Malabou, C. (1999). Jacques Derrida: La contre-allée, Quinzaine littéraire-Louis Vuitton. Mansbach, A. (1998). Existence and Meaning—Martin Heidegger about Man, Language and Art. Jerusalem: Magnes. (Hebrew) Meir, E. (2004). Jewish Existential Philosophers in Dialogue, Jerusalem: Magnes. (Hebrew) Raz-Karkochkin, A. (Autumn 1993). Exile within Sovereignty: Critism of ‘negation of the Diaspora’ as the Israeli Culture (Part 1). Theory and Criticism, 4. (Hebrew). Shechter, R. (2005). In the beginning was the Word—Is that so?. Jerusalem: Carmel. (Hebrew) Schuman, H. & Scott, J. (1989). Generations and Collective Memory. American Journal Review, 54 (3), 259–381. Szymborska, W. (1998). Poems New and Collected 1957—1997. Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Chvagh. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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HOMELESSNESS, RESTLESSNESS AND DIASPORIC POETRY Szymborska, W. (2001). Miracle Fair, Selected Poems. Translated by Joanna Trzeciak. N.Y & London: Norton & company. Zrubavel, Y. (1995). Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago press.
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the human being, and can direct the human experience through the acceptance of the transcendent law. This approach resembles for example Rudolf Steiner’s early twentieth century anthroposophy, in which the “spiritual” transcendent world is accessible to the human being, and directs the human experience through inner development. Anthroposophic education today is still very much informed by Steiner’s utopian spiritualism. In Jonas’ case, however, the inherent openness of the individual towards transcendence should not mean a new plunge into a “positive utopia”, but rather a genuine refusal to acknowledge any form of utopianism. What enables Jonas’ “anti-utopian” message, is the character of the individual contact with transcendence—not as a direct contact with a present divinity within the world, but with the echo of an absent one, still invested in the world. One can say that Jonas juggles here between liberal and conservative pedagogic impulses, balancing like a circus acrobat on the tight cable suspended high in the air, employing step by step all the professional knowledge at his disposal in order not to fall either side. Yet, it seams that such an act of flexible performance is crucial if one is to maintain a pedagogic approach which acknowledges political and cultural reality without succumbing to resignation. Enduring refusal or total approval of reality are its alternatives. References Benyamini, I. (2007). Paul and the Birth of the Sons’ Community: An Investigation into the Foundations of Christianity with Freud and Lacan. Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Cohen, H. (1972). The Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. New York: Unger Publications. Emberley, P. & Cooper, B. (Eds.). (2004). Faith and Political Philosophy—The correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1960. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Freire. P. (1985). The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Freire, P. (1986). Pedagogy of Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education. New York: Bergin & Garv. Funkenstein, A. (1986). Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton UP. Gadotti, M. (2003). Pedagogy of the Earth and the Culture of Sustainability. Lecture given at the International Conference on Life Long Citizenship Learning, Participatory Democracy & Social Change, Toronto, Canada. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2007). Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education: Toward Counter-Education and Enduring Improvisation. Rotterdam: Sense. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and Time. New York: SUNY. Hotam, Y. (2007a). Modern Gnosis and Zionism: The Culture Crisis—Life Philosophy and National Jewish Thought. Jerusalem: Magness. (Hebrew) Hotam, Y. (2007b). Gnosis and Modernity—A Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularization, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8, 3/4, 591– 609.
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ECOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY Jonas, H. (1934/1954). Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist. Tübingen: V&R. Jonas, H. (1958). The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press. Jonas, H. (1966). The Phenomenon of Life—Toward a Philosophical Biology. Evanston: Northwestern. Jonas, H. (1984a). The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Eethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jonas, H. (1984b). Der Gottestbegriff nach Auschwitz: Eine Jüdische Stimme. München: Suhrkamp. Jonas, H. (1996). Matter, Mind and Creation: Cosmological Evidence and Cosmogonic Speculation. In: L. Vogel (ed.). Mortality and morality: A search for the good after Auschwitz. Evanston: Northwestern UP. McLaren, P. (ed.). (2007). Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era. New York: Rutledge. Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy. New York: SUNY. Orr, D. W. (1994). Earth in mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Washington: Island Press. Rees, M. (2007). Our Cosmic Habitat. Princeton: Princeton UP. Weinberg, S. (1977). The First Three Minutes: a Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. New York: Basic Books. Weinberg, S. (1992). Dreams of a final theory: The scientist’s search for the ultimate laws of nature, New York: Vintage Books. Wiese, C. (2003). Zusammen philosoph und jude: Hans Jonas. Frankfurt aM.: Jüdischer Verlag. Suoranta, J. & Houston, D. & Martin, G. & McLaren, P. (2008). The havoc of capitalism: educating for social and environmental justice. Rotterdam: Sense.
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Names index
Adorno, Theodor, 37, 39, 44, 48, 59, 60–81, 96, 109, 110, 114, 116, 138, 141, 142–146, 155, 161, 167, 172, 173, 188, 307 Apollo, 12, 234 Anaximander, 14, 100 Arendt, Hannah, 99, 114, 142, 301 Aristotle, 161, 166, 202, 241, 247 Augustine, St., 48, 58, 88, 89, 101–105, 111, 115, 243, 244, 247 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhalowich, 131, 154, 257 Baudrillard, Jean, 30, 32, 44, 96, 106, 115 Bauman, Zygmunt, 19, 26, 37, 44, 193, 210, 220, 287, 298 Beck, Ulrich, 79, 80 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 61, 62, 66, 68, 70, 73, 75, 80, 88, 89, 98, 115, 131, 138, 142, 145, 167, 172, 179, 279, 295, 296, 298 Bergson, Henri, 107, 217 Bhabha, homi, 109, 136, 182, 210, 220 Bloch, Ernst, 31 Braidotti, Rosi, 19, 32, 44, 125, 207–221 Bourdieu, Pierre, 195 Boyarin, Daniel, 19, 26, 26, 127–140 Boyarin, Jonathan, 171–191 Butler, Judith, 177, 186, 187 Camus, Albert, 88, 96, 150, 162, 236, 237, 245, 246, 247, 249, 263, 270, 297, 298 Deleuze, Gilles, 34, 35, 36, 44, 68, 80, 93, 110, 147, 157, 207, 208, 210, 213–215, 217, 220, 260, 263, 270, 280, 282 Derrida, Jacques, 48, 88, 93, 96, 109, 110, 173, 207, 220, 287, 298 Descartes, Rene, 95, 238, 293 Dewey, John, 151 Dionysus, 13, 30, 35, 74 Durkheim, Emile, 259 Erdinast-Vulkan, Daphna, 26, 251–258 Foucault, Michel, 93, 110, 157, 187, 207, 208, 220 Freire, Paulo, 91, 92, 108, 115, 310, 311, 312
Freud, Sigmund, 14, 44, 48, 81, 111, 115, 244, 311, 312 Giroux, Henry, 71, 91, 280, 282 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 235, 249 Götz, Ignacio, 233–250 Gramsci, Antonio, 279, 280 Guattari, Felix, 35, 44, 68, 80, 136, 207, 208, 213, 217, 220, 260, 263, 270, 280, 282 Guevara, Che, 108, 236, 249 Habermas, Juergen, 73, 157 Hall, Stuart, 98 Haraway, Dona, 182, 209, 219, 221 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 38, 61, 81, 95, 103, 107, 184, 262 Heidegger, Martin, 41, 44, 69, 94, 101, 146, 147, 162, 261, 293, 294, 295, 298, 301, 303, 304, 305, 307, 312 Heraclites, 109, 142, 143, Hooks, Bell, 98, 167, 210 Horkheimer, Max, 34, 45, 59–81, 85, 110, 116, 138, 141, 155, 161, 167, 172, 173, 188, 307 Hotam, Yotam, 301–312 Jonas, Hans, 71, 81, 237, 301, 302, 303, 304–313 Kafka, Franz, 48, 156, 164 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 32, 38, 61, 81, 95, 103, 105, 107, 138, 173, 201, 247, 249, 262, 266 Kierkegaard, Soren, 37, 73, 74, 78, 169 Kizel, Arie, 285–300 Kristeva, Julia, 221 Lacan, Jacques, 252, 253, 311 Laclau, Ernesto, 210, 221 Levinas, Immanuel, 17, 42, 45, 48, 64, 72, 75, 79, 81, 96, 103, 104, 116, 121, 125, 133, 143, 161, 188, 261 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 136, 137, 138, 139, 189 Mainlander, Philipp, 39 Marcuse, Herbert, 45, 75, 77, 81, 85, 93, 96, 141, 242
[ 315 ]
Names index Marx, Karl, 38, 45, 48, 52, 60, 61, 81, 95, 96, 102, 103, 107, 116, 120, 134, 137, 138, 173, 184, 262, 286 McLaren, Peter, 71, 91, 98, 99, 153, 310, 313 Negri, Antonio, 33, 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 37, 44, 45, 60, 62, 74, 75, 81, 88, 94, 95, 96, 101, 109, 110, 114, 116, 150, 151, 158, 161, 303, 306 Pappe, Ilan, 26, 281–284 Pascal, Blaise, 75, 143, 245 Peters, Michael, 19, 26, 44, 81, 259–270 Plato, 33, 43, 54, 103, 104, 121, 130, 131, 141, 143, 145, 147, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 186, 239, 249, 259, 288 Rorty, Richard, 145, 154, 168
316
Rosenzweig, Franz, 70, 72, 81, 89, 105, 116, 169, 171, 187, 188 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 105 Said, Edward, 19, 127, 136–139, 164, 174, 175, 176, 259, 271–283 Sartre, Jean Paul, 263 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 37, 60, 75, 76, 78, 100, 101, 107–109, 116, 161 Shor, Ira, 13, 128, 164, 172, 184, 204 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 98, 109, 164 Todorov, Tzvetan, 19, 223–232, 251, 252, 257 Weber, Max, 204, 307 West, Cornel, 98, 141–170 Zizek, Slavoj, 45, 63, 81
Subject index
Absolute, 35, 36, 41, 42, 60, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 110, 135, 143, 148, 150, 174, 175, 178, 181, 184, 186, 190, 227, 228, 236, 238, 240, 251, 305 Aesthetic, 42, 55, 56, 80, 91, 108, 109, 121, 122, 142, 143, 150, 153, 175, 176, 217, 294 Affirmation, 57, 74, 107, 151, 207, 214, 216, 218, 232, 260, 261, 262 Agency, 32, 132, 159, 185, 187, 214, 218 Aim (also: goal), 30, 35, 39, 41, 47, 50, 56, 59, 61, 63, 65, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 100,101–103, 105, 110, 113, 119, 135, 143, 148, 152, 168, 169, 173, 180, 181, 186, 189, 193, 202, 209, 211, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 231, 241,256, 281, 286, 288, 306 Alienation, 12, 14, 16, 32, 34, 40, 60, 63, 68, 96, 107, 108, 119, 237, 260, 262, 287, 303 Alterity, 11, 13, 43, 54, 79, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 261 Auschwitz, 303, 305, 307, 313 Authentic, 66, 67, 71, 79, 99, 133, 157, 158, 159, 185, 237, 261, 294, 297, Autonomy/Autonomous, 31, 34, 36, 37, 61, 68, 70, 78, 110, 120, 134, 152, 177, 184, 185, 186 Authority/Authoritarian, 16, 23, 110, 129, 150, 154, 158, 193, 201, 207, 215, 216, 218, 253, 260, 271, 302, 307, 311 Barbarism, 14, 245, 262, 272, 280 De-barbarization of Mankind, 241, 243, 288 Beauty, 14, 17, 162, 175, 192, 269, 279, 281, 307 Body, 37, 44, 100, 101, 115, 122, 124, 133, 147, 149, 154, 159, 160, 161, 230, 232, 252, 255, 293 Capitalism, 6, 13, 18, 22, 25, 26, 30, 32, 37, 51, 57, 59, 78, 79, 80, 85, 97, 107, 120, 125, 137, 139, 162, 173, 175, 220, 226, 262, 270, 313 Catharsis, 12, 22, 27 Chaos, 185, 224, 244 Christian/ity, 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 33, 36,48, 56, 61, 62, 75, 85, 96, 98, 101, 105, 106, 107, 115, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 171, 173, 178, 179, 180, 223, 228, 231, 246, 253, 262, 290, 302, 303, 304, 311, 312, 313
Class, 25, 51, 88, 134, 137, 144, 225, 228, 230, 232, 240 Collective/collectivism, 5, 13, 14, 15, 17, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 73, 79, 81, 87, 88, 89, 94, 96, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 120, 121, 124, 127, 131, 132, 133, 139, 159, 176, 177, 180, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 196, 207, 209, 210, 211, 214, 220, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 254, 255, 256, 276, 278, 282, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 297, 298, 299 Colonialism, 12, 13, 18, 19, 21, 26, 27, 33, 41, 43, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 67, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 91, 93, 98, 99, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 124, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138, 152, 153, 160, 164, 165, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 187, 188, 208, 272, 275, 277, 282, 298 Commodity, 13, 20, 31, 35, 57, 60, 63, 64, 143, 196 Communication, 72, 96, 97, 110, 123, 124, 125, 155, 202, 205, 223, 224, 227, 232, 253, 291, 295 Communist/Communism, 107, 128, 173, 208, 226, 231 Community, 47, 54, 55, 70, 72, 75, 80, 149, 163, 166, 172, 179, 183, 186, 194, 196, 197, 198, 205, 207, 210, 219, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 241, 243, 247, 253, 259, 266, 276, 280, 283, 285, 302, 310, 311, 312 Consciousness, 12, 14, 30, 32, 34, 37, 57, 63, 64, 68, 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 116, 119, 127, 128, 132, 145, 149, 158, 182, 186, 188, 191, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214, 221, 254, 256, 286, 293, 296, 297, 302, 304 Conservative/Neoconservative, 84, 99, 166, 211, 309, 311 Consumption/Cnsumerism, 12, 13, 16, 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 44, 57, 60, 97, 98, 99, 102, 111, 114, 120, 195, 196, 211, 225 Contingency, 13, 18, 22, 92, 156, 179, 185, 187, 188, 236, 309 Co-poiesis (see: Poiesis/Co-poiesis) Cosmos, 14, 39, 40, 41, 43, 52, 56, 58, 79, 109, 112, 114, 121, 123, 150, 153, 160, 181, 183, 184, 306 Cosmic, 65, 78, 93, 302, 313 Counter-education, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 28, 29,
[ 317 ]
subject index 32, 35, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 44, 47, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 89, 102, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114,115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 141, 152, 181, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191, 298, 312 Creativity, 6, 12, 21, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 59, 62, 69, 71, 77, 79, 88, 93, 97, 109, 111, 120, 122, 125, 150, 155, 162, 163, 183, 187, 191, 213, 215, 218, 218, 219, 285, 288, 291, 297 Critical Pedagogy, 23, 43, 58, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 81, 115, 122, 125, 141, 143, 148, 149, 153, 167, 168, 298, 302, 310, 311, 313 Critical Theory, 12, 23, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 77, 81, 115, 116, 125, 141, 143, 153, 159, 167, 172, 175, 180, 213, 214, 215, 219, 298 Critical Thinking, 130, 141, 159 Critique, 12, 13, 26, 27, 28, 32, 40, 42, 61, 63, 64, 68, 73, 77, 80, 81, 83, 94, 98, 102, 105, 107, 116, 125, 130, 133, 134, 135, 141, 142, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 158, 164, 165, 167, 168, 177, 179, 186, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 250, 271–280, 282, 301, 304, 304, 306 Culture/Cultural, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 24, 25, 26, 32, 34, 39, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 93, 97, 98, 100, 103, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 143, 144, 147, 154, 157, 163, 164, 165, 168, 172, 173, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 189, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 210, 213, 216, 218, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 244, 246, 249, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 287, 289, 291, 297, 298, 301, 304, 310, 212, 313 Culture Industry, 11, 20, 25, 32, 57, 59, 62, 63, 68, 80, 97, 163 Curriculum, 58, 244, 301 Cyberspace, 17, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 53, 70, 79, 102, 111, 119, 162, 163, 164, 181 Cyborg, 17, 24, 37, 209 Dance, 76, 112 Danse Macabre, 21 Death, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26, 47, 74, 75, 94, 96, 97, 101, 106, 107, 108, 112, 142, 146, 156, 164, 169, 177, 203, 233, 236, 244, 245, 263, 264, 272, 276, 283, 287, 305, 306 Deconstruction/Deconstructive, 17, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 31, 34, 40, 91, 93, 94, 96, 110, 112, 113, 119, 143, 144, 154, 158, 164, 180, 181, 185, 188, 272, 275, 277, 278, 279, 282 Democracy/Democratic, 6, 14, 23, 25, 32, 50, 51, 71, 87, 107, 150, 151, 153, 154, 164, 167, 168, 175,
318
176, 210, 230, 243, 272, 280, 282, 310, 311, 312 Desire/s , 25, 57, 70, 71, 104, 179, 188, 195, 196, 205, 211, 213, 217, 218, 219, 230, 243, 252, 273, 291, 293, 297, 305, 306, 307 Destiny, 14, 38, 40, 50, 278, 289, 293, 295, 306, 308 Determinism, 29, 40, 49, 134, 185, 230 Dialectic/al, 12, 15, 16, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, 44, 52, 55, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 76, 80, 85, 95, 104, 106, 110, 114, 116, 121, 141, 142, 144, 146, 161, 177, 208, 214, 269, 271, 273, 274, 278, 279, 280, 281, 285, 287, 291, 304 Dialogue/Dialogical, 19, 22, 24, 31, 32, 39, 42, 55, 56, 57, 58, 70, 78, 79, 92, 121, 131, 136, 154, 155, 157, 167, 169, 179, 226, 232, 269, 275, 277, 280, 281, 282, 298, 312 Dionysian, 12, 30, 35, 74 Domination, 213 Ecology, 301, 311 Ecstatic, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 34, 51, 53, 56, 58, 62, 69, 72, 73, 74, 97, 99, 108, 109, 113, 144, 174, 185 Emancipation/Emancipatory, 12, 15–17, 18–21, 23, 27, 53, 55, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 84, 92, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109–111, 120, 123, 137, 148, 149, 151, 158, 159, 173, 180, 181, 186, 187, 188, 189, 195, 196, 231, 255 Empire, 6, 13, 27, 33, 71, 108, 154, 162, 188, 193, 194, 226, 264, 268 Empowerment, 26, 214, 221, 247, 309 Enlightenment, 11, 15, 22, 28, 29, 34, 36, 38, 60, 77, 80, 96, 105, 107, 108, 116, 141, 155, 164, 173, 177, 184, 195, 231, 248, 254 Environment/al, 19, 34, 36, 140, 156, 186, 208, 230, 240, 253, 287, 301, 302, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313 Equality/Inequality, 20, 83, 88, 107, 109, 155, 228, 229, 231, 232, 240, 241, 242, 249 Epistemology, 25, 38, 39, 55, 65, 102, 104, 119, 169, 208, 209, 212, 213, 279, 280 Eros, 12, 13, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 34–36, 41, 42, 48, 52, 58, 59, 73, 75, 77, 96, 113, 119, 120, 121–123, 144, 161, 162, 180, 183, 185, 187, 208, 234, 235, 306, 307 Essence/Essentialism, 15, 17, 20, 24–31, 34, 35, 37, 38–41, 52–57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 84, 90, 92, 94, 96–98, 103, 105–108, 111, 128–131, 133, 137, 138, 149, 150, 156, 157, 165, 173–175, 184, 188, 190, 207, 216, 218, 238, 243, 244, 245, 247, 252, 263, 269, 274, 278–288, 291, 293–296, 308 Estrangement, 37, 252, 260 Eternal Improviser, 29, 39, 41, 55, 59, 71, 79, 80, 112, 113, 114, 115, 146, 152, 291, 297, 298 Eternity, 34, 38, 40, 41, 44, 79, 94, 106, 109, 122, 124, 148, 306
subject index Ethnicity, 25, 263, 275, 283, 289 Ethnocentrism, 25, 32, 42, 43, 50, 54, 57, 72, 79, 92, 97, 112, 113, 120, 121, 123, 128, 132, 133, 134, 152, 153, 164, 172, 174, 175, 180, 184, 189, 190, 231 Ethics, 19, 22, 23, 28, 30, 31, 40, 42, 45, 54, 79, 93, 120, 122, 124, 141, 156, 157, 161, 175, 194, 202, 231, 291, 297, 301, 307, 310, 312, 313 Evil, 31, 65, 69, 76, 78, 80, 85, 100, 101, 102, 137, 142, 162, 229, 242, 277, 296, 304, 308 Exclusion, 27, 53, 130, 131, 143, 208, 213, 245, 247, 276 Existential/ism, 13, 16, 32, 39, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 60, 69–71, 73, 74, 76 –79, 83, 95, 110, 111, 119, 120, 123, 127, 131, 133, 137, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 153, 168, 174, 259, 261, 262, 264, 280, 289, 291, 292, 298, 303, 304, 305, 307 Fascism, 12, 108, 150, 183, 208, 210 Feminism/Feminist, 12, 13, 36, 47, 70, 81, 84, 91, 103, 109, 129, 130, 131, 167, 176, 177, 178, 182, 186, 208,209, 210–213, 219–221, 263 Forgetfulness, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 55, 58, 62, 70, 74, 98, 100, 104, 111, 112, 114, 123–125, 147, 148, 158, 168, 176, 183, 186, 292 Foundation/alism, 35, 40, 41, 59, 63, 64, 67, 76, 77, 79, 86, 89, 102, 116, 119, 132, 143, 151, 264, 293–295, 303, 305, 308, 312 Frankfurt School, 12, 44, 59, 69, 80, 115, 127, 145, 150, 172, 173 Freedom, 20, 25, 33, 35, 37, 54, 60, 64, 68, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 103, 105, 106, 107, 114, 123, 125, 132, 158, 173, 184, 185, 187, 195, 225, 230, 231, 242, 245, 247, 248, 249, 261, 276, 279, 291, 308 Friendship, 40–43, 205 Functionalism, 102 Garden of Eden, 12, 14, 17, 18, 26, 30, 31, 33, 53, 57, 59, 70, 72, 73, 79, 93, 95–97, 105, 109, 111, 119, 147, 159, 184, 188, 261, 295 Gender, 25, 32, 98, 144, 186, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 282, 291 Global/ization, 13, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 37, 42, 51, 57, 59, 78–80, 91, 97, 99, 102, 116, 119, 120, 125, 127, 136, 139, 140, 152, 153, 160, 161, 172, 174, 175, 181, 182, 188, 193, 194, 201, 202, 209, 210, 219, 226, 260, 262, 263, 268, 281, 301, 309 Gnosis/Gnostic, 19, 71, 80, 301, 303, 305, 306, 312, 313 Goal, See: Aim God, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23–35, 37–40, 42, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71,
72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79–81, 93–97, 99–103, 106–112, 15, 116, 122, 123, 127, 129, 132, 134, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 174, 177, 178, 180, 181,, 182, 185, 186, 187, 202, 234, 238, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 259, 261, 262, 263, 287, 295, 296, 297, 302–309, 311, 313 Good, 21, 23, 26, 34, 41, 44, 47, 50, 61, 62, 65, 69, 71, 78, 83, 89, 90, 92, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 109, 132, 136, 140, 142, 149, 156, 162, 181, 182, 188, 195, 196, 197, 198, 203, 214, 225, 231, 232, 235, 242, 243, 252, 255, 269, 296, 308, 313 Happiness, 32, 56, 59, 70, 95, 108, 112, 122, 152, 163, 245, 247, 297 Harmony, 13, 19, 29, 65, 89, 97, 98, 100, 101, 107, 114, 123, 150, 174, 247 Hegemony, 32, 36, 42, 52, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69–71, 87, 88, 91, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110, 113, 119, 121, 130, 145, 149, 153, 178, 179, 180, 213, 273, 277, 293 Hermeneutical, 269 Heroism, 16, 93, 94, 95, 96, 181 Hierarchy, 13, 17, 21, 22, 25, 27, 92, 109, 130, 131, 168, 195, 202, 208, 213, 218, 228 Higher Education, 240 Home/Homelessness, 11, 12, 13, 15–21, 25–27, 29, 30, 32–35, 37, 39–43, 45, 47, 50–57, 59, 62–26, 68–72, 74, 76, 79, 93, 95, 96, 97, 101, 102, 105–114, 119–125, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 145, 146, 152, 153, 155, 159, 173, 175, 176, 182, 183, 189, 194, 199, 200, 240 Hope, 11, 14, 15, 16, 28, 29, 31, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 57, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 96, 102, 106, 109, 113, 119, 121, 123, 147, 148, 152, 157, 158, 160, 164, 168, 177, 182, 183, 195, 203, 213, 219, 229, 256, 278, 286, 295, 306, 307 Humanism, 21, 56, 92, 95, 107, 145, 207, 208, 210, 211, 249, 278 Hybrid/ity, 13, 18, 19, 22, 25, 26, 99, 172, 178, 188, 189, 209, 211, 212, 224, 253, 256, 260, 268, 279 Identity, 27, 32, 38, 39, 58, 65, 68, 84, 104, 110, 127, 132, 133, 157, 165, 167, 171, 174, 179, 181, 182, 188, 193, 194, 205, 209–212, 218, 225, 226, 227, 229–232, 251, 255, 259, 260–263, 269, 275, 276, 279, 280, 283, 290, 293, 296, 304, 308 Ideology, 63, 64, 68, 81, 97, 98, 149, 150, 151, 154, 159, 187, 273, 279, 285, 287, 290, 292, 297 Imagination, 18, 40, 41, 91, 92, 116, 125, 128, 129, 207, 215, 217, 218, 219, 247, 312 Immanence, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 25–27, 29, 30, 32–35, 37, 40, 56, 70, 72, 75, 76, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 108, 111–114, 122, 125, 128, 147, 155– 157, 185, 208, 220, 305–308, 311
319
subject index Imperialism, 104, 176, 177, 262, 277, 281, 283 Improvisation/improviser, 14, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 37–41, 44, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 70, 71, 78, 79, 80, 83, 96, 105, 110–116, 120, 121–125, 134, 138, 141, 142, 146, 147, 148, 152, 154, 156, 159, 173, 174, 178, 181, 183, 186, 189, 286, 288, 291, 292, 297, 298, 312 Incommensurability, 262 Inequality, 20, 88, 109, 232, 240–242 Injustice, 23, 48, 56, 57, 62, 64, 67, 75, 77, 90, 92, 106, 112, 125, 143, 145, 148, 149, 152, 153, 157, 166, 172, 182, 197, 188, 213, 215, 231, 240, 293, 297 Infinite/Infinity, 14, 18, 21, 22, 27, 39, 40–44, 53, 55, 56, 58, 62, 64, 68–72, 74, 76–79, 108–110, 113, 121, 122–124, 134, 152, 157, 159, 161, 168, 174, 183, 204, 214, 229, 253, 256, 260, 270, 286, 292, 295 Instrumentalization, 79 Instrumental Rationality, 35, 57, 63, 70, 124, 173, 180 Intellectual, 11, 12, 15, 19, 23, 24, 47, 48, 51, 55, 56, 61, 62, 76, 80, 86, 119, 122, 123, 129, 146, 150, 158, 165–168, 172, 174, 175, 17, 177, 183, 197, 201, 213, 218, 224, 252, 259, 261, 262, 271, 272, 278, 279, 280–283, 301, 302, 303, 312 Internet, 162, 168, 205 Intersubjectivity See: Subjectivity/Intersubjectivity Intimacy, 11–18, 21, 28, 40, 41–43, 52, 96, 97, 120, 122, 150, 213, 254, 287 Jewish, 15, 19, 22–25, 27, 28, 37, 40, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55–57, 60, 61, 66, 67, 69, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 95, 106, 127, 128–131, 133, 136, 138, 139, 147, 152, 153, 161, 162, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174–178, 181, 183, 184, 189, 190, 191, 233, 253, 254, 256, 257, 260, 261, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 281, 282, 286, 298, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306, 307, 311, 312 Judaism, 15, 22, 23, 24–27, 37, 47, 53, 54–60, 66, 67, 77, 78, 105, 107, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135, 138, 139, 152, 161, 171, 172, 173, 175– 179, 184, 189, 190, 261, 286, 311, 312 Justice, 23, 47, 48, 60, 64, 67, 68, 75, 83, 90, 94, 98, 99, 100, 111, 137, 143, 144, 149, 152, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 187, 188, 231, 241, 242, 247, 249, 290, 313 Law, 21, 23, 24, 25, 35, 37, 52, 54, 55, 68, 77, 97–99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 151, 153, 177, 184, 187, 199, 227–229, 234, 238, 247, 262, 302, 303, 306–313 Liberal/ism/Neoliberalism, 26, 30, 47, 50, 51, 84,
320
90, 93, 97, 107, 108, 132, 172, 176, 180, 210, 229, 272, 279, 309, 312 Liberation, 13, 20, 26, 31, 107, 159, 165, 180, 283, 312 Liberty, 74, 75, 83, 157 Love, 11, 15, 17, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37, 39–44, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 68–71, 73–75, 79, 80, 83, 85, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 111–114, 120–124, 129, 141, 143, 144–148, 151–156, 158–164, 168, 169, 173, 174, 178, 182, 187, 200, 224, 229, 234, 235, 236, 242, 243, 246, 247, 248, 256, 269, 285, 288, 289, 291, 292, 296, 297, 311 McWorld, 13, 47, 50, 53, 56, 59, 97, 99, 102, 115, 180, 227 Marginalized/Marginalization, 20, 26, 52, 91, 120, 137, 148, 149, 168, 179, 188, 198, 208, 273, 275, 279 Marxism, 59, 60, 134, 135, 173, 212 Material/ism,17, 25, 31, 37, 39, 59, 112, 123, 128, 136, 146, 154, 159, 161, 173, 214, 220, 256, 263, 273, 274, 275, 292 Matrix, 13, 23, 25, 37, 43, 109, 120, 122, 218 Messianic/Messianism, 19, 23, 47, 56, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69, 75, 78, 106, 121, 160, 162, 163, 286 Metaphysic, 11, 15, 16, 19–22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 62, 53, 71, 85, 95–97, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 110, 111, 112, 249, 261, 263, 292, 306, 311, 313 Mimesis/Mimetic, 122, 212 Minorities, 48, 193, 208, 228, 231, 263 Multicultural/ism, 12, 25, 26, 27, 32, 34, 84, 90– 92, 103, 111, 115, 116, 132, 136, 143, 154, 200, 232, 262, 263, 268, 272, 292 Music, 62, 122, 123, 150, 157, 168, 195, 216, 227 Mystery, 36, 295 Myth, 21, 32, 35, 44, 50, 130, 138, 164, 239, 246, 247, 253, 254, 261, 263, 277, 279, 292, 309, 311 Narrative/s, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 53, 55, 66, 78, 91, 109, 112, 145, 151, 154, 165, 179, 184, 208, 209, 213, 259, 272, 275–278, 280, 281, 289, 290 Nation/al, 30, 44, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 76, 83, 85, 87, 91, 92, 103, 111, 119, 119, 127, 134, 135, 139, 144, 152, 165, 174–176, 179, 193, 194, 196, 199, 200, 208, 210–212, 219, 226, 228, 230–231, 239, 241, 254, 255, 257, 259, 261, 262, 268, 269, 271, 272, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 290, 292, 294, 298, 299, 303, 304, 312 Nature/Natural, 18, 24, 26, 31, 33, 37, 60, 83, 87, 91, 93, 95, 96, 100, 101, 105, 110, 119, 122, 130, 160, 184, 196, 198, 199, 203, 206, 208– 213, 221, 223, 231, 233–235, 239, 244, 247,
subject index 251, 254, 259, 261, 262, 269, 286, 291–294, 297, 301, 313 Nazism, 305 Negative Dialectics, See: Dialectics – Negative Negative Theology, 59, 61, 66, 67, 73, 76, 79, 131, 142, 161, 172, 173 Nihilism, 12, 30, 59, 69–71, 79, 113, 123, 151, 159, 261, 305, 309 Nirvana, 39, 41, 70, 71, 108, 111, 124, 189, 297 Nomadic/Nomadism, 13–14, 17–25, 29–44, 52, 53–56, 58, 59, 62, 68, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 96, 105, 106, 110, 112–114, 119–121, 123–125, 131, 132, 136, 138, 142, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 165, 166, 174, 175, 183, 189, 207–209, 211–221, 238, 260, 261, 262, 270, 285, 286, 288, 291 Normalizing Education, 15, 21, 41, 51, 52, 57, 58, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 89, 90, 99, 102, 104, 111, 113, 114, 148, 149, 153, 159, 178, 189 Nothingness, 11–21, 29, 39, 40, 43, 93, 96, 100, 107, 109, 112, 113, 121, 122, 123, 125 Objectivity, 91, 143 Omnipotence, 21, 28, 29, 57, 62, 69, 77, 80, 125, 185, 187, 188 Ontology/Ontological, 24, 29, 35, 36, 39, 55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 94, 95, 96, 101, 110, 114, 128, 134, 144, 187, 207, 253, 305 Oppression, 14, 17, 20, 22, 43, 48, 53, 60, 63, 64, 65, 71, 77, 77, 120, 122, 130, 140, 148, 149, 173, 180, 230, 283 Optimism, 50, 55, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 70, 78, 141, 158, 160, 179, 182, 183, 232 Otherness, 13, 14, 22, 24, 39–44, 54, 56, 57, 58, 62, 71, 79, 102, 112, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 133, 174, 178, 185, 187, 188, 189, 208, 210, 214, 225, 251, 260, 261, 269, 286, 313 Patriarchal/Patriarchalism, 25, 47, 178 Patriotism, 48, 159, 160 Peace, 27, 49–52, 62, 68, 83, 84–117, 122, 125, 175, 179, 187, 189, 233, 237, 242–244, 249, 273, 277, 282, 283 Pedagogy, 23, 43, 58, 61, 63, 65–68, 70, 81, 92, 115, 116, 122, 125, 141, 143, 148, 149, 153, 167, 168, 219, 280, 298, 301, 302, 310–313 Phallocentrism, 165 Place, 13, 16, 22, 23, 24, 32, 35, 36, 40, 51, 52–56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 86, 87, 91, 99, 104, 112, 119, 127, 129, 135, 138, 145, 146, 147, 155, 159, 165, 168, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 186, 194, 198, 207, 209, 214, 216, 217, 218, 225, 226–228, 230, 232, 235, 237, 241, 253, 256, 259, 260, 262, 263–265, 272, 273, 277, 281, 283, 288, 294, 295, 296
Platonic/Platonism, 33, 43, 103, 104, 121, 131, 143, 145, 147, 158, 159, 182, 186 Play, 11, 16, 24, 42, 43, 102, 125, 147, 185, 202, 215, 236, 238, 245, 249, 262, 276, 288, 292, 295, 306, 307 Pleasure, 11, 12, 14, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 42, 48, 55, 61, 62, 63, 65, 70, 73, 79, 97, 102, 110–112, 114, 120, 123, 124, 139, 152, 163, 287 Pluralism, 25 Poetic/al, 40, 41, 88, 97, 108, 142, 147, 148, 150, 202, 220, 255, 255, 256, 257, 291, 294, 296 Poetry, 19, 44, 124, 134, 141, 168, 221, 255, 256, 277, 285, 287–297, 299 Poiesis/Co–poiesis, 14, 16, 17, 19, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41–44, 69, 78, 79, 83, 97, 105, 109, 112, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123–125, 134, 136, 144, 147, 173, 174, 178, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 187 Postcolonial/ism, 12, 18, 27, 48, 52, 53, 55, 78, 80, 91, 99, 108, 109, 111, 115, 127, 135, 137, 153, 173, 208, 210, 271, 273, 275, 277, 281, 282, 283 Pragmatism, 50, 69, 79, 107, 149, 151, 168 Praxis, 26, 27, 61, 63, 68, 70, 74, 87, 106, 111, 127, 145, 167, 169, 276 Progress/Progressive, 14–17, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 41, 54, 61, 63, 66, 67, 71, 73, 78, 85, 87, 92, 93, 94, 95, 105–108, 115, 116, 128, 132, 147, 149, 162, 166, 167, 173, 178, 193, 194, 196, 207, 269, 301, 304, 308 Race/Racist, 13, 25, 87, 100, 101, 115, 119, 161, 208, 210, 212, 216, 220, 232, 275, 310 Reason, 16, 21, 30, 32, 35, 38, 52, 63, 79, 81, 95, 99, 102, 105, 107, 114, 142, 143, 144, 149, 181, 190, 198, 198, 207, 208, 241, 257, 303, 306, 312, Recognition, 20, 34, 28, 63, 75, 77, 86, 91, 100, 195, 197, 200, 213, 214, 218, 262, 281 Redemption, 15, 16, 17, 19, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 39, 55, 56, 57, 62, 65, 66, 70, 76, 81, 87, 93, 94, 96, 99, 101–106, 116, 173, 189, 286 Reification, 17, 30, 32, 79, 153, 277 Relativism, 13, 24, 25, 27, 40, 59, 69, 77, 151, 189 Religious/Religiosity, 14, 15, 20, 25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38–42, 48, 50, 53–57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65–81, 88, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 105, 108, 112, 113, 115, 120, 121, 127, 130, 141, 142, 150, 153, 156, 158, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174–176, 180, 194, 200, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232, 246, 253, 260, 263, 270, 283, 287, 288, 292, 297, 307, 310, 312, 313
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subject index Represent/ation, 36, 57, 58, 60, 64, 70, 87, 91, 96, 99, 106, 111, 123, 143, 180, 208, 209, 211, 215, 216, 223, 224, 252, 267, 277, 283, 292 Repression, 37, 38, 48, 226, 256 Resistance, 13, 19, 21, 26, 27, 42, 43, 62, 64, 68, 73, 85, 99, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 122, 130, 134, 135, 145, 149, 152, 157, 160, 187, 210, 214, 219 Responsibility, 15, 21, 23, 24, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 53–57, 59, 62, 64, 69, 73, 77, 79, 83, 88, 90, 91, 97, 100, 105, 106, 111, 113, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 132, 133, 142, 143, 147, 152, 161, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175, 180–187, 195, 219, 286, 297, 301, 302, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313 Respond-ability, 19, 37, 43, 76, 113, 120–125, 148 Response-ability, 43, 113, 114, 120, 121–125, 148, 184 Same/Sameness, 24, 33, 34, 59, 64, 67, 69, 79, 112, 114, 155, 181, 183, 208, 212, 215, 261, 305, Signifier, 21, 23, 50, 63, 96, 216, 252 Signification, 66, 68 Silence/d, 20, 26, 34, 39, 48, 81, 91, 92, 107, 112, 119, 121, 122, 123, 148, 158, 168, 244, 255, 283, 285 Simulacra, 16, 96, 107, 185, 218 Socialism, 61, 85, 278 Solidarity, 41, 56, 66, 74, 75, 79, 83, 90, 104, 132, 133, 140, 144, 178, 194, 274, 291, 309 Spirit, 12, 17, 20–28, 30, 31, 34, 36, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 57, 60, 62, 63, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 86, 92, 94, 100–102, 110, 114, 121–125, 142, 143, 149, 160, 165, 180, 181, 184, 199, 210, 217, 229, 231, 243, 253, 279, 287, 295, 296, 303, 308, 309, 312 Subjectification, 68, 97, 123, 184 Subjectivity/Intersubjectivity, 36, 54, 93, 122, 123, 184, 207, 208, 209, 214, 215, 219, 253 Suffering, 16, 24, 31, 40–43, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59, 62, 66, 69, 74, 79, 91, 96, 97, 100, 107–110, 112, 113–114, 119, 120, 122, 123, 137, 142, 144, 145, 149, 152, 167, 178, 212, 237, 251, 274, 281, 286, 294 Telos, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 39, 40, 42, 47, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 83, 93, 94, 95–97, 107, 110, 111, 120, 123, 127, 136, 137, 138, 148, 150, 172, 174, 179, 242 Terror, 24, 49, 61, 102, 104, 108, 177, 184, 233, 234, 236, 243, 244, 247, 249 The Totally Other, 15, 32, 36, 40, 42, 43, 54, 62, 69, 71, 72, 77, 102, 106, 121, 124, 125, 155, 156, 159, 160, 161, 162, 178, 183, 185, 188
322
Thanatos, 13, 15, 21, 27, 29, 34, 39, 41, 96, 111, 144 Time, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 32–34, 36, 38–40, 42–45, 48, 51, 52, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69, 72, 75, 80, 84, 87, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 113, 119, 120, 124, 125, 127, 131, 133, 134, 141, 146–147, 153, 156, 161, 162, 175, 197, 198, 198, 200, 201, 202, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, 223, 256, 260, 262, 264, 267, 275, 277, 279, 282, 287, 293, 295, 298, 303, 304, 306–308, 312 Togetherness, 24, 32, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 52, 54, 79, 112, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 125, 136, 174, 176, 183, 194 Totality, 11, 14, 15, 16, 25, 29, 34, 37, 40, 45, 57, 58, 63, 65, 68, 70, 72, 75m 79, 95, 96, 97, 99, 109, 110, 113, 178, 183, 184, 188, 216, 292 Transcendence, 11, 12, 13, 16–19, 22, 25, 27–44, 53, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 96, 102, 104, 105–108, 111, 112– 114, 119, 120, 123, 125, 128, 130, 135, 142, 147, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 168, 169, 174, 178, 180, 181, 185, 187, 188, 305, 306, 307, 308, 311, 312 Unconscious, 21, 252, 302, 303, 307 Universal/ism, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25–28, 40, 47, 48, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 83, 87, 90, 92, 97, 99, 103, 106–109, 113, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 137, 139, 149, 154, 164, 165, 173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 184, 189, 190, 195, 198, 207, 208, 210, 211, 219, 226, 230, 231, 234, 248, 262, 268, 271, 272, 274, 278, 279, 280, 281, 286, 288, 301, 302 Utopia/n, 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, 30, 34, 38, 39, 40, 42, 3, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76–78, 86, 87, 89, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 105–107, 109, 110–112, 120, 121, 131, 132, 142, 143, 147, 151, 152, 162, 173, 180, 181, 231, 236, 297, 307, 309, 310, 312 Victim/Victimizer, 13, 22, 24, 26, 26, 240, 43, 49, 51, 52, 55, 61, 85, 92, 120, 122, 134, 136, 137, 143, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150, 153, 178, 180, 233, 274, 277, 281, 292 Virtue, 99, 127, 156, 219, 241, 249 Whiteness, 84, 98, 109, 135, 137, 165, 173, 180, 212 Wisdom, 35, 104, 115, 158, 159, 166, 198, 243, 297