[MUSIC PLAYING]
Good evening, everyone.
Although the curriculum
has ostensibly
moved to a schedule
where we start on time,
the events still seem to
lag five to 10 minutes late.
So we're keeping with
that Harvard tradition.
My name is Charles Stang.
I'm the director
here at the Center
for the Study of
World Religions.
And it's my pleasure
to welcome you
to the center's annual
Albert and Vera List lecture
in Jewish studies.
Let me put the profane
before the sacred
and ask you all to
silence your phones.
I'll do the same.
And before I get too far
along into my remarks,
I'd like to acknowledge
and thank our co-sponsors
this evening.
That is the Center for Jewish
Studies-- where's David?
There he is.
Thank you, David.
And Harvard Hillel.
I don't know if we have anyone
from Harvard Hillel level
this evening but they
helped us get the word out.
And as always, I'd like
to thank the center's
staff for their help in
putting this event on.
So as I mentioned, this
is the annual List Lecture
in Jewish Studies.
Recent List lecturers
have included
Andre Aciman from the
CUNY Graduate Center,
Sarah Hammerschlag from
the University of Chicago,
and Guy Stroumsa, emeritus from
Oxford University and Hebrew
University in Jerusalem.
But it's my distinct
honor and pleasure
to welcome this evening
Professor Vivian Liska
as this year's List lecturer.
She is professor of German
literature and director
of the Institute of Jewish
Studies at the University
of Antwerp in Belgium.
Since 2013, she has been
the distinguished visiting
professor in the German
division of the faculty
of the humanities at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 2012, she was awarded
the cross of honor
for sciences and the arts
from the Republic of Austria.
She's published extensively
on literary theory,
German modernism, and German
Jewish authors and thinkers.
Professor Liska's
lecture this evening,
entitled "The Jew as Migrant,
from Theory to Poetry,"
falls into one of the
center's programming threads
entitled poetry,
philosophy, and religion.
The series aims to explore
the porous boundaries
between these three modes
of inquiry and utterance,
which have had a tense but
productive relationship
from antiquity until today.
For the most part we have,
to date, invited poets
to speak in this series.
Professor Liska, however,
brings a different perspective
to this topic.
This evening, she will
explore the trope of the Jew
as the archetypal
migrant, both in theory
and in poetry, and the political
implications of this trope.
She will chart
the transformation
of the theme of exile from
its ancient associations
as a source of discrimination,
oppression, and suffering,
and its modern
philosophical reimagination
as the embodiment of a
glorious deterritorialization.
But this romantic
reimagination threatens
to overlook the hardship
inherent in exile
and migration.
And so Professor Liska
will provide close readings
of theoretical and poetic texts
by Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice
Blanchot, Giorgio
Agamben, and Paul Celan,
which will highlight the dangers
of romanticizing migration
and the potential
of poetic language
to address contentious
ethical and political issues
of the present.
Please join me in welcoming
Professor Vivian Liska.
[APPLAUSE]
Good evening.
It is a great honor and
pleasure to be here.
Thanks so much, Charlie Stang.
Thanks, [INAUDIBLE].
I don't know if she's still
around for helping me.
And of course now, Byron,
who set all this up.
I want to thank you also for
accepting the topic that I
proposed for this lecture.
My title invokes
one of the oldest,
and pervasive, if
not eroded, topics
in Jewish literature and thought
and in the reflection about it.
It might indeed
come as a surprise
that the motif of
the Jew as migrant,
the Wandering Jew,
Jewish exile, is still
so prevalent in recent
theoretical writings
and in poetry.
So it is my primary contention
that an investigation
into its discursive
use, particularly
in philosophical writings
in the past decades,
can highlight crucial
political issues
and concerns of our times.
I would like to reformulate
the core question
that you have prepared in
your kind introduction.
So to reformulate the
question underlying my talk,
since biblical times, just as
in the ancient Greek world,
exile or forced
migration is considered
as a source of
discrimination, of suffering.
Jewish history
and scriptures are
replete with accounts of
the hardships of exile.
Recent philosophical
discourse, however,
often regards Jewish
exile as the embodiment
of a glorious
deterritorialization.
Speaking of exile as
a dismal predicament
implies a need for
rootedness and tends
to justify territorial
nationalism.
Celebrating exile, however,
overlooks or minimizes
its hardship.
Thus the question I would
like to address here,
is it possible to criticize
this romanticizing affirmation
of exile without endorsing
nationalist discourses
of territorial rootedness?
Throughout the
centuries, the Jews
was regarded as the
epitome of the stranger.
He was the universal
quasimythical symbol
of humanity's
homelessness on earth
but also the ruthless
intruder, parasite,
among other settled societies.
This duality between exile as
a universal human condition
and as a specific
sociopolitical predicament
already informs
Jewish scriptures.
Some biblical passages
that deal with exile
indeed invite interpretations
in the metaphysical existential
realm.
Others in the political one.
The expulsion from
paradise lends itself
to an understanding of exile
as a universal conditio humana
of the alienation of man
from nature, from fellow man,
and from God.
By contrast, take the passage
in Deuteronomy 28, 26, and 27.
And I'm quoting from
the King James Bible.
"The Lord shall bring
thee and thy king,
which thou shalt
set over thee unto
a nation, which neither thou
nor thy fathers have known.
And thou shalt become an
astonishment, a proverb,
and a byword among
all the nations
whither the Lord
shall lead thee."
These verses-- so in the
translation of the King James
Bible were where a
cursed and expelled
people become an exception
among other nations, which
all have their own
respective homelands,
refers to a specific
group, the Israelites,
and wields dismal political
and social connotations
of powerlessness
and humiliation.
In Luther's version,
for example, these words
convey a curse and a punishment
in the most unforgiving terms
of objection and humiliation.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
Now it's interesting,
the Buber translation,
the Buber-Rosenzweig
translation,
is very much like the
King James version.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
So much closer to the
idea of astonishment.
[GERMAN]
This is not quite the
same as a [NON-ENGLISH]..
The modern philosophical
and theoretical discourse
that I will explore
here, however,
attributes a positive quality
to the state of exile.
In this discourse, the Jew
embodies the renouncement
of fixity, dominance,
and belonging associated
with territorial emplacement.
Jewish exile, regardless
of its negative or positive
associations, has,
over the centuries,
become both a concrete
phenomenon and a metaphor
extending its meaning
to the universal realm.
The shifts between this
literal and figurative
will be part of
my investigation.
Now there have been,
before modern times,
positive legitimations
or views of Jewish exile.
One finds them, for example,
in some Kabbalistic writings
after the expulsion
from Spain where
this affirmation or
affirmative discourse of exile
is used as a kind
of consolation where
it is said that God went
along into exile with the Jews
and that this
represents, in some way,
a kind of divine
mode of existence.
However, in modernity,
Jewish exile,
beyond being a theological
historical and political issue,
became a [? polyvalent ?]
and discursive theme,
a literary motif, and a
loaded philosophical concept.
As an embodiment of
shameful rootlessness,
it appears in
anti-Semitic depictions
of the wandering outsider
among the nations of the earth.
And it's interesting that the
whole question of [NON-ENGLISH]
also implies that this is
something that can be used
metaphorically, that it
is something that can be
transposed, projected
onto others,
being taken over by others.
It was however, and
for diverse reasons,
also embraced by
many Jewish authors,
particularly modernist German
Jewish thinkers including Franz
Rosenzweig, to some
extent Walter Benjamin,
[INAUDIBLE] and many others.
For Rosenzweig, for
example, the Jew
is a faithful
agent of his people
only when he dwells
in foreign lands.
Longing for homeland is
part and parcel for him
of the messianic hope, for
redemption that is yet to come.
However, after the
perils of the situation
had become a deadly
reality under Nazi rule,
the attraction of the figure
of the Jew as it turned
into the migrant became
more contentious,
but it also gained
momentum as an antidote
to the territorial ideology
of national socialism.
Considering Jewish exile
as positive modality
served various purposes.
It reversed a hostile
view of the rootless Jew
and propagated a universally
valid alternative
and even a counterforce to
Blut und Boden ideologies.
For many intellectuals who were
skeptical about the newly born
Jewish state, the idea of
the Jew as eternal wanderer
often reactivated
the age old notion
of an intellectual rootedness
embedded in the law, the word,
and the letter.
It presented a
positive alternative
to a national or
geographic rootedness
and as a disruption of
territorial nationalisms.
Jewish exile became
for many a heroically
born transcendental homelessness
and noble wandering, or simply
an embodiment of
cosmopolitan modernity.
These ideas, however, raise
fundamental questions.
And I will sum them
up in three points.
One, political exile as for most
migrants in the modern context,
generally implied
a condition forced
by external circumstances, a
dismal state of displacement,
and exposure imposed on a
population or an individual.
This was particularly true
for the Jews over centuries.
What are the implications
of presenting Jewish exile
as positive?
Indeed exemplary
de-territorialization
in light of the Jewish
history of suffering, which
was more often than not,
also a history of suffering
from exile.
Two, in recent
theoretical discourse,
Jewish exiles
features as a metaphor
that has come to represent
an intellectual literary
philosophical stance that
can be emulated by all--
can and should.
Insisting on the
concrete specificity
of Jewish exile in history plays
into Jewish particular wisdom.
Embracing the generalizing
metaphor on the other hand,
means obliterating the
concrete Jewish experience.
Is there an alternative that
does justice both to the Jews
concrete historical experience,
and that at the same time
can be at least potentially
relevant to all?
And three the Jews designation
as the people of the book
has been played out
against the territorial Jew
in many variations,
sometimes paradoxically
uniting the extremes of the
spectrum, ultra Orthodox Jews,
and leftist intellectuals.
It is undoubtedly
attractive to be considered
as a primarily letter centered
culture, nation, and religion.
History has shown however that
while this has contributed
to the survival of Judaism,
it has also not protected
Jews in situations of utter
violence directed against them.
Therefore, my third question.
Is it possible to retain
the association of the Jews
with the people of the book,
captured in Heinrich Heine's
[INAUDIBLE],, without forgetting
the historically evidenced
precariousness of this
paper thin shield?
The celebration of the Jew
as exemplary migrant features
in numerous variations
and modalities
and theoretical and
philosophical writing
since 1945, the period
that interests me here.
These include works by thinkers
ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre,
Levinas, Blanchot, Bernard-Henri
Lévy, Francois Lyotard,
Philippe [INAUDIBLE],,
[INAUDIBLE],, Edward Said,
George Steiner, Jacques
Derrida, Gilles Deleuze,
and many others, some prominent
contemporary figures that I
will be talking about later,
some of them in Europe,
some in the United States, and
I'm thinking here of Giorgio
Agamben Slavoj
Zizek, Alain Badiou,
and here of Judith Butler
and the [INAUDIBLE]..
Some of these
thinkers speak about
an actual existing Jewish people
with a history and tradition
carrying the message
of [INAUDIBLE]..
And this is already
a major difference,
embodying ruthlessness
as a universal value.
Others refer to
Jewish ruthlessness
as purely mythical
or metaphorical.
In such cases, specific
manifestations of Jewishness
are regarded as not
only superfluous,
but even a hindrance
to or in conflict
with the targeted dissolution
of a localized identity.
An example of this is
Jean-Francois Lyotard's
distinction between Jews without
quotation marks and capital
letter, and jews in small
letter and with quotation marks,
claiming that Jews
with capital letter
and without quotation marks
are bad Jews, because they
precisely don't follow this
idea of the wandering, rootless,
and so on.
Furthermore, a
fundamental difference
exists between praise of
Jewish cosmopolitanism
as a model of a political stance
worth emulating on the one
hand, and turning a heteronomous
and ahistorical myth
into a universal
symbol on the other.
Similarly, one must distinguish
between the victim's attempt
to reverse the significance
of exile as a consolation,
like the example I gave before
after the expulsion of Spain,
and using the concept of
exile as a metaphoric screen
upon which to project
ideological agendas.
Now these are not always
easy to distinguish.
And therefore, I
think that one has
to look closely at the
rhetoric and at the way
these ideas are formulated.
Envisioning a
positive Jewish exile
as an attempt to give meaning to
a painful historical experience
is not the same as deploying
the figure of exile
for purposes of
identity politics.
Finally, different situations,
depending on the speaker,
the location, the
time of occurrence,
and different levels
of figurative speech,
from model and example
to symbol and metaphor,
produce starkly
different conceptions.
The affirmation and
universalization
of Jewish exile is, to say the
least, a precarious discourse
that requires careful
and individual scrutiny.
I will start with all
the well-known statement
about the wandering Jew.
And I was hesitating
to include it,
but I saw a few days
ago that George Steiner
died two weeks ago.
And I decided to include him.
I'm not sure if
this is an homage,
but it is certainly
worth remembering.
George Steiner represents
a prime example
of questionable
universalization of Jewish exile
by a Jewish thinker after 1945.
In his article, A
Kind of Survivor,
which is dedicated
to Elie Wiesel,
Steiner writes, "the
ruthlessness of the Jew,
the cosmopolitanism denounced
by Hitler and Stalin,
is historically an
enforced condition.
But though uncomfortable
in the extreme,
this condition is,
if we accept it,
not without a larger meaning.
Nationalism is the
venom of the age.
Even if it be against
his harried will,
his weariness the Jew--
or some Jews, at least--
may have an exemplary role,
to show that whereas trees
have roots, men have legs
and our each other's guests.
Even a great society is a
bounded, transient thing
compared to the free
play of the mind
and the anarchic
discipline of its dreams."
Moshe Idel, one of the most
important Kabbalah scholars
writing today, criticizes
Steiner's position
for being un-historical,
and applies his charge
to using the modern idea
of Jewish exile as a whole.
He then criticizes
Steiner's notion
of a Jewish spirit
as essentialism
and illegitimate
metaphorization.
He argues that Steiner's
recourse to the topos of Jew
as People of the Book
is but a construct
of modern
intellectuals, and fails
to do justice to Jewish life in
terms of ritual and community.
He criticizes Steiner's
view of Jewish exile
in similarly harsh terms.
"Few Jews," states Idel,
"ever imagined peregrination
as more than a simple
curse, reminiscent
of the wandering kind.
To say otherwise, is
from a historical point
of view, sheer distortion
or anachronism.
Jews were no more enamored of
the concept of the homo viator
than were medieval
Christians or Muslims."
Now rather than examining
the historical accuracy
of Steiner's claim, and rather
than arguing ideologically,
I shall consider his statement--
so Steiner's statement--
in terms of its
rhetorical gesture.
And this is what I am
trying to do throughout.
So the examples I chose--
the common denominator
between them
is that I believe that they
run into logical and rhetorical
problems.
It is not my aim to argue
politically or ideologically
here.
I am interested in how the
questions that I set up
at the beginning that
present themselves as double
binds or is as paradoxes--
how can you do
both this and that.
I believe that in the
examples that I'm giving,
they all come to the
fore in different forms
of contradictions, of
imprecisions and so on.
And that is what I
would like to look
at with each one in
the texts themselves.
So this is one
thing that I believe
that they have in common.
Another is that they address
all three questions that I asked
at the beginning, the question
of the suffering of exile,
the question of the relationship
between the particular
and the universal-- how can
this be exemplary metaphoric
for all--
and third, the question
of the relationship
between the experience
and the letter, the book,
that supposedly the Jews embody.
Now Steiner's
rhetoric is seductive.
For him, the Jews' specific
historical situation--
that is, as a
ruthless individual--
represents a universalist and
apparently universal ethics.
This ethics explicitly
directed in the context
of this quote against
Heidegger's rhetoric
of dwelling, of
[SPEAKING GERMAN] however,
would have to reject
the particularist notion
that the Jews are privileged,
exemplary, and ultimately
essentialized nation
of the ruthless.
Evidently aware of
the problem, Steiner
relativizes it with the
addition in the quote
above of the words,
"at least some Jews."
Now if not the Jew as such,
but merely some Jews embody
the state of ruthlessness--
so those who choose it--
then it remains an open question
whether the reference to Jews
remains meaningful.
Do Jews freely choose this
role, and must they uphold it,
or does it befall them
as Jews in the name
of an unexamined adherence
to the Jewish people
or its tradition?
In Steiner's exposition, a
violent historical uprooting,
to which he himself
refers, evolves seamlessly
into the admirable ruthlessness
of the free-floating intellect.
This portrayal thereby also
casts doubt on the range
and tendency of
Steiner's polemic,
his blurring of the distinction
between enforced exile
and cosmopolitanism, and
his self-affirming idea--
so I don't think that what was
denounced by Hitler and Stalin
was the Jews' cosmopolitanism--
and his self-affirming idea of
an exemplary role for his own
people weakened his
polemic against the poison
of a territorial nationalism--
so this part was called George
Steiner's imprecisions--
leaving us contradictions.
Like Steiner, Emmanuel
Levinas endorses
an ethics of uprootedness.
The core of his philosophy,
namely the constitution
of ethical subjectivity in
the exposure to the other,
is presented in terms of a
model of metaphorical exile,
[SPEAKING FRENCH] the
face of the other,
forces the subject out of
his or her self-absorption--
in the case of Levinas,
it's his, I added hers.
He has a text on
the feminine that
would justify this remark--
forces the subject out
of his self-absorption,
and shatters every
notion of autonomy.
Often, Levinas' description
of this exilic concept
of subjectivity is formulated
in purely abstract terms,
describing the structure
of exteriority.
But this universal structure
has in his writings
a concrete correlation.
It corresponds to the
biblical message of Abraham,
who unlike Ulysses,
does not return home.
Hearkening to the call of
God, of the absolute other,
Abraham--
according to Levinas--
leaves his own land
to journey to a foreign one.
And in his essay,
Heidegger, Gagarine et nous,
Levinas draws an
explicit analogy
between the structure
of subjectivity
and the story of
Abraham's departure
from the land of
his forefathers.
Levinas directs his praise
of Jewish rootlessness--
for which he uses the
term exile and exteriority
interchangeably--
against Heidegger's idea
of a bond to a place,
that is to what Heidegger calls
soil, a rootedness that Levinas
ascribes to paganism.
So the references to
Heidegger are also
among the common denominators
of all the examples
that I will give.
I'm not sure that
I will be referring
to Heidegger in each case,
but he is certainly there.
Here he is certainly
there as a negative foil.
This is not always the case.
And I forgot to add that one
thing they all have in common
is that they wrote
intensely about Paul Celan,
to whom I come at the end.
Contrasting Judaism and Jewry
to Heidegger's pagan rootedness,
Levinas characterizes it as a
de-territorialized community,
one enlivened rather than
deracinated by displacement.
Quote, "the constitution
of a real society
is an uprooting, the end
of an existence in which
the being at home is absolute."
For Levinas, a detachment
from this bond--
so the bond to the soil--
is the basic condition
of all ethics and politics.
And I quote, "one's
implementation
in the landscape, one's
attachment to place,
without which the universe
would become insignificant
and would scarcely exist, is
the very splitting of humanity
into natives and strangers.
In other words, the spirits
of the place, the genius loci,
are dangerous."
"Judaism," Levinas writes,
somewhat hyperbolically,
"has always been free
with regard to place."
I think one could write
an extensive paper
about the problematic
aspect of this statement.
But this is not what
concerns me here.
This negation of
rootedness lies at the core
of what Levinas regards
as one of Judaism's
universal messages.
He turns this message into
a fundamental distinction
between Judaism
and Christianity.
In Levinas' view,
Christian doctrine
not only retains pagan
residues, but also adheres
to a false conception of
Jewish loyalty to the letter.
So you see here that this is
the point of the letter that
comes back in.
In his view, such
loyalty refers,
quote, "not to the subordination
of the spirit to the letter,
but the substitution of
the letter for the soil."
It could seem as if Levinas,
like Steiner, fully affirms
Jewish exile and
de-territorialization.
One can, however,
sense contradictions
that run through Levinas'
writings between an ethics
of uprootedness and his
continuous awareness
of the migrants' plight,
between his universalist claims
and his privileging of
the Jewish tradition,
and most contentiously for
some, between his critique
of an attachment to the
soil and his unflinching
support of the state of Israel.
I have analyzed the complexity
of Levinas' position
mainly in a passage--
I don't have it here
in my PowerPoint--
but it's a passage in his
essay on Paul Celan titled,
From Being to the Other.
The passage begins with what
seems like a hyperbolic hymn
to exile, and I quote, "outside
of all rootedness and all
domesticity, being without the
fatherland, [SPEAKING FRENCH]
as authenticity."
The paragraph ends with a
similar seemingly unequivocal
sentence.
I quote, "but the
dwelling justified
by the movement toward the
other is Jewish in its essence."
In this formulation,
at the latest,
one could gain the
certainty that Levinas
takes the position
of the wandering Jew
as guarantee of a modality
of the ethical being, which
he associates with,
somewhat problematically,
essentialized Judaism, what
is Jewish in its essence.
At this moment, however--
and I can't demonstrate
this here in detail
because I don't have
it in the PowerPoint--
Levinas strikingly adopts
a language of detours,
of zigzags, of propositions
and counter-propositions
that destabilize his
own argumentation.
And I just give a little
example in the following quote.
"But the surprise of this
adventure of the self,
which is dedicated to the
other in the non-place--
it is the return.
It is as if in going to the
other, I withdraw in myself,
and implanted myself in the
soil from now on native."
Now this is indeed
a surprising turn.
Would Levinas' imperative
of going toward the other
be only destined to
return to the self
and end up rooted in soil?
Would the surprise
of this return
be that it is necessary
to go towards the other
in order to end up at home?
Arguably, Levinas-- and in this
he comes closest to answering
the question with
which I began--
resolves these
contradictions by invoking
another biblical reference.
He points to a conception
of biblical dwelling
that serves as a reminder
that the relation to the land
is neither possession
nor rootedness.
The land always
remains a promise.
It does not offer a homeland,
but in Levinas' words,
"serves as a mere refuge
to pass the night in order
to protect from the cold, from
hunger, from destitution."
And in a very beautiful,
lyrical passage,
Levinas describes the situation,
"a temporary shelter,"
where in strikingly poetic
words, unmistakably directed
against Heidegger,
Levinas speaks
of "the insomnia in
the bed of being--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]---- and the
impossibility to curl up
oneself to forget oneself--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]-- persists."
So his conception
of what that home is
is one in which it is
impossible to actually rest.
Levinas insists that a home
is not an attainable telos.
It remains and must
remain both a promise--
and in reference to
the Exodus from Egypt
and the feast of Sukkot of
tabernacles, a mere quote,
"hut in the desert."
True, this tentative
place between territory
and homelessness
does not entirely
resolve Levinas' contradictory
discourse on the Jew
as migrant.
After all, pagans can worship
the soil and live in tents,
and a state is hardly a
place to pass the night.
But hut in the desert thus
prefigured a possibility
to which I shall
return at the end.
My next example,
Blanchot's desert.
The topic of exile
associated with the Jew
is also an omnipresent
topic in the writings
of Levinas' friend, the
literary theorist and precursor
of deconstruction,
Maurice Blanchot.
Partly under the
influence of Levinas,
Blanchot effects a complex
bond between literature
and Jewishness.
Unlike in Levinas'
thought, however,
the placeless, rootless
Jew is not the bearer
of a message to humanity.
Instead, he is
explicitly a metaphor
in which the Jews' active
participation, even
the actual presence disappears.
In an implicit
dialogue with Levinas,
Blanchot shifts ever so
slightly, yet nonetheless
significantly,
Levinas' conception
of a universally valid
ethics of rootlessness
proclaimed by Jews,
and transforms it
into a poetics of wandering that
he associates metaphorically
with Jewish exile.
Blanchot, as Levinas, places
Jewish exile in opposition
to the pagan fixation
on place and dwelling.
Whereas Levinas argues
against attachment
to soil from an
ethical perspective,
Blanchot does so in
the name of literature,
which for him, stands for
a language that resists
any use and any grounding.
Such language is without
foundation or telos.
Its roots are detours
without goal or purpose.
And therefore, Blanchot
considers the Jewish people
as wandering in the desert
as the ultimate metaphor
of literature.
Commenting critically
on Blanchot's equation,
Levinas notes, "that
in the desert, the Jews
also entered into a covenant
with God and became a nation."
This criticism, however,
hardly undermines
Blanchot's metaphorical
construction.
In his theory of
literary language,
figurative discourse
is not dependent
on an external reality.
In Blanchot's view,
such discourse
is therefore more authentic
than the conceptual language
of philosophy, because it
admits referential failure
from the start.
Since it cannot reach reality,
it might just as well admit it,
and therefore all language
fails to reach reality.
Literary language admits
that it fails, and therefore
is the authentic language.
Considered as a performative
and destabilizing act,
a metaphor is itself a form
of de-territorialization.
Not surprisingly, Blanchot
uses exile and nomadism
interchangeably, and
largely overlooks
the vulnerability
associated with exile that
runs through Jewish history.
And I quote Blanchot.
"If Judaism is destined to
take on a meaning for us,
it is indeed by showing
that at whatever time,
one must be ready to set out.
Because to step outside is the
exigency from which one cannot
escape if one wants to maintain
the possibility of a just
relation, the
exigency of uprooting,
the affirmation
of nomadic Jews."
In his reflections
on uprootedness,
Blanchot explicitly admits
his indebtedness to Levinas,
yet he asserts that Jewish
resistance to place,
quote, "appears now as a
series of tropes, metaphors
for human tendencies
that can be disengaged
from their proper referent."
In replacing displacement
and exile with the nomadic,
Blanchot omits, in the words
of Sarah Hammerschlag, whom
you have quoted--
you said that she
was here last year,
and there is a certain dialogue
with Sarah in my paper--
so in Sarah's words
in her wonderful book,
The Figural Jew, "a mode
historically associated
with Judaism."
Jewish displacement, or
rather placelessness,
becomes for Blanchot
a pure metaphor
of the negation of any
identity and belonging,
and necessity of foreignness--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]---- an
exteriority of speech,
which according to
Blanchot, quote,
"unfolds in the prefix of
the words exile, exodus,
exteriority, and--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]---- The sliding
shift of these concepts,
from exile to--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]----
and exteriority,
which is a crucial
concept for Blanchot,
is what Blanchot would
term a performative act,
one subverting the foundations
of referential language.
Metaphor is itself similar
to, quote, "the exiled Jew,
a disturbing stranger, an
intruder in a foreign context.
It is [SPEAKING FRENCH] in
the sense of out of place."
So a metaphor is something
that finds itself in a foreign
context, and is
therefore out of place,
and [SPEAKING GERMAN]
That is itself [INAUDIBLE]
and confusing the
order of identities,
the Jew as metaphor,
the metaphor as Jew.
In this somewhat
circular argument,
the very exteriority
which Blanchot promotes
is at risk of getting lost.
I come to my two even more
contemporary figures, Agamben--
and this section is
called Agamben's pre-Jew.
I will have a post-Jew later on.
Discourse touching
upon Jews and place
has taken on an
increasingly political tone
in the context of
recent developments
in Continental thought.
Today's thinkers conduct
an affirmative discourse
of exemplary Jewish
exile in the context
of a critique of Zionism.
In this discourse, the Jew who
identifies himself as Jewish
and resists metaphorical
universalization
is taken to its
radical conclusion.
Simultaneously, the
metaphor is itself
superseded by the concreteness
of contemporary political
reality.
A strong example
for a radicalization
of the praise of Jewish
exile in this context
can be found in the Italian
philosopher, Giorgio Agamben's
short text, Easter in Egypt.
Agamben in this text
interprets a line
by Paul Celan he wrote to Max
Frisch and Ingeborg Bachmann
in 1959.
Answering their invitation
to visit them in Switzerland,
Celan apologizes
that he cannot come.
And this is what Celan
writes in the letter.
"I promised months ago to
visit an old aunt in London
for Jewish Easter, and
now, though I by no means
recall ever escaping
from Egypt, I
will celebrate it in
England with my relatives."
Celan, whose middle name
was, by the way, Pesach,
obviously refers to
the escape from slavery
in Egypt commemorated
on Passover
in a performative ritual.
Agamben, in a grave misreading,
turns this meaning of Egypt
and what Celan is
writing in this sentence
into what he considers
a positive non-place,
an objection to territory,
law, and peoplehood.
And here I dare explicitly
say grave misreading,
and maybe even come to some kind
of ideological and political
critique, but not only.
I believe that I still remain
within a question of logics
and rhetoric.
So this is what Agamben
writes about Celan's sentence
that I quoted before,
"though I by no means
recall ever having
escaped from Egypt."
"Celan positions himself
as a Jew in Egypt,
that is to say,
before or anywhere
outside of the
exodus of the Jews
from Egypt under the
leadership of Moses, which
the Jewish Easter
commemorates and celebrates.
This is something much more
radical than a claim for Galut,
for exile and diaspora."
So the examples we have
seen before, Agamben
says this goes much
further than only
embracing exile and diaspora.
"Celan locates himself
outside of the Exodus,
in a Judaism deprived
of Moses and of the law.
He has stayed in Egypt.
It is unclear on what
grounds, whether as
a prisoner, a free
man, or a slave,
but certainly, his
only abode is Egypt."
Agamben situates Celan's
good Judaism before and thus
without law and peoplehood.
Rather shockingly, he blurs the
distinction between prisoner,
free man, or slave--
that doesn't really matter--
a distinction at the
core of the meaning
of the Exodus from
Egypt, not only for Jews,
but for all those
who invoke Exodus
as a liberation from slavery.
In a strange conclusion,
Agamben lays open his cards
by merging the biblical Egypt
with a concrete situation.
Praising Celan for
remaining in Egypt,
Agamben concludes,
"I do not think
it is possible to
imagine a Judaism that
is more extraneous to
the Zionist ideal."
I do not think it is possible
to imagine a Judaism that
is more suitable for
Agamben's Pauline doctrine,
but I have to insist that this
is an interpretation of Paul
that does not take
recent interpretations
and reinterpretations of
Paul and his relationship
to Judaism into consideration.
"Without covenant,
peoplehood, and the law,
the efforts of supersessionism
would literally
and figuratively be saved."
Now what could
Celan possibly have
meant when he writes,
"though I by no means
recall ever having
escaped from Egypt?"
Well, I believe that it
could have two meanings.
He could be echoing
the injunction
central to the ritual
of Pesach, which
aims to recreate not the memory
of an incident in the past,
but to enact the liberation
from Egypt's slavery
as if one had been
there oneself.
This is part of the
Passover ritual.
Although I personally
have not been there,
I enact this on the
eve of the Seder.
It would be one interpretation.
Or Celan could be expressing his
feeling that the original act--
the liberation from slavery--
never occurred for him.
As a traumatized victim
of the Holocaust,
he himself remained
in a permanent state
of oppression and un-freedom.
Now in both cases, Egypt
stands for a negative stage
in Jewish history, a time and
place of slavery and suffering.
And my last theoretical example,
Alain Badiou's post-Jew.
One of today's prominent
contemporary Continental
philosophers, Alain Badiou,
makes pronouncements
that are even more dubious.
In his polemics against
Jewish particularism
conducted in the name of
a universalism inspired
by the apostle Paul--
and that's again,
that same Paul--
Badiou calls for abolishing
the exceptionality of the word
Jew, which he believes
derives from its extermination
under Hitler.
Even more than Agamben, he puts
the existing Jew and everything
so far associated with Judaism
into question, its history,
its nationhood, and
most strikingly,
its scriptural tradition.
And here we have all
three, and that's why I--
not only diachronically-- but
that's why I placed him last.
Because the three issues
that I've talked about
come together in three
letters in this quote.
"In this context it is important
to ask the following question.
What is the desire of
the petty faction that
is the self-proclaimed
proprietor of the word
Jew and its usage?
What does it hope
to achieve when
bolstered by the tripod of the
Shoah, the state of Israel,
and the Talmudic tradition--
the SIT-- it
stigmatizes and exposes
to public contempt
anyone who contends
that it is, in all rigor,
possible to subscribe
to a universalist
and egalitarian
sense of this word?"
Badiou is saying he wants a
universalist and egalitarian
sense of the word Jew, rather
than being the sacred signifier
that it became after the
Shoah, in the face of the state
of Israel, and with its
Talmudic tradition, by which he
basically refers to the law.
Badiou thus no longer plays
out the bad attachment
to a soil against the good
one of the letter or the book.
For him, Talmud is part of
what is wrong with the Jew.
No longer solely concerned
with the surrender
of a particularist
identity, Badiou
does not regard the Jew as
either the exemplary embodiment
of exile, or the metaphor
of de-territorialization.
Instead, the Jew is,
rather astonishingly,
the name of a new place
yet to be created,
a [SPEAKING FRENCH].
This place refers
to a new Palestine.
But because, for Badiou, quote,
"Palestine represents not only
a local situation, but stands
in as a symbol of all humanity,
it also carries
a wider meaning."
In line with his idea of
a supersessionist Paul,
whom Badiou calls,
"the paradigmatic Jew,
[SPEAKING FRENCH].
The Jew is supposed to stand
for, quote, "a Jewishly located
universalism--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]---- in which
there are neither Jews nor
Greeks."
Badiou's universalism
thus requires
divesting the Jew of any
historical, national, ethnic,
or religious particularity.
The consequence of this
postulate are remorseless.
I quote, "if we have
to create a new place--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]----
Badiou writes,
"this is because we
must create a new Jew--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
Satisfying this
imperative would not only
solve the question of the
reality, metaphoricity,
or exemplarity of
Jewish exile, it
would solve the Jewish
question altogether."
And to end, two
poems by Paul Celan,
where I find what Celan would
call a [SPEAKING GERMAN],,
a counter-word to the
theoretical positions
formulated above, and a
response to my initial questions
concerning the remembrance
of the hardship of exile
without endorsing
nationalist discourses
of territorial rootedness,
the search for language that
retains both concrete
historical experience
and can be relevant to all,
and the precious but precarious
association of the Jews
with the people of the book.
Leveraging the power
of his poetic language,
Celan un-hinges the
tropes and metaphors
so that they oscillate
between different visions,
values, and worldviews.
In a poem written
on 9, April 1966,
which concludes the cycle
Eingedunkelt, or Darkening
Light, published in 1968.
Celan envisions Jewish
exile in similar terms
to those of the other
authors considered here.
As did other thinkers who
regard the Jew as the embodiment
of displacement,
Celan associates
both rootedness and belonging
to a place with Heidegger,
and beyond that, with
the blood and soil
ideology of National Socialism.
Celan too associates
the alternative
to this dangerous rootedness
with the text and the letter.
Simultaneously, however,
he blocks the path
to appropriation,
and above all, enacts
an irrefutable resistance to
the forgetting of suffering,
in particular, the
suffering from exile.
I will read it in German,
and you have the English next
to it.
And the German is
important here,
because the references
are clear in German only.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
In this short two-part
sentence lacking any verbs,
Celan speaks as we or us, and
says what or how it is with us.
The intertextual reference
to Heidegger's being with--
[SPEAKING GERMAN]---- becomes more
explicit in the second line,
where he defines the
collectivity to which he
refers, the we/us are
the [SPEAKING GERMAN]----
the thrown, but here they are
the thrown about nevertheless.
We are and thus also
are not the Heideggerian
thrown, those thrown
into the world as being,
so Heidegger's [SPEAKING GERMAN]
We are more precisely
thrown about--
[SPEAKING GERMAN]---- thrown
from one place to the next,
displaced, hunted, and
expelled, we are above all,
those who nevertheless, despite
the trauma of persecution
and expulsion, resist
the yearning for fixity,
saving us from the
condition of thrown-ness.
We are those who nevertheless
defy the consolation of fixity
who turned the passivity of
having been thrown by fate
and history and those
who perpetrated it
into self-determined action.
We become the [SPEAKING GERMAN],,
who as such could
be Rilke's [SPEAKING GERMAN].
It is a--
[SPEAKING GERMAN] is a famous
term in Rilke's poetry--
circus people,
artists, vagabonds,
those unsettled and
unplaced melancholics.
Celan's travelers, however,
derive their significance
from the resistance evoked
in the nevertheless.
They are the expelled and
hunted, the [SPEAKING GERMAN],,
who nevertheless withstand
the temptation of rootedness,
who travel as a
resistance against it.
But this is no longer
an enforced exile,
but this is explicitly in
the distinction, a choice.
This resistance rests
on the only unrelenting,
undiminished certainty that
remains, the soul unscarred,
non-appropriable, defiant grief.
The unsurmountable
defiant grief,
uniting anger and mourning,
binds these travelers
and accompanies them.
It does not stand for
them metaphorically,
nor does it define an identity.
Rather, it is with them.
It is neither to be used
nor to be appropriated,
as a metaphoric undoing of
particularity would have it.
It stands upright
amidst all movement.
And there is another poem
called Never, upright grief--
Niemals, stehender Gram.
You see there is a line
here, the [SPEAKING GERMAN]..
So it is the other poem where
the word gram, grief, comes up.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
Just as in that poem,
written two years later,
the poem Mit Uns
defies mimeticists
who no matter how lettered,
never wrote a word that rebels.
The sorrow evoked
in With Us is as
defiant as the letter of this
poem in which gram, grief,
and grammaton, the
Greek word for letter,
come together in the
concrete and singular
reality of the poem that is
open to all fellow travelers who
are touched by it.
And to end, only a few
verses from the poem
[SPEAKING GERMAN].
Thus I will start reading,
but then I will only
go to the last stanza.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
As in With Us Celan's
poem, [SPEAKING GERMAN],,
refers to Heidegger, this time
to the German philosopher's
famous hut in the
Black Forest, which
embodies this celebration of
[SPEAKING GERMAN] earthiness,
a bond with the soil.
In his poem, Celan
associates the alternative,
the counter-word to this volkish
rootedness with the text,
and the letter.
But [SPEAKING GERMAN] is
also regularly translated
into English as
tabernacle window.
This translation clarifies
what is otherwise
only an implicit reference
to the Jewish tabernacle
[INAUDIBLE],, which commemorates
the years the Israelites spent
wandering in the desert.
The hut or tabernacle
window functions
here as a contronym
between Heidegger's Huette
and the Sukkah, oscillating
between a meaning
and its opposite,
Jewish wandering
at the same time as
its dangerous exposure,
its concrete enemy
in the present.
In the middle part of
the poem, various images
of desolation,
abjection, and suffering
are interrogated alongside
spaces and places
of myth and history.
The final stanzas invoke
letters of the alphabet.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
The poem ends on the contrast
between the aleph alpha
as both Greek and
Jewish immateriality,
and the bet with which
the Torah begins,
and where letter
and dwelling are
joined in one, bet and bayit.
These verses offer
not a territory,
but a shelter for both
mensch and Jew, a material,
everyday place of refuge,
a house and table,
as well as an
illumination that does not
stem from the shield
of David's star,
but from the candles of Shabbat,
and the doubleness of concrete,
earthly, even homely and
metaphorically holy heavenly
light.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
