Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

6. For Levinas, the face is not necessarily the literal face; it is an injunction to nonviolence conducted through any number of senses. Hence, Levinas refers to the “back of the neck” as the face, suggesting that the “face” is that dimension of human living that bears its vulnerability and imposes an ethical obligation upon those to whom it appears. See my Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 131–40.

7. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), for an important, if fallible, discussion of Walter Benjamin, translation, and the fusion of horizons.

8. The contemporary study of hermeneutics is indebted to the work of Dilthey and Schleiermacher, both of whom referenced problems of biblical hermeneutics as they sought to establish the foundation of the human sciences (or Geisteswissenschaften). The question of how to read biblical passages from the vantage of historical situations that postdate their writing opens up the question of how interpretation is invariably tied to the traversal of time. Although Gadamer tended to establish the historical continuity of tradition through a concept of dialogic interpretation, his views failed to account for those forms of temporal rupture when former modes of authority enter into crisis and lose their legitimacy. Although this criticism led Habermas to try to account for legitimation through nontraditional and precultural means, it brought thinkers influenced by Walter Benjamin to those acts of translation where the past must effectively break apart in order to be introduced into the future. Both versions refuse those modes of historical continuity that shore up tradition and authority, but whereas Habermas takes a quasi-transcendental approach, the Benjaminian approach focuses on the temporal disjunctures by which translation proceeds. It is the necessity of breaking apart, or scattering, that forms the effective background of this study. Interestingly, this also calls upon a version of the messianic tradition within Judaism. But if we follow Benjamin here, then the messianic form of scattering that appears in his work is already a departure from earlier forms. In other words, it is a further scattering of the scattered.

9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “More Thoughts on Cultural Translation.” See http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/spivak/en.

10. Talal Asad, “On the Concept of ‘Cultural Translation’ in British Social Anthropology’” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

11. For a consideration of the messianic in the work of Derrida, see Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001).

12. See Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

13. See Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings, ed. Ronald Feldman and Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2008).

14. Yehouda A. Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Ella Shohat, “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews.” Social Text 21, no. 2 (2003): 49–74.

15. See Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora.

16. See Najat Rahman, Mahmoud Darwish: Exile’s Poet: Critical Essays (Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2008).

17. Étienne Balibar, “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations,” Grey Room 44 (Summer 2011): 6–25, citation at 21.

18. For an alternative, see Asad, “On the Concept of ‘Cultural Translation.’”

19. Balibar, “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism,” 21. Balibar writes that religious differences “must be ‘mediated’ by the introduction of discourse, which … must appear ‘heretic’ from the point of view of any and all religions. Thus, in order for the various religious discourses to become mutually compatible in the same public space or enter into a ‘free’ conversation, the introduction or intervention of an additional a-religious element is needed” (21–22). Moreover, he writes, “it [the heretic element] is ‘performative’ and in the first instance performs its own parrhesia, or truth enunciation, against all theologies and mythologies that exercise power” (23). The question raised by this argument is whether the heretic moment is invariably “a-religious,” in which case only the “a-religious” can mediate between religious differences. But if the heretical moment or possibility is constitutive of religion itself, as many have argued, then the heretical becomes the occasion for translating between religious differences without presuming that it is only by a transcendence or negation of religion that such mediation becomes possible. This view, however, begs the question of whether translation must, or should, be considered as mediation at all.

20. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

21. Balibar, “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism,” 21.

22. See, for example, Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). In a debate about how Jewish intellectuals should formulate their opposition to Zionism as a violation of human rights, Anat Biletzki has argued that human rights must be based on reason, identified strictly with secularism, and so cannot be gleaned from religious sources. If there are good reasons for defending human rights in religious texts, it is because they are based on a form of reason that operates independently of all religion. See “The Sacred and the Humane,” opinionator column, New York Times online, July 17, 2011.

23 See my argument in “Competing Universalities” in Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, coauthored with Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau (London: Verso, 2000).

24. See Levinas’s remarks that the Palestinians have no face (and hence, their human vunerability can be the ground for no obligation not to kill) in “Ethics and Politics,” Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 289.

25. See also Levinas’s remarks about the “Asiatic hordes” who threaten the ethical basis of Judeo-Christian culture in “Jewish Thought Today,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 165. This was more fully discussed in my Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995), 84–101.

26. Yoseph Grodzinsky, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 2004).

1. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003).

2. Of course, the contention that Moses is an Arab Jew is itself an arguable point. See Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). But what is significant here is that Moses emerges from Egypt and is, in that sense, though surely a slave within those lands, also part of its history. Indeed, as a wanderer, Moses is not only in exile from his future homeland but from Egypt as well, suggesting that he is himself a figure of exile in which two traditions meet.

3. Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 185–204; Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

6. Hannah Arendt, “I Do Not Belong to Any Group,” dialogue, with Hans Morgenthau and Mary McCarthy, in Hannah Arendt, The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979).

7. See my discussions of Arendt’s view in chapters 4 and 5.

8. For Martin Buber’s discussion of “concentrative colonialism,” see “Concerning Our Politics” in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 137–42.

9. In his public writings, Buber chastised Israelis for violating Arab trust and offered a way of understanding, without condoning, Arab resistance to Zionist military violence in August 1929. See his response to Hans Kohn’s repudiation of Zionism on the grounds that its policy toward the “Arabs”—Palestinians—had no ethical justification: “Hans Kohn: ‘Zionism Is Not Judaism’” in Mendes-Flohr, A Land of Two Peoples, 97–100.

10. See Buber’s 1947 manifesto, “Two Peoples in Palestine,” in Mendes-Flohr, A Land of Two Peoples, 194–202.

11. For Levinas, the messianic tradition articulates a relationship to suffering. He recites the rabbinic statements “The day of rain is as great as the day when the Torah was given” and “The day of rain is as great as the day when the heavens and earth were created.” He links this equality of greatness to the notion of justice and tells us that “it is perhaps this state of mind that we normally call Jewish messianism” (DF, 36).

12. See Kafka’s speculation in his diary entry of January 1922 about his own writing: “if Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are intimations of this.” Franz Kafka Diaries, 1910–23, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1975).

13. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 111.

14. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978), 247.

15. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, August, Beirut, 1982, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 124–25.

16. Or so the poet Mahmoud Darwish writes in “Contrapuntal” (http:/mondediplo.com/2005/01/15said), his elegy for Said, discussed in chapter 5, when he assumes Said’s voice: “My own nostalgia is a struggle for a present that clings to the future.

1. Scholem explains that the kabbalists interpreted the Torah in several allegorical ways. One of them, proposed by the Zohar, is that “every word, indeed, every letter, has seventy aspects, or ‘faces.’” Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1965), 62.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity” in Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

3. See chapter 5 of my Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), where some parts of this discussion are already published.

4. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 116, 117. The French reads “La persécution est le moment précis où le sujet est atteint ou touché sans la médiation du logos.” Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement q’etre ou au-delà de l’essence (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2004), 193. Lingis’s translation is importantly mistaken in rendering sans here as “with.”

5. In French, Levinas writes, “Responsibilité dont l’entrée dans l’être ne peut s’effectuer que sans choix” (AE, 183); “être soi—condition d’otage—c’est toujours avoir un degré de responsabilité de plus, la responsabilité pour la responsabilité de l’autre” (AE, 185–86).

6. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1984), 336.

7. See Wendy Brown’s discussion in Regulating Aversion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

8. Emmanuel Levinas, New Talmudic Readings, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 48.

9. In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas writes: “The birth of the Ego in a gnawing remorse, which is precisely a withdrawing into oneself; this is the absolute recurrence of substitution. The condition or non-condition of the Self is not originally an auto-affection presupposing the Ego but is precisely an affection by the Other, an anarchic traumatism [an-archic, without principle, and so assuredly, enigmatic, that for which no clear cause can be given], this side of auto-affection and self-identification, a traumatism of responsibility and not causality” (93–94).

1. See Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010).

2. All citations in this essay are from “Critique of Violence” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1:1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–52, and in German from Walter Benjamin, Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965).

3. Benjamin’s word for “fate” is das Shicksal, which is more aptly translated as destiny.

4. Rosenzweig argues that the commandment is a verbal and written effort on the part of God to solicit the love of his people in The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 267–70. His focus on love corresponds to the efforts during that time to revive the spiritual dimension of Judaism over and against rabbinic reforms that focused on the elaboration of rules and the science of their interpretation. Rosenzweig’s concern with Judaism as a spiritual movement led him to argue that “[the Jewish people] must deny itself the satisfaction the peoples of the world constantly enjoy in the functioning of their state” (332). He argues further that “the state symbolizes the attempt to give nations eternity within the confines of time.” For such an eternity to be secured, however, nations have to be perpetually refounded, and they require war to perpetuate themselves. In Rosenzweig’s view, life is constituted by preservation and renewal. Law emerges as antilife to the extent that law establishes an endurance and stability that works against life and becomes the basis for state coercion. He sought to understand Judaism as beyond the contradictions that afflict nations and so sought to distinguish the idea of the Jewish people from the Jewish nation (329).

6. See Rosenzweig’s important distinction between “Israel” as the Jewish people and “Israel” as a claim to land in The Star of Redemption, 326, 351–52. In addition, he argued that “waiting and wandering” (329) was part of a messianic tradition that supervened the idea of “Israel” in either sense (404), affirming the importantly diasporic character of Judaism. See Buber’s remarks in 1948 on the “perversion” of Zionism, as it sought to realize itself in the form of a state, in Martin Buber, “Zionism and ‘Zionism’” in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 220–23.

7. For a record of Benjamin’s indecisive relation to Zionism, see the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem in the summer of 1933 in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940 (New York: Schocken, 1989).

8. See Jacques Derrida, Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 69. The original English version was translated by Mary Quantaince, “The Force of Law” and appeared in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, a special issue of Cardozo Law Review 11. nos. 5–6 (July-August 1990): 919–1046.

9. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 103–98.

10. Benjamin associates atonement and retribution with myth both in this essay and in several other essays of the period. He also clearly opposes the operation of critique to myth, which, in his view, wars against truth. See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 297–362. His essay was written between the years of 1919 and 1922.

11. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 191–92.

12. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 308.

13. Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment” in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 312–13; originally published in Walter Benjamin, Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Suhrkamp, 1965), 95–96.

14. The reason for the commandment, Benjamin writes, should be found “no longer in what the deed does to the victim, but what it does to God and the doer” (CV, 251).

15. See Benjamin’s remarks on “critical violence” in “On Semblance” (224), written in 1919–20, and in his “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (341), both in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings.

16. Benjamin writes that “in all language and linguistic creations, there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated,” which he refers to as “the nucleus of all languages” in “The Task of the Translator” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 261.

17. See Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike” in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds., Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy—Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge 1993).

18. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969).

19. Walter Benjamin, “The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 286–87 (my emphasis).

20. For a further discussion of the issue of forgiveness in Benjamin, see my “Beyond Seduction and Morality: Benjamin’s Early Aesthetics” in Dominic Willsdon and Diarmuid Costello, eds., The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

1. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) assumed that final legal and political sovereignty rests with nation-states and that any conflicts between them ought to be worked out at a social rather than juridical level. International law and human rights claims have had to struggle against the Westphalian doctrine in order either to establish sovereignty as a nonnational principle (a theory proposed by Hans Kelsen in the 1920s) or to establish rights claims for those who either belong to no existing nation-state or whose claims are articulated precisely against the nation-state to which they do belong.

2. See my “Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences,” Studies in Comparative Literature. 48, no. 3 (2011): 280–95.

3. Currently, according to the UNRWA in January 2010, there are 1,551,145 registered Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories alone, and another 951,709 in Gaza. These numbers added to the numbers who have been dispersed throughout the diaspora as a consequence of 1948 (and 1967) are now estimated at 5 million.

4. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” in Walter Benjamin, Abhandlungen, band 1.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 695.

6. Franz Kafka, “Cares of a Family Man” in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1976), 427–28.

7. Benjamin, “Uber den Begriff der Geschichte,” 695.

8. See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), 44, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1965), 100–5.

9. Jacques Derrida, La Force de loi (Paris: Galilee, 1994).

10. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1931–1934, ed. Michael William Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

11. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1931–1934, 697.

12. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Languages of Man” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. and trans. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

13. My translation. The German is “Die Jetztzeit, die als Modell der messianischen in einer ungeheuren Abbreviatur die Geschichte der ganzen Menschheit zusammenfasst.” The term ungeheuer refers to that which is uncanny, enormous, even monstrous.

13. See my paper on “Anarchism and Cohabitation,” on file with the author, presented at the New School University, May 2011.

14. Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht” in Reflections: Aphorisms, Essays, and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 210.

15. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

16. Haim Bresheeth, “The Continuity of Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba” in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba, 161.

17. Diana K. Allan, “The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatila Camp” in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba, 253–84.

18. See Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, eds., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).

19. See also Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Lynne Rienner, 1998), first published in Arabic in 1962; Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: Picador, 2006).

1. David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

2. See Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular?Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

3. See Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Rockville, MD: Wildside, 2008), 63–72.

4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), p. 66, Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 216–28.

5. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2006).

6. She emerged from a complex tradition of German Jewish thought, and I do not mean to engage in an idealization here, since there are many reasons not to idealize her. She wrote and spoke some clearly racist beliefs and she is no model for a broader politics of understanding across cultural difference. But she continues a German Jewish debate that began in the late nineteenth century about the value and meaning of Zionism. There was, for instance, a famous debate between Hermann Cohen—whose views I will return to—and Gershom Scholem on the value of Zionism in which Cohen criticized the nascent nationalism of Zionism and offered instead a vision of the Jewish people as cosmopolitan or “hyphenated.” Cohen argued that Jews were best served by becoming part of the German nation—a view that could only prove most painful and impossible with the development of German fascism and its virulent anti-Semitism. Arendt shared Cohen’s high valuation of German culture, though she explicitly rejected that nationalism.

7. See Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).

8. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

9. Hannah Arendt, “Jewish History, Revised” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken, 2007), 305.

10. Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism (London: Verso, 2008), 179.

11. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory Between Exile and History,” JQR 97, no. 4 (2007): 530–43, “Exile Within Sovereignty,” Theory and Criticism, no. 4 (2007), Exil et souveraineté: Judaïsme, sionisme et pensée binationale (Paris: Fabrique, 2007).

12. Of course, as Arendt herself points out, the need to establish an “internal” history of the Jewish people is one way to counter the position, held by Sartre and others, that the historical life of the Jews is determined mainly or exclusively by anti-Semitism.

13. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “‘On the Right Side of the Barricades’: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Zionism,” Comparative Literature (forthcoming).

14. This raises a complex question about the relation between the “cessation of happening” characteristic of the general strike and the end to a homogeneous form of history. At what point does the first cessation become the condition for the second, or are they at some point continuous with one another?

15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1963), 277–78.

16. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

17. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).

18. Hala Khamis Nassar and Najat Rahman, eds., Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet: Critical Essays (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2008). For a discussion of “here” and “there” in Darwish, see Jeffrey Sacks, “Language Places,” ibid., 253–61. Sacks makes the connection between Darwish’s poetic references to the shifting sense of “here” in relation to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit the discussion of the shifting “here” takes place in the section on sense-certainty. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 60–61.

19. See the introduction in my Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).

20. “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt” in Melvyn A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 333–34.

22. See Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), for a contrary view. Rose links the messianic movement with the Zionist pursuit of recurrent military catastrophe. My question is whether the messianic can give rise to a countermilitary position.

23. See note 26, this chapter. See Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Binationalism and Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Palestine” in Steven E. Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 165-80, “Jewish Peoplehood, ‘Jewish Politics,’ and Political Responsibility: Arendt on Zionism and Partitions,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 57–74.

24. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 20, 67, 80, 18, 24, 65.

25. Arendt to Jaspers, April 13, 1961, letter 285, in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 434–36.

26. See Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Peoplehood.” See also Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt” in Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 247–62.

27. A selective English translation of Hermann Cohen’s Deutschtum und Judentum can be found in Eva Jospe, ed. and trans., Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997).

28. The White Paper was a British document published in May of 1939 that sought to establish a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine, but refused to grant the notion of Jewish self-rule. It imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration and land acquisition in the territory and was regarded as a strike against Zionist nationalist aspirations. See Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon, 2006), 31–64.

29. Arendt is clearly opposing any efforts on the part of a human rights discourse to seek its legitimacy in nature or natural rights. But it would be wrong to say she has no affinity with such positions. In “The Decline of the Rights of Man and the End of the Nation-State” it would appear that she is writing against those who claim that the state and its provisions of citizenship constitute the problem of modernity. But can we say the same for the nation-state? What is clear is that she has no particular sympathy with the idealization of nature one finds in certain Enlightenment texts and she disputes the notion that one might find in nature those principles of equality, justice, and freedom we might like to see in the context of political life. In her view, stateless people are returned violently to a state of nature where there are no protections and no entitlements and where it is impossible to maintain what she calls their “humanity.” If there is to be a human subject, it must be made in the context of political life, made collectively; there can be no freedom outside a polis, a political community that is structured by equality and freedom. Of course, equality and freedom seem to have a status that does not fully depend on the contingent articulations performed by various states, and they seem to function as norms in her work, thus allying her with certain natural law theorists. Indeed, there seems to be something of an impulse of natural law that is void of the state of nature hypothesis, but this is a conjecture to pursue another time. What’s clear here is that, in Arendt’s view, the humanity of human beings only comes into being in the context of a political community and that those who are excluded, expelled, or, indeed, exterminated are deprived of their humanity the moment their rights to citizenship are suspended or destroyed.

The massive expulsions of populations in the twentieth century have, in Arendt’s view, brought this situation into relief. Arendt opens this essay by letting us know that it will be “almost impossible” to imagine what happened at the end of World War I. She describes the migrations of people who “were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere.” She describes as well a situation in which “hatred … began to play a role in public affairs everywhere,” a “vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs.” She describes, within the context of Europe, the emergence of two victim groups, the stateless and the minorities (OT, 268). Both groups were deprived of rights of citizenship, settling uneasily with provisional legality in various countries where they were explicitly regarded as outsiders, as not belonging to the nation. The population thus divided into those with full legal entitlements and recognition as citizens and those who were disenfranchised but still under the jurisdiction of state authority.

30. It is interesting that at this point in “The Decline of the Rights of Man and the End of the Nation-State” she turns to a rather devastating critique of the “rights of man”—how useless and impotent the doctrine has turned out to be. What I’d like to suggest is that Arendt rebukes the discourse of the rights of man for being weak, but offers a certain reconceptualization of those rights and does this through her own kind of declaration, one that we might characterize as strong speech. This will come as no surprise to those who know what she has to say about words and deeds in The Human Condition, where persuasive speech is part of the very definition of the political realm. And yet there remains a question of who can exercise such rights and how the human is delimited in her view. Although one reads the essay as a defense, if not an enactment, of the rights of the stateless, she makes clear that the stateless are also a threat to the human. At the end of the essay, those who are stateless, including, presumptively, the Palestinians and the Pakistanis, threaten to become a “barbarous” force that attacks the “edifice of the human.” At this point it seems that Israel and India are posited as national states that secure the “human” and so must be defended against the stateless that they themselves have produced. This runs counter to what seems to be the predominant argument of the essay, namely, that the stateless have the right to have rights.

31. Finally, then, I want to suggest that part of what Arendt is doing in this essay is defining these rights with assurance. In other words, she is providing, performing the rhetoric of definition in an assured fashion. Although she is no natural law theorist, Arendt lays out, even stipulates, the conditions of human life that precede and precondition any particular form of government and law. She does not base this view on prior principles, but elaborates it in the context of an address to her audience. Thus her rhetoric seeks to instantiate the social relation that she describes. Moreover, in laying out these conditions, she evacuates the first-person “I.” Arendt does not write this text as an “I,” someone with an individual’s perspective. When a pronoun appears, it is a “we,” but who is this “we”? As whom and for whom is she speaking? Does she represent a “we” or does she invoke one when she claims, ‘We are not born equal: we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights” (OT, 301)?

32. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 166.

1. See Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-determination, 1969–1994 (New York: Vintage, 1994).

2. See Steven E. Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994).

4. Yosal Rogat, The Eichmann Trial and the Rule of Law (Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1961).

5. Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade” in Ecrits II (Paris: Seuil, 1971).

6. Eva Jospe, ed. and trans., Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997).

7. My thanks to Susannah Gottlieb for directing me to this essay. See Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, “Beyond Tragedy: Arendt, Rogat, and the Judges in Jerusalem,” College Literature 28, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 45–56.

9. Arendt appears implicitly to be calling upon the Heideggerian distinction between earth and world in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofsstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). In “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” for instance, Heidegger claims that “to be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal.” But to be “on the earth” is, in his terms, to dwell (147). But in “The Origin of the Work of Art” he makes clear that world and earth differ from one another; the earth, in its givenness, is “set forth” or partially disclosed, but the world is “set up” and belongs to a practice of greater human agency or building (48–49). Although Heidegger argues that earth and world are oppositions that enter into a form of “striving” in the work of art, Arendt clearly understands the practice of human world-making to proceed as a political necessity from the given character of mortal humans who cohabit the earth.

10. See discussion in Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

11. See Talal Asad’s discusson of death dealing in On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

12. For a consideration of Hannah Arendt on the death penalty, see my “Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences,” Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 3 (2011): 280–95.

13. Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

14. See Bakhtin on addressivity in M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 95–99, but also Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives, trans. Paul Kottman (New York: Routledge, 2000), and For More Than One Voice, trans. Paul Kottman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005).

15. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2003), 95.

16. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

17. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 41.

20. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 76.

1. Hayden White, “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004): 113–24.

2. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961), The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1989).

3. La Stampa, June 24, 1982.

4. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, eds., The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961–1987 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 285.

7. For an excellent and singularly capacious discussion of this vexed position, see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52–71.

8. Quoted in Lawrence Langer, “Introduction” in Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette Lamonte (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xiii.

9. Delbo, Auschwitz and After. The original French uses veridique for “truthful,” suggesting a continuing link with verifiability. Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Paris: Minuit, 1970), 7.

10. Cynthia Ozick, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” New York Observer, May 10, 2004.

11. Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from Its Ashes (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 11–26.

12. Tom Paulin, “Killed in Crossfire,” Observer, February 18, 2001.

13. The invocation of this accusation in the context of the recent evacuation of Gaza was in some ways predictable. Some of the Israelis evacuated used the rhetoric of the Holocaust, arguing not only that they were being dispossessed and even destroyed again, but that all Jews were threatened by this act. For the record, approximately 8,000 Israelis were compelled to leave their homes in Gaza; 1,719 Palestinians have been killed since 2000, another 9,000 Palestinians injured there, 2,704 Palestinian homes razed, belonging to some 20,000 people. I do not say this to set up equivalents or to show that the nonequivalence is overwhelming. I offer it only so that the picture might be widened to understand where and how the human suffering in that region occurs.

14. This phenomenon is not exactly new. The discursive circulation of the Holocaust for politically strategic reasons has been there from the start. If I understand her correctly, Jacqueline Rose argues that the Holocaust becomes, for messianic Zionism, the modern exemplar of the catastrophe that is bound to recur and without which the messianic strain in Judaism cannot renew itself. In other words, the Holocaust must be renewed within contemporary politics in order to reinvigorate the messianic goal of collecting and authorizing the Jewish people as a nation. In effect, for her there can be no renewal of the messianic aims of Zionism without a catastrophe. See Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

15. Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi (Evanston: Marlboro, 1989), 54.

16. Belpoliti and Gordon, The Voice of Memory, 263.

17. Burg, The Holocaust Is Over, 78. The argument he makes is already made with greater historical amplification by Idith Zertal, who argues that the Nazi genocide against the Jews is no longer remembered for itself, is no longer given its appropriate place as a traumatic and ungraspable loss. The sanctification of what she calls the Holocaust is actually its devaluation, since it exercises a continuing traumatic effect, even endowing local political arguments with “transcendental, inexpressible quality” (IH, 169). The point is not simply that the invocation of the Holocaust is also a manipulative strategy for endorsing and expanding Israeli military power and destructiveness. Zertal mourns the loss of the actual loss, the way in which a monstrous and devastating historical genocide is transformed into a ploy and a strategy, establishing a “never-ending past” at the expense of a massive and unbearable historical crime. Of course, such arguments have to be differentiated from those claiming that any and all references to the “Holocaust” are simply part of the strategic rhetoric of war. Something else is happening here, a way the past refuses to become past, even devours the present, and produces an endless and futile sense of victimhood that cannot or will not conceive of the physical vulnerability of the non-Jew. It happens time and again when the Palestinian is likened to the Nazi. Zertal reminds us that Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister, likened Palestinians to the mufti of Jerusalem who, in his view, “repeatedly proposed … to Hitler … the extermination of the Jews.” Burg points out that even Abba Eban, widely considered a dove on matters of foreign policy, “coined a term that is still used today, defining Israel’s boundaries, the 1949 Armistice Line, as ‘Auschwitz borders.’” According to Burg, “the Six-Day war removed the virtual ghetto fences between Israel and Auschwitz” (23).

18. Burg, The Holocaust Is Over, 33.

21. Cited in Ze’ev Schiff, Israel’s Lebanon War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 220.

22. Belpoliti and Gordon, The Voice of Memory, 292–93.

23. As cited in Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 628.

25. Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Picador, 2004), 433.

26. Belpoliti and Gordon, The Voice of Memory, 285–86.

1. For a history of Zionist attacks on Palestinians and land confiscations prior to 1948, see Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). See also Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). Since the dispossession of Palestinans in 1948, there have been recurrent expulsions. See http://www.badil.org/en/al-majdal/item/1278-recurring-dispossession-and-displacement-of-1948-palestinian-refugees-in-the-occupied-palestinian-territory. See also Edward W. Said, The Politics of the Dispossessed (New York: Vintage, 1994). Palestinians rarely left the region prior to 1948 except during the 1880s–1910s, when migration was compelled by difficult economic times throughout the region, which explained, for instance, a significant departure of Palestinians for South America.

2. This right was unambiguously affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194(III) of 1948.

3. Naseer Aruri, Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (London: Pluto, 2001).

4. Zochrot (zochrot.org/en): an organization committed to mapping, commemorating, and publicizing the destruction of Palestinian villages and livelihoods during and after the Naqba.

5. My indebtedness here goes to Najat Rahman, whose volume, coedited with Hala Khamis Nassar, Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet: Critical Essays (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2008), had guided my readings and whose e-mail correspondence has been most useful in helping me to understand the original Arabic terms used for exile. See also Najat Rahman, Literary Disinheritance: The Writing of Home in the Work of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008).

6. See Said’s remarks, for instance, on the importance of diasporic Palestinians to any solution for Palestine in his introduction to The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 (New York: Vintage, 1995, xlii). See also the following essays that consider the importance of the exile intellectual to the development of a postnationalist politics for the region: Elias Khoury, “The Intellectual and the Double Exile” and Ilan Pappé, “The Saidian Fusion of Horizons” in Waiting for the Barbarians: A Trubute to Edward Said, ed. Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Başak Ertür (London: Verso, 2008), pp. xxi–xx, 83–92. See Ghada Karmi’s important reflections on dispossession in “Said and the Palestinian Diaspora: A Personal Reflection” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 304–13.

7. For Arendt, the nation-state that seeks to represent one national group is structurally bound to produce and reproduce a stateless class. See “The Nation-State and the Rights of Man” in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951).

8. Meron Benvenisti, http://kanan48.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/united-we-stand-by-meronbenvenisti/, and “The Inevitable Binational Regime”: http://www.americantaskforce.org/daily_news_article/2010/01/22/1264136400_13; see also the conference held in 2009, which involves Benveniste and several others, on “Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace”: http://www.yorku.ca/ipconf/. See also Mazen Masri, Ali Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (New York: Metropolitan, 2006); Azmi Bishara, “4 May 1999 and Palestinian Statehood: To Declare or Not to Declare?” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 5–16; Daniel Elazar, Two Peoples | One Land: Federal Solutions for Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan (Latham, MD: University Press of America, 1991); Oren Yiftachel, “Neither Two States Nor One: The Disengagement and ‘Creeping Apartheid’ in Israel/ Palestine,” Arab World Geographer 8, no. 3 (2005): 125–29.

9. See the numerous publications by Adalah on rights of Palestinian Israelis, including their 2007 report: http://www.adalah.org/eng/intl07/adalah-cerd-feb07.pdf.

10. Nassar and Rahman, Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet, 323.

11. Edward W. Said, “The One State Solution.,” New York Times, January 10, 1999; see also Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom, eds., Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), especially part 2.

12. Martin Buber, A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). That earlier notion of binationalism assumed the discrete homogeneity of the “Jewish” people as well as the “Palestinian,” thus ratifying Ashkenazi hegemony and refusing the diasporic character of both peoples. Buber’s efforts to articulate a binational framework in the late 1940s and through part of the 1950s suffered from a failure to fully criticize the settler colonial project. By separating cultural Zionism from political Zionism, he could imagine binationalism of a cultural sort, thus allowing political Zionism to remain intact. Even the federal authority that he proposed with Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt in 1946–47 did not go far enough to challenge the colonial presumption of political Zionism. Indeed, Buber himself referred to forms of “concentrative colonialism” for Palestinians as if such proposals were politically neutral and acceptable.

13. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

14. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003).

15. My thanks to Manal Al Tamimi, with whom conversations on the exclusion of considerations of power from Israeli-Palestinian encounter groups have informed my views on this topic.

16. Mahmoud Darwish, “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,” trans. Mona Anis, Cultural Critique 67 (Fall 2007): 175–82; see also Mahmoud Darwish, “Counterpoint: Homage to Edward Said,” trans. Julie Stoker, Le Monde Diplomatiqe (January 2005), http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/2005/en/0129_darwish.html and also “Counterpoint: For Edward Said,” If I Were Another, trans. Fady Joudah (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 183-92. Said himself uses the idea of contrapuntal analysis in Culture and Imperialism (60) to indicate the vacillating condition of “location” in exile. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).