Judaism in The Human Condition
Bonnie Honig
“Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.”1 In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes three domains of active human life (labor, work, and action) and gives a phenomenological account of them, specifying what properly belongs to each, which include, as many of her commentators note, different activities, mentalities, and temporalities.2 Arendt expresses some concern that in late modernity the domain of action has been overtaken by labor and work, with likely deleterious consequences for the freedom and meaning-making activities that are action’s unique treasure. This is, at its best, a critique of biopolitics avant la lettre. At its worst, it seems to be a rather conservative effort to insulate the political from contamination by so-called social issues such as material or sex-gender inequality. Many critics, including myself, have faulted Arendt on the latter point, with Hanna Pitkin at greatest length in her fine book, The Attack of the Blob.3 I will not rehearse those criticisms. In this chapter, I look at a detail in Arendt’s argument that has not thus far been examined, as rooted in Judaic thinking, though it might open up a host of questions about her work and about postcolonial political theory and practice more generally.
Toward the start and the end of the work section of The Human Condition, Arendt considers two liminal examples of possible use-objects—cultivated land and poetry. Cultivated land could belong to labor or to work, she says at the start. It could even force the collapse of the distinction between them: “The most necessary and elementary labor of man, the tilling of the soil, seems to be a perfect example of labor transforming itself into work in the process, as it were.”4
Likewise, poetry is pitched between two domains. It could belong to work or to action, insofar as it is “perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts . . . [and] less a thing than any other work of art.”5 But, in the end, poetry belongs to work because its “memorability,” which is to say “its chance to be permanently fixed in the recollection of humanity,” is underwritten by writing, which transforms the poem “into a tangible thing.” As text, poetry moves from intangible speech and language to a thing, an object. Cultivated land, though, is not durable enough to count as a thing. It is not a “true reification” because land, left to lie fallow, returns to nature: “The tilled soil, if it is to remain cultivated, needs to be labored upon time and again.”6 Thus, Arendt assigns land cultivation to labor, that is, what we must do by nature. She does not ask whether cultivated land, like poetry, might also have a textual (durable) form—even though land, too, can be written down, as it were, when it is mapped, for example.7
These are two brief moments in Arendt’s work, and I will make (perhaps too) much of them. First, though, I revisit the relevant parts of The Human Condition, emphasizing aspects of Arendt’s argument that dovetail with the work of D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory. I do not discuss Winnicott in detail, but the impact of his work will be felt as I read Arendt as a kind of object relations theorist.8
Work as a Holding Environment
In The Human Condition, labor is the domain of life preservation and consumption where life is biological and causally determined. The activities here are typically ceaseless and repetitive. Arendt’s description calls to mind things like cooking, cleaning, diaper-changing, growing food, weeding, and tending to people’s health and illness. No matter how well we do these things, they always need to be done again and again, and what is at stake in doing them is life itself. Notably, the subject of labor is animal laborans, and muteness is our creaturely condition in that domain. In action, by contrast, life is not biological and mortal; it is immortalizable. Action is the domain of speech, meaning-making, and politics. People, governed not by causality but by contingency, act in concert and contribute to the world’s (wide) web of human relations and meaning. In labor, we live under the sign of necessity, but in the realm of action, we experience freedom. Anything can happen: we are subject to surprise and, indeed, “miracle” is a term to which Arendt commonly resorts when discussing action.
Positioned between labor and action, work serves as a stable partner for each of the other two. Indeed, a close reading of The Human Condition suggests that work is the spine and soul of the book. This domain underwrites and secures the others. Without work, labor and action are both impermanent, each in its own way. Labor is subject to the ceaseless cyclicality of bio-reproduction, and action to the uncertain immortality of great acts. Both depend on work to offset the vicissitudes of their unique temporalities. The fabricated objects of work provide shelter from the storms that labor must weather (the hammers, nails, and ploughs that ease the burdens of labor are made by homo faber), while the fabricated objects of work also house the memories created by action (poems, memorials, sculptures, museums, and histories provide a secular immortality).9
In sum, work provides what D. W. Winnicott would call a “holding environment” for labor and action. Work’s products are objects, and their contribution to the ceaseless repetition and flux of the human world is nothing less than what Winnicott would call object permanence. Things, rather strikingly, are said by Arendt, who likely knew nothing of Winnicott, to contribute something unique to the human condition, which neither labor nor action on their own can secure: durability or (a bit later in The Human Condition) permanence.10 “The ideals of homo faber [man in the domain of work], the fabricator of the world . . . are permanence, stability, and durability,” Arendt says, and these serve the ideals of the other two domains of human life: survival (in labor’s cyclical time) and immortality (in action’s linear time).11 Work transitions us from the immersive infantile environment of labor into the more individuating experience of action. It is a recognizable Winnicottian development along a recognizably Winnicottian trajectory.12
Arendt says at the very beginning of The Human Condition: “The vita activa, human life insofar as it is actively engaged in doing something, is always rooted in a world of men and of man-made things.”13 For Arendt, things provide us with a world in which to move, and they provide the friction of finitude, and the sense of futility and possibility that limits or thwarts, but also drives, human care for the world. We vest things with meaning, but things also do the same for us: they anchor, limit, and orient us. Arendt gives several examples of things that do this for us: shoes, tables, craft-work, sculpture, and art are all made by us but exist independently of us. In their durability, their permanence, they serve as sources of orientation for us.
Because she worries about how politics is increasingly overtaken in the twentieth century by labor (biopolitics) and by work (the sovereign posture and means-end calculations of the maker, homo faber), Arendt is often assumed to be hostile to labor and work, and there are sentences in her book that seem to warrant this assumption. But these are mostly aimed at what is becoming of labor and work in late modernity, not at labor and work as such. Her overall project is not to demean these two, but to contain them, to insulate them from corruption. In any case, her depiction of these domains is not quite so univocal, in fact . In her account of work, for example, homo faber molds raw materials into planned shapes such as houses, sculptures, tables, and shoes. The wood, leather, and stone that he saws, nails, or carves are his to command; they bend to his will. Arendt scholars rightly point out that homo faber’ s sovereign relation to his materials is precisely the wrong orientation for politics, where we act among equals and cannot shape events to our purpose. Trying to master events in politics undoes precisely the freedom and contingency that characterize action and invariably leads, instead, to violence. But, what has thus far been largely neglected is that, on Arendt’s own account, sovereignty is not homo faber’s only experience. In the domain of work, he is pressed by his objects out of sovereign mastery and into mutuality, dependence, and vulnerability. When he takes his things to market for sale or barter, for example, others decide the value of his things.14 That is hardly a sovereign experience; it is actually one of vulnerability. To brand work as the domain of sovereignty essentializes it. Arendt does not do that. On her account, the domain of work stretches from sovereignty to mutuality, from solitariness in fabrication to interdependence in market relations, and from the deadness of the thing in production to the aliveness of the (market) encounter.15
Not only does Arendt sketch out a range of moods or orientations, not just one, in the work chapter in The Human Condition but she also considers a range of things. One by one, she assesses them, asking after their thingness, but also eyeing each one’s ability to serve the natural and political worlds well or ill. Not all things serve the cause of world-constitution and care.
We are alerted to the problem early on, in the opening pages of The Human Condition, where Arendt worries that Sputnik, a man-made thing, serves the cause of world alienation:16
In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars.17
The satellite entered into the company of celestial bodies whose circling path is different from the linear roads travelled by humans, and whose temporality (which looks to “us mortals” as though it “lasts from eternity to eternity”) is rather different from the “earthly time” by which humans are “bound.” The result18 is that “human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking)” can now be exchanged “for something [man] has made himself.”19 The problem posed by Sputnik suggests that Arendt was aware that things can only do their world-making work in a context supportive of the worldiness they help to constitute and whose givenness they also have the power to betray.
Among the several examples of things that Arendt considers in the work section of The Human Condition, as noted earlier, are land and poetry. Discussing the status of fallow land in the 1950s may not have been a matter of mere phenomenological interest, given the colonial treatment of fallow land as abandoned and free. And once we think about land in relation to poetry, which Arendt casts as written, questions about the politics of mapping press themselves upon us as well, though Arendt herself seems to have avoided them.
Land and Poetry: A Puzzle?
Arendt’s somewhat asymmetrical consideration of two liminal cases toward the beginning and the end of the work chapter generates a productive puzzle. The second case comes at the end of the chapter, en route to action from her consideration of work. Having just outlined in detail the thingness of things (stable, durable, and permanent) that belong to the domain of work, Arendt stops at the end of the work section to consider poetry, which is a made thing, like work’s objects, and includes artistic creations. But poetry is spoken, like the deeds in the domain of action. So where does poetry belong? In work? Or in action?
The problem is that poetry (along with music) is the least dead of the various arts, “less a thing than any other work of art,” Arendt says.20 In poetry, reification is “kept to a minimum.”21 Since poetry is speech, it may seem to belong to action, which is, after all, the realm of speech. Like action, poetry, too, seems to lack the staying power of things. But poetry is not political per se, which the realm of action is, and, though available to be spoken, a poem exists because it is written down, and so, Arendt argues, it has a thingness to it after all:
A poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be “made,” that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things, because remembrance and the gift of recollection, from which all desire for imperishability springs, need tangible things to remind them, lest they perish themselves.22
If we think of poetry as text, then there is no question: it belongs in the domain of work.23
At the beginning of the chapter on work, Arendt considers a different liminal example, cultivated land, which hovers between labor and work. Like the stuff of labor, cultivated land is in nature. Left to lie fallow, it returns to nature; it dissolves or decays. But, like the objects of work, cultivated land has some resilience. When neglected or abandoned, it lasts for a long time, as cultivated land with its boundaries legible to the passer-by before the land finally disappears into nature. Such temporary lastingness is not enough, however. Arendt writes,
Cultivated land is not, properly speaking, a use object, which is there in its own durability and requires for its permanence no more than ordinary care in preservation; the tilled soil, if it is to remain cultivated, needs to be labored upon time and again.24
For Arendt, poetry and land seem to mirror each other: both are minimally dead. Neither one is dead enough to obviously count as a thing.
Why, then, did Arendt not do for land what she did for poetry: consider land in its textual form? Like oral poetry, told and retold, so land, tilled and re-tilled, could arguably acquire object permanence when given written form, when it is mapped.25 Mapping does what Arendt’s things do: it lends permanence to the world. It renders durable certain relations or claims. Maps interpellate us into their frames. They often operate as devices of conquest, hegemony, absorption, and occupation, but they may also be vehicles of subversion or counter-organization.26 Maps shape our self-understandings, and they constitute the world of our imagination, care, and action.27 So why does Arendt seem to neglect the possible magic of cartography in the case of land while attending to the alchemy of writing in the case of poetry?
Part of the reason might be that Arendt took a dim view of mapping as a betrayal and not as a fulfillment of the proper aims of work. Where poetry and poets add meaning to the world, stabilize and deepen our relationship to it, maps and surveyors do precisely the opposite, Arendt argues:
The maps and navigation charts of the early stages of the modern age anticipated the technical inventions through which all earthly space has become small and close at hand. Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships and airplanes, there is the infinitely greater and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the surveying capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols, and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body’s natural sense and understanding.28
This is how Arendt saw mapping, as a device of diminution whereby the world is put at our fingertips for use and escape. Maps, for her, are an abstraction, the very opposite of thingification. There is truth in that, as critical geographers have pointed out in their critiques of “cartographic reason,” which also note the role of mapping in imperial and nation-state projects of dispossession and territorialization.29 But mapping is also a mode of democratic taking by way of which people claim the world and orient themselves in it collaboratively, collectively. That is, mapping does not only shrink space, but it also expands and reconfigures it. Art mapping is just one telling example. As Denis Wood and John Krygier explain,
Map artists do not reject maps. They reject the authority claimed by professional cartography uniquely to portray reality as it is. In place of such professional values as accuracy and precision, art maps assert values of imagination, social justice, dreams, and myths; and in the maps they make hurl these values as critiques of the maps made by professionals and the world professional maps have brought into being. . . . Some, Guy Debord among them, have explicitly called for a “renovated cartography” as a form of intervention. The project of art mapping is nothing less than the remaking of the world.30
The Politics of Mapping: The Castle and Translations
That Arendt had some sort of blind spot regarding mapping may be suggested, too, by her earlier, well-known essay, “The Jew As Pariah,” where she explores the politics of exclusion and assimilation, collaboration, and resistance by way of four examples: Heine, Lazare, Chaplin, and Kafka’s K.31 Of particular relevance to the politics of mapping is her admiration for Kafka’s K., the hero of The Castle, since K. is a surveyor; but Arendt does not note that.32 She is more struck in her reading of The Castle by the thwarted effort of Kafka’s K. to belong (on her reading, he is a Jew) than she is impressed by his thwarted effort to work (he is a surveyor).33 This even though her focus regarding the essay’s other exemplary pariahs is on their work life (Heine’s poetry, Chaplin’s films, and Lazare’s journalism), even though the mayor in The Castle repeatedly addresses K. as “Mr. Land Surveyor,”34 and even though K. says repeatedly that he wants to get to work.35 He is there to do a job. But he cannot do it because he cannot find his tools and he cannot find his way to the Castle to get his orders. It is surely important, and satirical or comedic, that he is a surveyor who cannot find his way around. Is he just a bad surveyor?
If we attend to K.’ s protests that he wants to do his work, and not to Arendt’s assumption that he wants to belong, a new reading of The Castle opens up in which the politics of mapping is key. We are helped by pairing The Castle with Brian Friel’s great play, Translations, which also features a surveyor thwarted in his work. Pairing The Castle, Kafka’s great modernist novel, begun in 1922 and published in 1926, with Translations, a 1980 Irish play set in 1830s rural Ireland subject to British imperial rule, may seem an unlikely move, but there is some warrant for the pairing in recent efforts by some to read Kafka’s work in colonial contexts. Noting that “K. encounters unreadable signs virtually everywhere he turns,” M. Keith Booker makes the case for “imperialism as a referent of The Castle” and treats Kafka’s novel as “a satirical depiction of the absurdity of imperialism” in which rule is always enigmatic:36 “one of the distinctive features of imperialism in general is the distance and lack of communication between the colonizers and the colonized, a separation that makes each group appear unreal and inhuman to the other.”37 Reading Kafka’s novel with the works of the Irish writer, Flann O’Brien, Booker argues that Kafka’s Castle “irresistibly recalls Dublin Castle, traditional seat of British imperial authority in Dublin.”38 Booker does not note it, but his case is strengthened if we recall that Dublin Castle was in fact called, simply, the “Castle” by those fighting for Irish independence until the end of 1921.
These historical details entice with the reassurance of reference, but ultimately the warrant for this approach is the new reading of The Castle suggested by reading Kafka alongside Friel. Translations tells the story of a translator and surveyor sent by the British military in the nineteenth century to create a map of a remote part of Ireland. As Paddy Duffy points out, “the Ordnance Survey and the General Valuation of the mid-19th century” were “pioneering episodes which were later replicated in the outreaches of the empire.”39 These events were preceded by the British mapping of Ireland almost 200 years earlier. The “first official [imperial] maps [the British] prepared were of Ireland in 1653, when they wished to confiscate the landholdings of the rebellious Irish,” explains Meron Benvenisti, and “ever since then, the surveyor has walked beside the British officer, and sometimes has gone before him.”40
This is what is depicted in Friel’s play, in which, however, the surveyor is the officer and he walks with the translator. The latter, an Irishman, suspected by some of the locals of being a collaborator, is impatient with what he sees as the backwardness of his community and is resigned to, even accepting of, the inevitable progress to be visited upon it by colonization. The former, an Englishman prone to romanticization, longs for the community that such “backwardness” seems to offer. The two work together, translating lyrical beautiful names of places connected to a changing natural landscape, and a mythic shared history into more reliable and transparent markers that do not just obviate the land’s unique Irishness and history, but also put in their place another identity—rational, impositional, English. Several waves of dispossession, emigration, and proletarianization will follow. As Benvenisti points out, this was done by the British everywhere they went from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. From Kenya to Canada, Australia, and Rhodesia, “topographical maps were plotted, and upon them, were printed official names: a mixture of English names (personalities and places in the old country), names chosen by colonists and soldiers, and local “native” names, altered so as ‘to be pronounceable in a civilized tongue.’”41
But in Friel’s play, some Irish villagers resist the British effort to take them into possession cartographically. They cannily speak Latin and Irish in the presence of the uncomprehending British who claim to be bringing civilization to the Irish. In so doing, the Irish locals defend against the “modern” by positioning themselves in the timelessness of the ancients. Others, “the Donnelly boys,” engage in guerilla warfare against the occupying forces. What if we read The Castle in the same way? Primed by Friel’s Irish villagers’ use of Latin and Irish in the presence of the uncomprehending British soldiers, we may want to look anew into the sources of K.’s miasma. Perhaps there, too, the surveyor is being played. Perhaps there, too, the villagers are not unaware of what it means to be visited by a surveyor, and they resist. What if the opacity that is K.’s undoing is neither a theological trait nor a modern or bureaucratic ill (the usual readings of The Castle), nor even a trait of colonial governance (the more recent readings, by Booker and Zilcosky), but a weapon of the weak?42 Why attribute all the agency to the Castle? K.’s sense of impenetrable fog might also be induced, conspiratorially, by the villagers who K. has been hired to map.43 The agencies at work may be plural.
John Zilcosky comes close to such a reading when he cites Timothy Mitchell’s account of a nineteenth-century Middle Eastern city (as an “uncontainable negative topos”) and says that it “uncannily characterizes K.’s 1922 frustrations with the geographically obscure village.”44 In the passage in question, quoted by Zilcosky, Mitchell says: “‘The city refused to offer itself . . . as a representation of something. . . . It had not been arranged . . . to effect the presence of some separate plan or meaning.’”45 That line “the city refused to offer itself,” points us beyond the geographic obscurity emphasized by Zilcosky and toward willful resistance. The city that refuses to offer itself is not simply a “negative topos,” mysterious and impenetrable to the outsider. It may be that, but it may also be a city in rebellion.
When we readers share in K.’s sense of miasma as he loses his bearings, when we wonder at the oddity of a mayor meeting with him from his bed, or at the weirdness of entering a stranger’s home only to stumble immediately on one of its elder members bathing in a bathtub in a common room, we may, as Kafka’s readers have done for nearly a century, share in K.’s anxiety, and feel awkward about things being so out of place.46 Or we may laugh with the villagers who seem to be finding ways to disorient the surveyor whose task is to provide orientation. Nature even comes to the villagers’ aid when it provides the blinding snowstorms and early darkness that help disorient the would-be surveyor.47 What an irony that the villagers make themselves unmappable, turning themselves from mappable (colonized) objects into unmappable (postcolonial) subjects, foiling the surveyor brought in by the Castle. Kafka’s K., Arendt says, only wants to live a normal life, and he is thwarted everywhere he turns, like the Jews in Europe. But we need not Semitize him. Arguably, the villagers too want only a normal life and they are threatened by K., not by his Jewishness or alienness, but by his surveyor’s quest to map them. Perhaps the villagers know that maps are “weapons of imperialism.”48 If so, their intelligence as citizens is manifest in their refusal to be intelligible to the surveyor’s gaze and their resistance to being ordered by cartographic reason.49
“What do we need a map for?” says the Chairman at one point to the would-be surveyor.50 We all get along fine. True, he says, years earlier “a decree came from I forget which department, saying in the categorical terms typical of the gentlemen there that a land surveyor was to be appointed, and the village was directed to have all the plans and sketches necessary for his work ready.”51 But, he explains, intimating resistance, “‘land surveying is an issue that deeply affects peasants, [and] they scented some sort of secret deals and injustice.’”52 The villagers did not hire a surveyor. And if the Castle did, no one confesses to know enough about that for the work to begin. Perhaps they have been expecting him. Regardless, they are ready for him. They practice a verbose noncompliance. A great deal is said, and nothing ever happens, at least not as far as land surveying is concerned. The map that was contracted for never comes into existence. The surveyor dies, or expires, and that is all. If it is from sheer exhaustion, as Arendt suggests, then he has—on this reading—been exhausted by the abundant efforts of the villagers to prevent him from fulfilling his task.
We may wonder, though, whether these conspiring villagers might have done still more. Is it enough just to prevent the hired surveyor from making a map, to, as James Scott puts it, “modify, block and even overturn the categories imposed” on a local community?53 This is the aim of the Donnelly boys in Translations. They kill the British surveyor and attack the British military camp. But is a politics of refusal adequate to the challenge? In Kafka’s novel, as in Friel’s play, resistance is reasoned, poetic, canny, conspiratorial, violent, and inspiring.54 But it remains defensive, a NO to cartographic colonization, and no YES, or a yes only to the status quo under assault.55 Illegible, Kafka’s villagers outsmart K., they get rid of him , but do they not remain vulnerable to the whims of the Castle? To the next surveyor? And the next? Had the villagers also made a map of their own, reflecting and structuring the village as they know it and want it to be, they might even have enlisted K. into their cause.56
Why do such a thing?57 Because a map of their own might have made of the village and its land an Arendtian thing—a use-object around which people could constellate and by which they might be interpellated in the future. It would no doubt also have started some arguments. But that is how it is with “participatory mapping,” an arguably Arendtian practice of action in concert. Mapping lends a new reality to the world, birthed by difference, agonistic contention, contest, and care. A map of one’s own is not necessarily enough, though. The locals in Translations do have their own maps, their own texts, their own place names, and their own ancient myths and heroes. But their land is nonetheless susceptible to the graphematic occupation, appropriation, and erasures of Empire.58 Still, the question is not only tactical, and the worth of participatory mapping need not be tethered to its immediate success or failure. What is at stake here is the world-building that Arendt endorsed as world care.
A Map of One’s Own
Participatory mapping, an Arendtian possibility, is one that Arendt herself missed because of her antipathy to early modern mapping. That antipathy may have a contemporary context as well. During the 1940s and the 1950s, when Arendt was writing “The Jew as Pariah” and The Human Condition, there was a flurry of mapmaking going on in Israel/Palestine. Various Israeli boards and committees were hard at work mapping the new state, replacing local Arab place names (curiously preserved in some form in the British mandatory maps) and replacing them with Hebrew names. “Ironically,” argues Benvenisti, one of these mapping committees, the Negev Names Committee (NNC),
only was able to successfully accomplish the task of the Hebraization of the map of the Negev thanks to the fact that the very regime and civilization it had come to uproot and expunge from memory [the British and their Mandate] had furnished it with all the necessary tools and means. The entire area had been mapped, plotted, and drawn, and names had been collected—by emissaries of the British Empire.59
What was left now was only to legitimate the erasure of the Arab place names preserved by the British. Hebraization was legitimated, with the NNC claiming, often falsely, that they were returning to places their proper, ancient, biblical names nearly lost to time. The ancient world was leveraged for modern purposes.60 Here the diasporic journey that takes us—in George Steiner’s words—from homeland to text is a story of dispossession: a people’s homeland, also claimed by another people, becomes text, another people’s text, a map or mapped land made available for settlement.
Much of the territory mapped by the various Israeli committees included cultivated lands, then lying fallow because their former owners and residents were dead or gone as a result of contingent and deliberate events that cleared the land of Palestinian Arabs and readied it for Zionist takeover. In the late 1940s, the new State of Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture developed an “Agrarian Reform Plan” that, Benvenisti argues, enabled “the takeover of abandoned land [which] was designated (at [Agriculture Minister] Aharon Zisling’s request) as ‘fallow land’—that is, land that was, supposedly, simply not being cultivated—with no mention of the reason.” This made it seem like these regulations were simply continuous with “Ottoman and mandatory laws providing for the expropriation of land that was not in use.”61 The so-called “fallow land,” then, was a highly politicized thing when Arendt was ruminating, supposedly abstractly, about whether cultivated land left to lie fallow was enough of a thing to merit inclusion in the “Work” section of The Human Condition.
This context may seem to suggest that Arendt’s refusal to grant the status of thingness to fallow land is no mere phenomenological finding, but rather a political claim strikingly in keeping with Zionist efforts ongoing at the moment to take possession of Arab lands. But this would not be consistent with her own criticisms of Zionism voiced repeatedly and at some cost during the 1940s. And, in any case, the same evidence points also in the opposite direction. We could just as well see the matter as follows: when Arendt focused on cultivated land as a particular problem worthy of attention, she knew that land cultivation has been taken by political theorists, from Locke to Tocqueville and beyond, as a sign of legitimate claim to displace indigenous peoples and exercise sovereignty over them. She also knew that Zionists, right then, were claiming that the land as they found it had been a desert and that their capacity to “make the desert bloom” in Palestine vindicated their possession of the Promised Land. By yielding its (agricultural) promise to them, the land was said to side with Jewish claims to sovereign statehood in Palestine/Israel.62 We could say, then, that when Arendt says, without ever naming such familiar arguments, that land cultivation does not produce an object with the sort of permanence needed to qualify as work object, she is undercutting such claims, perhaps even warning that they can only send us in the direction of an immersive biopolitics, tethered to nature, bound to its rhythms, and destructive of the worldliness that unites and separates us. When she says that even cultivated land is not removed enough from nature, that it is not stable enough, not object-like enough (ultimately, as she will say at the end of the Work chapter, not “dead” enough, that is, even dead cultivation is not dead enough!), to constitute the objective reified world needed by the realms of both labor and action, is she not pulling the ground out from beneath the feet of those, like Locke and Tocqueville, who claim native peoples never possessed the land because they never cultivated it (which was not true, in any case; often they practiced live, not dead, cultivation), and that settlers do possess it because they do cultivate it?63
In favor of this interpretation, we may note that in the 1940s, in The Jewish Writings (which includes “The Jew as Pariah” and its discussion of Kafka’s K.), Arendt is quite critical of Zionism as an increasingly violent, ethno-national state project.64 She does, however, have some appreciative things to say about pioneer life and the transformations that result from a life of land cultivation. She expresses admiration for the chalutzim and for members of the kibbutzim whose hard work, she said, created a new type of man and a new form of life, in contrast with what she took to be the indolence of Arabs disinclined to enter modernity.65 She had drunk a bit of the Zionist Kool-Aid, it seems, or else they had all drunk quite a lot from the European Enlightenment’s well. She had similarly reprehensible things to say, elsewhere, about Jews from the so-called Orient.66 But her admiration for this new type of man was qualified. These new pioneers fell for the lure of land, she thought. They mistook land cultivation for actual politics, and thus left politics and the work of world care to others whose project of national sovereignty would ultimately undo theirs. She worried especially about those precious joint Jewish-Arab projects, fragile islands of neighborly stability, that became the targets of violence from both sides, not for military or strategic reasons in the usual sense but for tactical ones: the aim was to destroy sites of Jewish-Arab cohabitation and cooperation, to force all parties to conform to the dictates of a friend/enemy divide.
Thus, when in 1958 Arendt bars cultivated land from object-hood in The Human Condition, she might well be undercutting the promise of the Promised Land. The Human Condition has been called Arendt’s most Greek text by admirers and critics alike (Adrienne Rich and Hanna Pitkin, for example). I am suggesting here that it might have a Jewish unconscious.
Of course, a critique of Zionism need not be Jewish, exactly (though there are reasons to think that in Arendt’s case it was67 ). The possibility that Arendt’s text has a Jewish inflection is furthered if we think about land not just by comparison with but also in connection with the other liminal case in The Human Condition, the one at the end of the section on Work: poetry. In the Work chapter’s passage from land to poetry, we retrace in reverse the route of the earlier “The Jew as Pariah,” where the first and last of Arendt’s pariahs are Heine and Kafka’s K., a poet and a land surveyor. Thus, “The Jew as Pariah” moves from poetry to land, while the Work chapter moves from land to poetry, tracking the familiar diasporic journey “From Homeland to Text.” This is George Steiner’s phrase for the Jewish passage from the Promised Land to the story of the Promised Land told in exile, from materiality to symbolization, the anchor of Jewish diasporic identity. It may be no accident, as it were, that the passage from homeland to text, conjured by Arendt’s move from land to poetry in The Human Condition’s Work section, is prefigured by her journey in “The Jew as Pariah” from text to homeland. “The Jew as Pariah” was written in 1944 when Arendt was still hopeful about the future of a possible Zionism in Palestine. The Human Condition, however, is published in 1958, by which time the binational State of Israel for which Arendt had once hoped had yielded to a reality of which she is quite critical: the sovereign State of Israel as Jewish Homeland.
Shmita: The Human Condition ’s Other Antiquity
As we have seen, leaving cultivated land to go fallow is not just a random example for an Arendtian thought experiment. It was, at the time of Arendt’s writing, a political product of a colonial and nationalizing politics. But it is also something else.
Leaving land to lie fallow is also a Sabbath practice—land sabbatical—mandated in the Hebrew Bible. Arendt may have been acquainted with it from Hegel, who has some choice things to say about it in his Early Theological Writings, by which Arendt may have been influenced when she relegated cultivated land to labor rather than work.68 In any case, Arendt herself calls the land sabbatical practice to mind in this context, because her essay “The Jew as Pariah” begins with an appreciative reading of Heine’s Sabbath poetry. She does not stop to consider the Sabbath in detail because what she admires in the poem is its canny commingling of “homespun Judaism” and Greek antiquity. Heine was, in any case, writing about the weekly Sabbath day, not the land and debt sabbaticals of the ancient laws. But this weekly ritual—commemorating the seventh day of Creation on which the Creator rested and was ensouled or refreshed (Shavat va-yenafash)—is connected to and recalls the biblically enjoined land and debt sabbaticals of every seven years (shmita) and the jubilee of emancipation (Yovel) every fifty years, as well. All of these offer rest and refreshment to the people, and they are biblically linked to each other.
The biblical practice of land sabbatical is called shmita, which means release. Since the land sabbatical lasts a year, it is called in Hebrew sh’nat shmita, which means a year let go. Shmita restores the nutrients of land as well as those of community. The land lies fallow, so it is restored. But community is also restored, since plants that grow on fallow land must be left for the poor to glean. They may not be harvested by the landowner. Sh’nat shmita is also a year of debt forgiveneness. It is a way to redress the accumulations of inequality. Here fallowness is a cultural practice and not a sign of neglect, violence, or abandonment. And release is active. Notably, “release” is the term used by Arendt, herself, when she talks about forgiveness, that feature of action described in The Human Condition as a process of “constant mutual release.” In its cyclicality (every seven years), shmita cites the temporality of labor (cyclical and repetitive), but in its orientation to the lasting effects of inequality, and its operation as a communal collective ritual that interrupts the cycle of nature, it belongs very much to work, and institutes the land as a kind of object around which to relate.
Sh’mita postulates rule-governed action, a redistributive mindset, and a community oriented toward the alleviation of misery. It is an an-economic breaking of the calculative paradigm of debt relations.69 Importantly, the release of shmita is not just a kind of “destituent power” (as Giorgio Agamben might say) but a constituent practice.70 Destituent and constituent powers here presuppose and require each other. People and organizations concerned about the devastation of debt and industrial agriculture today have turned in recent years to biblical practices of sabbatical and jubilee to inspire new practices of debt forgiveness and environmental care.71 Strike Debt’s Jubilee Project is just one such example.72 Its precedent is the jubilee work of the United Church of Canada, working for debt relief in Africa for decades now.73 Other great examples are the many Gleaning Projects from Project Share’s to the EU’s gleaning network, many of which invoke a very famous gleaner, the biblical Ruth.74
Shmita can be variously conjugated, or so I would argue, and it offers an important supplement to our considerations, thus far, of the politics of mapping, in which land is reified for colonial and postcolonial purposes. I see Ariella Azoulay’s film, Civil Alliance,75 as an example of such conjugation, though the film makes no reference to land sabbatical, nor to Arendt.76 The film gathers a group of Jews and Arabs around a table (Arendt’s favorite example of a thing that gathers people together).77 The table is a map of mandatory Palestine, which the viewer realizes when it is filmed from above.78 And one by one, or really two by two, those gathered around the map/table, speaking in Hebrew and Arabic, name places in the land at which various parties entered into civil alliances in 1947–48. These alliances—collected and reinterpreted by Azoulay—were agreements not to fight and commitments to live together in peace, no matter what political elites and military leaders would decide to do.79 This is not the usual religious sense of shmita: letting land lie fallow. But if we see it as a conjugation of shmita, we see how the film un-cultivates the land (undoes the cult of the land), releasing it from its usual constitution by practices of agricultural and ethno-national reproduction. Indeed, we could well see it as an effort to relocate land from labor to work, from biopolitics to thing-politics, from tilling to tabling (meaning: putting things on the table, for discussion, for action). When the people gathered in and by the film overcome an inherited cartographic illiteracy by repeating the place names in relation to the map, supporting each other in doing so, they re-perform a colonial practice, but that is not all: they go beyond participatory remapping all the way to “constant mutual release.” In this conjugation of shmita,80 ancient and modern come together to overcome the seemingly intractable inequalities of the present. Moreover, Civil Alliance unites land and poetry by way of performance, and thus attenuates the Steinerian trajectory—from homeland to text—that often undergirds diasporic longing and grievance.
The film alters our experience of the mapped land of Israel/Palestine. The room in which this occurs—and the film that stages and captures it all—are holding environments in which something precarious and possible might emerge, or re-emerge, to unsettle what seems so settled. Returning to a very old map, that of mandatory Palestine, the collective makes a new map. Through their practice of alternative mapping, they come into community. Of course, they can only achieve this mapping because they come into community.81 Unburying a buried history of the neighbor from beneath the unforgiving lines that divide friend and enemy, the film’s collective instances a practice of constant mutual release on which Arendtian action depends.82
The film’s performance of constant mutual release finds its powerful precedents in the land’s own history of promising, mutual compacts, and civil alliances, which are Arendt’s favorite examples of action. Here binding operates in the service of release. Neighbors bind themselves to resist the incitement to friend/enemy relations. If I have suggested here that the film should be seen as belonging also to another history, that of shmita, a Sabbath practice of constant, or at least regular, mutual release, that is because giving the land a rest requires wresting it from its usual functions and releasing it into new contexts, meanings, and possible futures. Such (w)resting is a poetic practice, and a political one, too. It is even a Jewish tradition. When Arendt subtitled her “The Jew as Pariah” essay, “A Hidden Tradition,” she meant to point to the tradition of “conscious pariahs,” who found alternatives to the pariah and parvenu options to which minority populations and refugees are driven, and which she found wanting. But her example of Heine’s Sabbath poetry recalls another hidden tradition, the Sabbaths of shmita and jubilee, which join with the weekly Sabbath to form a braided tradition of constant mutual release.83
The argument advanced here has one other particular implication for Arendt scholarship that may be worth underlining: it takes Arendt’s Jewishness out of the so-called “Jewish Writings,” and indeed attenuates the ongoing division of her work into the Jewish and the non-Jewish, where the latter is considered the more genuinely philosophical (because not Jewish?) and the former is treated or even disparaged as merely “public intellectual” or even “journalistic.” The aim here is not to repair the division and unify her work; it is to contest the legacy of such divisions, attributable to an older secularism in political theory scholarship and to a newer multiculturalism.84 Arendt herself argued vociferously against the twin poles of social assimilation and exclusion/exoticization (which she analyzed in detail in Rahel Varnhagen), identified by her as the parvenu and pariah options.85 It is an irony worthy of Kafka that Arendt’s own work thus far has been studied in precisely these two terms, as either part of the tradition of political theory (parvenu-ish and criticized therefore for its sad self-betrayals, its Greekness, its masculinism, etc.) or as a pariah form of political theory—that is to say, Jewish and therefore not of mainstream interest, until it was suddenly of interest, due to the multicultural shift to identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s, which Arendt would have seen as a branch of exoticization. This shift to a focus on identity paved the way for the publication of The Jewish Writings, a collection of Arendt’s writings on Jewish topics and themes. Arendt’s own proposed alternative to the problematic binary of pariah-parvenu was that of the “conscious pariah,” which suggests she may have thought of the pariah position she rejected as, in some sense, unconscious. My own alternative here has been to explore The Human Condition’s textual unconscious with the aim of developing some affinities between an Arendtian political theory and the several ancient or modern practices of sabbatical egalitarianism.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97.
2 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Richard Flathman.
3 Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 138.
5 Ibid., 169–70.
6 Ibid., 139.
7 Her knowledge of the ward system might have led her to think of land or ward as dependent upon writing, as George Shulman reminds me. On land-writing, see also Rancière, “Balzac and the Island of the Book,” in The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 94–112.
8 For two of my more detailed accounts of Winnicott as a contributor to political theory, see “Out Like a Lion: Melancholia with Euripides and Winnicott,” in Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier, ed. Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso (Oxford University Press, 2016: 356–88) and “Resilience,” Political Concepts 3, no. 4 available at https://www.politicalconcepts.org/honig-resilience/.
9 There is some circularity here, as Arendt points out, unperturbed (and as Winnicott would acknowledge as well): The world “consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 11.
10 In psychological terms, the domain of labor is immersive. (As Pitkin also notes, this trait is characteristic of the social, that bastard offspring of labor’s spread into all other domains of the vita activa, which Pitkin compares to the 1950s film creature, the blob.) Attentive above all to survival, labor does nothing to secure personal boundaries, and so the problem posed by it is how to separate or individuate from others. Labor is also ceaseless, and so another problem posed by it is how to interrupt or punctuate its ceaseless temporality. From an object relations perspective, we could say that we need durable objects to give definition to persons and time, lest we be consumed by Labor and remain always and everywhere animal laborans. The aim here is to identify the conditions under which persons and time can be bounded and defined. Work and its objects help with this. Similarly, in psychological terms, the realm of action poses challenges of its own. Action is individual (though we may act in concert), and so the problem posed by Action is not how to individuate but how to create and sustain human connection. Here, too, one aim is to punctuate time. Action offers its own temporality, that of immortality. Patchen Markell says Arendt shifts during the course of her treatment of work from durability (of objects) to permanence (via art). See Markell, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of ‘The Human Condition,’” College Literature 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 15–44. Work’s objects are first characterized as physically durable by contrast with Labor’s immediate consumption, but she attributes “permanence” to objects only later on. Arendt, The Human Condition, 136–37, cited by Markell, “Arendt’s Work,” 32. This may not be a shift, though, or not only one. It may also suggest recognition of something fundamental to object relations theory: durability teaches permanence.
11 Arendt, The Human Condition, 126.
12 Thus, although work is distinct and differentiated from labor and action, it also serves both of them, providing both with the permanent or durable objects that make the domains of labor and action stable enough for the world to be the object of care. Care for the world is Arendt’s most fundamental commitment. A war-tossed Jew forced out of Germany, then France, by the rise of Nazism, Arendt was mindful of the world’s fragility and was aware of its dependence on the attentive care of people. When Arendt wrote historically, as in The Origins of Totalitarianism, or theoretically, as in The Human Condition, she was very attuned to the dependence of the human world on objects. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994). In Origins, depriving people of access to things is part of a European politics of minoritization and genocide. The road to the camps was filled by those who were first deprived by the Nazis of full citizenship, then barred from employment and participation in the world of the national public, then unhoused, and then dispossessed of luggage, clothing and all the belongings that once betokened their belonging to humanity.
13 Arendt, The Human Condition, 22.
14 Ibid., 160.
15 Labor and action also house a range of moods, experiences, and tempos. The fact that work encompasses both sovereignty and mutuality is noted by Patchen Markell in his fine essay, “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of ‘The Human Condition.’”
16 Winnicott too worries about the alienating effects of the ability to leave the earth, writing in 1969, “The Pill and the Moon.” See D. W. Winnicott, “The Pill and the Moon,” in Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 195–209. (Thanks to George Shulman for this reference.) In a way, Sputnik inverts the Parisian fetish (noted by Arendt later in The Human Condition) for their tiny little bric-a-brac. Sputnik represents a world-escape that is too big, the Parisians’ escape is too small. Both are irrelevant, in Arendt’s terms, though only the latter charms.
17 Arendt, The Human Condition, 1.
18 Ibid. Arendt’s concern is not only the self-estrangement that is the likely result of all this, nor even primarily, as Arendt scholarship might lead us to expect, the misbegotten and dangerous commitment to human mastery that such innovation seems to evidence. “It was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which filled the hearts of men” on this occasion. It was relief.
19 Ibid., 2–3.
20 Ibid., 170.
21 Ibid., 169.
22 Ibid., 170.
23 Here Arendt channels Heidegger, who prizes poetry’s power to gather people together. But Heidegger tethers that power to poetry’s orality. Arendt leaves this view behind when she picks out poetry’s writtenness as the trait that secures its world-making permanence. The orality of poetry may gather people together, as Heidegger says, but poetry’s world-building quality postulates something even more powerful on Arendt’s account: the permanence of writing. I note that my own view on the matter is closer to that of Derrida, who criticizes the assumption that writing postulates permanence, and argues that it postulates, rather, iterability. This is a tenet of deconstruction and can be found throughout his work, though his essay, “Signature Event Context” makes the point most clearly and forcefully. See Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23. On this particular difference between Arendt and Derrida, see my “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding,” further elaborated in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 97–113, and in the chapter on Arendt in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
24 I italicize Arendt’s term, “use object,” to highlight the proximity to D. W. Winnicott’s view of objects in his transition from object relations to object use. With reference to cultivated land’s dependence on perpetual re-cultivation for its object permanence, this is not, per se, a difference from writing; even a written poem requires for its object permanence a repeated use: it needs to be reproduced, distributed, interpreted, circulated, and so on. In this sense, a poem is biodegradable, as Derrida says, using a figure for circulation that unites land and poetry, environment and text. Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 812–73.
25 It might be objected that land like this, when mapped, is better seen as “property” and that Arendt does see property as belonging to work. But mapped land is not reducible to property, and has its own distinct object permanence to offer.
26 Consider the maps circulating in the last two decades depicting which US states criminalize gay sex, ostensibly so as to plot how to get from point A to B without violating the law, but also to vivify the inequality-effects of such criminalization. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in favor of gay marriage, the equality effects of decriminalization were similarly made vivid: blog posts asked, “Where can gay people marry?” and in response showed a US map with all the states colored blue.
27 To be clear, maps may do all of this even when they are not written down. I focus on the written map in order to stay close to Arendt’s treatment of poetry. If writing can grant permanence to poetry, why not to land, and what if we did grant that possibility? What new thoughts and practices might open up? I follow this out even while disagreeing with Arendt’s assumptions about writing and/as permanence, as the footnotes here and throughout make clear.
28 Arendt, The Human Condition, 250–51. James Scott also notes the connection between mapping and miniature: “The [cadastral] map was especially crucial to the new bourgeoisie owners of landed estates, for it all owed them to survey a large territory at a glance. Its miniaturization helped it to serve as an aide-memoire when the property consisted of many small parcels or the owner was not familiar with the terrain.” James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 45.
29 Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Geography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2005): 11–33 and Denis Wood and John Krygier, “Cartography: Critical Cartography,” available at https://makingmaps.owu.edu/elsevier_geog_ criticalcartography.pdf.
30 Wood and Krygier, “Cartography: Critical Cartography,” 9–10. Art mapping is perhaps an easy example. A more difficult one might be something like HarassMap, a popular mapping project meant to empower Egyptian women in public by sharing information about street harassment in cartographic form. Nicole Sunday Grove cautions that “we should be wary of the idea that better, more total surveillance will produce accurate depictions of the environment of gendered sexual violence. We should also be critical of paradigms of risk management that seek to sort whole populations into ‘profiles and probabilities’ as part of a feminist internationalist organization of security governance in Egypt.” Nicole Sunday Grove, “The Cartographic Ambiguities of HarassMap: Crowdmapping Security and Sexual Violence in Egypt,” Security Dialogue 46, no. 4 (2015): 345–64, 360–1. Grove cites Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, “Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-scapes,” Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 3 (2011): 239–54, 251.
31 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 275–98.
32 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
33 Arendt may follow Max Brod, here. Agamben notes that K. is a surveyor but does not think about the fact that that is K.’s work. Giorgio Agamben, “K.,” trans. Nicholas Heron, in The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, ed. Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, and Alex Murray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 13–27. It is a key detail, in my view.
34 Kafka, The Castle, 55.
35 His work is to make a map. As John Zilcosky says: “One cannot help but wonder whether critics, confronted by the opacity of K.’s profession, have missed the trees for the forest.” John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 124. Zilcosky proposes that we “reconsider Kafka’s novel as a response to turn-of-the-century colonial understandings of territory, language, and (technologized) vision. Kafka,” he says “attempts to ‘elude’ a colonial Vorschift with The Castle.” Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 126. I will argue here, in a somewhat different vein, that Kafka depicts, perhaps inadvertently, the possibility of eluding it on the ground, exhibiting the agon between that Vorschift and anti-colonial efforts to counter it.
36 M. Keith Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracus, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 132, 131, 130.
37 This, he argues, contributes “very directly to the kinds of feelings of absurdity that so strongly inform both The Castle and [Flann O’Brien’s] Third Policeman.” Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, 130, 131. In his other readings, Booker calls to mind the traffic in women in Kafka’s The Castle: “One recalls here the recognition of Mr. Collopy in The Hard Life that he will be unable to communicate his grievances concerning the mistreatment of women in Dublin to the officials of Dublin Castle.” Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, 130.
38 Booker says “Prague in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was as much a colonial city as British Dublin.” Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire, 130–32. And indeed Phiroze Vasunia has suggested to me that, taken as characteristics of Empire, the details in Kafka call to mind more the middle European practices of Austro-Hungary than the British occupation of Ireland, and he is probably right about that. I am not claiming a referential connection, but an associative one, however. The pairing of The Castle and Translations does not depend on it, in any case, but it is surely buttressed a bit by associative possibilities like the following: “For centuries Ireland had been governed from . . . ‘The Castle.’ Members of the majority religion who co-operated with the British administration to their financial benefit were . . . ‘Castle Catholics.’ Everything British that moved and had its being in Ireland emanated from . . . the Castle.” Miles Dungan, “On This Day—Drivetime—Michael Collins takes Possession of Dublin Castle 16 January 1922,” Miles Dungan: Historian and Broadcaster (January 16, 2015), https://mylesdungan.com /2015/01/16/on-this-day-drivetime-michael-collins-takes-possession-of-dublin-castle-16-january-1922/. Kafka began his novel very soon after the Castle was ceremonially handed over by the English to Michael Collins. More Irish connections: Kafka was also a fan of George Bernard Shaw, and told his own parents about Shaw’s decision to leave Dublin for London and abnegate his responsibilities to his parents in order to pursue his writing.
39 Paddy Duffy, “Colonial Spaces and Sites of Resistance: Landed Estates in 19th Century Ireland,” in (Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, ed. Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 16. Although Friel has said his play is not political, but is only about language, it is hard to ignore the fact that Translations, which was published in 1980, was written in the aftermath of a 1972 event that replayed the nineteenth-century struggle when British Royal Mail decided that Townland names were “superfluous information” that should not be included in Irish addresses. Instead, people were told to restrict themselves to house numbers, road names, and postal codes. The “Townlands Campaign” arose in response, protested and won in an effort said to have unified Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants in the midst of “the Troubles.” Thus, Translations builds on an historical episode but may have been written in response to a contemporary one.
40 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 14–15. See also James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Part I, on the use of maps to develop sovereign states.
41 Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, 23.
42 As Jordan Branch notes, surveying projects in the eighteenth century, which includes the British Ordnance Survey, “were often resisted by local populations and elites.” Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76, citing Peter Barber, “Maps and Monarchs in Europe, 1550-1800,” in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 87. Branch notes that the state cartographer for the “Prince-Bishopric of Augsburg was repeatedly sued by local villagers in the region he was supposed to map. Yet,” Branch argues, “this type of resistance proved to be futile, as even the rebellious parties often ended up making use of the same mapping techniques—and thus all sides ended up framing their interests in cartographic terms. The narrow interests of one party were often contested by the other side, but the deep grammar of cartographic territoriality became fundamental to all claimants to authority.” Branch, The Cartographic State, 76, citing Philip D. Wolfart, “Mapping the Early Modern State: The Work of Ignaz Ambros Amman, 1782-1812,” Journal of Historical Geography 34, no. 1 (January 2008): 1–23. I note here that the judgment of futility is based on the aim being a resistance to cartographic representation as such rather than, as might be the case, the aim being the right to one’s own self-representation. Indeed, at the end of his fine book, Branch turns to digital practices of participatory mapping that have this aim, in fact.
43 This is a postcolonial or conspiratorial reading. On reading conspiratorially, see James Martel, Textual Conspiracies and my Antigone, Interrupted. James Martel, Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, & Political Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2011) and Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
44 Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 136.
45 Ibid., quoting Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 33.
46 Kafka, The Castle, 55.
47 “In fact, the dream of orderly, rectangular fields was approximated only on newly settled land, where the surveyors faced little geographical or social resistance.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 44.
48 J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 57, quoted in Branch, The Cartographic State, 105.
49 James Scott: “Land maps in general and cadastral maps in particular are designed to make the local situation legible to an outsider.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 45.
50 “For purely local purposes, a cadastral map was redundant. Everyone knew who held, say, the meadow by the river, the value of the fodder it yielded, and the feudal dues it carried; there was no need to know its precise dimensions. . . . a proper map seems to have come into use especially when a brisk market in land developed.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 45.
51 Kafka, The Castle, 56. Later, as K. interrogates the mayor about the details of this episode and his own more recent hire the mayor responds with a colonial cliché: “Are there supervisory authorities? There are only supervisory authorities.” Kafka, The Castle, 57. Among the traits of imperial rule, which include enigma, is the quest for transparency and order, which is flouted by such enigmatic conditions, as John Zilcosky points out in his discussion of imperial aesthetics and the early twentieth-century bildungsroman. Zilcosky also makes the case for Kafka as critically engaged with colonialism (albeit not with the Irish battle to decolonize, per se). The Castle, where Kafka “appears to be postcolonial avant la lettre,” goes some way beyond even the minor literature project of deterritorialization to which Deleuze and Guattari assign the writer, Zilcosky says. Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 47. Focusing on Kafka’s relationship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which he was directly situated, while eschewing the referential claims of Brod on this score, Zilcosky notes Kafka’s subversion of imperial writing at the level of style (“resisting imperial aesthetics”), detailing his effort to escape the “monarchical perspective,” and his replacement of the “density of language” associated with imperial writing (by Edward Said and others) with a more parsimonious style. Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 139, 142, and passim.
52 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1966), 66, quoted in Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 128. Cf. The Castle (Oxford World’s Classics), 62, for a different, also suggestive, translation: “a few [villagers] expressed distrust, saying that the question of land surveying concerns a farmer’s interests closely, and thinking that they detected secret deals of some kind and instances of injustice.”
53 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 49.
54 In an essay “Public Things” I found four characteristic ways of responding to oppression or occupation in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. Bonnie Honig, “Public Things,” Political Research Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 2015): 623–36 and Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). They may correspond with some of the responses in this list.
55 This is what Scott endorses when he cautions against assuming “that local practice conforms with state theory” and calls attention to a variety of illicit (from the perspective of the state) landholding practices such as “Land invasions, squatting, and poaching,” all of which are “de facto property rights not represented on paper.” Scott, Seeing Like a State, 49.
56 This is what Branch, as I noted earlier, characterizes as a “futile resistance to mapping,” because it yields to the Ptolemaic demand. But if the refusal is not against mapping as such but against the aims of one sort of mapping (possession, displacement and so on) that is, if it is against being mapped in that way, by that party, then a counter-mapping is not a futile resistance. Or at least the question of its effectiveness or futility is open.
57 Historically, as Branch points out, what started as refusals to be mapped ultimately became partisan counter-mappings. Branch, The Cartographic State, 78. See also 134 and passim for examples of cartographic contest: “Maps, in short, were used by each side to try to secure or extend its opposing territorial claims.”
58 On the violence of mapping, land appropriation, and other settler colonial practices in Canada (“Indigenous presence is attacked in all geographies”), see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 23, http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/download/ 22170/17985. In a section entitled “Nishnaabeg intelligence as resurgence,” Simpson says that “Being engaged in land as pedagogy as a life practice inevitably means coming face-to-face with settler colonial authority, surveillance and violence because, in practice, it places Indigenous bodies between settlers and their money. . . . Being a practitioner of land as pedagogy and learning in my community also means learning how to resist this imposition, it’s a process of learning how to be on the land anyway,” alongside, in the interstices of, and in resistance to colonial settler law. Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 19, citing Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 36. Through a series of stories, figures, and experiences, Simpson tries (as does one of her characters) to show “us land as pedagogy, without yelling ‘LAND AS PEDAGOGY,’ or typing land as pedagogy into a computer 50 times. Sometimes when I am teaching PhD students, I say . . . Nishnaabeg intelligence is for everyone, not just students, teachers and researchers. It’s not just pedagogy; it’s how to live life.” Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy,” 18.
59 Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, 23.
60 For further details, see the chapter, “White Patches,” in Sacred Landscape. Here the ancient world is enlisted for purposes of occupation, and not, as with Friel’s hedge school Irish, for purposes of resistance.
61 Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, 174. See also 159 for other details regarding the administrative managing of decla red “fallow” land. Many Arab citrus groves and olive trees were replaced by the preferred, more efficient, agricultural crops of the kibbutzim. The “question” of land ownership was settled in myriad ways—ranging from force to law to the force of law.
62 Tocqueville famously discounts Native peoples’ land claims because they do not cultivate the land, he says, and he starts to take them more seriously when they do take up farming, though, as he notes, the white settlers do not share his willingness to reassess. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), especially “The Present State and the Probable Future of the Indian Tribes Inhabiting the Territory of the Union,” 321–39. This may be the right context in which to take note of the Crow people’s self-reinvention, after white conquest, as a people who were once—and therefore are always already—farmers (the claim is noted by Lear in Radical Hope).
63 For her, to quote from the iconic film, The Graduate, it is all about “plastics.” Nonbiodegradable plastics.
64 “The Jew as Pariah” was written in 1944 when Arendt was still hopeful about the future of a possible Zionism in Palestine. The Human Condition, however, is published in 1958, by which time the binational State of Israel for which Arendt had once hoped had yielded to the reality of the sovereign State of Israel as Jewish Homeland with an Arab “minority.” Three years later, she went public with what would become her best-known critique of the ethno-national state project of Israel in her articles for The New Yorker, later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). Arendt worried that Jews, who had been barred from real political engagement because of their historical, exilic restriction to pariah forms of politics, were accustomed only to para-political but never properly political activities and were faithful to forms of European nation-state building now discredited. Where Michael Walzer finds in such para-political activities a worthy premonition of properly political life, Arendt finds only distortions. The Jewish Political Tradition, Vol. 1: Authority, ed. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar, co-ed. Yair Lorberbaum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). She was concerned that pariah habits would persist after the Holocaust (indeed she notes the temptation of the early Zionists to fall as pawns into the Great Game of geopolitics, a position that, though she does not quite say this, mimes that of their forebears who were players but always also pawns in European court intrigue). One of her concerns was about how the new State of Israel’s new citizens would relate—fetishistically or dissociatively?—to the land they claimed was claiming them.
65 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
66 See Amos Elon’s introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, xviii. Arendt’s comment about the “oriental mob,” noted by Elon, comes from a letter to Jaspers. See Hannah Arendt—Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 435.
67 Judith Butler makes the case in her most recent book on Jewish critiques of Zionism. See Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
68 See Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 197–98. Thanks to Miriam Leonard for calling this text to my attention. See my essay on Heine’s Sabbath poetry in UC Irvine Law Review for a longer discussion of the relevant passage. Bonnie Honig, “The Laws of the Sabbath (Poetry): Arendt, Heine, and the Politics of Debt,” UC Irvine Law Review 5, no. 2 (June 2015): 463–82.
69 Like what Nietzsche sometimes called “magnanimity,” as when he imagined the state foregoing punishment, declaring “what are my parasites to me?” Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 72.
70 The idea of Sabbath has recently been turned to by Giorgio Agamben, but I do not think Agamben has the three registers of Sabbath in mind when he calls man a “sabbatical animal.” Agamben does see the requirement to take a day of rest from instrumentality as a potentially powerful interruption of the neoliberal spell under which we labor, now, a restance, as it were, of inoperativity. Giorgio Agamben, “Elements for a Theory of Destituent Power,” trans. Stephanie Wakefield, 2013, http://www.scribd.com/doc/236409599/AGAMBEN-Elements-for-a-Theory-of-Destituent-Power. I reserve for elsewhere a longer engagement with Agamben and the idea of sabbath.
71 There are other details worth savoring. For example, in the jubilee year, all sales of land were to be returned to the original owner. Thus, there were only leases of property for periods up to forty-nine years; there were no sales “in perpetuity” of parcels of land in the Land of Israel. “For the Land is Mine; you are only temporary residents and settlers together with me.” Lev. 25, 23. See also https://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-nussbaum-cohen/shmita-jewish-sustainability-_b_5865444.html on its adoption in modified forms by Nigel Savage of Hazon, a Jewish environmental group.
72 See Astra Taylor on the Debt Collective and the Rolling Jubilee project: Taylor, “A Strike Against Student Debt,” The New York Times, February 27, 2015, A17, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/opinion/a-strike-against-student-debt.html.
73 Thanks to Jenny Nedelsky on this point.
74 I have written about Ruth elsewhere in connection with the different topic of immigration politics. See Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially chapter three. Another recent example affiliated with the sabbath spirit, though not tethered to a named Sabbath practice, is the action of the new Municipal Court judge in Ferguson, Missouri: Judge Donald McCullin, appointed in June 2015, “ordered that all arrest warrants issued in the city before December 31, 2014 be withdrawn,” as Reuters reported in August 2015. See Carey Gillam, “Judge Overhauls Troubled Ferguson, Missouri, Court,” Reuters, August 24, 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/24/us-usa-ferguson-court-idUSKCN0QT29 720150824. Cancelled. This is a debt cancellation, For Project Share’s Gleaning Project, see https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/24/us-usa-ferguson-court-idUSKCN0QT29 For the Gleaning Project by EU’s gleaning network, see https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/24/us-usa-ferguson-court-idUSKCN0QT29 I am grateful to Sharon Sliwinski for calling my attention to this example.
75 Civil Alliance, directed by Ariella Azoulay (2012), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lqi4X_ ptwWw.
76 For a detailed account of the materials and sources for the film, see Ariella Azoulay, “Civil Alliances—Palestine, 1947-1948,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 4 (2014): 413–33. “The little that was known of efforts to promote civil treaties was presented in a negative light, in the ruling perspective through which civil partnership appears as ‘collaboration,’ namely an act of national treason,” says Azoulay, citing as an example, Benny Morris, who, she says, refers to the civil alliance of Deir Yassin/Giv’at Shaul as merely a neighborly agreement, as if it is something less than real politics. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). By contrast, Azoulay proposes a “civil reading of documents,” meaning a reading done from the perspective not of nation-states but of civil alliances, one that, “recording the mutual efforts, collected in the Haganah archive, yield[s] a complex, vital picture full of hope and faith in the power of shared life. This picture cannot be reduced to the national-sovereign narrative that began to be constructed from May1948 and projected hopeless polarity and hostility onto the past. I was not the first one to read these documents in the archive, but I was the first to understand that what is recorded in them is not a footnote within the existing narratives of this period, but the iceberg of a completely different narrative that cannot be grasped within the partitioning of history into Zionism/Nakba. . . . Thus, for example, a work of foregrounding was required in order to make clear that the civil agreement between the inhabitants of Deir Yassin and Giv’at Shaul was violated not by local Jewish residents who were party to the civil contract achieved with their neighbors, but rather by Jewish militiamen.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 416.
77 “I decided to make a film. I invited 25 Arabs and Jews of varying age groups, each of them speak Arabic and Hebrew, to gather around the reconstructed map and recite these encounters, agreements and promises made by our ancestors in hundreds of localities in Palestine during this period. Each event is narrated shortly either in Hebrew or in Arabic while all the speakers speak both languages alternatively.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 415.
78 Azoulay reports: “The pile of documents I found in the Haganah archive, relating to the period between November 47 (the Partition Plan by the UN) and May 48 (the creation of the State of Israel), emerged slowly, not only as a missing chapter of local history but as a missing geography. I started to cover the map of Mandatory Palestine (issued in 1947) with points wherever Jews and Arabs got together, in urgent encounters or in others, planned in detail and in advance. Though until 1948, Jews and Palestinians shared Palestine and knew to find their ways between their mutual localities, such a map could not be found and I decided to reconstruct the propinquity of their localities from scattered information found here and there.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 415.
79 As she puts it in the abstract to “Civil Alliances,” “Between November 1947 (The UN Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (The creation of the State of Israel), many Jewish and Arab communities who cared for their country intensified the negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned meticulously to the last detail, during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to prevent the rising violence in the area from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and to salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. In over 100 documented encounters—and probably many more whose records have yet to be found—they promised themselves and each other the continuation of their shared lives.” Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 413.
80 We can perhaps now see some irony in the fact that the film finds a way to recover-invent a past map for the purposes of a possible new future (“The film reconstructs this historical past for its potential for the future”) through the mediation of the colonial map. Azoulay, “Civil Alliances,” 415. Speaking of new futures, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” said another great Irish writer, Oscar Wilde (for whom Kafka is said to have had “no time”). See Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (Portland, OR: Thomas B. Mosher, 1905), 40 and Robert Vilain, “Tragedy and the Apostle of Beauty: The Early Literary Reception of Oscar Wilde in Germany and Austria,” in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London: Continuum, 2010), 173–88.
81 In this sense, they are in the chicken and egg temporality of the paradox of politics.
82 Such neighborliness is a singularly Arendtian motif, and one that he saw as a promising alternative to the friend/enemy binary of Carl Schmitt, as John Wolfe Ackerman persuasively documents in his work. On Arendt’s politics of the neighbor, see Ackerman’s excellent contribution, The Politics of Political Theology: Rosenzweig, Schmitt, Arendt (Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2013).
83 Shmita and jubilee were, it must be noted, quickly rendered nugatory by a series of rabbinical rulings that protected the propertied from sabbatical egalitarianism.
84 Although one repair may follow from this argument: we may find reason to question the exceptionalism with which her writings on Israel are treated and see them, rather, as part of her critique of imperialism rather than as part of some separate foray into Jewish history.
85 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).