The Politics of Nihilism: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel 1623561728, 9781623561727

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
1 Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New Hermeneutics of Exposure
2 Less than Nihilism
3 Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing?
4 A Concept of Nihilism for the Coming End of the World
5 Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle
6 The Epistemology of Nihilism in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character
7 In Sickness and in Health: Nietzsche, Améry, and the “Moral Difference”
8 Nihilism and Repetition: Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Reiterations as Critique
9 What is a “Manifestly Illegal” Order? Law and Politics after Yoram Kaniuk’s Nevelot
10 To Be at Home: Spaces of Citizenship in the Community Settlements of the Galilee
Index

Citation preview

The Politics of Nihilism

About the Series The Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series stages an ongoing dialogue between contemporary European philosophy and political theory. Following Hannah Arendt’s and Leo Strauss’s repeated insistence on the qualitative distinction between political theory and political philosophy, the series showcases the lessons each discipline can draw from the other. One of the most significant outcomes of this dialogue is an innovative integration of 1) the findings of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction (to name but a few salient currents) and 2) classical as well as modern political concepts, such as sovereignty, polity, justice, constitution, statehood, self-determination, etc. In many instances, the volumes in the series both re-conceptualize age-old political categories in light of contemporary philosophical theses and find broader applications for the ostensibly non- or apolitical aspects of philosophical inquiry. In all cases, political thought and philosophy are featured as equal partners in an interdisciplinary conversation, the goal of which is to bring about a greater understanding of today’s rapidly changing political realities. The series is edited by Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Other volumes in the series include: On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Martin Heidegger, translated by Andrew J. Mitchell, edited by Peter Trawny, Maria Cavalcante Schubeck, and Michael Marder Deconstructing Zionism by Michael Marder and Gianni Vattimo The Metaphysics of Terror by Rasmus Ugilt Negative Revolution by Artemy Magun Humanity at Risk by Daniel Innerarity and Javier Solana The Voice of Conscience by Mika Ojakangas Democracy of Knowledge by Daniel Innerarity Politics of the One by Artemy Magun

The Politics of Nihilism From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel Edited by Roy Ben-Shai and Nitzan Lebovic

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Roy Ben-Shai, Nitzan Lebovic, and contributors, 2014 This book is based on the work of the research group “Nihilism and the Limits of Political Critique“ at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, under the directorship of Dr Nitzan Lebovic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The politics of nihilism : from the nineteenth century to contemporary Israel / edited by Roy Ben-Shai and Nitzan Lebovic, pages cm.  –  (Political theory and contemporary philosophy)  Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-256-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-62356-148-2 (paperback)  1.  Nihilism (Philosophy) 2.  Opposition (Political science) 3.  Political culture–Israel. 4.  Israel–Politics and government.  I. Lebovic, Nitzan, 1970- , author, editor of compilation. II. Ben-Shai, Roy, author, editor of compilation. HX828.P655 2014 320.9569401–dc23 2014011169 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6256-4   PB: 978-1-6235-6148-2 ePub: 978-1-6235-6698-2 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6172-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents Acknowledgmentsvi Contributorsviii Introduction1 1 Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New Hermeneutics of Exposure Nitzan Lebovic13 2 Less than Nihilism Luca Di Blasi35 3 Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing? Michael Gillespie51 4 A Concept of Nihilism for the Coming End of the World Adi Ophir63 5 Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle Bülent Diken79 6 The Epistemology of Nihilism in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character Bettina Bergo103 7 In Sickness and in Health: Nietzsche, Améry, and the “Moral Difference” Roy Ben-Shai125 8 Nihilism and Repetition: Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Reiterations as Critique Liron Mor151 9 What is a “Manifestly Illegal” Order? Law and Politics after Yoram Kaniuk’s Nevelot Itamar Mann177 10 To Be at Home: Spaces of Citizenship in the Community Settlements of the Galilee Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronnen Ben-Arie205 Index227

Acknowledgments Investigating the limits of critical thinking implies a set of highly debatable— often unanswered—questions. This volume of essays owes a great debt to those who did not insist on receiving the answers before the questions were asked. We owe much to the intellectual generosity, professionalism, and curiosity of different people at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute who were willing to accompany this open-ended search. First and foremost, our thanks goes out to the director, Professor Gabriel Motzkin, who supported the research and the group of scholars that convened in the institute for long discussions every couple of weeks, for eighteen months, during the academic year 2009–2010. During the academic deliberations, Professor Motzkin insisted on one criterion alone for the work and the continuous support, which was to maintain the highest possible intellectual level. We were—and still are— grateful for this rare invitation to think beyond geographical boundaries, without the interference of political considerations, and without any academic or disciplinary limitations. The group was able to meet on a regular basis thanks to the dedication of a few members of the institute: Zippi Hecht’s warmth and care made the institute a second home; Shimon Alon, Tali Bieler, and the always-smiling Limor Sagi assisted wherever they could and often caught potential problems and fixed them even before we noticed them. It has been a unique experience to work with this exceptional group of people. We hope that this volume will prove daring enough and professional enough to suit their high intellectual standard. We know we could not reward them in any other, or better, way. This volume of essays joins a special issue Nitzan Lebovic edited for Rethinking History (forthcoming). If the special issue was edited with the idea of a historical investigation in mind, this volume concentrates on the political philosophy of nihilism. We were lucky enough to find in Michael Marder and his colleagues at Bloomsbury Academic enthusiastic supporters of such explorations of radical thinking. Finally, this work owes much to the support of leading intellectuals and activists, some of whom took part in the research group without contributing

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articles. We would like to thank Salman Bashir, Eyal Bassan, Hillel Ben-Sasson, Lin Chalozin-Dovrat, Udi Edelman, Adam Farkash, Boaz Hagin, Merav Mack, Noam Yuran, Ohad Zehavi, and Naomi Zusman for their interest, participation, and contribution during those eighteen months. It was a great pleasure to think together with this wonderful group of scholars.

Contributors Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat is an architect and co-owner of the “Zubiedat Architects and Urban Planners” office. Currently, she is conducting a research on the development of architectural culture beyond the Green Line—“Architecture of Negotiations, Israeli Construction beyond the Green Line, 1967–1982,” as part of her PhD studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Technion, Israel. Her research interests are the history and criticism of architecture in cross-cultural contexts within spaces that are different in their essence and contradict each other politically. Ronnen Ben-Arie is conducting his PhD at the Department of Government and Political Theory at the Haifa University. In his dissertation, he explores the spatial dimensions of the concepts of resistance in the political thought of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. He studied architecture at the Bezalel Academy and holds a master’s degree in History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas from Tel Aviv University. His research interests are the politics of heterogeneous spaces in Israel-Palestine, and the political and ethical implications of alternative professional spatial planning. Roy Ben-Shai is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and visiting assistant professor at Haverford College. He published articles in The European Legacy and Telos and several book chapters. His dissertation, “Moral Pathology,” is a philosophical study of Holocaust Survivor and essayist Jean Améry. It won the Hans Jonas Memorial Award for best dissertation in philosophy at the New School for Social Research and is currently being prepared for publication. His current research is a historical study of shifting approaches to pathos and pathology in the philosophical tradition. Bettina G. Bergo is professor of philosophy (Université de Montréal). She is the author of Levinas between Ethics and Politics and co-editor of five collections, notably Levinas and Nietzsche: After the Death of a Certain God (2008), Trauma: Reflections on Experience and Its Other (2009), Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (2002), and Levinas’s Contribution to Contemporary

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Thought (double issue of the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 1999). She translated three works of Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind (1998); God, Death and Time (2000); and On Escape (2003). She also translated Marlène Zarader’s The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage (Stanford 2006), and co-translated the proceedings of the Paris conference entitled Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida (Fordham 2007) and Didier Franck’s Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (Northwestern, 2012), as well as over twenty articles and chapters. Her manuscript The Missed Conversation: Husserl, Freud, and Cognitive Science is under review. Her current monograph is on the concept of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and psychoanalysis. Luca Di Blasi, born 1967 in Lucerne (Switzerland), is University Lecturer in Philosophy at the Universität Bern. He has published widely on the topic of philosophy of religion, including Der Geist in der Revolte: Der Gnostizismus und seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Fink 2002) and Cybermystik, ed. (Fink 2006). His last publications include Wendy Brown/Rainer Forst: The Power of Tolerance (a debate), co-edited with C.F.E. Holzhey (Columbia UP 2014); Der weiße Mann: Ein Anti-Manifest (transcript 2013), The Scandal of SelfContradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Geographies, Subjectivities, and Traditions, co-edited with M. Gragnolati and C. F. E. Holzhey (Turia+Kant 2012). Di Blasi is currently completing a new book on the decentering of the secular. Bülent Diken teaches social theory at Lancaster University, Department of Sociology. His research fields are social philosophy, social theory, political and economic theology, cinema, and urbanism. His most recent books are Nihilism (2009) and Revolt Revolution, Critique—The Paradox of Society (2012). Currently he is working on a project entitled God, Politics, Economy—Social Theory and the Paradoxes of Religion. Michael Allen Gillespie is professor of political science and philosophy at Duke University. He works in political philosophy, with particular emphasis on modern continental theory and the history of political philosophy. He is the author of Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History, Nihilism before Nietzsche, and The Theological Origins of Modernity. He is also co-editor of Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, Ratifying the Constitution, and Homo Politicus, Homo Economicus. He has published articles

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on Montaigne, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Existentialism, and various topics in American political thought and public philosophy, as well as on the relation of religion and politics. Nitzan Lebovic is an assistant professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, Palgrave Macmillan 2013), and Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (forthcoming). He co-edited Catastrophe: The History and Theory of an Operative Concept (DeGruyter, 2014). Nitzan has edited special issues of the New German Critique (Political Theology, 2008), Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (Politics and Power, 2008), and Rethinking History (Nihilism, forthcoming). Nitzan published articles about German-Jewish History, Film, and Literature. Itamar Mann studies national security law, immigration, and legal theory. His dissertation explores the foundations of human rights through a history of international legal responses to “boat people” since the mid-twentieth century. In 2010–2011, Itamar was awarded Yale Law School’s Bernstein fellowship for International Human Rights, and conducted field research in Greece and Turkey. Before that, he practiced as a lawyer in Israel, and was active particularly in cases concerning the rights of security prisoners, and those of detained asylum seekers. Itamar holds an LLB from Tel Aviv University, where he also studied philosophy, and an LLM from Yale Law School, where he is completing his JSD. Liron Mor is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Her dissertation draws on Hebrew and Arabic literature in order to delineate poetic structures of conflictual meaning as models for understanding political conflicts. Mor has published an article on translation as a political concept (Mafte’akh: Lexical Review of Political Thought 2, Winter 2011), as well as several translations of theoretical texts into Hebrew. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a BA in History from Tel Aviv University.

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Adi Ophir is director of the Lexicon for Political Theory project at the Minerva Humanities Center and professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 1990 he was the founding editor of Theory and Criticism, the main Hebrew journal for critical theory; since 2009 he is the editor of Mafte’akh: Lexical Review for Political Thought. Among his recent books are The Order of Evils (2005); The One State Condition, co-authored with Ariella Azoulay (2012); and Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (2013). Ophir is also the editor, together with Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi, of The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Israeli Rule in the Occupied Territories (2009).

Introduction The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself? Butler 2002, 220 Nihilism comes from the Latin word nihil, meaning “nothing” or “nothing at all.” The argument presented in this volume is that nihilism (literally, “nothingism”) could function as a mirror image or a limit case to all forms of “legitimate” critique in the public sphere. Nihilism marks the point where critique becomes unacceptable, threatening, or simply “illegitimate.” This intrinsic attribute of nihilism was expressed even by the earliest usage of the term and that expression continues to this day. This book follows the theory and history of nihilism from its first and general consideration in late eighteenth century philosophy, down to its most recent and concrete manifestation as a form of radical critique in contemporary Israel.

A short history of a limit-concept Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi—a German theologian and stern critic of the Enlightenment—introduced the concept of nihilism into philosophical debate in 1799, and a term of debate, or dispute, it remained ever since. In an open letter to Johann Gottlieb Fichte—a follower of Kant and one of the forerunners of German Idealism—Jacobi evoked the concept in reproach against Fichte’s idealism, suggesting, as it were, that ideal-ism is nothing but a cover word for a nihil-ism. This was a somewhat ironic response to Fichte’s reciprocal critique of Jacobi’s own position as “chimerism,” as if to state: you say that I offer chimeras, well at least I offer something, for what you, my friend, are offering is nothing at all. The term in that sense entered the conversation as a derogatory, as the absolute negation by a critic of a position that amounts, in the critic’s view, to absolutely nothing.

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Despite this unprivileged birth, the concept of nihilism not only managed to survive in philosophical discourse but even to evolve and to thrive in it, developing an interesting, if peculiar, life of its own. G. W. F. Hegel— perhaps the foremost proponent of German Idealism—picked up on Jacobi’s provocation while characteristically turning it on its head: for Hegel, not only was Jacobi himself a nihilist, but he was not “nihilistic” enough (for Hegel’s position on the matter, see Chapter 2 of this volume). A few decades later, Friedrich Nietzsche employed the term to designate the decadent trajectory of Western philosophy and history as a whole. Yet, while critiquing this trajectory, Nietzsche also characteristically gave it a positive or vindicating spin: it is through a radicalization of its nihilism or consciously carrying it to its extreme, Nietzsche proposed, that human history may redeem itself or overcome its stultification (for more on Nietzsche’s nuanced approach to nihilism, see Chapters 3, 5, and 8). Nietzsche’s dual or complex vision of nihilism, as entailing both the poison and the potential cure for it, was again evinced in the late 1930s by yet another German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger argued (by now not surprisingly) that Nietzsche’s radicalization of nihilism was still not radical enough. Counter-intuitively, Heidegger proposed that what nihilism meant was a failure to take “the nothing” (nihil) seriously, that is to say, the exclusion of the nothing from consideration or at least its reduction to a simple negation of “something” rather than a phenomenon in its own right. According to Heidegger, the history of Western metaphysics (now including Jacobi, Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche), leading down from Plato and all the way to modern empirical science, is the history of positivism, under whose auspices the demand to “take the nothing seriously” sounds like a joke. Joke or no joke, for Heidegger, attending to the nihil was nothing more and nothing less than what is called “thinking” (for more on Heidegger’s stance, see Chapter 7). Nihilism is therefore at once the ending and the beginning of thought. Heidegger’s spin on Nietzsche’s spin—as in a critique of critique (of critique …)—is revelatory of the nature of the concept itself. By now, this characterless or at least plastic concept has already developed a rather distinct and recognizable character, as if independent of the individual philosophers who vehemently deploy it in their mutual polemics. In 1969, Stanley Rosen gave one more shot at it, arguing that both positivism and Heidegger’s antipositivism partake in the same phenomenon, namely, nihilism (how else?). Rosen, however, asked to return to square one. Rather than celebrating or

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once again calling to radicalize this nihilism—whose increasing presence since the nineteenth century he considered “a crisis of reason”—Rosen wanted to put an end to it, to defend reason and philosophy against the nihilism that threatens to run them to the ground. (Interestingly enough, for Jacobi it was faith rather than reason that was called upon to counter nihilism). However, despite Rosen’s battle cry, Continental philosophy since the 1970s, under the unabated influence of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, has continued and still continues to flirt with and reinvent the concept of nihilism, indicating that it has by no means said its last word. Indeed, it is perhaps time we realized that this concept and its movement are as integral to our intellectual heritage as are the concept and movement of “the Enlightenment,” whose illegitimate sibling it seems to be. If this is so, then to better understand nihilism—how and what it means—is to better understand ourselves: our past, our present, and perhaps our future. Nihilism, in any case, is pervasive in recent debates in political theory. In the opening to their Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri declare that a “primary effect of globalization is the creation of a common world … that has no ‘outside.’ ” Recognizing the radical commonality and immanence of this globalizing world is, for Hardt and Negri, a specifically “nihilist recognition,” in that it forces us “to abandon all dreams of political purity and ‘higher values’ that would allow us to remain outside [of it]” (Hardt and Negri 2009, vii). Slavoj Žižek, in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, criticizes Hardt and Negri for their interpretation of globalization and the work relations it engenders, but nonetheless reiterates their call to think about the present nihilistically, saying: “Only a new ‘heresy’ can save what is worth saving in the European legacy” (Žižek 2012, xx). As “heretic,” nihilist thinking transgresses and offends the limits of the state apparatus that controls our life, as well as “every ideological edifice [which can only be] the outcome of a hegemonic struggle to establish or impose a chain of equivalences” (Žižek 2012, 31).

On this book and its authors, and what brings them together Žižek’s use of the term nihilism hints at the feature of the concept that most interests us—both editors and authors of the present volume. What from the hegemonic perspective of “sound common sense” and “good values” may be derided as “nihilistic” (i.e., destructive, irrational, annihilating, and self-

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annihilating, indeed, heretic), from the perspective of the radical political critic is a form of resistance and revolt, even an attempt to “save” something more noble from our heritage and tradition. The nihilistic stance (or response, or “recognition”), in that sense, involves two main gestures: first, it makes present a limit to a certain ideology or form of thinking (the one that deems it “nihilistic” in the first place), that is to say, in its provocation, it teases out the limit of this ideology’s tolerance and comprehension, beyond which it is unwilling (or is unable) to listen, see, talk, or think. Second, the nihilist response places a “dark mirror” before this ideology itself, showing it in a nihilistic (annihilating) light. Indeed, if we look back at the brief historical survey we just laid down, we can see that this polemical and mirroring aspect of the concept, being tossed from side to side (and from negation to affirmation), has been there all along. The significant contribution of this specific volume to the understanding and discussions of nihilism is that, rather than developing a particular and more or less monological understanding and employment of it (as promoted in treatises on the subject by thinkers like Löwith (1995) and Rosen (1969) and most recently Vattimo (2004)), be it negative or positive, this volume brings into concert a heterogeneous polyphony of perspectives and interpretations: historical, analytic, hermeneutic, and literary, yet always in orientation political. These perspectives, moreover, are at times in discord (see, for example, the conflicting approaches to Saint Paul in Chapters 4 and 5; the conflicting approaches to Nietzsche in Chapters 3, 5, and 8, which endorse his view, and Chapter 7, which critiques it; and even conflicting approaches to nihilism itself, at times treated pejoratively, as in Chapter 9, and at times affirmatively, as in Chapter 3). But whether they are in discord or in accord with each other, the essays form a conversation: they are no more a random aggregate of reflections on the subject than a monological treatise. Adhering to Hanna Arendt’s understanding of political action as pluralistic, they act in concert, each at the same time introducing something new (see Chapters 4 and 10 for discussions on Arendt’s notion of pluralism and its relation to the problem of nihilism). We believe, and hope to convey, that only such a pluralism of approaches and voices is adequate to the study of a limit(ing)-concept (Grenzbegriff) such as nihilism, a concept that has neither a stable meaning and identity (as self or as other) nor an identifiable center. Like “the community of those who have nothing in common”—to cite the title of a book by Alphonso Lingis (1994)—this community of authors shares nothing but a common interest in the potential (or impotence, if needs be) of nihilism and its nihil to expose the limits of, and

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perhaps to think beyond, norms and conventions, traditions and narratives, values and ideologies, policies and discourses, if only in order to enable the separation of a critical competence from the forces of normalization and control. It is not coincidental that recent biopolitical critics like Roberto Esposito have turned the nihilist “nothing-in-common” of the community into a constructive force: “[T]he community is not proscribed, obscured, or veiled by the nothing: it is constituted by it.” (Esposito 2009, 41). Thus, to Arendt’s emphasis on the pluralistic nature of the political as such, we ought to add Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on dissensus. As Bülent Diken puts it in Chapter 5 of this volume, “Since it only exists insofar as it disturbs the consensus, which sustains the police order, politics is per definition dissensual. It is an intervention into a given order of the sensible” (citing Rancière 2010, 36–37). Dissensus, however, is not the final goal, but a necessary step. The point of politics, Rancière also tells us, is “to construct different realities, different forms of common-sense—that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings” (Rancière 2010, 102). If this is the case, then nihilism, as we present it here, is absolutely vital to contemporary political thought, and action. The idea and framework for this topic and approach originated from two years of work at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, where a small group of researchers, women and men, Jews and Muslims, decided to examine the limits of political critique within the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the social oppression that accompanies the privatization of the public sphere. This project was initially called “The Concept of Nihilism and the Limits of Political Critique.” During the past two decades, Israeli democracy has failed to form a committed and active opposition to the occupation of the Palestinians and the oppressive market state. A recent social protest (the “tent movement” in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011) had to pretend, for that very reason, to be a-political. The inherent crisis of Israeli democracy acted for this group at once as a personal-political motivation and as a theoretical case in point, perhaps even a paradigm of the present. Žižek who, in characteristic irony, portrayed the “neo-liberal world” as one in which people can imagine the end of the world but not the end of capitalism (see Žižek 2008, 78 and Chapter 5 of this volume), grasped the pertinence of the Israeli “case” as a paradigm for the contemporary paradox of democracy and critique in general. “The standard Zionist argument against critics of the State of Israel,” he wrote, “is that, of course, like every other state, Israel can

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and should be judged and eventually criticized, but that the critics misuse this justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes” (Žižek 2012, 39). This, like other cases of democratic censorship, is what Žižek calls “the liberal game of ‘how much tolerance can we afford?’ ” (Žižek 2012, 45–46). The group of researchers who took part in the “Concept of Nihilism and the Limits of Political Critique” project, as shown in this and in other publications, made a conscious attempt to grasp the conditions of possibility for a critical democratic discourse, in both the local and global, the national and transnational, contexts of the contemporary (neo) liberal democracy. An understanding shared by all participants is that, while labeling politics under democratic and liberal banners, the actual operations of democratic governments in the West are in fact diminishing the scope of relevant critique. By implication, Western democracies are erasing those areas of critical discourse and free speech that they are unable to control or contain. What nihilism showed us, and we intend to show our readers, is that the limits of political critique are dynamic, and that the kind of critique deemed illegitimate and nihilistic becomes increasingly pertinent as the regime attempts to delegitimize critique in general or suffocate it in heated but hollow disagreements whose parameters have already been tacitly agreed upon in advance.

The structure and contents of this book The book moves from a general discussion of nihilism as a condition for critical thinking in modern times to its specific applications in contemporary politics, considering, in the process, the prospect it opens up for a new vision of reality beyond the coordinates of the neo-liberal state. Starting with the history of nihilism in a political context, we move to different analytical and hermeneutical readings of nihilism as an operative concept, and from there, to its application on the ground. The order of the articles in this book is therefore a gradual movement from the general to the specific, while—at the same time—opening wider and wider the possibility of a new political theory of nihilism grounded in forms of pluralism, radical politics, and self-critique. A reader of this volume, we hope, will end up knowing more about nihilism and its history in the most general sense, and also about its specific appearances in Israel/Palestine, and by extension, its potential applications in contemporary politics and the public sphere.

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The opening chapter, by Nitzan Lebovic, mirrors the structure of the book as a whole. It begins with a broad historical perspective on the adventures of nihilism and some of its more notable employments and ends with observing the adventures and contrarian uses of the concept within Israeli discourse. In the process, Lebovic underscores the role of nihilism as marking the limits of legitimacy and the exposure of these limits as a particular kind of criticalhermeneutic practice of prime political significance. Aiming to shed light on the tenuous situation of Israeli democracy, and perhaps neo-liberal democracy more generally, Lebovic draws the connection between nihilism and a much older, yet similarly fluctuating, concept, namely, the Greek stasis, which may mean both balance or equilibrium and distinction or dissent, both rest or stagnation and destructive civil war. Nihilist critique, Lebovic proposes, offers not only a self-distancing from any political transfixion, but also a way to overcome it by making it implode. Chapter 2 by Luca Di Blasi also gives us an insight into the history of nihilism, specifically by exposing a continuity (or else a cycle or repetition) between the earliest debates on the subject in the turn of the nineteenth century and latest ones in the turn of the twenty-first. Di Blasi emphasizes the fact that the struggle between philosophy and religion, reason and faith, was a pertinent motif in Jacobi’s critique of Fichte’s philosophy and in Hegel’s response to this critique. A similar problematic, and similar dynamic, recurs two centuries later, where debates around the concept of nihilism among thinkers like Vattimo, Derrida, Habermas, and Žižek again revolve around the relation between religion, science, secularism, and “post-secularism.” Beginning with Hegel, Di Blasi’s chapter ends with a focus on Žižek as a “neo-Hegelian” showing how, in attacking his contemporaries, Žižek mirrors and revives Hegel’s approach in his critique of Jacobi and Fichte. Suggestively, Žižek informs us that now “the circle is closed” and that “to be a Hegelian today does not mean to assume the superfluous burden of some metaphysical past, but to regain the ability to begin from the beginning…” Chapter 3 by Michael Gillespie offers a thorough introduction into the nuance of Nietzsche’s thought on nihilism, arguably, the most extensive and influential reflection on the concept and certainly the most recurrent in the remainder of our volume. Gillespie’s chapter discusses Nietzsche’s inner classification of the concept into different types of nihilism and culminates in an account of Nietzsche’s “Dionysian nihilism” and the “great politics” to which it could (and was meant to) give way. Dangerous though this Dionysian nihilism admittedly

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is, Gillespie insists that it “could never legitimately be practiced by a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, all of whom were driven by the desire for revenge, but might very well be the work of an Ataturk, Gandhi, or Mandela.” Chapter 4, by Adi Ophir, proposes an original interpretation of the concept, following from and moving beyond one of Nietzsche’s core conceptions, as the “negation of the value of differences.” Ophir underscores the possibility of nihilism, or “limited nihilism” as he calls it, as a “discursive act” that must be examined within the context of its time. Our time, however, is very possibly the end of time, or “the end of the world,” Ophir proposes. Facing, alongside and against the discursive nihilist, the end of the world rather than effacing it compels, according to Ophir, an Arendtian reflection concerning the conditions of having (and sharing) a world and making any sort of discursive claim, nihilistic or not. Chapter 5 by Bülent Diken begins by analyzing the false alternative or antinomy between “radical” and “passive” nihilism: between “renouncing the existing world in the name of an idea or renouncing an idea in the name of the existing world, between values without facts or facts without values.” These are two sides of the same (nihilistic) coin, which unfortunately pervades contemporary politics, allegedly torn between revisionist and conservative tendencies. As a way out of this trapping, Diken elaborates on what he calls the emancipatory logic and temporality of “revolt,” which renounces neither values nor facts but only the semblance of a choice between them. The time of revolt, which Diken, following the footsteps of Agamben in this regard, regards as a non-theological “messianism,” is opposed to chronological time yet not external to it (as in an “after-life”). Akin to Lebovic’s stasis (Chapter 1), it “transforms it from within,” creating new values (and facts) in the process. Diken’s essay concludes by gesturing toward the political potentiality of a work of art as the “ultimate revolt,” and “the main antidote to the problem of nihilism.” The next two chapters, by Bettina Bergo and Roy Ben-Shai, address nihilism through the controversial works of two radical Viennese-Jewish intellectuals at different moments of the twentieth century, Otto Weininger and Jean Améry. Bergo borrows from Walter Benjamin a distinction between “epistemological” and “methodological” nihilism, the latter serving as a sort of immanent critique of the former. Weininger’s work, as Bergo shows, exemplifies both forms of nihilism, in fact deteriorating from the latter to the former, thereby giving us a chance to observe from “up close,” so to speak, some of the maladies of fin de siècle Europe. Bergo’s provocative and innovative study also shows that, at

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its best, Weininger’s methodological nihilism in fact runs far ahead of its time, anticipating the distinction between sex and gender, while deconstructing both rubrics of gender and “race.” Pushing male and female, anti-Semitic and Jewish, stereotypes to their extreme, embodying them and typologizing them, Weininger was able to explode the strict lines of division of his time. Bergo’s conclusion is a radical point of departure for any future research on Weininger and cultural anti-Semitism: Relying on the power of his nihilistic view, she argues that “Weininger’s own anti-Semitism was an attempt to protect Jews from worse forms of Jewish hatred than his own.” Roy Ben-Shai’s chapter begins by developing a notion of moral difference out of the works of Heidegger and Nietzsche, that is, the difference between moral values, which are determined, and the value of these values, which is essentially indeterminate and questionable. Ben-Shai proposes to think of nihilism, already in Nietzsche’s work, as the obliteration of the moral difference or the reduction of the value of values to a “given … beyond all question” (Nietzsche). Although Nietzsche’s reflections on nihilism and moral values lends itself to such a conclusion, there is nonetheless a significant tension in his work, Ben-Shai argues, between the tacit commitment to maintaining a moral difference and a sometimes dogmatic vitalism, namely, an unquestioning affirmation of the value of life and power as a first given. It is against this vitalism that Ben-Shai presents and analyzes the work of Holocaust survivor and essayist Jean Améry, who rejected what he called “the logic of life” and instead advocated a revolt against the will to power, a specifically moral power to resist allegedly “natural” dictates. Turning Nietzsche’s view on its head, this interpretation suggests that nihilism is not the negation of life, health, and the future, as Nietzsche believed, but rather their unquestioning and homogenizing affirmation. Our collection concludes, and hopefully arrives at fruition, with three specific analyses of nihilism in the context of Israeli and Palestinian politics. Liron Mor and Itamar Mann’s chapters bring the praxis of nihilistic reading to the crossroads of literature, law, and politics. Innovatively relying on Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same,” Mor analyzes a poem by Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of Israel’s best known poets, following the 1989 trial of a group of soldiers who beat an innocent Palestinian to death and injured his son. In her poem, Ravikovitch parodies the generic conventions of Jewish lullabies, by juxtaposing them to the formal language of the courts and to the violence of the army. Through a verse-by-verse reading, Mor shows

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how while exposing the vacuity and dis-communication generated by the rigid frames of legalist and nationalist discourses, Ravikovitch’s practices of juxtaposition, repetition, and citation also serve to open up an imaginative, sympathetic space of community thinking and building beyond the borders of national heritage and identity. Itamar Mann’s chapter discusses the work of another of Israel’s leading authors, Yoram Kaniuk, who wrote a novel grappling with the implications of the 1958 trial of the soldiers responsible for the massacre in Kafr Qasim two years earlier. Kaniuk’s novel, which has for its protagonists a group of aging veterans who, having lost all sense of purpose and identity, set out on a murderous rampage against liberal hipsters, deploys cultural clichés and tropes used during the 1958 trial, while defamiliarizing and rendering them all but uncanny. Mann shows that taking a nihilist stance to its utmost extreme was Kaniuk’s way of grappling with the situation and preserving the memory and details of the atrocities from a perspective that avoided the traps of both rightwing and liberal self-righteousness. Both Mann’s and Mor’s chapters therefore support Diken’s claim (Chapter 5) about art’s political potential to transcend the dichotomous coordinates of party politics. Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronnen Ben-Arie’s chapter was chosen to conclude this book for two reasons. Not only does it bring the theoretical discussion to its most specific, most contemporary apex, but it also functions as a firsthand testimony to how nihilism can be employed for both coping and rebelling. Relying on the authors’ own experience of appealing before Israel’s Supreme Court concerning the right of the Zubeidat family to build their home in an Israeli settlement in the Galilee, the two authors demonstrate the relevance of a sophisticated reading of contemporary political theory to the practical tactics of reform and revolt. By identifying the concept of “home” as occupying the “contours of the public sphere,” Abreek-Zubeidat and BenArie use it to deconstruct the private–public opposition, and to show how it is employed in the service of exclusion and oppression. Coming from perspectives of architectural and legal theory, the two authors combine forces to challenge the logic of an “ethnocratic regime,” which sustains itself “through the regularization and normalization of the nihilistic act of destruction, dispossession and negation that it is founded upon.” The struggle of the Zubeidat family to build a home in a Jewish settlement can be seen as a nihilistic act that is meant at once to disclose, and to estrange and undermine, a nihilistic politics that refuses to admit to its own basic principles and their limitations.

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Bibliography Butler, Judith. 2002. “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”. In The Political, edited by David Ingram, 212–228. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Esposito, Roberto. 2009. “Nihilism and Community.” In The Italian Difference, edited by Lorenzo Chisea and Alberto Toscano, 37–53. Melbourne: re.press. Hardt, Michael and Antoni Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lingis, Alfonso. 1994. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Löwith, Karl. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus. New York: Continuum. Rosen, Stanley. 1969. Nihilism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 2004. Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law, edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. New York: Picador. ———. 2012. The Year of Thinking Dangerously. London: Verso.

1

Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New Hermeneutics of Exposure1 Nitzan Lebovic

The Greek term stasis is usually understood as a time of faction or civil war, revolution, civil discord, strife, sedition, or—as it was understood in ancient Greece—“the destroyer of all things” (Kalimtzis 2000, 3). In the medical world, stasis is the state in which the “normal flow of a body liquid stops” (MerriamWebster Online). The implied violence of stasis is identified with the end of normality, but also with the dynamics of conflict and struggle. It marks a potential change, not death. The beginning of the end or the suspension of bodily fluids implies the moment when death is first comprehended, when nothingness materializes. The moment of total suspension, self-destruction, or absolute critique is the nihil of existence, the root of nihilist thinking, the motor of self-negation and radical critique. To put it succinctly, stasis and nihilism sing the same song of temporality and destructive inclination that enchants the ship of norms to its end. Nihilism and stasis share the same rebellious instinct against structures, hierarchies and organizations, limitations and self-censorship. Their critical position, as a Grenzbegriff, a lighthouse, helps the nihilist or suspender of norms expose the preconditions of norms. Both radical concepts require the examination of their own existing sense of power, temporal order, and indexical grid. Both nihilism and stasis live at the edge of legitimacy and can be used to mark the limit of the “legitimate” critical discourse. They mark the end of the public sphere, even when hidden in the invisible pulsing center of the body politic. Along those lines, the following chapter examines the relation between nihilism and stasis to the limits of political critique in general, and those adopted in the state of Israel, in particular. This chapter owes much to the comments I received at the “The Fracture of Nothing—The Return of Nihilism” conference at the ICI in Berlin, May 3–4, 2013. More specifically, I am grateful to the organizational skills of Luca Di Blasi and the introspective comments of Evelyn Annuss and Roy Ben-Shai.

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The temporality of nihilism/stasis The physical and linear nature of spatial thinking makes temporality a better conceptual framework for the discussion of stasis and nihilism than any spatial or territorial terminology. This chapter reads nihilism as a form of stasis, that is, “frozen temporality” or suspense. If stasis and nihilism mark a language of refusal, resistance, negation, or not-I, as shown in Michael Gillespie and Adi Ophir’s chapters in this book, then it is a language that refuses to accept linearity as a condition. It rejects the expectation to move from nonaction to action, or from a dispersed to homogenous space. Both nihilism and stasis demonstrate how action can be considered retroactively, not as a “solution” of sorts, but as a reflection and delimitation of the states of nihilism or stasis themselves. The affiliation of the two semantic fields of nihilism and stasis offers a new focus on their temporal-political and spatial-social order. For centuries, the goal of politics was seen as that of ending stasis and nihilism, but as such, the presence of stasis and nihilism occupied the very heart of the political. As Eugene Garver showed in his recent Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together, “Aristotle claims that knowing the causes of faction (stasis) will tell us how to resist them” (Garver 2012, 133). For Aristotle, the drive toward a homogenous and a democratic polis defined the essence of politics and philosophy. A close reading of Aristotle’s Politics demonstrates that Aristotle identified stasis with political partisanship and destabilizing constitutions and the authority of the polis. “And since we are considering what circumstances give rise to party factions (staseis) and revolutions (metabolai) in constitutions, we must first ascertain their origins and causes generally” (Aristotle 1992, V.2.1302a16–21). In short, according to Garver, “factions destroy states, the moving cause must be in some way extrinsic to the ruling principle of the constitution” (Garver 2012, 143). Kostas Kalimtzis built upon Aristotle and other writings about stasis in his Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease and pointed out the close relation in Plato and Aristotle between destabilization of the state’s sovereignty and organic diseases of the body. If the term stasis had simply referred to the outbreak of conflict, to what Hobbes called [in his translation of Thucydides] ‘sedition,’ or what the American founding fathers called ‘faction,’ then the rendering of the term would be straightforward …. Both of these Latin words emphasize the presence of entrenched, intransigent parties ranged against each other in conflict; they

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connote a ‘going apart’ (seditio) or ‘a taking of sides’ (faction) … [According to the Greek philosophers] signs of stasis called for a philosophy of the soul that could diagnose and correct the malaise in its nascent stages … when one comes to the sixth-century poetry of Solon, … [stasis] is no longer figurative, personified, or a quasimarginal visitation; it is an actual process of wasting away from the injustice afflicting the city.

The simultaneous emphasis on universalization and individualization of stasis was meant to bring it as closely as possible to what we identify as nihilism, for, as a tradition leading from Demokritos to Solon via Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles described, “Whatever the differences, not one of those thinkers would have found any point of disagreement with Demokritos’ aphorism that fratricidal stasis is an evil to each, for to both the victors and the vanquished the destruction is the same” (Kalimtzis 2000, 2–3). Modern thinkers would not disagree. Stasis marks the horizon of “the demise of the old civilization” and “the end of philosophy,” declared already in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer and repeated in Karl Löwith’s critique of Western philosophy. Both thinkers characterized nihilism—a century apart,—as a major force in Western philosophy and politics (Löwith 1995, 187). Their shared notion of demise, adopted also by Heidegger and Jünger, Foucault, Deleuze, and most recently Agamben, focused on different aspects of stasis that related to the temporality of political crisis. In other words, recent political theory brought stasis back to the forefront as a relevant concept, if one attempts to grasp the temporality of an end. In the article “Stasis: Beyond Political Theology,” Dimitris Vardoulakis quoted an ancient metaphor—“The ‘stasis of appreciation’ recalls Alcaeus’ boat at a standstill from the stasis of the winds”—that describes the “meaningless or the irrational function” or the “single word that incorporates the impossibility to either conflate or separate the political from the theological …. It necessitates the work of interpretation in order to unwork meaning” (Vardoulakis 2009). Both the beginning and end of politics and philosophy seem to rise from the dark depths of stasis. William Empson quotes this metaphor in his Seven Types of Ambiguity as an illustration for the seventh and most ambiguous type, which “occurs when the two meanings of the word … are the two opposite meanings.” Such a contradiction, or the “stasis of appreciation,” Empson observes, “may be meaningless but it can never be blank” (Empson 1966, 192–193; See also Vardoulakis 2009, 132). From the perspective of the present, one may add that the two opposite meanings create a state of suspense that exposes the hermeneutic

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power of blankness itself. In other words, one could relate to the discussion of stasis in ancient philosophy as an attempt to overcome the state of political paralysis. If in ancient times “paralysis” was seen in strife, in modernity paralysis is often its opposite, that is, the attempt to avoid critique and conflict. As Giorgio Agamben noted, the state of suspense is usually seen as a last and a militant resort and yet activated all too often (Agamben 2005). The Israeli democracy is a case in point. Slavoj Žižek describes this same temporality and blankness when he writes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; “Perhaps the first move towards a solution is therefore to recognize this radical stalemate; by definition, neither side can win” (Žižek 2002, 129). But the question, of which Žižek is aware even without being an expert on Israeli politics, is not the conflict (as in ancient times) as much as the politics and discourse that prolong it and extend the stalemate while using it in order to silence critics of the regime. Tracing the blank spot between two opposing poles means finding the moment of stasis/ nihilism, which is often located somewhere else than in the visible conflict. What stasis and nihilism expose is temporal suspense—a refusal to negotiate or a calculated strategy of derailing peace talks—as a tool of control and internal as well as external politics. Žižek expresses this in philosophical terms when he wonders, “Is not this antagonism the one between what Nietzsche called ‘passive’ and ‘active’ nihilism?” (Žižek 2002, 44). Below I will explain the link between nihilist thinking (the end of philosophy) and the state of stasis (the ends of politics) as two radical moments of negation, resistance, and destruction—in other words, their shared semantic legacy. The temporal order of both is a necessary starting point. According to Vardoulakis, the ultimate state of stasis is also the paradigm of suicidal or active nihilism. The concept of stasis evolved into its modern—nihilistic—shape from its earlier form in Gregory of Nazianus’s De Filio. It is mentioned again in Goethe and Nietzsche before Carl Schmitt politicizes it in Politische Theologie II in 1969. Schmitt’s reflection on this “absolute negation” serves as a moment of political distillation. Schmitt quotes Gregory of Nazianus in order to stress enmity as the pulsing motor of politics, in contrast to Eric Peterson’s stress on the Catholic dogma of trinity and Hans Blumenberg’s emphasis on secularization and legitimacy. According to Schmitt, stasis and open enmity form a principle of negative hermeneutics where “the One is always in revolt against itself,” (Gregory) and where the contradictory meanings of stasis (serenity or standstill, and rebelliousness or radical change) support the separation between a friend and an enemy (Schmitt [1969] 1996, 90–92). Building on Thomas Hobbes’s

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theory of enmity (sedition), Schmitt argues that only the human can be an enemy to itself, or as Vardoulakis puts it, “Universal humanity requires a permanent state of revolt, a perpetual stasis, for its self-definition. Such a humanized stasis is nothing but a flawed attempt to decide upon the enemy.” It is clear, then, that “stasis allows Schmitt to develop a typology of action … stasis propels a political movement infected by self-destruction” (Vardoulakis 2009). Stasis, in other words, is the very temporality of modern nihilism, and simultaneously, the junction between modern politics and theology, auctoritas and veritas, the friend and the enemy, either for a constructive purpose—as Hobbes and Schmitt argued—or a destructive one, as Verdoulakis does. Stasis is where things begin and where they end. It is the ultimate place of standstill, and simultaneously the exact spot where revolution and unrest occur. It is the most telling concept of political philosophy, when one thinks from the perspective of radical critique. Stasis is the time of nihilistic thinking, where one grounds the negation of everything, and the simultaneous overcoming of it. If nihilism is a world whose core is stasis, then both stasis and nihilism are calling for action. But not just that; in fact, both stasis and nihilism—the end of homogeneity and convention—call for a sudden burst of action, no matter the cost. Both strive for a pure time of action for action’s own sake. In short, stasis and nihilism orient themselves toward the action of action, the negation of negation, pure potentiality. This interpretation of the stasis of nihilism or nihilism as stasis is not unrelated to contemporary politics and its hermeneutics. Giorgio Agamben diagnoses the current stalling of temporality in Western politics, but can imagine only a metaphysical order, after the now-time has passed. “The inactivity and désoevrement of the human and of the animal [are] the supreme and unsaveable figure of life” (Agamben 2004). By locating the core of all life in nonlinear “inactivity,” Agamben’s hermeneutics recommend the pure potentiality of a nonrealized action or a passive “letting-be” of life, a sense of being-there he borrows from Heidegger. Thinking about the Endtime implies for Agamben “to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.” This is the same “threshold, or zone of indistinction” that characterizes for him the inherent paradox of the state of exception/ emergency (Agamben 2005, 23). “In the exceptional situation the norm is annulled” (Agamben 2005, 34). Since the exception has turned out to be the rule in politics, especially since September 11, 2001, “the state of exception is not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial

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model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law” (Agamben 2005, 48). Following in the footsteps of Gershom Scholem, rather than Walter Benjamin, Agamben realized that indeed “it is the suspension of law [that] freed a force or a mystical element … a sort of ‘degree zero’ of the law” (Agamben 2005, 51). Here, passive nihilism meets with religious anarchism and a contemporary resistance to globalization and the market state. Yet, imagining this beginning of the end from the perspective of religious anarchism implies also an ingrained limit, which is the actual end-of-the-end, the messianic redemption of the world and of creation. Examining the state of Israel from the perspective of nihilism and stasis implies a similar awareness of the “emptiness and standstill of the law,” but in a slightly different context. When the emptiness and standstill are used as oppressive tools of occupation, “letting be” cannot be the solution, nor can any messianic expectation, even if negative. Here, a nihilist plea for action equals “active nihilism,” or the hermeneutics of exposure, that is, a plea to unwind stasis. Only the total commitment to exposure, as promised by stasis, can open the discourse of legitimate critique to a critical examination. As will be shown below, nihilism and stasis draw the ambit of this discourse. Only they can expose the assumptions concerning the social and political role of critique as a discourse. Only those who speak the language of nihilism and stasis can inquire about the usefulness and service of political critique to a system that wishes to suppress critique, but also abuses it in order to justify its actions under the banner of democracy.

The history of nihilism The history of nihilism should be defined by its proximity to the state of stasis, and the drive to overcome it by placing the immediate call for action before any discussion of its origins or goals. A nihilist action can be destructive, and worse, destructive without any obvious purpose. Its main and only purpose is to overcome the black hole that is formed by stasis. In that sense the concept of nihilism does not act as a positivist concept; it doesn’t offer any constructive hope, either in reality or in the political discourse it attacks. Stemming from a nihilistic response to stasis, the nihilist is willing to risk his or her own self for the sake of a supposedly “meaningless” action. “When we speak empire,” the members of the French guerilla group Tarnac Nine argue

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in the “L’insurrection qui vient [The Coming Insurrection],” “We name the mechanisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary potential in a situation” (Invisible Committee 2009, 13). “From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out …. The sphere of political representation has come to a close” (Invisible Committee 2009, 23). But stasis, or the state of suspense, is also an opportunity for a nihilist action. “What is called ‘catastrophe’ is no more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world” (Invisible Committee 2009, 81). Two centuries of nihilism started with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s attack on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s neo-Kantianism, nihilism, “Chimerism” and supposed “atheistic Spinozism.” For Jacobi, a critical examination of norms from a secular perspective represented the undermining and destruction of divine authority (Gillespie 1996, 65). A similar worry about the loss of all values and hierarchies is apparent in G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) writings from the early 1800s. “Of all the problems Hegel faced in attempting to base metaphysics on the critique of knowledge, the most serious was the challenge of ‘nihilism’ ” according to Frederick Beiser (Beiser 2005, 17). In 1802, Beiser writes, Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), influenced by Jacobi, pondered “Fichte’s dilemma at the close of his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre” (Beiser 2005, 175) leading to “a moral [rather] than a metaphysical refutation of nihilism” (Beiser 2005, 191). This refutation continued after Hegel with Left Hegelian critics who adopted the tools of negative language and rebellious democracy, often in opposition to Hegel’s own views. Left Hegelianism spread Fichte’s speculative idealism as a revolutionary and nihilist code to other parts of Europe. In 1836 Nikolai Stankevich, a stubborn opponent of “political despotism” who was heavily influenced by Left Hegelianism, interpreted nihilism and radical negation according to Fichte as “the ground of freedom” and introduced Fichte’s ideas about negation to the father of anarchist philosophy, Mikhail Bakunin (1814– 1876). According to Bakunin, “Fichte was the true hero of our time” (Gillespie 1996, 141). Left Hegelianism and the French utopianism of Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, opened the door for Russian nihilism. The young Russian-French thinker Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was aware of this radical tradition when he addressed Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in a series of seminars in the 1930s. Reading Hegel from the perspective of post-Hegelians, he was convinced of a Hegelian “end of history,” absolute negation, and a continuous state of conflict.

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Karl Löwith (1897–1973), a radical German-Jewish thinker, saw nihilism as an end-point on a critical axis that existed mostly, or only, in Europe. “[If] Europe had already advanced a critique of itself, one more radical and open, more serious and penetrating, than the foreign critique,” it was an utter selfestrangement, a “not-I” that enabled it, since “the West saw itself in the critical mirror of Russia and China” (Löwith 1995, 175). Even more specifically, as it was put forth by Bauer, whom Löwith quotes and affirms, “the demise of the old civilization” was placed in the context of “the end of philosophy” in historical-political terms. Löwith’s conclusion was that “the German question and Russian question are the only two living questions of the newer Europe” (Löwith 1995, 187). In “The Intellectuals and the University,” written in 1963, the Swiss-born Jacob Taubes relied on these observations by Löwith in determining that Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx, the Left Hegelians, demanded that “philosophy now step out of itself and become worldly and revolutionarypractical” (Taubes 2009, 292). Yet, as Hegel had already shown, “synthesis is not stasis,” and post-Hegelians should be careful not to confuse the Hegelian negation, which leads to love, with the act of resistance that is risking the very death of authority itself, spirit (Geist) and God included (Taubes 2009, 154). For Nietzsche, who was thoroughly versed in the Spinoza debate of the older generation and metaphysicians’ warnings against secular “meaninglessness,” nihilism functioned as a system that turned “against meaninglessness on the one hand and moral value judgments on the other” (Nietzsche 2003, 83). But the observer cannot be separated from the method of observation; thus inevitably, nihilism must turn against itself or the person practicing it. Translating this to the process leading to the rise of the “overman,” nihilism became the leading characteristic of the last man on his way to overcoming the self and its moral-metaphysical limitations. “The sight of man now makes us tired. What is nihilism today if not that? … We are tired of man” (Nietzsche 1997, 25).2 A cultural exhaustion required a new dynamic that would force the self to overcome its old “tired” self. Since Nietzsche, nihilism has turned out to be even more dynamic than it had been before. Nietzsche’s “transevaluation of values” demanded a nihilistic thinking that would require the rethinking of thought’s own boundaries. Rethinking thought from the perspective of negation transformed the enlightened skeptic into what Ivan Turgenev called in Fathers and Sons (1862), “one who does not bow to any authority,” or a rebel “against the “Der Anblick des Menschen macht nunmehr müde—was ist heute Nihilismus, wenn er nicht das ist? … Wir sind des Menschen müde” (Nietzsche 1999, 278).

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fathers,” against the ancient notion of law, or, more recently, into a rebel against Romanticism, aestheticism, metaphysics, and morals. At the heart of that insurrection stood the resistance to temporality of progression, essential to the development of politics since the ancient polis. Nietzsche’s “active” nihilist was able to overcome the passive and the reactive in order to destroy both in a short burst of “the most decisive … high violence [Das Entscheidenste … oberste Gewalt]” that would bring “the man of the future [who] will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision” (Nietzsche 1997, 67). Needless to say, this approach drew the attention of both pragmatists and idealists. A key element of Nietzsche’s argument and style is ambiguity, which often caused confusion between his “pessimism” and “nihilism,” or between his positive characterization of nihilism and his call to “overcome nihilism.” Alain Boyer wrote in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, “As Heidegger pointed out, Nietzsche’s doctrine of truth never stops being ambiguous. One cannot simultaneously speak and refuse every conception of truth” (Boyer 1997, 16). But isn’t this ambiguity the mark of Nietzsche’s nihilism, a concept Boyer ignored? Already in 1934 Löwith observed that, “Nietzsche’s philosophy is neither a coherently united system, nor a plurality of unrelated fragments” (Löwith [1934] 1956, 15). Löwith was among the first to point out the relationship between Nietzsche’s doctrine of the overman, the will to power, nihilism, and the paradigm of eternal recurrence. At the center of Nietzsche’s thought, according to Löwith, stood his resistance to the liberal and progressive temporal order. “Overcoming nihilism through man’s ability to overcome his own self,” Löwith wrote, “is the condition for the confirmation of the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s philosophy never leaves this principle. The will to the superman, and to the eternal recurrence is for Nietzsche ‘the last will’ and his ‘last thought,’ and his whole experiment is grounded systematically in it”3 (Löwith [1934] 1956, 59). Tying nihilism to the eternal recurrence enabled Nietzsche a hermeneutic freedom, political through and through, because it was explicitly oriented against the attempt of the political sovereign to control it and limit it. In the words of Friedrich Balke, “Nietzsche is undoubtedly the “Die Überwindung des Nihilismus durch den sich selbst überwindenden Menschen ist die Voraussetzung für die Wahrsagung der ewigen Wiederkehr, und über sie get Nietzsches Philosophie im Prinzip nicht hinaus. Der Wille zum Übermenschen und zur ewigen Wiederkehr ist Nietzsches ‘letzter Wille’ und sein ‘letzter Gedanke’, in dem sich das Ganze seines Experiments systematische zusammenfast” (Löwith [1934] 1956, 59).

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philosopher of this modern man and his politics insofar as … [he] conceptualizes the content of ‘good life’ as the result of processes that continually intervene into the ‘bare life’ and give it form” (Balke 2003, 706). In short, in the eyes of some theoreticians who adhere to the Foucault–Agamben critique of biopolitics, Nietzsche’s work was the first critique of biopolitics. While helping to explain Nietzsche’s revived popularity among theoreticians and filmmakers, these critics have so far failed to recognize the importance of Nietzsche’s nihilism, and of the eternal recurrence, to the biopolitical critique (see also del Caro 2004, 405–417; Thurschwell 2003, 1204). Reconsidering nihilism as an expression of stasis demonstrates its relevance for a biopolitical critique of our time. If one translates this discussion to the political arena, behind Nietzsche’s call to recognize the power of nihilist politics lay the simultaneous growth of both liberalism and despotism in Bismarck’s Germany, which represented for Nietzsche nothing more than a politics of suspense. Nietzsche attacked the politics of suspense through his hermeneutics of eternal recurrence, placing a call for action at the center of “grand politics.” As Roland Duhamel wrote, Nietzsche’s stress on action would lead to a circular notion of nihilism “as an occurrence [Geschehen], not a position [Zustand]” (Duhamel 2006, 12). For the next “post-Nietzschean” generation, the destructive power of nihilism was recognized as a way out of the politics of suspense, no matter at what cost. As Stefan Elbe said in his interpretation of Nietzschean nihilism, “for Nietzsche the advent of European nihilism was also ‘a pathological, transitional state’ in the history of Europe and the ‘danger of all dangers’ ” (Elbe 2000, 48). A nihilist call for destruction would bring down not only Prussian politics, but the whole European monarchic system of patriarchic law that had been sustained since the Roman Empire. According to the nihilists themselves, such tactics of destruction would bring them very close to their enemies, those who serve, and identify with, a destructive sovereign power. According to Bauer and, following him, Löwith, in modern times it is the engineer, rather than the educator, who is the “the man to whom populations confer their trust in their practical struggle with space and time … [but] the standing armies are their schools of philosophers” (Löwith 1995, 188). The result, according to Löwith: “Almost everything on earth is determined by the most common and evil forces, by the egoism of acquisitors and military despots” (Löwith 1995, 191). It is no wonder that Foucault was drawn to Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean exceptionalism. As Foucault wrote in Power/Knowledge, “Nietzsche is the

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philosopher of power; a philosopher who managed to think power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so” (Foucault 1980, 53). The focus on power or mechanisms—rather than on existing values or institutions—creates a reverse temporal order in which the solution comes before the problem is stated or defined, and where action for action’s sake overcomes the drive to telos or intentionality. Overcoming normative politics by an action of meaningless destruction became the heart of the post-Nietzschean era. Foucault brought this logic to its radical conclusion by perceiving the “regulatory mechanisms [which] must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field. In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life” (Foucault 2003, 246). By separating Herkunft (source) from Urpsrung (origin) in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault demonstrated how such life—and genealogy— can be identified back in a historical source without assuming an identity between regulatory mechanism and progress. As Foucault and Agamben after him illustrated, such mechanisms were deeply grounded in the ambiguity of “optimizing life,” which justifies its legitimacy in terms of an assumed crisis or “state of exception.” One of the most interesting post-Nietzschean voices of the last generation belongs to Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s interpretation of nihilism in his early Nietzsche and Philosophy (orig. 1962), especially the last chapter, became crucial for today’s radicals. Deleuze defined nihilism in the following way: In the word nihilism, nihil does not signify non-being but primarily a value of nil. Life takes on a value of nil insofar as it is denied and depreciated …. Nihil in “nihilism” means negation as quality of the will to power …. Nihilism has a second, more colloquial sense. It no longer signifies a will but rather a reaction. The supersensible world and higher values are reacted against, their existence is denied, they are refused all validity—this is no longer the devaluation of higher values themselves. (Deleuze 1983, 147–148)

As Deleuze pointed out, Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism for the first time created a chance to look beyond metaphysics. The mechanism of doing so is characterized by Deleuze as the temporalization of nihilism, that is, looking at the past and the future through the prism of the last moment of nihilism and the first moment of overcoming it, for “nihilism is the a priori concept of

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universal history” (Deleuze 1983, 166). In the conclusion to his essay, Deleuze notes that such a reading of Nietzsche brings the political, the philosophical, and the aesthetic together. “The enemy is closer to hand. Nietzsche is engaged in a critique of all conceptions of affirmation which see it as a simple function, a function of being or of what is …. There is no difficulty in identifying Nietzsche’s enemy; it is the dialectic which confuses affirmation with the truthfulness of truth or the positivity of the real” (Deleuze 1983, 183). Only that—placing nihilism as the condition of universal history,—allows us to comprehend the current implications of an existing, albeit unacknowledged, nihilism.

Nihilism and Zionism 101 This particular early twenty-first-century appearance of suspense, after 9/11 and the 2008 crisis of the market state, has a long history that should be unpacked in relation to specific political structures. A new hermeneutics of power—pushed to the foreground by a nihilistic critique—enables us to reexamine our own assumptions concerning politics, history, norms, and the language that expresses them. In Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study (2001), historian of language Ron Kuzar examined the evolution of different discursive systems in Israeli politics. Kuzar’s linguistic observations stem from two primordial moments: the formation of much of the Hebrew language by the great linguist reformer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) and the “normalization” of Hebrew during the 1950s, shortly after the establishment of Israel. Ben-Yehuda was responsible almost single-handedly for the revival and modernization of the Hebrew language during the early twentieth century. Kuzar shows how this initial reform of the ancient language must be closely connected with 1950s discussions about “normalcy” as a linguistic and political characteristic. “The political debate coalesced with the debate about the normalcy of Hebrew” (Kuzar 2001, 10). In fact, Kuzar argued, “The resolution of the political and linguistic debates remain closely interrelated” (Kuzar 2001, 11). At the heart of the discussion stands the concept of normalcy and its tight relationship to its supposed rival, the abnormal or exceptional, the nihilist, who attempts to step out of the normal–abnormal dichotomy. In short, the transformation of Hebrew from its preliminary, wild moment of birth to “normalization” reflects the shift from an unacceptable to its domestication. The nihilist questions the legitimacy of both.

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In spite of the normal–abnormal opposition, the story of Hebrew is tightly connected to the concept of nihilism from its conceptual and historical roots. Tracing the origins of Hebrew revivalism in the early twentieth century, Kuzar relates Ben-Yehuda’s work on Modern Hebrew to his interest in Russian revolutionaries and nihilism, and specifically to his interest in Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev, and Peter Kropotkin. However, as Kuzar observes, Nihilism, [back] then, was not a well-defined dogma, but rather a field with different sites … the shared part is often described as the “nihilist ethos,” a new code of behavior, inaugurated in the 1860s, and lasting well into the later phases of the revolutionary movements. This new revolutionary ethos introduced into its discourse the term “self-realization” and “acting here and now” combined, crystallized as an agentive subject position, a deep personal commitment to carry through one’s beliefs, rather than be an armchair revolutionary. (Kuzar 2001, 54)

The nineteenth-century nihilist ethos found its form in the “excitable and stormy temperament of Ben-Yehuda,” that “found [a] discursive outlet” (Kuzar 2001, 111). But how successful was the domestication of the language? Tracing the process of “normalization” and “domestication” during the 1950s, Gershom Scholem warned of the “explosive” potential embedded at the core of this highly charged language. Any attempt to ignore it, he warned, would only end in a disaster (Biale 1982, 210). According to his view, grounded in the history of religion, one has to examine things from the perspective of anarchism and nihilism in order to move back into a conscious ethical–political position. In more specific terms, “normalization” is a different name for “realization” of a retroactive—anachronistic—history. In the context of the “normalization” of the 1950s–1960s, the construction of national ideology, and increasing reliance on the trauma of the Holocaust, a new nihilist discourse was formed at the heart of Modern Hebrew. At this point, nihilism was tightly interwoven with the dialectical structure of the state: Without ever admitting it, the normative discourse was grounding its sense of right and legitimacy on the basis of what it negated, that is, the exilic life of Jews and the catastrophe that ended it. Following the Israeli case enables us an innovative look at the heart of nihilism in the early twenty-first century. This is a form of active nihilism that is used for affirmative purposes. If during the ancient times, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter, stasis marked the temporality of a crisis or the end of politics, something the polis should overcome. In the early 2000s stasis has turned into an active state-sponsored action. Let me explain: The political

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philosopher Adi Ophir published a series of articles that recommended moving past the metaphysics of the Holocaust as an anchor for collective identity. “A religious consciousness built around the Holocaust may become the central aspect of a new religion, one that has at its core a story of revelation” (Ophir 2003, 195). After his sharp critique of what he calls “a new religion of the Holocaust,” Ophir explains that sacralizing victimhood might end with a new and empty sense of identity (Ophir 2003, 199). Only a nihilistic perspective could reveal the outcome of the “new religion” and its empty identity: in a recent book about the history of the occupation in Palestine as a system of governmentality, Azoulay and Ophir analyzed the mechanism of an ingrained discourse of victimhood meant to legitimize the practical tools of destruction, evacuation, and occupation of the land. “Ongoing destruction helps present the Palestinians as foreigners on their land, a minority in the Jewish homeland, temporary stateless refugees” (Azoulay and Ophir 2013, 218). In short, Ophir—following on Foucault and Agamben’s critique of norms—recognized the very language of exceptionality: The Israeli state uses the Jewish past to justify the normalization of sovereignty, by appealing to the unchanging structure of victimhood. It justifies, on this basis, the prolonged state of emergency in which the state of Israel has been since 1948. From that angle, only the nihilistic perspective could expose the crude justification of norms and militant behavior. But the story of nihilism does not end here. The theorist of political architecture, Eyal Weitzman, demonstrated recently how nihilistic methods, some of them adopted from poststructuralist philosophy, apply to policymaking and to military operations in the West Bank. Army strategists in the IDF used Foucauldian and Deleuzian categories to reconfigure a new and updated army tactics in the twenty-first century. In an interview he gave to Weitzman, an IDF general, Shimon Naveh, explained that his colleagues refer to him as “Foucault on Steroids” and that Deleuze and Foucault were his models of operation. Naveh’s reading of the relation between military and guerrilla action has produced such headlines as [Deleuze’s] Difference and Repetition or “striated space” borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Weitzman 2006, 11). If Ophir and Weitman’s interpretation is correct, then one needs to reconsider not only where the critical discourse is suppressed in Israel, a favorite preoccupation of left-wing liberals and NGOs, but also where it is used in order to justify anti-humanitarian measures. Examining critique and exceptionalism via nihilism and stasis, or the temporal order of both, is a good starting point.

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Looking at nihilism from the perspective of stasis is due to distance it from nineteenth-century dialectics and metaphysics. Weitzman starts doing exactly that when he turns back to Bauer and Löwith’s characterization of modern society as an apparatus working in a united mechanistic space and grounded in the temporality of repetitive stasis. If for Bauer and Löwith the key person in modern nihilist society is the civil engineer, for Weitzman, in Israel, it is the military engineer. Weitzman identified the nihilistic tactics of the occupation in the West Bank as coded under “ ‘technology instead of occupation’ … allow[ing] for the transformation of warfare from conflicts based on maneuvers to conflicts based on ‘standoff capacity, precise fire and the deadly effects of invisible forces’ without the need to resort to occupation and with minimum friction with the enemy and the civilian population” (Weitzman 2009, 552). This discussion of nihilistic character, ethos, or discursive outlet might sound abstract. However, for Israelis and Palestinians there is nothing abstract about it. It is easy to demonstrate the importance of this concept in everyday life and everyday communication. In the next section I will bring this philosophical argument down to earth and point out where and how this discourse is used and abused in everyday life.

Nihilism and Zionism 102 Recent developments in Israel suggest an inescapable and vital view of nihilism, publicly identified with post-Zionist critique, left-wing activity, public critique of Israeli policy, and often with Tel Aviv, the most secular and liberal city in Israel. Scholars researching the counter-history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were often tagged as nihilists (Sharan 2003, 34; for a critical perspective, see Silberstein 2008, 4). During the 1990s, the term “nihilist” trickled down into everyday language and was openly discussed and radicalized in newspapers and popular literature. For example, a December 15, 2006, column on Israel’s Ynet website by Gadi Taub—a popular author and journalist—noted that settlers in the West Bank were “shocked to hear that the left acts out of moral sense of mission, a strange idea. The left, Tel Aviv, post-Zionism, drugs, New Age, nihilism, individualism, the new literature, newness and consumption, signify just one thing: moral bankruptcy …. They have an image of a club in Tel Aviv, populated by tattooed women and men

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with earrings, which wins all arguments; it is … the nihilist’s Sodom at best.” It is the same liberal-minded Taub who, in a scholarly article, described the “radical left” as “nihilistic and anarchistic” showing that where the radical left stands, he agrees with the settlers (Taub 2003, 3). The category of nihilism, in other words, can be useful in order to expose the limits of the “legitimate” liberal critique. In recent decades different voices from the right-wing settlement movement have discussed the left in “annihilatory” terms, a discourse that has been accepted and popularized by large segments of the Israeli public and media and, more recently, by the government itself. This characterization has become a common cliché in the popular political discourse in Israel. Op-eds in the daily newspapers often identify the exclusion of the left with a right-leaning popular will. For example, Hanah Eisenman, a settler from Hebron, wrote in an op-ed on the website of the Maariv newspaper titled “The Voice of the People,” that she had “found what the Left wants: turning Gush Katif to a monument like Yad Vashem.” Eisenman’s equation of progressive critique and the Nazi annihilation of the Jews grounds the analogy in the legacy of nihilism. Such accusations have been made in Israeli history against both left and right. But Eisenman’s insistence that she speaks from the heart of the consensus is new. In the op-ed, Eisenman argued that even moderate or centrist leftists “say the Left is characterized by qualities such as variety of opinions, nihilism, escapism, rejection of order and structure, being difficult to accommodate … in short, similar to ‘anarchists’ who define honesty and authenticity in cooperation with the enemy who stands upon them to annihilate them” (Eisenman 2005). Since 2006 such views have been translated to policymaking and adopted by Netanyahu’s government. Indeed, the liberal Labor Party did not oppose these efforts to exclude “radical elements.” The Israeli government recently passed a series of laws making critical activity such as supporting an economic or cultural ban on the settlements or the occupation practically illegal. According to the new law—“The Law to Prevent Damage to Israel by Ban” (in short: “The Ban Law,” approved July 11, 2011)—even an expression of sympathy with the ban or its supporters might lead to prosecution. The law was initiated and promoted by a centrist coalition of Labor and Likkud party members. A startling example of the new policy is the decision to interrogate left-wing and human rights organizations for supposedly receiving funding from “terrorist organizations” (Lis 2011; Ynet 2011). The legalization of reactionary ideas is not surprising, if one takes into account how—since the second intifada in 2000—such rhetoric has been supported by a large range

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of voices, from the radical right to the moderate left, and from the margins of society to the elite. Shlomo Avineri, usually identified with the liberal left in Israel, has become an adamant critic of those he identifies with post-Zionism, nihilism, and the “absolute negation of the legitimacy of Israel to exist—those who strive to uproot [Zionism].” For Avineri, a respectable political scientist, post-Zionism equals nihilism due to “intellectual dishonesty and the attempt to present this [post-Zionist critique] as a new phenomenon.” He claims it is grounded in “a traditional anti-Zionist rhetoric by communists and the [old socialist] Bundists” (Avienri, 2007). Avineri is not alone in his observations. It is no coincidence that during the past few years the same critic of postZionism unleashed a series of newspaper articles criticizing, on the one hand, the policymaking of Netanyahu’s government, but also, at the same time, criticizing supporters of the BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) movement. Again, the concept of nihilism is useful here in order to expose the code of legitimacy among political centrists, whether from the center-left or the center-right of the political map. An alternative to the centrist conventions should be mentioned here: some critics of current Israeli policy have accepted the label of nihilism and tried to work from within it. Avi Primo, a well-known Israeli journalist, concluded a December 2000 op-ed with the words, “Once you are done accusing me of self-hatred, elitism, leftism, anti-Semitism, nihilism and the rest, please take a look in the mirror: Is anything wrong with our collective behavior?” (Primo 2000). Reuven Miran, a novelist and a critic for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote in a review of the radical journal Mitaam that it was expressing “the potential for a radical discourse” and endorsed a pro-nihilist approach (Miran 2005). Indeed, as Empson argued, where two contradictory meanings of a word such as nihilism empty it of meaning, only a blank space and repetitive temporality are left. Then again, as indicators of a failure in the public sphere, such moments of blankness should be grasped as a dark mirror, one that reflects the absence of light or the warning signals flickering from the edges of the public sphere.

Conclusion Nihilism is commonly defined as “a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life” (Crosby 1998). It has been interpreted since its early days as a radical negation of all forms of authority—be it God’s, a human sovereign’s, or that of moral values. More specifically, the concept of

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nihilism has emphasized the connection between authority and interpretative competence, political sovereignty, and a hermeneutic knack. The Latin nihil, or nothing, was identified during the late Middle Ages with a heretic “annihilation,” that is, with the sovereign strategy (in this case by the church) of incriminating a rival theological interpreter in order to gain legitimacy and extinguish any threat (Ritter, Gründer, Gabriel, 1984, 846). The evolution of the concept of nihilism up until today demonstrates how it is situated at the crowded crossroads between nothingness, the undermining of authority, the Not-I, the inherent ambivalence of meaning, the suspension of time, the death of God, and the end of metaphysics. Constructs such as the end of time, the end of a historical era, and the death—literal or metaphorical—of a sovereign that leaves only a shade of legitimate power, all lead to a sense of profound stasis. But the revival of nihilism in our time points toward the attempt to overcome a political “frozen time” by striving for a substantial destructive act. This motivation is what I called in the title of this chapter the hermeneutics of exposure. Those using nihilism in order to expose the limits of critique and the forces of exclusion build consciously on the stasis of the period and have no problem accelerating its end, by radicalizing it. An excellent demonstration of such nihilistic tendencies can be found in the 2009 manifest L’insurrection qui vient, which argues that “the era of states, nations and republics is coming to an end” and “there’s nothing more to say, everything has to be destroyed” (Invisible Committee 2009, 87). Only a general plea for the destruction of norms and conventions, I believe, can show where the power of the state truly lies. In contrast to what the political rhetoric lets us believe, it does not lie in the hands of a certain “coalition,” but in the hands of centrists from both “coalition” and “opposition” who cooperate in order to preserve their control of the dialectics of power. What concerns the author of this particular chapter is the thin line that marks the separation between legitimate and illegitimate critique, between centrists and radicals. The democracy to come, I would like to argue, cannot and should not make such differentiations. This is not a redemptive call for a superman, but rather a plea for a better mapping of our analytical borders.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. The State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1992. Politics. New York: Penguin.

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Avineri, Shlomo. 2007. “The Lie of Post-Zionism.” Haaretz, April 7. http://www.haaretz. co.il/opinions/1.1422688. Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir. 2013. The One-State Condition. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Balke, Friedrich. 2003. “From a Biopolitical Point of View: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Crime.” Cardozo Law Review 24(2): 705–722. Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. New York: Routledge. Biale, David. 1982. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyer, Alain. 1997. “Hierarchy and Truth.” In Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, edited by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crosby, Donald A. 1998. “Nihilism.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7, edited by Edward Craig, 1–5. London: Routledge. Del Caro, Adrian. 2004. Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Duhamel, Roland. 2006. Die Decke auf den Kopf. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Eisenman, Hanah. 2005. “On Hypocrisy and Hatred of Israel.” NRG, March 28. http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART/889/060.html. Accessed March 11, 2013. Elbe, Stefan. 2000. “European Nihilism and Annihilation in the Twentieth Century.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1(3): 43–72. Empson, William. 1966. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garver, Eugene. 2012. Aristotle’s Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillespie, Michael Allen. 1996. Nihilism before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kalimtzis, Kostas. 2000. Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kuzar, Ron. 2001. Hebrew and Zionism. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lis, Jonathan. 2011. “Knesset Votes to Probe Israeli Groups Accused of ‘Delegitimizing’ IDF.” Haaretz, January 5. http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/knesset-votes-toprobe-israeli-groups-accused-of-delegitimizing-idf-1.335390. Accessed March 11, 2013. Löwith, Karl. (1934) 1956. Nietzsches Philosophie der Ewigen Widerkehr des Gleiche. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.

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———. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. New York: Columbia University Press. Miran, Reuven. 2005. Haaretz, February 16. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999a. Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Geneaologie der Moral. Kritische Studienausgabe. Munich: De Gruyter. ———. 1999b. Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Kritische Studienausgave, edited by Giorgio Colliand Mazino Montinari. Munich: de Gruyter. ———. 2003. “Notebook 2, Autumn 1885–Autumn 1886.” In Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Kate Struge, 66–101. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Ophir, Adi. 2003. “On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise.” In Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust, edited by Shelly Hornstein, Laura Levitt and Laurence J. Silberstein, 195–206. New York: New York University Press. Primo, Avi. 2000. Ynet, December 3. Ritter, Joachim, Kalfreid Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel (eds). 1984. “Nihilismus”. In Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 6. 846–854. Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag. Schmitt, Carl. (1969) 1996. Politische Theologie II. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Sharan, Shlomo. 2003. Israel and the Post-Zionists. Brighton, UK: Sussex University Press. Silberstein, Laurence. 2008. Postzionism: A Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Taub, Gadi. 2003. “The American Sixties in Israel: From Rebellion to Conformism.” Iyunim Bi’Tkumat Israel 13(1): 1–28. ———. 2006. “The Last Zionist Fort?” Ynet, December 15. http://www.ynet.co.il/ articles/0,7340,L-3340161,00.html. Accessed March 11, 2013. ———. 2011. “MKs Hold Stormy Debate Over Leftist Probe.” Ynet, January 2. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4022354,00.html. Taubes, Jacob. 1987. Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung. Berlin: Merver Verlag. ———. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thurschwell, Adam. 2003. “Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida.” Cardozo Law Review 24(3): 1193–1260. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2009. “Stasis: Beyond Political Theology?” Cultural Critique 73(1): 125–147. Weitzman, Eyal. 2006. “Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict.” Radical Philosophy 136: 8–22.

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———. 2009. “Thanato-Tactics.” In The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, edited by Adi Ophir, Michael Givoni and Sari Hanafi, 543–573. New York: Zone Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

Online articles Merriam-Webster OnLine, s.v. “Stasis,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ stasis. Accessed November 4, 2013. Ynet, 2011. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4022354,00.html. Accessed March 11, 2013.

2

Less than Nihilism Luca Di Blasi

Introduction We are witnessing a steady loss of legitimacy of the Western, capitalist, democratic system. After the financial crisis revealed the calamities of capitalism and the impotence or corruption of democratic institutions, the recent disclosure of the immense dimensions of surveillance gave us an idea of rapidly growing possibilities of mass control and manipulation, of the erosion of privacy, and of limits to effectively control secret services. The exploitation of nature is growing steadily and unstoppably, as well as the imbalance of property distribution. At the same time, no realistic alternatives to democracy and capitalism have come into view. In this situation, optimism appears to be deceptive, or even “cruel,” as Lauren Berlant called it (Berlant 2011). There is a shared sense of an exhausted future. One could identify two basic ways to react to a fundamental loss of confidence in the future: the first might be called “religious,” that is, escaping the destiny of this world by trusting a meta-historical principle; the other “anarchic,” that is, rejecting any attempt to formulate alternatives for a better future. And indeed, it is difficult to overlook the current significance of both: of a growing importance of religion in the last two decades on the one side, and of an anarchic, undialectical negation, an anti-teleological stance, in contemporary continental philosophy on the other. The two possibilities, however, can merge, as Nietzsche suggested when he related Christianity to anarchism, and as we can see nowadays in some manifestations of the so-called Islamic fundamentalism, insofar as both exhibit a certain form of nihilism.1 This means that the apparently dated, “dulled by overexposure” (Brassier 2007, x) notion of nihilism is becoming increasingly topical. The political and the religious aspects of the notion of nihilism also intersect on a theoretical level. Regarding contemporary Italian philosophy, Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano speak of the “increasing significance of Christian and Catholic thematics” where “ontological and political nihilism often seem indiscernible” (Chiesa and Toscano 2009, 5).

1

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The Politics of Nihilism

In this chapter I focus on nihilism as a connection of anarchic and religious impulses, and, more specifically, in Slavoj Žižek and what I would like to call his less than nihilism. I will first broach the subject by the connection between nihilism and the concepts of faith and knowledge as they were discussed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in Hegel’s response to F. H. Jacobi. Second, I will turn toward the renewed discussions about faith and knowledge over the last two decades and indicate the relevant role that nihilism (either implicitly or explicitly) plays there as well. Finally, I will interpret the peculiar fact that Žižek’s philosophy seems to be equally popular among people of fundamentally different political convictions, as a consequence of his capacity to merge religious and anarchist ideas in a way that responds perfectly to the current crisis of confidence in the future.

Faith, knowledge, and nihilism around 1800 The beginning of the philosophical use of the term “nihilism” has been very thoroughly investigated (e.g., Müller-Lauter 1975, 1984; Pöggeler 1970). One of the first philosophers to use the term, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, deployed it to criticize transcendental philosophy and particularly Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Jacobi 2004). The critique of Fichte radicalized an earlier critique launched by Jacobi against Spinozism. According to Jacobi, the deterministic worldview promoted by Spinozism resulted in the elimination of all values, including those of freedom, love, and beauty, and was therefore inherently nihilistic. Fichte’s philosophy went even further, reaching the point of complete nihilism, where the “I” had finally destroyed even the thing-in-itself, transforming everything into a mere “non-I” (Jacobi 2004). Jacobi did not criticize Spinoza or Fichte for being bad philosophers—on the contrary, they brought philosophy to its inevitable consequences. What was at stake here, in other words, was not only Spinoza or transcendental idealism, but the destiny of philosophy as such. By revealing that nihilism is the inevitable destiny of philosophy, Jacobi wanted to demonstrate the necessity of belief.2 In his text “Faith and Knowledge,” published in 1802, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reacted to Jacobi with a maneuver typical of modern philosophy: he turned Jacobi’s position on its head. What Jacobi understood as the last consequence of Jacobi’s notion of glauben includes, nota bene, not only the religious faith but also a meaning of “to hold as true” (See Jacobi 1787, iv).

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philosophy—nihilism—was presented by Hegel as its very first step: “The first step in philosophy is to recognize the absolute nothing” (Hegel 1977a, 169) of any finitude made absolute. Earlier, he argued against Jacobi: […] it is only possible to put trust in the Ideas when [empirical] […] reality has been brought to nothing; it is quite impossible to put trust in the Ideas as long as the dogmatism of absolute finitude and subjectivity is maintained, a dogmatism that puts the eternal verities in bodies and other matters of fact. (Hegel 1977a, 139ff)

Hegel agreed with Jacobi that Fichte’s destruction of Kant’s thing-initself (“the nothingness of the spectral thing-in-itself ” [Hegel 1969, 47]) was consistent. In contrast to Jacobi, however, he understood the apparent triumph of the subject in annihilating the world as a (potential) turning point—marking the possibility of overcoming the subject, or more precisely, of desubjectivating logical categories. The problem with Fichte, according to Hegel, was not that he went too far but that even he did not go far enough with his annihilating procedure. By maintaining a “subjective approach,” he was still too positive.3 Similarly, Jacobi’s position remains for Hegel too subjective, since the faith he espouses is no longer naive and truly devoid of subjectivism and rationalism, but is already elevated by self-reflection to the place of subjectivism and rationalism in the very movement of opposing them and justifying itself through this opposition. When it is introduced into philosophy […] faith completely loses this pure naiveté [author’s note: Hegel uses the term Unbefangenheit, which is more positive than Naivität] […] faith itself is affected by the occurrence of this opposition to reflection and subjectivity. Since it now acquires this negation as part of its meaning, faith preserves reflection on the nullification of reflection; it preserves the subjective consciousness of the nullification of subjectivity. Subjectivity has thus saved itself in its own nullification. (Hegel 1977a, 141)

Furthermore, it is precisely the “timid,” “fearful,” and “incomplete” standpoint (Hegel 1969, 51) with respect to nihilism that leads to what Hegel described, invoking Jacobi, as “blind hatred of the nullification of temporality, along with the holy zeal for the good cause of matters of fact [wirkliche Dinge]” (Hegel 1977a, 140). In other words, subjectivity preserves itself in its will to nullify nullification, in its annihilating gesture against nihilism. “Aber die subjektive Haltung dieses Versuchs ließ ihn nicht zur Vollendung kommen” (Hegel 1969, 41).

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Hegel’s diligence in finding ever new ways to discover and castigate a sophisticated subjectivism behind its own apparent nullification makes very clear that the persistence of subjectivism was his main target:4 he spoke of a “pollution of faith” and a “hallowing of subjectivity,” of an “eternally returning introspective concern for the subject” (Hegel 1977a, 143), an “extreme meticulousness, nostalgic egoism and ethical sickliness,” “inner idolatry” (Hegel 1977a, 146); and finally even used terms like the “torment of eternal self-contemplation,” accusing those immersed in such torment of engaging in “spiritual debauch with themselves” (Hegel 1977a, 147). This subjective nihilism can be overcome not by denial or negation, but rather when it is understood as only one moment of true philosophy, namely, as the “negative side of the absolute.” Infinity is the pure nullification of the antithesis or of finitude; but it is at the same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinite, because it eternally nullifies itself. Out of this nothing and pure night of infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace, the truth lifts itself upward. (Hegel 1977a, 190)

The pure concept of infinity as the abyss of nothingness in which all being is engulfed, Hegel continued, “must signify the infinite grief [of the finite] purely as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a moment. Formerly, the infinite grief only existed historically in the formative process of culture. It existed as the feeling that ‘God Himself is dead,’ upon which the religion of more recent times rests” (Hegel 1977a, 190). Here, Hegel used the famous expression of the “speculative Good Friday.” A few years later, Hegel still described the confrontation with the negative in terms of conversion: “This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being” (Hegel 1977b, 19).5 But while “tarrying with the negative” could easily be read as a heroic gesture, it should more accurately be read as the defeat or destruction of the heroic subject. It is not the master with his heroism in the face of death, but rather the slave (Knecht) who actually tarries with the negative. The master, instead, in preserving his honor, does not experience annihilation, and preserves a remnant of subjectivity Regarding Hegel’s critique of romantic irony for its excess of subjectivism, see, for example, Mascat 2013, 230–45. Frederick Beiser (2002) has read German Idealism in general as a “struggle against subjectivism.” 5 In the (first) preface of the Science of Logic, something similar reappears in the formulation of the “stay in the nothing” (Hegel 1969, 28). 4

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(Hegel 1977b, 111–119; Kobe 2005, 127). Hegel’s tarrying with the negative is thus opposed not only to Jacobi’s subjectivity, which persists in the mode of selfnegation, but also to the “heroic” facing—or even acceptance—of negativity in the “German Nihilism”6 of the so-called Conservative Revolutionary movement (Konservative Revolution). The Romantic nihilism at the turn of the nineteenth century and the heroic nihilism following 1918 can therefore be understood as two different forms of subjectivism, which are equally directly opposed to Hegel’s philosophy. Jacobi and Hegel, to conclude, agreed that there was a problem, a tendency in modern philosophy toward a nullifying subjectivism or subjective nihilism, but they completely disagreed as to where the problem lay and how to resolve it. While for Jacobi, the final revelation of nihilism as the telos of philosophy opened the possibility or even necessity of accepting belief (and providing a stable ground for religion), Hegel believed in an immanent solution and appeared in this specific sense to be progressive. The problem could only be resolved by pushing the underlying logic even further. Only by doing so would it become clear that the problem did not concern the tendency itself, but the fact that this tendency (or logic) was not fully developed. What first appeared as dangerous or destructive would reveal itself as necessary, even as “progress,” as soon as we are prepared to take the final step rather than avoid it. And, as we will see, this is exactly the strategy that Slavoj Žižek used two centuries after Jacobi and Hegel, when criticizing some of the major representatives of critical thinking, such as Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas.

Faith, knowledge, and nihilism around 2000 Earlier than most other leftist philosophers, Gianni Vattimo brought the topic of Christianity into philosophy,7 and the title of his book from 1996, Credere di credere, was an implicit reference to the debate between Jacobi and Hegel. “Credere di credere” could be translated literally as “believing to believe.” By Regarding the notion of German Nihilism and its relation to the so-called “Conservative Revolutionary movement,” see Strauss 1999. 7 For conservative philosophers, Christianity has never stopped being a relevant topic. René Girard seems here particularly interesting. While Jacobi’s early critique of the “nihilist” disappearance of the object is based on a philosophy of consciousness and subjectivity, Girard’s mimetic theory provides an interesting possibility for reformulating a critique of nihilism on the basis of inter-subjectivity (see Di Blasi forthcoming). 6

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weakening the “high” notion of belief (faith) through reference to the “low” notion of belief (guessing), this title indicates a distancing from Hegel, who criticized Jacobi precisely for having consciously confused faith and belief and thereby devalued a high notion of faith (Hegel 1977a, 124ff). But Vattimo also distanced himself from Jacobi, offering a very different conception of belief, as the consequence of a long process of a nihilist weakening of all convictions, including religious ones. The title Credere di credere was therefore deeply programmatic. Vattimo was interested in interpreting the weakening of faith as a positive kenotic and nihilist tendency of Christianity. Nietzsche was right, according to Vattimo: Christianity resulted in the weakening of all our convictions—in nihilism. But Nietzsche was not correct in blaming Christianity for that. In achieving this nihilist condition, Christianity overcame the violence of monotheism and metaphysics. A few years later, Vattimo and Jacques Derrida published a volume on religion, and for his contribution, Derrida chose Hegel’s title “Faith and Knowledge” (Derrida 2002), thereby suggesting a parallel with the older text. Similarly to Vattimo and Jacobi, Derrida introduced his text with reflections on the term “belief ”: We believe we can pretend to believe—fiduciary act—that we share in some preunderstanding. We act as though we had some common sense of what “religion” means through the languages that we believe (how much belief already, to this moment, to this very day!) we know how to speak. We believe in the minimal trustworthiness of this word. (Derrida 2002, 44)

Derrida thereby accepted, like Jacobi, the importance of belief. And similarly to Vattimo, he also related it to a specific tradition—the Christian one. At the same time, however, this tradition appears here in a much more problematic light than in Vattimo. It is closely connected to the history of a violent abstraction and “nihilist” uprooting. Following Nietzsche and Heidegger, Derrida connected Christianity implicitly to nihilism or to what he called “the evil of abstraction,” “the dislocation, expropriation, delocalization, deracination, disidiomatization and dispossession […] that the tele­techno-scientific machine does not fail to produce” (Derrida 2002, 43, 81). Christianity and the “teletechno-scientific machine” are related in that both are based on belief or faith, which he connected to the notion of credit: “We speak of trust and of credit or of trustworthiness in order to underscore that this elementary act of faith

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also underlies the essentially economic and capitalistic rationality of the teletechnoscientific” (Derrida 2002, 43, 81). Christian belief and credit stand, according to Derrida, at the core of Western globalization or globalatinization, as Derrida put it in order to underline its Latin, and thereby Catholic, aspect (Derrida 2002, 50, 52).8 And in destroying all particularities, this uprooting of globalization appears as radical evil: “I understand Judaism as the possibility of giving the Bible a context, of keeping this book readable,” says Levinas. Does not the globalization of demographic reality and calculation render the probability of such a “context” weaker than ever and as threatening for survival as the worst, the radical evil of the “final solution”? (Derrida 2002, 91)9

The other source of religion, other than faith, is the sacred, which Derrida related to Islam. Reacting against the uprooting tendency of faith, the sacred tends to revere soundness, health, family, and tradition, and can all too easily give way to “sacrificial” (but one might also say anarchist or active nihilist) selfdestruction and violence. We can detect here a specificity of the relation between belief and nihilism. Both notions are here constantly shifting between a positive and a negative meaning. The same belief that Jacobi considered as a way out of the nihilism inherent to philosophy, appeared for Hegel as a (bad) attempt on the part of reason to escape reflection and retreat into a sort of fundamentalism. The same weak belief that appeared in Vattimo as result of a (good) nihilism, and as the best way to overcome the violence of a metaphysical conviction and fundamentalist faith, was depicted by Derrida as a (negative) uprooting, a nihilist process, which is closely connected to the Christian and Western tradition and incites rather than overcomes a violent and “nihilist” fundamentalist identitarian counterreaction. There is, according to Derrida, a third possibility, in which both sources of religion come together: the “experience of witnessing situates a convergence of these two sources: the unscathed (the safe, the sacred or the saintly) and the fiduciary (trustworthiness, fidelity, credit, belief or faith, ‘good faith’ implied in the worst ‘bad faith’)” (Derrida 2002, 98). Derrida related this third form to witnessing, a term that recalls the witnesses of the Holocaust (see Weber 1994, 79ff) and to Judaism. This third possibility appears as a potential mediator in an Structurally, the term globalatinization is a variation of his notion of Western “phonocentrism” (see Derrida 1997; Di Blasi 2007). 9 See also Di Blasi (2013). 8

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escalating conflict between a Christian/Western world and an Islamic world. The place where the contradiction between two nihilisms—Western abstraction and violent counterreactions—can be overcome is thereby not a neutral, universal philosophical or speculative standpoint beyond religion, but is related to one (religious) tradition and experience: the Jewish one. In his influential acceptance speech on the occasion of the presentation of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (also entitled “Faith and Knowledge” and held in October 2001) Habermas introduced his notion of the postsecular. In this speech, we are confronted with a very similar structure. Here as well, we have an escalating dialectic between a nihilism inherent in Western science and technology, and, as a counterreaction to it, another nihilism related to Islam and “religion,” which appeared most drastically in the “blind fundamentalist attack” by suicidal murderers in 9/11, an event that Habermas mentioned at the very beginning of his speech (Habermas 2003, 101–127). Here as well, we find the acceptance of the importance of religious “resources of meaning” (Habermas 2003, 109). Acknowledging the continuous importance of religion is what distinguishes, for Habermas, between the secular and the postsecular. But contrary to Derrida, it is still secular reason—that is, an (allegedly10) metareligious principle—that is understood as the mediator between the growing biotechnological possibilities and a growing fundamentalism or violent “return of religion.” Although skeptical toward modern sciences, Habermas, following Kant, accepted what one might call a methodological nihilism of science (concerning moral, aesthetical, or religious values) as inherent to theoretical reason as such. He contended, however, that we must limit the realm of this science and complement it with other forms of rationality. In consequence, we do not have to eliminate or replace either religions or theoretical thought. We can adhere to a religion-friendly understanding of secularization, one that tries constantly to translate religious intuition in a rational language appropriate to our time. Habermas therefore not only tried to reaffirm the secular against both a biotechnological and fundamentalist nihilism, but he also tried to confirm a specific anti-nihilist understanding of history. With a religion-friendly understanding of the process of secularization, he confirmed a fundamental geschichtsphilosophische basis for his thought: the assumption that we are living in “a context of ongoing secularization” (Habermas 2003, 104)—an Wendy Brown (2012) has summarized some major arguments against the assumed neutrality of secularization.

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understanding that was put into question by the reappearance of religion. In this context, Habermas contrasted between Kant and a (could we say Jewish?) “promise of salvaging the future,” on the one hand, and an overpowering reason in Hegel and senseless repetition in Nietzsche on the other: Hegel makes death by crucifixion as suffered by the Son of God the center of a way of thinking that seeks to incorporate the positive form of Christianity. Thus, religious contents are saved in terms of philosophical concepts. But Hegel sacrifices together with sacred history [Heilsgeschichte] the promise of a salvaging future in exchange for a world process revolving in itself. Teleology is finally bent back into a circle. Hegel’s students and followers break with the fatalism of this dreary prospect of an eternal recurrence of the same. (Habermas 2003, 112)

Beyond or beneath the dangerous escalation that occurs in both knowledge and faith and the two related nihilisms, a third nihilism becomes visible in this passage, namely, the denial of linear historical progression and of a redemptive-historical dimension. In attacking this third form of nihilism, the basic coordinates of Habermas’s Geschichtsphilosophie become most visible: he declares himself in favor of the teleological understanding of history in Kant and in Hegel’s (leftist) followers, and against a nihilistic, cyclical process allegedly promoted by Hegel and Nietzsche. It is precisely this kind of nihilistic cyclical process, however, that Slavoj Žižek has been arguing for and developing over the last twenty-five years.

Less than Christian nihilism Very early, before Habermas popularized this term in 2001, Žižek not only dismissed the notion of the postsecular as “post-secular crap,” but he also used this notion as a way of associating Habermas with two other influential positions of continental philosophy—postmodernism (Vattimo) and poststructuralism (Derrida)—in order to reject them all sans phrase. Žižek positioned himself as Neo-Hegelian, reframing our contemporary situation in accordance with the one that prevailed two centuries ago. The terms of Žižek’s rejection of postsecularism can be best gleaned through his critique of John D. Caputo’s so-called weak theology. For Caputo, God is weakened and reduced to a trace, or a trace of a trace, and faith is reduced

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to a weak faith. Caputo’s God is the subject of an endless agony and endless disappearance, a fading. This idea recalls the endlessness of the secularization process as understood by Vattimo and Habermas, as well as motifs fashioned by Derrida. What Žižek criticizes is the idea of an excess of linear time, an endless time, with the impossibility or incapacity of it coming to an end—the incapacity, for example, to accept the death of God. In the way that Žižek understands it, postsecularity sounds very much like the “timid,” “fearful,” “incomplete” standpoint attributed by Hegel to transcendental philosophy and subjective idealism. One can deepen Žižek’s demarcation of the postsecular by relating it to his distinction between desire and drive. Desire consists in the longing for the lost incestuous object in which all differences and tensions disappear and an originary peace is regained. This notion recalls what Nietzsche called “passive nihilism” and Freud referred to as “Nirwanaprinzip.” These dispositions bespeak a stubborn relation to loss, a fear of losing the loss, whereby we stand to lose the object for good. Following Žižek, the postsecular appears precisely as that: namely, the fear not of losing God, but of losing the lost God. In his film Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais reflected on the double bind of the lover: her longing for the dead lover and the fear of relinquishing this longing, of betraying him by forgetting him, of killing him a second time. The lover is bound to the lost object through her fear of the second death. Considered in this manner, the postsecular cannot only appear as a desire that revives religion; it also appears as an attempt to avoid the second death of God by postponing or deferring it into the future. Žižek, instead, clearly advocates atheism. While he sometimes sympathizes with mystical attempts to inscribe the lack to the absolute itself—God is then preserved, not as omnipotent but as himself lacking and therefore as dependent as the human being—he always supports the notion of the death of the omnipotent God. The insistence on the death of God, however, also means that it is important to Žižek to connect atheism to its specific preconditions: a specific history of God, related to Judaism and particularly to Christianity, which includes the moment of his death. An atheism that does not relate to the death of God actually leads to the deification of something else (the human being, the process of history, etc.). The emancipatory potential, which the death of God opens up, becomes especially apparent, according to Žižek, in the crucifixion of Christ. This violent

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death, which was accompanied by a collapse of the symbolic universe of Jesus’ disciples, was followed by a resurrection in the form of a “Holy Spirit,” a faith that had lost any transcendent and metaphysical foundation and was now based solely on the community of believers. In more philosophical terms, one might speak here of a new beginning that became possible in the moment when a world, a totality, seemed exhausted.11 The circle is closed, we have reached the end, the immanent possibilities are exhausted, and, at this same point, everything is open. This is why to be a Hegelian today does not mean to assume the superfluous burden of some metaphysical past, but to regain the ability to begin from the beginning (Žižek 2012, 393)

This new beginning enabled by the accomplishment and collapse of a totality contradicts the Habermasian understanding of Hegel’s philosophy as “dreary prospect of an eternal recurrence of the same” and recalls instead Alain Badiou’s decidedly anti-nihilist philosophy and his notions of the (collective) subject and of fidelity to a (revolutionary) event. Already in 2003, Žižek connected the “Holy Spirit” to the subject of Badiou: “ ‘Holy Spirit’ designates a new collective held together (…) by fidelity to a Cause” (Žižek 2003, 130). In a direct comparison with Badiou, however, the “nihilist” aspect of Žižek’s philosophy becomes evident as well. The community of believers envisioned by him oscillates between faith or fidelity and a second death, the loss or even betrayal of faith. “In every heroic narrative of recuperation,” Žižek writes, “there is a moment of loss or betrayal which enables the later redemption” (Žižek 2012, 349). Instead of Badiou’s long-term fidelity to an event, and instead of the “seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labor of the negative” (Hegel 1977b, 10) advocated by Hegel against romantic irony and frivolity, we have here a frenetic acceleration of collapse and new beginnings.12 Because of its relation to Christianity, one might be tempted to call Žižek’s accelerated repetition between collapse and resurrection, and between fidelity and betrayal, a “Christian nihilism” in both meanings of the phrase: a nihilism that depends on Christianity and the transformation of Christianity into nihilism. In his contribution for this volume, Adi Ophir suggests another interesting way to give to nihilism a positive meaning, or, more precisely, to react in a responsible manner to the possibility of a total annihilation. 12 Bruno Boostels argued that by giving priority to the act as “a negative gesture of radical, selfrelating negativity, as death drive in actu”, Žižek would “devalue in advance every positive project of imposing a new Order, fidelity to any positive political Cause” (See Žižek 2006, 64). 11

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But this conclusion is not yet satisfying, since it does not do justice to Žižek’s revolutionary striving to regain the ability to begin from the beginning. We have to go a step further here and we could best achieve that if we first take a step backwards. While Žižek, as we saw, relates the postsecular to desire and to its specific temporality of deferring the loss of the loss (the second death), his entire philosophy can be said to circle around his notion of the drive and its own specific temporality of endless repetition: The elementary matrix of drive is not that of transcending all particular objects toward the Void of the Thing (which is then accessible only in its metonymic stand-in), but that of our libido getting “stuck” onto a particular object, condemned to circulate around it forever. […] We become “humans” when we get caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it. (Žižek 2006, 62ff)

Žižek’s affirmation of the death drive not only endorses Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same” but it endorses it in the way by which it was negatively and critically understood by Heidegger. The notion of “eternal recurrence,” described as “in alle Ewigkeit hinaus, unersättlich da capo rufen” (Nietzsche 1999, 75, “for all eternity insatiably calling out da capo”), was conceived by Nietzsche as the possibility of overcoming (both passive and active) nihilism (see Gillespie 1995, 221ff). Heidegger, describing “the essence of modern technique” as “permanent rotating recurrence of the same” (“das Wesen der modernen Technik […], das heißt: die ständig rotierende Wiederkehr des Gleichen” [Heidegger 1954, S112]), cleverly and maliciously transformed what Nietzsche had understood as a possibility for overcoming nihilism into the purest form of Western nihilism. Now, in embracing this “self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction,” Žižek reaffirms precisely this nihilistic connotation that Heidegger attributed to the eternal recurrence. But at the same time, and this is crucial, Žižek transforms it into “something” that overcomes—or better—undermines nihilism, namely, the “death drive,” a quasi-vital, quasi-mechanical eternal movement activated by a “less than nothing.” Here is the formula at its most elementary: “moving” is the striving to reach the void, namely, “things move,” there is something instead of nothing, not because reality is in excess in comparison with mere nothing, but because reality is less than nothing. (Žižek 2012, 4)

Here again, we can try to better understand Žižek by comparison with Badiou, specifically, Žižek’s obscure “less than nothing” with Badiou’s transparent notion

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of “subtraction.” Starting from the importance of negation for the production of something new, the French philosopher distinguishes between a “negative part of negation” (the destruction or disintegration of the existing order or totality) and an “affirmative part of negation,” which he calls “subtraction” and defines as the “possibility of something which exists absolutely, apart from that which exists under the laws of what negation negates” (Badiou 2012, 270). This subtraction is within the horizon of negation, but it exists independently of the purely negative part of negation. It exists apart from destruction. For example, Arnold Schönberg’s new musical axioms are in no way deducible from the destruction of the tonal system and exist independently from this negative part of negation (Badiou 2012, 269ff). Žižek also aims at an “affirmative part” of negation that persists behind its destructive side and his term “less than” also suggests a “subtraction,” even though in a completely different, neither rational nor mathematical, and hence obscure, way. Rather than the nihilist striving for nothing, understood as striving for (self-)extinction, the death drive for Žižek is the “disturbance of any void, as the insistence of a pre-ontological X on account of which ‘it moves.’ ” According to him, the “ultimate ontological choice is thus not the choice between nothing and something, but between nothing (extinction) and less than nothing (eppur si muove)” (Žižek 2012, 954). This is why his philosophy is not easy to grasp in terms of nihilism: Be it against Buddhism, the postsecular, the Nirvana principle or desire—Žižek is constantly advocating the importance of a lack even inside nothing, a disturbance, an irrational or non-mathematical subtraction, a “less than nothing” that prevents us from obtaining an ultimate peace. Therefore, his philosophy is neither nihilism nor against nihilism, but rather less than nihilism. Or, to come back to our earlier formula: It is not Christianity, not nihilism, not a Christian nihilism, but a less than Christian nihilism. In light of this it might be clearer why Žižek may be one of the most popular contemporary philosophers, appealing to people not only of fundamentally different political convictions, but of different religious (or irreligious) beliefs as well. With his dissociation from the postsecular, he satisfies leftist “progressive” atheists, while by relating atheism to the death of God and crucifixion, he satisfies Christian believers. At a deeper level, Žižek manages to connect a diffused despair in the face of an exhausted future with the possibility of a new beginning, the resurrection of a Holy (revolutionary) Spirit, and to undermine nihilism not by something positive, but on the contrary by a void, a disturbance,

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a less than nothing. The cost of his operation, however, is the constant risk of an oxymoronic fusion or confusion of the opposites: fidelity and betrayal, activism and defeatism, leftist Christianity and nihilism.

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———. 1977a. Faith and Knowledge, edited by Walter Cerf and Henry Silton Harris. New York: State University of New York. ———. 1977b. The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Arnold V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Was heisst Denken? (GA 8), edited by Paola-Ludovika Coriando. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1787. David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus: Ein Gespräch. Breslau: G. Loewe. ———. 2004. Schriften zum transzendentalen Idealismus (Werke 2,1), edited by Walter Jaeschke and Irmgard-Maria Piske. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Kobe, Zdravko. 2005. “Die Auferstehung des Begriffs aus dem Geiste des Nihilismus oder Hegels spekulativer Karfreitag.” Filozofski vestnih XXVI: 113–128. Mascat, Jamila M. H. 2013. “When Negativity Becomes Vanity: Hegel’s Critique of Romantic Irony.” Stasis I: 230–245. Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. 1975. “Nihilismus als Konsequenz des Idealismus: F. H. Jacobis Kritik an der Transzendentalphilosophie und ihre philosophiegeschichtlichen Folgen.” In Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus, edited by Alexander Schwan, 113–163. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ———. 1984. “Nihilismus.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, 846–853. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Kritische Studienausgabe 5), edited by Massimo Montinari and Giorgio Colli. München: dtv. Pöggeler, Otto. 1970. “Hegel und die Anfänge der Nihilismus-Diskussion.” Man & World 3: 163–199. Strauss, Leo. 1999. “German Nihilism.” Interpretation 26: 355–378. Vattimo, Gianni. 2003. Nichilismo ed emancipazione: Etica, politica e diritto. Milano: Garzanti. Weber, Elisabeth (ed.). 1994. Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich. Frankfurt a. M. Jüdischer Verlag. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ———. 2012. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

3

Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing? Michael Gillespie

Nihilism … can be a symptom of increasing strength or of increasing weakness. Friedrich Nietzsche And now which is which? Lewis Carrol “Something must be done.” How many times have we heard this or something like it? It has almost become a mantra, uttered by people of all political stripes and in all walks of life. And yet whenever it is uttered or thought, it is almost invariably a justification for inaction, a sop we use to excuse our anomie. The phrase reflects a concealed despair that arises out of a sense of powerlessness and the belief that there is nothing we can do. It is thus not the assertion of an active will but the plea of a paralysis that wishes someone would make things different than they are. The appropriate response is, of course, “Well, do something,” but one almost never hears this because everyone knows the answer would be “What can I do? Nothing I can do will make a difference.” As a result we end up doing nothing. There are many reasons for our inaction. Our world has become so complicated and interrelated that getting anything significant done requires the coordinated efforts of thousands of actors who are pulled in different directions by conflicting personal motives, economic interests, and political imperatives. In satisfying individual desires, we rely almost exclusively on the market, which allocates goods in efficient ways, but when it comes to collective action our very freedom often gets in the way of consensus. In an effort to remedy these coordination problems we generally turn to bureaucracy, but do we control our bureaucracies? They repeatedly seem to take on a life and direction of their own often at odds with our intentions. As Arendt pointed out, bureaucracy thus often seems to mean government by nobody, in which no one is ultimately responsible

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with the buck passing continually from one hand to another (Arendt 1970, 38, 81–83). Here, she shares the opinion of her teacher Heidegger who argued that in the modern age humans are increasingly directed by the very technologies they imagine make them masters of nature (Heidegger 1992, 311–341). Under these circumstances, he believes there is no practical solution to our problem, and we can only wait for a god to save us. Viewed from this perspective, Max Weber’s pessimistic remark that politics is “the strong and slow boring of hard boards,” seems ridiculously optimistic (Weber 1946, 128). Is it any wonder that nothing seems to get done? At times though things reach a boiling point where inaction is no longer acceptable. People become so hopping mad that they shake off their ennui and plunge into vigorous and often violent action. There may be nothing positive they can do, but they need to do something, to lash out, to strike a blow against the system, to avenge injustice. The sense of powerlessness that characterizes the anomie of modern life is transformed into an irrepressible rage that wants only to hurt or destroy. This anger is no longer satisfied with the thought that something must be done and says, “Nothing doing! I will no longer abide by your rules or live in a world that is so intolerable, so unjust, so repressive, or so inimical to human well-being. To hell with it all!” This attitude is a form of rebellion. Faced with a system of rules so rigid, arbitrary, and impossible to change, we come to believe, as Camus pointed out, that we have only two possibilities, murder or suicide.1 We cannot live without killing and if we cannot kill those who are the source of our suffering, we must die. Not surprisingly, these two possibilities are often combined in the suicide terrorist. He may give some reason for his action but he is driven by rage and a desire for revenge. This longing to do violence was already evident in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in such literary works as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, London’s Call of the Wild, and André Malraux’s Man’s Fate as well as in the political tracts of Sorel, Martinetti, Gorky, and Lunacharsky. And of course it became a horrifying reality in the wars, revolutions, and concentration camps of the twentieth century. I describe these two attitudes not to promote despair or provoke violence, but to make visible the character and consequences of the dominant forms of nihilism in the present, and to ask whether nihilism might not play a more positive role in our future. The former is the subject of The Rebel, the latter of The Myth of Sisyphus.

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The term “nihilism” was first used in the late eighteenth century by two largely unknown German scholars to criticize Kant’s transcendental idealism, but it was Friedrich Jacobi who gave the term its definitive early meaning when he characterized the absolute egoism of Gottlieb Fichte as nihilism (Jacobi 1812–1825, 3: 44; see also Gillespie 1995, 65). His usage largely shaped the understanding of the concept for almost a century. If the I is absolute, as Fichte suggested, then, Jacobi argued, God is irrelevant to human life, and every decision is guided only by individual inclination. This absolute or Promethean egoism, which posits the perfect freedom of the I, is thus nihilism. Fichte’s successors and Hegel in particular sought to defend the idealist position against this charge, arguing that what seemed to Jacobi to be the caprice of the individual will was in fact guided by a dialectical rationality that was invisible to the ego itself in its historical unfolding. This hidden reason, however, became visible at the end of the process when humanity’s historical tasks had been completed and humanity itself had become one with the absolute in and through science. The “cunning of reason” in this sense replaces divine will in the guidance of human development. History may seem to be a slaughtering bench in which all forms of existence are continually and arbitrarily negated, but the process of negation is in fact a process of development that brings humanity to its greatest possible perfection. History in this sense is not a meaningless series of negations but a rational dialectical process that ends with the reconciliation of individual and collective freedom in the context of the rational state. This optimistic notion of historical change was later picked up by the Left Hegelians and then by Marx and Engels although in their case the rational end of historical development was projected into the future and thus became an object of political striving. Negation in their view was specific and limited, aiming at a particular goal, the destruction of capitalism, and the worldwide triumph of communism. For others, however, there were growing doubts that the order of historical development was rational or progressive. The slaughtering bench of world history that Hegel had imagined could be justified through a theodicy of spirit began to seem a utopian dream especially after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 that demonstrated even to the most ardent Hegelians that reason did not rule the world and that the rational was not actual nor the actual rational. The most immediate and obvious response to this notion was the rise to prominence of Schopenhauerian pessimism. Schopenhauer imagined that the world was directed not by reason but by a malicious demonic will that determined

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all natural and human motion. This deeply pessimistic vision led him to the remarkable conclusion that active negation is impossible since it is always only an expression of the world-dominating will. Individual freedom in this sense is an illusion and human beings at their best can thus only practice a kind of Buddhistic denial of the will to life. This means not merely doing nothing but wanting nothing to do with this malicious will or with life itself. Resignation in this sense is the attempt to negate absolutely, to come to dwell in the nothingness that is beyond the will, in a Nirvana of non-striving. This Schopenhauerian pessimism served as the model for what Nietzsche called passive nihilism (Gillespie 1999, 153–154). The term “nihilism,” which is often thought to have been the beginning of Nietzsche’s thought, actually first appears in his notes only in 1880 and in his published work only in 1886. While his use of the term is quite late, the problem that it refers to had preoccupied him since his youth when he became deeply concerned about the decline of German culture. His understanding of the nature of the problem took on a more specific form as a result of his discovery of Schopenhauer in 1865, and crystallized for him in the context of his growing friendship with Wagner that was rooted in their mutual fascination with Schopenhauer. During the period of their friendship, Nietzsche was deeply concerned with what he then called the problem of European pessimism and sought to show that it had also been a problem for the classical Greeks. In his view it was a problem that they had overcome with their art, and thus by analogy a problem that Germany too might overcome through the power of music. Greek pessimism in his view was bound up with the phenomenon of the Dionysian. He describes this phenomenon in a number of different ways in the Birth of Tragedy. Perhaps the most trenchant is put into the mouth of Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, who tells Midas that the best thing for a man is not to be born, not to be, to be nothing, and if already born, to die as soon as possible (Nietzsche 1967, 42). He also identifies this attitude with the despair that immobilizes Shakespeare’s Hamlet when he recognizes that something is rotten not merely in the state of Denmark but in existence as such (Nietzsche 1967, 60). In Nietzsche’s early thought, such pessimism is in fact the inevitable result of the recognition of the truth. The Greeks, however, did not succumb in the face of this abyss but struggled against it, converting it through their art into something life-affirming. Socrates, Plato, and Christianity in Nietzsche’s view changed all this. Unable to master the suffering of this life, they sought a means to endure it by imagining

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another life beyond this one in which all of their suffering would be avenged and in which they would live without pain or despair. This solution, however, was at best only a stopgap and became untenable as a result of the death of the Christian God who became unbelievable in the light of modern science. The death of God, which Nietzsche characterized as the greatest of all events, brought humanity again face to face with the most debilitating pessimism, or what in the later 1880s Nietzsche began to call nihilism. In the absence of God, the world seemed to have no purpose, meaning, or goal. His early hopes for an aesthetic solution on the basis of Wagner’s music also seemed increasingly untenable to him, and he became convinced that the continuation of this nihilism would lead to mass suicide. The phenomenon of Russian nihilism, however, convinced him that there was at least one other possibility (Kuhn 1984, 262–263). The Russian nihilist movement began with a Fichtian hope that a heroic human freedom could transform the world from an authoritarian cage into a playground for human creativity. In contrast to the Hegelians, the Russian nihilists did not believe that man’s freedom was subject to a dialectical necessity but was capable of absolute negation and something like creatio ex nihilo. It was thus not necessary to traverse all of the dialectical steps to reach a predetermined end. According to the nihilist Dobrolyubov, a titanic act of human freedom could change the world in a single night (Valentinov 1969, 209–210). Where this would take humanity, however, was less clear. Indeed, in the nihilists’ view what this new world would be like could not be known in advance since it would only be possible to imagine these new possibilities once humanity was freed from the blinders of existing social norms and institutions. The important thing in the present was thus not imagining this new world but destroying the old one. Their initial efforts to do away with the regime, however, were thwarted by the authoritarian power of the state, which led them into a continually escalating campaign of violence and terror ending in the anarchistic nihilism and terrorism of Bakunin and Nechayev. It was this desire to destroy at all costs that so impressed Nietzsche and that gave rise in his thought to the idea of active nihilism. He explains this notion in the Genealogy of Morals with his famous remark that the will would rather will nothingness than not will (Nietzsche 1967b, 163). What he means by this is that if the will discovers it lives in a world with no purposes, goals, or meaning, it will become destructive rather than do nothing. Or to put the matter in other words, in order to will the will will choose active nihilism over passive nihilism. Despite its obvious drawbacks,

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Nietzsche considered such active nihilism fundamentally superior to passive nihilism, for while it was more destructive, it was also more energetic and thus more life enhancing. In order to understand why he believed this to be the case, however, we need to examine more carefully what Nietzsche took to be the state of modern man. At the beginning of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche suggests that the death of God has left man mired in one or the other of these two forms of nihilism. He argues, however, that both are ultimately untenable as ways of life, ending as they do in either suicide or murder. Humanity was once able to live on the basis of the false belief that there was a God in heaven who established purposes and goals for them and thus gave meaning to their lives. Now that that God is dead, such a life is impossible. We are thus thrown into nihilism. However, both active and passive nihilism are dead ends. Nietzsche saw two other possibilities for contemporary man: he could become either the last man or the superman. The last man, according to Nietzsche, is the man who is moved and dominated by his momentary desires, homo economicus, the pure utilitarian consumer who recognizes nothing higher than his own pleasures (Nietzsche 1954, 129–131). In his later thought Nietzsche characterizes this position as incomplete nihilism (Gillespie 1995, 153–154). It is a form of life with which we are all intimately familiar. Nietzsche recognized how attractive this possibility is to most men, but his goal was to convince at least some that they should choose the other path and strive for the superhuman. This alternative he later called radical or Dionysian nihilism. To understand what he means by this, however, we need to examine the role that the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same plays in his late thought. The death of God seemed to Nietzsche to leave the humanity in a world without meaning. This lack of order and purpose gave birth to pessimism and passive nihilism. Schopenhauer, however, suggested that the problem was deeper than this, since from his point of view there was nothing we could do to change our condition. We always seem to be stuck in the temporal unfolding of things and thus constantly determined by the dead hand of the past or what Zarathustra calls the “it was.” The misery and despair we experience in the present are connected to this sense of powerlessness. Because we cannot free ourselves from the past, we seek to avenge ourselves in the present by punishing those we believe to be responsible for our suffering (Nietzsche 1954, 249–254). Our ontological condition thus produces what Nietzsche calls the spirit of revenge. It is this spirit that he believes lies at the heart of active nihilism. The key problem

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for humanity posed by nihilism is thus how to escape from the spirit of revenge. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence offers an answer to this question and thus makes possible a form of innocent willing that is truly creative. The only way in which we can be free from antecedent causality is if we are able to will our own destiny, or at least are able to act as if we willed it. In Nietzsche’s view this is only possible if we can will backwards, that is, will everything that has been. Or to put it another way, our freedom and innocence depend upon accepting and affirming everything as if we had willed it. This task in Nietzsche’s view can only be accomplished by willing the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, the doctrine that everything that has been and that will be is simply a gigantic causal whole that repeats itself eternally. Thus, when I will forward, I also will the past since they are connected in a cycle that eternally recurs. In Nietzsche’s view the acceptance of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence—whether true or not—is the crucial psychological move that enables human beings to overcome both the despair of passive nihilism and the rage of active nihilism. It produces amor fati, love of fate. To affirm this doctrine is to affirm the whole as our end or purpose. This affirmation gives meaning to life, and redeems all of the past by transforming it into a product of our will. Willing the eternal recurrence thus frees us from the spirit of revenge. Some have dismissed this doctrine as relatively unimportant in Nietzsche’s thought, but all of the biographical evidence suggests that he considered it his deepest, most difficult, and most dangerous thought (Janz 1978, 2: 197, 280, 291, 322). He considered it dangerous for humanity because he believed it would act as a hammer that would free the superman from the rock of humanity but that would also crush uncountably many ordinary people in the process. However, the thought is not just dangerous to the many but also to the person who thinks it because of the titanic demands it imposes on him. To draw a comparison, Goethe’s Faust agrees to forfeit his soul if he ever experiences a moment that he wants to last for all eternity, that is, a moment of perfection that can justify everything else that has ever been. For Nietzsche such a perfect moment could never redeem the past because all of those other imperfect moments would still lie abysmally beside it. What one must affirm and really will is not just the most beautiful or most wonderful moment but every moment and particularly the most abysmal moments not just as necessary for something else but as truly loveable in themselves. Hegel’s slaughtering bench of world history in other words cannot be justified by a theodicy in which reason triumphs in the end.

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What one must affirm and actually will is the slaughter itself, all of the horror in which the most beautiful human beings, the most magnificent creations are overthrown and destroyed by what is most vile and disgusting. One must affirm Iago’s destruction of Othello, and every other instance in which the noble is destroyed by the base, the innocent by the wicked. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov asserted that in order to overcome nihilism it would be necessary to affirm the torture and murder of innocent children (Dostoevsky 1996, 245– 255). In contrast to Nietzsche, however, he was unwilling to say yes to such things. No perfect moment, he suggests, can ever redeem such crimes. They are simply intolerable. He thus says that he gives back his ticket, or in other words, says to God that he will not ride on this train or play in this game. Nietzsche, by contrast, insists that in order to affirm at all, we must will everything that has been or will be no matter how horrible or disgusting. Such a task in Nietzsche’s view will destroy most men and can only be accomplished if one overcomes all pity. This in his view is the path to the superhuman. There is something steely cold and horrifying in the thought, but if one can will this doctrine, one can free oneself from the desire for revenge, thus cease to be reactive and become truly active and creative, driven by the love of what might be rather than the hatred of what was. This too for Nietzsche is a form of nihilism since it recognizes the death of God and all absolutes, recognizes that there no longer is an absolute, unitary good but only a variety of humanly created goods and forms of life. But it is a positive form of nihilism that leaves behind the absolute negation of Schopenhauerian pessimism and the raging destructiveness of Russian nihilism, putting in their place a new hope for rising above the intransigence and anger of the present. I want to suggest that this notion of nihilism may provide a model for action today. It is nihilistic in that it accepts the fact that there is no God, no highest good, and no moral absolutes to guide our actions. Such a position is often characterized as anti-foundationalism or relativism but the approach that generally goes by this name typically fails to grasp the depth and seriousness that Nietzsche brings to the question. To take just one example, Richard Rorty suggests that life under these circumstances is not tragic but ironic, a kind of play (Rorty 1989). From Nietzsche’s point of view such a position is not representative of the Dionysian nihilist but of the last man. It seeks not to harness but to release the terrible tension that is essential to all creativity and to promote an “I’m okay, you’re okay” attitude toward life. It thus teaches us to be satisfied with the present rather than imagining a different future.

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As Charles Taylor and others have pointed out, such a position fails to take seriously the importance of a profound dedication to a conception of the good for human thriving (Taylor 1989, 3–52). Or to put the matter differently, it imagines that any conception of the good, however trivial or mundane, can serve as the basis for a human life. Nietzsche was well acquainted with such a view from his careful and comprehensive reading of John Stuart Mill, but he was convinced that such a view lacked the spiritual depth that is essential to human excellence. Living as Rorty would have us live, would leave us, as T. S. Eliot put it, hollow men, that is, comfortable with what Nietzsche calls implicit nihilism. For Nietzsche it is crucial to recognize the tragic heart of existence, the Dionysian depths, and to have no doubts about their abysmal character. The world in its unfolding makes no sense. There is no reason in history. Everything is tied up with everything else, and we can thus say yes to everything or to nothing at all. If we accept this idea, we recognize how fruitless it is to wallow in our powerlessness or to cast blame on those who came before us or live around us. Instead we realize that the only question is where we go from here. We recognize that what we take to be good is not absolute but also that it is the only means by which we can give shape to our lives and civilization. Such a view inevitably draws on traditions and aspects of the existing order, but they are merely the raw material out of which a new way of life is formed and do not determine our present or future. We stand in the midst of the nothing, literally nowhere, and give ourselves our own directions, making our own whence and wither. Dionysian nihilism thus forms the basis for what Nietzsche calls great politics. Ordinary politics as Aristotle recognized is factional. For him that meant factions based on differences in wealth. We would also add race, ethnicity, tribe, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. as sources of division. Politics reflects these factional struggles and is concerned with parceling out benefits and burdens to different groups, and establishing rules of the game in the forms of rights, practices, and/or laws. Solutions to factional strife generally reach an equilibrium that over time becomes increasingly difficult to change. Politics can break out of this equilibrium only by establishing a new goal that generates new common purposes that inspire individuals and groups to think of themselves in new ways. This is the goal of Nietzsche’s Dionysian superman, to be a creator of new values that inspire a people to form around a goal and to set a new direction. At the core of Nietzsche’s Dionysian nihilism is thus the idea of a revaluation of all values, of the creation of a new way of life based on a vision of the good that

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can inspire action and lift us above both the do-nothingness of passive nihilism and the nothing-doingness of active nihilism. It aims not at improving or controlling markets and bureaucracies (that is, at establishing what Machiavelli called new modes and orders) but at convincing us to admire and pursue different things, and thus to turn our politics toward different ends. Nietzsche recognized that such a transformation was likely also to require the use of force and violence against those in the old order who struggle to hold onto their power. He knew this would be dangerous. He suggested, however, that the violence employed in the pursuit of these new goals would not be the result of hatred or a desire for revenge. It would thus not be limitless or excessive. Nietzsche’s great politics thus could never legitimately be practiced by a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, all of whom were driven by the desire for revenge, but might very well be the work of an Ataturk, Gandhi, or Mandela. Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism thus helps us to distinguish between those who look to the future with innocent eyes and those still motivated by the spirit of revenge. Of course, this does not mean that we will always judge correctly. Indeed, it is essential to recognize that the desire for revenge remains powerful in us as well unless and until we grasp our finitude in the unfolding of time, and accept the responsibility this entails. A passage from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra encapsulates this point: O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children’s land shall you love … the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. (Nietzsche 1954, 315–316)

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1996. The Brothers Karamazov. NewYork: Modern Library. Gillespie, Michael Allen. 1995. Nihilism before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. “Nietzsche and the Anthropology of Nihilism.” Nietzsche Studien 28: 141–155. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Basic Writings. New York: Harper Collins. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1812–1825. Werke, 3 vols. Leipzig: Fleischer.

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Janz, Curt Paul. 1978. Nietzsche. Biographie, 3 vols. Munich: Hanser. Kuhn, Elisabeth. 1984. “Nietzsche’s Quelle des Nihilismus-Begriffs.” Nietzsche Studien 13:253–278. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin. ———. 1967a. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Random House. ———. 1967b. The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Random House. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. The Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Valentinov, Nikolai. 1969. The Early Years of Lenin, translated by Rolf Theen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Weber, Max. 1946. Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

4

A Concept of Nihilism for the Coming End of the World Adi Ophir

Against all odds I am trying to present here a coherent concept of nihilism. The phenomena to which this concept refers are limited to one sphere: the sphere of discourse. Nihilism as a category describing a psychological type or of a whole epoch will not be considered. I am not trying to be faithful or even fair to the rich research in intellectual history and to the many different ways in which the term “nihilism” has been used since its introduction by Jacobi at the turn of the nineteenth century, including its projections on earlier philosophical positions identified as nihilistic avant la lettre. I will use this history only as a resource of nihilistic discursive acts that exemplify various moments or possibilities that are logically contained in the concept itself. Each of these examples may also be a test case for evaluating the productivity of the concept, its utility as a tool of thought that helps us reframe and revise our understanding of specific phenomena associated with nihilism, juxtapose and compare them, make distinctions and draw parallels among them. In other words, I will not be interested in the shifting meaning of the term but rather with a spectrum of possibilities within which such shifts may still be considered as moments or aspects of one, single concept. Nihilism, then, is a discursive act, sometimes merely a gesture, a mode of discursive performance, and always only one moment within a wider discursive context. As such, it is a specific form of negation. I take my first clue from one line in Nietzsche. Drawing a sketch for his study of “European Nihilism,” at the very beginning of the first section of notes collected in The Will to Power, Nietzsche defines nihilism parenthetically as “the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability” (Nietzsche 1968, 7). The definition does not do justice to Nietzsche’s own account of nihilism because its scope is larger than what would occupy him in the rest of that text. It does cover but fails to specify two important moments in Nietzsche’s writing on nihilism: his use of the term

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as an epochal concept (“what I relate is the history of the next two centuries” Nietzsche 1968, 7) and the inner dialectic of the development of nihilism that he describes (“what does nihilism means? That the highest values devaluate themselves” Nietzsche 1968, 9). It is precisely because this initial definition is more colloquial, free of the specific way Nietzsche uses the term in his writings, having a broader scope and more mundane tone, that I would like to use it here as my point of departure. If one bears in mind that the radicalism of the “radical repudiation” is a matter of context and positioning, the door is open for a certain “de-dramatization” and “trivialization” of the concept. It is this trajectory of “de-dramatization” that I would like to follow here, up to a certain point. Nietzsche’s first definition is cumbersome. The desirability of an object is an expression of a value or meaning assigned to it, and therefore the three terms in Nietzsche’s definition may be reduced to two. Furthermore, meaning in this context should be understood not as a linguistic function but as “meaning for someone,” and in this sense it is synonymous with value (e.g., Nietzsche 1968, 11: “the idea of valuelessness, meaninglessness”); in any case, for the nihilistic act to have any effect, both meaning and value have to be repudiated. Hence, for our purposes, it would be enough to speak about the radical repudiation of values. The repudiation is radical if the negation does not refer to this or that object but to the very source of values. But do values have a source? Do they have one source, a single root, and the radical repudiation is necessarily the uprooting or this root? The dramatization of the nihilistic act is directly linked to this metaphysics of origin, which Nietzsche reinstates while trying to overcome it. Instead of a single source that accounts for a plurality of values, I would like to understand “radical repudiation of values” as an act of negation that refers to a whole realm in which all values undergo devaluation. Finally, to complete this modification of the initial Nietzschean definition, let us take another clue from Nietzsche, who said that the creation of values is based on the creation of distances (Nietzsche 2002, 257), and speak about the value of differences only, not of entities like objects, places, deeds, or people. When values are ascribed to the latter, it is always an expression of a distance that separates them from other entities of their kind, or a difference that distinguishes them. The repudiation at stake is therefore not of this or that value or set of values but of the possibility of evaluating differences within a given realm. Hence I propose to reformulate the initial definition thus: nihilism is the negation of the value (or meaning, significance, validity or truth) of differences within a given realm. Note, however, that the nihilistic negation

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does not destroy objects or people or institutions, obliterate their differences, or liberate one of their yoke; it only annuls the value of these differences or revokes their validity.1 The problem is never with the value of a specific entity or difference, but with the very possibility of assigning values to differences within a closed realm. No authority can function without being able to assign value to differences, hence the close affinity between nihilism and anarchism. But the two are not identical and the indifference to authority is only one effect or one type of the more general repudiation of values. In order to be nihilistic, according to this definition, it is not enough to negate (ignore or deny) the value of a specific difference, for example, between voting to this or that party, or taking this or that route, or adopting this or that way of living. One becomes nihilistic by denying the value of a whole spectrum of differences within a given realm or a given world, for example, all political parties, all routes in the region, or all modes of living, thus denying the difference between voting and not-voting, between moving and not-moving, living or notliving. However, the discursive act that affects an entire realm is performed with respect to a distinct position from which the realm may be grasped as a whole. The nihilistic act implies closure: one must have in mind the entire political spectrum in a given country, or even all political systems in which voting is an option to assert one’s indifference to voting; it may be the case that there is no difference between moving and not moving within a certain region and yet there is a value to the difference between staying and not staying in that region; in order to become indifferent to life itself, one must have in mind all possible forms of living, at least all those which one may strive to assume. There may always be a point beyond which the nihilist hesitates, because a certain value, small perhaps but greater than zero appears. The nihilist discursive act tacitly implies or explicitly refers to a whole realm whose boundaries are more or less recognizable. This holds even when the realm to which the nihilistic negation applies encompasses the world in its entirety. For a nihilist discursive act to become possible, the nihilist must imagine himself outside the realm in which the value of differences comes to nihil. Let me call this special standpoint of the nihilist “a transcendent position.” Transcendence refers here to the realm in question. When the realm in question is the world, or life, or being, transcendence assumes its traditional metaphysical meaning. But the logic of transcendence and closure is the same for partial realms as well. Deleuze says something similar in his chapter on Nietzsche’s nihilism: “In the word ‘nihilism,’ nihil does not signify non-being but primarily a value of nil” (Deleuze 1983, 147).

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By transcendent position I mean the position in relation to which all the differences in the affected realm are stripped of their value. For the Preacher in Ecclesiast, it is death. Or perhaps it is the position of the wise “king over Israel in Jerusalem,” who has come to understand that in the face of death “all is vanity and vexation of spirit” (Ecc. 1:2, 9), and even his own Highness, his greatness in wisdom and power, can produce no valuable difference (Ecc. 1:12–17). In the world of Brothers Karamazov, this position is occupied by Ivan who follows the logic of his atheism to its final conclusion and stands at the empty place of God. In Kafka’s Trial, the position from which no legal difference can be stabilized and all such differences lose their value and significance is not that of Ka’, entangled as he is in the web of law, but rather of the narrator who can freely move in and out of the realm of law (or of Ka’s world, if we read the law as a metonym for Ka’s world as a whole). This position, which actually merges with that of the reader, is achieved through the suspension of the advent of sense and reason, the deferment of the responses to all the queries, perplexities, and puzzlements that unfold throughout the novel. In all three examples, the transcendent position is empty, a vanishing point of reference that once used to serve as the basis of all values and now can maintain its very distinction only through the memory of a loss. The nihilist effect is the result of that loss. However, the opposite case is also possible: the emergence of a new transcendent position that introduces a new constitutive difference, and delineates a realm within which the value of differences is annulled. This is precisely what happens with the appearance of the “word of the Cross” in Paul’s Epistles. From the point of view of the Cross, its messianic promise and pressing time, the earthly world of human affairs becomes that realm in which established differences and distinctions lose their value—“there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Paul actually applies to the human world what the prophets before him applied to the realm of deities and their worship. When the prophets demanded to worship one invisible God and abandon all other forms of rites, they annihilated the value of differences among the various gods of other peoples and the many ways to worship them. These gods who became idols could still maintain some of their power—as it was the case even for Paul (I Corinthians 10:19–21), but the value of the differences among them has been totally revoked. In a similar but more explicit and pronounced fashion, Paul revokes the differences among all social states and classes: “let those who

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have wives live as though they have none [hos me]; and those who mourn as if they were not mourning…” (I Corinthians 7:29–31). The nihilistic gesture recurred in Paul in other contexts. In fact, it was encapsulated in the very address to the gentiles: “I am speaking to you Gentiles” (Romans 11:13). The term “gentiles” marks in Paul, explicitly and systematically, the negation of differences among the particular ethne (people, e.g., Egyptians, Greeks) (Rosen Zvi and Ophir, forthcoming). When viewed from the position of the coming Messiah, the term ethne has lost its ethnic connotation, which is the precise meaning derived from the value of differences among different ethnic groups. The differences among gentiles come to nothing, the nothingness of their non-Jewishness. The same gesture that separates gentiles from Jews annihilates all differences among particular gentiles with respect to Jesus Messiah. Paul may have exercised nihilist acts more often and more emphatically than others but for the purpose of my analysis here he is but another example. My point here is to show that the nihilistic act and attitude do not have to wait for the death of God to be revealed as such, and as the example of the gentile shows, that they may be applied to different realms, even in the context of Christianity, at the very moment of its birth. In fact, once understood as discursive operation, nihilism may be dissociated from the history of any particular religion.2 Abstracted from this privileged historical context, the special relation between atheism—considered as a late phase within the history of monotheism—and nihilism appears as contingent and may assume many forms or no form at all. Nihilism is certainly helpful for characterizing and explaining certain moments within the histories of religious and metaphysical systems but is not restricted to these histories. One has to be neither an ardent believer nor an atheist to practice nihilism. The dissociation between nihilism on the one hand and atheism and religious faith on the other is the result of the fact that while the nihilist discursive act is always articulated with respect to a close realm and a transcendent position, the closed realm does not have to be the totality of the entire world, only the totality of a world, and this transcendence need not be that of a God or of his death. Conceived as discursive act, which involves both a gesture and a position, a nihilistic moment is actually implied in every claim about equality among In fact, Nietzsche, who is perhaps more responsible than any other thinker for the close link between nihilism and Christianity, proposes the best example for such dissociation when he speaks of Christianity and Buddhism as two nihilistic religions (e.g., Nietzsche 2005, 20).

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members of a set. For the diabetic person any kind of food that contains sugar is equally forbidden and all differences of taste, ingredients, and calories among these food items lose their value. At the theatre entrance all ticket holders are equally accepted and no difference among them counts. At an even more basic and trivial level, the equality of many different signifiers of the same signified (the letter “a” for example), implies indifference to all differences of shape and colors among them, and this indifference is condition for the very possibility of any semiotic system. Accepting this “trivialization” of the nihilist moment, one may imagine a continuum between the most common, most restricted nihilistic gesture involved in any claim for equality (including the equality of “the same” signifier), and the most extensive and rare, in fact an epochal, event that takes place with the advent of a new transcendent position: God’s revelation, his concealment, or his death. Somewhat less dramatic and radical, but of exactly the same structure is the revolutionary oment—to the extent that revolutions are conceived as ruptures and associated with new beginnings. The revolutionary is the one from whose vantage point most differences among parties and positions within the existing political order come to nothing and the possibility of a new order is explicitly opened. The most recent examples could be witnessed in the spring and summer of 2011 when demonstrators and activists filled the streets of Cairo, New York, Athens, Madrid, or Tel Aviv. The people who camped in public spaces for weeks and months, with no end in sight, without stating any end that could have been translated into the language of political negotiation, and who refused to play according to the rules of ordinary politics or associate with any of the existing parties or establish one of their own—these people acted as nihilists. They were nihilists with regard to the existing political system and revolutionaries to the extent that they imagined a break with the present order, with or without presenting explicitly an alternative one. At the same time, they also exemplified clearly the difference between these two moments, the nihilist and the revolutionary, which are easily confused. The nihilist moment turns into a revolutionary one only when the position from which differences are annulled or rebuked is capable of establishing itself as a new source of value and a new basis of valuation. If this shift happened in the occupy movement, it was short lived, local, and fragmentary. While the revolutionary moment was fragmentary and ephemeral, in many places the nihilist moment has been carried back into and preserved within the public and private spaces to which most demonstrators have withdrawn since that summer.

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Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the most banal and the most dramatic nihilist moments stands the modern liberal state itself with its principle and institution of universal citizenship. The citizens’ formal equality before the law means revoking the value of all differences of origin and status, culture and nature among a group of governed people. However, the realm regarding which the nihilistic act applies is therefore that of those who take part in the body politic and enjoy the protection of the ruling power. In the modern state at least, not all those governed by the same ruling power are included in the group of equals; the difference between (those governed as) citizens and (those governed as) non-citizens is one of the most basic features of the modern state. The boundary line may be a result of the constitutive violence that initiated the law or of sovereign act through which citizenship is granted or denied by making an exception. The transcendent position with respect to which the value of differences is revoked lies not with the law, be it natural or positive law, but with the sovereign position, fragmented and momentary as it may be.3 The sovereign is the one who, through successful acts of initiating or suspending the law, can grant and deny citizenship, and by this very act is also the one who declares himself, at least for that very moment of the sovereign act, to be outside the law. He or she is a citizen with rights and authority that equal those of no other. His or her authority is selfconstituting, that is, rests on nothing besides the moment of the initiation or exception. Hence the liberal state is nihilistic in a double sense: in revoking all differences among its citizens and in having nothing besides its own sovereign act on which to establish the constitutive difference between citizens and noncitizens. This is precisely the kind of liberal state Israel has always refused to become. By insisting on the value of differences among particular groups within the governed population—not only between citizens and non-citizens but also, or first and foremost, between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and also between orthodox and non-orthodox Jews, Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and all other Israeli Jews—Israel has long undermined the nihilist condition of a liberal system of government.4 One should not assume the existence of a stable position from which “the sovereign” acts, but only moments in which one or several actors, who cannot be designated in advance, position themselves in a sovereign position by effectively initiating the law or declaring its exception. For the initiating or suspending act to be effective, it must be felicitous, that is, solicit acceptance or acquiescence not only from its direct addresses but also from many of those who could challenge it. 4 Consciously, I have omitted the distinction between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, because it has no legal expression (and is therefore most difficult to acknowledge). All other differences are legally and constitutionally grounded. 3

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The formal, discursive conception of nihilism proposed here and the continuum among kinds of nihilism that it allows helps us free nihilism from the primacy of the theological (“religious” or “anti-religious”) while drawing attention to certain structural similarities between various contexts in which nihilistic acts are performed, including the theological and the political. However, this wide spectrum of possible nihilist acts calls for further formal distinctions. The first distinction I would like to propose is that between limited and unlimited nihilism. The limited nihilist stops at the limit of the realm her nihilistic performance circumscribes, for here appears a difference that really makes a difference for her, for example, between citizens and non-citizens, between the brothers in faith and the infidels, or between lovers of truth and those indulging in illusions. Unlimited nihilism, on the other hand, cannot afford to ascribe value to any difference and seeks to be applied to the whole world as well as to itself. For this nihilism, no division within the world can assume any value, not even the division between self and world or between the one who has become aware of the fact that nothing makes a difference and those who are still steeped in illusions about the worth of something. For the unlimited nihilist, the nihilistic performance, the claim and the gesture that announce it, makes no difference. To advocate nihilism is worth as much as not to advocate it, or to advocate an opposite view. This is not an easy position to maintain. Even the Preacher in the Ecclesiast who went all the way to deny the value of the difference between wisdom and folly, between knowing and not knowing the vanity of all things, introduces a difference that makes a difference, the difference of suffering. [5] “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit [‫]רעיון רוח‬. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Ecc. 1:16–19). And soon after, the text finds a true relief from the anxiety of vanity in God. The unlimited nihilist who gives no value to any difference, no matter how real and valuable differences seem to others, is caught in a performative contradiction; the very performance of the nihilistic act presupposes the value of the difference between proclaiming and not proclaiming the nihilistic message, and by implication, the difference between the pragmatic and semantic planes of discourse. Even Bartleby, the scrivener, who “would prefer not to” do anything, had a preference for which he eventually gave his life. Thus, unlikely as it may seem at first sight, unlimited nihilism is inconsistent, while only limited nihilism could be consistent, because only limited nihilism

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respects the condition of closure, which is necessary for the nihilist act. Without giving value to the boundary of the enclosed realm, the nihilist operation could not take place with respect to that realm. Accepting the necessity of closure has far-reaching consequences because it precludes in advance the possibility of appearance or encounter with a difference that would make a valuable difference. Insisting on the impossibility of closure in any given domain is the best argument against nihilism. At the extreme, such a position borders on messianism. Following Derrida, we may call messianic the belief that history is not a closed system in which all differences of justice and injustice comes to nothing, and that a moment in which such a difference would be inscribed into the human world is possible. We may call messianism the belief that such a moment can already be grasped in a way that allows one to view history in its totality and provide a transcending point on the basis of which one may claim that the value of all differences within history come to nothing (Derrida 1994, 65 ff, 1998).5 Let me present my second distinction through another modification of a certain moment in Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism. In his schematic exposition of nihilism in Nietzsche, Deleuze reduces the many forms of nihilism to be found in Nietzsche to two types. The first type, “negative nihilism,” is “the depreciation of life, the negation of this world” in the name of “superior” (or transcendent) values. The second, “reactive nihilism,” is the dialectical negation and radicalization of the first type. Now God is thought to be dead and with it the whole “supersensible world” of “highest values” is denied while life is still and ever more depreciated. Life “continues in a world without values, stripped of meaning and purpose, sliding even further toward its nothingness” (Deleuze 1983, 147–148). For Nietzsche, who considers nihilism as an effect of different states and forms of a degenerated will to power, negative nihilism is the effect of “a will to deny, to annihilate life,” while reactive nihilism is “not a will to nothingness but ultimately a negation of all will” (Deleuze 1983, 147–148). There are many modern thinkers who may exemplify this conception of Messianism, but in Derrida’s context the most important is Levinas, for whom there can be no moral difference without “the eschatological vision" [that] breaks with the totality of wars and empires. Without the absolute exteriority of the infinitely other the totality of being comes down to an endless series of violent acts in which everything rest on war and all empires, in fact all human institutions are the same. Consider this passage from the opening of Totality and Infinity:

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War is not only one of the ordeals—the greatest of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory … being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought … every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same. (Levinas 1969, 21–23)

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If we bracket this last claim about the origin of the nihilist act, which is also the basis for origin of the dialectic of nihilism, we are left with one realm— that of this life and this world—and two transcendent positions from which nihilism is applied to that realm. In the former case, which Nietzsche calls negative and I would like to call simply straightforward nihilism, the value of all differences in a certain realm comes to nothing through a relation to some transcendent entity. The moment of revoking the value of differences rests on a stable ground—God, the Messiah, the law or the sovereign, a clear and distinct idea, or even an end that sanctifies all means and annihilates the moral differences among them. In the latter case, which Nietzsche calls reactive and I would like to call inverted nihilism, values are assigned to differences, but this very act of differentiation is found to rest on nothing. Once the vanity or vacuity of their ground is demonstrated, these values are revoked or annulled. It matters little for the critic that the nihilistic moment is denied or repressed by the believer who is now accused of being a nihilist. Nihilism in this case is not necessarily a matter of taking a conscious position, for one may be totally unaware of it; it is rather a matter of ontology: the presence of nothingness at the heart of a certain realm of being that affects its inner differentiation. The assumption here is that the groundlessness of the ground annuls the value of differences. The nihilist discursive act, in this case, is not performed by the one accused of nihilism but by the one who reveals the truth of the former’s position. Much of the modern discussion of nihilism, from Jacobi through Nietzsche and Heidegger to Vattimo and Connor seems to fall under this category, but now it should be clear that this tradition of thought is far from exhausting the possibilities of the concept.6 I believe that the two distinctions just presented may serve us to map the terrain where the term nihilism has been an acceptable currency, reconstruct its changing discursive formations, and reveal some unexpected links and affinities within it. But in the context of the present discussion I would like to use the last two distinctions for constructing a thought experiment that would hopefully serve three objectives: it would demonstrate the usefulness of the above distinctions; it would introduce a new dramatic element to the discussion of nihilism, but this time without involving God or His death; and it would finally, albeit briefly, put my analysis in contact with some pertinent Cunnigham provides the most impressive analysis and exposition of inverted nihilism in which “nothing becomes something” (Cunningham 2002), but he ignores the possibility of straightforward nihilism.

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political questions. I would like to introduce a case of nihilism that applies to the world as a whole and is nevertheless a case of limited nihilism; it is also a case of inverted nihilism that is nevertheless conscious, and even though it relates to the whole world, it should not necessarily lead to resignation and inaction. Imagine there is no God, there is no heaven too. Imagine that this God is not dead or absent but that simply and radically he is no longer part of our imagination and that all the memories of his figure and its many deeds are no more than fossils testifying on the cultures that worshiped him. Imagine that this forgetfulness of the possibility of a God does not give rise to a sense of loneliness, for everybody knows that we are not alone in this world but rather share it with others, human and non-humans, animals, plants, and viruses, and even some half-animated machines. In this world we share numerous artifacts, which other men and women have made, together with the images, stories, and theories they have construed. This world is also populated with an abundance of stuff, people, animals, artifacts, and signs of which we know nothing and which no story, theory, map, or picture of ours can exhaust, and we are fully aware of this. Now imagine that this world, in which we dwell and which we share, will soon come to an end. This end will be complete, no one would be saved. This end is imminent; there is no God to save us and there is nothing we can do about it. We know that the end is imminent because we trust our scientists, historians, and sociologists, who tell us about rapid, accelerated climate changes and their effect on the environment, about the negligence and carelessness with which governments and corporations deal with environmental risks and how they tend to exacerbate them, and about the destructive forces humans have accumulated and the meager means they have employed in order to check and control the use of these forces. Imagine that for all these reasons it becomes clear that soon, say within a few months, the end would come and there is nothing we can do to avert or postpone this fate. Once the imminent end of the world is realized, all differences among human actions, modes of conduct, governmental policies, plans, and dreams lose their value and significance. Some people may still believe that the question of how to die (alone and together) is no less important—and now in fact much more important—than the question of how to live, and that there are moral and ethical differences among different ways of dying. There are at least just and unjust ways to distribute the suffering and agony of the last months. But these differences too would soon come to nothing; there would be no witness to recall and tell

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about them, nobody would ever care that and how we are dying, together with the entirety of our civilizations. Some people would insist that it still matters how to die, alone and together, and that the difference between the present of those still living and the future of total destruction makes all the difference in the world, the very difference created by the existence of the world, even if this is a difference that would last for a few months only. But this insistence would only affect the scope of the nihilistic act without being able to avoid its far-reaching consequences. The realm affected by the nihilist act would include everything related to the ongoing business of the living, the sustaining of institutions, labor and commerce, the arts and the sciences, in short everything except for the preparations for the coming end. The imminent end of the world thus appears as a transcendent point for a limited and consistent nihilism. If the end of the world is imminent, nothing really matters, except perhaps for the just distribution of suffering in the time that remains. It would soon become clear that all we have and do is in vain. This clarity itself, or any attempt to pronounce and announce it, would make no difference either; it is also part of the vanity, which can now be anticipated and demonstrated. And yet we have just announced it. And we did it on the basis of a clear difference between knowledge and superstition. If the end of the world is a meaningful idea, it is only because we are convinced that unlike the alarmist apocalyptic prophecies of previous generations, ours are based on reliable sources of knowledge and valid methods of analysis and are therefore trustworthy. But conviction is not enough; our desperate nihilism needs absolute certainty. The nihilism just described can be justified only as long as one assumes a full closure of the world that precludes any possibility of unexpected events capable of averting or significantly postponing its coming doom. The nihilist act and position collapse precisely when one realizes the impossibility of this certainty and of the closure on which it rests. The conditions described in this thought experiment are not far from the preset predicament of the human species and its world. Or rather, how fair they are is an open question, part of the uncertainty that allows—or rather forces— us to use the end of the world as a transcendent point without succumbing to nihilistic conclusions. The state of our knowledge is such that we cannot be sure about the imminent end of the world—or a world that enables the continuation of our civilization at least—but we cannot rule it out either. It may be more comfortable, perhaps more comforting to say the inverse: even if we can’t trust our sciences, we can’t rule out the bad news brought to us by the priests and prophets of knowledge. We are unable to estimate how plausible their predictions are, but

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we can understand that the imminent end of the world is a real possibility whose probability is yet unknown. Hence some human actions make all the difference in the world. They make a difference because they may be those that determine the very existence of the world we share. The same goes for every human institution, every social movement, and every theory. What matters is how each one of these may contribute to the end of the world—or to its sustainability. All other aspects of our vita activa would come to nothing. The end of the world has become a new transcendent position from which the values of many differences are annulled, while a new set of valuable differences is introduced at the same time. These new values are made of nothing—or rather of the conjunction of two forms of nothingness: the end of the world and the groundlessness of our reason and knowledge. But the nothingness of the transcendent point is not revealed through loss of faith or awakening of rational consciousness. It is even not postulated as such. All one needs is to use the limited knowledge we have and assert its possibility, a possibility that cannot be denied any longer. And it is this possibility of radical annihilation that makes a difference. What difference it makes is never clear enough. From the point of view of what must be done to avert or postpone the end of the world, the value of all the rest may be partly or entirely revoked, but since we cannot be certain about what must be done, the imperative to save the world, like anything else within the world, must be negotiated and cannot be assumed as a transcendent law. Only the possibility is transcendent and given as such and it calls us for action, but it never tells us what should be done or not be done. This remains part of the immanent, never-ending business of living together, of thinking, talking, and acting together. The possibility of the end of the world reveals a choice and a responsibility: we, that is, those of us who prefer to share this world rather than perish with it, are responsible in various ways and to various degrees for the very distinction— and distance—between this world and its end. Before the appearance of the end of the world as a real possibility, this choice was not ours for there were not two options to choose from. Even the responsibility was not ours, because without the relevant knowledge and without a God to fear and worship, we could not have imagined that our actions could endanger the world as a whole. But now, when the possibility of the end has been acknowledged, choosing the world over its end has become the ground for the possibility of any other choice and being responsible for the world has become the condition for any other form of responsibility. The choice may still be that of isolated individual

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but the responsibility is shared by many, if not by all, at least all those who are always already responsible for each other, regardless of their choice. The values of the differences among multiple ways of assuming responsibility for this difference cannot be determined, let alone revoked from any single position transcendent to this world; rather, they are up for grab, objects of contest, struggle, and competition among all those who share this world together. The nihilist, that is, the one who insists on revoking the values of all differences among various courses of actions and modes of life, has excluded himself from the web of relations among those who have affirmed their world-sharing and their responsibility for the world they share. We do not have to place ourselves at the very edge of being in order to understand this. Although the thought experiment presented here is far from being a mere fiction, the end of the world does not have to be interpreted as a cataclysmic event involving the destructive forces of a thoroughly socialized nature and a naturalized humanity. It may also be—and it has often already become—the result of political powers that destroy what Hannah Arendt called “the public realm and the space of appearance,” which are the “life blood of human artifice.” By emptying the public realm of free speech and action, these political powers turned the world from “a human artifice” into “a heap of unrelated things,” within which human affairs become “as floating, as futile and vain as the wandering of nomad tribes” (Arendt 1958, 204). For Arendt, it is neither the death of God nor the physical end of the world, but rather the loss of trust in the world, or of the capability to have a world, that gives rise to the nihilistic moment. It is this loss and not the emergence or disappearance of a transcendent point of reference that revokes the values of differences. The expectation that value would be based on some transcendent ground instead of being created, assigned, and reevaluated in an endless process of conflict, contest, and negotiation among multiple men and women is futile. It is nothing but an expression of giving up the shared world in which values are created and assigned. Her reference for such nihilism is “the Melancholy wisdom of Ecclesiastes.” Quoting its first lines, she adds: [That this melancholy] does not necessarily arise from specifically religious experience; but it is certainly unavoidable wherever trust in the world as a place fit for human appearance, for action and speech, is gone. Without action to bring into the play of the world the new beginning of which each man is capable by virtue of being born, “there is no new thing under the sun.” Without speech to materialize and memorialize, however tentatively, the “new things” that appear

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and shine forth, “there is no remembrance;” without the enduring permanence of human artefact, there cannot be any remembrance of things that are to come…. (Arendt 1958, 204)

Ultimately, nihilism is not the result of the fact that values have no transcendent, solid ground, but of the fact that the space in which men and women can come together and freely compete and negotiate over their differences has been destroyed and therefore absolute closure and the exclusion of the unexpected can be imagined, imposed, and trusted.7 Whatever threatens this space must be opposed and rejected, removed or avoided. From within the depth of his performative contradiction, the nihilist may insist on claiming that there is no value in having a world that allows the creation of values (and meaning, and sense, and truth), that nothing distinguishes this world from its absence. Arendt would respond by telling him what are the conditions of having a world in which his claim may be heard, make sense, and be remembered.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cunningham, Conor. 2002. Genealogy of Nihilism. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. “Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” In Religion, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida, 1–78. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. NewYork: Vintage Books. ———. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Ophir, Adi and Ishay Rosen Zvi. Forthcoming. “Paul and the Invention of the Goy.” Jewish Quarterly Review. Speaking of citizens and refugees in the modern state, Arendt famously formulated the minimal condition of human political existence as “the right to have rights.” In a similar vein, we may speak about the rejection of consistent nihilism—the value of being able to create and assign values—as the minimal condition for having and sharing a human world.

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Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle Bülent Diken

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? Much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face. Melville 1998, 339 This is how Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, describes the impossibility of describing Moby Dick. The inhuman whale, in all its indifference, is a monster, a “Leviathan,” which stands for the “heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” Thus it is sublimated as an unspeaking, silent God with no face, with no promise of meaning, as an already dead God, which therefore cannot be killed (Melville 1998, 175, 310). And in as much as Ishmael cannot describe Moby Dick, Ahab, “chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world” (Melville 1998, 167), cannot kill it. As such, Melville’s Moby Dick is a metaphor for an absurdity grounded in the perception of an immanent world that does not possess a transcendent meaning or generate values by itself. The first task of thinking and action in the face of such absurdity is to affirm its existence, rather than denying it. Or, in Nietzsche’s words, what is necessary is to accept “existence as it is, without meaning or aim” (Nietzsche 1967, 35–36). To think or to act otherwise amounts to nihilism, that is, an inability to accept the world as it is, resenting the fact that the world is devoid of a goal, unity, or meaning. To be able to endure the meaninglessness and the chaos of the world, the nihilist tries to endow it with meaning, imposing an illusionary totality upon it (Nietzsche 1967, 12; see also Lebovic’s chapter in

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this volume on the origins of nihilism). Hence, for Nietzsche, nihilism is, in its origin, the invention of monotheistic religions, the invention of a transcendent God, in order to escape into a supra-sensory realm beyond earthly life, a realm that promises consolation for the inherent absurdity of the world. As against this nihilism, one must insist on immanence: ours is a world without an external cause or a final purpose, a world of becoming (see Nietzsche 1967, 35–36). This does not mean, however, that one should resign to the absurd. Then, how can one negate the absurd without becoming a nihilist? Revolt, at a first approximation, is the answer to this question.

Radical and passive A concept grounded in the problem of nihilism, revolt is a “leap into flight” out of the absurd (Camus 1953, 270). In this sense revolt is productive; it produces value. But it is also destructive for what is at stake here is of a pragmatic nature, the principle according to which values are produced. Therefore, every revolt inevitably involves a practical destruction, the annihilation of existing nihilistic dogmas. To be sure, this rebellious, destructive “no” is partly a rational gesture (see Marcuse 1955, 26). However, reason is not the last word on revolt. Revolt is also a question of will and drive, an act that does not justify itself through reason. Revolt has its own (virtual) sense; it has no other (actual) reasons. In this sense, the will to negate is only one side of revolt. Its other side is affirmation. Each dramatization, each repetition of revolt produces a difference, a creative excess, that is, new values, which is also a Dionysian transmutation of pain into joy, of hatred into love (Deleuze 1983, 173). Yet, if revolt ceases to involve such an affirmative moment, the tension between the virtual potentialities and the actual reality can only be resolved into an abstract nothingness. Hence the test of revolt: the transformation of will into creativity. Then, the will is not the last word on revolt either: To redeem the past and to transform every “It was” into an “I wanted it thus!”— that alone I call redemption! Will—that is what the liberator and bringer of joy is called: thus I have taught you, my friends! But now learn this as well: The will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates: but what is it that fastens and fetters even the liberator? “It was”: that is what the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an

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angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire—that is the will’s most lonely affliction. (Nietzsche 1961, 161)

Insofar as revolt is “redemption” from absurdity, it cannot be based only on will. In case of such an attempt, there are two dangers that lie in wait for the “prisoner.” First, the will can release itself in a “foolish” way, through nihilistic revenge, which is nothing other than “the will’s antipathy towards time”: one concludes that, since one cannot undo the past, “everything deserves to pass away” (Nietzsche 1961, 162). Ahab, for instance, in his delirious revolt against Moby Dick, is devastated by his own hatred. He is prepared, “for hate’s sake,” to risk everything, including his crew and his ship, to spit his “last breath” at the whale (Melville 1998, 507). But his passion for revenge destroys Ahab himself before Moby Dick. What is at issue here is the ambivalence of event: one can “burn” with fire as well as “leap” with it (Melville 1998, 450). “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee” (Melville 1998, 380). But there is a second, equally sinister danger: “realizing” that no deed can be undone, the will pacifies itself; willing becomes not-willing (Nietzsche 1961, 162). This is the case with Ishmael. If Ahab is a “woe that is madness,” Ishmael is the “wisdom that is a woe” (Melville 1998, 380; see also Friedman 1963, 451). If Ahab is ready to sacrifice actual existence for the sake of touching the void, the virtual, Ishmael is willing to sacrifice the virtual to be able to open up a space for himself in the actual. He perceives that his own individuality is merged “in a joint stock company” on the ship, in society, and, on this basis, he can develop a critique of Ahab’s spiteful destructiveness (Melville 1998, 287). Yet Ishmael, the only member of the crew who is saved and thus returns to the land, “does not offer an alternative point of view to Ahab nor succeed in the quest for truth where Ahab fails” (Friedman 1963, 91). For Ishmael, like Nietzsche’s “last man,” time is an empty movement just as life is a pointless process, a “burning ship,” moving toward an ultimate catastrophe (Friedman 1963, 86; Melville 1998, 378). And this lack of perspective is also a lack of will. After all, interpretation, the ability to construct a perspective, new values, requires a subject, a personality, that can actively evaluate the world. Yet, in modernity God is dead, and action has become impossible. In an indifferent, absurd world, in which he no longer can believe, Ishmael turns into an alienated, passive spectator: The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief … Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. (Deleuze 1989, 171–172)

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The problem of revolt against nihilism is to reestablish this link. If this link is to be reestablished through the reaffirmation of this world, of “belief ” in it, Ishmael is not able to make this leap of faith. Hence, just as Ahab devalues the actual world, Ishmael devalues values as such. Ahab’s leap leads him to selfdestruction, Ishmael’s inability to risk such a leap condemns him to passivity: radical nihilism versus passive nihilism, two inappropriate answers to the question of nihilism, two unsuccessful attempts at revolt. If, in its origin, nihilism is a will to escape from the immanent “chaos” to a transcendent, illusory world, with modernity, or, with the “death of God,” this originary nihilism divides itself into two: radical and passive nihilism. The first insists on transcendence by taking the negation of this world to its logical extreme, the annihilation of the actual; the second, becoming content with the actual world, gives up its virtual dimension. There is therefore a strange symmetry between the two nihilisms, between (Ahab’s) willing nothingness and (Ishmael’s) annihilation of will. Two opposite tendencies juxtaposed to each other in the same social space, paradoxically united in disjunction, disjointed in union. Thus Nietzsche’s definition of a nihilist reads like this: “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist” (Nietzsche 1967, 318). If existing values are devalued while, at the same time, this world is preserved, we encounter passive nihilism, or, a “world without values” (Deleuze 1983, 148). If, on the other hand, despite realizing that one’s supreme values are not realizable, one still desperately clings to them, we confront radical nihilism: values without a world.

“Has been,” “to come” Revolt, then, must break this deadlock between radical and passive nihilism, and it can do so only on the basis of affirmation. What is crucial is the passage from the will to affirmation, the central concern of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return: to propose fidelity to immanence as the source of all values, “remaining true to the earth” (Nietzsche 1961, 42). It is only by saying “yes” to all that “has been” and to everything “to come” that immanence can be affirmed absolutely. A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trustful fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. (Nietzsche 1969, 103)

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As such, the temporality of the eternal return promises a redemption, which is very different from redemption in its Christian version. This cosmology goes against the monotheistic thesis that time had a beginning and will have an end, that the world was created and will be annihilated on the Judgment Day. In contrast, Zarathustra preaches a world that is in becoming, a world one should return to in order to overcome nihilism (Hass 1982, 224). In the doctrine of eternal return, there is no conclusion to historical time. The temporality of eternal return is fundamentally opposed to the understanding of time as a linear flow, of history as continuous progress. Indeed, for Nietzsche, nihilism itself signifies a “regress” rather than “progress,” a situation in which reactive (passive) forces triumph over the active ones (see Nietzsche 1967, 55). If it is the “same” world, the world of difference and becoming, that eternally repeats itself and gives birth to nonlinear change, what matters in such a world is trying to seize each moment, to be fully present in it, that is, to repeat. Repetition, the event, requires both a forgetting of the past, a disconnection from the given, and simultaneously a “belief ” in a connection to what is to come. Thus Nietzsche describes the eternal return as a “gateway” that connects two opposing paths, two eternities: the past and the future, what has been and what is to come (Nietzsche 1961, 178). The gateway is of course the present moment. Eternal return is about following the two paths “further and further,” until they cease to be in opposition, until the present appears like “a straight line, limitless in either direction” (Deleuze 1990, 165). Through this movement, the “future” ceases to be something that can be achieved by going forward in chronological time. Rather, one moves into the future by retracing, reinterpreting the past with a view to raising it to a higher level, through the deconstruction and reappropriation of the past (see Rosen 1995, 188). Life becomes meaningful only through repetition. The ability to repeat is to mark life with the sign of eternity. “Was that life? Well then! Once more!” (Nietzsche 1961, 178). In this sense the creation of value in an immanent, meaningless world is a matter of choice, of affirmation, without any objective ground. Nevertheless, it is possible to live in a world without values, as the “last man” does, and be content with it. The life of the last man is in fact a life “as it is,” a life without the possibility of change or a life of an eternal chain of “absurdities” (Hass 1982, 216). His is a world in which everything is repeated as bare repetition, without difference or consequence: bare repetition as a “curse,” a sign of resignation vis-à-vis the absurd (Nietzsche 1967, 38; see also Ophir and Ben-Shai’s chapters in this volume). Repetition as eternal return,

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in contrast, aims at overcoming such bare repetition. It is what enables an antinihilist revolt that promises new values.

Cheerful separation As is well known, Benjamin depicts “history” as a pile of pseudo-events, the indistinct flow of chronological, “empty” time as a catastrophe. Hence his modernity is a mobile hell, the ideal of which is bare repetition. In turn, only redemption can “fill” time by linking the present to the whole of the past (Benjamin 1999, 245). Redemption, revolution, is a “leap into the past,” an act of tearing “the past from its context, destroying it, in order to return it, transfigured, to its origin” (Agamben 1999, 152; Benjamin 1999, 253–255). Thus, if history repeats itself as farce, if in pseudo-history the tragic reappears as comedy, this is not necessarily a reason for melancholic detachment but rather an occasion for a joyful separation—history has this course “so that humanity should part with its past cheerfully” (Marx 1975, 179; see also Agamben 1999, 154). “Happiness” is a cheerful separation from pseudo-history, from bare repetition. In this context, Benjamin draws a sharp distinction between the empty time of chronology and the time of the event. The time of revolution is the messianic time. But he insists that there is no direct path from theology to the political (Benjamin 1979b, 155). Nothing actual can relate to the virtual by itself and the actual cannot be constituted on the idea of the virtual. This, however, does not mean that there is no mediation between the two. Kairos is what mediates the two domains. The moment when the actual world “touches” the virtual domain, “when they interlock,” is the kairos (Taubes 2009, 68). As such, kairos, the time of revolution, is opposed to chronological time. But it is not external to it. Rather, it is an “operational” time internal to chronology, transforming it from within (Agamben 2005a, 68). As the temporal dimension of the event, kairos signifies the timing of actualization, that is, the recognition, articulation, and the decision to seize the moment. It is the moment of opportunity, which can be grasped by a strategic decision, by an untimely intervention, on the basis of reading the symptoms, signs, available in a given situation; “acting into time to change the course of time” (Dillon 2008, 13; see also Lebovic’s chapter in this volume). But why, in the first place, is it necessary to seize the moment? It is necessary because there is a promise involved in kairos: the promise of the new. Significantly,

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however, this promissory aspect of kairos is not necessarily messianic in a religious sense; kairos is not the Messiah (see Dillon 2008, 14). Messianism is not necessarily a religious experience. What is irreducible in this “messianism without religion” is an experience of the “emancipatory promise” (Derrida 1994, 74). This promise is an “absolutely undetermined messianic hope,” that is, its content is not, in contrast to religion, determined. In this respect there is a crucial difference between religious repetition and the repetition specific to nonreligious messianism. In religious repetition, a pre-established identity (e.g., the child of Abraham, the resurrected body, the recovered self) returns and does so “once and for all”; in the eternal return, in contrast, what returns returns “for an infinite number of times,” without bringing back any readymade identity, without restoring the self, the world, and God (see Deleuze 1990, 301). The “alterity” of that which returns in nonreligious messianism cannot be foreseen; what is “to come,” the future, remains unpredictable, that is, new. The Last Judgment will not occur. Instead, the messianic return demands a “messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance” (Derrida 1994, 81). Nonreligious messianism is a “call,” a “promise” of the new independent of the monotheistic religions, for it holds to the antinihilist belief that “faith without religion” is possible (Derrida 2004).

The double of kairos Can power “seize” or capture kairos, too? This is what Benjamin suggests by juxtaposing two versions of the state of exception: the actual state of exception in which we live and a “real” one, which can redeem us from the first (Benjamin 1999, 248). There is, in other words, a homology between kairos (as the time of the event—of revolt) and the state of exception (see Agamben 2005b, 2). The reoccurrence of nature within society, the state of exception, is the necessary background for political theology. And crucially in this respect, the three characteristics that the law displays in the state of exception—the disappearance of the inside–outside divide, the unobservability of the law, and its unformulability—appear in the kairological deactivation of the law, too. Paul’s messianism is a case in point. Here, the messianic figure of the law, “the law of faith,” which can be rendered as “justice without law,” also suspends the law through deactivation, while this deactivation does not eliminate the law,

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reducing it to nothing, but preserves it, opening up a space of indeterminacy between the inside and the outside (Agamben 2005a, 100). The consequence of this is the unobservability of the law, which finds its expression in the radical shortening of Moses’s commandment (“Do not desire the woman, the house, the slave, the mule … of thy neighbor”) by Paul as “Do not desire” (Agamben 2005a, 108). Since this is not really a commandment, what follows is the Kafkaesque impossibility of observing or formulating a clear prohibition; “instead, the law is only the knowledge of guilt” (Agamben 2005a, 108). And significantly, such unobservability can only be restored by faith. Thus Paul divides the law into two, into a this-worldly law of sin on the one hand and a law of faith on the other, thus rendering it inoperative and unobservable—he “can then fulfill and recapitulate the law in the figure of love” (Agamben 2005a, 108). Following this, the political task is not to restore the link between exception and the law, reaffirming the primacy of the law, for instance by trying to bring the state of exception back to the domain of the law. The state of exception is not an accidental addition to the workings of power but its central aspect, its fundamental secret. What is necessary is to bring to light this secret, to illuminate the tension between life and the law (Agamben 2005b, 86–87). Regarding this tension, the contrast between Schmitt and Benjamin is illuminating. Benjamin divides the concept of exception into two by juxtaposing to Schmitt’s exception another, an exception to exception itself, or, “a real exception.” Whereas Schmitt wants to legitimize state power, or counterrevolution in general, Benjamin criticizes it. Schmitt’s thought is katechontic, conservative; Benjamin’s eschatological, revolutionary. Whereas in Schmitt exception is the political kernel of the law, it becomes revolutionary or “divine” violence in Benjamin. If mythic violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood. (Benjamin 1979a, 150–151)

Like God’s judgment, revolutionary violence strikes the privileged without warning, annihilates without threat, but, in annihilation, also “expiates” the guilt of bare life, purifying the guilty (not of guilt but) of law as such: “mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living” (Benjamin 1979a, 150–151). But what is the precise meaning of “guilt” here?

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Nihilism as government Just as sovereignty, governmentality too is rooted in theology. Significantly in this respect, through Christian theology (at the end of the classical civilization), the Greek term oikonomia has moved into the theological field, signifying a divine design, the “divine plan of salvation” (Agamben 2011, 20). As such, oikonomia is the theological answer to the question of what is to be done in a world ontologically created by God and must be redeemed by the religious praxis of a separate person, the Son. This is also to say that the economy, praxis, has no foundation in ontology (Agamben 2011, 65). However, praxis (the Son) must be related to ontology (God). God and his government of the world must be brought together. Hence the significance of the concept of free will, which, Nietzsche insisted, was “fabricated” by monotheistic religions to make humanity “accountable” to a transcendent God (Nietzsche 1969, 53). Through this concept, which is “in agreement with the theological oikonomia” (Agamben 2011, 56), the Christian monotheism seeks to overcome the Gnostic split between two Gods, and to unite God’s creation and government of the world. In this sense, insofar as it sought to reconcile a transcendent God, which is inoperative in relation to the existing world, and a savior/redeemer as the ruler of the world, Christian theology is not only political but also economic-managerial from the start (Agamben 2011, 66). The apolitical paradigm of governmentality has political consequences. Crucially, this relation between ontology and praxis, sovereignty and governmentality does not constitute a dialectic that results in a synthesis. Rather, it constitutes “a bipolar machine, whose unity always runs the risk of collapsing and must be acquired again at each turn” (Agamben 2011, 62). Or, a disjunctive synthesis, in which the two poles can neither be united nor fully separated. The King/God reigns but does not administer, a task beyond his dignity. At the same time, however, his power cannot be separated from him. That is, the two poles are not completely unrelated either; they operate together, within the same “functional system” (Agamben 2011, 79). Here we also arrive at the point at which political and economic theology intersect: glory. Power needs the spectacle. Acclamations, protocols, ceremonies, exclamations of praise, often accompanied by ritually repeated bodily gestures, are indispensable to power because they form a public opinion and express consensus (Agamben 2011, 169–170). In its Judaic origin, glory signifies the manifestation, becoming visible of God as a consuming (thus blinding) fire. In

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this sense it is an “objective” aspect of the divine. At the same time, however, it has a “subjective” dimension: the glorification of this divine reality by God’s subjects, by human praxis. In this sense, “glorification stems from the glory that, in truth, it founds” (Agamben 2011, 199). Glory, the spectacle, is what establishes the link between the Kingdom and oikonomia, between sovereignty and governmentality. Thus it does not disappear with increasing modernization; rather, it shifts to the domain of public opinion, or consensus, as the modern way of acclamation: “Contemporary democracy is a democracy that is entirely founded upon glory, that is, on the efficacy of acclamation, multiplied and disseminated by the media beyond all imagination” (Agamben 2011, 256). Ours is a democracy of the spectacle. Let us open a parenthesis regarding the spectacle here. If the originary, religious nihilism, which, according to Nietzsche, negates this world by juxtaposing it to a heavenly, “true” one, and tries to justify its illusions as reason, truth, supreme values, this is also to say that nihilism is a “philosophy of illusion” (Hass 1982, 16). As is well known, for Marx, too, religion consists in illusion; it is “the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve round himself ” (Marx 1957, 42). Religion has always been instrumental for humans to articulate real social and political distress, but even when it expresses a reality in this way, religion is the “opium of the people” (Marx 1957, 42). Thus “only lack of illusions in the head of workers could correspond to their lack of property” (Engels 1957, 270). Significantly, however, despite its genealogical tie with monotheistic religions, nihilism cannot be reduced to them. “Illusion” does not disappear with modernity or secularization; the end of religious nihilism is not, automatically, the end of nihilism. Indeed, this primordial link between nihilism and illusion remains a constant today. In Debord’s “society of spectacle,” for instance, the “spectacle” signifies the manifestation of the commodity form, “the material construction of the religious illusion” (Debord 1983, 20). Yet, while for Debord capitalism is the engine of the spectacle, with Agamben (2011) one can claim that the originary link is not only between capitalism and the spectacle but rather, and more generally, between political theology and oikonomia, and thus between their secularized forms, that is, between sovereignty and governmentality. Then, insofar as contemporary liberal democracy designates consensus politics, it is worth recalling that what is glorified in a neoliberal world in which people can imagine the end of the world but not that of capitalism (see Žižek 2009, 78) is first and foremost capitalism itself. In this regard, it might

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be illuminating to rethink to the relationship between religion and capitalism. After all, theology persists as an active force in modern economy. Capitalism and Christianity are structurally linked together. Weber (2003) discusses the relation between Christianity and capitalism in two directions: on the one hand, the protestant ethic was a cause, a precondition for the development of capitalist economy and culture; on the other, the Protestant Christianity itself was a result of capitalism. The question is though whether a third sphere articulates their relation (see Hamacher 2002, 86). That third sphere is debt, or, guilt. Hence Benjamin insists that capitalism is a religion, a cult religion that does not expiate but produces guilt. An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it to consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt, in order to finally interest him in repentance. (Benjamin 1996, 259)

How is God himself included in guilt? How is debt turned against the creditor himself? Indeed, the “stroke of genius on the part of Christianity” is precisely the invention of a God that sacrifices himself for the guilt of humans, a God that pays himself off: “the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love (are we supposed to believe this?) out of love for his debtor” (Nietzsche 1969, 72)! Just as the religious economy presupposes a guilty god, “capitalism as religion” (Benjamin 1996) presupposes a god in debt. It is through the mechanism of debt (credit) that value begets surplus value, a process that resembles “a god’s genesis out of something that is not,” a god’s self-generation out of nothing (Hamacher 2002, 92). Thus, in Marx, the law of value functions as an abstract law that governs the relations of equivalence among commodities, as a transcendent moment within the immanent relations of equivalence. “Money is therefore the god among commodities” (Marx 1993, 221). The paradox here consists in the movement through which the abstract value becomes totally value-free, or, “valueless:” abstract capital that seeks out further capital accumulation whenever, wherever, regardless of whatever. Ultimately, therefore, the concept of value can say nothing on value, or rather, nothing other than surplus value. In this sense, the capitalist concept of value is nihilistic. The world of capitalism is essentially a world without value. However, this cynicism must not be mistaken as the absence of a religious dimension in capitalism. It is coupled with the cult, with “a strange piety,” which functions like a “spiritualized Urstaat,” enabling the

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illusion that all production in a capitalist society emanates from “God-capital” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 225). Capitalism posits an infinite debt to capital, which is the fetish object, the “body without organs” of the capitalist society. Just as the sovereign miracle in political theology, capital is that which performs miracles in economic theology. Indeed, this “strange piety” also constitutes an eschatology in the sense that capital “is always also an anticipation of an imagined future” (Goodchild 2005, 143). Capital is always something “to come,” the promise of a future-return in the form of profit. And insofar as the promise or the future is linked to credit (credos), one can say that capitalism (does not only level but also) creates beliefs and desires. In this respect capital reveals itself as the truth of oikonomia rather than a deviation from it. Credit, debt to the future, thus appears as kairos, that which mediates ontology and praxis. Religion, says Feuerbach, takes over the best qualities of humans and allocates them to God, affirming in God what is negated in man (Feuerbach 1989, 27). Hence the paradox of religious alienation: the more God is valued, the more human life is devalued. Marx repeats the same logic in 1844 Manuscripts, where he depicts capital as a source of economic alienation: the more wealth the workers produce in capitalism, the poorer they become (Marx 2007, 119). But where does this process originate? The original accumulation, which is not the result of capitalist production but rather the starting point of all accumulation processes, was called by Adam Smith “previous accumulation.” Marx says that “primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology” (Marx 1976, 363). In this fictional phase (reminiscent of the “state of nature” in political theology), we are told, while the diligent and intelligent accumulated wealth, the “lazy rascals” were condemned to poverty, a situation in which they have “nothing to sell except their own skins” (Marx 1976, 363). As such, the starting-point of capital is divorcing the producer from the means of production, his expropriation from the soil. Just as religion captures what is profane and sacralizes it through glorification, capitalism captures the commons and commodifies them through the spectacle. Just as religion demands the infinite increase (subjective glorification as infinite guilt) of what cannot be increased (objective glory of God), capitalism demands infinite accumulation (subjective glorification of capital) of what is beyond human agency (objective glory of abstract capital). In both cases “glorification is … what produces glory” (Agamben 2011, 216, 227). And in

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both cases the paradox is a cover for the fact that the center of the machine is empty. Similarly, in both cases what is at stake is human life, which is inoperative, that is, without purpose (Agamben 2011, 245–246). Its essence is non-utilitarian “play.” The human is “the Sabbatical animal par excellence” (Agamben 2011, 246). What religion does is to capture this inoperativity and inscribe it in a religious sphere by sacralizing it, only to ration it, to partially return it in the form of the “sabbath,” a situation in which all “work,” all economy, ceases to exist and everything falls back upon inoperativity, which eschatology waits for. What capitalism does is to capture the multitude’s inoperativity, its freedom, and inscribe it in a utilitarian sphere, only to partially return it as permitted freedom, as holiday, which is the main promise of work in capitalism. A post-political promise, in which work (hell) is replaced by play (paradise).

The ass festival Toward the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we meet some of Zarathustra’s guests who all think they have “unlearned” from Zarathustra the religious sentiment, the despair that follows from feeling weak in this world and prompts humans to imagine a transcendent heaven in which pain and antagonism no longer exist. Thus, they are in the carnival mood. Yet, Nietzsche makes it clear that killing God is not enough to get rid of him. A materialist, hedonist world is prone to new, this-worldly illusions, even new gods and idols. At one point in the carnival, therefore, the noise abruptly stops and, precisely when they think they have overcome it, the crowd falls back upon a religious mood. “They have all become pious again, they are praying, they are mad!” (Nietzsche 1961, 321). But what they worship is a this-worldly God: an ass. They explain that the ass carries their burden, he is patient, and never says No, indeed he never speaks, and so on. “Better to worship God in this shape than in no shape at all” (Nietzsche 1961, 322). In Zarathustra, it is the “ugliest man,” the passive nihilist, who has murdered God and delivers the tribute to the ass that has “created the world after his own image, that is, as stupid as possible” (Nietzsche 1961, 322). In the contemporary liberal democracy, too, providence takes its cue from men: the ass is embodied in utilitarianism, and the desire for change, for transfiguration, has disappeared into the cry of the ass. Ours is a society that plays one side of the bipolar machine against the

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other, pushing to an extreme the administrative logic of economic theology, to a point of eliminating the transcendent God/Kingdom. In this sense: Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion. (Agamben 2011, 287)

Crucially in this respect, as it generates consensus, the spectacle also functions as the katechon, as that which keeps the event at bay by delaying the “catastrophe.” After all, the straightforward aspect of all counterrevolutionary thought is its definition of the existing world as an invariant and its direct opposition to ideas that promise another world. But in a second, more sinister and more interesting sense, the katechon signifies the revision, internal perversion of, rather than opposition to, eschatological ideas. It designates not merely an external force but a strategic field of formation in which the struggle revolves around appropriating, accommodating, and revising ideas and principles. In this second sense, the possibility of counterrevolution exists within revolution. Thus, in the context of oikonomia, the “economy of mystery” (the economy of the event) constantly risks becoming revised into the “mystery of economy.” While “economy” originally, in Paul for instance, signifies the necessary administration of activities in the service of realizing God’s will, in the Trinitarian theology “economy” itself tends to become “mysterious.” That is, economy coincides with governmentality, thus reconciling a transcendent God with the administration of this world (Agamben 2011, 38–39, 50–51). In this essentially revisionist process, the actual (economy) tends to take place of the virtual (mystery). And in the horizon of “permanent economy” pragmatism dominates and utopian politics is suspended. Let us, to exemplify, turn to contemporary post-politics. As a political way of emptying out the political, post-politics is a particular form of politics in which already recognized groups negotiate interests without challenging the hegemonic relations. Thus consensus is the essence of post-politics, provided that “consensus” is not thought of only as the avoidance of conflict. At a deeper level, it is an agreement regarding the terms of disagreement (see Rancière 2010, 144). That is, consensus allows one to have different opinions, to disagree, criticize, but only in a given framework of sensibility, which is effectively justified each time such permitted critique takes place. Ultimately, therefore, post-politics designates a society that cannot imagine radical events; a society, in which the political loses its constitutive (virtual) dimension and is reduced

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to (actual) governmentality. But this is not the whole story. Despite its negation of “the political,” of antagonistic politics, post-politics is not unrelated to it. So, we are witnessing in post-politics also the revival of sovereignty as a radical, ultrapolitical version of the disavowal of the political by depoliticizing conflicts via direct militarization of politics and sublimation of order as an absolute value in the Schmittian sense (see Žižek 1999). When politics is foreclosed, bare life becomes the main object of politics. Sovereign violence and post-politics are thus complementary ideological operations (Žižek 2008, 34). This uneasy relationship is mediated around an obligatory point of passage: a domesticated, trivialized version of messianism. According to the apocalyptic tradition, worldly powers cannot become “holy,” for the holy is, precisely, the “measure” of the God to come (Taubes 2009, 194). In this radical sense, the idea of messianic apocalypse cannot be really assimilated by sovereignty. Thus it is revised and transformed. A double movement is visible in this context: while it “sacralizes” power through political theology, modernity also “secularizes” eschatology, excluding it by accommodating it (Bradley and Fletcher 2010, 2). This tamed, decaf version of eschatological apocalypse, fit for a passive nihilist society, is also the “blind spot” of contemporary liberal democracy. Consider Fukuyama’s neo-evangelistic “good news” that the “end of history” has arrived, that all regimes in the world, including dictatorships, now evolve toward liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992, xii–xiii, 212). On the one hand, this thesis sacralizes a particular, actual expression of temporal power, the market, turning it into the telos of history (Bradley and Fletcher 2010, 2). But on the other hand, this divinized liberal democracy is distinguished from its empirical manifestations, arguing that it is a “trans-historical,” that is, an infinite, virtual idea that cannot be reduced to its actual, finite manifestations or delegitimized by use of empirical evidence (see Fukuyama 1992, 139; see also Derrida 1994, 86). As such, the eschatologylight does not really exclude the dialectic between the actual and the virtual/ transcendent. Rather, it flattens it so that the “idea” loses its power of destroying and transvaluating what exists, becoming instead the potentiality of an already sacralized liberal democracy. A similar flattening is visible in contemporary social theory. Consider, for instance, the actor-network theory as domesticated version of poststructuralism. The actor-network theory, one of the most popular contemporary theories, insists that action must be understood in terms of “mediation” in a continuous network of associations (Latour 1996a, 237). Society consists only of networks:

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“there is nothing but networks” (Latour 1996b, 370). The social is a “flatland,” which is “only made of lines” (Latour 2005, 172). Therefore, at first sight the actor-network theory sounds close to Deleuze, who also insists that “lines are basic component of things and events” (Deleuze 1995, 33). But whereas Latour’s “lines” are only actual, “actualized virtualities” (Latour 2005, 59), for Deleuze there are always two kinds of lines, actual and virtual, which constantly interact to produce virtualizations of the actual as well as actualized virtualities, without the virtual becoming fully actualized. To be fair, Latour has a concept that is similar to the virtual: “plasma,” which signifies the necessary but incomplete and open-ended background, the “outside,” for every networking activity (Deleuze 2005, 242–243). As that which is “not yet measured, not yet socialized … or subjectified” (Deleuze 2005, 244), plasma cannot be captured by concepts of actuality. Thus the concept in a way affirms the significance of the virtual, or, testifies to the fact that there is more to the world than networks. Crucially, however, this concept is not really operationalized and thus remains a residual category, a kind of ersatz virtuality. In this specific sense, Latour’s ontology is a revisionist ontology, the formula of which could be: Deleuze minus the virtual. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Latour insists on economy: “There is no other world […] there is no longer any particular mystery” (Latour 2010, 35, 97). Indeed, we have never been modern for we have ignored the spectacle, the “factish” point of passage between fiction and reality. We have ignored the spectacle because we have “misunderstood” the second commandment, the ban on images: God did not ask us not to make images (what else do we have to produce objectivity, to generate piety?) but he told us not to freeze-frame, that is, not to isolate an image out of the flows that only provide them with their real—their constantly re-realized, re-represented—meaning. (Latour 2010, 123)

Interestingly, this defense of the image (and thus the spectacle) brings to mind the Byzantine defenses of the icon. Nikephoros, for instance, argues against the iconoclasts, who refer to the second commandment, by claiming that “it is because Jews are by nature idolators that they were ordered not to make graven images” (quoted in Mondzain 2005, 109). In the same way, Latour seeks to turn the iconoclast’s weapon against himself. Consequently, the ban on images is referred to those who cannot distinguish the icon (which represents the divine without emptying it out in the actual image) and idol (which replaces the divine by “freeze-framing”).

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It is as if, since economy is focused on the incarnation of visibilities (e.g., actualization of the virtual), which is indispensable to the administration of the temporal reality, the economic model tends to prioritize actualization. As a consequence, while the “mystery” moves from the side of the virtual/ transcendent to the actual/temporal, the role of virtualization, of counteractualization, is evacuated. Following this, the virtual appears to be exhausted once the act of actualization has taken place, and the dialectic of the actual and the virtual is blurred.

Kairos and counter-actualization An actual event takes two forms. First, the actor actualizes the event by seizing the moment, by saying “here, the moment has come” (Deleuze 1990, 151). There is, however, another aspect of the event, which goes beyond actualization. The actor, too, is transformed in the process. As a result of acting, he deviates from himself, his actual identity, through a process of “counter-actualization” (see Deleuze 1990, 151). The physical actualization of the event in the state of affairs is doubled by the actor through a counter-actualization. And it is precisely through the latter, through a metamorphosis, a transmutation, that the actor becomes “the actor of one’s own events” (Deleuze 1990, 150). One must be transformed, become intoxicated by the moment while one seeks to seize it. One must “become worthy” of the event (Deleuze 1990, 148). In this way, the two sides of the event, together, give us a full definition of ethics: “not to be unworthy of what happens to us” (Deleuze 1990, 149). In this sense kairos is an act that forms one’s ethos, an ethical act: being in the moment, one is formed by the moment. Which is also to say that the decision-making at work in kairos is not merely a strategic, rational act; while one “seizes” the moment, one must also “be seized” by the moment. Confronted with the potentiality of the event, the “promise” of the new, one must be able to affirm this potentiality. To use Nietzsche’s phrase, you become what you are in kairos. Therefore, the problem of kairos is never merely an administrative problem. Kairos requires fidelity too; it demands an appropriate response from the subject that is constituted in the very moment of response. Thus what is really at stake in kairos is to interweave “seizing” with “being seized,” strategic timing of the event with fidelity to the event for without such fidelity “the very opening of the world itself is endangered” (Dillon 2008, 13–14).

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Following this, politics does not need to choose between seizing the moment (economy) and intoxication, being seized by the moment (pure politics). What if, indeed, this is a false dichotomy, thereby a false choice, and therefore a trap for true politics? What if, in other words, the relationship between “utopianism” and “strategic calculation,” for instance, does not necessarily point toward a “split,” an antinomy, but rather to an aporia intrinsic to the temporality of the event, kairos? Both sides of the kairos—strategy and intoxication, calculus and conviction, knowledge and faith—are necessary. Strategy without intoxication (passive nihilism) is as useless as intoxication without strategy (radical nihilism). This is the fundamental problem with conservative and revisionist theories of revolution: they can think of this aporia only in terms of antinomy. Weber, for instance, approaches the “split” between strategy and intoxication as an “antinomy,” as a contradiction between “the ethic of conviction” and “the ethic of responsibility.” Thus, he claims, confronted with the inherent “ethical irrationality of the world” (Weber 1958, 125), all political action has to make a choice between two “opposed maxims:” it can either justify itself with reference to an “ethic of ultimate ends,” to an “absolute ethic” that does not ask questions regarding consequences—for example, the dogmatic Christian act “does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord”—or, assuming the burden of decisionmaking, “follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case, one has to give an account of foreseeable results of one’s actions” (Weber 1958, 120). This is, as Weber formulates it, also a choice between saying “my kingdom is not of this world” and “adaptation” to the sociological reality of modernity, in which case “all talk of ‘revolution’ is farce, every thought of abolishing the ‘domination of man by man’ by any kind of ‘socialist’ social system or the most elaborated form of ‘democracy’ a utopia” (quoted in Callinicos 2007, 22). Weber’s choice is thus ultimately between two renunciations, between renouncing the existing world in the name of an idea or renouncing an idea in the name of the existing world, between values without facts or facts without values, or, between radical nihilism and passive nihilism. Whenever the gap between strategy and intoxication is seen as an antinomy rather than aporia, this “choice” appears as blackmail: either, or. Precisely, therefore, it is necessary to insist on “aporia rather than antinomy” (Derrida 1993, 16). On the one hand, an engagement with the actual, a strategic calculus, is necessary. On the other hand, however, intoxication is equally indispensable for if you lose faith there is no point in engaging in radical politics.

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Both sides of kairos are vital and thus what matters is to keep them in relation. And since this relation cannot be a dialectical relation, since a synthesis is impossible or will result in antinomy, the relationship must be thought of as a disjunctive synthesis. But, it is not enough, either, to say that this aporia must be maintained, for it will result in the infinite deferral of actualization. Therefore, finally, the aporia must be overcome in praxis, in actual repetition of the idea. In Nietzsche, the figure of overcoming is the eternal return, the only way to get out of the deadlock of radical and passive nihilism, which necessarily involves a self-overcoming, the “perishing” of the nihilist. In Marx, communism is what overcomes the vicious circle of revolution and counterrevolution, a process, which, again, “abolishes” the subject (the proletariat). Crucially, in both perspectives, what are overcome are false antagonisms and thus false choices. The false antagonisms, in this sense, provide the space for repetition: the false choice between radical and passive nihilism exists so that the nihilist can perish, overcome himself; farce is there so that one can “cheerfully” destroy it. This is why radical politics always starts with questioning the consensus in a given social space. Free thinking always involves going beyond given questions.

Conclusion: Art instead of God’s art If the history of nihilism is the history of the illusion, it seems today that we have gone through the full circle of nihilism, at the end of which the illusion of the “real world” has disappeared: we have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? … But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world! Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind… (Nietzsche 1969, 41)

In other words, overcoming the metaphysical juxtaposition of this world to the “real world,” is not enough. The moment of the “shortest shadow” is a world without value and meaning, a life without a virtual dimension. Which is why, for Nietzsche, the artistic “will to illusion” is more profound, more divine, than the will to truth. It is the only activity that can replace oikonomia, “God’s art” (see Mondzain 2005, 13, 115; see also Mor and Mann’s chapters in this volume). After all, illusions (fictions) are necessary to live. “Illusion” is not merely an irreality or

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nonreality; rather, as in il-ludere in Latin, it is a play upon, a challenge to actual “reality” (Baudrillard 1993b, 140). Only, illusions must not, as nihilism does, be treated as abstract truths. There is nothing behind the spectacle. The spectacle is the nihilist veil that hides the nothing behind power. This is why the empty throne is the symbol of glory. The apparatus of glory finds its perfect cipher in the majesty of the empty throne. Its purpose is to capture within the governmental machine that unthinkable inoperativity—making it its internal motor—that constitutes the ultimate mystery of divinity. (Agamben 2011, 245)

The spectacle does not only mask a reality but also an absence. Indeed, the secret of power, the spectacle of glory, can only be understood when focus is shifted from the dissimulation of something (e.g., through “fictionalizing reality”) to the dissimulation of an absence (Baudrillard 1994, 6). It is literally hiding a “nothing” that the spectacle creates nihilistic illusions. The spectacle exists in order to hide the fact that it is contemporary society, all “real” world, that is a spectacle (comp. Baudrillard 1994, 12). This duality in the spectacle also mirrors the inherently paradoxical nature of all politics. Politics is always a politics of risk; any political intervention can end badly. If politics did not have such a paradoxical dimension, it would turn into an economy, a technique, a recipe book for the “good society.” It would have been reducible to a routine procedure that merely consists of a struggle within an already established political space. But the political is also that which reconfigures the political space and constitutes a new political scene. Which is why the spectator, too, is a paradoxical figure—both a passive receptacle of illusions and a potentially “emancipated spectator” who views actively and creatively, transforming and interpreting what s/he sees, feels, and understands, disturbing the given distribution of the sensible: The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common-sense—that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings. (Rancière 2009, 102)

Since it only exists insofar as it disturbs the consensus, which sustains the police order, politics is per definition dissensual (Rancière 2010, 36–37). It is an intervention into a given order of the sensible. This is why Marx starts his critique of political economy by demonstrating that it is obsessed with one sense of equality, the question of distribution in a given world, and juxtaposes to

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this sense another sense, equality as an egalitarian maxim. Thus the difference between “interpreting” and “changing” the world is ultimately grounded in the difference between the two senses (see Marx 1998, 569). By the same token, the creation of sense, art, is the ultimate revolt, the main antidote to the problem of nihilism (Nietzsche 1967, 452).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Means Without End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005a. The Time That Remains. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005b. The State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2011. The Kingdom and the Glory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Baudrillard Live. Selected Interviews. London: Routledge. ———. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “Capitalism as Religion.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913– 1926, edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, 288–291. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ———. 1979a. “Divine Violence.” In One-Way Street, edited by A. Chadhuri and J.A. Underwood, 132–154. London: Verso. ———. 1979b. “Theologico-Political Fragment.” In One-Way Street, edited by A. Chadhuri and J.A. Underwood, 155–156. London: Verso. ———. 1999. Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Bradley, Arthur and Paul Fletcher. 2010. “The Politics to Come: A History of Futurity.” In The Politics to Come, edited by A. Bradley and P. Fletcher, 1–12. New York: Continuum. Callinicos, Alex. 2007. “Leninism in the Twenty-first Century? Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility.” In Lenin Reloaded, edited by S. Budgen, S. Kouvelakis and S. Žižek, 18–41. Durham: Duke University Press. Camus, Albert. 1953. The Rebel. London: Penguin. Debord, Guy. 1983. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1983. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. ———. 1990. Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx. London: Routledge. ———. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 2004. “For A Justice to Come.” interview by Lieven De Cauter. http://archive. indymedia.be/news/2004/04/83123.html. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx, London: Routledge. ———. 2004. ‘For A Justice To Come’, Lieven De Cauter’s interview with Derrida, available at http://archive.indymedia.be/news/2004/04/83123.html. Dillon, Michael. 2008. “Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment.” Theory and Event 11(2): 1–22. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/ theory_and_event/v011/11.2.dillon.html. Engels, F. 1957. “Juristic Socialism”, In On Religion, edited by K. Marx and F. Engels, pp 267–270. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Feuerbach, L. 1989. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Prometheus. Friedman, Maurice. 1963. Problematic Rebel. New York: Random House. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press. Godchild, P. 2005. ‘Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology’, In Theology and the Political, edited by C. Davis, S. Žižek and J. Milbank.Durham: Duke University Press. Hamacher, W. 2002. ‘Guilt History. Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion”’, Diacritics 32(3–4): 81–106. Hass, Jørgen. 1982. Illusionens filosofi. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag. Latour, Bruno. 1996a. “On Interobjectivity.” Mind, Culture & Activity 3(4): 228–245. ———. 1996b. “On Actor-Network Theory.” Soziale Welt 47: 369–381. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. On the Cult of Factish Gods. London: Duke University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1955. Reason and Revolution. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1957. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction.” In K. Marx and F. Engels, pp 41–58.On Religion, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ———. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin. ———. 1975. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Introduction.” In the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. 3, edited by L. Goldman and V. Pospelova, 175–187. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin. ———. 1998. “Thesis on Feuerbach.” In The German Ideology, edited by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 568–571. New York: Prometheus Books. ———. 2007. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Dover. Melville, Herman. 1998. Moby Dick. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Mondzain, Marie-José. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1961. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin.

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———. 1967. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage. ———. 1969. Twilight of Idols. London: Penguin. ———. 1996. On the Genealogy of Morals. London: Oxford University Press. Rancière, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. ———. 2010. Dissensus. New York: Continuum. Rosen, Stanley. 1995. The Mask of Enlightenment. London: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Taubes, Jacob. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1958. “Politics as Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Dover. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso. ———. 2008. Violence. London: Profile Book. ———. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso.

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The Epistemology of Nihilism in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character1 Bettina Bergo

Es ist unmoralisch, ein menschliches Wesen zur Wirkung einer Ursache zu machen, es als Bedingtes hervorzubringen, wie das mit der Elternschaft gegeben ist; und der Mensch ist im tiefsten Grunde nur deshalb unfrei determiniert neben seiner Freiheit … weil her auf diese unsittliche Wiese entstanden ist. Daß die Menschheit ewig bestehe, das ist gar kein Interesse der Vernunft; wer die Menschheit verewigen will, der will ein Problem und eine Schuld verewigen, das einzige Problem, die einzige Schuld, die es gibt. Das Ziel ist ja gerade die Gottheit, und Aufhören der Menschheit in der Gottheit; das Ziel ist die reine Scheidung zwischen Gut und Böse, zwischen Etwas und nichts. Weininger 1921, 4582

Weininger’s investigation of fundamental principles This essay examines a work that has been called the foremost manifesto of Viennese expressionism, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, 1903) using a distinction, suggested by Walter Benjamin’s work, between epistemological and methodological nihilism. A version of this chapter was published in Price and Johnson (2013).  … It is immoral to turn a human being into the effect of a cause, to produce a conditioned human being, as does parenthood, and the ultimate source of the bondage and determinacy which accompany the freedom and spontaneity of a human being is the fact that he has been created in such an immoral fashion. Reason has no interest whatsoever in the eternal continuation of humankind. Whoever wants to perpetuate humankind wants to perpetuate a problem and a guilt, indeed the only problem and the only guilt that there are, for the aim is the deity and the ending of humankind in the deity, a pure separation between good and evil, between something and nothing. (Weininger 2005, 311–312)

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Simply put, epistemological nihilism states that there is no fundamental meaning to existence, whether human or cosmic. This kind of nihilism arises, for example, out of the vicious circularity generated when philosophies of history or of mind open to utopia, which then serves to legitimate the philosophy itself. It is this kind of phenomenon that Walter Benjamin intended, it seems to me, when he argued for (restricted) methodological nihilism, or the vigilant critique of utopian practices and institutions coupled with the full awareness of mortality, ours and that of institutions. What Benjamin understood, in his Theologisch-politisches Fragment, is that nihilism is not simply something we can overcome—whether through a “restoration of metaphysics” or through revolution—but rather something to be taken up as a practice (Benjamin 2002, 306). It is only in practice that nihilism’s relationship to values can be concretely evinced and the two above-mentioned domains (epistemological nihilism and nihilism as critique) held in a tensed rapprochement.3 My argument here will be that Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character begins from a restricted methodological nihilism (“First Part: Sexual Diversity”) only to slide into a full-blown epistemological nihilism (“Second or Main Part: The Sexual Types”). The work and life of Weininger, in all its pathos and perplexity, illustrates an argumentative drift, from practical nihilism as critique of the dominant values of the Belle Époque toward epistemological nihilism as man’s overcoming of his bodily nature and ultimately, union with divinity. Driven by a boundless intellectual curiosity, Weininger set out to explain the wealth and diversity of human “characters” (in his day, “differential psychology”) while also uncovering the forces underlying sexuation, erotic attraction, and the “perceptual” dimensions of anti-Semitism. From scholarship in the Classics, Weininger moved into biology at the University of Vienna, and ultimately into idealist philosophy and Nietzsche’s thought. His doctoral thesis, Eros und Psyche, was a study on the fundamental sexual hybridism of all living beings and the impact of this on human characters. He submitted the thesis to an ambivalent jury. Once defended, he set to work on an expanded version consisting of two unequal parts: the scientific discussion of the chemical components of masculinity and Benjamin phrased this as the imperative “to strive for such a passing away” as can be found in the movement of life and death typical to nature. For him, this would be the task for a “world politics,” cognizant of human finitude and the fragility of all institutions and practices created by human beings. Anti-messianic, anti-eschatological, Benjamin’s “Fragment” mobilizes nihilism to hold open both conceptions of a good life and a desirable society, without assuring them or merging the theological and the political that are found together in epistemological nihilism.

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femininity, characterology, and algorithms for sexual attraction. Part I closed with a discussion of the “woman question” and examined prospects for female emancipation. Elements from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s research into sexual indeterminacy (sexuelle Zwischenstufen) and “Uranians,” or a “third sex” supported his principal argument that every de facto human being was physiologically a combination of maleness and femaleness. Part II exploded into a philosophical discussion of ideal types, “Die sexuellen Typen” he called “Mann” and “Weib” as opposed to de facto “Man” and “Frau.” This part proceeded on the formal definition of the two limit types: it opened onto masculine and feminine essences, consciousness, and finally talents and “Genialität.” It extended theoretical discussion of the types into ethics, social teleology or social entelechy, and the essence of the feminine and its meaning in the universe (Chapter XII, “Das Wesen des Weibes und sein Sinn im Universum”). Chapter XIII was devoted to “Das Judentum” (Jewry), and struggled against more metaphysical forms of anti-Semitism such as supercessionism. The ultimate chapter developed the equation “Problem des Juden = Problem des Weibes = Problem der Sklaverei.” At the core of this “dilemma” was the ultimate status of femininity: how to comprehend it, how to determine it? If—within the logic of ideal types— activity, reality, substance, could be symbolized as one or unity, then passivity, unreality, and absence should be formalized as zero. Between one and zero lay the spectrum of sexuation in living beings. Yet the zero that abbreviated the ideal type that was femininity also entailed an indeterminate activity that Weininger characterized as Kuppelei, coupling or bonding (the English translation renders the derogatory connotation with the term “matchmaking”). In order to understand the purpose of Woman we must start with a very old and well-known phenomenon, which has never been seriously considered, let alone properly recognized. It is none other than the phenomenon of matchmaking, which can lead us to the deepest, most important, insight into the nature of Woman. (Weininger 2005, 231)4

In short, the nothing was active; it nothinged. It was active essentially as correlational, thanks to the presence and influence on it of the all or masculine ideal type. Replaying a conundrum that a philosopher like Georges Canguilhem would observe about attempts to define “the pathological” against a single Um hinter diesen Sinn zu kommen, muß von einem Phänomen ausgegangen werden, das, so alt und so bekannt es ist, noch nirgends und niemals einer ernsteren Beachtung oder gar Würdigung wert befunden wurde. Es ist kein anderes als das Phänomen der Kuppelei, welches zum tiefsten, zum eigentlichen Einblick in die Natur des Weibes zu führen vermag (Weininger 1921, 337).

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standard of normality, Weininger thereby found himself caught in the paradox of a feminine ideal type defined on the basis of the masculine—and yet somehow necessarily implicated in bringing human beings together erotically.5 The problem was significant because the feminine ideal type was present by degrees in all living things and went some way toward defining what Weininger understood as the difference between Aryan and Jewish men. First, however, I will explain exactly what I mean by Judaism. I do not mean either a race or a nation, and even less a legally recognized religious faith. Judaism must be regarded as a cast of mind, a psychic constitution, which is a possibility for all human beings and which has only found its most magnificent realization in historical Judaism. (Weininger 2005, 274)6

Despite the apparently positive appraisal of Judaism, the putative cast of mind was negative: any group possessed of a high percentage of femininity qualified thus as lacking in spirit—“even the most masculine Jew has a Platonic methexis [participation] in Women” (Weininger 2005, 276). It thus redounded to beings of high masculine “content” to develop their potentiality for genius, above all in terms of moral self-awareness. The moral agent was able to bridge the distinction between nature and freedom by incarnating the moral law in himself. The clearest way, Weininger argued, to bring this about had to pass through a focus on the relationship that offered the greatest danger of instrumentalization of another human being. Not unpresciently, Weininger identified this relation as sexuality. In order that a human being realize its (masculine) potential—that is, its creative ability to self-overcome— it should abide by the moral law within, avoiding, amongst other things, the instrumentalization of women as sexual beings. However, as it was the male gaze that constituted woman as a distinctly feminine entity (the feminine being in itself nothing, mere Kuppelei), avoiding sexual contact also implied the dissolution of the category of woman (Weib). Now, the disappearance of woman as ideal type (and implicitly as gender) promised their true emancipation as de facto women, hopefully allowing women to realize that percentage of As Canguilhem put it in his landmark Le normal et le pathologique: “The concept of norm is an original concept that cannot be reduced, in physiology or elsewhere, to a concept objectively determinable by scientific methods. Thus strictly speaking there is no biological science of the normal. There is a science of biological situations and conditions called normal. This science is physiology” (Canguilhem 1966, 204; my translation). 6 Zuvor jedoch will ich genau angeben, in welchem Sinne ich vom Judentum rede. Es handelt sich mir nicht um eine Rasse und nicht um ein Volk, noch weniger freilich um ein gesetzlich anerkanntes Bekenntnis. Man darf das Judentum nur für eine Geistesrichtung, für eine psychische Konstitution halten, welche für alle Menschen eine Möglichkeit bildet, und im historischen Judentum bloß die grandioseste Verwirklichung gefunden hat (Weininger 1921, 402). Henceforth, only the English translation will be used. 5

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their creative potential coming from the male principle in them. If the human species was thereby condemned to disappearing, perhaps the price was not as great as it seemed, as part of humanity would have realized Nietzschean selfovercoming via the enactment of the Kantian moral law extended to sexuality. Human kind would gradually merge into a Schellingian divinity, in which Schelling’s principle of inertia or Weininger’s nothing (das Weibliche) would be absorbed into pure light. It should be emphasized that a nihilistic epistemology may not acknowledge its commitment to “nothing,” much less its inability to exit the circle of dismantling and rebuilding its logical phantasms. I will attempt to show how Weininger moved from a positivistic vision of critical openness to sexual hybridity, toward a stultifying cosmological ethic. Indeed, Sex and Character went initially unnoticed until his suicide in the same year (1903) aroused such a stir that the volume sold off the shelves, going through over twenty editions and influencing authors as far flung as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce—to mention but a few. Weininger became a sort of “canary” in the “coal mine” that was an epoch of anxiety before emergent feminism, homosexual movements, socialism, and literary mysticism. The question is why he slid irresistibly from critique and science into epistemological nihilism. I hope to illustrate this in the narrative that follows. Weininger started from the hypothesis that all living beings were composed of elements of masculinity and those of femininity—at the cellular level (“arrhenoplasm” and “thelyplasm”). He hoped to explain human nature starting, this way, from embodiment. In so doing he believed he held a key to understanding eros itself, as attraction and the possibility of love. Influenced by the elaborate research and the emancipator’s zeal of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Weininger turned to science to explain racial differences in light of his paradigm of dynamic intersexuation. His project could not have come at a better time. Sexology was a burgeoning field thanks to the works of Richard Krafft-Ebing, Georg Groddeck, Paul Julius Möbius, and indirectly Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler—not to mention Freud and Breuer. The binarism of masculine and feminine appeared to be opening to the possibility of a third sex, homosexual men, and the German-language movement for the “Schutz des Mutterrechts” (protection of motherhood) inaugurated an early feminism (Rosa Mayreder). Explaining anti-Semitism in light of the “effeminacy” of Jewish men certainly displaced focus from the theological claim against Jews as the murderers of God toward a socio-biological misfortune devoid of any particular danger. Finally, proposing a synthesis of Nietzsche and Kant, such that self-overcoming passed through

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self-perfection and the free election never to treat women as sexual instruments, rejoined the ascetic “creativity” of (a notably Viennese) expressionism. These were the objectives of Weininger’s study. Weininger did not so much write a philosophy as a hybrid study that began by exploring the embryology and sexology of his day. As I indicated, the second part of the work brought philosophical reflection to bear on the meaning of the ideal types of masculinity, femininity, and the genius. One might qualify Sex and Character as a “middlebrow” essay, whose principal challenge was to develop categories able to bridge the ideal and the practical levels, to give European humanity the conceptual wherewithal by which to live an ethical life as sexually intermediate beings. Prior to publishing his thesis, Weininger was very active in the intellectual life of Vienna. Like Freud and many Viennese intellectuals at the turn of the century, he attended the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna, many of whose discussions concerned the initially disturbing movements around women’s emancipation, and “Uranians.” These questions must be considered in light of the larger context that combined German-language socialism, syndicalism, and the chilling mood promoted by the popular antiSemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger (1844–1910; Mayor from 1897 to 1910). It is difficult to calculate the symbolic impact, especially in the discussions of the Philosophical Society, of the rise of the Jewish population of Vienna between 1860 and 1910, where numbers went from 6000 to 175,000, a thirty-fold increase in two generations (Lindemann 2000, 57).7 It is not false, though it is easy to say that, at the turn of the century during the Belle Époque, philosophers found themselves singularly inept at dealing with the reverberations of what could only have been conceived as new vectors of conflict and change: females, polychromatic colonized peoples, Western and Eastern Jews—but also, embryology and genetics.8 That is, genetics, but without a genetic code. Albert S. Lindemann recalls that

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from the mid-eighteenth century until the eve of the Holocaust, the Jewish population of Europe increased faster than that of the non-Jewish population. There was also a more rapid move of Jews than non-Jews into urban areas, especially capital cities, another kind of significant rise in status. Per capita income rose more rapidly among Jews … The percentage of Jews who were among the very wealthiest citizens of Europe’s nation states shot up by the end of the century, as did the number of Jews who won Nobel prizes after 1905. (Lindemann 2000, 53ff) We need to think only of telegony and neoteny: the disconcerting “stain of the quagga” or zebra on the mare, who was then crossed with an Arabian stallion only to produce a striped hybrid in her second issue. For neoteny, consider literature on the African child, observed as an infant possessed of greater motor and cognitive abilities than the European child, only to be declared apt to develop up to adolescence and then to stop.

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“Zuchtung” or breeding was a matter of debate at the turn of the century. The sexuate indeterminacy of the embryo until ten weeks spawned debates about an originary femininity in all beings versus a “revolution” of the masculine in that transformative event we today call hormonal activation (thanks to Paul Möbius. Cf. Schiller 1982, 49–65). I have not even touched on the anxiety of cultural degeneration and civilizational decadence—calling, half-consciously, for the salvation from without that Benjamin so sharply criticized. How then to calculate the effect of all this on philosophy—notably, those philosophies that worked at the middlebrow level, integrating popular science into questions of ethics and politics?

The Belle Époque canary Two events contributed to an idealistic turn in Weininger’s thought, away from the empiricism in which he was immersed and educated. Around 1901, Weininger’s encounter with German philosophy, notably the works of Kant, Schelling, and Nietzsche, led him to revise his voluminous, scientific thesis “Eros und Psyche,” producing instead a 600-page manuscript that he submitted to his crestfallen directors Jodl and Müllner for the doctorate. The final, published work, Geschlecht und Charakter was hardly shorter, coming in at 461 pages. As I indicated, the shorter version proved to be a two-part exercise. It evinced the uneasy coexistence of scientific research into sexuation (before “modern synthesis” genetics were framed in the late 1930s) and a hybrid of conceptions about the genius, Nietzschean self-overcoming, and Kant’s Kingdom of ends. The latter, Weininger framed in terms of the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative: always treat humanity, whether in yourself or another person, as an end and not merely as a means. This philosophical aggregate was unstable. In Weininger’s case, it was vitalism and Kantianism that ultimately triumphed, and he came to regard his early scientific research as shallow. Correlatively, his increasingly unstable personality accounts for the Nietzsche-like eruptions in his book, which argues at length about the “feminine,” but also tries to undercut the anti-Semitism of his time. Two things must be kept in mind. First, Weininger was himself Jewish. His goal was to argue, circularly, that anti-Semitism was rooted in ressentiment and that anti-Semites often evinced characteristics more “Judaic” than many Jews in Vienna at the time; moreover, Jews were not to be blamed for “eliminating God,”

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the “Aryan” dislike of Jews was due to the greater effeminacy of the former. To be sure, his view reflected stereotypes around Jews from reactions to the Ostjüde to assimilationist bromides such as we even find in the remarkable director of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus, who would later defend Weininger’s work. For all that, my concern is with nihilism as epistemology, and we see a restricted methodological nihilism, akin to Benjamin’s critique, at work in Weininger’s initial deconstruction of sexual identity, which is the thematic that structures Sex and Character Part I. Weininger was among the first to develop a dialectics of sex versus gender, and to a lesser degree biology versus culture. He would argue that every living being was a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics, and therefore one became a man or a woman through a process of cultural institution. Radicalizing Schopenhauer, he deconstructed sexuality into three dimensions of embodied sexuate intermediacies, social construction, and idealization.9 Like Nietzsche and his multiple forces or “intelligences” in bodies, Weininger argued that there is nothing that allows us to speak of a purely masculine genotype, much less a feminine one. Prior to any understanding of genes, hormones or their action, Weininger distilled from the zoological and embryological literature of his time what had to be the most plausible hypothesis: “the occurrence of intermediate sexual forms is determined by the different degrees of original sexual characteristics, in conjunction with the inner secretions (which probably vary in quality and quantity in each individual)” (Weininger 2005, 25). Underlying the debates about sexuation were two questions: First, how and why does life diversify as it grows? Second, how are individuals to be thought in relation to species and sexuation? Rejecting two popular hypotheses about sexual difference, that it was a matter strictly of forms or that sex concerned only particular sites in an otherwise neutral human body, Weininger adopted a cellular theory in which, “it is possible to imagine an infinite number of different sexual characteristics of every single cell” (Weininger 2005, 17). We should keep in mind that Nietzsche glimpsed at least one of the terrible questions underlying this investigation: Why is it, or what is it, that causes a Luft writes, in “Otto Weininger’s Vision of Gender and Modern Culture” in EIV: “Weininger’s achievement was to separate discourse about gender from literal assumptions about individual men and women … What makes his argument interesting is his attempt to deconstruct his culture’s understanding of gender and to develop a methodology that distinguishes male and female types from individual men and women.” He is careful to observe that Weininger nevertheless “seems to assume [at times] that a man can become 100 percent male, although a woman cannot [be 100 percent female, lest she be basically nothing]” (Luft 2003, 54, 57). In addition, while a man can be close to “female,” Weininger will write, “the woman can never become a male” (Weininger 2005, 241; cited by Luft 2003, 63). This is largely because, like a host of others, Weininger begins from the assumption that the male is largely the human norm (cf. Luft 2003, 61).

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cell to start to divide? (Nietzsche 1988, 106–107). What forces transform the nucleus into two nuclei? What is active, what is passive? It is important to note that Weininger’s attempt at philosophical systematicity patently fails. However, it fails in one significant sense: Weininger cannot reconcile the transcendental with the empirical; his nihilism as critical method slides directly into a nihilism as epistemology. His thought reflects the exacerbation of the critique of decadence arguing in favor of the self-overcoming of man, even at the cost of the gradual disappearance of the species. However, the path it takes to that end is not necessarily stranger than other philosophies that themselves evinced an “unendliche Mangel an Sein” [unending falling short of being], as Manfred Frank said of Schelling (Frank 1975). Weininger writes: We may thus arrive at the following notion, which is hypothetical from the point of view of formal logic, but which is raised almost to the level of certainty by the … facts: every cell of the organism (as we will provisionally say) has a … certain sexual emphasis [bestimmte sexuelle Betonung]. According to our principle of the generality of intermediate sexual forms we add that this sexual character can be of different degrees. The … assumption of different degrees in the development of the sexual characteristics would make it easy … to incorporate into our system pseudohermaphroditism and even genuine hermaphroditism (the occurrence of which among many animals has been established, albeit not with certainty among humans) …. If … as all empirical facts seem to dictate, the principle of innumerable transitional forms of sexuality between M and W is extended to all cells of the organism, [then] the difficulty that troubled Steenstrup is removed [how bisexuality would be distributed] and bisexuality [or bisexuation] no longer runs counter to nature. Based on this principle, it is possible to imagine an infinite number of different sexual characteristics of every single cell, from total masculinity through all intermediate forms down to its complete absence … total femininity. (Weininger 2005, 17)

While that does not mean that gonads are equivalent to kidneys, much less to brains, Weininger hastens to add: The gonad is the organ in which the sexual characteristics of the individual appear most visible and in whose elementary morphological units they can most readily be demonstrated. (Weininger 2005, 19)10 The citation continues: “However, we must also assume that the genus-specific, species-specific, and family-specific qualities of an organism are represented most completely in the gonads” (See Weininger 2005, 19).

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Following a current respected in biology but largely unknown to philosophy, Weininger writes: … Naegeli, de Vries, Oskar Hertwig, et al. developed the … theory … that every cell of a multicellular organism carries in it all the qualities of the species and in the gonads these are only concentrated in a particularly marked form—as will perhaps appear to all researchers one day [since] … every living being comes into existence through the … division of one single cell. (Weininger 2005, 19–20)11

The idea of life originating from a single cell with “forces” in it may have led Weininger to Schelling and his notion of a living “Basis” (Schelling 1986, 30). Before the hypothesis of a kind of fundamental living matter, a base material that nineteenth-century science called the “idioplasm,” the question of what fuels initial differentiation suggested the necessity of a binarity of forces so that there be something like activity and passivity, something like emergence and inertia— of which all the vitalists and Lebensphilosophe had spoken. Weininger proposes his solution. … we too can, and must, create the concepts of arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm as the two modifications in which any idioplasm can appear in sexually differentiated beings, bearing in mind that these concepts [arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm] … again stand for ideal cases, or boundaries, between which empirical reality resides. Thus the protoplasm which exists in reality increasingly departs from the ideal arrhenoplasm and, passing through a (real or imaginary) point of indifference (true hermaphroditism), turns into a protoplasm which is closer to thelyplasm [a feminized idioplasm] and from which it is … distinguished by a small differential. (Weininger 2005, 20)

This was Weininger’s response to debates about the emergence of sexuate characteristics in embryology. In order for the multiple degrees of sexuation at the cellular level to be meaningful, two ideal boundaries had to be established, for the sake of heuristics. These ideal boundaries would form the center of the investigation in the second half of the book, An Investigation of Fundamental Principles—the moment at which Weininger’s critical nihilism slides into epistemological nihilism. Working with a polarity of ideal masculine and ideal feminine, which phenomenalize as “emphases” [“Betonungen”] in bodies, Weininger inserted Note, however, that this was not August Weismann’s theory, which argued that sex cells are specific and localized, not found throughout the body. Weismann’s germ plasma theory was developed before 1900.

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his schema into a German-Darwinian (Wilhelm Roux and Ernst Haeckel) framework: the Betonungen had to serve an evolutionary purpose. For him, this purpose was the facilitation of sexual attraction and reproduction. Influenced by his classical education, Weininger started from the Aristophanic thesis of the divided, one-time complete being in search of its complement. He thus proposed that the quantity of masculine influence in a given being was proportionate first to the quantity of feminine influence, and could be expressed as a ratio, like 61:39 in a given individual. Further, this person, most likely a male, would be attractive to another person, no matter what their socialized gender was, provided they had something close to the inverse proportion of emphasis, say 61 percent femininity to 39 percent masculinity. For this, he developed the algorithm of maximal sexual affinity, factoring in two other elements: the “analytical function of the time individuals are able to act upon each other” (Weininger 2005, 35), and a constant, supposed to represent what we know, scientifically, about sexuality now, versus what we should know in the decades to come. I want to emphasize that Weininger is here separating sexual expression from sexual attraction, but also sexual attraction from sexuation per se, that is, sex from gender. In terms largely untouched by philosophers up until then, we might say that Weininger was attempting to approach the question of identity in an a priori sense that simultaneously took account of sexuation even as it dissolved the social criteria with which his society had defined sexuality. He pursued this down to the movement of animals and sex cells. Wilhelm Pfeffer called these movements [of sex cells like spermatozoids] chemotactic and coined the term chemotropism for all these phenomena …. There seem to be many indications that among animals the attraction exercised by the female when perceived by the male … through the sense organs … is … analogous to chemotactical attraction. (Weininger 2005, 37)

Weininger cited other research of his time and recalled Goethe’s chemical novel, Elective Affinities, as a prescient literary speculation on forces at work in sexual attraction. From there, he dealt with education and socialization, feminine men and masculine women (Weininger 2005, 50ff.). Above all, he was looking to combine what he called a “differential psychology” with biological concepts; notably the principle of correlation phenomena and the concept of function (Weininger 2005, 54–56). The correlation principle argued that organs in a body were mutually adapted to each other, facilitating nutrition, safety,

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and competitiveness. Weininger extended it to a range of physical preferences between individuals. He did so using an evolutionary notion of function in light of species. So much for the scientific beginnings of Sex and Character. Its ambition was to emancipate men and women from the straightjacket of essentialist sexuate types; it was also hoped that anti-Semites might realize the groundlessness of their ressentiment against somewhat effeminate beings.

From the empirical to the ideal types: Mann und Frau to Mann und Weib We are perhaps more sophisticated today than the morphologists, social theorists, and physiognomists of the Belle Époque. Nevertheless, the question of the relationship between acculturation and biology, or discursive practices, cultural objects, and bodily drives, remains. Indeed, it turns on the nihilistic social imaginary underlying and conditioning the turn-of-the-century embryology— not to mention the logics of life that philosophers like Schelling had contributed to German language physics and biology.12 Above all, Weininger’s sexuate “Betonungen” depended on the limit conditions, which he calls “heuristic,” the ideal types that make up Part II. The ideal types required a philosophical elaboration in order to be grounded principially. The second half of the book effectuated the passage from the scientific literature, a popularized empiricism, to a synchretic idealism whose concepts would promptly show their uncanny superannuation. Underlying this was Weininger’s Kantian-Schellingian vision: a world in which no one treated another in the worst instrumental sense possible, that is, sexually. And this alone permitted man to rise in purity toward unity with the godhead (Schelling’s vision). What is stranger than the science Weininger attempted to popularize was his conviction of the necessity of a meta-biology, grounded transcendentally. There, his fear of effeminacy and nihilism cashed itself out in static a priori categories. As indicated, the ideal symbolization for masculinity was presence, action, energeia, plenitude, or simply the number 1. As ideal type, the feminine was passivity, inaction, dunamis, absence, or the cipher 0. Bon gré mal gré, Schelling was the editor of the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik at the time he published the Philosophical Inquiries, 1809.

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Weininger’s own anti-Semitism was an attempt to protect Jews from worse forms of Jewish hatred than his own: what made “the Jew” dislikable was the surprising quantity of femininity he possessed. In classic colonialist language, Jews, like women, like Africans, were imitative unoriginal creatures, incapable of creation or innovation. Caught in service to the species, all these groups consisted of herd animals rather than true individuals. I would like to make you laugh with citations from Weininger to this effect, but as I said, he is a canary in the coalmine called nihilism: he stated what philosophers discussed in euphemisms and code, but did not generally publish. The conundrum was how to think sociopolitical upheavals with the inherited categories. Interesting here is that the great stigma in all these cases is the lack, or abyssal inertia, that characterizes “Weiblichkeit” (femininity) as a component in women or men. That lack means that femininity and even “Jewishness” become analogous, once again, to a principle that can be found in Schelling’s writing, namely, the “principle of darkness” or ground that is the inertial prime matter in all things, including God. In 1809, Schelling argued: All birth is birth out of darkness into light … We recognize … that the concept of becoming is the only one adequate to the nature of things. But the process of their becoming cannot be in God, viewed absolutely, since they are distinct from him toto genere …. To be separate from God, [things] would have to carry on this becoming on a basis different from him. But since there is nothing outside God, this contradiction can only be solved by things having their basis in that within God which is not God himself, i.e. in that which is the basis of his existence. (Schelling 1986, 33)

Lacking all definition, the feminine—like the dark Basis in God and nature—is boundariless, yet paradoxically serves as quanta of exchange. “Matchmaking [Kuppelei] is a blurring of boundaries,” argued Weininger, “and the Jew is the blurrer of boundaries kat’exokhen. He is the opposite pole of [the] aristocratism [of individuation]. The principle of any aristocratism is the strictest observation of all boundaries between human beings, but the Jew [just like the female] is the born communist and always wants community” (Weininger 2005, 281). While we might find this qualification complimentary, an enduring philosophical difficulty is evinced. Slavoj Žižek finds in Weininger the precursor to Lacan’s “the woman does not exist,” and by extension the anticipation of our own recognition of the profound void at the heart of what

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we call subjectivity (Žižek 2005, 137–164, esp. 145).13 It remains that we have here a nihil that is active. It is active as Eros—just as Schelling’s Basis was active as longing or “Sehnsucht.” All of these terms express the search for ways to conceptualize movement and affect between beings. That is why “matchmaking” is a genteel translation of the derogatory “Kuppelei.”14 But that Kuppelei, that cipher, could be dissociated from the unifying force of Eros is doubtful. It is unclear how a cipher—how the transcendental feminine— can match-make but not cause movement or consolidation. All of this, of course, revolves around the epistemology of nihilism and Weininger’s painful search for ways beyond it. Weininger’s solution to the difficulty at the ideal level could only be ratified by the empirical fact that all beings are composed of masculine and feminine forces at the cellular level. But the empirical solution of intersexuation ran aground the self-destruction of its definitional limits and, notably, the active nothingness that was ideal femininity. This underscores the reciprocal dependence in Weininger of the empirical and transcendental levels, as well as their impossible coexistence. The Nietzschean dimension of the work concerns self-overcoming: every man must overcome the nothingness in him, but the only ones who can truly do this are those qualified as “geniuses.” A Romantic theme, the genius recalls the saint in Nietzsche’s writings like Human, All too Human (1878). The genius in Weininger was the bridge—between the empirical mischling and the overman. The genius was also the true moralist and authentic monad.15 The genius’s connection with the universe is his Kantian-Nietzschean capacity to find and bestow meaning, to approach the sublime in his own figure. “Consequently he evaluates everything,” said Weininger, “both within and outside him according to this idea [of intrinsic unity]; and for that reason … everything in Note, however, that whereas, in her inexistence, her nothingness, Weininger’s “Weib” or ideal type of the female is something generated by masculine desire, and is wholly subjected to the “phallus” (Weininger’s words), Žižek defends Lacan, arguing that for the latter, “the exact opposite is true: the pre-symbolic ‘eternally Feminine’ is a retroactive patriarchal fantasy—that is, it is the Exception which grounds the reign of the Phallus …. It is thus the very lack of any exception to the Phallus that renders the feminine libidinal economy inconsistent, hysterical, and thereby undermines the reign of the Phallus” (Žižek 2005, 151). The outcome is largely the same, as the argument has a circularity to it; the principal difference is that for Weininger, it is actual men who must turn away from sexual engagement with women, if de facto women—as mixtures of masculinity and femininity are to come into their own as human beings. 14 The Grimm Dictionary points out that Kuppelei is close to Koppelei, as “doppel” to “dupple” and comes from the Latin Copula. 15 “A human being may be called a genius if he lives in a conscious connection with the whole universe. Thus genius alone is the really divine element in humans” (Weininger 2005, 149). 13

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his view, rather than being a function of time, represents one great and eternal idea” (Weininger 2005, 148). From the genius too flows the moral law; it is not the affair of formal, practical reason alone. [Ordinary human beings] may relate to the sun or the moon, but they certainly lack the “starry heavens” and the “moral law.” The moral law comes from the human soul, which holds all totality, and which can contemplate everything because it is everything. The starry heavens and the moral law, they too are basically one and the same thing. The universalism of the categorical imperative is the universalism of the universe, the infinity of the universe is only a symbol of the infinity of the moral will. (Weininger 2005, 150)

Here, Weininger attempts to open a path to the Übermensch precisely by a return to the pre-critical Kant’s sublime, embodied by great men, or the genius. Only the man of genius is a complete human being. What is contained in every individual as a possibility of being human … in the Kantian sense, as dunamei, is alive and fully developed as energeia in the genius … He is himself the quiescence of all laws and therefore free …. (Weininger 2005, 151)

Consistent with the practical task of the book, which changed as Weininger studied Nietzsche and Idealism, the highest human destiny had to permit the authentic embodiment of its ideal. If recourse to the genius is Romantic, it remains that the bridge beyond “man” could only be unity with the divine. For such a self-overcoming, man had to overcome two things: first, his action had to be based not on an ethics of compassion, but on one of respect. “As was first articulated by Kant, the only being in the world that we respect is the human” (Weininger 2005, 154–155). But how to respect the non-genius; how to respect other human beings, say women, or Jews? “The first [way is] by ignoring them … the second, by taking notice of them … and the third, trying to recognize them. Only by being interested in them, thinking of them … trying to understand them as themselves … can one honor one’s fellow-humans” (Weininger 2005, 155). This first overcoming required a Nietzschean forgetfulness as well. More specifically, man had to overcome his bisexuate nature. This meant that he had to overcome eros or Kuppelei in himself. Such overcoming was crucial from the moral perspective too, because it was ultimately man’s desire that constituted woman as a gender (not as a sex). “Man” makes “women” by desiring them, in the way that Schelling’s “self-will” is aroused in order that love find a material basis or resistance through which

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to realize itself (Weininger 2005, 219ff).16 This material is man’s own flesh—or the feminine—just as, in Schelling’s beginning, it was the Basis, the almostnothing out of which God crystallized as the “One.” But Weininger continued to argue, in Kantian terms, that the instrumentalization of a being with more “femininity” than “masculinity” in it, was morally reprehensible to human destiny (Weininger 2005, 224–225). Nothing impeded our reunification with the deity more effectively than the instrumentalization of another human; notably but not exclusively, erotic instrumentalization. Thus sexual intercourse in any case contradicts the idea of humanity; not because asceticism is a duty, but … because in sexual intercourse Woman wants to become an object, a thing, and Man really does her the favor of regarding her as a thing and not as a living human being with internal psychic processes. That is why Man despises Woman as soon as he has possessed her, and Woman feels that she is now despised, even though two minutes earlier she was idealized. The only thing that a human being can respect in a human being is the idea, the idea of humanity. The contempt for Woman (and for Man himself) … is the surest indication that the idea has been violated. And anybody who cannot understand what is meant by this Kantian idea of humanity might at least consider that the women concerned are his sisters, his mother, his female relatives: it is for our own sake that Woman should be … respected as a human being and not degraded, as she always is through sexuality. (Weininger 2005, 312)

I hope that this quote (and the underlying science, at this time more footling than sheer “pseudoscience”) shows why this book was so confusing yet so seductive to a host of German and English intellectuals from Wittgenstein to Karl Kraus, to Schoenberg, to Hermann Broch,17 Elias Cannetti, Thomas Bernhard, James Joyce, and Heinrich Böll.18 Between 1903, the year Weininger committed suicide following his conversion to Protestantism, and 1947, Sex and Character went through twenty-eight editions and was translated into many languages. Wittgenstein called it a great error. Molly Bloom was said to be, in We might also understand this as being close to Lacan’s notion that women are in a sense socially constructed to incarnate or to be the phallus rather than to have the phallus. 17 Hermann Broch, author of The Death of Virgil, wrote, “Weininger, the most fervent moralist since Kant, placed himself completely on the ground of this ethic, but he succumbed to the terrible nothingness it contains when he sought to transform it into a dogma” (Broch 1977, 248, cited by Le Rider 1982, 229). 18 For a discussion of some of Weininger’s influences, see Harrowitz and Hyams 1995; Le Rider 1982; Sengoopta 2000; and Toews 2003, 301ff. 16

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Joyce’s Ulysses, modeled after Weininger’s Woman. But then the Belle Époque knew so much worse.19 My argument concerns the attempt of middlebrow philosophy, in the era of the demise of Idealism, to come to terms with biology and the sociopolitical mutations of the time. With the separation of psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy, thinking faced what could be called a problem of concepts or categories. A philosophy like Weininger’s, which began as a critique and a subtle understanding of finitude, veered into what I have called a nihilistic epistemology. Middlebrow philosophy proved inadequate to explanation without normalization, and an ethical-theological vision of redemption in nothingness. Many who were still impressed with the older philosophy could not separate Idealism, Romanticism, and the Lebensphilosophie inaugurated in part by Schelling. And it is not without interest to note that the ultimate, contradictory conclusion of Sex and Character follows closely the structure of Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. Please recall that in Schelling, the Absolute must be considered alive, lest it drift into the formalism he suspected of Hegel. Like all life, the Absolute or universe gives birth to itself, thanks to the coexistence of two principles that were interdependent but did not interact directly with each other. In the place of Hegel’s dialectic, Schelling brought Lebensphilosophie into the Absolute itself. Weininger would resort to this exceptional logic to situate his NietzscheanKantian self-overcoming within a cosmological framework. The ultimate outcome of this process for Schelling had to be the triumph of the light or the form-giving dimension of the Absolute—for Weininger, it was the Masculine. With that end, the inertial Basis, which was present at the beginning as “almost nothing,” would gradually be eliminated—like “das Weib” in Weininger. The divergent principles would never be fully reconciled, but the unmoving, In the same year, in 1903, Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), who gave Freud his concept of the Es, thanks to Nietzsche, authored an idiosyncratic prose poem entitled, A Problem of Woman, in which he rhapsodized:

19

The three branches of the future stand before us: beauty, clarity, childhood. What a plenitude of divinity resides in woman! Ever since the culture of man, at its apogee, was broken, with the fall of Athens, the world has lived from the beauty of woman in search of man … woman must presume and cultivate free beauty, that beauty which is its own end and fulfillment. The cult of the goddess of a hundred breasts, the cult of Mary, shall then be a harmonious reality. (Groddeck 1979) At the antipode of this rhapsodic imitation of Zarathustra stood the neurologist, Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907), arguing for the physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes, or physiological feeblemindedness of females. This was the title of a pamphlet that went through nine printings by 1908. Möbius knew of Weininger, appreciated him, but felt eclipsed by Weininger’s “success.”

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amorphous Basis had to be left far behind or simply disappear into pure light. In so doing, the attraction the Basis exerted on the One or the light, like an originary gravity, would be annulled.20 Schelling urges, For, as in the beginning of creation, which was nothing other than the birth of light, the dark principle had to be there as its Basis, so that light could be raised out of it (as the actual out of the merely potential); so there must be another basis for the birth of spirit [in humans], and hence a second principle of darkness [the unconscious source of human evil], which must be as much higher than [the status of the basis] as the spirit [or divine love in humans] is higher than light [in nature]. This principle is precisely the spirit of evil which has been awakened in creation through the arousing of the dark natural Basis—that is the disunion of light and darkness—to which the spirit of love is now opposed as a higher ideal, [just] as before[,] light was opposed to the unruly movement of nature in its beginnings …. (Schelling 1986, 52–53, 85)

Conclusion The reader who began Weininger’s book likely thought that Weininger was working out a law bringing bodies and personalities together, even as he argued that there was no simple norm for “empirical” males or females. Yet, not even half-way through the work, one notes the change in tone and ends. In their ideal forms, Man and Woman, Mann und Weib, are aligned with Schelling’s two principles in the Absolute, the Basis and the One. Consistent with Schelling’s logic, the unfolding and destiny of these two forms are related but different. Like Schelling’s Basis, Weininger’s ideal Nothing exerts an arousing force on the One, which in turn creates empirical femininity through its emergent, “masculine” desire. In Weininger, the One and the Zero of ideal masculinity and femininity are directed to follow the course of Schelling’s two principles, proceeding toward the entelechy of union-in-divinity. Weininger’s peculiar reading of Kant’s “Kingdom of Ends” provides the practical itinerary toward union with the godhead. Reinterpreting Kant, such that One and Zero might no longer instrumentalize each other by coupling, Weininger aligns Kant with the return Schelling described of the two principles to their ultimate situation, “For since this Being (Wesen) of primal nature is nothing else than the eternal basis of God, it must contain within itself, locked away, God’s essence, as a light of life … but longing or desire, roused now by the understanding, strives to preserve this light of life … within [the basis], and to close up in itself so that they always remain [together in the] ground” (Schelling 1986, 36, 361).

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where the force of love has sublimated the Basis in pure spirit, thereby making the Basis obsolete as a pseudo-force and pseudo-presence. For Weininger, that would be the ideal destiny of the type “Woman,” of das Weib. If the repetition of historic tragedy looks like farce, then Weininger was farce and suffering, but he was not alone as playwright of nihilism. The consequences of his philosophical nostalgia and the patent superannuation of idealistic concepts had consequences for the decades that followed.21 The Weininger effect was a powerful, intellectual fashion, which endured for more than a generation. It should be emphasized that, in the Belle Époque, opposition to capitalist expansion and concentration took the form of sometimes shocking critiques of Liberalism, but also of ethnic and economic chaos (see Rider 1990, 103–108). Karl Kraus, the influential editor of the review Die Fackel (1899–1934), had some sympathy for social democracy. But he was deeply influenced by a comparably powerful aristocratic elitism. Kraus defended Weininger after his suicide and his influential journal appeared up to the famous issue of 1934 entitled “Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint”—“Why the Fackel is No Longer Published.” It bears repeating that the constitution of social and political identity proceeds thanks to the proliferating imageries that help constitute what Cornelius Castoriadis called “social imaginaries” (Castoriadis 1997, 1986, 3–18). But these images could not take hold, obtain legitimacy, much less engage debate—including, among intellectuals—if it were not for the ability of certain concepts to survive their depletion of content and recombine with other concepts, a process intrinsic to the expansion of nihilism. The unfolding of these combinations is not tidy, but in nineteenth-century society, it followed certain patterns: the ability for alterity to be aligned with potentiality, effeminacy, or degeneracy;22 the ability for alterity to assimilate to hypertrophism, whether that of masculinity in the case of colonized peoples, or of intellect, in the case of Jews. Once displaced, both masculinity and femininity permitted combinations George Mosse has studied how synchretic architecture contributed to the nationalization of the masses, but also large popular movements (see Mosse 1999, 183–197, 1975, 21–38, 207–216). 22 Thus, sex, health, and sanitation, motifs Foucault develops in a number of works. Note, moreover, that in 1892, Max Nordau—famous as a journalist and physician, responsible for coining the term “Muskeljudentum” [muscular Jewry] as antidote for the widespread conception of Jews as effeminate and therefore, degenerate—published his masterwork, Degeneration, a term he borrowed from the French psychiatrist, B. A. Morel, who studied human deviations from a physiological standpoint. Nordau was well known and his work an immediate success. He represents the heritage of a materialism gone awry; one of a host of critics of nineteenth-century culture, comprising Christian and Jewish intellectuals, Nordau preceded Weininger by a decade and anticipated his themes of genius, anti-feminism, sexual morality, and a certain Kantianism (see Nordau 1993). 21

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with infantilism, whether corporeal (written indelibly into African bodies, as neoteny), or political (inscribed on the Jewish body, as ineptitude for military service). When correlated with idealist logics, these categories took on a semiconscious affective charge, influencing the use and value of concepts like identity, unity, plurality, difference. Here is where the epistemology of nihilism shows itself most clearly. In the case of Weininger, but also in that of Schopenhauer and other post- or para-Kantians, categories were often animated by the drive to reconcile a root of pure reason with freedom and the practical good. This is why Benjamin insisted that nihilism, understood as a method, must never let go of finitude and can only proceed as unremitting critique. There is not enough space here to pursue the two levels I am describing: ongoing popular and middle-brow categorical combinations, which supplement or promote ideology, and some higher level encounters between these categories and philosophy (at least those in the Belle Époque). Karl Kraus had no idea that National Socialists would co-opt the discourse of his satirical review, Die Fackel. When this happened he protested in disgust, insisting that his was always a “defense of nature and spirit against the destructive powers of a deviated intelligence and a badly mastered technology” (Le Rider 1990, 132, 148).23 And yet, even in binaries such as “nature” and “spirit,” we hear, still echoing, strains of idealist and vitalist thought, in service to a nihilism Kraus could not have failed to recognize. The conundrum, for us, concerns perceiving the mutations of the serious into the farcical, before what looks like farce to some, is appropriated to nihilistic ends.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. 2002. Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935-1938, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Broch, Hermann. 1977. Philosophische Schriften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. He did so notably in Die Fackel, Nos. 890–905, July 1934, pp. 101ff. What has been called Kraus’s jüdischer Selbsthass is addressed by Adorno’s insight (echoed by Sander Gilman), to the effect that one attempts to extirpate from oneself and project onto various others, human or not, that with which one is most profoundly at odds. To this end, the uncanny quality of nineteenth-century categories took its sharpest relief in the multiple pretenses at unifying empirical science with postidealistic philosophy, toward moral ends. I thank Oona Eisenstadt for the reference to Adorno. There is little doubt that Kraus believed in a Germany that was unified, open to assimilation, democratic, and anti-capitalist (although he too could speak the language of the anti-Semites and Judenfeinde) (see Le Rider 1990, 103–153; 1993).

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Canguilhem, Georges. 1963. Le normal et le pathologique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1986. Les carrefours du labyrinthe. Paris: Le Seuil. ———. 1997. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, edited by David Ames Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1998. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frank, Manfred. 1975. Der unendliche Mangel an Sein : Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Groddeck, Georg. 1979. Un problème de femme. Paris: Éditions Mazarine. Harrowitz, Nancy A. and Barbara Hyams (eds). 1995. Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Nietzsche. New York: Harper & Row. Latraverse, François and Walter Moser (eds). 1988. Vienne au tournant du siècle. La Salle, QC: Éditions Hurtubise. Le Rider, Jacques. 1982. Le Cas Otto Weininger: Racines de l’antiféminisme et de l’antisémitisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1990. Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité. Paris. Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1993. Modernity and Crises of Identity. Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna. New York: Continuum Publishing. Lindemann, Albert S. 2000. Anti-Semitism before the Holocaust. Essex, UK: Pearson Education Limited. Luft, David S. 2003. Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Micale, Mark S. (ed.). 2003. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mosse, George L. 1975. The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich. New York: Howard Fertig. ———. 1999. The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. New York: Howard Fertig. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1988. Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter. Nordau, Max. 1993. Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Price, Daniel and Ryan Johnson. (eds) 2013. The Movement of Nothingness: Trust in the Emptiness of Time. Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers.

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Schelling, Friedrich W. J. 1986. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Schiller, Francis. 1982. A Möbius Strip: Fin de Siècle Neuropsychiatry and Paul Möbius. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1968. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II Supplements to the First Book, “Supplements to the Fourth Book.” New York: Dover Press. Sengoopta, Chandak. 2000. Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Toews, John. 2003. Refashioning the Masculine Subject in Early Modernism, in Mark S. Micale, ed. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America 1880–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weininger, Otto. 1921. Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine principielle Untersuchung 22nd Edition. Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller. ———. 2005. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, translated by Ladislaus Löb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2005. The Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso Press.

7

In Sickness and in Health: Nietzsche, Améry, and the “Moral Difference”1 Roy Ben-Shai

‘In the long run, you’ve got to live’, people say, excusing every miserable thing they have initiated. But do you have to live? Do you always have to be there just because you were there once? In the moment before the leap, suicides tear to pieces a prescription of nature. Améry 1999, 13 “[One] might ask, as a physician: ‘How did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all the corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?’ ” (Nietzsche 1979, x). Thus spoke Nietzsche, “as a physician,” in Beyond Good and Evil. I do not know if Socrates really corrupted Plato, still less if he deserved his hemlock, but I do have some idea about the meaning of this charge by the Athenian justice. This charge has much to do with “causing malady” in the social body, whose strongest, most vital organ is its youth. No proof of this crime needed to be brought before the court, for Socrates generously supplied it himself in his defense speech, which was more indicting than anything the prosecution could have possibly said. Socrates confessed before the court that he believed the unexamined life was not worth living, far inferior to death, which is at least less noisy and tiresome. To anyone with ears to hear, this statement intimated the following: life is not a good in and of itself. The mere fact that one happens to exist justifies neither this existence nor its continuance. One best scratch one’s head, every now and then, and think up a more compelling My warmest thanks go to Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez for her generous, thoughtful, and patient support throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank Michelle Nordmark for invaluable help in editing this chapter.

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excuse. In communicating this horrifying thought, which he himself seems to have found rather amusing, and establishing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is, in fact, the nihilist the court suspected him to be, Socrates did, however, achieve a small triumph. He used the court of justice to make a statement about justice that we are not always capable of hearing, even today, when we read his speech as it is retold by Plato. Socrates made it clear to his judges that he did not think that justice has the same role as medicine does, and that a judge should not ask questions “as a physician.” In other words, it is no more the job of justice to maintain the preservation and health of a community (or individual) than it is to administer poison. It is not the job of justice to ensure that the youth continue to live and to think as the old did, even if one knows pretty well that this kind of continuity is essential to the preservation of the Athenian form of life, including its Gods and its conception of justice. With that, the cheerfully suicidal Socrates placed himself as judge of justice, the judge of his judges, in a way that only a person who is willing to stake his life, and life as such, could. It was precisely the kind of show of impiety that they did not want their youth exposed to any longer. This chapter will deal with the relation between justice, or morality, and life. Does justice serve life? Does life serve justice? Under what conditions, and according to what standard, can we judge our own system of justice, our own moral convictions, and our own existence? I will begin the chapter by introducing a notion of “the moral difference,” which I hope could be instructive in answering these questions. The moral difference, as implied, though not explicated as such, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, is the difference between values and their value. The existence of such a difference is a necessary condition for the possibility of questioning and modifying our values. If values determine their own value, that is to say, if they have intrinsic value, then they are beyond question and judgment. I will show that the condition in which values come to determine our judgment and will, rather than the other way around, is a major part of what nihilism, at least in its negative, decadent sense, meant for Nietzsche. In the first section of the chapter, I will explain the notion of the moral difference by drawing a parallel between Nietzsche’s moral philosophy and Heidegger’s ontology, and between their respective understandings of nihilism. In the second section, I will offer a perspective on, or bring out an aspect of, Nietzsche’s work: his manner and method of posing questions “as a physician,” that is to say, examining the health-value and life-value of moral values. I will take

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an issue with this approach, by way of an immanent critique or deconstruction, proposing that Nietzsche’s valorization of life, health, and future threatens the radicalism and integrity of his critique of morality; to wit, it threatens to collapse the moral difference that it is meant to sustain. The concluding section will engage the work of Holocaust survivor and essayist Jean Améry in a polemic against Nietzsche. Arguing against the intrinsic value of life, health, and future was as consistent a motif in Améry’s work as the converse was in Nietzsche’s, starting with Améry’s influential book of essays on the Holocaust in which he launched an apology for ressentiment against Nietzsche’s condemnation of it. Améry’s rejection of “the logic of life,” as he called it, was epitomized in one of his last books of essays, on the subject of suicide (from which the epigraph to this chapter is taken), and in his actual suicide committed two years after its publication. The suicidal manner, if we may call it that, of Améry’s work and life, seems to fit perfectly into Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism as “a will to nothing” and aversion to life. As I have tried to intimate in my opening remarks about Socrates, I am not sure that such judgment is warranted. I am not sure that a person’s aversion to, or love for, life has anything to do with morality or, for that matter, with the quality and value of his thought. Moreover, I will make the case that we can see in Améry’s rejection of the intrinsic value of life, health, and future an attempt to turn Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism on its head. Nihilism, I will suggest, may have more to do with having, and maintaining, trust in the world, and with an unquestioning valorization of life and health, than it does with being sick, weak, or suicidal. Beyond this polemic against Nietzsche, I will use Améry’s insights to reconfigure the meaning of the moral difference, arguing that the importance of the moral difference is not to enable epochal revolutions in morals (what Nietzsche termed revaluation or transvaluation), which tend to lose their revolutionary force soon after they occur, but to spur a more continuous (or rather discontinuous, “youth-corrupting” and community rupturing) attitude of mistrust and moral revolt.

The being of beings and the value of values Heidegger was fond of saying that every philosopher has a word, a key term or phrase that defines his thought and the thought of his time. Arguably, Heidegger’s own phrase was the ontico-ontological difference, namely, the

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difference between beings (which are plural and determinate) and the being of beings (which is singular and indeterminate). As he pronounced it in the introduction to Being and Time: “The being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being.”2 This phrase suggests a very particular understanding of the logic of differentiation and of the meaning of difference. Very often this word is used to describe a relation between two things, as in “X is different than Y.” But to say that the being of beings is not a being does not only mean that the being of beings is different from (all) beings, but also that it is not something other. The being of beings is “the transcendence pure and simple” (Heidegger 1962, 62). Transcendence pure and simple, like difference pure and simple, is the transcendence (or difference) itself rather than that which is transcendent or different (e.g., God, the Other, and so forth). The ontological difference must therefore be a difference internal to or underlying being: the self-differentiation and self-transcendence of being as such. Heidegger’s emphasis on the ontological difference was intended as an antidote to nihilism, understood as the metaphysical, the scientific, and the technological drive to determine the meaning of being once and for all, that is to say, to define being in a-temporal terms, as fully present and given. The self-differentiation of being means that being is undefinable; it is destabilizing (ek-static), and temporal through and through. According to Heidegger, the endeavor, spurred by anxiety in the face of finitude, to arrest and tame the self-differentiation which is being can only amount to a resolute effacement of being itself and the truth of being. The nihil is “the veil that conceals the truth of the Being of beings” (Heidegger 1982, 11). It is precisely due to our hectic endeavor to know and master being that we end up, paradoxically, “floundering in nothingness” (Heidegger 1991, 208). Let us now draw attention to Nietzsche’s thought. In the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that the book’s task was not only to inquire into the origin of morality but, more importantly, into the value of morality (Nietzsche 1989, 19). He wished to voice a “new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values must first be called in question” (Nietzsche 1989, 20). It is not accidental that the phrase “the value of values” (der Werth dieser Werthe) shares the structure of Heidegger’s expression “the being of beings.” Indeed, as I see it, Nietzsche’s critique of morality is essentially a matter of differentiating between given moral values (which are plural and Das Sein des Seienden “ist” nicht selbst ein Seiendes (Heidegger 1962, 26, where Seienden is translated as “entities”).

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determinate) and the value of values (which is singular and indeterminate). I call this differentiation the moral difference. By drawing a parallel between the ontological difference and the moral difference I’m suggesting that in both cases the difference is not between two separate things. The moral difference is therefore not between two systems of values; rather, it conveys the idea that the value of values is not another value. The moral difference is associated for Nietzsche with a logic of origination— genealogy. A genealogical approach to morality suggests that values are created (the historical and organic products of a process of valuation), finite (susceptible to de-valuation), and indeterminate (subject to re-valuation).3 For Nietzsche, this means that values are themselves living things that can grow, change, die, create, and destroy. While the devaluation and usurpation of values by new valuations is a natural process, vital for maintaining the integrity of morals, nihilism is a devaluation, or rather decay, of values of an entirely different order. Here, values are detached from life and from the soil of history, not in the natural sense of perishing, but on the contrary, in gaining the unnatural or “metaphysical” capacity to outlive their death (and life), to linger on as ghosts and empty shells. This process involves the concealment of the origin of values and forestalls the activity of revaluation. It is sustained by a false and unthinking sense of conviction, where values are either regarded as eternal and universal or reduced to the impersonal, “objective,” level of facts: “One has [come to take] the value of these ‘values,’ ” Nietzsche writes, “as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree …” (Nietzsche 1980, 20). When moral judgment, if we can use this term at all, becomes mechanistic and unreflective, a matter of blindly following and obeying existing codes, personalities lose their distinction and vitality as well. When values live on as ghosts and empty shells, so do persons, for the generation and differentiation of personality types, perspectives, and sensibilities is dependent on the process of valuation. The concealment of the origin of values, which means nothing but their loss of value, is therefore a homogenizing process. We can sense the connection between homogenization and the decay of value when Nietzsche writes, decrying the state of morals in Europe, that when “the herding-animal alone attains to honors, and dispenses honors, ‘equality of right’ can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong” (Nietzsche 1997, 84). This trilogy (valuation, devaluation, revaluation) has a parallel in Heidegger’s propriation, expropriation, and appropriation.

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As is the case with the “over-determination of being” for Heidegger, the overdetermination of morality amounts to the effacement of morality—its source and its reference point—so that, paradoxically, with all our good efforts to attain and secure justice and rights, we end up floundering in valuelessness, in nihilism. It is easy to see that Nietzsche’s demand that we distance ourselves from our values by questioning their value and origin, thus already replanting them in life, history, and human interest, is akin to the Heideggerian venture to withdraw from our immersion in beings so that the question of being, and with it a fresh, original eye and ear for beings, could be rekindled. The parallel between the two thinkers, however, and Nietzsche’s obvious influence on Heidegger, only stretch thus far. At the end of the day, Heidegger not only considered Nietzsche’s philosophy a part of the essential history of metaphysics, namely, the drive to determine being in terms of presence, but as its very consummation. The central claim in this critique of, or distancing from, Nietzsche, which Heidegger developed during the late thirties, was that Nietzsche determined the meaning of being as the will to power, thus reducing thinking to the business of evaluation. Nihilism for Heidegger did not mean the loss or decay of value but precisely the all-consuming concern with power, the desire to dominate being. Nietzsche’s “evaluative thinking” and his conception of nihilism in terms of value, as well as his approach to the problem of nihilism “as a negation that [could] be set to right at once by an energetic affirmation” (i.e., by revaluation) was therefore nihilistic in and of itself (Heidegger 1982, 21–22).4 Heidegger’s own antidote to the nihilistic logic of domination was to turn to and demand a thinking of being which, rather than aiming to grasp, define, classify, utilize, or valuate being, “lets being be,” and lets it be different. It should be born in mind that these assessments by Heidegger were probably made less with an eye to Nietzsche’s own work than with an eye to the surveillance of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche by Nazi party agents.5 In Hannah Arendt took this to be the very essence of the so-called turn (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought. It is tempting, she argued, to locate the precise moment of the turn in the transition from Volume I to Volume II of his book on Nietzsche. To “put it bluntly,” she says, “the first volume explicates Nietzsche by going along with him, while the second is written in a subdued but unmistakable polemical tone.” The timing of this “change of mood,” in the late 1930s, seems evident to her: “what the [turn] originally turns against,” she explains, “is primarily the will-to-power. In Heidegger’s understanding, the will to rule and dominate is a kind of original sin, of which he found himself guilty when he tried to come to terms with his brief past in the Nazi movement” (Arendt 1978, 173). 5 As far as I can tell, Nazi brutality never offended Heidegger’s moral sensibilities nearly as much as the idea that his thinking could be “supervised” by people who have neither the concern nor the capacity for original thought had injured his pride. It offended the honor of the one thing he truly valued, namely, the freedom of thought. For the claim that his lectures were under surveillance, see Pattison (2000, 106). 4

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addition, it could be argued that the category of “the will to power” was not as important to Nietzsche’s work as a whole as it was for the prevalent, ideological, interpretations of his work during the Nazi era, and that Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche’s nihilism were at least in part a response to them.6 Be that as it may, Heidegger’s critique could easily be reversed on Nietzschean grounds, for Nietzsche might have argued that Heidegger’s resolution “to let being be” is precisely the expression of the will to “rid oneself of the responsibility”: “to get around the will, the willing of a goal, the risk of positing a goal …” (Nietzsche 1968, 16–17). I will therefore set Heidegger’s critique aside, and try to show in the following section that, even if we do not overstate the importance of the will to power in Nietzsche’s work, nevertheless his naturalism, vitalism, and valorization of life suggest an overdetermination of the value of values. My concern, in other words, is not that the moral difference constitutes a reduction of the ontological difference and therefore an effacement of being, but rather that Nietzsche’s overdetermination of value jeopardizes the integrity of the moral difference itself, and amounts to an effacement of value. As such, it could result in the same kind of valuelessness that Nietzsche wished to counteract.

The value of health and the horizon of life Despite Nietzsche’s determination to question the value of values, one looks in vain for any attempt in his work to question the value of life, health, and the future—three terms that, as will be seen, are intrinsically interrelated in his thought. Indeed, any attempt to question their value, let alone to deny it, would already be judged in their light and diagnosed as a sickness, if not as some form of hypocrisy or self-deception. Although there are no fixed coordinates to sickness and health, and what appears in a certain context or perspective as a sickness could be seen as healthy from another, and vice versa, it is still the case that Nietzsche as a rule values the conditions under which life is enhanced and derides those that diminish it. In his critique of morality he very often dons the hat, and employs the terminology, of a philosophical physician. This approach is clearly exhibited in the early essay, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life that opens with a quote from Goethe: “I hate “Anyone with ears to hear heard in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism” (Heidegger’s statement, cited in Wollin 1993, 101).

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everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity” (Nietzsche 1980, 7). This statement explicates the goal of Nietzsche’s investigation, namely, to find out how, and to what extent, history is advantageous for life. The proposition that “the natural relation … to history … is only in the service of future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a future strong with life,” is attributed by him the same characteristics we reserve to axioms: this proposition, he states, “is simple, as truth [itself] is simple, and immediately convinces even him who has not first been given a historical proof ” (Nietzsche 1980, 23). Life, and in particular the future, which is regarded as the orientation of a healthy life and its enhancement, are therefore set as the standard by which to judge the value of history—not just particular events but history as such, the recollection and the preservation of the past. Nietzsche does not mince words in this regard: “Only so far as history serves life will we serve it” (Nietzsche 1980, 23). We must “constantly learn to improve our ability to do history for the sake of life” (Nietzsche 1980, 14). This prescription is intended to remedy what Nietzsche diagnoses as “a consuming historical fever” from which we should all at least come to “realize that we suffer” (Nietzsche 1979, 8). The symptomatic expression of this historical fever is the indifferent and undiscriminating study of history for history’s sake, a quest after knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Against this, Nietzsche contends that it is a general law that “every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful only within a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself … it will wither away feebly or overhastily to its early demise” (Nietzsche 1980, 10). The “horizon” is a matter of selective apprehension, that is, it marks not only the orientation “forward” (toward the future) and the openendedness and expanses of the field of vision, but its boundedness as well. In that sense, Nietzsche’s horizon anticipates Heidegger’s notion of the “region of unconcealement”—the idea that the other side of knowledge and truth (of disclosure) is an active ignorance and hiding (i.e., closure)—except that Nietzsche sees in this closure an essentially positive and life-preserving phenomenon. The capacity to “draw a horizon around itself ” is the capacity to discern between what should be preserved and what should be forgotten, what should be turned toward and what should be turned away from and “left behind.” Above all, it is an orientation and sense of direction and is futural at that. The task, therefore, is to study history on the horizon of the future, not out of sheer learned curiosity, but as a resource, a potentiality, for furthering life

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and movement. The importance, for understanding Nietzsche’s project, of these early remarks about the study of history and its horizon, is that they seem to serve as a blueprint to his later genealogical work. It is precisely genealogy’s task, as Nietzsche practices it, to “draw a horizon around” history, not simply to understand the past but to imbue it with life, in the service of the present and the future, of quickening history’s power of activity and lightening its step rather than burdening, slowing, and pulling it backwards like an overweight. It is because it draws its coordinates and motivation from the present and its maladies that genealogy is essentially “polemic.” Like the essay on history, it means “to act against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it is to be hoped, of a coming age” (Nietzsche 1980, 8, italics mine). Observing the therapeutic ethos of Nietzsche’s thought can help to understand why his work, as it matured, became increasingly invested in the problem of morality. Why did the concern with life and health lead Nietzsche into the domain of moral philosophy? For one thing, distinguishing between what should be remembered and what should be forgotten is itself the work of valuation, which is always a matter of distinction and discrimination: telling the high from the low, the valuable, conducive, “advantageous,” from the invaluable, useless, or damaging. But there is, I propose, a more specific reason for the concern with morality, which could perhaps be better understood if we compare the work of drawing a horizon to that of digestion. The function of the digestive system is to draw the line between inside and outside, what is internalized and what is externalized—it sorts out what is advantageous for the body and for life and what is not. Not only our memory, but our experience in general, can be said to be “digestive” in the sense that we tend to take in or preserve what can be converted into energy and discard what is useless as waste or as insignificant. Consider, then, that moral values, convictions, and sensibilities are the digestive organs of spirit. Like valves, they determine what we are capable and what we are incapable of taking in (“stomaching”) and conversely, of letting out and letting go of. The task of cultivating a horizon— in fact, the task of self-differentiation and orientation, of making up a self as a project, of becoming who one is—necessarily calls upon an assessment of how well these values function. Employing health as a standard for judgment equips us, at least in principle, with an affective barometer: to be healthy, powerful, and more alive should feel better than being sick and weak. The plot thickens, however, when we realize that moral values have the power to take over and displace this natural

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barometer, as one comes, for example, to feel bad or guilty precisely because one feels good. This is no ordinary sickness, for it not only jeopardizes the capacity to heal and overcome but the desire to do so. As a consequence, a diseased morality is neither felt nor diagnosed as a disease at all, but on the contrary, it propagates itself as the standard for health and judgment. Paradoxically, it destroys the natural barometer, obscures the power of judgment and knowledge of the good, all the while masquerading as this very knowledge. While immanently growing as a living, natural process morality can therefore end up asserting itself above life and nature. “This is the antinomy,” as Nietzsche declares in one of the aphorisms compiled in The Will to Power: “Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence” (Nietzsche 1968, 10). Later he clarifies this thought: “Moral value judgments are ways of passing sentence, negations; morality is a way of turning one’s back on the will to existence” (Nietzsche 1968, 11). The task of On the Genealogy of Morals (which could equally have been titled On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Morality for Life) is to bring moral values before the court of life, to summon morality to the physician’s office for periodical examination, asking whether our moral values and sense of justice are “a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, the plentitude, force, and will of life, its courage, certainty, future?” (Nietzsche 1989, 17). At the physician’s office, however, it can no longer be “justice that sits in judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiably selfdesiring power” (Nietzsche 1980, 23). Already made in the essay on history, this last statement invokes the moral difference: the difference between justice and the justness of justice, between justice and judgment. Nietzsche makes it implicit that justice cannot set the standard for judging its own justness, for that would be the epitome of injustice. The problem, however, is that this statement also determines what kind of force should sit in judgment, as well as what the parameters for making judgment should be. This is not unlike dropping a heavy stone on one’s foot as a solution to a troublesome toothache. It should, in any case, be clear from this analysis that morality is not in and of itself a disease; on the contrary, if there is anything more self-destructive than a malfunctioning morality, it is the obliteration of morality and valuation as such. Morality, on this view, is precisely the system that preserves and fortifies the human organism, its horizon, and its limits. The way that morality can successfully serve life is memorably captured in Nietzsche’s analyses of “the slave revolution in morality,” namely, the overtaking

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of the Roman world by Christianity. Nothing short of a moral revolution, a revolution in values, could have brought about such a victorious transformation. Since the slaves did not have the physical means or power to rebel against their masters, a new mode of valuation endowed the condition of slavery itself with value: If God, the very symbol of omnipotence, chose to incarnate in the life of slavery, powerlessness, and suffering, then this life is no longer experienced as failure and degradation, but as a mark of glory and a promise of redemption. Consequently, the self-understanding and self-esteem of slaves is no longer bound up with the deeds and decrees of their worldly oppressors (for whom, with their infidelity and ignorance, they can at most feel sorry), but is defined solely in terms of their spiritual relation to the transcendent God. This means that they are no longer slaves to anyone but Him, who loves them. When it is not praised as God’s self-deferral and self-sacrifice, corporal suffering is perceived as a categorical (though temporary) punishment for an original sin, for the sinfulness of the flesh and lustful desire. Furthermore, it is not the believer who is punished but the flesh, to which he is no longer subordinate or reducible. Since the spirit itself, the true self of the believer, sanctions and justifies this punishment, it is not experienced as imposed from without but as willed, as self-punishment, as a means to purify and strengthen the autonomy of spirit and the power of faith, bringing one that much closer to redemption. Triumph and meaning thus attach to the pain, the more so the greater and more meaningless it is. Suffering becomes a source of power and a promise of a future. And thus, long before their physical unchaining and the lifting of the sword, the slaves have been emancipated. Insofar as the historical creation and promotion of the Christian value system allowed its followers to turn reality on its head, to produce overwhelming power and liberation out of an equally overwhelming powerlessness and despondence, and ultimately, to make rulers out of slaves, this revolt remains a prime manifestation of the capacity for self-overcoming by means of a revaluation of values. As Nietzsche puts it, Christianity “prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life; from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation” (Nietzsche 1968, 10). But the cure became a particularly powerful poison—and the task of Nietzsche’s genealogy is to underscore both these aspects, the healing and the injurious. The denouncement of flesh and desire and the devaluation of worldly existence were preservative and life-enhancing as long as the flesh was synonymous with pain, desire was only on the side of the oppressors, and

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the dynamics of worldly existence were disabling and degrading. But the goal to which this denouncement was the means was, on Nietzsche’s analysis, to overcome these conditions along with the need to valorize them. The problem is that, since this operation involved the portrayal of values as purely spiritual and transcendent and hence supra-historical and universal, they ended up systematically diminishing the resources needed for their own overturning, losing their original power to emancipate, revolutionize, and shape a future. Since self-overcoming—the destruction of old forms of life and the creation of new ones—is utterly essential to life, growth, and evolution, destroying the resources, and suppressing the impetus, to achieve it can only be suicidal in the long run. At this point, one of the most important terms in Nietzsche’s vocabulary needs to be introduced: Ressentiment was his name for the life and fate-hating ethos that ensued in the aftermath of the slave revolt in morality. Like every phenomenon in Nietzsche, this one too is attributed progressive (conducive, healthy) and redemptive aspects as well. In this context, however, I will focus solely on the negative aspects, which, as conveyed both in the letter and the tone of Nietzsche’s text, are the more essential in this case. The spirit of ressentiment is primarily characterized by two negative and weakening emotions, namely, envy and pity. The former marks hostility toward privilege, distinction, and strength, while the latter marks identification with weakness and the underprivileged. What stems from the combination of these destructive emotions is an essentially leveling and herding ideology, according to which all individuals must equally be slaves to social justice and answerable to impersonal, “disinterested” or “unselfish,” “transcendental” or “universal” rules. To Nietzsche, this implies the killing of some of life’s noblest traits: the instinct of freedom and creativity, the taste for polemics, self-distinction, and selfovercoming. This leveling conspiracy is responsible for many of the maladies of the age: the cult of justice as “fairness,” the distinction-abolishing politics of liberal democracy, free market, socialism, and communism, as well as the spread of scientism, positivism, and historicism, with their ethos of “neutrality” and “factual objectivity” and the indiscriminating pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake—the “consuming historical fever” mentioned above.7 Their dangerous motto is fiat veritas pereat vita (Nietzsche 1980, 23: let there be truth, and may life perish!). “All I wish to draw attention to,” Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “is that it is the spirit of ressentiment itself out of which this new nuance of scientific fairness (for the benefit of hatred, envy, jealousy, mistrust, rancor, and revenge) proceeds …” (Nietzsche 1989, 74).

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But the essence of ressentiment most truly comes to bear in its inverted relation to time. Joining forces with guilt, its internalized twin, it worships and obsesses over the past while turning one’s back to the future. Ressentiment in that sense is nothing if not a severe case of indigestion: the inability and dispositional reluctance to forget, to turn away, and move on. In stark contrast to the life-affirming, future-oriented activity of drawing a horizon around oneself promoted by Nietzsche, the spirit of ressentiment is devoted to seeking out injustices to condemn and to abhor and, far from working to heal the wounds of history, it aggravates them, ruminates over them until they turn poisonous and yield a veritable disdain for life. This sensibility destroys any positive and constructive indicator of what benefits life and future. It is therefore either a paradigmatic case of, or a general name for, moral sickness. Before proceeding to a different, counter-polemical view on the meaning of ressentiment, a few words to conclude this section. I have suggested that Nietzsche’s own philosophy has a horizon, a commitment, a goal, and therefore a unity of project, as he himself would demand that any life, person, or philosophy should have. I also suggested that there is a conflict between Nietzsche’s resolve to question the value of values, and his reduction of the value of values to the value of life. It may be argued, against this line of critique, that Nietzsche posited the value of life and health in response to his own sickliness and suffering, or, as he often stated himself, that it was a defiant reaction against the nihilistic “Nosaying” spirit of the age as he perceived it. Such approach would suggest that his affirmation of, and preoccupation with, life is more of a polemical device, relative to historical circumstances, than it is a value in and of itself. If it is true that life is not of intrinsic value for Nietzsche (or conversely, that this term is as indeterminate as Heidegger’s being is), then perhaps the gesture of appealing to it, as one does to a supreme court of appeals, is not as problematic as I propose. Yet there is sufficient evidence to suggest that this is not quite, and certainly not always, the case. Life is often attributed physiological or biological determinants by Nietzsche and is often enough presented as a meta-standard, so that even if other values that appear to be “beyond” the vitalistic logic of preservation and enhancement (including transcendental ones) are sanctioned, they are sanctioned in view of their life-value or health-value, and insofar as they further the future. If Nietzsche taught us that moral thinking is a questioning of values rather than questioning in light of values, it is well within the spirit of his work to call his own values to question. This requires shifting the ground, or horizon, of discussion.

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Mistrusting trust As argued, ressentiment symbolizes in Nietzsche’s work a paradigm case, or general name, for moral sickness. In an essay titled “Resentments,” Jean Améry sets out, in an explicit polemic against Nietzsche, to philosophically defend ressentiment as “the emotional source of every genuine morality.” He goes so far as to present his own view as a “slave morality” (a “morality for losers”), and himself as a reactionary “in the exact sense of the word” (Améry 1980, 81, italics mine). It is my claim that in these proclamations, as in his entire work, Améry shows himself to be a Nietzschean in the only way one could be Nietzschean, namely, by turning against Nietzsche with the same polemical rebelliousness that characterizes Nietzsche’s own work.8 If the constellation of terms that defines the horizon of Nietzsche’s thought are life, health, and future, the ones that define Améry’s are incurable injury (or an unclosable wound), mistrust (or revolt), and ressentiment (or a “twisted” time-sense). Before bringing the two horizons into direct confrontation, I will first sketch the concrete background and formal structure of Améry’s.

The incurable injury as the origin of morality, and the injurious efforts to close it off In 1976, more than thirty years after his liberation from Auschwitz, Améry writes, What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted. I rebel: against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way. Nothing has healed …. (Améry 1980, xi)

We should note that Améry’s ressentiment, indeed reactionary “in the exact sense of the word,” is not, as it was for Nietzsche, a “spirit” or a “mentality,” Jean Améry was born as Hans Mayer to a half-Jewish, Austrian family in 1912. During World War II, while working for the Resistance in Belgium, he was apprehended by the Gestapo and subsequently tortured and interned in Auschwitz. After the war he returned to Belgium, changed his name to Jean Améry, and worked as a freelance journalist. In 1965 he delivered a series of lectures on German public radio. These lectures contained phenomenological reflections on his experiences of torture, the concentration camp, and their aftermath. They were compiled in a book titled Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Beyond Guilt and Atonement), translated into English as At the Mind’s Limits. The radio talks and the book won him almost instant fame and critical acclaim in Germany and in his native Austria and proved formative for the postwar generation. He continued delivering radio talks and writing essays until his death in 1978, by suicide.

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that is to say, a psychic and subjective disposition. It is, rather, an imposition: a reaction to a happening that is revolting. In other words, it does not stem from some conscious or unconscious “interiority,” some unhappy consciousness that categorically refuses to let go. At the same time, it is not turned inwards, but on the contrary, is directed outwards, “against the age” as Nietzsche might say. “I preserved my resentments,” Améry states, “And since I neither can nor want to get rid of them, I must live with them and am obliged to clarify them for those against whom they are directed” (Améry 1980, 67, italics mine). Ressentiment is therefore relational from top to bottom: it is a reaction-to (a particular past and present) and is directed-toward and -against (a particular society and generation). In order to understand this sense of ressentiment, something must therefore be said about the revolting happenings that engender it and about the ethos that it turns against. Surprisingly enough, what initially spurs ressentiment for Améry is not the past but the present. It only surfaced for him, he tells us, twenty years after the war, during the generational transition of the 1960s, when he began to feel the “wheel of time” at work, as society and public opinion, suddenly taking a keen and sentimental interest in past victims and their welfare, began pressing for reconciliation, reassuring them that no one “bears a grudge” anymore, that they are welcome and respected as any other human being. For the victim, however, the call to rejoin this happy family of humans, this fictional “We,” is more revolting than it is appeasing. Alienated, mistrusting, the victim “cannot join in the unisonous peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future!” (Améry 1980, 68). He cannot help but see, peering through the conciliatory wave, the same conformist and quietist indifference of the society that only yesterday joined ranks around, or at least submissively complied with, the goal of expelling him and other vermin of his sort. The order of things is therefore reversed. It is not that the reconciliation efforts react to the victims’ resentments (or, for that matter, the past itself), but the other way around: reconciliation is inertly prompted by the passage of time and the rejuvenation of society, of its morale and its economy, and this process is hindered by the presence of those whose existence tells another story. Transitional justice, as the business of rehabilitating and reintegrating past victims, is in that sense a matter of healing (or concealing) wounds and

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scars in the social body and conscience in the service of life, health, and future.9 However, as far as those victims are concerned for whom “nothing has healed” or could be healed, this movement only exacerbates the injury and further opens the wound rather than healing it. Bearing in mind Foucault’s suggestion that “Peace [could be seen as] a form of war, and the state a means of waging it” (Foucault 1984, 65), we may even consider the well-meaning attitude of society toward its past victims not only as self-serving and self-interested but as a form of symbolic violence. It is to this violence that ressentiment reacts. As we can see, much depends on the claim that certain violations and injuries resist and defy the process of healing and comprehension, even recollection (the German word for which is Erinnerung, interiorization). Had it not been the case that the injury itself is somehow irredeemable, the victim’s resistance to healing would have been rightly considered a subjective-psychological disposition and stubbornness, and perhaps a misdirected modality of desire or the will to power. But what kind of injury could be regarded as incurable, irredeemable? For Améry, its paradigmatic case is torture. He makes the case, which I can only summarize here, that the apotheosis of Nazi persecution was the perverted relational dynamic of torture for torture’s sake. It was an “inversion of the social principle,” wherein Mitmenschlichkeit (human being-with) turned into Gegenmenschlichkeit (anti-humanity).10 Insofar as the “social principle” can be inverted and has been inverted, the result is a loss of trust in the world (Weltvertrauen).11 This loss of trust, I will soon explain, is the irredeemable and decisive aspect of the wound of torture.

Trust in the world as a veiling, and “the moral truth” Trust in the world includes all sorts of things: the irrational and logically unjustifiable belief in absolute causality perhaps, or the likewise blind belief in the validity of the inductive inference. But more important … the certainty that by reason of some written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me …. (Améry 1980, 28)

It so turns out that the confidence that “the other person would spare me” was as “logically unjustifiable” and “blind” as the belief in causal necessity and At the limit, we could say that the business of transitional justice is to eliminate victimhood and celebrate survival. “In Nazism,” as he puts it, “the rule of the antiman is expressly established as a principle … It hated the word ‘humanity’ like the pious man hates sin” (Améry 1980, 31). 11 Vertrauen can mean anything from “trust” to “faith” to “confidence” to “reliance” to “credit.” 9

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the validity of induction were (both of which, as Hume taught us, relied on the presupposition, which experience could not possibly verify, that nature must be consistent and coherent).12 If this confidence was not justified then, then it is certainly not justified now. Little about our history, and nothing about the manifest stupidity and occasional meanness of many of our leaders, policemen, and intelligence officers, and many of our fellows, supports this trust. In this sense, we could propose that trust in others is not something learned or acquired as much as it is a function, a necessary postulate for leading a relatively healthy and functioning existence. The problem is that (if you are willing to entertain this line of thought a bit longer), self-preservation is not the only role that this kind of existential trust plays. Trust in the world is an essentially self-validating mechanism. One does not wait passively to see whether or not trust is justified. Much like Nietzsche’s notion of “drawing a horizon around oneself,” trust in this sense is a mental armor and a proactive (if often unconscious) organizer and sorter of information. This means that, whatever violates or undermines the validity of trust needs to be overlooked, invalidated, or explained away. If that is the case, then trust in the world stifles rebellion just as it stifles the possibility of undergoing or recognizing a crisis. It will no more yield to experiential or historical learning than transcendental or ontological structures would. In addition, trusting means that trust is a “non-issue,” taken for granted. To truly trust another is not so much to “believe” that the other would not betray me, but rather, not to be preoccupied or perturbed by the prospect of betrayal at all, let alone be anxious or sickened by it. It is therefore one of those modalities of experience (such as being at home) that, as soon as they become conscious or aware, “problematized” in experience, they are already undermined or modified, if not completely destroyed. This is akin to that famous saying that if the deer became aware of how fast it was running it would immediately stumble and fall. Real trust is blind to itself by essence, whence its fortitude and efficiency, no more visible than the limits of the field of vision. It is the Mayan Veil that hides nothingness—its own groundlessness and the fundamentally insecure nature of the sense of security and confidence it forges. 12

One might also wonder whether philosophers who do not share the belief in the consistency and coherence of nature and history, but would rather see it as a willful discursive postulate, yet nonetheless tread the streets with confident step, do not have trust in the world. This trust is felt in the legs and in the bowels, not in the mind, and the legs and the bowels should bear the effects of its undermining.

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If we combine these features of trust it should follow that its loss is as irrevocable as the loss of naivety is, or, differently put, that rehabilitating trust makes as much sense as rehabilitating naivety. While a physical and mental injury can perhaps be cured, the loss of trust alters one’s relation to the world, including one’s own body and psyche and, as we will soon see, time. To argue that “succumbing to torture” has the capacity to modify ontological and transcendental structures implies that these structures are violable, and that the confidence in the capacity to postulate them is underwritten and conditioned by trust. We might even suggest that their postulation is prompted by the need to maintain and secure trust. The ontological envelope tacitly reassures us that something like torture cannot be perceived or imagined (or would certainly be irrelevant to fundamental thinking). The violability of trust does not simply imply the structural groundlessness of existence and vulnerability to death (which are non-relational), nor can it be reduced to the constitutive relationality of existence and dependency upon the other (which remain unchanged regardless of whether the “social principle” is upheld or inverted). It is, rather, vulnerability to dehumanization. Dehumanization is the truly nihilistic abyss of meaninglessness and reasonlessness of the sadistic brutality of torture or rape, the specific kind of sustained and predetermined cruelty—cruelty as a project, as a norm, as a commitment—that apparently only the rational animal is quite capable of. Any attempt to explicate the meaning of torture or rape, if on psychosexual, sociological, or political grounds, is an attempt to explain their meaninglessness away, distorting the inhumane and unintelligible with a humane and intelligent perspective. As such, this attempt acts in the service of trust in the world and already attests to its existence. This, then, is the antinomy: either the antiman exists or it doesn’t. While this antinomy may be “undecidable” or insoluble, taking it seriously might already provoke a good measure of mistrust by the person who thinks it or at least uncomfortable self-awareness in the acts and postulations of thought. For Améry, this discomfort is well called for, since, however ironically, trust is the thing to fear, to mistrust. The more trust is culturally or philosophically consolidated, the more easily it can be turned around and against itself. For the same trust that allowed Améry to focus his energies on his continued existence before his experience of torture, also permitted (in fact, beckoned) the decisive majority of his fellowmen to stand by while others were being tortured, failing, perhaps, to register the world-shattering implications of the

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violation to which they bore witness. Trust is therefore untrustworthy, and the realization of this untrustworthiness is, according to Améry, “the moral truth” of this event: Only I possessed, and still possess the moral truth of the blows that even today roar in my skull, and for that reason I am more entitled to judge, not only more than the culprit but also more than society—which thinks only about its continued existence. (Améry 1980, 69–70)

While the physical torture is “over” and past, the moral truth of it is not. Perpetually haunted by it, incapable and unwilling to trust, and to tolerate blindness in others, the victim remains “nailed onto the cross of his ruined past” (Améry 1980, 68).13 “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured,” Améry writes, and adds that the “permanence of torture gives the one who underwent it the right to speculative flights, which need not be lofty ones and still may claim a certain validity” (Améry 1980, 34).

Time, “twisted” and straight The injury is therefore incurable, trust will not be regained. The contrast between this incurability or moral truth, and society’s industrious efforts to cure and deny it; between the unpassing of this event and the pressure of new generations to let the “past” pass (already assuming this to be possible and desirable), results in a particularly painful and contradictory condition for the victim. The victim is pulled at once in two opposite directions: forced to “survive,” survival becomes increasingly impossible. The more the society and world that sustain him move and press “onward,” the more he is pulled “backwards,” thrown behind. It is not only symbolic that this experience of time is a form of torture; that “the wheel of time” becomes a breaking wheel. When Améry states that he must clarify the meaning ressentiment to those against whom it is directed, it is certainly in part this predicament that he wishes to clarify, especially to those who are anxious to help the victim to move on with life, perhaps not fully realizing the true motivations or the consequences of their endeavor. The barely disguised reference to Christian mythology in this phrase is not meant to invoke an analogy but to emphasize a difference: insofar as Jesus was resurrected, he was not nailed to the cross of his ruined past. On the contrary, his essence as savior and redeemer was to demonstrate that the Via Dolorosa and the cross are not the “end of the story”: There is a future salvation, a repair.

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Améry calls this conflicted experience of time a twisted (ver-rückt) time sense.14 To explain this notion and what I think it does, I must first offer a general point for reflection about time. Time itself is a contradiction, if rarely experienced as such. It is at once poison and cure, arrest and liberation. On the one hand, as the common sayings have it, time “heals all wound,” and “this too shall pass.” This natural attitude was given ontological credence by Heidegger, who adequately showed that time is the condition of our transcendence, and therefore our freedom. As temporal beings, aware of their temporality, we are never at one with ourselves, always outside of ourselves in the world and ahead of ourselves toward future and death. For that reason, neither we nor our world are ever reducible to the present and presence, and nothing that happens to us is ever final, fixed, or “irreversible,” a mere “fact.” On the other hand, time is the condition of our helplessness and vulnerability. With respect to time we are at base patients and not agents. Time as a happening, as the place-holder to all that happens to us, beyond what we can anticipate, understand, hold, recollect, or control; that which can never be stopped, upheld, contained, or mediated. It is in time and by time that we get injured, ill, and grow old. With respect to all finite beings, by their essence as “finite,” time is degeneration, the impossibility, in the final count, of absolution, redemption, or cure. In this (irreducible) respect, time is not what Kant called “inner sense” and certainly not a “form of intuition.” We do not age, nor does our skin become yellow, in “inner sense.” Time is both degeneration and regeneration, dispossession and control, anxiety and trust, poison and cure. With this contradiction in mind, we can appreciate the fact that the twisted time-sense of ressentiment is not a simple inversion. It is not, in other words, a turning “backwards” rather than “forwards,” concern with the past instead of the future. It is rather a time-sense that holds (or rather, is held by) this contradiction. If ressentiment emphasizes time as the irreducible condition of our violability, it is only in the motion of countering, reacting, and revolting against, a tradition and esprit that emphasizes time as the condition of transcendence, freedom, and salvation. The “twisted” time-sense in Améry’s exposition stands against the “natural consciousness of time.” The term “natural” is not to be taken as implying a Ver-rückt colloquially connotes “crazy” or “mad.” By separating it into its components, Améry seems to call to mind a visceral resonance both in the sign and in what it signifies. It could perhaps be read as “turned-behind-the-back.” The English translation, “disorder,” does not quite capture this visceral aspect. “Twist,” the term I am using, is, as Améry notes elsewhere, the original meaning of torquere, or torture, and it also conveys more strongly the sort of psychopathological connotation that his ver-rückt provokes, and at the same time challenges.

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universal law but a habitual attitude, which “became a part of [or engrained in] the social representation of reality” (Améry 1980, 72, translation slightly modified). In describing the characteristics of this natural organization of time, Améry invokes the language of the physician, proposing that it “is rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing” (Améry 1980, 72). With a nod to what we have seen is a core postulate of Nietzsche’s ethics and approach to history, he adds: “What will be tomorrow is more valuable than what was yesterday. That is how the natural feeling for time will have it” (Améry 1980, 76, italics mine). Améry’s position concurs with Nietzsche’s in the sense that both see the natural orientation of time as the work of valuation, which is in turn viewed as a matter of healing and health. There are, however, two main points of contention in the way by which they understand the natural. First, there is a substantive shift from the agentive paradigm that can be discerned in Nietzsche, typical of modern thought and especially of nineteenthcentury vitalism, to a pathological (passive) paradigm.15 Where the former talks of desire, drive, force, the latter stresses the existence of wounds and injuries that are inflicted and undergone. The organization of time, life, and reality in that sense is more reactive than proactive—a helpless fleeing from passivity rather than a positive drive toward self-preservation and self-determination. When viewed through the lens of the pathological paradigm, the agentive paradigm itself (the postulation of conscious or unconscious primordial drives) can be said to be “rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing,” as part of a preventative or immunizing modality of healing. Such preventative measure, however, is as ideological and fictional as is the idea of an original sin, which, as suggested, was erected to justify and vindicate a suffering that is fundamentally unjust and meaningless. If life is prefigured as an agent, a “self-desiring force” as Nietzsche called it, then passivity is prefigured as a derivative, somehow inessential to life as such, at most its product or side-effect. In that sense, the designation of life as force, desire, or will (and along with it the self-understanding of thinking as a force, desire, or will), already works to circumscribe passivity. To minimize passivity and accident, or vulnerability and exposure to them, is to fortify trust in the world, since an impassive being cannot be injured. Implied here is a modified understanding of what metaphysics is about and how Nietzsche might still be regarded a metaphysicist: the metaphysical, like the proactive, is invulnerable. The fantasy of invulnerability animates Nietzsche’s categorical We could say that Améry’s thought was exhibiting, in 1965, what since the 1990s has been termed “an affective turn.”

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Yes-saying and love of fate no less than it does categorical No-saying. In short, under this paradigm shift the origin of valuation and of moral values is not the will but the need to close off, or conceal, an open, unclosable wound, while moral values are not the condition for the possibility of power but for the concealment of powerlessness. Second, and alongside this implicit paradigm shift, there is a difference in the understanding of “the future” and its role. While Nietzsche often makes it sound as if the future is a given value and the ultimate test for the health-value of values, the sense we get from Améry is that valuation manufactures the future, or that future is a value-concept. Like metaphysical or transcendental constructions, it is a mode of transcendence. If, however, we follow the footsteps of Nietzsche’s own critique of metaphysics, we must wonder whether the investment of value in this kind of transcendence is not already an anticipation of valuelessness, the decay of values and their detachment from their origin in history and life. Be it as it may, for ressentiment, this kind of transcendence is foreclosed. Its twisted time sense “blocks the exit to the … future” (Améry 1980, 76, italics mine). Interestingly, in the very same statement Améry contends that the future is “the genuine human dimension.” We are led to believe that being denied exit to the human dimension is precisely where the moral significance of ressentiment lies, implying not only that morality and humanity are not intrinsically correlated as they are traditionally made out to be, but that they are somehow mutually exclusive. This idea is not entirely new. Henri Bergson gestured toward it when he argued that “Philosophy should be an effort to go beyond the human state” (Bergson 1992, 193), and Nietzsche himself seemed to believe so too, as suggested by his appeal to an “over-man,” a self-overcoming of humanity. If, however, the future is the genuine human dimension as Améry contends, it becomes doubtful whether the overman, whom Nietzsche never fails to portray as a man of the future, is anything but an idealized and wishful portrayal of the human as such. This would make the overman less an overcoming than a resurrection (and reification) of the same. To conclude, ressentiment radicalizes rather than destroys the moral difference asserted by Nietzsche’s thought, in that its alienated, exiled gaze casts the future, along with life and health, and the “genuinely human,” into the side of moral values, and into question. As Améry notes: “Indeed: it’s a rather cheap truth to say that our condition [Befinden] generally gets noticed only when we are out of condition [Misbefinden]” (Améry 1994, 34). This is perhaps the reason for which it is so difficult for us, men of knowledge, to know ourselves.

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Morality, between conformity and revolt There are two traditional ways to conceive the relation between morality and nature: monistic and dualistic. The former sees morality as subordinate to natural desire, and the latter sees morality (along with human rationality and the divine) as independent from, transcendent/transcendental to, and higher than nature, enabling to guide natural desire and keep it in check. My interpretation of Améry is espousing an alternative perspective, whereby the moral is neither subordinate to nature nor is it higher or independent from it. Rather, it is a disordering of and revolt against nature. Morality is, in that sense, nothing but a (moral) difference; it is not another sphere, elsewhere, but a dissociation and dislocation (Verrenkung), a crisis and revolt. “The moral power to resist,” states Améry, “contains the protest, the revolt against reality” (Améry 1980, 72). As already seen in Nietzsche, the moral difference stands at once against the reification of values and the homogenization of perspectives and personalities. In Améry too, it is what distinguishes between the herding moralization of “the individual who incorporates himself morally into society and dissolves in its consensus,” and “the person who perceives himself to be morally unique,” remaining true to his experience and fate. Whoever submerges his individuality in society and is able to comprehend himself only as a function of the social … really does forgive … His time-sense is not dis-ordered … it has not moved out of the biological and social sphere into the moral sphere. As a de-individualized, interchangeable part of the social mechanism he lives with it consentingly. (Améry 1980, 71)

Consider how different this version of slave morality and ressentiment is from the phenomenon Nietzsche critiques, in which “the good man” is aligned with “the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the sentimental, the weary” (Nietzsche 1989, 95). Whereas for Nietzsche ressentiment is, so to speak, the sentimental “cementing” of the herd and of the mob, Améry’s ressentiment beckons us to consider that it is rather the affirmation of life, health, and future that performs this function, and performs it well. Nietzsche exposed an important truth about the value of ordinary values and its relation to healing, but, at least to some extent, he ended up reinforcing and conforming to the same natural, healing mechanism he diagnosed. His work often implies that, in the end, all of us—animals, humans, gods, and supermen

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alike—are but slaves to life and fate; some, like slaves, carry their crosses begrudgingly, while others, like dunces, rejoice. Is this an alternative at all? *** As cited in the first section, Heidegger argued that the nihil is “the veil that conceals the truth of the Being of beings” (Heidegger 1982, 11). Trust, I propose, is the veil that hides the truth of the value of values—the moral truth. The origin of the value of values—the wound and the vulnerability—is closed off and concealed by the generic and undiscriminating prescription that wounds can and should be healed and that “the past” should be attended to in the service of life and future. Values then become empty shells and golden calves. We become too busy defending human rights to be bothered by humans (or each other); we commit violence for the sake of maintaining peace, ignore the others’ autonomy in the name of promoting freedom; injure by aggressively and intrusively healing; alienate and instill resentments in the guise of reconciliation. With characteristic irony and resignation, Améry reassures us toward the end of his essay on resentments that we need not worry. Slave morality is a “morality for losers,” and the natural consciousness of time and its trust in the world will prevail over ressentiment, or at least successfully suppress it (Améry 1980, 81). The future is stronger and healthier than the past, as the young are stronger and healthier than the old, and the strong are healthier than the weak. All this “is simple,” to recall Nietzsche’s words, “as truth is simple, and immediately convinces even him who has not first been given a historical proof ” (Nietzsche 1980, 23). Perhaps due to this simplicity, the words of the philosophical physician are bound to be more pacifying for the public, for the present, and for the coming age than those of the patient that he cannot cure.

Afterword: Améry and the State of Israel The Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel is called Yom Hashoah Ve-hagvurah, meaning, “The day of the Holocaust and Heroism.” Gvurah, the Hebrew word for heroism, is etymologically related both to overcoming and overpowering (Ligvor) and to masculinity (Gavriut). As the name suggests, this day places equal weight on the commemoration of annihilation and victimization as it does on the incidents of uprising and revolt by Jews against their perpetrators. This coupling of Holocaust and Heroism, however, seems to extend beyond the

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historic context of World War II, in which actual displays of heroism were all but apparently swallowed up by the devastating force of victimization. The heroic side of the equation belongs more to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel, as meant, in its very existence, to make amends— to counter humiliation and attempt at annihilation with a more noble, powerful, self-defending, and self-reliant character. As the Hebrew poet Jabotinski famously wrote: Through blood and sweat, there will arise in us a race Proud, and generous, and merciless.

Since Améry’s book takes up victimhood itself—without venue for positive redemption—as its focus, there should be little wonder that this book, originally published in German in 1966, was translated into Hebrew only in 2001, despite the fact that it is one of the canonical texts of Holocaust Studies and that it had long since been translated into English and French. It would not be far-fetched to propose that, prior to the last decade, such an approach to victimhood would have had little audience in a country that cannot commemorate, let alone reflect, on the Shoah without its adjacent moment of Heroism, and whose selfidentification consists in the trajectory of a victim-turned-hero and a manly self-overcoming above the abysses of past and pending victimization. The mindless self-righteousness by which what is overwhelming and shameful is transformed into a cultural trope, a flag, and a slogan and by which sadness and resentments blend into a celebration of life, health, and vigor; the employment of morality in the service of power and justification of violence, can easily make one develop a deep suspicion of, if not aversion to, the very notion of “morality.” The importance of Améry’s work in the Israeli context is that it gives voice to the feelings of shame, pain, fear, and deep-seated resentment, and yet halts their utilization as fuel to mobilize parades and “just” wars, and the promotion of hollow and undiscriminating solidarity, an entirely unjustified trust in ourselves. The moral difference, in that sense, is a ridge between morality and the celebration of power. Maintaining this ridge, keeping the wound open and attending to it as such, allows for once the question to be asked rather than decided upon in advance: what is “morality?” Is there something like a “moral truth” outside the activities of self-righteous moralization, identity formation, and theory-building; outside the concern for and discourse about survival and future? What precepts would remain to guide us if we dared to cast our

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continued existence, as we are, into question? If we dared to pass, and tolerate, judgment about it? In 1966, the first generational transition since the end of World War II, Améry’s book was designed for and addressed to the German public, in particular young intellectuals who had to assess their relation to their homeland and the past. Perhaps the fact that in 2001 this book was finally translated into Hebrew signifies the readiness of a new generation of Israelis to make the same kind of assessment, to be corrupted as the youth of Athens were once corrupted by a nihilistic Socrates. Many intellectuals on the left are urging us today to move on, to stop being “the victims,” so that we can finally have a future. I beg to differ; it is like dropping a stone on one’s foot to heal a toothache. Rather than calling to overcome our self-identification as victims, which was never genuine (or wholehearted) in the first place, I would sooner call the Israeli youth to overcome the poisonous myth of manly and heroic invulnerability.

Bibliography Améry, Jean. 1980. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1994. On Aging. Revolt and Resignation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1999. On Suicide. A Discourse on Voluntary Death. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of Mind. Thinking—Willing. New York: Harvest. Bergson, Henri. 1992. The Creative Mind. New York: Carol Publishing Group. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper&Row. ———. 1982. Nietzsche, Vol. IV: Nihilism. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers. ———. 1991. Nietzsche, Vol. II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. New York: HarperCollins. ———. 1993. Basic Writings. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1979. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Dover Publications. ———. 1980. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1989. Geneaology of Morals. New York: Vintage Books. Pattison, George. 2000. The Later Heidegger. New York: Routledge. Wollin, Richard (ed.). 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Boston: MIT Press.

8

Nihilism and Repetition: Dahlia Ravikovitch’s Reiterations as Critique Liron Mor

As if Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous announcement of the death of God was not dramatic enough, Gilles Deleuze dramatizes it further, employing it to outline a typology of nihilisms based on the various potential meanings of this statement. The first form of nihilism he introduces, the negative nihilism of the death of the Judeo-Christian-Pauline God, manifests itself in the will to nothingness—an ascetic rejection of this world, whereby life takes on the value of nil and all trust is vested in higher ideals as grounding all knowledge and values. To it belongs what Nietzsche terms slave morality, the blind obedience to transcendent laws and norms regardless of their content, assigning blames and punishments in order to view oneself as good. The second form, the reactive nihilism of the European higher man, who killed God only to put himself in His place, constitutes a reaction to this devaluation of life by annulling higher values themselves. It may therefore be seen as characterizing a critical modern perception of the law: Unlike the Law of ancient philosophy or the Judeo-Christian Law, which were considered to be grounded in some ideal Good, our modern laws are nothing but manifestations of the current state of power struggles and the good is simply determined by the legal.1 Thus, upon realizing that even when taking the place of God he remains a slave— living a depreciated life and following empty conventions—man has no one to blame but himself. We then end up with the passive nihilism of Buddhism, or of the death of Christ as Buddha—the last man’s preference of nothingness of Deleuze elaborates on this modern perception of the law, and on true repetition as set against the law, in his Difference and Repetition and “Coldness and Cruelty” (Deleuze 1994; 1991, especially 81–90).

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the will over a will to nothingness, his noble acceptance of the destruction of the self itself, of the end of man.2 However, beyond this supposedly linear progression toward absolute annihilation, and at the height of nihilism—precisely at the point where it overcomes itself—we find Nietzsche’s hypothesis of the eternal recurrence of the same as another type of nihilism. In the eternal recurrence Deleuze recognizes the radical, active nihilism of the superhuman consciousness, the active willing of man’s own destruction—in no way an effort to put an end to one’s life, but rather joyfully accepting the death of God and actively killing what is “man” in us. Turning the eternal recurrence into the repetition of difference, Deleuze characterizes it as a selection—affirmative, active, creative—whose ultimate end is the most radical form of critique, a critique beyond critique, the transformation of all known values; not a change in values but a change in the very element from which the value of values is derived (Deleuze 2002, 171–175). Focusing on Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch’s (1936–2005) poem “A Lullaby Translated from the Yiddish”3—written in 1989, in response to the exoneration of IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers accused of beating a Palestinian civilian to death—this chapter explores the first three types of nihilism, demonstrating how Ravikovitch exposes the nihilist nature of laws and norms in Israeli society. It further examines whether certain practices of reiteration that the poet utilizes may be seen as instances of the final, active type of nihilism, and whether this should be perceived as the culmination of nihilism or as its very dissolution, a different form of political critique. Analyzing Ravikovitch’s practices of reiteration, I show how it is precisely by pushing nihilism to its extreme forms—utilizing the nil itself and the active selective repetition of the eternal recurrence—that Ravikovitch suggests a radical form of critique against the nihilist implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. There are two by-products to this endeavor. Concretizing the fictional concept of the eternal return through reiterative literary devices—namely, allusions and quotations of a certain kind—may aid us in illuminating the idea of the eternal recurrence itself, which is considered impossible to grasp since its active nihilism is allegedly predicated on the destruction of the very For Deleuze’s typology of Nietzsche’s nihilisms as dramatized by the death of God, see Deleuze (2002, 152–156). 3 Hebrew, Shir ‘eres meturgam mi-Yiddish (Ravikovitch 2010, 334–335). 2

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subject who thinks, or rather experiences, it.4 Second, the various types of nihilism surveyed above constitute not only types of interpretations and evaluations of the world, but also types of interpretations and evaluations of the self in its relation to others—ranging from a self that is completely dependent on a transcendental “master” to a superconsciousness that goes beyond itself so as to connect with the world, with others. I therefore argue that this active, critical nihilism is bound up with a necessarily different relation to others. Indeed, the relation of Ravikovitch’s poetry to Palestinian suffering is quite unique in the sphere of Hebrew poetry. Her own generation of poets, the socalled Statehood Generation (1950s–1970s),5 tended to shun overtly political issues in favor of mundane and personal experiences, a move commonly viewed as a rebellion against the previous generation—the Palmach Generation. This previous generation consisted mainly of poets who participated in the establishment of the state of Israel and generally prided themselves on the nationalist character of their work.6 While Ravikovitch’s political poetry is not satisfied with this self-obsessed enclosed subject and therefore clearly differs from the poetry of her own generation, it nonetheless avoids merely returning to the methods of the Palmach Generation. Those nationalist poets, even when attempting to step outside of themselves in writing about the Palestinian disaster of 1948 (the Nakba), tended to view it through the lens of the Jewish Holocaust, enslaving the former to latter, rendering the Holocaust the cause and justification for the Nakba and whitewashing its crimes.7 Between a complete disengagement from the other, left in its radical alterity and rendered fully inaccessible, and its absolute subsumption under one’s own language—which leaves nothing of the other’s alterity in place, thereby missing it altogether— Ravikovitch’s political poetry suggests a third, more ethical, alternative. It is through her use of poetic reiterations, as I will demonstrate bellow, that This heuristic analogy between eternal recurrence and poetic reiterations seems quite sensible taking into account their similarities: citation, either by quoting or alluding, like eternal recurrence, seems to be self-annihilating and, like eternal recurrence, is in fact selective, emphasizing difference— fragmenting texts, we select elements to be repeated and thus affirmed, and interpreting them creatively we are able to reinvent the rules of the game, the criteria for judging. 5 Among the prominent poets of the Statehood Generation are Yehuda Amichay, David Avidan, Yona Wallach, Meir Wieseltier, Natan Zach, and others. 6 Central to this generation of poets were Natan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, Amir Gilboa and Haim Gouri, among others. For a discussion of the history of poetry in Israel as a generational struggle, or an Oedipal rebellion against the father, and Ravikovitch’s place within it see (Gluzman 2010, 173–174). 7 As Hannan Hever demonstrates in his introduction to the collection Al Tagidu be-Gat (Hever 2010, 9–55). 4

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Ravikovitch articulates a certain relation to the other that is based on fiction and thus avoids both representing the other and disengaging from her, and which I here term sympathy.8 Like many of Ravikovitch’s political poems, “A Lullaby Translated from the Yiddish” directly addresses the issue of the nihilism of the law and ethical judgment by presenting a certain case for us to evaluate, as though constructing—or rather, reconstructing—a trial of sorts.9 Written in 1989 in the wake of a military trial known as the Givʿati Case, this poem not only stages a trial but also refers to a recent one. The case revolved around an incident that occurred on August 22, 1988, during the First Palestinian Intifada, at the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, when four Givʿati Brigade IDF soldiers fatally beat a father and his teenage son during the apprehension of the son, allegedly involved in stone-throwing. The father and son were then detained and brought to the military post, where later that night the father, Hani alShami, died of his wounds. The four soldiers were prosecuted for manslaughter in a Military Court, claiming in their defense to have been merely following orders.10 When a later beating at the military post by other, supposedly unknown, IDF soldiers came to be regarded as the more direct cause of al-Shami’s death, the military judges acquitted the defendants of manslaughter, finding them guilty of brutality alone and never prosecuting the soldiers involved in the later beating.11 Evidently, the nature of the law here is such that it is only interested in the question “is this the case?”—that is, whether or not this case falls under the category of the offense, here translated into the question “is it or is it not a I use the term sympathy here, rather than other similar expressions—such as empathy, for example— for three main reasons. First, its etymology suggests participating in the pain of others, feeling with them (from Greek sympatheia: syn- “together” and pathos- “feeling”), and it therefore more adequately signifies Ravikovitch’s specific relation to others, which will be discussed below. Second, the concept of sympathy has a long, rich history in political thought, especially in the thought of the eighteenth century, when central figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke were discussing its power as an aesthetic, ethical, and political emotion, capable of tying society together. Finally, the word is already in use in the pejorative term “Palestinian sympathizer,” serving to denote precisely those who maintain an empathic and supportive relation to Palestinians. 9 On the proliferation of trials in Ravikovitch’s writing and their staging as a site of strife between conflicting interpretations, see Szobel (2013, especially 43–48). 10 These orders—stipulating that during apprehension, suspects of disturbance of peace should be beaten to the point of broken limbs, regardless of whether or not they resist arrest—were indeed, as a defense witnesses pointed out, congruent with the spirit of the phrase coined by the Israeli Minister of Defense at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, famously calling upon the IDF “to break their arms and legs” (see in the ruling itself, Kassim 1989, 196. For discussions of Rabin’s deplorable statement, see Gordon 2008, 157; Grossman 2003, 10). 11 Everyone involved in this case—defendants, investigators, and witnesses who allegedly saw the beating at the post—claimed no knowledge (or recollection) of the identity of any of those who took part in this fatal beating (Kassim 1989, 190–191). 8

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case of manslaughter?” The work of judgment here is merely concerned with subsuming this particular case under a universal category and hence shows no interest in the questions of who actually committed the offense, why, and how, just as it shows no interest in the question of its actual ethics. In Nietzsche and Deleuze’s terms, it is the negative nihilism of delegating all moral criteria to the law, exempting oneself of genuine evaluation. However, Ravikovitch’s poem— asking rather “which is the case,” “of what type it is”12—contests this nihilistic dimension of the law through its reiterations and offers a different perspective for interpreting and evaluating the case, one founded on sympathy. Interestingly, this poem is the only one in Ravikovitch’s Complete Poems (Kol ha-shirim) that is itself repeated, being published in two versions—an earlier one, bearing the full title “A Lullaby Translated from the Yiddish,” and a later one, simply titled “A Lullaby” (Shir ʿeres), as though no longer in need to be as obvious about its “origin” or about the very fact of being a reiteration. This self-attested repetition is, however, the very reason I chose to focus here on the earlier version. Additionally, and unlike the later version, this version incorporates quotations of testimonies from the judicial decision in this case, quotations that constitute the first form of poetic reiteration discussed here. The second form of poetic reiteration employed by Ravikovitch, a certain kind of allusion, is implied by the title, which proclaims the poem itself to be a repetition—not an exact rendering but rather a slightly altered one, a translation. What is supposedly translated here is a Yiddish lullaby. It is not, however, any particular lullaby, but rather an archetype of this Eastern European Jewish genre, which was traditionally combined with the genre of lamentation song and used Against what he calls “the judgment of God”—that is, Kantian determinative judgment or transcendental judgment—which is merely interested in the Socratic question “what is x?,” or “is this x?,” and is therefore only concerned with subsuming particular objects or cases under universal categories and rules—Deleuze sets up a notion of Nietzschean immanent evaluation based rather on the question “which is the case?”, “of which type it is?” (Deleuze 2002, 20, 76–79; Kant 1996, A132/B172). It may be tempting to perceive the alternative form of evaluation that I am about to present here in terms of Kantian reflective judgment, especially in its aesthetic forms, for reflective judgment is indeed concerned with the particular and employs the imagination in order to generate a universal rule (or a principle, a category, or a concept) in order to account for it (Kant 1987, 18–20). However, by way of anticipation of my argument in Section II, I would like to stress that the idea of a generalizable type as a mode of evaluation has nothing to do with creating a universal; its generalization is always local and limited and in no way assumes universality. While the evaluation of a type may in fact rely on similarities and differences in relation to precedents, for example (and as such is related to the legal tradition of the common law, as opposed to the codified civil law), it is closer to a search of a certain concrete episteme of a particular era in a particular place—or, in Deleuze’s words, “a type is a reality which is simultaneously biological, psychical, historical, social and political” (Deleuze 2002, 115).

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to grieve and protest persecution and devastation (Kronfeld 2010, 527–528). The translation process here refers primarily to the importation of the form of the Yiddish lullaby into the Israeli-Palestinian reality, so as to lament and oppose the persecution of Palestinians by IDF soldiers. In order to do so, however, Ravikovitch must evacuate the Yiddish lullaby of its Jewish protagonists, at least partially, actively introducing some nil into it, in order to allow others to temporarily and simultaneously take a place in it.13 This is achieved already through the ambiguity concerning the target language of this translation. On the surface, the poem seems to “translate” the language and cultural heritage of Yiddish into those of Modern Hebrew, the language in which it is in fact written. However, the poem may also be understood as a “translation” from Yiddish culture to the Arabic experience of a Gaza refugee camp, even if it was never written in either of these languages. This ambiguity, attained by hollowing out Ravikovitch’s own heritage as she repeats it, is central to the political effect of the poem, for it manifests the active nihilism Deleuze finds in Nietzsche, which may serve to combat the nihilism of the law.

I The poem consists of three lullaby stanzas, separated by two blocks of quotations from the judges’ decision in this case. Since Ravikovitch’s critique of nihilism is largely found in the middle part of the poem, I will introduce the first stanza briefly and circle back to it later. Mama and Grandma shall sing, shining-white mothers of yours. The wing of Mama’s shawl is touching the covers almost. Mama and Grandma shall sing an ancient and mournful tune;14 This gesture, which becomes even more explicit in the final stanza, suggests a transgression of a tacit command that is increasingly upheld in Israel—never to compare any calamity to the Holocaust or to any other anti-Semitic persecutions (which are the main concern in Yiddish lamentation lullabies) (on this command, see Ophir 2001, 12–21). Most recently, a bill was introduced in the Israeli parliament, legally banning the use of Holocaust symbols and vocabulary when not in reference to the Holocaust itself, thus limiting any such comparisons and identifications. 14 The translation is mine. It is, however, in dialogue with Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation of the later version of the poem, titled “Lullaby,” which appeared in the most recent English collection of Ravikovitch’s poems (Ravikovitch 2009, 219–220). 13

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These first few lines already contain Ravikovitch’s poetic justice in a nutshell. They fashion the classic setting of a lullaby—the physical intimacy of mothers tending over the bed of a sleeping, or about to be sleeping, child—and situate Ravikovitch’s trial within it, as a song, a poetic search for justice, addressed to a half-anesthetized, largely disinterested puerile audience. As we will see, these verses, like the title, produce an ambiguity as to the mothers’ identity by hollowing out the form of the Yiddish lullaby, opening their figures up to be occupied by Palestinians as well, thereby involving the readers in an active interpretation. Finally, they intimate a certain repetition by referencing a generational cycle and indicate that any judgment is suspended, is only to-come, by staging the entire scene in the future tense, as though this song, the alternative trial, is not the one we are reading but is rather yet to be sung. Additionally, these opening lines position the reader as the addressee of the poem—the child who is being put to sleep. In line with the ambiguity discussed above, the readers are put either in the position of a young Israeli child, about to hear the story of the Givʿati Case and hopefully grow up to be critical of the situation it discloses, or in the place of a Palestinian child, perhaps the very Palestinian child who was the victim of the Givʿati soldiers.15 Thus, we are made to take the place of both an Israeli and a Palestinian child, both a victim and a future judge of this case, and therefore evaluate this case by imaginatively experiencing the situation of the victim rather than merely assessing it as a removed object. Captured thus by the singing mothers, put in the place of the passive listening child, the reader is now presented with a certain scene from the case, which is about to be repeated three times throughout the poem: in the dark cordon in Jabalya set down, clasped in each other, a broken father, spitting langue-blood, and his fifteen-year-old son.

This scene, of the shattered father and son being held by each other,16 portrays a specific moment in the chain of events, after they had already been beaten at their home, detained, and brought to the post, where they experienced further violence. The posture depicted recalls the iconography of a Pietà, the scene of In her reading of the later version of the poem, Dana Ulmert suggests another possibility—that the lullaby is addressed to a different son of al-Shami, a brother of the one involved in this affair (Ulmert 2010, 438). 16 This reciprocity is further emphasized in the Hebrew original (aḥuzim ze ba-ze). 15

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the lamenting Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ,17 and mirrors the singing mothers in their intimate scene over the child’s bed. I will return to this posture and the associations it raises shortly. Ravikovitch then interrupts the form of the lullaby in order to introduce the first quotation from the judicial decision—an excerpt of a witness testimony— which repeats the very scene that was just portrayed by the poet, yet in a language aspiring to the objectivity of legal discourse: The first witness who referred to the assault on the deceased at the post was Second-Lieutenant Zaken, Shimon … At the beginning of his testimony the witness notes that he remembers the incident … The deceased was wearing a white galabiyya stained with blood … The witness noted that at the time the deceased and his son were leaning against the wall, shoulder to shoulder … SecondLieutenant Zaken notes that at that time he threatened the deceased and told him to shut his mouth.

Notice Ravikovitch’s omissions, her emptying out of the legal text as her efforts are primarily focused on extrapolating this specific scene of Pietà. The first ellipsis indicates the omission of some concrete details about the witness, such as his identification number and position, while the second marks the omission of the context of the incident, “during which the deceased and his son arrived at the post and were leaning on the western wall of the [soldiers’] rooms” (Kassim 1989, 198). The third ellipsis stands for the omission of the witness’ reported account of his attempt to converse with al-Shami: “He tried to speak with the deceased, asked his name and address, but only heard him groaning ‘I want to die.’ ”18 Just as Ravikovitch dismisses the supposedly concrete details of the witness’ identity and of the context of the event, so too she rejects SecondLieutenant Zaken’s account, reported by the judges, of al-Shami’s words on this occasion, despite their dramatic effect. Repeating al-Shami’s refusal to give his formal details to Zakan, Ravikovitch refuses to put words in his mouth that are three times removed from their source. She does not allege to know what alShami said or felt under the circumstances; she merely focuses on the bodily aspects of the scene, now “corroborated” by the quotation from the decision— the father and son leaning toward each other in a kind of mutual Pietà while blood is oozing out of the father’s mouth. In the later version of the poem, this image of the mournful mother is further echoed in mentioning “Rachel weeping for her children,” as a kind of “Jewish” version of the Mournful Virgin (for the poem, see Ravikovitch 2010, 241; 2009, 219). 18 For the full testimony, see Kassim (1989, 198). 17

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Why does Ravikovitch omit these concrete details, emptying out and fragmenting the quotation from the testimony? Why does she repeat the same scene instead of adding new ones? Why does she focus most of her efforts on these bodies, their posture, and their suffering? It is only in the next stanza, which reintroduces the form of the lullaby, that we learn against what Ravikovitch is struggling and by what means. Moving in his sleep, the child, shaking his innocent head. Four angels from the throne of glory flapping their wings above him. Suddenly trembling seized him and his mouth dried up like straw. It is only a nightmare you witnessed, a dream and not reality. Back to sleep, my dear, apple of my eye, nothing has happened yet.

The child is suddenly awakened by a horrific dream, which is described as the most astonishing religious revelation. Echoing a long tradition of lamentation, the stanza mentions the throne of glory from the Book of Jeremiah (Jer. 17:12, NIV) and the four angels of the throne, alluding to a mystical revelation in the Book of Ezekiel, when the workings of heaven are revealed to the prophet in the form of a throne engulfed by four heavenly hybrid creatures (Ezek. 1:26). This description therefore refers us to the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, both of whom forebode the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple due to the Israelites’ sins.19 With this allusion in mind, the child’s revelation seems like one of reproach, foretelling the punishment and destruction of those who had transgressed God’s laws by their murderous act, a punishment that is still to come, for, as the wording of the poem has it, “nothing has happened yet.” With these allusions in mind, this revelation seems to follow the logic of negative nihilism, the resignation to transcendent laws and ethical codes while neglecting life in this world, the implications of violence on living bodies, Moreover, since this revelation leads the child to be seized by trembling (Hebrew, “ra‘ada aḥaza bo”), it also alludes to a verse in the Book of Isaiah, which depicts the fear and trembling that seize sinners upon God’s destructive journey to exalt His glory: “The sinners in Zion are terrified; trembling grips [seizes, aḥaza] the godless: ‘Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire?’ ” (Isa. 33:14). The answer to this question is clarified in the next verse: only the righteous will survive.

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and the duty to perform ethical interpretations and evaluations of one’s own. However, since these references appear in the poem immediately after the presentation of the brutalized father and son, they may also be perceived as ironically characterizing the brutal, senseless orders that the Givʿati soldiers allegedly received—to break the limbs of disturbers of peace whether or not they resist arrest—as following the tautological logic of negative nihilism: That is, as acceptable, even good, simply because they came from above. Within this logic, the soldiers’ obedience was “good” (regardless of the brutality inflicted) on the condition that this was indeed the order given, for the order itself must have been good. Hence, the judges’ obsessive attempts throughout most of the trial to determine whether those were in fact the orders—so as to determine the culpability of the soldiers—become a grotesque embodiment of this nightmarish tautological logic. However, the nightmare can also be understood as the terror produced precisely by the fact that nothing has happened yet, that no punishment had come upon the transgressors—for the brutal soldiers were acquitted of manslaughter and the murderers were never prosecuted. As such, the terror pertains to both Israeli and Palestinian children, now taught by their mothers that any hope of punishment for the attackers is merely “a dream and not a reality.” These allusions thus question the authority of the law in its purest form—the Godly law, the transcendent, universal law that is one with the infinite Wisdom and Goodness of the Absolute Himself—for it does not correlate to its consequences. At the very least, these allusions establish that any such system of Godly judgment, in which there is perfect correlation between the moral good, the law, and its consequences, belongs in dreams and is no longer part of this world. This perspective embodies the turn toward reactive nihilism—annihilating all higher values just to be left with the horror of no values in this world—which then culminates in the passive nihilism of sleep. This turn from negative to reactive nihilism—a very subtle turn, for, as Deleuze points out, the two are rather interdependent and consist of the same type of depreciated life (Deleuze 2002, 25–29)—was itself played out during this specific trial, when, in a highly unorthodox step, the brutality itself and the legitimacy of the orders came to be examined. Once the causal link between the beating at the house and al-Shami’s death had been loosened, the military judges could not but acquit the defendants of manslaughter, in line with the “yes or no” logic of legal judgment. Yet, in this case, whose “uniqueness” is emphasized over

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and over again throughout their decision,20 the judges exceptionally found the defendants guilty of brutality, ruling that they should have refused the order to beat non-resisting suspects, for the order was itself “manifestly illegal” (Kassim 1989, 236). As explained, and complicated, by Itamar Mann in his contribution to this volume, a “manifestly illegal order” is a specific legal category within the Israeli military codex referring to an order that is so patently illegal and immoral that soldiers ought to disobey it (as opposed to a merely illegal order, which soldiers are in fact required to obey).21 By taking an apparently legislative, sovereign stance, putting themselves in some external meta-position and rendering this specific order exceptionally illegal, the judges did not reestablish some higher principle of moral good beyond the law or the order. Rather, by this exception, they fundamentally legalized and sanctioned all other immoral and illegal orders—including the ones that were given in the military post and might have led, according to the ruling itself, to al-Shami’s death. The law’s self-correction in the form of the “manifestly illegal order” does not solve the problem of its nihilism, but rather leads to that nihilism of a second order—reactive nihilism.

II The way Ravikovitch relates to this case, however, is in every way opposed to this logic of the judgment by law. In her poetic reworking of this legal affair, she does not ask herself whether or not this is the case, whether or not the four Givʿati soldiers directly caused al-Shami’s death, whether or not those were the orders, or whether or not they were legal. This dichotomous logic is of little help to her. Furthermore, Ravikovitch is not interested in what actions exactly took place and in what words were allegedly uttered. Rather, she is concerned with the questions “which is the case?” “of what type is it?” and with the very bodies of the victims themselves, presenting them to us as almost-physical evidence. This is one form of Ravikovitch’s political reiteration, the form of a quotation, with which this section is concerned. See, for example, Kassim (1989, 186–188). This legal term was first introduced by Judge Binyamin Levi in his decision in the affair of the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1957 (Parush 1990). As Leora Bilsky showed, Levi was a central figure in the Holocaust trials of the 1950s and the 1960s and an advocate of harsh punishments to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis (Bilsky 2001).

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Quotations, as a collection of examples, are the exact opposite of the horizontal, universal, and abstract law that is grounded only in itself. They are always particular, concrete cases, which, by the very act of repetition, are imbedded in a vertical tradition, thereby calling for an evaluation according to their similarities and differences in relation to their precedents and according to the criteria they themselves suggest. This evaluation is never a sentencing; its verdict is forever differed, for the body of text is still addressed to anyone who positions herself as its reader. As particular examples, quotations do not attempt to represent anything; they certainly do not seek to abstract any universal logic pertaining to each and every case. Rather, they merely present, physically importing a body of text and positing it before us. Let us examine these notions in Ravikovitch’s second quotation from the Judgment: Another witness, Corporal Teperberg, Haim … noticed the deceased, who was walking bending forward and was set down next to the wall. He was leaning against the wall and putting his head on his son’s shoulder. At that time, blood was oozing from his mouth.

Why does Ravikovitch repeat the same exact scene for the third time, again emptying out the testimony of any concrete or new details? She omits all these details that may have been relevant to the questions posed by the judges because she is concerned with something else entirely—namely, the body and its suffering posture. This selective quotation, eliminating everything but the body, is a desperate attempt to relate to an other as he is, without any representation that would impose her own language on him—without putting words in his mouth, thoughts in his head, or feelings in his gestures. As a literary excursion, having no real access to the bodies of these others, this attempt is of course destined to fail; however, this does not prevent Ravikovitch from asymptotically aspiring to articulate nothing more than these bodies, thereby testifying to the preposterousness of the legal system’s pretense to know these others and this event inside and out and give a conclusive verdict on the matter. Ravikovitch’s practice of quotation emphasizes the inanity of this pretense further: first, because it showcases the discrepancies between the different witnesses’ accounts (and between those and her own), thus demonstrating the impossibility of knowing anything beyond the mere fact of the suffering body; second, because her practice of quotation itself repeats the same gesture as the attempt to present the body in itself, without representation: instead of reporting

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the event of the trial, instead of criticizing its proceedings and this aspiration for objective knowledge—for critique is still within the realm of representation— Ravikovitch merely brings parts of it into her text. It is a nearly physical importation of fragments of the Judgment into her poem in an attempt to avoid any representation whatsoever. This attempt, again, remains merely asymptotic, for any selection must in fact involve some interpretation. However, since the selection of the parts of text is primarily focused on descriptions of suffering bodies, both form and content here unite in accentuating a certain surplus of the body, particularly the suffering body, over the logic of the law. Ravikovitch’s selections therefore force us to look at this specific case, at this specific body brought before us, leaving behind the legal yes/no questions and their universalist disjunctive logic. We are no longer required to judge whether or not this is the case the law stipulates, but rather, asking “which is the case,” “of which type it is,” we must actively invent a rule, a logic, that may account for this case, that may allow us to evaluate it. But what is the type that Ravikovitch finds in this case as a rule for interpreting and evaluating it? It is none other than the type of the Pietà, which she discerns in the posture of the bodies themselves. Emphasizing this type—by repeating the same bodily scene three times and mirroring it in constructing the entire poem as a lullaby— Ravikovitch suggests that we evaluate the case according to its posture and the traditional iconographies it recalls. This Pietà scene may be seen not only as forging a link between the beaten son in Jabalya and the dozing-off child in the poem (and between the dying father and the child who is falling asleep)— thus further strengthening the ambivalent positioning of the reader—but also as bringing into consideration the often-neglected perspective of women and mothers. Many scholars have claimed that Ravikovitch makes ample use of her perspective as a woman to undermine the national narrative and transgress national boundaries by sympathizing with other “private” women.22 However, Ravikovitch goes here beyond any personal identification—as a woman, as a mother, or as an orphan who lost her father as a child. By the redoubling of the The imagining of the suffering of other women and mothers through her own experience as a woman and a mother seems to characterize much of Ravikovitch’s poetry, especially in her book Mother with a Child. (Hebrew, Ima ‘im yeled ) In her poem “A Mother Walks Around” (Hebrew, Ima mithalekhet), for example, Ravikovitch is striving to imagine the suffering that a pregnant Palestinian woman whose fetus was killed by the IDF might experience in giving birth to a dead child and living the rest of her life in his absence. Throughout her poetic attempt to understand, Ravikovitch maintains the future tense and the counterfactual form—that is, narrating the events that will not happen, but could have happened, had this child been born. (For the poem, see Ravikovitch 2010, 234, 2009, 214–215.) For discussions of the place of motherhood and femininity in Ravikovitch’s poetry, see Kronfeld (2010); Szobel (2013); Tzamir (2010); Ulmert (2010).

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mothers in the father and son, Ravikovitch imports this scene of pity, of pain for the suffering of others, along with the lullaby scene, into her reconstituted court, thus taking the case out of the male environment of the military post or the courtroom, placing it in relation to other historical sufferings, and introducing a new logic for its evaluation: the logic of a sympathetic relation, of pity, that is inherent in the lullaby itself—for ultimately, a lullaby is nothing other than a parent fictionally attempting to relate, from within their own monologue, to an other that is physically present yet verbally inaccessible. In other words, unlike other scholars, I do not believe that Ravikovitch simply uses her “femininity” or “motherhood” in order to relate to other women or mothers, thus accepting given gender divides. Rather, while recognizing that she indeed has nothing at her disposal other than these constructions, she pokes holes in them and imaginatively uses them to relate to those who are not necessarily women or mothers. She uses the position in which she is already imbedded and repeats it differently precisely in order to relate to those who do not immediately belong to the same category, thereby challenging the category itself. As we will see in the next section, Ravikovitch makes similar use of the category of her Jewishness. This process—inventing new rules according to the case itself, while insisting on its difference—is, according to Deleuze, characteristic of the active selection of the eternal recurrence. Yes, there are many cases like this one, and they repeat time and again. But instead of judging them according to a pre-given law, we may choose to evaluate each of them creatively according to the criteria it suggests—in this case, following the logic of the Pietà and the lullaby. Deleuze uses Nietzsche’s metaphor of the dice-throw to clarify this aspect of eternal recurrence. We may cast the dice over and over again, waiting for the winning combination according to the rules of the game, the one that will allow us to roll again. Or we can reinvent the rules of the game each time the dice fall back on the table, affirming the result by creatively extrapolating a rule out of it in order to “win” and bring back the dice throw (Deleuze 2002, 25–29). The bad player counts on the return of the combination by the repetition of throws; the good player obtains the repetition of the dice-throw in the fatally rolled number. This is Deleuze’s definition of the repetition of difference: Unlike the repetition of the same, the repetition interpreted and evaluated according to a preexisting rule, it is a repetition that creatively selects, reads the difference in each return, and invents rules to account for and evaluate it. Moreover, according to Deleuze, the repetition of difference, the eternal return, also eliminates from returning all reactive forces, negating negation itself,

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its ressentiment and will to nothingness, thus bringing about a transmutation of values (Deleuze 2002, 68–71). For Ravikovitch, this means that her repetition of the “same” scene eliminates everything that has to do with preexisting laws and their logic—the concrete details of the witnesses, the militaristic context, the descriptions of the orders and the beatings, all presented in the ruling in order to answer the question “is this the case?” Rather than judging the case by these preconceived universal rules, she invents a new, temporary one, immanently evaluating the case according to what she creatively selects in its returning, according to the type she both recognizes and constructs. It is thus that quotation can approximate the active, selective, and creative selection of the eternal recurrence.

III Let us now return to the first stanza and to that second form of nihilistic reiteration that Ravikovitch implements—the ambiguity produced by her practice of allusions, by introducing a certain absence into the reiteration of her own tradition. While the shawl (Hebrew, miṭpaḥat), for example, worn by the singing mother in the opening stanza, seems at first as a specifically Jewish attribute, the word miṭpaḥat in no way signifies Jewish head covers alone and may in fact refer to any kind of head covers, including Muslim ones (or even to other forms of fabrics worn or held by the mother). Similarly, while the characterization of the mothers as “shining white mothers,” as pure and holy mothers, is a convention of the Yiddish lullaby (Kronfeld 2010, 522), the redoubling of the mother in the figure of the grandmother does not belong to these conventions and therefore opens them up to other connotations: Since in the following four verses we learn of the violent incident at Jabalya, one of the ways to make sense of this redoubling is to understand the two mothers as singing each to her own son—that is, the Palestinian child from Jabalya, the mother’s son, and his (dead) father, the grandmother’s son. Thus, the “holy mothers” convention of the Yiddish lullaby, just like the miṭpaḥat, is opened up to being potentially occupied by Palestinians as well. This enlisting of “Jewish” symbols and conventions and their opening up to be occupied, at least partially and potentially, by others, culminate in the sixth line, when we learn that the song to be sung, presenting the Givʿati case, is “an ancient and mournful tune” (Hebrew, zemer ʿatik ṿe-nugeh). This phrase is not merely an

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ironic comment about the affair, portraying it as the regretful repeated behavior of IDF soldiers; it also merges together, and thus hollows out, two canonical Hebrew poems, “Mournful Song” (Zemer nugeh), written by Raḥel Bluwstein in the 1920s, and “Ancient Tune” (Nigun ‘atik), written by Natan Alterman in the 1950s. While these poems, which were set to music and are therefore widely known in Israel, seem so particularly Israeli, their contents, as unrequited love songs, aspire to the universality of human experience. However, this attempt at universality—composing melancholy love songs whose story is as ancient as time, only purely in Hebrew—is itself part and parcel of the national enterprise, for it positions Hebrew poetry as one national corpus amongst all others and situates Israel itself—whose canon, too, now consists of ancient mournful tunes and is thus itself as ancient as time—as one nation amongst all others.23 Ravikovitch’s placing of these poems in the mouths of the two lamenting mothers not only hollows out the canon of Hebrew poetry to make room in it for the mournful and long-familiar tune of soldiers’ brutality toward Palestinians, but also redeems these poems of their universalist aspirations, tying them back up to their locality, and precisely thereby exposing their nationalist ambition and transgressing their national boundaries. After all, the “ancient and mournful tune” that the mothers are about to sing is the very story of the violent murder in Jabalya. This tactic of repeating her own tradition while hollowing it out, just like her critique of the political situation and its discourse, is recurrent in Ravikovitch’s poetry. Of special importance here is her known poem “Hovering at a Low Altitude” (1982). Ravikovitch opens this poem, which then proceeds to depict the rape and murder of a young Palestinian girl, by declaring, “I am not here” (Ani lo kan). While it appears at first as an absolute negation of the self or as a form of nihilist escapism, this nonsensical formula—“I am not here”— encapsulates in fact the logic of Ravikovitch’s self-evacuating practice of reiteration as a struggle against ethical nihilism. It is at once an ironic rendering of an escapist spirit and an emblem of the practice of sharing our “here” with other bodies and voices by removing some of the self.24 The “I” that suspends itself from “here” makes room for others to appear; however, since by indexing a “here” with its finger the “I” cannot be fully absent, Ravikovitch’s formula marks this active partial removal of the self as a political act and suggests that Tsamir makes similar claims in relation to the Statehood Generation in Hebrew poetry (Tzamir 2006). 24 On the status of the self in “Hovering at a Low Altitude” (Hebrew, Reḥifa be-gova namukh), compare: Kronfeld (2010); Ulmert (2010). 23

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she relates to others and their suffering precisely through the “here” of her “I.” In “A Lullaby Translated from the Yiddish”—like in many other political poems in Ravikovitch’s Mother with a Child and True Love25—the “I am Not Here” formula is consistently utilized, as Jewish identity, tradition, and experience do not merely serve as an alternative to those of Zionism, but also as an arsenal of cultural and historical experiences, as that “here” that helps her get closer to, and sympathize with, others. Ravikovitch seems to understand the suffering of Palestinians not by separating herself from the Jewish collective and its history (including the occupation of Palestine itself), but rather by making this history all the more present: she recruits her heritage to the fullest degree in order to allow her “I” not to be “here,” in order to create some empty space for the other to appear. This poetic practice of hollowing out the self is congruent with the affirmative forgetting that Deleuze discovers in Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, memory is the “festering wound” (Nietzsche 2000a, 6) of the base man—it is the ressentiment and the spirit of revenge of the nihilist who ceaselessly blames and accuses, who knows all too well “how to not forget” (Nietzsche 2000b, 1, 10), and never acts on her painful emotions. The noble, active, and creative, on the other hand, know how to actively forget (Deleuze 2002, 116). It is only in active forgetting that one can truly love one’s enemy (Nietzsche 2000b, 1, 10). Overcoming a nihilistic attitude requires this active selection, deciding which burdens we can let go of, what memories we can eliminate from future returns. Klossowski, even more so than Deleuze, makes this forgetting “[coincide] with the revelation of the [Eternal] Return,” since in it “I learn that I was other than I am now for having forgotten this truth, and thus that I have become another by learning it” (Klossowski 1997, 57). This active selective annihilation of the self—literally, an active nihilism—is the second sense of radical nihilism, as an overcoming of nihilism by pushing it to its limits and as a new form of critique, which is found in Ravikovitch’s reiterations. While this practice recognizes a basic similarity between the self and the other, thus relating to her through speculating upon one’s own experience, Ravikovitch’s sympathetic relation does not consume this other for it assumes and marks differences through the nil, without describing that different being. This is most readily apparent in a section in True Love (Ahava amitit) titled “Issues in Contemporary Judaism” (Sugiyot be-Yahadut bat-zemanenu), which, as its name clearly suggests, contemporizes issues traditionally regarded as Jewish, rendering them relevant to the recent political situation in Israel–Palestine, often by opening them up to being occupied by Palestinians as well (Ravikovitch 2010, 199–208; 2009, 189–198).

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The Palestinian mothers putting the child to sleep in this poem are in no way equated with Jewish mothers in Yiddish lullabies—such a repetition of the same would merely trivialize their pain by universalizing it, turning all suffering into one and the same suffering.26 Similarly, had Ravikovitch attempted to speak for them or give them a concrete form from within her own language, she would have simply erased their alterity and specificity. Instead, it is her own heritage that she repeats but with a difference—selectively, with gaps, according to the logic of the “I am not here”—so that the differences of this specific case may shine forth. Whatever interpretation is produced in this gap constantly attests to the fact that it is merely fictional and could have been produced differently. This is accomplished not only through the ambiguity surrounding the mothers’ identities, but also by the narration of the scene in the future tense—suggesting that the events may unfold otherwise—and by the use of qualifiers, such as the “almost” describing the encounter between the shawl and the covers as a metonymy for the encounter between mother and son.27 The labeling of this lullaby as a translation seems less arbitrary considering that this hollowing out and making room appears to be the very definition of translation. Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Task of the Translator,” for example, emphasizes precisely this gap, which is produced, according to him, by any translation: “Whereas content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds […] and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien” (Benjamin 2004, 258). The very process of translation therefore necessarily creates a gap between the language of the translation and “its content,” between the reiteration and its supposed origin. The repetition of the textual heritage of the self with a difference, the repetition of the form of the Yiddish lullaby in Modern Hebrew in relation to Palestinian suffering, thus necessarily introduces this “overpowering and alien” gap. This form of relating to Palestinian suffering, equating it with historical Jewish suffering, is prevalent in Hebrew poetry—or, at least among those few Israeli poets who attempted to fathom Palestinian pain (see, e.g., Hever 2010). 27 This signaling of the fictionality of her account and the fact that it could have been produced differently is most prominently achieved in Ravikovitch’s poetry by her characterization through counterfactuals, which serves her to tacitly present an alternative story to the one she is engaged in telling and to fictionally speculate about others without imposing her interpretation upon them as a truth claim. See, for example, “Hovering at a Low Altitude,” where she relates to a young Palestinian girl by listing the things she is not and the things she has not done, and the aforementioned “A Mother Walks Around,” in which Ravikovitch narrates the events that a dead Palestinian baby and his mother will not experience, but could have potentially experienced, were it to be born (Ravikovitch 2010, 179, 234; 2009, 174, 214). 26

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Maurice Blanchot takes this gaping a step further, claiming that this spacing of the text, infusing it with “the privilege of ambiguity and instability,” is the very definition of a good translation, for when a translation is successful, it not only brings with it a “feeling of a light space between the words and what they aim at,” as in Benjamin’s metaphor, but also makes these meanings “oscillate mysteriously between many forms whose perfect suitability is not enough to restrain them” (Blanchot 1995, 180). By creating gaps, good translations evoke all the other possible translations for the text before us, hence “[involving] us in restoring to them in silence all that the passage from one language to another has made them lose, and all that no language would ever have allowed them to express” (Blanchot 1995, 189). Blanchot therefore considers a good translation to be the quintessential literary act: by gaping, it opens up a sea of potential meanings, thus involving us in active reading and interpretation, while indicating that any interpretation, including that of the translator herself, is merely experimental and temporary and could have been otherwise.28 This is, I argue, precisely what Ravikovitch achieves in this poem, which thus justifies its title to the last degree.

IV Mama and grandma are singing a song so that you sleep without harm, tender child, holy mothers are watching over you. Here, a twig from above you fell as well.29 At the same time, the questions of translation also epitomize the quandary of relating to the other. The incessant negotiations between an impossible absolute faithfulness to the original and an equally impossible absolute freedom from it are ever-present in theories of translation throughout history. The entire question of translation lies between the extremes of absolute untranslatability— the impossibility of accessing the other for it is so foreign that it cannot be translated—and radical translatability, the complete reduction of others to the language of the self due to the absence of any markers indicating a shared meaning beyond what I imagine in my own language. Translations are precisely the texts whose manner of relating to the other lies in-between those impossible extremes. The fact that translations do exist, however, constantly undermines this assumed impasse and attests to the fact that some relation to others is always already in place, therefore the question should rather be how does this relation operate. For a historical survey of the negotiations between faithfulness and freedom in translation, see, for example, Bassnett (2002); Bassnett and Lefevere (1998). 29 In the Hebrew—“hine gam zalzal me‘alekha tsanaḥ”—me‘alekha might signify both “(from) above you” and “from amongst your leafs.” I chose to focus on the first meaning since it echoes the mothers’ protection from above, as well as that of the angels, thus relating to Ravikovitch’s struggle against transcendental judgment. 28

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Thus begins the final stanza. The ironic, even sarcastic, tone that runs like a red thread through the poem, condemning the nihilistic attitude of those who “sleep” during such injustices, culminates here, with the “holy mothers” of the Yiddish lullaby alleging to sing a song that is keeping the child from harm: As a Palestinian, the child is already brutally harmed, and as an Israeli, being thus kept from harm in his bed, he needs no protection and stands in stark contrast to the injured Palestinian child, his utter passivity thereby disparaged. This passive will to perish, this “nothingness of the will,” is further implied by the allusion to the title of one of the most famous poems by Chaim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, “A Twig Fell” (Tsanaḥ lo zalzal). This late poem by Bialik laments the perishing of his life, and creative force, through an extended metaphor comparing human life to the journey of a twig throughout the cycle of natural seasons; come spring, however, the subject of this poem will no longer flourish again, like a twig no longer organically connected to a tree. The opening verse of this poem, which lends it its name, encapsulates much of its significance: “A twig fell upon a fence and slumbered.”30 It is this slumber on the fence that leads to the subject’s demise, for had the twig fallen on either side of the fence, upon fertile ground—that is, had the narrator taken any action instead of merely sleeping or sitting on the fence—then it might have not ended up barren, thrown out of the cycle of life. Linking passivity and sleep with death, the twig thus joins the four angels from the throne in foreboding destruction and in calling upon the sleeping children of Israel and Palestine to awaken, to transform their passivity into action. The sense of a cyclical return introduced by this allusion is reinforced in the next verses: And you shall grow up and become a man, and the anguish of Jabalya you shall never forget from ’48 to ’67, from ’67 to ’88, the anguish of Jabalya you shall never forget, and the Village of Beita and the village of Hawara and Saja‘iyya and the village of Silfit.

While any judgment is suspended, this suspension is complemented by a plea to never forget, thus guaranteeing that this suspension is not an absence of awareness (but, perhaps, an awareness of a certain absence). With this plea Hebrew, “tsanaḥ lo zalzal ʿal gader ṿa-yanom …”

30

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to never forget Ravikovitch again enlists her own cultural heritage, explicitly hollowing it out in order to allow room for relating to others. In this case, she reappropriates two Holocaust commemoration practices: first, the practice of listing names of towns where suffering was endured, here replacing East European names with Palestinian ones; second, the command to “never forget,” here “translated” from its established collective form of Holocaust commemoration in Israel, “we shall not forget” (lo nishkaḥ), into the second-person imperative, “you shall not forget” (lo tishkaḥ). Ravikovitch says nothing here about Palestinians or for them; she merely introduces difference into her own culture. Through the selective appropriation of these practices she takes this struggle against injustice out of the national realm and makes it the concern of anyone who positions herself as the addressee of this poem, anyone who sympathizes, thus paving the way to imagining a broader civil society. Furthermore, these commemoration practices are clearly used here to observe Palestinian suffering. This is done, however, merely by citing towns’ names, without attempting to represent Palestinian suffering in Ravikovitch’s own words and without unifying it, without speaking about the Palestinian suffering. The repetition of names of concrete places is redoubled in the repetition of years marking specific events in time (the Nakba of 1948, the occupation of 1967, and the incident at Jabalya during the First Intifada in 1988), which in the Hebrew original is intensified through the alliteration of the sound aḥ, a cry of pain and anguish, concluding the names of the Hebrew years and the command to never forget (“mi-tashaḥ le-tashkaḥ, mi-tashkaḥ le-tashmaḥ, / et tsa‘ar Jibaliyya lo tishkaḥ”). Here, Ravikovitch joins together the two methods she has been employing so far: the allusions to Jewish history, which is being partially hollowed out, and the citing of suffering of Palestinian towns, using proper names—which, like quotations, are the closest thing to concrete bodies and their singularity. These methods allow Ravikovitch and her reader the option of relating to this suffering through their own experiences, while not losing sight of concrete places, events, and people, and while maintaining the awareness that this relation is fictional. The catalogue of places and dates creates a certain kind of metonymic generalization. As opposed to the exceptionalist logic of the judges in the case mentioned above, the repetitive allusions to Palestinian pain in other places and times suggest that the Givʿati affair was not “unique” but rather one among many other cases of senseless orders and acts of brutality. The repetition here is clearly not of the kind of the eternal recurrence, but rather a nihilistic repetition

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of the same. What is repeated is a nihilistic type of orders, norms, and legal proceedings and their acceptance in Israeli society. In Ravikovitch’s critical presentation of this vicious cycle, however, the different cases are not equated— they maintain their proper names, their singularity. Unlike the judgment by law, or other acts of judgment that place particulars under a universal (rule, concept, or category), this kind of typical generalization generates a community through difference. It is a matter of a different relation between the one and the many, which implies the possibility of a different kind of community.31 The conclusion of the lullaby brings the critical effect to its most radical peak: And all their blood shall be on our heads, demand it from us, nice child.

The blood on our heads alludes to the biblical story of Rahab. Rahab is known as the prostitute who hid the Israelite spies—sent by Joshua to explore the land of Canaan before its occupation—from their enemies. In return, she obtains immunity, assuring that she and her family will not be harmed during the coming occupation as long as they remain within her clearly marked house. As the biblical text expresses it, if they leave the house, their bloodshed will be “on their heads;” if they do not, any bloodshed will be “on our heads” (Jos 2:19). Indeed, the promise is kept and Rahab and her family are saved, while the rest Interestingly, Ravikovitch seems to oppose this use of particular cases to make more general claims about the situation. In her poem, “Marina Ḥadad”—where she narrates a counterfactual, the events that could have happened were the news reporters to enter the “right door” and visit the recently deceased Marina Ḥadad (a name suggestive of a Christian Palestinian)—Ravikovitch writes,

31

All the makings were there: bereavement, sorrow, the mother a single parent, the state of the nation as metonymy for the fate of the individual (especially vice versa) […] She was one of a kind, call it the luck of a goy that she alone was not exploited to diagnose the state of the nation and forecast the inescapable reifications. (Translated by Bloch and Kronfeld. See Ravikovitch 2009, 259–260) It seems as though, despite terming it a metonymy, it is rather the form of synecdoche that Ravikovitch rejects, for it is the exploitation of the individual Marina Ḥadad to represent the whole, the entire nation, which disconcerts her. The practice of reiterating the names of years and towns does not fall under the same category for it does not universalize the Givʿati Case or efface all differences between different calamities, even within Palestinian history itself. It is clearly not standing for the whole nation, clearly not a synecdoche, but rather a metonymy, an open and limited generalization of sorts, indicating that this singular case shares features in common with a few other particular cases to which it is adjacent.

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of the population of Jericho is massacred (Jos 6:16–17). The blood that “shall be on our heads” in the poem is therefore the bloodshed of the exceptionally sacred, those who were not supposed to be harmed during the occupation. However, unlike the occupation of the land in the days of Joshua, the modern occupation of Palestine spares no one and makes no differentiations between the inhabitants according to their different conducts, hence “all their blood shall be on our heads.” Simultaneously, this blood “on our heads” is the very mark of the rare exception to the violence of occupation, that single instance when the order to commit a massacre will not be legal. It is thus an emblem of the manifestly illegal order and a sign that even this exceptionalist logic does not absolve of responsibility for suffering but rather intensifies the sense of nihilism. Finally, the call on the child and the reader to demand this blood from the collective is a twofold call. On the one hand, it is a call for a retrial, for a new and completely different evaluation of this case. This reevaluation, however, is suspended, still to-come, for an alternative trial never materializes in the poem itself. It remains a potential prospect, in some future time when the addressee of this poem, the child or the reader, has “grown” to reevaluate the situation and oppose its logic. The suspended temporality of this trial—obviously preferable to the decisive rulings of the soldiers and the judges—resists the law’s demand that we subsume the case under a category, for the most important part is yet to happen. Rather, it implores us to experience the case at hand and come up with a general rule, basing our creative evaluation on the criteria dictated by the case and its precedents, so that we conduct ourselves ethically. On the other hand, Ravikovitch’s poem pleads for the (self) destruction of the collective in its militant and nihilistic form—a destruction that is the very turning point between passive and active nihilism. While Ravikovitch herself may be unable to take this active supracritical position, she has already paved the way for her reader, urging her to take this step. Ravikovitch’s quotations, almost physical fragments of a foreign text, are not turned into an exotic artifact judged under our preconceived criteria but rather present us with a selective hint, a physical fragment, of a larger entity, with which we can relate by the literary practice of sympathy—a speculative and temporary identification with the other performed in the gaps left by the selections. A similar sympathetic evaluation is offered by Ravikovitch’s use of allusions, these hollowed-out repetitions of the self. As such, Ravikovitch’s poetic justice, these evaluative trials-by-reiteration, constitutes a radical form

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of critique precisely by not criticizing in the prevalent sense of the word—for these reiterations merely present the case anew. According to Deleuze, true critique is not criticism—negative, reactive, representative—but a political experience—affirmative, active, creative, transgressing the law and pushing its limits. As such, it has a double function: exposing the law as empty and, subsequently, reinstituting the very movement it is attempting to prohibit—in our case, the movement toward others. In this way, critique and affirmation are bound together, for this critique is at the same time creative, substituting the principle of difference and selection for the principles of universalism or resemblance. This figure of reiteration is a repetition geared toward the future, toward difference. It is the eternal return as Deleuze perceives it in his reading of Nietzsche, the repetition of that which differs from itself, whose ultimate goal is the radical transformation of values. Finally, it suggests not only a certain interpersonal ethical relation, but also the possibility of a different political collective as metonymic—that is, brought together by shared analogical concerns, that are not necessarily “the same” but are still perceived, from within each particular experience, as relatable.

Bibliography Bassnett, Susan. 2002. Translation Studies. New York: Routledge. ———, and André Lefevere (eds). 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Benjamin, Walter. 2004. “The Task of the Translator.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. I, edited by Michael William Jennings and Marcus Paul Bullock, 253–264. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Bilsky, Leora. 2001. “Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastnesr.” Law and History Review 19(1): 117–160. Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. “Translated From…” In The Work of Fire, edited by Charlotte Mandell, 176–190. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. “Coldness and Cruelty.” In Masochism, edited by Jean McNeil, 9–138. New York: Zone Books. ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London and New York: Continuum.

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Gluzman, Michael. 2010. “ha-Kina ha-‘oletzet: ‘al shne shirim shel Daliyah Raviḳovitch ‘al Yona Ṿolakh.” In Kitme or: Ḥasmishim shenot biḳoret u-meḥḳar ‘al yetsiratah shel Daliyah Raviḳovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 173–182. Bene Beraḳ: ha-Ḳibutz ha-me’uḥad. Gordon, Neve. 2008. Israel’s Occupation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grossman, David. 2003. ha-Maṿet kederekh ḥayyim: Ma’amariym, 1993–2003. Tel Aviv: ha-Ḳibuts ha-me’uḥad. Hever, Hannan (ed.). 2010. Al tagidu be-Gat: Ha-nakbah ha-Palesṭinit ba-shirah ha-‘Ivrit, 1948–1958: Asupat shirim. Tel Aviv: Sedek; Parhesyah; Zokhrot. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kassim, Anis F. 1989. “The Order to Beat Palestinians: Justice à la Israel.” Palestine Yearbook of International Law 5: 184–241. Klossowski, Pierre. 1997. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, translated by Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kronfeld, Chana. 2010. “Shira poliṭit ke-omanut lashon be-yetsiratah shel Daliyah Raviḳovitch.” In Kitme or: Ḥasmishim shenot biḳoret u-meḥḳar ‘al yetsiratah shel Daliyah Raviḳovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 514–543, Bene Beraḳ: ha-Ḳibutz ha-me’uḥad. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2000a. “Ecce Homo.” In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann, 655–800. New York: Modern Library. ———. 2000b. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann, 437–600. New York: Modern Library. Ophir, Adi. 2001. ‘Avodat ha-hoṿeh: Masot ‘al tarbut Yiśre’elit ba-zeman ha-zeh. Tel Aviv: ha-Ḳibuts ha-me’uḥad. Parush, Adi. 1990. “Psaḳ ha-din be-parashat Kefar Ḳasem: Mivḥan ha-degel ha-shaḥor veha-muśag shel Peḳuda bilti-ḥuḳit baʿalil.” ʿIyune mishpaṭ 15(2): 245–272. Ravikovitch, Dalia. 2009. Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, edited by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Ravikovitch, Dahlia. 2010. Kol ha-shirim, edited by Giddo Ticotsky and Uzi Shavit. Tel Aviv: ha-Ḳibuts ha-me’uḥad. Szobel, Ilana. 2013. A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Tzamir, Hamutal. 2006. be-Shem ha-nof: Le’umiyut, migdar ṿe-subyeḳṭiviyut ba-shirah ha-Yiśre’elit bi-shenot ha-ḥamishim ṿeha-shishim. Yerushalayim: Keter; Merkaz ha-ḳsharim, ha-merkaz le-ḥeḳer ha-sifrut ṿeha-tarbut ha-yehudit ṿeha-Yiśre’elit, Universitat Ben-Gurion ba-Negev.

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———. 2010. “ha-Tsofa le-vet Yiśra’el mibi-fenim: Daliyah Raviḳovitch, ha-shira hale’umit-Yiśra’elit, ṿe ha-migdar shel ha-yetsugiyut.” In Kitme or: Ḥasmishim shenot biḳoret u-meḥḳar ‘al yetsiratah shel Daliyah Raviḳovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 416–443. Bene Beraḳ: ha-Ḳibutz ha-me’uḥad Ulmert, Dana. 2010. “‘Ani lo kan’: Ha-ʿemda ha-poliṭit ṿeha-ʿIyumʿal ha-zehut be-shirat Daliyah Raviḳovitch.” In Kitme or: Ḥasmishim shenot biḳoret u-meḥḳar ‘al yetsiratah shel Daliyah Raviḳovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 416–443. Bene Beraḳ: ha-Ḳibutz ha-me’uḥad.

9

What is a “Manifestly Illegal” Order? Law and Politics after Yoram Kaniuk’s Nevelot1 Itamar Mann

We knew about wars from the side of a firearm, not from the side of the pretty sons of bitches who filled our windows, who laughed, who thought old age is a disease and who say that all we did in war wasn’t worth what one F-15 does. We were the elders of the rough blow, we cut Arabs’ balls, made no big deal of heroic songs. Kaniuk 2006, 108 This essay proposes a typology of three formations of the political imagination, which have had the tendency, in the post–Cold War period, to devolve into three kinds of nihilism: sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, and the rule of law. Each of them is regarded as “nihilism” for different reasons, which will hopefully become clear as the argument unfolds. I conclude by somewhat tentatively proposing an alternative to these nihilisms, under the title of “judgment.” Needless to say, there is nothing new in exercising judgment. The particular political and cultural conditions in which judgment now occurs will be the object of the discussion below. To concretize and contextualize these themes, the essay relies on three texts: first, a piece of fiction, the novella Nevelot (“Caracasses”) by the late Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk (Kaniuk 2006).2 The story will lead directly into the second text, Military Prosecutor v. Malinki, which is a famous opinion of an Israeli military Thanks to Roy Ben-Shai, Kenneth Mann, Liron Mor, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Nitzan Lebovic, Oded Na’aman, and the members of the Van Leer Workshop on nihilism for their invaluable comments. 2 Yoram Kaniuk died June 8, 2013. He was a great writer. As the book covers of his English translations obstinately testified, The New York Times once called him “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World.” But as Nicole Krauss describes, he died feeling underappreciated. I would like to dedicate this essay to his memory. For background on Kaniuk and his death, see Kershner (2013, A25); Krauss (2013). 1

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court.3 In 1958, the court held that soldiers who followed an order to kill unarmed Israeli citizens were criminally responsible, as the order was “manifestly illegal.” This doctrine proved influential both in Israeli domestic law and in international criminal law in the second half of the twentieth century.4 The question of what a “manifestly” illegal order is, as opposed to a simply “illegal” one, has long been contested.5 Yet surprisingly, it has so far only been partially understood, and arguably has never been compellingly resolved, with the important exception of Hannah Arendt’s commentary about it in her essay Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.6 This essay is the third text I will engage. What is the relationship between these three seemingly very different sources? And how does either of them shed light on the theme of this volume, namely, the current “political dead end” “in the west in general, and the Israeli political stasis in particular”?7 The brief intervention in an age-old debate on how the “manifestly illegal” clause in Malinki should be understood will hopefully suggest an answer to these questions. To do that, it will be necessary to make some observations on the most fundamental question in the philosophy of law, namely, what is law?8

Sovereignty If we are to believe Yoram Kaniuk’s sinisterly amusing description in Nevelot, contemporary sovereignty has devolved into a kind of nihilism. Military Prosecutor vs. Major Malinki and Others, Military Court case no. 3/57 (henceforth, “Malinki”); see also military appeals court case Ofer v. Military Prosecutor, Appeal no. 279–283/38, upholding the district court opinion (Justice Moshe Landau wrote that it is “the duty of every soldier to examine the orders that are given to him under the standard of his own conscience.”) 4 In the context of International Criminal Law, see Dinstein (2012); Osiel (1999, 77); In the context of Israeli law, see, for example, Parush (1990, 245–272). 5 Sanford Levinson therefore remarks, in the context of a discussion of torture, that “Those of us who discuss ‘torture,’ ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading activities,’ and ‘highly coercive interrogations’ must climb down into the muck and confront the ‘facts on the ground,’ rather than merely doing what we do best, which is to proffer (and take refuge in) place-holding abstraction.” See Levinson (2005, 251–252). 6 Arendt (2005, 17); Osiel (1999, 71) (mentioning that “the precise scope of this special subset of crimes—not simply illegal, but manifestly so—has been carefully explored in neither judicial opinions nor the scholarly literature built upon them”). 7 Nitzan Lebovic’s chapter in this volume. 8 Doing so will hopefully be a small contribution to that part of the interdisciplinary field of “law and literature” concerned with literature’s guidance in this philosophical question. In his history of interdisciplinary approaches to law, Richard Posner comments in passing that this is “a question that has little practical significance if, indeed, it is a meaningful question at all.” One of the things I hope to accomplish is to show that this question has an extremely weighty practical significance, in a limited but important subset of cases. See Posner (1987, 765). 3

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Several of the Jewish paramilitaries that fought in Israel’s war of independence are at the center of this novella, recently rendered by Israel’s Channel 2 into a TV series.9 As former members of the Palmach, the protagonists of Nevelot used to be among the most venerated icons of Israel’s founding generation.10 They are symbols of sovereignty, or perhaps of a particular moment in the history of sovereignty, which we have long left behind. The tale takes place in Tel Aviv in the 1990s, when their glory has diminished, along with the youthful adventurism that had once fired up their escapades. In their mid-seventies or early eighties, these former freedom fighters describe themselves as pathetic and unappealing. Some have grown fat. Others have become disabled, or are otherwise falling apart. But what marks them as paradigmatic manifestations of nihilism is not the stench of old age. It is the considerable violence they still wield, both arbitrary and cruel. As the author tells us, one day they sit in their regular café and resolve to carry out a systematic campaign of murder (Kaniuk 2006, 52). The previously glorified fighters will use the skills they acquired to deliberately take the lives of innocent, unarmed, civilians. Their motivations—at least at first blush—are revenge, as well as the sheer fun of it. Though himself a former fighter in the Palmach, Kaniuk never had compunctions describing the violence such paramilitaries had engaged in during Israel’s founding. Indeed, his entire oeuvre is filled with descriptions of the violence inflicted on Palestinian combatants and civilians alike, often appallingly visceral, always chillingly candid (see esp. Kaniuk 2012). This, to be sure, is not to say that Kaniuk is a critic of such violence. As he often said in his interviews and articles, the 1948 war was a war of survival: it was either killing or being killed. Any discussion of the laws of war in this carnage would either be hopelessly naïve, or simply hypocritical. Neither of the adversaries respected a principle of distinction between civilians or combatants. No such principle is applicable. The environment Kaniuk describes is one of an existential division between friends and enemies. It is a world in which Carl Schmitt’s views of “the political” provide the most accurate account of public life.11 In this account, much Nevelot (Hot 2010). The ingenious cast features Yossi Pollak, an aging theater actor politically associated with the left, co-starring with Yehoram Ga’on, a nationalist pop star who made his name in the 1960s. 10 The Palmach was an elite combat force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish community during the British Mandate period in Palestine. It was established in 1941, and with the creation of Israel’s army, it was disbanded. Members of the Palmach formed the backbone of the Israel Defense Forces high command for many years. 11 Schmitt famously argued that “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motivations can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (Schmitt 1996, 26). 9

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discussed in recent years, politics does not rest on norms—neither natural nor positive. Politics is war by other means, and war rests on decisions, not reducible to the application of normative rules or principles.12 The Jewish paramilitaries at the center of Neveolt accordingly track Schmitt’s complementary conception of the Partisan.13 The Partisan, he writes, “has turned away from the conventional enmity of the contained war and given himself up to an other—the real—enmity that rises through terror and counter-terror, up to annihilation.”14 The Jewish paramilitaries too have given themselves to terror and counterterror.15 But even more explicitly than in other works by Kaniuk, the violence in Nevelot is not the “constitutive” violence of the partisan, which Schmitt conveys as deeply rooted in community.16 In Nevelot, the victims are not “enemies,” Palestinians or other, imagined or real. They are, rather, fellow members of the same body politic. They are Israeli citizens, and the reason for which they deserve to die is that they are young. Could a sociopathic war against the young signify “the real” enmity, in Schmitt’s words? Each night the band of veterans will roam the bustling streets of Tel Aviv. Each night they will find a young man or woman in one of the intimate alleyways, and take them away. In a memorable scene from the TV version, a young couple makes out on a city beach. The heavy-set Yossi Polak sees them caressing in the soft light of the distant promenade. When he approaches, the surprised young man addresses him with the mixture of politeness and patronism often awarded old men boarding an overcrowded bus. But Pollak is there to kill, and he does that with his bare hands. The terrorized woman screams her head off. Instead of the existential claim of killing one’s enemy in order to survive, the 1990s version of the assassination operations is about the old doing away with the new. It’s hard to imagine what kind of community can emerge from this pattern of violence.17 Rather than enacting a model of

War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy—all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. (Schmitt 1996, 49) 13 Kaniuk (2006), 84, 104. 14 Schmitt (2007), 7. 15 The veterans fully embrace the label “terror” as an accurate description of particular Jewish paramilitary actions (Kaniuk 2006, 127). 16 “ ‘The population is your greatest friend’ is how the Manual for Low-Intensity War for Everyone puts it” (Schmitt 2007, 18). 17 One might speculate of a state for the moribund, perhaps a suitable foundation for many European democracies, burdened by late capitalism’s characteristic aging demographic. For a more graphic example see Ulrich Siedl, Dog Days (Allegro Film, 2001). 12

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contemporary political violence, the protagonists of Nevelot seem to employ violence that is bifurcated from any recognizable form of politics. The Hebrew word Nevelot literally means “carcasses.” It is associated in Jewish law with unsavory meat, unworthy of eating. In this context, the word has an ambiguous meaning that reveals some of the novella’s irony. In somewhat outdated colloquial language, Nevelot is used as an insult—think of something like “ass holes.”18 Looking out the café window, the veterans watch young Israelis passing by, flaunting their toned, flexible bodies, showing off their tight behinds. The veterans become unbearably envious. “Scoundrels,” they call them—“Nevelot!” They are angry to see the joie de vivre that had once been theirs, now dripping like sweat from the bodies of others. And the word “Nevelot” later becomes the codename for the nighttime assassination operations. Once they begin to implement their plan, they start talking about “going out on a Nevelot,” or “doing more [or less] of the Nevelot.” The word becomes synonymous with a killing spree against the youthful. But the second referent of the novella’s title is not the victims, but the murderous veterans themselves. In this context, “Nevelot” should be understood in its literal meaning, as “carcasses,” or “corpses.” The suggestion is that, while apparently alive, these veterans are already dead. It is this limbo between life and death that spells out the basic premise of the first type of nihilism I would like to propose here: sovereignty corresponds to the literary figure of the undead.19 The undead, explains Wikipedia (our best guide on such matters), is “a being in mythology, legend or fiction that is deceased yet behaves as if alive. A common example is a corpse re-animated by supernatural forces […] Undead may be incorporeal like ghosts, or corporeal like ghouls, vampires and zombies.”20 Some of the most celebrated figures in literary history fall into this category. A familiar example is Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)— not to mention the abundant zombies of more contemporary literature and film. While the novella does not explicitly say that the Palmach veterans are ghosts or zombies, on this interpretation it should be read within this literary tradition. Rather than renewing the old assassination operations once directed at “enemies,” these fighters are contagiously spreading the disease of death from I would like to thank Kenneth Mann for proposing this translation. Joel Trachtman has written that the notion of a “fixed, complete, and unassailable sovereignty” is a “zombie” that “haunts and perturbs our discourse […] we should drive a stake through its heart by shunning its use in rational discourse” (Trachtman 1998, 564). 20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undead, accessed October 9, 2013. 21 Compare with Tamari (2010). 18 19

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within.21 The bite of this reading is of course that these deaths furnish a political allegory. If partisans represent the political founding of a new community, the novella is about a community that is haunted by its own founding. In doing so, it illustrates the destructive role that sovereignty may have today. The concept of sovereignty, according to this position, no longer has the authority it used to have upon us. This authority may have once endowed meaning to political action, even when action shed blood.22 As Schmitt explains, politics acquired a theological role, as the death of members of one’s polity was understood as sacrifice (see also Kantorowicz 1957, 268). Alas, Schmitt’s “political theology” has undergone a thorough disenchantment. Both meaning and sacrifice are no longer available to the members of the polity. And without this theological imagination, dying for sovereignty appears as a criminal act of murder.23 Unlike the undead in the Wikipedia definition, in our story the undead are not re-animated by supernatural forces, but by the remains of sovereignty.24 Sovereignty, in this context, is defined by three constitutive aspects: the first is the normative demand for collective self-government, which in international law is sometimes labeled “self-determination”; the second is the Weberian idea that sovereignty has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence; and the third is the legal positivist idea that sovereignty generates the ultimate source of legal authority, or the grundnorm, as Hans Kelsen put it. Think of these pillars of sovereignty as forming a dilapidated, haunted house. This house was once home for a family that we know is ours but whose members we can no longer recognize. In these conditions, being killed for sovereignty cannot offer redemption. Redemption gives way to the ressentiment of the old against the new.25 Sovereign violence is not deployed as part of a story about selfgovernment or the well-being of the governed. And sovereignty’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence falls apart; hence, the ghostly reappearance of the pre-independence paramilitaries.26 Indeed, for the protagonists of See, generally, Kahn (2010). Schmitt will not allow for this: “The intensely political character of the partisan is crucial since he has to be distinguished from the common thief and criminal, whose motives aim at private enrichment” (Schmitt 2007, 10). Compare with Kahn (2010), characterizing going to battle without such an imagination as being tortured. 24 The idea of “remains” comes from Santner (2011). 25 One of the contexts in which the experience of ressentiment comes up in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work is the invocation of a monumental past as a weapon against the present (see Shapiro 1989, 9). 26 A fruitful line of interpretation, which is not the one I will be pursuing below, is that the assassination of the young in this novella refers back to anti-Semitic “blood libels” according to which Jews would kill non-Jewish children (in order to drink their blood). According to this reading, contemporary Israeli youth are construed as “non-Jewish” while the revolutionary founders are the only “Jews” still around (see Dundes 1991). 22 23

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Nevelot, it is as if shedding blood can somehow rekindle a political imagination that is no longer available.27 This “sovereign nihilism” may be considered within the historical context in which Kaniuk is writing—that of Israel in the 1990s. The novella came out in 1997, against the backdrop of a surge of terrorist attacks at the centers of Israeli cities. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, were all attacked repeatedly. Kaniuk makes this backdrop relevant: responding to the assassinations, the terrified Israeli public points its fingers at the Palestinian neighbors.28 On a different level, the novella rings true to the Israeli intellectual context of the time. The 1990s were a moment of unprecedented questioning among Jewish-Israeli revisionist scholars, who began to reconsider the most basic tenets of Zionism.29 Though sometimes referred to as the “New Historians,” their cultural influence far surpassed the study of history alone and was part of a larger “post-Zionist” cultural orientation. Thus, the two aspects of “sovereign nihilism” became salient: on the one hand, the nationalist project seemed to cost the lives of a growing number of unarmed civilians. On the other, the political imagination that endowed these deaths with meaning gradually eroded, collapsing into pastiche.30 Be this “domestic” interpretation attractive as it may, its underlying premises are generalizable. Rather than being exceptional, the Israeli context is pregnant with insights of interest to political theorists conceptualizing sovereignty in many other contexts. It recalls the way that Achille Mbembe has conceptualized sovereignty in the African “postcolony” in terms of “necropolitics.” For Mbembe, sovereignty creates “death-worlds,” which are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40, italics in the original). Another perspective, which I would like to expand upon, is the violence that remains key to American sovereignty. This is the violence that The screams of the terrorized woman lying alone on the sand testify that state violence hasn’t lost its capacity to induce fear. But unlike the Hobbesian sovereign, who governs by fear while promising protection, here no such promise is offered, let alone fulfilled. 28 The fact that it is the past haunting them and not their declared enemies, perhaps suggests a reason why the conflict with the “enemies” has proven so intractable (Kaniuk 2006, 124). 29 For a survey of this debate, see Kimmerling (1998). For a critique of the movement, see Masalha (2011). 30 One of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions: “Pastiche” (n.) is “A work, esp. of literature, created in the style of someone or something else; a work that humorously exaggerates or parodies a particular style.” In this case, I’m referring to the protagonists’ reenactment of constitutive violence, while not constituting community, resulting in mere imitation. One might also regard this violence as the “simulacra” of sovereignty, in the sense of being a representation that no longer has an “original” (see Baudrillard 1995). 27

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Simon Critchley, writing about the Bush administration, has labeled “cryptoSchmittian” (Critchley 2007). As Paul Kahn explained, American liberalism’s emphasis on the social contract seldom accounts for this violence (Kahn 2004). But violence pervades American sovereignty, running through the porous theaters of the protracted “war on terror.” It thus continues to preoccupy the popular political imagination.31 The way Nevelot illuminates the disintegration of national identity in the post–Cold War moment will help us make sense of this violence too. Like Schmitt, for Kahn the most revealing aspect of sovereign violence is its capacity to enable sacrifice. A sacrificed soldier has died for the sake of her polity, and her death is sanctified for the community for which she died. The same supposedly holds true for a citizen who had fallen victim to a terrorist attack. This populist aspect of sovereignty may currently be under considerable strain. “In recent years,” writes Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, “the complete giving of the self—or its taking by the government—that had come to characterize total war of the twentieth century, is absent” (Taussig-Rubbo 2008, 83). As TaussigRubbo explains, this partial disappearance of the citizen-soldier is tied to the rise of consumer-citizenship. The wasted lives of the young in Nevelot might therefore stand for the victims of political violence once sacrifice is no longer possible.32 The violence the novella depicts is not that of the twentieth-century war, in which the death of a citizen-soldier reaffirms the collective ties of identity.33 Think rather of the creation of an environment in the United States in which so many schoolyard shootings became possible since the late 1990s. These killings had become the terrifying mirror-image of Kaniuk’s fictional story: instead of the old killing the new, here kids machine-gun their peers and elders. The United States government is at least partially responsible for this deeply violent environment, whatever one’s answer to the constitutional questions about gun control may On the role of the political imagination, see, especially, Kahn (2013). It is therefore tempting to think of the novella as a particularly macabre illustration of what Giorgio Agamben described as the transformation of the citizen into homo sacer: a person that can be killed but cannot be sacrificed. Two important qualifications to this proposal are necessary at this point. In Agamben’s analysis, sovereignty continues to loom large, even when citizens become dispensable. But the return to the Partisan in Nevelot largely suggests the dissolution of sovereignty. Agamben conceptualizes the homo sacer as a person that cannot be sacrificed, and whose killing cannot be regarded as murder. But Nevelot suggests a kind of deadly equilibrium, whereby the end of sacrifice leaves murder behind. For more on this, see below in the section titled “the rule of law.” 33 An appropriate example from the United States might be the arbitrary violence of the kind that took place at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. As author David Eggers described poignantly in his novel Zeitoun, in this context unchecked violence was unleashed against the state’s own citizens (Eggers 2010. See also Pikington 2010). 31 32

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be. The violence in such examples is flagrantly senseless, and principally mute. It does not add up to any revelation of meaning, and it cannot be encoded in the cathartic language of sacrifice. In the final paragraph of his Sacred Violence (2008), Kahn contends that terrorism and the violent US response to it—that of torture—have proven that sovereignty has all but died. “As with the death of God,” he writes, “were the sovereign to die neither man nor world would be the same. Whether we will get to such a point remains an open question, for the world-threatening character of the political is hardly over. The terrorist with weapons of mass destruction may very well put an end to our dream of a global political community of human rights” (Kahn 2008, 178). Reading this paragraph, it may seem like there are only two options: either sovereignty dies, ushering in a cosmopolitan world of human rights; or sovereignty remains alive, in which case the conjunction of political violence and political meaning continues to thrive. Kaniuk’s novella, however, suggests a far darker world, in which the binary opposition has no purchase. Nevelot describes a brand of post-sovereign violence in which violence and politics are bifurcated.34 It is “post-sovereign” precisely because it fails to produce meaning. While reenacting constitutive violence,35 this violence turns against members of the polity. Although sovereignty is undead, we have hardly witnessed the rise of a world of cosmopolitan human rights.

Cosmopolitanism The nihilism of undead sovereignty is not the only kind of nihilism we find in Kaniuk’s text. Reaching only slightly deeper into the motivations of the elderly assassins, there is something else going on, apart from envy and revenge. The victims of the Nevelot attacks are punished for the corruption they introduce into Israeli society. Often in foul language, the founders-assassins criticize this generation for adopting the most familiar characteristics of a consumerist society. They are nihilist in a more pedestrian sense: nothing really interests them other than buying another pair of shoes or visiting the newly opened mall. They are completely pleasure-driven, and have no interest For an explanation of this condition in a different context, see Mann (2013). Or in the case of Zeitoun, the Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy.

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in combat or in the defense of their own people. If that is not enough, they move freely on the face of the planet, untethered to any particular territory by anything other than the ties of convenience. They do not speak Hebrew, but an “English-Hebrew that comes out of the television’s ass.”36 Thus, while the older generation often expresses envy for the younger generation’s flagrant sexuality, it rejects this generation for being part of a global lumpenproletariat of shoppers. The only thing that members of this generation share with each other is a capitalist set of nonvalues. But consumerism is not the only aspect of the opposition between the old and the new. Another example is the new generation’s sexuality, contrasted with the more modest love the elders remember from their own youth.37 The opposition between the old and the new can helpfully be organized as shown in Table 9.1. As Table 9.1 illustrates, 1990s nihilism is not simply criticized for its capitalist or hedonistic orientation. The critical boxes are the three on the far right. Table 9.1  From 1940s Sovereignty to 1990s Cosmopolitanism 1940s

Politics

War

Sacrifice Love

Covertness

Local

Past

Decision

1990s

Capital

Market

Pleasure Sexuality

Exhibitionism

Global

Present Nature

Violence Human Rights

In our protagonists’ minds, the most outrageous aspect of the young generation’s worldview is their constant appeal to human rights. While they focus their energies exclusively on the accumulation of wealth, their words express an apparent fidelity to universal values. These universal values in turn allow the young to criticize the constitutive violence against the Palestinian population that lived in Palestine on the eve of the founding of Israel. This criticism against Israel, however, has no corresponding action. While judging expropriation unjust, this new generation is shirking from responsibility, and risking literally nothing. They are perfectly content to reap the fruit of the constitutive violence they criticize. One of the veterans explains succinctly one of the reasons this bothers him: Kaniuk (2006), 133. Interestingly, this is not monogamous love. The group of veterans reminisces on how they all loved the same woman. This woman was a holocaust survivor that arrived to Palestine on an immigrant boat and was completely dehumanized by what she had undergone. She was beautiful. Though she slept with all of them, it is unclear if she ever loved them back. Kaniuk explains that she loved them as a family, and strongly suggests that she was a rape victim during the holocaust (Kaniuk 2006, 123).

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We saw how those who avoided the draft in the war of independence became rich, and those who fought ate shit. The fighters who came back could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and those who did nothing, hundreds, thousands, they received whatever they wanted: abandoned property, houses, film theatres in Jaffa, in Ramleh, Lod, neighborhoods in Haifa.

The “abandoned property” in this paragraph refers to the Israeli nomenclature for the Palestinian property belonging to refugees who fled or were deported during the 1948 war. Under an Israeli statue titled “The Abandoned Properties Law—1951,” this property was transferred to the Israeli government, and then put on the market or otherwise given over to the private possession of third parties—virtually always Jews (see Forman and Kedar 2004). Having pointed out this “unfairness” in the distribution of booty, the speaker proceeds to stress the magnitude of the plunder. Some of the places he mentions are relatively expensive neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, where the so-called Israeli “left” is overwhelmingly concentrated: “Abandoned property is what all of Afeka is, half of Haifa, all of Acre, all of Ramat Aviv, Ramat Aviv Gimmel, Shikun Tsameret in Tel Aviv which was Jamussin, all of the land of Abu Kishek which is today Ramat Hasharon, they got everything through their connections for a few pennies.” For this reason, the young and liberal generation of the 1990s is labeled nihilist. And for this reason their nihilist adversaries from the founding generation decide: they must die. A fascinating paragraph leads us to the second text I would like to explore. One of the veteran-assassins makes reference to a legal doctrine according to which soldiers have a duty to disobey a “manifestly illegal order.” The rule, considered one of the cornerstones of international criminal law, was spelled out by a military court when Israeli soldiers that participated in the “Kafr Qasim massacre” (1956) were indicted for murder. The soldiers had opened fire on unarmed Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel on their way back from a day’s work, killing forty-nine.38 These inhabitants of Kafr Qasim, a village that was under Israeli control since 1948, didn’t know of a closure that prohibited them from being outdoors after dark. In Military Prosecutor v. Malinki (1958), Justice Binyamin Halevi found that the fact the soldiers obeyed orders could not excuse them from criminal responsibility. The soldiers should have known the command was illegal. “A Black flag hangs over such a command,” Halevi enunciated.39 According to one prominent interpretation, this “black flag” For historical background, see Orbach (2013). On the trial, see Orbach (2013, 496).

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clause refers to natural law: when an order violates natural law, the soldier receiving the order must refrain from acting upon it (see Osiel 1998, 939, 1008, and the citations thereof). This arguably came to be the standard reading of the judicial text, and it is this reading that I will reject, attempting to outline an alternative one. When one of the veteran-assassins casually mentions Halevi’s opinion forty years later, it becomes clear he is extremely unhappy about it. He believes this apparent vindication of human rights was, in fact, the moment in which Israel fell into what might be labeled cosmopolitan nihilism. It is here, in other words, that we find the early roots of the political corruption of liberal young Israelis: those who happily condemn the injustice of the 1948 displacement while living on the most expensive of expropriated land. “And then they made a military with a manifestly legal order,”40 continues the veteran-assassin.41 But the rule justice Halevi articulated, he says, did not exist in the most decisive of wars, that of the founding. One of the lawless battles the speaker reminisces about took place along the road leading from the coast to Jerusalem, in a place called Bab-al-Wad: “Did we have manifestly in Bab AlWad? With manifestly we wouldn’t have a state. And then came the Nevelot and was very successful without the manifestly. Cause we were the military of the good old days.”42 (Kaniuk 2006, 109). The conjunction of consumerism and human rights is the principal marker of the second nihilism we find in Nevelot. Embodying it is a Jewish Israeli citizen, who lives on land that will fetch a fortune on the boiling real estate market, while condemning the sins that established his title. As one of the veterans says: “my stupid children want peace now and to suck up to Arabs. To open their legs to them. They just want a jeep and a Honda and I don’t know what, and the Arabs will kick their asses.”43 Long before the 1990s, this coupling was one of Schmitt’s favorite objects of criticism: To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. It Kaniuk humorously replaces “manifestly illegal” with “manifestly legal,” in order to demonstrate the speaker’s lack of sophistication in this legal matter; and perhaps also to suggest that, from the point of view of the partisan, there is no real difference between the two. 41 Interestingly, this moment coincides with the consolidation of the Jewish paramilitary groups into a standing Israeli army. 42 Driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one can still see the historical vehicles parked where they remained in this battle, a monument freezing this historic moment. 43 Or literally translated, “turn them into burgers” (Kaniuk 2006, 78). 40

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is a manifest fraud to condemn war as homicide and then demand of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there will never be war again. (Schmitt 1996, 48)

But this conjunction also provides the outline for a critique of the Israeli liberal “left.”44 Read in the context of the 1990s, it seems to capture the underlying problems of the “peace process.” A liberal camp enthusiastically supported withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza (territory enjoys no particular sanctity for cosmopolitan nihilists). These people expected, however, that such withdrawal would be achievable with no significant political transformation. The premise was that it would finalize the “division” between Jewish and Palestinian populations. Most importantly, it would allow the “economic miracle” of Israel to remain unshaken. Thus, it aimed to reify a particular moment in the present while rejecting the values that ghosts of the past imposed.45 As in the case of sovereign nihilism, cosmopolitan nihilism too demands a reading that extends beyond the Israeli context.46 It is beyond the scope of this essay to fully explore why, in one compelling reading, consumer culture (or the preference for “neoliberal” markets) and human rights (in the natural rights vein) are two sides of the same coin. Suffice it to stress, with the admitted risk of oversimplification, that both came to rely on an account of human nature. Economic doctrine held that human rationality is consumer rationality, fashioned as a quest for preferred goods and services for the cheapest possible price. When human rights embraced natural rights theory as its foundation, it embraced a rather similar understanding of human nature, and held—in John Finnis’s formulation—that there is “a set of basic practical principles which indicate the basic forms of human flourishing as goods to be pursued or realized, […] and which are in one way or another used by everyone who considers what to do, however unsound his conclusions” (Finnis 1980). In relying on nature, The label “left” is mostly associated with a commitment to egalitarian principles requiring robust governmental regulation of markets. In the context of Israel in the 1990s, “left” referred to those in favor of a territorial compromise with the Palestinians, even if they were vehement supporters of the free market. 45 This “solution” has so far proven unattainable, precisely because it fails to address the values that many in Israel-Palestine are still willing to die for. The question of if there is an alternative political vision that succeeds in challenging such values—opening the way for a future—remains hopelessly unanswered. 46 Simon Critchley’s idea of the “passive nihilist” is related to cosmopolitan nihilism. “Rather than acting in the world and trying to transform it,” writes Critchley, “the passive nihilist simply focuses on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for perfecting himself, whether through discovering the inner child, manipulating pyramids, writing pessimistic-sounding literary essays, taking up yoga, birdwatching or botany, as was the case with the aged Rousseau” (Critchley 2007, 4–5). 44

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both positions were unanimous in limiting the scope of the human capacity to politically reinvent our collective futures—and ourselves. In both accounts no room remains for the decision, so central not only for political theologians like Schmitt or Kahn, but also for a classical popular democratic sovereignty theorist like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.47 The analysis David Grewal provides in his Network Power (2009) is helpful in this broader critique of “cosmopolitan nihilism.” In his critique of globalization, Grewal specifically takes issue with transnational social movements, which, starting from the 1990s, aimed to act beyond the pale of sovereign political institutions. These “coalitions of the willing,” he explains, ended up pooling divergent issues like the plight of Darfur, environmental disasters, and consumer protection, into one undistinguishable mass (Grewal 2009, 190). Citizens of the world were presumably free to participate in varying forms of activism, which created the illusion of a vibrant global civil society. The problem with this voluntarism, however, was that no authority had the duty to respond to their demands, or even to address them. Sovereignty, Grewal contends, remains the only arena in which political demands are articulated within an institutional setting that can grant remedies. A necessary aspect of such remedies is allocating costs, and violence, in a way that allows citizens to collectively self-govern. For Grewal, a return to sovereignty is expected to lift us from the fallen state of cosmopolitan nihilism. If sovereignty is undead, however, does it still remain a viable option? That is a question the next section will address, through a slightly closer look at Malinki.

The rule of law Kaniuk portrays sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism as two intractable aspects of politics in the post–Cold War moment. Following Simon Critchley, one might think of them as two kinds of political disappointment.48 It is not only that politics holds a promise of a meaningful life and is unable to fulfill that promise. The disappointment stems from the fact that no such promise is even made. For a concise elaboration of the possible inconsistencies between capitalism and democracy, see Fiss (1992, 908, 911–920). 48 Critchley (2007, 1) (opening his book with the assertion that “philosophy begins with disappointment”). 47

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Clearly, Kaniuk’s foremost alliance is with the Palmach veterans, fashioned as his own alter egos.49 Their rejection of cosmopolitan nihilism is a comical overstatement of Kaniuk’s own position with respect to the post-Zionist culture he witnessed around him. With the Nevelot operations reenacting the paramilitary operations at the founding, history repeats itself simultaneously as tragedy and farce. But sovereign nihilism is not a viable alternative to cosmopolitan nihilism. The disappointment in question is characterized by the experience of both options “lacking or failing” to appropriately address a “violently unjust world” (Critchley 2007, 3). The mobility of humans and capital within the cosmopolitan context has rendered sovereignty defunct. But rather than being a solution, “human rights” become part of the problem. As one commentator aptly put it, “Because they promise everything to everyone, they can end up meaning anything to anyone” (Moyn 2010). In the natural law tradition, human rights are bifurcated from both an institutional setting in which they can be enforced and from a popular will, which could grant them legitimacy. Sovereignty and human rights are set in opposition to one another, but are united by being equally hopeless. In what remains of this essay, I would like to take this dichotomy between the two nihilisms as an invitation to rethink justice in political terms. What can Nevelot, and the historical resources it invokes, contribute to reconsidering the possibility of justice? The first option to consider has already been alluded to above. Might the opposing principles be united in one synthesis, in which universal natural rights are enforced by a measure of sovereign violence? This is a concise formulation of what is sometimes referred to as the rule of law.50 The paramilitary veterans in Nevelot refer back to Malinki but don’t seem to remember the details. Instead of talking about a “manifestly illegal order,” as Justice Halevi did, they confuse the language and talk about a “manifestly legal” one. This confusion is all but arbitrary. It captures a normative universe As Nicole Krauss explains, Kaniuk thought of himself as undead.

49

He used to say that in 1941, he was killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ternopil, Ukraine, even though he was eleven at the time, and busy eating sour cream on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, fought bloody battles for Israel’s independence in the Judean hills, was shot in the leg, and died in the arms of a nun who quoted the second century rabbi Ben-Azzai in Germanic Hebrew. Later he moved to New York, was treated for his wounds in Mount Sinai Hospital, befriended Charlie Parker, kissed Billie Holiday, stayed for a decade, and died there when he gave up being a painter and returned home. (see Krauss 2013) Paul Kahn aptly labels this an “unhappy synthesis” (see Kahn 2004, 43).

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in which a particular act of killing can be thought of as equally legal and illegal (with no authoritative arbiter to make the final call). But the error also suggests that it might be worthwhile to go back to the case and reread it more carefully. From a rule-of-law perspective, a “cosmopolitan” reading of the text will be just as erroneous as the “sovereign” reading of it, embodied by the protagonists of Nevelot. Did both parties forget what “the rule of law” had once meant for the community they belonged to? If so, the task would presumably be to rediscover, and ultimately make it possible to appeal to, the rule of law as a way out of nihilism. But simply appealing to the rule of law will prove to be a failure. Unaccompanied by judgment—a concept that I will return to below—it will simply lead to another, third, brand of nihilism.51 In Malinki, Justice Halevi convicted eight of eleven defendants. The soldiers were charged with murder. As the Israeli military went to war for the first time on the Egyptian front in 1956, it declared a curfew effective in certain Palestinian villages in Israel, starting 5 p.m.52 Halevi’s opinion recounts how one soldier asked his commander what would be the fate of people coming home from work. The response was the Arabic “Allāh yarḥamu,” literally translated “may God have mercy on their souls.” As the order was passed down, it was specified that women and children would have to be shot as well. What is normally a consolation for relatives of the deceased became an order to open fire on unarmed civilians—or more to the point—on citizens. This is the crucial and often-quoted paragraph from Halevi’s decision, in which he explains the criminal legal status of such an order: The distinguishing mark of a “manifestly unlawful order” should fly like a black flag above the order given, as a warning saying “Prohibited.” Not formal unlawfulness, hidden or half-hidden, nor unlawfulness discernible only to the eyes of legal experts, is important here, but a flagrant and manifest breach of the law, definite and necessary unlawfulness appearing on the face of the order itself, the clearly criminal character of the acts ordered to be done, unlawfulness piercing the eye and revolting the heart, be the eye not blind nor the heart not stony and corrupt, that is the measure of “manifest unlawfulness” required to release a soldier from the duty of obedience upon him and make him criminally responsible for his acts.53 On the nihilism of the rule of law, see also Liron Mor, essay in this volume. For a background of this decision, see Orbach (2013, 493–494). Verdict, 213–214. English translation from Solis (2010, 360). For the Hebrew original see Israel, District Military Court case No. 3/57, Military Prosecutor v. Malinki and Others (1957). For an extensive review of the doctrine in international law, see Osiel (1998).

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In his opinion, Halevi sifts carefully through the evidence from the massacre, a large part of which came from statements by Palestinian villagers who survived. Among the stories are several incidents in which men and women coming home from work were rounded up and shot. Some of the witnesses were only able to testify because they played dead until the next morning. One scooted among a herd of running goats, barely escaping the shooting. Justice Halevi meticulously paints the picture of a harrowing crime. He deliberately mentions in his opinion that some of the witnesses were either grieving family members or were physically maimed following that night (Malinki, sec. 6). His judicial response to this crime seemingly marries the oppositions outlined above: nature and decision; violence and human rights. Malinki ostensibly demonstrates that it is very important for the rule of law to allow for a certain modicum of natural or universal law to prevail. As Adi Parush explained, the opinion makes no sense from within a positivist understanding of law (Parush 1990). One of Parush’s objections to a positivist justification for the “manifestly illegal” test is the following: imagine the Israeli parliament passes a statue authorizing soldiers to kill unarmed civilians. The Kafr Qasim order could then not be regarded as “manifestly illegal” under Israeli law. The same objection can be reformulated in terms of conventionalist positivism (which relies on accepted social practice): if soldiers generally think and act as if they are authorized to kill, such action can no longer be regarded as “manifestly illegal.” But this seems contrary to Halevi’s decision.54 Assuming that with appropriate legislation Israel could also exempt itself from international law, Parush concludes that the result Halevi reaches requires a reliance on natural law.55 So we have a component of nature. But for the rule of law to be enforceable, it must also allow for a modicum of decision. Extant commentary is unanimous in rejecting the idea that a soldier identifying a “black flag” during combat is the decision Halevi refers to. The decision is that of the judge, who presumably This is the interpretation the Israel Supreme Court preferred in later case law. See, especially, Member of the Knessent Yossi Sarid v. Prime Miniser Ariel Sharon, HCJ 4668/01 (December 27, 2001). Ehud Yatom, who had murdered captive terrorism suspects by order of the head of Israel’s secret security service, testified that he did not know a “black flag” hung above that order. Though he explains he later realized this, the problem supposedly raises doubts about his culpability (or Mens Rea). Justice Matza does not believe he could have not identified the illegality of the order. The “Black flag,” he explains, is reserved for orders that every soldier identifies as illegal. From the present perspective, however, the burden was on Yatom. If he identified the Black Flag, he would presumably have resisted. The fact that he did not resist is precisely what exposes him to the judgment I’m thinking about here. The remedy against such a flaw is not reserved to courts, though courts can carry them out. Such actions question a person’s very membership in her community. See also Arendt (1963). 55 He happens to reject natural law on philosophical grounds unrelated to this opinion. 54

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represents no individual in particular, but the community in which judgment is made; the community of citizens to which both the defendant and the victim belong. The judge is able to make a decision about a natural norm, curiously rendering it both positive and natural at one and the same time.56 Just as importantly, this vision also relies on a conjunction of human rights and violence. We already know that natural law provides a human rights component. The violence is that of punishment at the end of the process, conceived as a retributive remedy in the name of society, and ultimately for the benefit of the victim. Violence is of course married to human rights not only by realizing the right to retribution. The violence of punishment is expected to be proportionate to the crime, distinguishing it from revenge. It is in this context of punishment that the poverty of the rule of law was exposed in concrete historical terms. The eight soldiers convicted for murder were sentenced with various periods in prison, the shortest seven and the longest seventeen years. These sentences were not served in a military prison, but rather in a hostel. Worse, all the convicted soldiers were pardoned by Israel’s president, Yitzhak Ben Zvi. The longest sentence served was one year long. In retrospect, the invocation of a “black flag” seems more like a smokescreen that barely hides yet another kind of nihilism. The rule of law figures as a third nihilism, borne of sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism combined. It is a reflection of the worst of both worlds. Sovereign nihilism comes into play in the fact that in Kafr Qasim Israeli sovereign command directed the killing of the state’s own citizens. This is not Schmitt’s world, or the venerated world of the Partisans during the founding. In both, the political decision involves killing enemies. The villagers of Kafr Qasim bare the marks of what Giorgio Agamben has called the homo sacer (Agamben 1998). Agamben defined homo sacer as a person who is killed without being sacrificed; and whose killing remains unpunished. Both components of the formula are squarely on point, as is Agamben’s emphasis that not only enemies or foreigners, but (paradigmatically) citizens, are under the threat of such death. Cosmopolitan nihilism is relevant too, in giving Justice Halevi’s words their properly dismal interpretation. The “black flag” that appears on “the face of the order itself ” comes to appear only on that order. It comes to have no real legal or institutional force, and is merely a rhetorical trope. This dual reliance on both community and universality captures much of what human rights lawyers hope for today. To name just one relevant source on this, the Rome Statue signals a preference for domestic enforcement of universal law.

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One may object that pardon is not part of “the rule of law,” and that it should properly be understood as an exceptional political intervention after the legal process is over. This, however, would rearticulate the problem in other words. Recall that Schmitt is the most important theorist of exception. When war crimes against a country’s own citizens are exceptionally pardoned, what is exposed is the defining feature of Schmittian sovereignty. The political decision is revealed as something that can neither be reduced to a norm (natural or positive) nor to the sovereignty of the members of one’s community. What Schmitt demonstrated perhaps better than any other legal theorist is that a theory of law without an account of politics is meaningless. What should be at stake in the question “What is law?” is not merely an explanation of legal rules. It should rather be a more general picture of normativity, which would be able to account both for the norm and for its exception, unlimited in its scope for one or the other. Historically, the massacre of Kafr Qasim was a reenactment of the constitutive violence of Israel’s founding.57 Though carried out less than a decade after the founding, it is also structurally similar to the imaginary assassinations of the young generation in the 1990s. In both cases, violence is directed toward citizens. It set the precedent for sovereign nihilism. The judgment of Halevi’s court—whatever he may have had in mind—became an embodiment of cosmopolitan nihilism after Ben Zvi granted the murderers pardon. It produces the most evocative rhetoric in the name of justice, while failing to do anything to realize it. Only by considering both options as interconnected, can one appreciate the nihilism of the rule of law.

Judgment Extant interpretations of the “manifestly illegal” clause stress its legal nature in one of the following ways. In the natural law tradition, the suggestion is that a “black flag” hangs above actions that are prohibited by a code inscribed in our very making as humans (Osiel 1998, 1008). As the sections “Cosmopolitanism” and “The Rule of Law” argue, this view risks reducing the space of human As Orbach explains, the plan occurred in the context of a top-secret plan (“Operation Mole”) that envisioned a scenario in which the Arabs of the region were to be evacuated to enclosures in central Israel until the end of the 1956 war. Rumors about the plan reached officers of the Border Police, some of whom mistakenly understood that the objective was to expel the population to Jordan (Orbach 2013, 493–494). Gadi Algazi has argued that the massacre was the first part of Operation Mole.

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decision. The concern is that law is bifurcated from politics, making it impossible to employ the violence that the enforcement of rights may require. In the positive law tradition, the best reading of the opinion is conventionalist: it suggests that a “black flag” hangs above actions that a “reasonable person” would believe is “manifestly illegal” (see Osiel 1998, 1009).58 The role of a judge is to decide what the content of an “objective” reasonable person as a matter of fact, avoiding recourse to the judgments of any particular individual (including her own). But as discussed in the sections “Sovereignty” and “The Rule of Law,” such a test may also bifurcate rights from remedies. If exceptions are made in the name of popular opinion within a particular community, the result can be arbitrariness in remedies for violence (illustrated by the pardon for the Kafr Qasim murderers). This arbitrariness amounts to further violence. In her short essay titled Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, Arendt calls her readers’ attention to this point. Writing in the aftermath of the debate Eichmann in Jerusalem unleashed, Arendt returns to Halevi’s idea of the “Black Flag.” For Arendt, this idea refers to the individual responsibility of each and every person to determine the justification of her actions. As she painstakingly emphasizes, this determination cannot rely on the application of rules. Following her own observations during the Eichmann trial, she is interested in historical conditions in which all such rules are occluded. These were the historical conditions in the Third Reich, in which the most “respectable” members of society carried on with what should have been properly recognized as a criminal regime. The contemporary experience that has unfolded during the post–Cold War period, and even more significantly in the ongoing post-9/11 period, is also characterized by such an occlusion of rules. This is not necessarily because we are all cogs in an enormous transnational criminal enterprise, as Agamben sometimes seems to suggest. It is, rather, because of the disenchantment described above, which gave way both to sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism, and to the nihilistic “rule of law” they had borne out. Arendt’s interpretation emphasizes the clause in which Halevi explains that what is manifestly illegal “[pierces] the eye and [revolts] the heart, be the eye not blind nor the heart not stony and corrupt.” As she explains, this “presupposes an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion arises” (Arendt 2005, 41). Despite this rhetoric, she says, courts that applied this On the importance of conventionalism in jurisprudence more generally, see Posner (1988, 333).

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standard had not actually asserted such an “optimistic” view. What courts had actually said is that “a feeling for such things has been inbred in us for so many centuries that it could not suddenly have been lost.” In the terms introduced above, they relied on conventionalist positivism. At least with regard to the Third Reich, however, all evidence shows that in fact the feeling has been lost. Arendt is thus pushed to the demand of “judging without being able to fall back upon the application of generally accepted rules,” which is precisely the condition in an environment of sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism (Arendt 2005, 37). In his commentary on “Manifest” illegality, Mark Osiel deplores the fact that there is not more case law from domestic and international tribunals that might grant content to this standard.59 From the present perspective, however, decrying the sparse jurisprudence on this issue is missing the underlying point Arendt introduces so forcefully. No jurisprudence would help, as this area of law does not allow us to rely on judges, and requires each member of a community to make her own choice. Arendt talks about those who simply walked away from their roles in the German state. In the final paragraphs of the essay, she relies on them as a force that, cumulatively, could have prevented the catastrophe of the holocaust (Arendt 2005, 47). Here, however, we might go even further than her: because a “black flag” pierces the eye, the foremost mode of enforcement is a right to resist, passively or actively. Second, perhaps, come practices of witnessing—whether in a court or in public. In itself, witnessing can be a remedy for the violation of a fundamental right. One might object that the requirement of such judgment conflates law and morality. This is not true. “Legal and moral issues are by no means the same, but they have a certain affinity with each other because they both presuppose the power of judgment” (Arendt 2005, 22). What we find is a “zone of indistinction,” to use Agamben’s phrase (against his own intentions), between personal moral choice and the community’s law. Agamben discussed an indistinction between politics and law, which potentially exposes every citizen to being killed by the sovereign (or becoming homo sacer). Arendt, however, exposes the farreaching entailment of this assertion within a democratic context: once such a zone is recognized with regard to sovereign choice, it must also be recognized Osiel believes that the passage from the Malinki decision, quoted above, is “rather purple and overheated”—though he admits that there is rarely a more precise definition, as he wishes for. As he explains, “The reason for this is clear: most prosecutions for war crimes are conducted by the very state whose soldier stands accused. The fora for such prosecutions are the municipal courts-martial of the defendant’s nation state. The collective inclination within any military organization to punish one’s comrade in arms, when he has risked his life for the country, is rarely strong” (Osiel 1999, 77).

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with regard to the choices of each and every one of us.60 What in Agamben is conceptualized as a site of abandonment and killing can also be seized upon as a site of remedy or rescue (as Agamben too obliquely suggests in a few places in his writing). Moral judgment applies to any situation in which I ask myself: “what is the right thing to do?” The judgment discussed in Malinki is not about all such cases. It is only about those conditions in which moral judgment is experienced as an imperative. This imperative must not be held in abeyance or suspension, and must trump any form of positive law: domestic, international, or natural. It expresses a realization according to which for a legal system to enjoy legitimacy, actors must subject it to judgment that assesses it from outside its own terms.61 To be sure, the word “judgment” here does not point to an exclusively cognitive process. Phrases like “piercing the eye” reflect a process far removed from computation or even from discourse (which is Arendt’s preferred mode of thought).62 While the actor believes she is following an already established rule, she may not have had access to this rule before the encounter that provokes such judgment. In that sense, while we seem to know in advance that killing unarmed civilians is illegal, this interpretation of Halevi’s black flag rule is potentially more expansive. It invites the possibility of illegality in a set of circumstances that is not defined a priori and that must be experienced in real time. Think of the Israeli military control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank. As years passed since the beginning of the occupation, some have refused to serve in the Israeli Army. For people who made this choice, a Black Flag is raised over the permanent military control of a population of noncitizens. As Chaim Gans has noted, the failure of Israeli left-leaning politicians to endorse such decisions has exposed the poverty of their ability to exercise judgment (Gans 2002, 20, 23). Or, to take another frequently discussed example from the other side of the Israeli political map: inasmuch as a soldier would refuse to follow an order to evict settlers for reasons anchored in her own conscience, that soldier too would be exercising judgment. Ariella Azoulay has usefully conceptualized this as a “civil state of emergency” (see Azoulay 2012). This comes close to Adi Ophir’s definition of nihilism in this volume. Compare with Robert Cover’s anarchism, according to which law “is a bridge in normative space connecting [our understanding of] the ‘world-that-is’ […] with our projections of alternative ‘worlds-that-might-be.’ ” (Cover 1985, 181). 62 “The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking” (Arendt 2005, 45). 60 61

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As Critchley explains in a related discussion following Emmanuel Lévinas, judgment is never entirely autonomous (Critchley 2007, 38–68). It is heteronymous in the sense that it is given to me, directly, by that which pierces the eye. The judge’s description is as visceral as it is cognitive. Halevi requires the actors within the legal system not only to feel, but also to make themselves open to such feelings. This may sound sentimentalist, in a way that immediately invites the criticisms against cosmopolitan nihilism, meted out above.63 However, returning to Nevelot and Malinki suggests how this understanding of judgment differs from cosmopolitan nihilism. In short, it is intimately related to action, and cannot be exercised from the armchair of cosmopolitan nihilism. Apart from the Palestinian survivors of the Kafr Qasim massacre, one witness who appeared before Justice Halevi was particularly effective. This witness, a soldier named Kotler, suggests yet another signification for the title of the novella. As he recounts, as part of his military duty he arrived at Kafr Qasim that night and saw that the Military Police posted there rounded up villagers and were killing them. Justice Halevi quotes what he said: “You are murdering innocent people coming back from their work, you are committing a crime. Stop!” He then added a sentence that is particularly important in the present context: “If our people [the Military, as opposed to the Military Police] would have been there, we would have attacked them and finished this up.” The murderous actions thus provoked an urge to defend the Palestinian citizens by using violence. As Halevi specifically writes, “the use of the word ‘Nevelot!’ ” reflects the way this soldier thought about the murderers (Malinki, sec. 7). They were no longer part of his community. Protecting the Palestinian citizens, for him, became analogous to self-defense. By speaking out in the course of an operation, he is presumably taking on some measure of risk. He is positioning himself in adversity with military policemen who are supposed to be on his side. Kotler, however, doesn’t represent more than a missed opportunity, as he does not in fact intervene. He does, however, stand for the realization that remedies for policies that look like they have a black flag over them are not the responsibility of judges alone. Such remedies are the role of every member of a community that is presumed to share a way of judging particularly egregious wrongs. And even if the opportunity on the battlefield is missed, reporting and witnessing—inside of courts and outside of them—can Compare with Liron Mor’s discussion of sympathy in this volume.

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still help generate processes that grant remedies to victims. Such witnessing may also entail a risk, even if it is an undoubtedly more modest one.64 The imperative of this encounter is experienced in the following terms: either I take a risk and secure my community’s constitutive commitments, or I secure myself and allow my community’s constitutive commitments to be put in risk.65 This kind of risk is precisely what the sovereign nihilists are willing to take, but they stand for no constitutive commitments, and are not carried out in the name of community. For cosmopolitan nihilists, the idea is, of course, to preserve commitments while avoiding their actualization when that means taking a risk. While the rule of law explained in the section “The Rule of Law” reflects an attempt to speak in the name of constitutive commitments, its delegation to judicial institutions invites a decline into nihilism. Courts cannot replace personal judgment. The three categories of nihilism—sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, and the rule of law—are relevant also for a historically situated understanding of judgment. Both sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism signal the same underlying crisis in community. They both amount to two different descriptions of a globalized or internally fragmented political condition in which there is no identifiable community at all. This remains a real challenge, which can perhaps be overcome by pointing out the different temporal orientation that judgment stands for. Sovereign nihilism was associated with the past, cosmopolitan nihilism was associated with the present, and the rule of law was a failed attempt to join the two together. But judgment is oriented toward the future. It conforms to a regulative ideal: what are the constitutive commitments that my community will stand for? Nevelot is about a community that is haunted by its own founding. Returning to the use of the word “nevelot” during the night of the Kafr Qasim massacre invokes a future community that was possible but was never born, one in which killing an Arab citizen of Israel is exactly like killing a Jewish one.66 In Israel, it is exemplified by the work of a veteran organization called “Breaking the Silence” (see Breaking the Silence 2013, and Na’aman 2012). 65 As Eric Santner notes in a related discussion, “At a certain point the measures designed to immunize the population against risk begin to destroy the vibrancy of the community and the values on which its civic life is based” (Santner 2011, 7). 66 One of the defendants testified that even if the order was to fire on unarmed civilian citizens of a Kibbutz, he would fulfill it “Because it is an order” (Protocol, session 55, July 18, 1957, 12, 26, IDFA 165/1992–12. Quoted in Orbach 2013, 34). This would indeed suggest equality between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. 64

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Postscript In the 1990s post–Cold War period, many Israelis found themselves caught between sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism. In the United States this moment arguably began only after 9/11 and is still very much alive. But for many Israelis, Kaniuk’s characterization of cosmopolitanism no longer captures the present. Consumer culture thrived but its flipside of human rights has been significantly marginalized.67 The decisive moment in this respect was the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, its aftermath with the “Goldstone Report” accusing Israel of war crimes, and the backlash against the report. It is doubtful that Kaniuk would have believed in the power of judgment to amend any of that. Responding to the Goldstone Report, he voiced a fundamentally Schmittian opinion that seemingly rejected the impetus to legalize warfare; perhaps more importantly, he also rejected the young generation of Israeli veterans who cooperated and testified before Goldstone. Because his own public position is one of a veteran, this rejection was rather dramatic. Here is a translation of a few paragraphs of Kaniuk’s opinion piece (Kaniuk 2010): When you see someone approaching you under fire, you do not open Immanuel Kant in order to know what is moral and what is not. You do not think what is a manifestly illegal order, because with such an order the war will be lost. You shoot because you were told to shoot. You kill because otherwise you will be killed. […] Revolutions in history killed millions of people for no good reason, apart from justifying their own causes. Those who wanted a better world massacred millions in the name of their will, like the French Revolution that shed tons of blood. And? Was it just or not? At its moments of truth, it was. […] It is forbidden to judge soldiers at moments of war. Perhaps whoever decided on “Cast Lead” made a mistake. Perhaps Hamas made a mistake that it asked for this. Perhaps the commanders gave contradictory orders, I saw a lot of unnecessary blood, but in war there is nothing unnecessary, this is the price, if people want to live together—someone needs to be the policeman, even before there is anyone to arrest. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that this commitment was never of the constitutive kind that people are willing to die, or even takes risks for.

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Preparing for this essay, in June 2012, I went to visit Kaniuk at his small apartment on Bilu Street in Tel Aviv. I asked him about this opinion—did he really think that the Kafr Qasim murderers should not have been tried? Did he think it right that they were released so early? Of course not. In Kafr Qasim, it wasn’t a war, he explained. “But there was a War on the Egyptian front, and why not assume that Kafr Qasim was part of that War?” I asked. Don’t get all lawyerly on me, he laughed.

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Kahn, Paul. 2004. Putting Liberalism in Its Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2008. Sacred Violence. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ———. 2010. Out of Eden. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2013. Finding Ourselves in the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaniuk, Yoram. 2006. Itim Venvelot. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Aharonot. ———. 2010. “Milhama Ba’alil.” Ynet, December 28, available at http://www.ynet.co.il/ articles/0,7340,L-4004359,00.html. Accessed April 21, 2014. ———. 2012. 1948. New York: New York Review of Books. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kershner, Isabel. 2013. “Yoram Kaniuk, 83, Israeli Novelist.” The New York Times, June 12, A25. Kimmerling, Baruch. 1998. “Between Celebration of Independence and Commemoration of Al-Nakba: The Controversy over the Roots of the Israeli State.” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 32(1): 15–18. Krauss, Nicole. 2013. “Born Again.” New Yorker, June 12, 2013. http://www.newyorker. com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/yoram-kaniuk-postscript.html. Accessed October 10, 2013. Levinson, Sanford. 2005. “In Quest of a ‘Common Conscience’: Reflections on the Current Debate about Torture.” Journal on National Security Law and Policy 1: 251–252. Mann, Itamar. 2013. “Dialectic of Transnationalism: Unauthorized Migration and Human Rights, 1993–2013.” Harvard International Law Journal 48(2): 313, 346–355. Masalha, Nur. 2011. “New History, Post-Zionism and Neo-Colonialism: A critique of the Israeli ‘New Historians’.”. Holy Land Studies 10(1): 1–53. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1): 11–40. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. “Human Rights in History.” The Nation, August 30/September 6. http://www.thenation.com/article/153993/human-rights-history?page=0,0. Accessed October 23, 2013. Na’aman, Oded. 2012. “The Checkpoint: Terror, Power, Cruelty.” Boston Review, November 13. Available at http://www.bostonreview.net/world/checkpoint-odednaaman. Orbach, Danny. 2013. “Black Flag at a Crossroads: The Kafr Qasim Political Trial (1957–1958).” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 45: 491–511. Osiel, Mark J. 1998. “Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War.” California Law Review 86(5): 939–1129. ———. 1999. Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline and the Law of War. New Burnswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Parush, Adi. 1990. “Psak Hadin Beparashat Kafr Qasim, Mivhan Hadegel Hashahor Vehamusag shel Pkuda Blti Hukit Ba’alil.” Tel Aviv U. L. Rev. 15: 245–272.

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Pikington, Ed. 2010. “The Amazing True Story of Zeitoun,” The Guardian, March 11. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/11/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricanekatrina. Posner, Richard. 1987. “The Decline of Law as an Autonomous Discipline: 1962–1987.” Harvard Law Journal 100(4): 761–780. ———. 1988. “Conventionalism: The Key to Law as an Autonomous Discipline?” The University of Toronto Law Journal 38(4): 333–354. Santner, Eric L. 2011. The Royal Remains. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. Theory of the Partisan. Candor: Telos Press Publishing. Shapiro, Gary. 1989. Nietzsche’s Narratives. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Solis, Gary D. 2010. The Law of Armed Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Tamari, Assaf. 2010. “Erev-Rav.” Mafte’akh 2: 43–74. Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo. 2008. “Sacrifice and Sovereingty.” In Killing States: Lethal Decisions/Final Judgements, edited by Jennifer Culbert and Austin Sarat. Durham: Duke University Press. Trachtman, Joel. 1998. “Cyeberspace, Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, and Modernism.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5(2): 561–581.

10

To Be at Home: Spaces of Citizenship in the Community Settlements of the Galilee Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronnen Ben-Arie

Introduction In her short article “Reflections on Little Rock,” published in Dissent in 1959, the political theorist Hannah Arendt refers to discrimination as an indispensable social right, just as equality is a political right, after examining the historical events that unfolded in Little Rock in the fall of 1957 and spring of 1958, following the famous US Supreme Court decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case (Arendt 1959). Arendt argues that the Supreme Court and civil rights activists were misguided in their attempts to forcefully integrate schools in the South. Central to her arguments are her notions of the political, social, and private realms (Duran 2009; Hinze 2009; Morey 2011). Arendt argues that each realm is governed by a different dominant principle. She asserts that the political realm is governed by the principle of equality, the social realm by the principle of discrimination, and the private realm by the principle of exclusivity. Arendt states that the government should enforce equality in the political realm and nowhere else (Morey 2011, 11). Arendt inveighs against the blurring of the boundaries and the threat of reasoning of one of the domains based on the others. The separation of the domains is a must for her as she identifies the blurring of the boundaries as a nihilistic threat for the possibility of political action. In this chapter, we seek to examine the relevance of Arendt’s distinctions between the domains in light of the story of a couple of Palestinian citizens living in Israel, who chose to live in Rakefet—one of the Community Settlements of the Galilee. The couple, that attempted to build their home in the community settlement, struggled against the effort to prevent Palestinian citizens from living

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there on the basis of ethnic-national discrimination and segregation. In contrast to Arendt’s definition of home as an enclosed, secure, and interior space that belongs to the private space, we wish to think about home as the contours of the public space, that is, to highlight the limits of the home, by outlining the powers of the community and state institutions to allow and deny such a home. We try to relate to the question of how the home enables some to think of it as secure—assuming the existence of an autonomous subject residing in it, separated from the public sphere, while for others, living in the same territory and governed by the same regime, the home is considered through negation and absence. The first part of the chapter describes the general background of the struggle around the Palestinian citizens’ right to choose their place of residence, and details the spatio-historical conditions that enabled the establishment of the community settlements by limiting the Palestinian citizens’ living space. This section details the nihilistic acts and procedures of the state that constitutes its power through the negation and destruction of the Palestinian existence. In the second part, we discuss the concept of community as related to the social sphere according to Arendt’s definitions. In this context we ask about the power of the community in acting within the social realm, justifying the negation in the name of securing the separation between the political and the private spheres. In this complex reality, the chapter analyzes how the political is organized, how it intervenes and attempts, through the High Court of Justice, to secure the distinctions between the spheres and to ward off the nihilistic threat. The third part of the chapter explores the political boundaries through the private sphere—the home— and wonders as to the meaning of the act of providing and denying a home. The chapter concludes at the point where the home, and the claim for a home, might exceed the fixated perception and mark a new political space, which emerges from the actingtogether of all citizens in an attempt to rearticulate the nihilistic counteract as a positive one.

Act 1 On June 2013, the Zubeidat family, husband and wife, began to build their new home in Rakefet, a community settlement in the rural region of the Galilee, in northern Israel. This might seem a trivial, almost banal, thing—to build a home in the place of your choice—yet this is not the case here. It required seven years of public and legal struggle, culminating in the verdict of the Israeli High Court

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of Justice, to reach this point. It all begun in 2005, when the Zubeidats wanted to build their home on a family-owned private plot of land in the hometown of Sakhnin, an Arab-populated town at the center of Galilee. Soon they found out that due to planning regulations, this was impossible. The plot was divided by the municipal border between Sakhnin and the neighboring regional municipality of Misgav, and any attempt to build on the plot required the agreement of the neighboring municipality, which denied any such appeal on the ground of their disapproval of any expansion of the Arab town. Facing the impossibility to build on their own land, the Zubeidats have decided to challenge the housing and planning systems that severely limit the possibilities available to ArabPalestinian citizens in Israel. The couple chose to live in Rakefet, one of the twenty-nine community settlements in the Misgav Regional Municipality surrounding the city of Sakhnin, which are designated for Jewish residents only. The choice of Rakefet was due to its proximity to Sakhnin and the fact that it is located on lands that were originally owned by Palestinians living in Sakhnin and confiscated by the state in order to establish new settlements for Jewish citizens.

The Judaization of Palestinian land The origins of the current spatial conditions in Galilee, as they are present in today’s Israeli planning, land and housing policies, are to be found as far back as the time of the 1948 war, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel. The war, which is considered by most Israelis as their War of Independence and by most Palestinians as their Catastrophe (“Nakba”), broke out immediately after the acceptance of the United Nations Partition Plan in November 1947 and ended in January of 1949. This tragic event led to the destruction of dozens of towns and about 400 villages, with about 750,000 Palestinians rendered homeless and stateless. Only about 160,000 Palestinians remained in Israel and granted citizenship by the new state (Khalidi 1992; Masalha 2000; Morris 1987; Pappé 1988, 2007; Segev 1998). At the same time, Israel absorbed some 700,000 Jewish immigrants and refugees from Europe and the Islamic states of Asia and North Africa and quickly settled them throughout the country. Thus, by 1953, the state established 370 new settlements for Jewish residents, 350 of which were located on lands that were occupied before by Palestinians (Falah 1996; Golan 1995; Kedar and Yiftachel 2006).

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Different practices were used by the Israeli state in order to allocate public and state lands and lands that were previously owned by Palestinians for the use of its Jewish-Israeli citizens. The expansion of existing Jewish settlements and the establishment of new ones continued, as well as the destruction of most Palestinian villages, towns, and urban neighborhoods and the restriction on the expansion and development of the ones that remained at place. The landscape went under a Hebraization process with the changing of the names of localities, sites, and geographical elements, and the municipal boundaries were redrawn in order to secure the Jewish dominance and control of space (Benvenisti 1997; Kedar 1998; Kemp 1997). These practices, according to Kedar and Yiftachel (2006), characterize the Israeli regime, which they designate as an ethnocratic regime that supports the expansion of one ethno-national group in a multiethnic contested territory (Yiftachel 2006). Such a regime promotes the spatial, economic, political, and cultural objectives of the dominant ethno-nationality, and it is the ethnic ascription rather than the civic one that operates as the main key for the allocation of resources. Kedar and Yiftachel contend that one of the main bases for the constitution and institutionalization of ethnocratic regimes is the system of spatial and land control, having its core in two complementary state apparatuses: the land authority and the planning administration (Kedar and Yiftachel 2006, 131). The Israeli ethnocratic regime has enabled, assisted, and supported the Zionist project of Judaizing the Israeli and Palestinian space (Kedar and Yiftachel 2006, 133), at first mainly by legislation during the formative years of the state, which aimed to normalize the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people (Forman and Kedar 2004), and then complemented by administrative arrangements between the state and several Jewish suprastate institutions. The ethnocratic regime constitutes itself through the regularization and normalization of the nihilistic acts of destruction, dispossession, and negation that it is founded upon. In the wake of the war, only about 13.5 percent of the territory that has now become the state of Israel was under formal state and Jewish ownership, available for the interests of the Jewish sovereignty and the Jewish vast majority, which by 1951 reached almost 90 percent of the population. In order to answer this discrepancy, between 1948 and 1960, millions of acres of land formerly owned and used by Palestinians have been transformed into Israeli state lands. The nationalization and Judaization of the formerly Palestinian land were accomplished by several corresponding measures (Kedar and Yiftachel 2006, 139–142; Yiftachel 2006, 136–143):

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1. Confiscation of lands owned by Palestinians, mostly those who became refugees and “absentees” during the war, but also much of the lands owned by those who became citizens of Israel. This was done by military, administrative, and legal procedures, of which the major ones up until the mid-1950s were the Absentee Property Law (1950) and the Land Acquisition Law (1953). During the 1950s and 1960s, this was done mainly by the legal procedure of a “land title settlement” that transferred much of the lands claimed by Palestinians into state-owned land. As of today, only about 3.5 percent of the lands within Israel are privately owned by Palestinian residents. 2. Transfer of about half a million acres of previously Palestinian agricultural land to the ownership of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). 3. Concentration, since 1960, of the control and administration of all these lands in the hands of the Israel Land Administration (ILA), which is in charge of the management of all public lands, amounting to as much as 93 percent of the land within the Israeli boundaries, including those owned by the state and by the JNF. The agreement between the state and the JNF granted the latter equal representation at the executive Council of the ILA although it owned only about 17 percent of all public lands. 4. In 1960, the state adopted the JNF policy and stated in the first section of the Basic Law: Israel Lands that all state lands will never be sold and will remain forever in the ownership of the state, the Jewish people, and its national organizations. These were the foundations of the Israeli ethnocratic land regime that is still in effect even to this very day. For the past sixty-five years, the Palestinian citizens have remained almost totally excluded from the state public land regime, with only about 0.25 percent of all public land allocated to them (Yiftachel 2006, 143). The subordination of expropriated Palestinian lands to the Jewish people was fixed in covenants that were signed between the state and the Jewish organizations, particularly the JNF and the Jewish Agency. The former secures the Judaization of the land at the stage of ownership and the latter at the stage of allocation. As part of this process, a sophisticated apparatus was shaped, which excludes Palestinian citizens from rural areas where state lands were allocated only to settlements designated for Jewish inhabitants. According to “the three-party lease” arrangement, the initial land allocation for a settlement was signed by the state Land Authority, the Jewish Agency, and the settlement

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as a collective. In order to be able to lease a plot of land in the settlements, individuals had first to be accepted as members of the collective that was legally arranged as a cooperative association. This enabled the effective screening of Palestinian citizens from almost all rural settlements that are organized in Regional Municipalities that control about 84 percent of the state area (Kedar and Yiftachel 2006, 144).1 The development of Jewish settlement in the Galilee region has its origins even earlier than the beginning of the Zionist movement, as early as 1881. However, most of the settlement attempts have failed and only a small part has succeeded, mostly near the northern border. This settlement has modestly increased during the time of the British Mandate, adding a few small settlements along the border. Even after the 1948 war, the establishment of the state of Israel, and massive destruction and expulsion of the Palestinian towns and people, the Galilee remained a large condensation of Palestinian population. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the state responded to this situation mainly by the establishment of peripheral new towns amidst areas that were highly populated by Palestinians and their inhabitation mostly by Jewish immigrants. During the early 1970s, new plans for the expansion of the Jewish towns in the Galilee were made along with intentions to establish new small settlements throughout the region in order to increase and disperse the Jewish population. These plans were accompanied by the publication of new expropriation orders for thousands of acres of Palestinian owned lands. These plans were devised at a time of increase of national consciousness among the Palestinians living within Israel and crystallization of processes of their political organization. This led to mass reactions to the state policies and plans, which culminated in the events of the Land Day of 1976, when massive demonstrations were held in many Palestinian towns throughout the country and were responded to harshly by police and army forces, killing six demonstrators (Bashir 2006; Yiftachel 1999, 2006, 170–171). The events of the Land Day and the political developments within the Palestinian population in Israel and their relationships with the state acted as a catalyst for the implementation of new state policies and plans for Jewish settlement in the Galilee (Sofer and Finkel 1988, 10–11; Yiftachel 2006, 69). Some commentators emphasize the role of the religious discourse in the desire to create a “Jewish place,” which has its origins in the “historical right for the country” (see Bashir 2004). In our analysis we focus more on the institutional and procedural apparatuses that enable the dual project of Judaization and de-Arabization of the space.

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The Mitzpim plan Rakefet was initially established as one of the Mitzpim (literary, outposts or lookouts) that were established throughout the Galilee as part of an extensive national project that was initiated at the end of the 1970s. Within only four years, between 1978 and 1982, forty-four new settlements were established on state-owned lands, mostly located on bare hilltops, and inhabited by Jewish citizens who readily joined the national effort. The project was a joint enterprise of the state government and The Jewish Agency, which was very dominant as the main body to initiate, promote, fund, and execute the project (Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992; Sofer and Finkel 1988). The project was not a direct outcome of a comprehensive statutory plan, but rather the product of an ongoing struggle, debate, and negotiation between various government ministries, state authorities, the army, and suprastate Zionist organizations, all having their own aims and goals, which did not always match one another. The declared goals and objectives changed with time, as did practices of realization. Still, the most fundamental and consistent goal, agreed upon by most actors most of the time, was epitomized by the slogan “Judaization of the Galilee,” which had both a spatial and a demographic dimension. That is, to increase the number of Jewish residents in the Galilee in order to increase its proportion in the total population of the region, to secure hold by Jewish population of as much land as possible, and to establish Jewish presence in areas that are over-dominated by Palestinians. As stated in the decision of the Joint Settlement Committee shared by the Israeli government and the World Zionist Organization, “The Mitzpim plan is intended to promote the deployment of Jewish population in the mountainous Galilee and to secure the protection of state lands by presence and inhabitation …” (April 30, 1979, cited in Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992, 182). The basic practices in the realization of the project were to locate possible sites to be inhabited, to open rough roads to the localities chosen, and to organize small groups of seven to fifteen families to inhabit the outposts, with only minimal basic infrastructures and temporary housing structures at the beginning. At the time of their establishment, the exact future designation of each outpost was not determined, as there was no general plan to set their purpose of use or expected size, rather they were conceived as temporary settlements to be developed in the future to various different kinds of permanent ones. In this way, dozens of new outposts were established quickly within a very short time, setting the conditions for future development. Thus, practices that were

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already in extensive use in the Occupied Territories during the 1970s, and were in fact a continuation of Zionist practices originating in the 1930s (Bashir 2004; Rotbard 2003), were now relocated and used in similar ways in a new region. Three aspects of the Mitzpim project’s realization are of particular significance for our discussion in this chapter and will serve as its basis. First, the role of the Zionist suprastate organizations in the planning and implementation of the project. The World Zionist Organization and its operative arm, the Jewish Agency, together with the Jewish National Fund, were all very dominant in initiating and promoting the project. Although in partial cooperation and coordination with the government, as for instance in the Joint Settlement Committee, but also in initiating independent actions that caused continuous strife and contention with state authorities (Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992, 185–187). These organizations had a major role in the mobilization and administration of the Jewish population in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Israeli state, and continued to take a significant part in the development of the state, while holding on to their unique position as external to the state. The relations between the state and the Zionist organizations are complex, as the goals and aims of the different parties, as well as their institutional commitments and obligations, do not always coincide. Regarding the Mitzpim project, some commentators claim that part of the motivation of Jewish Agency officials in promoting the project was to influence against the priority given by the new right-wing government to the new settlements in the Occupied Territories (Sofer and Finkel 1988, 11–12). Thus, although there might be a general agreement on the goal of “Judaization of the Galilee,” in practice, there can still be effective disagreements, whether on the national scale, as to where to concentrate state investment, or locally, with state’s authorities, as to specific locations or the order of operation. Nevertheless, these complex relations and the external position of the Zionist organizations, enables them to be very effective in their influence on the trajectories of investment and development of the state, allegedly in the name and benefit of the global Jewish people, and, when needed, to work in collaboration with the government, helping it to disregard its obligation to the non-Jewish citizens of Israel. These complex relations were later identified and signaled out as problematic by the Israeli High Court of Justice in the verdict of the Ka’adan case, to which we will return later, by stating “that the state is not entitled to allow discrimination in [the allocation of] state lands by transferring these lands to the Jewish Agency.”2 HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan vs. Israel Lands Authority (2000).

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Second is the intertwining of the national and the personal in the realization of the Mitzpim project. One of the main objectives stated for the project was to “protect state lands,” which is a code for preventing Palestinians from making use of lands that were expropriated and are now owned by the state. Typically, there are state authorities that hold the responsibility for executing this task, and various possible practices are available for that purpose, such as delineation, fencing, and continual surveillance performed by state officials. In this case, this task was supposed to be handed over to the residents of the new small settlements, who were supposed to fulfill it by the very presence of their bodies and homes. There were some debates among officials whether this fulfillment should be a passive one, meaning that the physical holding of the land should suffice, or whether it should be more active, with some suggesting that the settlers should be properly trained for the mission (Sofer and Finkel 1988, 22–23). In either way, there was a general agreement that by choosing to make their homes in one of these outposts, the newcomers take upon themselves the vocation of a national mission. Thus, the seemingly personal and private act of choosing a place to live and build one’s home has become, right from the start, a political act and a crucial element in a national project. This understanding of the way the national is entangled with the personal and the equivocal nature of the act of building a home, being both public and private, is of great importance when considering the “Build Your Own Home” (Bneh Beit’cha) trend, which became widely popular in Israel during the same years, as will be discussed next. Third, and last, is the evolvement of a new type of settlement—the Community Settlement. As mentioned before, the outposts were established with no determined designation as to their future type of settlement, and they could have developed into any one of the already existing types in the Israeli rural settlement system. The most common ones at the time were Kibutzim and Moshavim, which were originally based on agriculture, and which maintain different degrees of communal life and corporate economy.3 Nevertheless, almost all the original Mitzpim have eventually developed into what is known today as, and was new at the time, Community Settlements. This, in fact, is the fulfillment of one of the secondary objectives of the project that aimed to create new types of settlement (Dor 2004, 20; Sofer and Finkel 1988, 13). It was already clear at the time, to the project’s initiators, that promoting more These types of settlements have undergone a fundamental change in the past thirty years or so, but were still very much based on these principles at the time of the Mitzpim project.

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rural settlements based on agriculture in the Galilee is very problematic, both because of the region’s topographical conditions, the lack of suitable available lands for agriculture, and the decrease in the sector’s profitability, and because of a change in the preferences of the potential inhabitants of the new settlements. The emergence of the Community Settlements reflects a radical change in the political and economic ideologies of Israeli society since the 1980s (Newman 1984; Rosen and Razin 2008). Neoliberal tendencies have set the ground for the desire by many for high quality of life to be found in rural and exurban small settlements (up to 500 families, and usually much less than that), with private houses in a green environment. This coincided with the increasingly popular practice at the time by state housing authorities, of separating the planning and allocation of land from the building itself. This practice was realized in the “Build Your Own Home” (Bneh Beitc’ha) projects, in which residents would lease plots of land from the state and self-build their homes according to their own design (Yizhar and Kallus 2012). This practice, which is typically associated with ideas regarding the responsibility and self-expression of the tenants, was incorporated by neoliberal systems of individuation and common conceptions of “quality of life,” as well as the national project of rapid establishment of new settlements. Looking back, after more than three decades, it seems that the creation of this new type of settlement is one of the most significant outcomes of the Mitzpim project, while its principal objectives have failed. As of today, the population of the Community Settlements in northern Israel numbers only 30,000, which is quite negligible in a population of 1.3 million throughout the region (CBS 2011). Taking into consideration the fact that 75 percent of the inhabitants of these settlements have relocated from other localities from within the region (Dor 2004, 67) makes it quite safe to conclude that the establishment of the Mitzpim failed to change dramatically the ratio of Jewish and Palestinian residents in the region as had been expected by the project’s initiators. As for the protection of state lands from being used by Palestinians, it was already clear at the time that the vast majority of unauthorized building by Palestinians is taking place on privately owned lands within Palestinian localities (Lipshitz and Kipnis 1991), and the presence of the new Jewish-inhabited outposts did not make much difference in this regard (Dor 2004; Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992; Sofer and Finkel 1988). Thus, the most valid and present product of the Mitzpim project is the very existence of the Community settlements, a neoliberal transfiguration of previous Zionist modes of life and existence. These settlements, which have become a

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symbol for high quality of life, usually lack any economic base and are almost totally dependent on commuting to nearby regional and metropolitan centers. They are formally organized as communal associations, but have no essential corporate assets or cooperative existence. Yet, although seemingly distanced from old ideological formulations, these settlements still partake in the production of the segregated space of the Galilee. Today, what holds together this double-faced operation of the Community settlements is, more than anything else, the concept of community and the ways it is understood, manipulated, and used in the current discourse and practice. This will be the focus of the remainder of the chapter.

Act 2 In October 2005, the Zubeidats approached the Admission Committee of Rakefet, the local body responsible for the absorption of new residents into the community settlement. According to the administrative procedure, every citizen who chooses to live in one of the community settlements needs to pass an admissions process, which should examine and confirm his or her social fitness to be part of the community. The process consists of three stages, the first of which is a meeting with local representatives of the community, meant for mutual acquaintance; it is not supposed to be decisive but rather only to recommend. The second stage includes socio-psychological tests that aim to diagnose the fitness for community life in the specific desired settlement. The third stage is a meeting with a regional committee that includes representatives of the regional municipality, the Jewish Agency, and the community settlement in question. This committee has the authority to decide whether to allocate a plot of land in the settlement, according to the recommendation and results of the two prior stages. This procedure is effective with regard to almost 700 settlements throughout the state, which makes for 85 percent of all rural settlements in Israel. At this stage, aware of the existing reality and of the experience of previous attempts of Palestinian citizens to live in community settlements, the Zubeidats approached two civil rights NGOs that cooperated at the time in a joint action against the admission committees—Alternative Voice in the Galilee, which was an action group of Jewish and Palestinian residents of the region aiming to promote civil equality and a shared society,4 and For a more extensive account of the organization’s activities, see Svirsky (2011, 94–108).

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Adalah—The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.5 The Zubeidats went through all three stages of the admission process and were rejected on the basis of “social incompatibility for living in a community.” At this stage, they’ve decided to appeal to the High Court of Justice,6 with the legal and public assistance of the two NGOs, claiming their civil right to build their home on public state land in the place of their choice.

The place of community A few years earlier, in 2000, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) issued a verdict on another case of a Palestinian family that wished to build its home in a Jewish community settlement. The Ka’adan family appealed to the HCJ after being rejected from purchasing a plot land in the Katzir settlement on the basis of the argument that the Jewish Agency is entitled not to allot plots to Palestinians as its commitment is only to the Jewish people. The HCJ decision was that the state cannot discriminate against Palestinian citizens by using a third-party organization, such as the Jewish Agency in the allocation of state lands. This decision was considered as a breakthrough precedent, which might affect future relations between the state and its Palestinian citizens with respect to land issues, and even the judges added that, “naturally, there exist different types of settlements such as Kibutzim, Moshavim and Mitzpim … that might arouse different problems.”7 The HCJ decision stated that the Ka’adan family is entitled to go through the admission process as does any other citizen, but it did not discuss the essence of the process itself. By doing so, the HCJ failed to challenge the guiding principle that the authorities and the community have the right to decide who may be part of a community settlement and thereby discriminate in the allocation of the public resource of state land. Indeed, in the following years, as the authorities rearranged the admission procedures as a result of the Ka’adan case, it was stated that the main criterion for acceptance would be made on the basis of “compatibility to social life in a small community.”8 The concept of community was the basis for the Zubiedats’s petition, as well as the cornerstone of the state authority’s responses to it. http://adalah.org/eng/ HTC 8036/07 Abreek-Zubiedat, Zubiedat and others vs. Israel Lands Authority and others. For more on the Ka’adan case, see Barzilai (2000); Ziv and Shamir (2000), and articles in the Adalah’s Review, Fall 2000. 8 Israel Land Authority Executive Council decision 1064. 5 6 7

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Apart from the Zubiedats claiming the personal right to build their home on state land in Rakefet, the petition’s main claim was that the state is using the concept of community in a way that excludes Palestinian citizens, among other minorities in the Israeli society, disabling them to make use of the public resources. According to this claim, the whole apparatus of the admission process is based on the conception that a small group, supported by the state authorities, is entitled to decide who can join in and benefit from public resources. The principal plea of the petition was that this apparatus should be abolished and that land, as a public resource, should be allocated equally to all citizens. This plea was a direct response to the official deployment of the concept of community as it was exhibited in the administrative procedure as well as in the community settlement’s justification for using the criterion of “social compatibility.” In the settlement’s reply to the plea, it asserted that [t]he essence of Rakefet as a community settlement is expressed in the overall activities of its inhabitants as a homogenized and active community … the community atmosphere is expressed also in an increased social activity during holidays, ceremonies, and different events that emphasize the atmosphere of the brotherhood and the cooperation between the community members … the settlement is strict to mention and celebrate the [Jewish] holidays … (italics in the original)

The settlement claims its right to exist as a close segregated community, and since this is made possible by the allocation of state public land and the implementation of the administrative admission procedures, it also claims the responsibility and obligation of the state to enable this existence and to protect the right to exist as such. That is, the claim is that the HCJ cannot and should not interfere with the internal conduct of the community settlement and should not attempt to exert the principles of equality to which the state is committed, in this case. Thus, given that in the Ka’adan case the HJC has denied the possibility to discriminate in land allocation through the use of a third party that is committed only to Jews, now the demand is to enable the continuation of discrimination on the basis of an allegedly legitimate exclusion by Jewish communities. This understanding of community as a legitimate exclusion based on an internal common essence coincides with Arendt’s conception of community as an element of the social sphere that is based on difference and maintains discrimination. As Arendt asserts, within the social realm,

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[w]e become subject to the old adage of “like attracts like” which controls the whole realm of society in the innumerable variety of its groups and associations. What matters here is not personal distinction but the differences by which people belong to certain groups whose very identifiability demands that they discriminate against other groups in the same domain. (Arendt 1959, 51)

That is, community as group association is a sort of expansion of the private sphere, which is dominated by difference and is not subordinated to equality, which is the innermost principle of the political sphere. In this sense, the community is part of the social realm, which is, according to Arendt, a “curious, somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private” (Arendt 1959, 51), one which connects the two, while keeping them separated. The social exists between the private and the political realms, and although distinct from them, it is dominated and operated by the logic of both. On the one hand, it is governed, just like homes, by necessity and difference, but on the other hand, like the political sphere, it is public. It is, in other words, the extension of the space of necessity into the public realm, but without being governed by the principles of equality. According to Arendt, the social sphere acts as an in-between zone, “for each time we leave the protective four walls of our private homes and cross over the threshold into the public world, we enter first, not the political realm of equality, but the social sphere” (Arendt 1959, 51). As Morey explains, the social realm should exist as a transitional realm between the private and public realms, and in no way should consume the latter two, which are necessary components of modern society (Morey 2011, 19). Arendt understands the emergence of the social realm and the blurring of the distinctions between the private and the public as a disturbing phenomenon of modern times, one that puts both the private and the public realms in danger and undermines the possibility of the existence of a political space (Arendt 1958, 38–50). For Arendt, the threat stemming from the rise of the social and its expansion is that of the domination of conformity over the plurality that is a prerequisite for political action. The threat of conformism and homogenization as the annulment of the political is the basis for her identification of the modern age as inherently nihilistic (Arendt 2005, 103) and of totalitarianism as nihilistic and anti-political (Arendt 2005, 120, 1973, 328). As Adi Ophir demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, for Arendt, nihilism occurs when the distinct space in which men and women can come together and freely compete and negotiate has been destroyed. Thus, it is crucial for Arendt to secure the distinctions between the political sphere and the social

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sphere in order to, on the one hand, protect the equality and plurality that rule the political, and on the other hand, safeguard the possibility of free association which is the expression of the private that extends into the public realm. It is also vital to secure the distinction between the social realm and the private one, which is where “even those excluded from the world could find a substitute in the warmth of the hearth and the limited reality of family life” (Arendt 2005, 59). Moreover, for Arendt, securing the private realm, the home, is of the utmost importance, since the possession of a home is a condition for the possibility of taking part in the political realm (Arendt 2005, 36–37). These claims for a stable distinction between the different realms are based on the assumption of their possible autonomy, and indeed, Arendt calls to protect the distinction between the three realms and to resettle the boundaries between them. These are the conceptual foundations for Arendt’s rejection of the enforced desegregation in public schools in the southern states of the United States (Arendt 1959). Following Arendt it is possible to understand the community settlement’s demand to maintain its right to screen newcomers in order to secure its inner essence as an attempt to secure the social realm within its proper boundary. According to this reasoning, it is justified for the settlement to demand that the HCJ, as well as any other state organ, should refrain from exerting the principle of equality, which should be limited to the political realm, on the community’s conduct within the social realm. The settlement’s claim is that it should be warranted the ability to define the community’s boundaries and those individuals who may be part of it. This claim should serve the need for free association of the community members as the extension of the private realm into the social, public realm. For them, this is the basis for the justified discrimination of those who are not considered as their likes. At first sight, it seems that Arendt should have agreed with this assertion. But this might not be the case, as for Arendt a home is a completely different story. As she mentions in passing, the right to a home is more fundamental than any other political right, such as the right to vote, and should be strictly secured (Arendt 1959, 49). This is of course understandable, taking into account the relation of conditioning that prevails, according to Arendt, between the private and the public domains, namely, that the possession of a home preconditions the participation in the political realm (Azoulay 2010, 419). If, as our spatio-historical analysis shows, the combination of the statesupported practices of land expropriation, limitation on the possible development of Palestinian localities, and the screening of Palestinians from rural settlements,

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creates a denial of the right to a home for Palestinians in Israel, Arendt might have agreed that this is the case for the political to intervene in the social. For Arendt, such an intervention may have been justified in order to resettle the private realm and thus to protect the very existence of the political. This is, in fact, a re-inscription of the boundaries and restabilization of the distinction between the private and the political.

Act 3 In September 13, 2011, the HCJ ruled that the Zubiedat couple should be granted the right to build their home in Rakefet and that the ILA should allocate them a plot of land in the community settlement. This was the end of a six-year struggle for the couple but wasn’t the end of the story. The HCJ has decided not to pass judgment on the principal demand to abolish the admission apparatus altogether. This was supposed to be settled in a legislation process that was already going on in the Israeli parliament, and which began as a response to the petition. The law, which is still under debate, wishes to strengthen the power of the community to choose its members according to its own definition of the community’s essence and shared values. Accordingly, some of the community settlements in the Misagv Regional Municipality have already begun to attempt to rewrite the bylaws of the settlements and redefine the community as founded on the basis of “the values of settlement, Zionism, Israeli heritage, values of the Israeli state as a Jewish democratic state.”

Negating political negation How should we understand the HCJ decision and the communities’ reaction in the context of Arendt’s conceptualization? Would the intervention of the political through the HCJ decision to grant the right for a home secure the possibility for Palestinians to participate in the political realm in Israel? Would an acknowledgment by the HCJ of the negation of the right to a home by Palestinians make a substantial change in the state’s spatial policy? And is the re-inscription of boundaries a way to promote change in the political system, or does it merely reaffirm the existing power relations? Arendt’s suggestion that a relation of conditioning exists between the home and the political sphere engenders a twofold effect. While on the one hand the

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intervention of the political in order to facilitate those to whom a home was denied is meant as an act of inclusion aimed at granting the basic condition that enables to participate in the political sphere; on the other, by re-inscribing the strict separation between the private and the political realms, the home has to be excluded from the political sphere and its political conditions of possibility are denied. That is to say, this is an act of excluding inclusion by which the home is granted only through being depoliticized. While the HCJ accedes to the demand for a home, it also reaffirms its own sovereignty to deny or grant this right and ignores the prior political conditions that found this sovereignty, as well as the denial of the home in the first place. Judith Butler contends that Arendt’s conceptualization of the distinction between the private and the political spheres is uncritical of the act of excluding the private from the political, which is political in itself (Butler and Spivak 2007, 17). The home, which Arendt considers as a non-political outside of the political sphere, is in fact part of the political since the act of excluding the home is a political act. That is, the political is not that which takes place in the political sphere but rather the act of defining the boundaries of the political and between the political and the private. Thus, the HCJ ruling that aims to resettle the boundaries, in line with Arendt’s conceptualization, ignores the political dimensions of the home that originate in its exclusion to the private realm. Moreover, the attempt to resettle the distinctions between the spheres also overlooks the fact that these distinctions were never valid to begin with. As our spatio-historical analysis shows, building a home in a community settlement in the Galilee was never simply a private act. The conditions that make such an act possible are grounded in the specifics of the exclusionary Israeli land regime operating in concert with a neoliberal economy. Furthermore, the concept of community that is allegedly legitimized due to its belonging in the social realm as some extension of the private, is in fact related all along to the political act of delimiting boundaries according to national identities, as became clear in the settlements’ later attempts to redefine the communities’ essence. This act can be understood as nihilistic since it exposes the community’s urge to undermine the alleged boundaries and to cross over to the political realm in order to protect itself when it seems that the state is not fulfilling this aim. Actually, as Roberto Esposito asserts, it is the “nothing in common,” which is at the basis of community (Esposito 2009), and what keeps individuals together is not a common thing or essence, but rather the immunitary logic of distancing what is perceived as a threat (Esposito 2011, 8–9). Hence, the community settlements

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with their exclusionary practices should not be understood as standing alone, but rather as part of a continuous and comprehensive project aimed at the exclusion of Palestinians from the physical space as well as from the political. This continuity between the current negation and the constitutive negation lies primarily in the fact that the negation was shaped as a vehicle—one of a repertoire of available means whose significance is determined only according to the end to which they are subordinated.9 It is indeed a negation of the political existence of the Palestinians, but one that cannot be answered by the rectification of the particular negation of the right to a home. Based on this understanding, it makes sense to consider the very act of approaching the HCJ in a demand to recognize and rectify the negation of a home, as an affirmation of the regime that denies the home and has the power to grant it. As some critics claim, to turn to the state’s juridical system is to accept its “rules of the game” and is oriented toward a change that might come from within the system without challenging its political foundations.10 It is also possible to claim that the demand to be allowed to build a home in Rakefet is in itself an affirmation of the very existence of Rakefet on expropriated Palestinian lands and an acceptance of the Judaization project and its outcomes.11 A third possible proclamation is that the desire to build a home in Rakefet is no more than the acceptance of the neoliberal project of “Build Your Own Home” and the affirmation of the current economic order. According to such assertions, the attempt to negate the negation of the home carries with it an affirmation of the negation itself and of the regime that entails it. This is true only if we consider the demand for, or rather claim to, a home as one that is simply aimed at being granted a home. But, following Rancière (2004), we should understand this claim as directed not at the negation of the home, but rather, at the negation of the political. According to Rancière, and as shown earlier, the negation of the political is not to be responded by the granting of the home, as Arendt might have had it, since it does not take into account the very act of delimiting the political and the private. Rather, the claim itself is to participate and to have a place in the political. This demand is the political act that aims to challenge and reset the boundaries of the political. As Rancière has it, the political is not the absolute or abstract sphere that was already determined; rather, it is precisely where we draw the line separating one life from the other. See Azoulay’s discussion of the destruction of homes of Palestinians (Azoulay 2010, 411–415). Ziv and Shamir (2000), in relation to the Ka’adan case. 11 This claim was proclaimed by some Palestinian activists and residents of the region. 9

10

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Politics is about the border (Rancière 2004, 303), it is the continuous process of demanding participation in the political space and challenging the boundaries that were set in order to exclude those who are not counted. As Bulent Diken, following Rancière, argues in a similar vein, in the conclusion to his chapter, the political is that which reconfigures the political space and constitutes a new political scene, and politics is always dissensual (Rancière 2010, 36–37), that is, working against the consensus of the prevailing order. Thus, the claim to a home in Rakefet is in fact a claim to participate in determining the boundaries of the political. This act, which does not only expose the blurred boundaries between the different realms but also undermines their very stability by aiming at their rearticulation, should be considered according to Arendt’s terms, just as the attempt to redefine the community’s essence by its current members, as a nihilist act in itself. Both acts are aimed at the nihilistic actions of the state, but while the community’s act is determined to preserve negation and exclusion, the Zubiedats’s one is a nihilistic counteract whose positive purpose is to establish a new political space that will be effectively constituted on plurality and equality.

Act 4—by way of conclusion In the summer of 2013, as we are writing this chapter, the home of the Zubiedats is already under construction in Rakefet, on that plot of land they were allocated by the order of the HCJ. Soon after the future presence of the new, undesired inhabitants became visible with the erection of the first concrete wall, it was sprayed, anonymously, with the phrase: “No Loyalty—No Citizenship,” which is a well-known right-wing political slogan alluding to the Palestinians’ flawed status as citizens in Israel. This came as a reminder that not only is the saga not over yet for the Zubiedats, but also that what is at stake is not simply the building of a home in a pleasant environment, but rather the political existence of Palestinians. The presence of a Palestinian home within the bounded limits of the all-Jewish community is not just a threat in terms of real estate, but is in fact an undermining of the common sense of exclusionary citizenship in Israel. It is a challenge to the boundaries of political space itself and an attempt to realign them in a way that will make it possible for a new political space to emerge, one that will be based not on separation and exclusion, but on plurality, inclusive participation, and consent. At the end of the day, the concrete walls that the Zubiedats have decided to leave exposed, absorbed within them the harshness and the crudity of the

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words sprayed on them. But the softness of this malleable matter created space for congregation and for the beginning of a civil discourse between the two sides, Jews and Palestinians, and marked the active space of resistance and acting together.

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Falah, Ghazi. 1996. “The 1948 Israeli-Palestinian War and Its Aftermath: The Transformation and De-Signification of Palestine’s Cultural Landscape.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86(2): 256–285. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01753.x. Forman, Geremy and Alexandre Sandy Kedar. 2004. “From Arab Land to Israel Lands’: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 809–830. Golan, Arnon. 1995. “The Transfer to Jewish Control of Abandoned Arab Lands During the War of Independence.” In Israel: The First Decade of Independence, edited by Selwyn Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas, 403–440. Albany: SUNY Press. Hinze, Christine Firer. 2009. “Reconsidering Little Rock: Hannah Arendt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Catholic Social Thought on Children and Families in the Struggle for Justice.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29(1): 25–50. Kedar, Alexander (Sandy). 1998. “Majority Time, Minority Time: Land, Nation, and the Law of Adverse Possession in Israel.” Law Review 21(3): 665–746. ——— and Oren Yiftachel. 2006. “Land Regime and Social Relations in Israel”. SSRN Scholarly Paper 1. Swiss Human Rights Book. http://papers.ssrn.com/ abstract=906336. Kemp, Adriana. 1997. Talking Borders: The Construction of a Political Territory in Israel 1949–1967. Doctorate dissertation. Tel Aviv University. Khalidi, Walid. 1992. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies. Lipshitz, Gabriel and Baruch Kipnis. 1991. “Satial Policy in Imagined Reality Conditions—The Land Background for the Establishment of the New Settlement in the Galilee.” State, Government and International Relations 35: 99–118. ——— and Hubert Law Yone. 1992. “The New Settlement in the Galilee—The Planning’s Objectives and Characteristics.” Studies in the Geography of “Eretz Yisrael” 13: 179–197. Masalha, Nur. 2000. “Introduction.” In Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, 1–28. London: Pluto Press. Morey, Maribel. 2014. “Reassessing Hannah Arendt’s ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (1959).” Law, Culture and the Humanities 10(1): 88–110. Morris, Benny. 1987. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Newman, David. 1984. “Ideological and Political Influences on Israeli Rurban Colonization: The West Bank and Galilee Mountains.” Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien 28(2): 142–155. doi:10.1111/j.1541-0064.1984.tb00781.x. Pappé, Ilan. 1988. Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. New York: Oneworld Publications.

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Rancière, Jacques. 2004. “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2): 297–310. ———. 2010. “Ten Theses on Politics”, In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited by Steven Corcoran, 27–44. London and New York: Continuum. Rosen, Gillad and Eran Razin. 2008. “Enclosed Residential Neighborhoods in Israel: From Landscapes of Heritage and Frontier Enclaves to New Gated Communities.” Environment and Planning A 40(12): 2895–2913. doi: 10.1068/a4066. Rotbard, Sharon. 2003. “Wall and Tower.” In A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, edited by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, 39–56. Tel Aviv and London: Babel and Verso. Segev, Tom. 1998. 1949, The First Israelis. New York: Henry Holt. Sofer, Arnon and Rachel Finkel. 1988. “The ‘Mitzpim’ in the Galilee—Aims, Achievements, Lessons.” Publications in Problems in Regional Development, 43. Rehovot: The Center for Research of Rural and Urban Settlement. Svirsky, Marcelo. 2011. Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine. Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Yiftachel, Oren. 1999. “The Land Day.” Theory and Criticism 12/13: 279–289. ———. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Yizhar, Dikla and Rachel Kallus. 2012. “Splitting Discourse: Israeli Professional Practice in the Neoliberal Era.” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 29(4): 347–360. Ziv, Neta and Ronen Shamir. 2000. “‘Politics’ and ‘Sub-Politics’ in the Struggle against Land Discrimination.” Theory and Criticism 16: 45–66.

Index Agamben, Giorgio 8, 15–18, 22–3, 26, 88, 184, 194, 196–8 Alterman, Natan 153, 166 Améry, Jean 8–9, 125, 127, 138–40, 142–50 Amichay, Yehuda 153 Anarchism 18–19, 25, 28, 35–6, 41, 55, 65, 198 anti-Semitism 6, 9, 29, 104–5, 107–9, 114–15, 122, 156, 182 Arendt, Hanna 4–5, 8, 51, 76–7, 130, 178, 196–8, 205–6, 217–23 Aristotle 14–15, 59 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal 8, 60 Atheism 44, 47, 66–7 Avidan, David 153 Avineri, Shlomo 29 Azoulay, Ariela 26, 198 Badiou, Alain 45–6 Bakunin, Mikhail 19, 55 Balke, Friedrich 21 Bauer, Bruno 15, 20, 22, 27 BDS movement 29 Beiser, Frederick 19 Benjamin, Walter 8, 18, 84–6, 89, 103–4, 109–10, 122, 168–9 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 24–5 Ben Zvi, Yitzhak 194–5 Bergson, Henri 146 Berlant, Lauren 35 Bernhard, Thomas 118 Bialik, Chaim Nahman 170 Biopolitics 4, 22 Bismarck, Otto von 22 Blanchot, Maurice 169 Bleuler, Eugen 107 Blumenberg, Hans 16 Böll, Heinrich 118 Boyer, Alain 21

Broch, Hermann 118 Buddhism 47, 67, 151 Burke, Edmund 154 Butler, Judith 221 Camus, Albert 52 Canguilhem, Georges 105–6 Cannetti, Elias 188 capitalism 5, 35, 41, 53, 88–91, 121, 180, 186, 190 Caputo, John D. 43–4 Castoriadis, Cornelius 121 chimerism 1, 19 communism 53, 97, 136 Conrad, Joseph 52 Critchley, Simon 184, 189, 190, 199 death of God, the 30, 44, 47, 55–6, 58, 67, 76, 82, 151–2, 185 Debord, Guy 88 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 15, 23–4, 26, 65, 71, 94, 151–2, 155–6, 160, 164–5, 167, 174 Demokritos 15 Derrida, Jacques 7, 39–44, 71 Dobrolyubov, Nikolay 55 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 58 Duhamel, Roland 22 Elbe, Stefan 22 Eliot, T. S. 59 Empson, William 15, 29 Engels, Friedrich 53 Eros 104, 107, 109, 116–17 Esposito, Roberto 5, 221 eternal recurrence, the or eternal return, the 9, 21–2, 43, 45–6, 56–7, 82–3, 85, 97, 148, 152–3, 164–5, 167, 171, 174 exceptionalism 22, 26

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Index

Feminism 107 Feuerbach, Ludwig 20, 90 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 1–2, 7, 19, 36–7, 53 Finnis, John 189 Foucault, Michel 15, 22–3, 26, 121, 140 Fourier, Charles 19 Frank, Manfred 111 Freud, Sigmond 44, 107–8, 119 Fukuyama, Francis 93 fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism 35, 41–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 8, 60 Gans, Chaim 198 Garver, Eugene 14 Gilboa, Amir 153 globalization 3, 18, 41, 190 Goethe, J. W. von 16, 57, 113, 131 Gorky, Maxim 52 Gouri, Haim 153 Gregory of Nazianus 16 Grewal, David 190 Groddeck, Georg 107, 119 Guattari, Félix 26 Habermas, Jürgen 7, 39, 42–5 Haeckel, Ernst 113 Halevi, Binyamin 187–8, 191–6, 198–9 Hardt, Michael 3 Hegel, G. W. F. 2–3, 7, 19–20, 36–41, 43–5, 53, 57, 119 Hegelianism 19–20, 39, 45, 53, 55 left Hegelianism 15, 19–20, 53 neo-Hegelianism 43 post-Hegelianism 19–20 Heidegger, Martin 2–3, 9, 15, 17, 21, 40, 46, 52, 72, 126–32, 137, 144, 148 Heroism 38, 148–9 Herzen, Alexander 25 Hirschfeld, Magnus 105, 107 Historicism 136 Hitler, Adolf 8, 60 Hobbes, Thomas 14, 16–17, 183 Holocaust or Shoah 9, 25–6, 41, 108, 123, 127, 148–9, 153, 156, 161, 171, 186, 197 homo sacer 184, 194, 197 Hume, David 141, 154

idealism 1, 19, 36, 38, 44, 53, 114, 117, 119 Israel criticism of 5, 26–7, 29, 186, 188–9, 201 and democracy 5, 7, 16, 69 and the holocaust 148–50, 171 Israeli army or IDF 9, 26–7, 152, 154, 156, 160–1, 163, 166, 177, 179, 187–8, 191–4, 198 Israeli law 10, 28, 178, 187, 193, 206, 209, 220 Israeli poetry and literature 166, 168, 170, 177 Israeli politics and policy 9, 10, 16, 24, 26, 152, 178, 187, 198, 207–14, 220–1 and nihilism 1, 6, 13, 18, 25, 27–8, 69, 152, 172, 183, 188–9, 199, 201 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 5, 16, 27, 156, 160, 167, 170, 186, 198 Jabotinski, Ze’ev 149 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 1–3, 7, 19, 36–7, 39–41, 53, 63 Jesus 44–5, 66–7, 143, 151, 158 Joyce, James 107, 118–19 Jünger, Ernst 15 Kafka, Franz 66 Kafr Qasim, the massacre in 10, 161, 187, 193–6, 199–200, 202 Kahn, Paul 184–5, 190–1 Kairos 84–5, 90, 95–7 Kalimtzis, Kostas 14 Kaniuk, Yoram 10, 177–80, 183–6, 188, 190–1, 201–2 Kant, Immanuel 1, 37, 42–3, 53, 107, 109, 117, 120, 144, 201 Kantianism 118, 121–2, 155 Kantian moral law 107 neo-Kantianism 19 Katechon 86, 92 Kedar, Alexander 208 Kelsen, Hans 182 Klossowski, Pierre 167 Kojève, Alexandre 19 Kraepelin, Emil 107 Krafft-Ebing, Richard 107 Kraus, Karl 107, 110, 118, 121–2 Krauss, Nicole 177, 191

Index Kropotkin, Peter 25 Kuzar, Ron 24–5 Lacan, Jacqques 115–16, 118 Latour, Bruno 94 Lawrence, D. H. 107 Lévinas, Emmanuel 41, 71, 199 Lindemann, Albert S. 108 Lingis, Alphonso 4 London, Jack 52 Löwith, Karl 4, 15, 20–2, 27 Lueger, Karl 108 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 52 Machiavelli, Niccolò 60 Malraux, André 52 Mandela, Nelson 8, 60 manifestly illegal order 161, 173, 177–8, 187, 191, 201 Martinetti, Piero 52 Marx, Karl 20, 53, 88–90, 97–8 Mayreder, Rosa 107 Mbembe, Achille 183 Melville, Herman 79 Messiah or Messianism 8, 18, 66–7, 71–2, 84–5, 93, 104 metaphysics 2, 19, 21, 23, 26–7, 30, 40 , 64, 104, 130, 145–6 Mill, John Stuart 59 Miran, Reuven 29 Möbius, Paul Julius 107, 109, 119 Morel, B. A. 121 Morey, Maribel 218 Mosse, George 121 nakba, the 153, 171, 207 naturalism 131 Nazism or National Socialism or The third Reich 28, 122, 130–1, 140, 161, 196–7 Nechayev, Sergey 55 Negri, Antonio 3 Netanyahu, Benjamin 28–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2–4, 7–9, 16, 20–4, 35, 40, 43–4, 46, 51, 54–60, 63–5, 67, 71–2, 79–83, 87–9, 91, 95, 97, 99, 107, 109–11, 116–17, 119, 125–39, 141, 145–8, 151–2, 155–6, 164, 167, 174, 182

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Nietzschean philosophy 22, 104, 107, 109, 116–17, 119, 126–8, 130–1, 133, 137–8, 146, 155 post-Nietzschean philosophy 22–3 nihil (greek term) 1–2, 4, 13, 23 nihilism (as a general term) 1–10, 15, 29–30, 35–7, 40–3, 51–2, 58, 63–5, 67, 70–2, 76–7, 79–80, 82–3, 99, 114–15, 121, 127–31, 151–2, 173, 177, 218 active nihilism 16, 18, 25, 46, 55–7, 60, 152–3, 156, 167, 173 anarchistic nihilism 55 biotechnological nihilism 42 Christian nihilism 43–8 consistent nihilism 74, 77 and cosmopolitanism 185–6, 188–91, 194–7, 199–201 critical nihilism 112, 153 Dionysian nihilism 7, 56, 58–9 epistemological nihilism or nihilistic epistemology 104, 107, 110–12, 116, 122 ethical nihilism 166 European nihilism 22, 63 fundamentalist nihilism 42 German nihilism 39 as government 87 heroic nihilism 39 history of 1–3, 6–7, 18–24, 36–9, 53–5, 97 implicit nihilism 59 incomplete nihilism 56 inverted nihilism 72–3 and law 154, 156, 161, 192, 194–5, 200 limited or unlimited nihilism 8, 70, 73–4 methodological nihilism 8, 42, 103–4, 110 negative nihilism 70–1, 126, 151, 155, 159, 160 passive nihilism 8, 18, 44, 46, 54–7, 60, 82, 96–7, 151, 160 practical nihilism 104 radical nihilism 2, 8, 82, 96, 167 reactive nihilism 71, 151, 160 religious nihilism 88

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romantic nihilism 39 Russian nihilism 19, 55, 58 and sovereignty 178–9, 181, 183, 189, 191, 194, 195, 200 as stasis 13–18 straightforward nihilism 72 subjective nihilism 38–9 western nihilism 46 and Zionism 24–9 Nordau, Max 121 oikonomia 87–8, 90, 92, 97 Ophir, Adi 26 Osiel, Mark 197 Palestine (territory) 26–7, 69, 152, 154, 156, 167, 173, 186, 189, 198, 201, 212 Palestinian (people) 6, 26, 156, 166–8, 171, 179–80, 183, 186, 198 Arab-Palestinian (Israeli citizens) 187, 189, 192–3, 199, 205–11, 213–17, 219–20, 222–4 Parush, Adi 193 Paul (the apostle) 4, 66–7, 85–6, 92 pessimism 21, 53–6, 58 Peterson, Eric 16 Pfeffer, Wilhelm 113 Plato 2, 14–15, 54, 106, 125–6, 198 political theology 15, 85, 88, 90, 93, 182 Pol Pot 8, 60 Positivism 2, 136, 193, 197 Postmodernism 43 post-politics 92–3 poststructuralism 43, 93 Primo, Avi 29 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 19 Rabin, Yitzhak 154 Rancière, Jacques 5, 222–3 rationalism 37 Ravikovitch, Dahlia 9–10, 151–9, 161–9, 171–3 Resnais, Alain 44 romanticism 21, 119 Rorty, Richard 58–9 Rosen, Stanley 2–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 190 Roux, Wilhelm 113

Saint-Simon, Henri de 19 Schelling, F. W. J. 19, 107, 109, 111–12, 114–20 Schmitt, Carl 16–17, 86, 93, 179–80, 182, 184–5, 188–90, 194–5, 201 Scholem, Gershom 18, 25 Schönberg, Arnold 47, 118 Schopenhauer, Arthur 53–4, 56, 58, 110, 122 scientism 136 September 11 or 9/11 17, 24, 42, 196, 201 sex or sexuality 8, 59, 103–14, 116–19, 121, 186 Shakespeare, William 54 Shelley, Marry 181 Shlonsky, Avraham 153 Smith, Adam 90, 154 socialism 29, 96, 107–8, 136 Socrates 54, 125–7, 155, 198 Solon 15 Sophocles 15 Sorel, Georges 52 Spinoza 20, 36 Stalin, Joseph 8, 60 Stankevich, Nikolai 19 state of exception or state of emergency 17, 23, 26, 85–6, 198 subjectivism or subjectivity 37–9, 116 Taub, Gadi 27–8 Taubes, Jacob 20 Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo 184 Taylor, Charles 59 totalitarianism 218 Turgenev, Ivan 20 utopia or utopianism 19, 53, 92, 96, 104 Vardoulakis, Dimitris 15–17 Vattimo, Giani 4, 7, 39–41, 43–4, 72 Vitalism 9, 109, 131, 145 Wagner, Richard 54–5 Wallach, Yona 153 Weber, Max 52, 89, 96, 182 Weininger, Otto 8–9, 103–22 Weitzman, Eyal 26–7

Index Wieseltier, Meir 153 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 107, 118 Yiftachel, Oren 208 Zach, Natan 153 Zionism or post-Zionism or anti-Zionism 5, 24, 27, 29, 167, 183, 191, 208, 210–12, 214, 220

Zionist institutions Israel Land Administration (ILA) 209 Jewish Agency, the 209 Jewish National Fund (JNF) 209 World Zionist Organization, the 211 Žižek, Slavoj 3, 5, 7, 16, 36, 39, 43–7, 115–16

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