The Visitation of Hannah Arendt [1 ed.] 3110663090, 9783110663099

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter 1. Visitation
Chapter 2. Rahel’s Dream
Chapter 3. The Visitation of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Chapter 4. An Anonymous Hand in the Middle
Chapter 5. Mother Tongue/Body Language
Chapter 6. Stefan Zweig
Chapter 7. The Visitation of Michal, Daughter of Saul
Bibliography

Citation preview

Michal Ben-Naftali The Visitation of Hannah Arendt

Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

Edited by Vivian Liska Editorial Board Robert Alter, Steven E. Aschheim, Richard I. Cohen, Mark H. Gelber, Moshe Halbertal, Christine Hayes, Moshe Idel, Samuel Moyn, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman, Bernd Witte

Volume 13

Michal Ben-Naftali

The Visitation of Hannah Arendt

Published in Hebrew by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2006. Translated from Hebrew by Mirjam Hadar.

ISBN 978-3-11-066309-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066347-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-066430-0 ISSN 2199-6962 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933296 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Cover image and frontispiece: Pontormo (Carucci, Jacopo called 1494-1556): Visitation (post 2014 restoration). Carmignano, San Michele. © 2020. Photo Scala, Florence www.degruyter.com

Contents Chapter 1 Visitation

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Chapter 2 Rahel’s Dream

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Chapter 3 The Visitation of Dahlia Ravikovitch

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Chapter 4 An Anonymous Hand in the Middle Chapter 5 Mother Tongue|Body Language: Chapter 6 Stefan Zweig

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Chapter 7 The Visitation of Michal, Daughter of Saul Bibliography

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Chapter 1 Visitation 1. On receiving the Annunciation from the archangel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary learns that her aging relative Elizabeth, too, infertile until then, is six months pregnant. Mary decides to pay her a visit. The reason for this visit is not mentioned. All this happens, writes Jean-Luc Nancy (2001a), as though the miracle had to be confirmed twice over, by means of two mysterious and inconceivable pregnancies. Mary’s “visitation” with Elizabeth comes close on the heels of the archangel’s, and before that, God’s visitation; resonating them. It also inaugurates a broad semantic field, reminding us of the Biblical Hebrew root P.K.D. [‫ – ]פקד‬visit, befall – which moves between the extremes of favorable and disagreeable remembering; between recompense and punishment; between presence and absence. “Visitation” connotes scrutiny, experiencing something, and rendering yourself account of the experience or the trial. God visits Elizabeth and Mary. Way back in the past he had visited Sarah, wife of Abraham. The book of Genesis sets down two principles of origin: the principle of spirit and the principle of flesh, the principle of Sarah and the principle of Hagar. The tension between these two principles caused the very idea of the family to tear apart.¹ The gospel of Luke, however, which documents the visitation, erases any such antagonism. Not only is God present in the womb of both women, but they both believe that each of them, both herself as well as the other, has the power to give life. “And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy’ “ (Luke: 41– 44). Where and whence does all this come to pass? What is the source of pregnancy, of light? How do we approach a sublime region, beyond memory, before birth? Where is the topos or atopos where natality is born, a spiritual, mental

 Galatians 4:22, NJKV: “For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-001

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place-without-place, a complex combination of voices and devotion, vision and awe? Near Elizabeth’s house, out in the open, and perhaps near us, among us? In his depiction of this scene, the Italian painter Pontormo’s knowing hand and listening heart (“The Visitation”, 1528 – 1530) submerge us all at once, far away from theological and dogmatic constraints, into the very bowels of the painting, the keys of creation. The women’s arms embracing, the delicately intent clasping of hands, their bellies hardly touching, the torrent of textiles, colors flowing together and apart, the feet lifting from the ground as in dance, suspended and static; the golden ends of Mary’s locks defiantly peeping out from under her coif. And more than anything, the gaze, submersion in the gaze, eye to eye, drawing in all the senses. Conception occurs in the gaze. But this depiction of the visitation includes two additional figures – the servants. They are copies, it would seem, of their mistresses – they are their age, wear their hair similarly, and are dressed in the same colors. But this is where similarities end. The copy after all is the uncanny double of the origin, the uncanny potential of the visitation. The servants are not pregnant. Elizabeth’s servant is part of the triangle, while Mary’s pulls its axis to the left of the painting. They look neither at each other nor at their mistresses. Both look us directly in the face. Their gaze challenges us and might be trying to lock with ours. Though the younger servant’s gaze is perhaps more inviting and illuminated than the more serious look of the other, older one, neither reveals her feelings. What do their expressions seek to convey? A respect for the intense intimacy they witness? Embarrassment, resignation, fatalism, yearning, terror? Are they excluded from the visitation, in the fullest sense of the word? On the contrary: for it is only through them, as we return their gaze, that we enter the picture. No one, it seems, is barred from this visitation. This embrace brings together the whole church, the entire flock, the full community, though it assigns members very different roles – roles they themselves don’t yet know.

2. Sometimes, in the course of reading, a writer becomes a companion, as if making a protracted visit, then vanishing as suddenly as he appeared. This real and phantom author-hero seems sensitive to his reader’s vital motions; he besets the reader’s days, thoughts, perceptions, the order he keeps as well as his disorders, leading him a long way from the very constraints that eventually injure and immobilize him too, in spite of himself. This bond gently emerges after the tutelage stage, during which the pupil copies out quotations and avoids summary explications; he does not wish to miss a meaning, to lose sight of the ponderous

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questions at the very pinnacle of thought. He is sufficiently at ease by now to float, daydream, withdraw from his reading, to open hectic parentheses inside fraught sentences and demanding paragraphs. The reader thereby accumulates associative layers and discovers that he is sustained less by concepts and arguments than by tunes, images, repetitions, by the relations between fixed structures or foundations and the details in flux. He is nourished by everything that exceeds the expressed; the ethereal, imperceptible, which gradually gains radiant prominence. This is the silence that inhabits writing, where statement ceases, over and beyond knowledge. A genuine author manages to constitute, in his own way, at times implicit and without instructions, his own reading subject. He fashions a certain reading consciousness capable of containing and willing to respond to him. He creates a mysterious, secret bond of style and mood and worldview that overcomes ineluctable unfamiliarity. From this very moment everything seems possible and imaginable. The reader might quietly mumble something to himself which he then finds written a little further on. He might surmise what he would have heard had they been conversing in person about this and that, things not mentioned in the work itself, issues that never stirred the author’s agenda. He knows, moreover, how the author would pace the room, his room, engaged, demanding, suddenly subdued and drawn back into his silence. This is the specious contract, the delusional conception, which is called transmission or culture. The reader absorbs into the grammar of his language what has been thought and created under a different sky. The more personal the gesture of absorption, the more he turns the original work into poetry, and its concepts almost into first names. Can an author be loved for his books? Can reading books produce the same intimacy that accompanies love? Can one devote oneself to authors so passionately and faithfully and unreservedly – through blind imitation and ingestion, through heartbreak and the pains of detoxification – that they become almost like blood relatives? Was Hannah Arendt in her final days thinking of the flesh when she used the metaphor of “the life of the mind”?² It would seem not. In her efforts to understand the process of thinking, she emphatically invoked the idea of friendship as both lived reality and metaphor. Due to the role the figure of the family played in Western political-philosophical discourse, and its implication in the crises of the 20th century, Arendt maintained an intense distaste of genealogical images. She  The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s last book, was published posthumously. The title can be understood as metaphor in the word’s etymological sense: a mode of expression that moves the subject (whether writer or reader) from one place to another, constituting as it were the very movement of The Life of the Mind as such.

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had hitherto carefully distinguished between the demands of the body’s metabolism, and acts of subtlety and the imagination. Her book The Life of the Mind presents us with an unexpected metaphorical combination. Here the aging Arendt suggests the presence of someone who is expecting you – a member of the household, a friend, neither relative nor wanderer, even though ostensibly you cannot share your abode with anyone. He – or she – enables you to live with yourself, to bear with yourself. He is your living conscience/consciousness. Together, always the two of you, alone but not lonely, you manage what is called “thinking”, a process with neither a clear target nor assured outcome. Arendt understood the a priori structure of friendship as the formal feature of the mechanism of thinking. By means both covetous and loving, she befriended the historical figures she reimagined: Socrates, for instance, Aristotle, Augustine, Lessing, Kant, and Montesquieu, as well as flesh-and-blood friends she visited, with whom she had lively correspondences, and whose presence she never stopped recording in her writing, directly and indirectly. Hence her portrayals of Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, and Waldemar Gurian serve as hidden poetic keys to her own work (Arendt [1968] 1983; Men in Dark Times henceforth).

3. Thought’s internal split – the movement of two in mutual pursuit, en route to a never-achieved harmony and rest – took concrete shape in the act of writing. Arendt regarded herself as neither philosopher, nor sociologist, nor historian; none of these domains, she said, could theoretically or practically satisfy her. As in her own description of Walter Benjamin, which escapes all categorization, she too can to a considerable extent be defined by negation, as opposed to all she is not. Alternatively, she can be understood as a “narrator”, her own term for one who seeks to restore – including to the scientific community – the connection with experience in the face of the hypnotic temptation and the stultifying impression of theory. Arendt’s thinking/writing strives to maintain close relations with an ideological, mental, social and political reality. In the absence of conclusive lexical support or a specific school to which to refer, her writing draws eclectically on French and German existentialism, on phenomenology and on Enlightenment philosophy, from the Church Fathers and the ancient Greek philosophers. In her historical works, and most estimably in her Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt [1951] 1976), she presented an unprecedented attempt at thinking incarnate. This mode of thinking openly displays its inability to stand up to reality, always paced by the futile attempt to catch up; a mode of thinking

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that refuses to congeal into method or dogma. Thought, no matter how dynamic, always runs late. She inevitably approaches her challenge by way of assumption, preconception, in which concepts or images serve to evoke the sensibility of an historical period. These however only scaffold the core of the construction, which must not be familiar or domesticated. It must remain open to the event, absorb further details, incidental as well as essential, and renew itself; as reality thickens, it must thicken too. The story spontaneously takes shape in parallel to the thinking/writing subject who learns about it through observation and study. Though it lays the conceptual foundation, the point of departure is not the bottom line, even if it was conceived after the fact, having served as an effective working assumption. She lets herself be dramatically flooded, because events are enigmatic and dramatic. Although the conversation I have with myself issues into linear writing, that writing does not pretend to even out an errant reality into coherence. In this way Arendt presents a search all her own through the history of philosophy, on the seam between phenomenology and historiography. She aims to subdue thinking/writing to being, to furnish an impermanent, experimental and limited response to the challenge of what there is. She therefore oscillates between concepts and illustrations due to the ever-present suspicion of the former’s vitality and persuasiveness. The Origins of Totalitarianism is the most radical product of this approach, mainly due to the complex historical task it set itself: to survey a time when there was slippage and blurring of every possible kind between subject positions, categories, boundaries – and between ostensibly distinct, or even clashing, conditions. To carry out her mission, Arendt even-handedly examined expressions of negation and loathing between one group of humans and another. She peered into the real and phantasmatic conditions for the distortions of vision that bring about superstition, self-deceit, despair, frustration, grudge, anxiety, withdrawal, indifference, hatred, and fanaticism. The audacity of her investigation turned inevitably into impertinence. She sought to discover whether there is not some, even the weakest, factual basis to the phantasms of individuals as well as groups, including the most unfounded, mad, evil, and abusive. This work marks a sea change in her writing, from the melancholy intimacy of her early essay on Rahel Varnhagen (Arendt 1997) to the public sphere. This work demanded – not less so than the work of her younger years – that she probe deeply into the existential experience of one who is uprooted and strange to herself. To understand what happened she had to confront nothingness, the collapse of the bridling, civilizing walls of the super-ego. She had to address the ultimate possibility of the absence-of-world, the absence-of-object, the abysses of depredation strangling any subjectivity, leaving her without language,

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meaning, and desire, and dragging her down to infancy or bestiality. For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. ³ And yet, thinking as a deconstruction, which violates any solid identity and any metaphysical concept, broke up, in Arendt’s case, into another paradox. It was as though the mental perplexity, imposed by the act of dissection, needed a counter-balance, a barrier against an all-out crash. Her works appear almost in pairs, coming out close in time, and staking out arresting movements between alogic of chaos and darkness and a search for order and renewal. The pair The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958) come out in the 1950s; about a decade later Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and On Revolution (1963) appear together. They represent opposing efforts: between deconstruction as historicity and historiography, on the one hand, and the normative and phenomenological effort of seeking models for thought and action, on the other. The link between them cannot be reduced to mental distress and therapeutic needs. For these two movements of thinking, after all, are sustained by a fragmented tradition, one that is neither unwavering nor simply continuous, yet which at the same time never stops providing the means to discuss past and present and to anticipate the future in meaningful terms. As Arendt invents, renews, weans herself, and searches for alternative sustenance, she does not give up on a non-fundamentalist factuality– ontological, political, historical – that constitutes all that is. She does not give up in spite of the absence of an authority which separates positive from negative, orthodox from heretical, relevant from trivial. Even though this touches on the bedrock of error and failure.

4. Rahel Varnhagen at the beginning and The Life of the Mind in the end – both remain within the walls of the home. Between them lies an extensive and comprehensive oeuvre which mainly unfolds outside, on the town square. Arendt, at least for some time, appoints the public domain as the exclusive realm for meaningful communication. The present book takes its shape from the places where the debut and the finale emerged, but in such a way that it rereads the entire output. With the exception of one encounter in a park, over a drink, with the ghost of Stefan Zweig,

 Ecclesiastes 3:19 NKJV.

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Arendt mostly pays domestic visits. Of the four visitations in this book, only this meeting with Zweig happened in real time: a fleeting, almost cruelly furious conversation – not face to face, but in the form of her criticism, following his suicide, of his autobiography The World of Yesterday (1941). What importance do we attach to visibility and audibility in rooms? What importance do we attach to stories that are not plied in the plural, as she described in The Human Condition, but between two people who affect each other with goodness and mercy,⁴ who exchange word-wealth as they clear their way to the other only to stop short? These questions were by no means unknown to Arendt. Her late encounter with them, though, was camouflaged. It never took the form of a first-person or personal aesthetic attempt. Instead, Arendt persisted in her stubborn search to understand nihilism, typical of the dynamic of thinking as such, as well as its disturbing and dangerous expressions throughout the 20th century. Her work on totalitarian movements, on the one hand, and on existentialist philosophy, on the other, took her, time and again in different subject positions and at varying degrees of abstraction, to reflections concerning the threshold of life, to the temptation to cross that threshold and approach the emotional or moral pain that stuns the self. It only seemed that Arendt gave up entirely on the hoarse throat of the morning’s demons. Even if the major part of her writing turned to different continents, it is not hard to imagine her hosting figures who have a hard time leaving their bed; daunted by the high price for getting up, they stay in, motionless, stare at the window, or eventually choose to meet their death there. It isn’t hard to imagine her reminding them: Yes, it is worthwhile. Yes, life is precious. The figures who open their doors to her: An unknown student, the poet Dahlia Ravikovitch, the ghosts of Stefan Zweig and Michal, King Saul’s daughter. Despite their clashing voices and temperaments, these four figures meet and momentarily unite by means of intricate processes of mimesis and rejection, strife and reconciliation. This space where they meet is neither “merely” a private domain nor a public one but rather a “play-domain”. They converse about Jewishness, religiosity, and historicity, about engagement with the world, the other, death, about sacrifice and family, about dreaming. About the uncontrolled seepage between the regions of the human condition. One of the characters grows suddenly tired, and has to stop. At times, it is Arendt herself. Troubled shades seem to have been pushed into the corner. A time to speak and a time to keep silence. Was it something that was said? Let it go, or insist? Hard to believe how time has passed. And then fear kicks in.

 Psalms 23:6: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” NKJV

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Those who assiduously taught themselves not to need anything dread growing addicted to a visitation. The demanding, somewhat rarified formula of the philosophical dialogue here makes space for the quasi-genre of the written visitation. The move from living speech to writing interferes and changes the pace of the visitation and its awkwardness. Still, this rendition seeks to preserve the logic of the visitation, even if it doesn’t wholly reproduce speech, even if it occasionally enhances forgetfulness, tiredness, depletion, the excesses of drinking, or simply the difficulty of spending a lot of time with one another. And so it embellishes a little, in order to give voice to the truth of the visitation, the music of the visitation, the impression of necessity it leaves in spite of its unpredictability; its long and interrupted breath; the way in which ideas arise in quick succession, generously, not always accountably; the manner in which it requires surrender and invites humor. Each visitation of Hannah Arendt is guided by the code organizing a particular work of hers, whether this work gets mentioned in the course of the visitation or not. Rahel Varnhagen forms the basis for the first visitation of an unknown student; the essays of The Jew as Pariah (1978) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) [20] frame the encounter with Zweig’s ghost; and The Human Condition (1958) leaves its marks on the visitation of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Finally, the book concludes with a double meeting with the anonymous student and the spirit of the daughter of king Saul, Michal. This last encounter is guided by The Life of the Mind (1978), in which Arendt returns to the meditative mode of Rahel Varnhagen, but this time from a non-depressive perspective. Due to the unrestrained leaps characteristic of Arendt’s writing, however, these visitations move restlessly between subjects, arguments, images and explanations, maintaining no chronological continuity. The works call upon each other. To offer the reader a taste of Arendt’s style, each chapter features a flow chart which includes some quotations that form its underpinning. The book has two core essays: A short one on Dahlia’s Ravikovitch’s poem “Hovering at a Low Altitude”, and an extended one on Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Between them stretches the long arm which time and again reaches across Ravikovitch’s poetry. That arm also serves as a fitting image for the grasping and intrusive dynamic which can characterize the interpretative process as a whole. Someone reaches out to link two authors whose gestures are apparently so different. Through aesthetic, somatic, or – as Julia Kristeva calls it – semiotic scrutiny, one can see how in both cases home economics, abjection, the “mother tongue” and phantasmatic elements trickle into writing on historical-political questions. One can notice, too, how this percolating deepens the encounter with the political and intensifies it by opening another channel for thinking and judgment. The essays themselves, too, are

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thus subsumed by the same domesticating movement that dominates these visitations. As we’ll see, Arendt’s report on the Jerusalem trial more closely approaches the lyrical than any of her other writings.

5. Thought strains, laughs, holds off, gets blocked, stumbles. Faint. Empty. Even a useless movement eventually knows how to identify its own flutterings. Hence the dark moods that visit it, its contact with the walls, its limits. She does not deserve this gift, she wants to tell her. You’re leaving already? I must go. Already?

Flow Chart Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind / Thinking Even Socrates, so much in love with the marketplace, has to go home, where he will be alone, in solitude, in order to meet the other fellow. (190)

Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin”, Men in Dark Times To describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework of reference, one would have to make a great many negative statements, such as: his erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian and he was not particularly interested in the Bible; he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations; […] he reviewed books and wrote a number of essays on living and dead writers, but he was no literary critic; […] I shall try to show that he thought poetically, but he was neither a poet nor a philosopher. (155 – 156)

Hannah Arendt, “Waldemar Gurian”, Men in Dark Times [T]he crime most alien to him was the crime of oblivion, perhaps one of the cardinal crimes in human relationships. (254)

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Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”, Men in Dark Times But we are astonished that Lessing’s partisanship for the world could go so far that he could even sacrifice to it the axiom of noncontradiction, the claim to selfconsistency, which we assume is mandatory to all who write and speak. For he declared in all seriousness: “I am not duty-bound to resolve the difficulties I create. May my ideas always be somewhat disjunct, or even appear to contradict one another, if only they are ideas in which readers will find material that stirs them to think for themselves”. (8)

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Willing It is characteristic of Scotus that, despite his “passion for constructive thinking” he was no system builder; his most surprising insights often appear casually and, as it were, out of context; he must have known the disadvantages of this, for he warns us explicitly against entering into disputes with “contentious” opponents who, lacking “internal experience”, are likely to win an argument and lose the issue at stake. (134)

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals. The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in the world, who had no rights whatsoever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person. (286 – 287) If tribal nationalities pointed to themselves as the center of their national pride, regardless of historical achievements and partnership in recorded events, if they believed that some mysterious inherent psychological or physical quality made them the incarnation not of Germany but Germanism, not of Russia, but the Russian soul, they somehow knew, even if they did not know how to express it, that the Jewishness of assimilated Jews was exactly the same kind of personal individual embodiment of Judaism and that the peculiar pride of secularized

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Jews, who had not given up the claim to chosenness, really meant that they believed they were different and better simply because they happen to be born as Jews, regardless of Jewish achievements and tradition. (240)

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Thinking Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and that we shall not be able to renew it. […] If some of my listeners or readers should be tempted to try their luck at the technique of dismantling, let them be careful not to destroy the “rich and strange”, the “coral” and the “pearls”, which can probably be saved only as fragments. (212) The metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it. (12)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition In the realm of ideas there are only originality and depth, both personal qualities, but no absolute, objective novelty; ideas come and go, they have a permanence, even an immortality of their own, depending upon their inherent power of illumination, which is and endures independently of time and history. Ideas, moreover, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented. (259)

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Willing (An error rather prevalent among modern philosophers who insist on the importance of communication as a guarantee of truth – chiefly Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber, with his I-thou philosophy – is to believe that the intimacy of the dialogue, the “inner action” in which I “appeal” to myself or to the “other self”, Aristotle’s friend, Jasper’s beloved, Buber’s Thou, can be extended and become paradigmatic for the political sphere.) (200) Since the personified concept itself is supposed to act, it looks as though (in Schelling’s words) philosophy has “raised itself to a higher standpoint”, to a “higher realism” in which mere thought-things, Kant’s noumena, dematerialized products of the thinking ego’s reflection on actual data – historical data in Hegel, mythological or religious in Schelling – begin their curious disembodied ghostly dance whose steps and rhythms are neither regulated nor limited by any idea of reason. (159)

Chapter 2 Rahel’s Dream For some time now I have been looking for other people’s dreams. Actual dreams, not the kind that have transmuted into ideologies or utopias. And not daydreams either, but dense enigma-images of everyday things, showing up over and beyond anything wished for, that attack mercilessly. I look for a narrative distress, before it soars as a problem, stifling and perplexing the dreamer, expelling him from his sleep and leaving him restless. Even Hannah Arendt’s grave and accurate words – heritage without testament – are inadequate to describe these moments of extinction, devoid of consciousness and familiarity. Did she inherit dreams? And what is one to do with transmitted dreams, pearls of a different kind, which slip between those fingers that haven’t already flung away the salvaged treasure as though horror-stricken. For some time now I have been looking for other people’s nightmares. Actual nightmares, that throw into disarray the usually secured rhythms of night and day; the rushed inscriptions of a bewildered mind, waking on edge and paralyzed by something overwhelming and awful, both asserting and obliterating its presence. What is it that threatens the mind, usurps it, and seems to swallow its very being? What makes it is so persuasive, so obvious, so natural, as if it expanded and narrowed the mind, stunning it with a surprise so predictable the latter identifies it as something from which, surely, it has tasted before? What is this story that did not happen, which compresses and camouflages what happens all the time? What – or who – watches over her, transmitting something, and easing her suffering with such conviction and convolution? Other people’s dreams. Other people’s nightmares. And the mind of one who asks herself whether she can afford the space for them, and whether one is permitted at all to visit there, in all humbleness. I lay on a wide bed, covered with a grey blanket. On the same bed opposite me, without touching me, feet also under the blanket, somewhat to my right, lay Bettina Brentano,¹

 Bettina Brentano (1785 – 1859) was one of the most outstanding female authors in modern German literature. Her major works, self-portraits, both document and invent her extended correspondence with Goethe and with her brother, the poet Clemens Brentano, leader of the second wave of the German Romantic movement. In 1811, Bettina married Achim von Arnim, himself a leading figure of German Romanticism. She showed an active political sensitivity to deprived people, but remained ambivalent about Jewish emancipation. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-002

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and in Bettina’s direction, to her right but to my left, the Mother of God. Whose face, however, I could not see at all distinctly; in fact, over everything visible there seemed to lie an extremely fine, very thin grey cloud, which, however, did not hinder seeing – only everything was seen as a kind of mist. At the same time it seemed to me as if the Mother of God had the face of Schleiermacher’s² wife. We were on the edge of the world. Close on the right, beside the bed, a large strip of earth fairly far down under us could be seen, something like a very big highway; on it microscopic human beings ran back and forth, performing the world’s work; I only glanced at this cursorily, as if it were something very well known. We were the maids of the earth and no longer living; or rather we had departed from life – though without surprise for me or sadness or thoughts of death – and I had an obscure knowledge that we were to go to a certain place; but our business on this bed, our occupation namely, was to ask each other what we had suffered – a kind of confessional! “Do you know mortification?” we asked each other, for instance. And if we had ever felt this particular form of suffering in our lives, we said: “Yes, that I know,” with a loud cry of grief, and the particular form of suffering we were speaking of was rent from the heart, the pain multiplied a hundredfold: but we were rid of it forever and felt wholly sound and light. The Mother of God was quiet on the whole, only said Yes! To each question, and also wept. Bettina asked: “Do you know the suffering of love?” Whimpering and almost howling, I exclaimed, while the tears streamed and I held a handkerchief over my face, a long, long Yes! “Do you know mortification?” Yes! Again yes. “Do you know enduring wrong, injustice?” Yes! “Do you know murdered youth?” Yes! I whimper again in a longdrawn-out tone, dissolving in tears. We were finished, our hearts pure, but mine was still filled with the heavy burden of earth; I sit up, look excitedly at the other women, and want my burden taken from me; in words spoken thickly, but with extreme distinctness, because I want to receive the answer Yes to this question too, I ask: “Do you two know – disgrace?” Both shrink away from me as if in horror, though with still something of pity in their gesture; they glance rapidly at one another and try, in spite of the confined space, to move away from me. In a state bordering on madness I scream: “I have not done anything. It’s nothing I have done. I have not done anything. I am innocent!” The women believe me; I see that by the rigid way they lie still, no longer unwillingly, but they no longer understand me. “Woe”, I cry out, weeping as if my heart were threatening to melt away, “they do not understand me either. Never, then! This burden I must keep; I knew that. Forever! Merciful God! Woe!” Utterly beside myself, I hastened my awakening. (Rahel Varngagen, 191– 192)

Many years later, Arendt would write The Human Condition, a night-erasing text which seems to have lost interest in the lining and folds of the three regions of wakefulness meticulously engraved on it: “labor”, “production”, and “action”. She forgets about each region’s fluctuations between being-inside and escaping. In spite of herself – and without proposing a phenomenology of the sleeping

 Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834) – theologian, philosopher and Romantic – was one of the most influential thinkers of 19th century German Protestantism. From 1810 onward, he taught at the newly established University of Berlin.

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mind, or dealing with the metaphysical status of sleep and dream in the life of action and contemplation – Arendt does not quite manage the dream. She does give us lyrical insight, so explicit in the “Day and Night” chapter of the Rahel Varnhagen book, into sleep’s boons and curses, into that strange necessity, exceeding mere need, and into the wondrous adjacency between dreaming and thinking. But time and again this insight is inserted elsewhere into her disciplined formulations. “Interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action, for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is constantly checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience” (Origins of Totalitarianism, 245). Even though her nights do not sufficiently counterbalance the activity of her days, Rahel Varnhagen gets up resolutely. Indeed, the hard work of self-obfuscation that takes its toll on her days is redeemed by a tortured night, dwindled like a sealed and narrow container of despair. Such is Arendt’s imagery as she gropes for her heroine in the formless dark, violating boundaries she was meant to keep, imposing her fragmented notes, and demanding chunks – spectacles, words, and bits of words – from the economy of light. “The more the day had hidden, the more defenseless it was against the deceptions of the night which in spite of being deceptive still revealed truths” (Rahel Varnhagen, 193). This is the pit of hell, similar to this world and bound up with it. Neither more colorful than it, nor greyer. It simply amplifies the roaring waves of the same experience. Her days are all grief and anger, nor did her heart rest at night, and this too is vain. ³ A wakeful heritage, and a heritage of dreams. The last will, forbidden to those awake, may have strayed to the night; we, with our poor powers, have difficulty reading it. Here, suddenly, almost unnoticed, the plural lashes out and touches the twilight zone between private and public. Arendt borrowed the expression “heritage-without-testament” from René Char⁴ in order to put the crisis of modernity in the abstract. This wisdom shorn of a legacy, a last will as generous as it is miserly, bids the imagination to return to tradition. It invokes the models and the figures, the concepts and the events, the always-quoted yet unguided and baseless authorities, without divulging how. It is a non-testament, imposing itself at any point in time, which hence becomes a point of departure, a “natality”. Arendt decides what, of all this, is hers. She discovers and connects,  Ecclesiastes 2:23: “For all his days are sorrowful, and his work burdensome; even in the night his heart takes no rest. This also is vanity.”  René Char (1907– 1998) was a French poet who dedicated himself to poetry, poetics, and ethics. He joined the Surrealists between 1930 – 1934, and served as a member of the Résistance during World War II.

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at will, between a past unexamined and a future unknown. She overcomes the temptation merely to repeat, to ignore mutability, to return to a despotic tradition turned to stone. Yet she is driven by a no less despotic impulse to surrender to just that. Responsibility weighs her down and she has nothing of her own. She accepted this burden on faith, so as to become acquainted as best as she could with the smallest handful, the merest nothing and make it meaningful – first of all for herself. Thus did Judaism and Christianity, respectively, evolve into Jewishness and European civic culture and society in Arendt’s vocabulary: by weaving into them threads of undogmatic existentialism and of phantasm and the imagination, her hand takes a book from the shelf with reverence and awe. Multivocality, and an ear that is willing to listen. Stupid and undiscerning critics have called it (Heine’s writing) materialism or atheism, but the truth is that there is only so much of the heathen in it that it seems irreconcilable with certain interpretations of the Christian doctrine of original sin and its consequent sense of perpetual guilt. It is, indeed, no more than that simple joie de vivre which one finds everywhere in children and in the common people – that passion […] which finds its supreme literary expression in the ballad and which gives to the short love-song its essentially popular character. [The Jew as a Pariah, 71]

Simple joie de vivre serves as the second voice in the evolution of Arendt’s writings – and not just in the chronological sense. It is the voice that accompanies and enables her playfulness with libraries and with identities. But what to say about the first, primitive voice, closer to the truth of writing, to her mood? The proud and dazzled writer takes charge of preserving and delivering the first voice. This sense of mission pervades each and every statement she makes, anything called “disclosure” – immediately a generalizing gesture – even when she directly and indirectly confesses that she took the hermeneutic frame from the oeuvre itself. For she intended only to lend her voice to the story which its heroine was supposed to tell. Arendt, believing thought to be exaggeration, went overboard with this gesture. Outside the book she was writing, she told her intimates that Rahel Varnhagen was her closest friend (Arendt, Blücher, 1999).⁵ In the book Arendt calls her by her first name, Rahel; this was how Berlin salon ladies of the late eighteenth century were referred to, she explains. Secretly she knows that naming Rahel somewhat softens the ponderousness of the statements. Arendt visits her sitting room and bedroom, stitching together quotations from her journals and corre-

 From a letter to her partner Heinrich Blücher, dated 12 August, 1936. Unfortunately, she writes, my very best friend died a hundred years ago.

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spondence, omitting references in order not to restrict the first voice’s precise range even slightly. The point was not to assume to know more than Rahel herself knew, not to impose upon her a fictional destiny derived from observations presumed to be superior to those she consciously had. That is to say, I have deliberately avoided that modern form of indiscretion in which the writer attempts to penetrate his subject’s tricks and aspires to know more than the subject knew about himself or was willing to reveal; what I would call the pseudoscientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology, etc. fall into this category of curiosity-seeking. (Rahel Varnhagen, 83)

Intimacy, which aims fruitlessly for a loyalty without advantage, exacts its price – from both of them. There’s nothing like the author’s interference with her heroine’s dreams to render the former’s resistance, her refusal. But prior to this, and throughout the entire book, Arendt obviates excessive closeness by means of judgmental reluctance. The guest turns her carefully chosen friend into a type. It transpires, moreover, that she chose this friend because her fate, in an exemplary and condensed way, was implicated in what made the era and its imperatives possible. For who, after all, is this friend? A love-chasing Romantic who frequently addresses “no one”, represents nothing and therefore everything, in order to prove that “no one”, indeed, deserves her love, is vital to her and irreplaceable. “No one” is a source of consolation. He allows her, even wishes her, to love him. How do his tiresome traits measure up to love’s specific gravity?! Rahel surrounds herself with relations and visitors who are not inclined to stay the night; no matter how much they respect and honor her, their awkward intimacy has not the slightest effect on the rigid decisions and autonomous forces that guide her. Arendt never forsakes her friend who embodies the Romantic subject – a sentimental type, lonely and cloistered, who downplays the very plainest fact so it will not oppress her with its dreariness. To make contact with her own night – her phantasms and specters, a void that emerges when others turn their backs – Arendt must first close her eyes. Only thus can she hear what is usually communicated through omissions in the flow of memory. She knows that she must support her heroine just as she herself receives support. Under optimal conditions for interpretative work, she is blessed with a bond she both discovers and invents. At such moments, Rahel/Arendt’s voice thrills to the smallest capillaries of sensation. Arendt shifts between torment and pleasure at the endless repetitions, the silences, the moments of suspension, the crude insights; the effort it takes to transpose broken expressions to the narrative coherence that enfolds the singular and in doing so aims for stability and universality. Her torment

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and pleasure appear to concern the capricious morality of Eros, who passes his grave judgment on actions and then shrinks, taken aback in the face of impotence. The collapse of Eros soon fills with even more useless words, another empty silence, the baffling privilege of the indifferent or the passive-aggressives. Torment and pleasure, in the end, at the intimate talk that pulls back so it won’t further reduce itself. Here is the portrait of love’s ill-logic: “You are never really with a person unless you are alone with him. […] I will go still further – you are never more actually (with a person) than when you think of him in his absence and imagine what you will say to him,” and – it might be added [this is Arendt’s voice] – “when he is cheated of any chance to reply and you yourself are free of any risk of being rejected” (Rahel Varnhagen, 100). But wry bitterness, which spots the protective value of self-oblivion and omnipotent magic, immediately turns into a flogging: “Whatever is not proved by thinking is not provable – therefore, make your denials, falsify by lies, make use of your freedom to change and render reality ineffective at will” (ibid. 92).⁶ In didactic, teleological bursts, she anticipates the end of this journey which will issue in two key terms henceforth to direct her thought – parvenue and pariah. ⁷ This is how she describes becoming a pariah – in other words the ability to experience being consciously and uprightly: The ambiguity […] of being not only a self, but also having a specific social quality, and of being not only a single person, but a person naturally intertwined with many others in the

 “From dread of the unequivocal, simplistic triviality of the Real, the Romantic always retreated back to the contradictions from himself” (p. 130). Arendt’s formulation in The Origins of Totalitarianism, concerning two other notable contemporaries, Adam Müller and Friedrich Schlegel, is bolder: “No real thing, no historical event, no political idea was safe from the allembracing and all-destroying mania by which these first literati could always find new and original opportunities for new and fascinating opinions” (ibid., p. 167).  Arendt elaborates these notions in her essays on Judaism and Zionism, collected in the volume The Jew as a Pariah, and in the first part of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Referring to the work of Max Weber and Bernard Lazar, Arendt adopts the notion of the “pariah”. In India, the term signifies the individual who does not belong to the caste, is impure and hence untouchable. But Arendt takes it to denote both the personal and collective status of Jews, in principle, in relation to the social-ethnic-cultural environment in which they lived. She uses the pejorative “parvenue”, which somewhat overlaps with “nouveau riche”, for a social climber or assimilationist who seeks (especially starting from the period of Jewish emancipation in Europe) to divest himself of the “pariah” status by adjusting himself to society’s expectations and demands – whether explicit or implicit. See Leibovici (1998) for an interesting conceptual elaboration of these notions.

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intricacies of social life; of existing simultaneously as mother and as child, as sister and as sweetheart, as citizen and as friend – this she had to learn. (ibid. 173)

About twenty years after Hannah Arendt’s death, Julia Kristeva dedicated the first volume of her Feminine Genius trilogy to her. The hermeneutic intuition informing the book makes “natality”, life, sanctity and narration the centers of gravity of a philosophy that from beginning to end feeds on Christian eschatological sources.⁸Arendt is at once the father of her oeuvre, its mother and its progeny, and the product of an impregnation that obliterates the differences between generations and sexes. The new gospel according to Arendt is not a mere biological, natural fact. More than anything it is a possibility of radical renewal within an order of things that urges to repeat – like the realization of a phantasmatic absolute beginning, self-birth, which forgets the primal scene and uses a story to issue a new identity card guaranteeing the move in its totality. Kristeva argues that to gain an understanding of Arendt one must contemplate the relations between the typically embodied experience of birth, and the work of sublimation. For Arendt, sublimation is carried out by reason or mind; for Kristeva, by a more heterogeneous entity, namely the psyche, a fabric made up of impulse and sense. In other words, one must articulate (however cautiously) the missing links on the way to producing the sign, the meaning, the subject, in a transformative process which is inherently psycho-physical, aesthetic, private, and sacred. This is Kristeva’s Arendt from A to Z. In an orchestration of this kind, the first voice moves to the interpreter, who then loans it back to the source. Arendt, after all, wrote the following lines, which bear an extraordinary affinity to Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia”: Bitterness was only the ugly consequence of melancholy […]. When the melancholic emerges from his sadness, in which the world and life and he himself, his life and his death, have been so vividly present to his mind, although without fixed outlines; when he emerges and forgets that this sadness of his was the final, the ultimate sadness […]; when he emerges and fixes his attention only on the pretext and realizes that that at any rate is past and done with; when he begins to draw comparisons between himself and others, he is already beginning to love life again. Later he will defame his melancholy by calling it ordinary unhappiness. Thinking only of the pretext, he forgets the truth which melancholy had revealed; forgets the general nature of sadness which needs no pretext because it can rise

 Kristeva (1999, 82). According to Kristeva, Arendt is the most post-Christian among modern philosophers (ibid. 317), especially where it comes to the redemptive dimension in her thinking: from the importance of natality in individual lives down to the importance of forgiveness and promise in the life of action of the polis.

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up unpredictably out of anyone’s inner self, because it is deeply rooted in the fact that we have not given life to ourselves and have not chosen life freely (Rahel Varnhagen, 137– 138).

Let it be stressed: this is not psychobiography. Kristeva seeks to inaugurate a distinct psychoanalytical aesthetics, which calls on the reader/listener to recognize the work’s capacity to absorb, its frustration threshold, the tact and discretion it demands. The same rule governs both therapeutic and interpretative ethics. Kristeva adopts figures and concepts from the source text, as though she allowed Arendt herself to establish the proper hermeneutic frame for dealing with her. Her interventions are careful and minute – here and there a suggestion, an explication, a comment – never taking the form of antagonism or dispute. At similar ages, Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva produced adjacent texts. This “calling deep”⁹ emerges once and then immediately subsides. Just once, even though everything subsequent seems to be variations on the same theme. This bold and impulsive form nevertheless grows subtler and more subdued, even somewhat alienated. It changes shape, appearing in the form of case studies, thrillers, or Histories. This evolution holds out a certain reprieve and hope, not least for the reader. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”¹⁰ was such a text, just as Arendt’s “Rahel Varnhagen”. In Kristeva’s text the enjambment between two subject positions – offering resistance and revolt as opposed to the always available possibility of impoverishment – plays out between two separate columns of print. The central column describes the genealogy of the Virgin, the Great Mother in both western and eastern Christianity. The narrower column on the left edge of the page presents the drama of delivery, between two biological mothers: the daughter who has just given birth and her mother. Since both columns deal with motherhood and mothers, they do not stay within their formal limits. Each, answering to a shared psychic logic or ill-logic, feeds from the images and suggestions of the other. The writing daughter, apparently in control of the entire picture, cannot avoid exposing the complexity inherent in the act of autobiography. That act imprints its repressions on the body of the text which makes present the three female creators and thus questions their respective positions. Center and margins come together in the transferences, in the displaced identifications. Creation registers as a body born from the maternal object but brutally separated from it in order to adopt –  Psalms 42: 8, NKJV.  This text, written as early as 1976, is named for a medieval hymn attributed to Jacopone Da Todi (approx. 1228 – 1306), describing Mary’s suffering at her son’s grave. Kristeva mentions several musical variations inspired by the hymn, including compositions by Palestrina, Pergolesi, Haydn, and Rossini.

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not without suffering – another mother, Mary. Stabat Mater. Birth in sorrow, birth of sorrow, which tears open the mother tongue. Is this what Rahel Varnhagen’s dream addresses? Yes, perhaps this as well, through a deep and prohibited relationship between women, through a tonal range stretching between the compassionate and the comical, all the way to irony and sarcasm; through an object-less hatred, for whose intensity there is no fitting object, as Kristeva writes. That hatred duplicates the constant hatred, expressed or implied, of the mother. A hereditary hatred which in the “Stabat Mater” text takes the form of a false courtesy toward other women. Kristeva’s interest in Arendt’s notion of forgiveness may have something to do with a search for a mother-mentor who will both support and undo this tie, and allow Kristeva to give birth to a trilogy, shorn of ambivalence, in honor of women-sisters. We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion – quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost – would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance. (Between Past and Future, 94)

Arendt’s portrait of Rahel starts from her deathbed. It returns to the middle, her young womanhood, to pick up the story and to report her compulsive repetitions, subject to the terrors of unconscious memory. Arendt thereby bringing up an erased past which, having become the latter’s ousted horizon, appropriates the future. Rahel as a girl is absent from this portrait. Arendt turns away from deterministic roots and patterns: she maintains an almost absolute silence about the orthodox Jewish household and the mother. She makes the merest mention of the father’s death. A firstborn, three brothers and a sister. We get only an unadorned sentence: “After all, her soul had already been abused and crippled in her youth” (Rahel Varnhagen, 153). People undergo banal experiences due to what was set down at birth, as she will say later. “Uncommunicated and incommunicable things which had been told to no one and had made no impression upon anyone, which had never entered the consciousness of the ages and had sunk without importance into the chaos of oblivion – such things were condemned to reiteration; they had to be reiterated because although they had really happened, they had found no permanent resting-place in reality” (ibid., 163). “Rahel had no home in the world to which she could retreat from fate; she had nothing to oppose to her destiny” (ibid., 124– 125). What does she mean? Arendt keeps her promise not to tell a story her heroine could not have told, and not to play witness to what the latter experienced without witnesses. So she leaves untouched – it is one of the few, rare cases in her writing – the dumb, awkward body language; the passive mental life, with its

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symptomatic expressions; the nothingness at the source where language emerges. All of these are incorporated into the story as if they had no spiritual or intellectual dimensions, no “de-sensualisation” as she would come to call it later. Here we have no displacement from the physical to thought, the one and only way to redeem meaning. Arendt never experienced – not in any discursive form – the gap between being and representation as a problem; she saw it rather as an opportunity, a challenge to capture the plural by scant means. And yet she identified the active desire not to know, a desire steadfastly present even in those whose thirst for knowledge is unquestionable. Where do examination, interpretation, and analysis come to a halt, and for what reason? Is the halt a form of respect for boundaries and sober tact? Or is it entailed by identification or projection which recognizes similar boundaries in the interpreter herself? The remaining details about Rahel which Arendt supplies amount to no more than a sketch: a family’s contempt for the wretchedness of an unpretty girl; caustic letters, among the most vulgar in her correspondence, addressed to her married sister; her connection with her brother’s family and the children; letters to her brother, written in old age, in which she once more uses Hebrew characters. And a letter to Alexander von der Marwitz, a beloved friend, many years younger than she: “I comfort myself – as one may find comfort in the existence of a child, say – in the knowledge that a similar nature, with the finest abilities, with the most secret and delicate nuances, exists upon earth and is going to be happier than I am… I know you, understand you and feel you so intensely that my happiness and your happiness flow in one stream” (Rahel Varnhagen, p. 208). [N]ot only do appearances never reveal what lies beneath them of their own accord but also, generally speaking, they never just reveal; they also conceal […] They expose, and they also protect from exposure, and, as far as what lies beneath is concerned, this protection may even be their most important function. At any rate, this is true for living things, whose surface hides and protects the inner organs that are their source of life” (Life of the Mind / Thinking, 25)

*** Me: Let’s talk about Rahel’s dream. In the book you’re not excessive with words. You write that nowhere did Rahel express what separated her from others without cover up, without embellishment, without hope. She: Yes, I think that much like an actor is not sovereign in his world, neither dream nor dreamer are sovereign, even though one might suppose dreaming is a possible, even exclusive, zone of sovereignty. In this case, that fantastic labor of thought, which was particularly alive in Rahel – look how easily it

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comes to me, the memory, it’s ages ago since I read these things – that labor of thought, which tied together the events she experienced and initiated, organized and staged in her salon – which tied all this with the pictures her imagination cooked up, smashed any illusions she might have had about assimilation and acceptance. In this matter my position is entirely phenomenological. Since the dream’s landscape appears before the dreaming consciousness, exactly like the waking landscape appears before the observer’s consciousness, it constitutes an object and this has objective value. Me: I’m not sure whether this is all there is to say about this dream – not a narrow interpretation of the historical picture, and not a broader examination of the evolving self-awareness of the “pariah”. We must pay attention to what you call the pictures of the imagination, the surprising casting of this dream: in other words, Mary, mother and virgin. The impossibility of solidarity between these three women – and the number too carries meaning – includes an ideal figure who symbolizes, with her tears and her milk, compassion and solace. While everything about the concrete social narrative brings together three women, close in age, the virgin’s presence suggests a different type of relations between them – those between mother and daughter. Yet each woman, including the virgin, is in touch with an inner child-like quality. They lend an ear to pain, to the confession that speaks it forth. They listen not necessarily to remove the pain, but at the very least to let it be heard. Dwelling in an erotic domain, they forge a connection that is close to prayer. They are at the very center of the world, even if only in terms of their own experience, and yet something fails to emerge between them, does not happen, as though they had reached some brink beyond which they stopped being for one another. Here, to put it differently, failure does not merely refer to the question of blending in or social assimilation. It involves a Jewish woman’s phantasmal search (in vain, as it turns out) for Mary, or a failed attempt to imagine herself as Mary, assuming that the figures in our dreams are our own doubles or split-offs. She: I haven’t heard such nonsense in a very long time. You’ve made me come all this way for this? I thought that the insipidness of psychoanalysis had long since lost its appeal. I’m rather surprised, to tell you the truth. The world doesn’t move, and women, when they get stuck, don’t move either. Or is it that things in Israel have run a little stale? What I mean to say is, do you imagine this as a sort of group therapy, with Mary as the Great Therapist flat out by the side of her lady-patients?

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Me: Please, Mrs. Arendt, allow me, I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for so long. I must talk to you. She: OK. OK. If you must. Don’t let me scare you. A bit of humor? All this is terribly serious. Me: It’s an extremely serious dream. From an abstract perspective, even before we discuss the encounter between religions or cultures. You do agree, don’t you, that the question of assimilation touched on the limits of the encounter between Jews and Germans, or on the validity of what they call the Judaeo-German soul, which fittingly expresses the need for symbiosis? So, from the abstract perspective this dream, through its distinctive staging and the manner in which it implies shame and guilt, poses fundamental questions about the human condition, about the limits of thought, of discourse, of healing, about religion, taboo and impurity, about Eros and sexuality – even if the women don’t touch or interact other than via their voices and eyes. It is a dream, too, about redemption and forgiveness. On the one hand, the Mary figure herself seems to be in distress. She does not only take care of the others – she herself needs nourishing exactly as they do. She is human, not only because she has a son but because she has lived in the world, has interacted in and with it, which in this context does not exempt her from the possibility or the experience of sin. On the other hand, it is the Jewess, the synagoga, as the images drawn by her soul show, who needs this type of Mary-ecclesia. She: What makes you think that a Jewish woman or psyche would need a Mary? I agree with you that this dream expresses something in the range of necessity or determinism; it presents some sort of fixation, if not a certain fatalism, exceeding historical contingency and turns it into an essential product of its times. We don’t disagree about the fact that the dream’s dramatic core coheres with the tangle or dilemma of Rahel’s life, her Jewish origins, the source of her shame and misery. But what value would the psychological examination you propose add to that? Me: I’m far from suggesting a theory of dreams or of guesses, and equally far from relying on learned studies on the topic. Whatever I say does not cover all the associations a person’s dream may hold. For a dream comes through much activity. ¹¹ I’m relating to the dense metaphorical aspects, at once very intimate and collective, universal, like the role Mary plays here. I acknowledge that the

 Ecclesiastes 2:5 NKJV.

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transition from metaphor to interpretative discourse could be absolutely misguided. Let me begin descriptively: The dream brings together women reclining on a bed, away from the salon in which they usually meet, deeper into the house, as it were, in a back room in which there is no ambiguity between private and public. But this place, we are told, is separate from life. This is not the familiar space of the bedroom but an uncanny time-space into which their exchange has been transferred, an archaic space that retains nothing of earlier “salon conversations”. It is totally outside the symbolic. To prove this, they weep, cry, sob. Next, you say that a small part of Rahel’s generation yielded to what David Friedländer¹² described as a demand for mass-baptism in the name of the Enlightenment or the new humanism. These were the rare Jews who fled from their Judaism in order to achieve their own humanization. This is what happened, for instance, to Rahel and her brother when she changed her name. This is the case with Dorothea Schlegel, Moses Mendelsohn’s younger daughter; as you yourself argued, Dorothea was the perfect issue of her father’s ambivalent orthodoxy. So too with Henriette Herz,¹³ who nevertheless delayed her baptism until her mother’s death. But in your view – and here we differ – all these gestures were part of the egocentric, pragmatic considerations characteristic of the social domain, where for the sake of recognition people are willing to humiliate themselves by any available means in order to become someone else. The tears in the dream suggest baptism to be the authentic and immediate product of the body-mind, of confession. This no doubt regressive desire for baptism seems to be renewed after death alongside an archaic womb. Due to the virgin, death is not final, but some shared slumber. Hence I ask: Can we really ascribe this picture to the behavior of conformist social climbers? These women, in other words, were not only acting as their husbands’ marionettes. Perhaps their ac-

 David Friedländer (1750 – 1834), Moses Mendelsohn’s pupil and disciple, developed a deistic approach to religion which emphasized the link between Jews and Protestants in terms of eternal truths deriving from the original Mosaic monotheism. His protracted efforts towards the emancipation of the Jews of Prussia involved advocating an ideology and practice of assimilation. He is considered a pioneer of Reform Judaism.  Henriette Herz (1764– 1874) – a social leader in Berlin and an accomplished linguist who opened her salon to contemporary intellectuals. This is where Dorothea Mendelsohn met Friedrich Schlegel (see below, “The Visitation of Michal, Saul’s Daughter”, note 6); Rahel Levin – her husband Varnhagen von Ense. Henriette conducted a correspondence in Hebrew with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philosopher and Romantic, whom she had taught the language. Under Schleiermacher’s influence she converted to Christianity after the deaths of her mother and husband (Markus Herz) in 1817. Her memoir Erinnerungen, with a biography by J. Fuerst, was published in 1850.

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tions originated in something different, more essential. Men, after all – whether fathers, husbands, or sons – are absent from this dream. She: Rahel was endowed with a talent for bringing together ostensibly disparate things and for discovering incoherence in what superficially appeared of a piece. The complex imagery of her dreams made manifest her originality and freshness of perception. I don’t reject the possibility – though I’m already impatient as I put it into words – that her own images divide into figures in which she becomes all at once actress, author, and audience. So much for the simpler, formal dimension. Since you haven’t yet explained how the dream reveals the “essential”, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. But it seems a problematic philosophical direction to take. Let’s set that aside, for now; it’s not that important. Let us consider the claim that the dream acts as a reflection and summary of a political-historical problem, of self-definition in political-historical terms. To say this claim is reductive would mean uncritical acceptance of modern or modernist assumptions regarding the place of authentic life, intimacy, the truth of the subject and so on and so forth – things I’ve always looked at askance. To my mind, a fruitful conversation between us would depend on whether we can let go of judgmental or moralistic qualifications that shift between the radical and the superficial, between the empowering and the reductive, and instead deal with the argument as is. What area of experience in Rahel’s life, in her sensibility, and maybe in that of her generation, do we ignore when we interpret the dream by reference to the feature she herself saw as the inescapable deficiency of her personality – that is to say: her being a Jew? Me: The dream’s subtle erotic dimension teaches us that the shame she expresses cannot in the end be detached from what the two other figures represent for her. Her shame is an affect that arises in the face of the others, is influenced by them, internalizes them, and hence judges itself before them. But at the root of the scene she dreams is another very different scene; that scene involves the final reckoning of shame, that which doesn’t see the light of day and may perhaps be revealed only after death – as though it were the grave of the self, the grave within the self. The storm raging within her, the waves surging between what is allowed or desired, and what is prohibited, are born of a confrontation between two images. Both images are phantasmatic, although one has roots in Rahel’s biographical reality. Shame derives from the fact that in Rahel’s imagination it is Mary who is the source of birth and of death, the object of longing for an archaic union; it is Mary and not Rahel’s biological mother or anything related to her cultural and psychological foundations. Rahel directs herself to this foreignness and recoils from it. Miles away from her origins, she suddenly

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receives an anamnesis which presents her with another memory of something that never was. Would you like some Campari? She: Excellent idea, thanks. How do you know I love Campari? Me: A letter to Jaspers, dated 29 May 1963. She: You’re fanatical. Me: And so? She: Do you worry I might drink too much? You can put your mind at ease. Strong liver, she says pointing in the direction of her liver. Mind if I smoke? Me: Heavens no! She: I hear they’ve been making a huge fuss about it in America, since I died. One has to know when to pack one’s bags. I pour a glass and give her another glass, by way of an ashtray. She smiles. For myself I take a can of beer. She: I understand you to be saying – and I am not convinced why this should point at some essential structural option of the mind – that you perceive a type of rebellion in the dream. Although this rebellion has no political or social effects, it expresses Rahel’s violent hostility toward her biological parents, you surmise, and perhaps even more so toward her origins. Her secret, that is, inheres not in what she exposes to the non-Jewish women, but in the discomfort she feels about her Jewish elders, from whom she withholds her craving for Mary, in fact the greatest betrayal of her father’s home and her mother’s language. The scathing lump of shame is her awareness, in the dream, that here she has crossed a line that must not be crossed. Let’s assume you’re right. In that case, as well as in the opposite one (with shame aimed at the non-Jewish social group), the affect itself pertains to the woman who wants to be different. It isn’t as if Mary or Bettina puts her to shame. It is she who is ashamed about disobeying an internalized authority. She experiences herself as unworthy of others’ company, excluded from their community, dependent on them in order to hide her shame, from herself and from them, or alternatively in order to share it with them. However you look at it, this self-perception, which is hardly communicable, involves an outrageous non-acceptance of herself.

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Me: Mrs. Arendt, you’ve argued that this conversation, which does not give Rahel recognition of her Jewishness, clarifies to her that she needs to do inner labor, and allows her to recognize a factuality which she will not want to lose, in spite of her surroundings’ negative judgment. The path at which you point, in other words, is paved with the conditions of natality, or subjectivation. I believe that in this dream Rahel elaborates her desire for this particular mother – symbolic, holy – and for a place in which she cannot accept herself in a simple manner. The rejection the dream describes becomes a response that is valid for every subject. Even a subject who lives in harmony is not exempt – unless he is a victim to self-deception – from the waxing and waning tension of desire. She: But in that case, it’s about an a priori structure of desire, standing free of any religious dogma. But you stress the object displacement from her mother – or from the biblical matriarchs – to the virgin mother. Me: As I said, social-historical components may be extended by means of images that borrow – witness the shame and the secrecy – from Christianity’s supply of images. The encounter or conflict between the Jewish religion and the Christian religion makes no appearance in the dream. True, I assume it, due to the intense shame aroused by the question which Rahel feels is being addressed to her, whose essence is: Aren’t you ashamed? At one time, obviously, even just once, this question meant for her a sweeping failure in terms of everything she ever was. How is it possible that you don’t understand a priori, given what you seem to have learned, given your milieu, given the education we gave you, given us, that the act you’re about to commit, the thought you are about to think and so on, that these bring shame upon you and us, those who carry ultimate responsibility for what you have become, at your own responsibility. She is already ashamed in the dream, knowing that she ought to feel ashamed about the dream, a dream that must not be exposed. Now I dare to ask: What is the point of all of this? What can Mary be to a Jewish woman? What is Mary to us? And do we need Mary? I think that on the speculative and phantasmatic level at which it is asked, the question is important. It’s not about conversion, God forbid, but about the relations between these figures; between the traditional home that was familiar to Rahel, and the world she encountered; and the possible, perhaps the complementary relations between these. I allow myself to present you with this because it seems you yourself considered these meanings, religious but non-dogmatic, exposed unsettling mixtures, and in spite of the absence of Mary’s figure, in relation to Christian thought. Wasn’t this how you began your writing, and actually never stopped, directly or more implicitly, from Augustine to Kierkegaard, via neo-Catholic thought and the examination

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of the concepts of natality, forgiveness, revolution, through the question of the will in The Life of the Mind? I imagine that for you, as for Rahel, the whole of this world was given, simply, in the street, in churches, in works of art, in literary images, in the aesthetic sensibilities a person internalizes as he forms himself. Do you know Julia Kristeva’s work on the Christian elements in your oeuvre? She: I read everything they write about me. I have plenty of time and it gives me considerable pleasure, I must admit. Is that hers? That psychoanalytic mishuggas and the Mary mayhem? Just joking, don’t take it badly. But we’re skipping, rather, from one thing to another. That’s how it always goes on visitations. Me: You think so too? She: Sure. Me: May I ask you something? She: Sure. Me: From another direction: You write about Rahel’s dream in the chapter “Day and Night”, the eighth of thirteen – midway, that is – and I have to say that these are among the most poetic passages you ever wrote. In writing about this dream which links between life and death, you almost completely reduce your own presence. In other chapters you are constantly involved. Here you hardly comment on the particular figures appearing in the dream – as against its implications – and you prefer to move immediately into the dominion of light, the public, another agenda which refuses dream insights, strangles the dream’s suggestive contents, or replaces them with absolute concepts without a remainder. You make no attempt to put words to what ostensibly lacks meaning, and should perhaps be recreated by means of them. Apropos Kristeva, she actually believes that you don’t, in this book, reckon your own relationship to Christian theology via Rahel. You delay that reckoning to The Life of the Mind, she argues, and you exaggerate Rahel’s return to her Jewish roots as her death approaches. Rahel, after all, did not abandon her new faith, the ritual of the Enlightenment, or German patriotism. She: Of course, I cannot fully answer this. One cannot reconstruct the conditions of writing, neither with hindsight nor in the moment, and most definitely not with a book like this one, written in varying states of mind and often extreme living conditions. I am unable properly to answer you. I can say that I remained

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silent about what I experienced at that time as a great, a very great pain, and not on the narrowly religious level or the one that you are thinking of. But to your question: As far as I remember the figure of the Christian mother never aroused anything in me. My pain was social and intimate in nature, and my conclusion political. I understood the dream through this configuration, which perhaps explains why its particular images were immediately processed as part of a conceptual framework, without my stopping to consider they might require analysis; they seemed to me so self-evident. The intimacy longed for in the dream was impossible because Prussian society – transitioning from feudalism to a nation state and a society without privileges – became at that time overwhelmingly antisemitic, except for the very brief interval of the salons – an idyllic phase, as society had never received the Jews so warmly. Those who had become friends with Jews for a period of time – especially aristocrats – now turned their bitterness and frustration against the Jews overnight. From then on, becoming part of society meant to internalize its antisemitism, to accept its attendant terror, as this minority felt it (to the degree that it let itself feel anything rather than trying to escape from its feelings). I imagine that this is how I interpreted Mary’s presence in the dream, an indication of straightforward antisemitism, as simple as that. I still don’t understand why you need her. Me: Rahel – it’s Rahel who needs Mary, in order to start something, to find the strength, the courage, the vitality to begin. Mary enables her to express something that would not otherwise be said. Whether I need her too, I don’t know. I’m not being evasive. It’s not an unimportant question, given the ways Judaism has rejected and excluded the figure of the mother. She: I’m not at all sure that Rahel needs Mary. Rahel and her female contemporaries experienced the dissolution of the Judaism practiced in their parental homes as a liberation, without having to deal creatively with another version of Judaism or Jewishness. On the one hand, they did not have to contribute to the creation of such a version. On the other, they did not experience prayer as a ritual of belonging and commitment, as a return to the cult of the mother, which they required over and beyond their process of Bildung. In this sense, your psychological interpretation of the dream is justified, at least to the extent that these people – men and women alike – defined themselves by reference neither to religion nor to nationality, but as part of a group with certain psychological traits. If Jewishness had turned into a psychological trait, the Jewish question had become a personal question for the individual Jew. Never before had being Jewish by birth played such a fateful and compulsory role in private life and everyday existence as it did among these assimilated Jews – starting with

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Rahel’s generation, the first generation of the so-called Judeo-Germanic symbiosis, through the generation of Proust and the salons of the Faubourg St Germain, in a very different French context, all the way to the interbellum generation in East and West Europe. Such people found to their surprise that everything that happens to them is nevertheless linked to the fact that they are Jewish; they were exposed to these feelings as long as they were invited to high society salons, where they were received with the same fascination as other “criminals.” As far as I’m concerned, a merely psychological engagement, depleted of religious or national, social or economic substance, clearly spells a reduction; an impoverishment of the human in its political sense. The impending catastrophe will be so incomprehensible and so terrible because it lacks all value as far as the psychological Jew is concerned. In his willingness to so let go of himself, moving on every whim between apologetics and provocation, between feeling inferior and then again superior, he has also lost the aura of martyrdom – the ability, that is, to justify himself, as he did in the past, when he sacrificed his life in the name of God. Me: Isn’t your political response nevertheless psychological confrontation, in the end, personal and eccentric, in Jewish terms? Given the psychological change you describe, does Rahel’s dream become superfluous, or does it so easily translate to the concepts according to which the small drama taking place in it is nothing but a compromise, lie, or concession to be made for the sake of society? I don’t think so. If the truth or truths of this dream are its deceit, then a phantasmatic truth emerges here. Elsewhere, when discussing Jews’ and non-Jews’ post-Emancipation desire for an encounter, you looked at literary texts; what Proust, for instance, could say about the issue was not to be expressed in a strictly social or economic analysis. Aesthetic insight enabled you to consider elements in the realization of that failed encounter, and dream work is close to creative work in terms of the mental powers it harnesses, even if it lacks the important stages through which creativity becomes creation. As to your earlier suggestion, for me the dream’s stretching or extension of the idea of Jewishness refers equally to Islam, and the attempt to think of Mary applies, even more emphatically perhaps, to Hagar. What we have here is not exclusive to Jews and Christians, even if the present situation and the context would suggest it. It is about the imagination and the imaginary power of each of the religions, in what each represses and registers, the manner in which it constitutes the psyche of those who inhabit it. “Rahel’s ladder” does not raise these questions by means of didactic engravings on a church facade, but in a very precise mode that opens thought, with a readiness toward syncretistic merging. For together the sources contain truth, vital truths, should they be put into impulsive

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terms. In doing so, these truths will likely recognize the blindness of each figure alone, its refusal, the impossibility in its own terms; and fundamentally they will have to recognize what cannot be achieved in this blending, and what is fated to stay unachieved. Inquiring after the Judeo-Germanic psyche qua “psyche” is tantamount to looking into syncretism, plurality, into enchantment and bewilderment; in a dream this syncretism knows no contradictions, no cause and effect, nothing but what a woman, dreaming and apparently utterly passive, incorporates, and what is not available to her in any Bible. You take your two concepts of the “pariah” and the “parvenu” to the extreme, all the way to extreme loneliness, one within the original community, the other outside it, in the target community; one abandoning all convention, on the margins of the Jewish community, the other through an artificial conformism. For me these two concepts together eventually resonate a similar ambivalence. They point at the limits of freedom. I know I understand them unlike the way you wanted them to be read, and that I add an emphasis which at the start of our conversation you called deterministic or fatalistic. That’s true. There’s fatalism, or at least fatality, in accepting a state of affairs, even in the case of active affirmation, just as there’s fatalism or fatality, on the same scale and at different intensities, when another state of affairs is adopted, in revolt, in the ability to forgive or invent something new. She: Then the notion of revolt loses its proper quality. Me: I don’t agree, Mrs. Arendt. She: Pour me another Campari. Me: With pleasure. She: Yes, the ability to revolt. Where do the resources of choice come from? How do we think of them, how do we process the miracle of birth? To what extent are we responsible for ourselves and for what we have become? That’s for another conversation. We don’t see eye to eye. Though what you’re getting at is not entirely alien to me. I am overdoing it. You mention my early essays on Catholicism, on Protestantism, on Kierkegaard, and later on the neo-Catholic authors. I believe that I was especially attentive at that time to the latter’s radical rupture from their environment, to a sensibility that took in real tears and laughter and tried to process them, one which I thought important in its own right, regardless of the artistic or philosophical value of their thinking. I was looking, looking for something. I wouldn’t want to say with hindsight that it was a phase, or that you

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somehow are going through a phase. How should I presume to make that sort of opinionated, patronizing comment? Anyway, I believe that these layers – the imaginary, the emotional, the mental – are not regulated as a function of the reading of source texts in secluded rooms, or as a result of old wives’ tales or children’s fables, no matter how thrilling or impressive. They are rather channeled, manipulated, and poisoned through and through by concrete social and political conditions. The aesthetic play or education you propose becomes meaningful only in relation to these domains. I have no quarrel with the notion that it’s imperative to use the imagination, but for me it is located in a different place and relates to different forces. In dire times, what has been honed in the household, on the sofa or the bed, cannot guarantee the power to resist, survive, or revolt. It is useless. I feel I came to learn this gradually. That shouldn’t turn my own learning into an exemplary Bildung. This is my credo; obviously I have faith in it. There’s only one fatality: a political fatality of belonging. With books, and with what you call the cultural and psychological foundations and images, we can travel unperturbed from one place to another. Me: But they are what determines our identity, even if they “weigh” less in terms of deciding fate, whether death or life. I know that using terms like “psyche” or “essence” is philosophically problematic, their implications perhaps even dangerous. But since we’re only talking, if I may put it like that, I’m willing to use hyperbole at the risk of being irresponsible, just to enliven the ear. She: A strategy I wholeheartedly approve! Me: What, then, happens in the inner life of a Jewish soul dreaming of another mother by means of a failed encounter with the figure of the other religion’s ideal mother? Consider the figurative inventory, the internal objects that signify for her what a mother is, or motherhood in her heritage or home, in her personal biography. To what extent do these stir her longing, restlessness, dissatisfaction, curiosity, throw a shadow over her relations with her own belongings, leading her to visit other sources? The word “essence” here seeks to rid this proposition of Rahel’s particular life or that of the women of her generation and shift it to an exemplary, archetypal level. In other words, “essence” indicates that we might be talking here about a search in the general sense, one everyone may experience, a search that nevertheless grounds to a halt on meeting its inherent limit. She: And yet, the dream does not only involve Rahel and Mary/Mrs. Schleiermacher. There are six eyes; there’s a third party. And something else: as you yourself noted (but in a way that does not settle with the new religion or religios-

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ity you portray), not one of the women talks about faith or God. Their conversation is a shared depressive-oppressive experience involving a consequent skepticism vis-à-vis the world. Me: First, some general things about Mary need mentioning. She is an ascetic figure, pure and humble, partner to her son’s suffering. But she also has a powerfully sovereign side. She is born miraculously and in turn gives birth miraculously. She is both subject to the cycle of life and free from it. She reveals herself in this dream as one who cannot bear the pain of another, alien woman. It is as though the dream takes Mary’s ear – one of the major metaphors of her suffering – and puts it in an all-too human dimension, a long way from the immortal ideal orthodox tradition bestowed on her. She does not give to Rahel what she granted to her son and the community of the faithful. In this sense she does not offer her what a person needs, on the phantasmatic plane, in order to thrive, and in the absence of which she is bound to sink into a depression. Rahel’s depression, inside the dream and outside of it, is related to this. This failed encounter might have given her the one opportunity to be reborn from a mother, with a mother at her side, with her as a witness, with the security she is supposed to give. This possibility is not realized even with the adopted, imaginary mother, the one she chose rather than the one into and from whom she was cast; even with “the mother”, the good mother, the emblem of the dedicated mother. The Virgin is frigid, icy, untouchable. Though not without tenderness, she is also impervious, as though she resists internalization. At the most, what happens there is a halfhearted attempt to talk, not identification. There is no embrace, no acceptance, no love, and most certainly no symbiosis. Utterly alone, Rahel acknowledges a vacancy at the very roots of identity. She will have to learn to live with that, and that only, not with the political fact of her being a Jew and so on, which logically and chronologically comes later. She must learn to live with this nothingness, and believe, first of all, that life is passable. In this respect I don’t agree with you. This is a dream about faith. What is faith? Isn’t it related to the attempt to become a child again, close to the mother? To the assumption that she is there, loves her, pays attention, and that from there on all depends on herself, the believer, her own love, now that she has received infinite credit from the mother, and in the light of which she may disappoint, be insufficiently giving, fail to manage? This is one possible structure, one of several, to understand this turning to Mary, though it doesn’t appear so in the dream. Here shame is more complex, pointing back to Rahel’s actual mother. There isn’t a single image in the entire book that brings her close to her mother. Intimacy with the mother occurs only in the dream. There it is Mary, a substitute that equals mother-murder, and the consequent frustration that this whole paralyzing, terro-

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rizing maneuver does not yield the expected outcome. The presence of the third party, also the judging, observing eye —possibly these are Rahel’s own judging and observing, splitting into three —reinforces the objective value of this dream as a lesson. The result is twofold: It subverts the basic and exclusive desire to be born to a virgin mother, that is, to be wholly hers, to be wholly for her. Intriguingly, this takes place not in the presence of a man but in the presence of another woman, as though the possibility of conception, birth and development depended only on these women’s affective-psychological capacity to produce pleasure and life, a facility untethered from their bodies, ages, and situations. This presence allows for the individuation of each of the figures witnessing her own loneliness in the course of this séance. Communication, however defective, occurs; things come across. Each figure, including the mother, has a name; she can be called upon. While the mother is remote, that very distance, no matter how painful, enables her to be thinkable, enables thought as such, and thus – life. In the end, the political or the cultural differences between the characters in the dream do not matter. Do not matter, that is, in “life” as such, to the extent that this fiction, this illusion or hallucination expresses life in its reality. Mary is present there because a mother like her is absent from Jewish sources. Jewish mothers in the Bible are far more ambivalent and meager; they are women of valor, pale and absent, who convey nothing more than a kind of vexation, discontent, a denied depression. They fail to enable what Mary evidently is supposed to enable. At the same time, Mary appears in the dream as one who does not bring about complete pleasure, who does not lend herself to dependency and does not overcome the breach necessary to forge a synthesis. All this signals that a permanent lack of understanding will prevail even in her own congregation, among the Christian women who share a mother tongue. The same books and recitations, the same insights and phantasmatic structures. Exactly the same. Paradoxically, by means of her presence Mary in the dream sets the limits of religious hospitality, the limits of hosting the other. Here she is not present as she was for her son. We thus encounter the question: to what extent is she capable of embracing another woman’s pain? After all, Mary herself had a mother. In this scene, the Christian women do not consort against the Jewish woman; they do not exert some privilege from which Rahel is excluded. The others too are bound to feel shame, even only due to the ever-existing gap between their external surroundings and their hidden wishes. But it’s in the nature of shame that you don’t attribute it to others; you take it on yourself, as though the other must be shameless, or unashamed, so that the subject may feel shame for himself and them. Shame, in other words, is not contingent but structural; it originates in the eternal drama that unfolds in the interstices between conscious life and the unconscious. Thus Rahel is unable to express the

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shame and the others cannot listen to her. Shame constitutes the unconscious of everyone and everything. It is the vanity of words, as if they were a mask that must be removed, to be followed by silence. And so the dream suggests an analogy: natality is close to loss, for we must die in order to be born; competence is close to helplessness; desire is close to separation, which in turn is therefore also opportunity, not mere deprivation; and companionship prepares for seclusion. She: It seems to me that what you’re saying exceeds the facts. You suggest that Rahel does not only participate in the hidden tradition of “conscious pariahs”¹⁴ which I was looking for at the time, but actively tried to institute a heterodox tradition, to deal with Jewish values or figures through interpretive innovation, and therefore to dedicate herself to her emancipation by means of discovering and experiencing inner abilities. But I’m not persuaded that one can observe, either in Rahel or in the others – in spite of their neurotic and hysterical features – a longing for the transcendent. I fail to see something we might call a mystical search or metaphysical experience, a wish to convert the human family, or the Jewish one, into the holy family. I don’t even discern the pursuit of another version of the family, one that involves identification with an ideal mother and assimilation to Christianity as a consequence. They did after all get married and conduct a conventional family life… Me: Conventional in what sense? They abandoned husbands, sometimes children as well… She: But just in order to redefine themselves in relation to their loved ones, out of identification with their world and their social needs. So there was no revolution here. At the most, we may speak narrowly of an intimate revolt. Yet in your description Rahel becomes Everyman. That kind of generality proved to be, in the 20th century more than ever before, extremely dubious. So my criticism is twofold. It touches on the excess of interpretation you expend on the question of conversion and its essential, what you call phantasmatic substance. First, I don’t identify a singular Jewish-female corpus of creation, a distinct idiolect, not even in the form of hints in correspondences, that would positively process

 Arendt is ambivalent about the characteristics of the pariah, which derive from his condition, mainly from loss-of- the-world (acosmism). The condition may produce a range of behaviors, from a community’s intense generosity and humanity, all the way to barbarism. She therefore distinguishes the “conscious pariah” in the group, one who doesn’t completely merge with it but rather sits on the fence, taking the role of an actor or onlooker. Bernard Lazare, for instance, described in her essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”, falls into this category.

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a deviation from traditional taboos. Was it shame that stood in the way, spelling such a severe devaluation that it led to an inability to translate these images into creation? I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was the bullying power of the Jewish home, or by extension, of Jewish law and religion. Frankly, this sort of speculation about motives and reasons doesn’t really interest me. There is no creation, that’s the reality, and the dream is insufficiently solid to support your conclusions. Second, I’m worried about the troublesome transplantation of the concrete, factual discussion to an abstract existential plane, which gets associated, in your argument, with an idiosyncratic version of Heideggerian guilt. This type of position has never brought progress in terms of historical understanding. On the contrary, its poetic truth has often come at a heavy price. Me: We are circling the same question in a way that helps to highlight the debate. For you, there is something absolutely radical in the political given, in terms of both its implications and outcomes. For me, the radical is first and foremost tied to the affective organization instituted by the sources, the manner in which religious codes call into being an interiority, an articulate subjectivity, relations – harmonious or fractious – between self and world, between self and the paternal principle, between self and the maternal principle. These relations seep directly into us, with an intensity that demands pre-reflective adjustment to values of the sacred and the impure, an adjustment not easily subjected to examination or criticism. Why do all of the fasts and prayers to God of Biblical women address despair and a desire for motherhood? Why doesn’t one of them utter an at least equally powerful yearning to travel, to tear herself away from the social and familial circle, to dwell in solitude, to devote herself to the Creator and creation? Why is their distress always couched in terms of the family unit, as a lack that can be appeased and healed by a miracle or divine intervention? The void does not appear as a fundamental, unredeemable experience, as vanity of vanities, nor as actively pursued suffering, suffering that isn’t punishment for overstepping the mark, for a pit some woman dug for herself, whether inadvertently or not. No woman, even when she experiences displeasure originating away from her own conditionality, translates negation into a quest for her soul. There are no dreaming women. Events in Rahel’s dream are not fully translatable into her conditionality or her conscious choices. She would have chosen differently in the face of a different social and political and cultural situation, of course, or rather: a different textual situation. “Textual situation” is not restricted to the self-conscious and expanding internalization of the educational process. Before anything it forms in the course of containment, a restrained and uncontrolled ingestion bound to fold the subject into her- or himself. Even if you’re right about the order of reality and the crucial weight of the political in the effort

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to understand, and cope with, the former, when it comes to the order of the dream I don’t think you’re right. Your reading does not bring to bear those elements that are additional to the public configuration linking the Enlightenment, Romanticism, traditional Judaism, political reforms, and the normative social order. At night, the condition of being a Jew/being a woman grows more complicated, due to the regression of sleep. Exactly for this reason, the regression to the dream ties private experience to the universal. The regression to sleep tells the truth of the religious conversion: an incestuous yearning for the mother. Does the dreamt failure originate in Rahel’s limited inventiveness? Maybe. But something about this dream’s familiar strangeness is likely to stir something in everybody. I couldn’t be more unscientific, but I believe, nevertheless, that some things carry an internal justification even if they are as yet theoretically unsatisfactory. It’s as though the history of subjectivity were imagined from its end point, from when it stops existing, transferred to the world of the dead and remaining domesticated, it turns out, since the arm holding on to the bed brings on the awakening… Arendt keeps her head lowered. My eyes rest on her immersed face. She is chainsmoking. Now she smiles. Do you really think – she asks after a long pause– that we can take in other people’s dreams? Not everybody is so keen on hosting people in their dreams. Some prefer to be left alone there. The alienness of the one who enters is awful, absolutely forbidden, it is unparalleled in our wakeful entries. Me: I agree with you. You’re right. She: Freud crucially used his mental processes, his dreams, in the making of his theory, the project of writing and practicing psychoanalysis. My choice was the opposite. Me: Really? You really think that? All of a sudden she rises, her movement sharp, straightens her back, stretches her shoulders, grunts as if looking for fresher air. Open the window, with all that cigarette smoke it got too hot, I must breathe. How do you manage? Do you pop out for some air, now and then? One can’t be locked in a room all the time. It’s not healthy.

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Together we open the window. Another long silence. She: It’s OK to be silent. Me: If I’d ask you to sum up everything you believe —“the entire Torah standing on one leg” as they say in the Talmud – I know it’s absurd, but still. What would you say? She: Torah?! Oh well. I’d tell you simple things, which you’ve probably heard before. Not clichés. That’s not the same thing. By no means. Ordinary things, nevertheless. Me: Tell me. She: One has to content oneself with what others are able to give, not expect them to give what they can’t. Me: You’re right. Tell me more. She: You greedy one. Me: So just repeat the same. She: But that I told you. Me: I remember the tune, not the details. I need you to repeat it, please. She: I must go. Me: Already? *** Between withdrawal into the archaic and the use of linguistic archaism, a strange bond sometimes emerges. The language pangs of an articulate woman reduced to an ashamed stutter, her stutter; a citizen turned infant suddenly, too conscious and proud to allow the mumbling between words and syllables to be heard. So she strains a bit more, is punctilious about grammar and syntax, embellishes and fools the ear. The glory of the phrase, the awkward denseness, exposed, language turned ornate. This is not how one talks. So how? Rahel Varnhagen was Arendt’s first attempt to make implicit contact with speech’s contin-

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uous struggle against muteness. This excess – by turns referred to as body, pleasure, pain, sensuality, and taste – required thought to render it solid and lucid. But her Life of the Mind persistently and stubbornly transferred silence and commanded silence. Arendt paradoxically succeeded in pointing at the archaic without appealing to archaisms, by allowing the phenomenal world to enter her thinking, yet to stop at the point where the latter might collapse in face of the body and cease. One aspect of her anti-determinism was tied up with a rejection of the nightmares and perversions of somatic fatalism. She looked so exhausted when she left. I tired her out. A conversation that bent out of shape. What makes it so urgent to hone disagreements? All because of someone else’s dream. As we learn from her correspondence in the 1950s, Arendt moved on from Rahel when she came across the manuscript again and gradually prepared it for publication. She turned to Rahel with good reason; from now on the question of the emergence of identity and its limits would reappear throughout her oeuvre despite the growing split between the narrator-heroine and the author-observer. In fact, however, every act of writing, including autobiographical writing, is not mimetic. Life-becoming-biography must stop clinging to the existent so as to give new life. What is singular about biography is that it does not consist in transgressing against the past, in sweetening its suffering or solving a problem, but rather in the opportunity, the yield of the imagination, to offer meaning and appeasement. If Arendt has a Mary, she is embodied in her unique version of the mother of the mind, who revives and is revived. This is her “père-version” – or her “mère-version”, an expression Julia Kristeva uses in her description of the development of the third in her trilogy on female genius, Colette.¹⁵Arendt removes natality from the private sphere and disconnects it from dependence on one sin-

 Père-version and mère-version – The question of perversion (of the child and of the adult) and of its relation with creativity, idealization, and sublimation preoccupied Kristeva from her earliest writings, which aim at the interstices between psychoanalysis and aesthetics. In French, the word “perversion” includes a homology with the word for father – père. Kristeva, following Lacan, suggests the existence of a mère- (or mother‐) version: a perversion that originates in the infant’s dependence on, and uncertainty about, the mother, and in a late fixation of the adult on objects appropriate to infantile sexuality. Such objects draw him or her away from genital sexuality to the point of a total stripping away of sexuality. Yet what is called “perversion” does not merely challenge the Law of the Father and its prohibitions; it also confirms them. The superego, representing the Father, says: Enjoy. And père-version is obviously a father-version, the child’s surrender to the Father’s desires. Thus Arendt’s path between questions of motherhood, natality, infertility, melancholic incorporation, creation, revolt, and situating the process of individuation in the public domain, constitutes her own very specific père/mère-version (Kristeva, 2002).

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gle person, the parent as well as the caregiver; it occurs in the crowd, between strangers, in public. The dimension of time she emphasizes as a result shifts from the scarred archaic past to an open future in which the subject is constantly renewed. Birth from above. The birth of birth. This radical turn, which already leaves its imprint on the conceptual framework organizing the book on Rahel, is associated with the many years she spent outside her home. Evidently, she did not make the concept of the stateless refugee into an existential category. Such an abstracting and figurative gesture was foreign to her writing. But the experience of the refugee casts both light and shadow on the whole of her yield: on subject matter, on concepts, on decisions; on the very movement. It casts both light and shadow, for Arendt holds on to both sides of the Biblical saying: Because God visited (upon) his people. In its modern, perfectly secularized form of the visitation, the outcome of human actions, she hears the constant sounds of catastrophe and redemption. Arendt’s life, including of course her writing, was ousted all of a sudden from the private with its repetitions and regularity; from leisure, from slowness, the phantasm, the dream; without prior warning, in an impatient rush, she had to leave. A time to pluck what is planted. ¹⁶ Tabula rasa, trains, suitcases, a few books, a tongue plucked out, divested of the privilege to be simple.¹⁷A new and fascinating horizon, given the extent to which one can somehow become a stranger to oneself, one’s habits, one’s acquaintances, one’s education, one’s homeland, one’s shalls and one’s shan’ts. As though her belonging there, to the origin, stopped being her truth or that of the subject in general, and certainly not an object of yearning and praise. Truth shifted to the ability to take a distance from the origin, to behave as though we had just arrived, and to cleave to alienness in order to create. She criticized the weak spots of philosophical methods from the ruins of the place, the non-place, away from property, from what is and from the secure. She described the nature of thinking thus: While thinking I am not where I actually am; I am surrounded not by sense-objects but by images that are invisible to everybody else. It is as though I had withdrawn into some nevernever land, the land of invisibles, of which I would know nothing had I not this faculty of remembering and imagining. Thinking annihilates temporal as well as spatial distances. I can anticipate the future, think of it as though it were already present, and I can remember the past as though it had not disappeared (The Life of the Mind/Thinking, 85).

 Ecclesiastes 3:2 NKJV.  After escaping Germany in 1933, Arendt remained stateless for eighteen years until she received U.S. citizenship.

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An economy of burial and resuscitation: uncover a little here to hide more elsewhere. This never took Arendt to the zero point where the personality evacuates. Once you decide to live, she wrote, you forfeit the right to mock life. Deprived of references and names, she freed herself from the fear of change, and gave herself over to the ease of the unknown. A time to heal. ¹⁸

Flow Chart Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin”, Men in Dark Times Full fathom five thy father lies,/ Of his bones are coral made,/ Those are pearls that were his eyes./ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange. (Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1,2) Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his life-time, were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability […] Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive a new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as “thought fragments”. (205 – 206)

Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen We might possibly still escape the mute and consuming lament of night if the specific parallel did not also press forward into sleep, manifest itself in dreams which assail the waker in the shape of memories, and which he cannot blanket by the activities of the day, because they repeat themselves. Ultimately, then, night and sleep become identical with certain dreams whose meaning needs

 Ecclesiastes 3:3 NKJV.

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no interpretation, which penetrate into the day, and which the day recognizes from days past. The duality of day and night, the salutary division of life into the specific and the general, becomes ambiguity when night turns into a specific night, when dreams insist, with monotonous repetitiousness, upon certain contents, darkening the day with excessively distinct shadow-images, troubling its occupations, and again reverting to things past without the clarity of memory. (186) [S]he needed Varnhagen to make her in reality Frau Friederike Varnhagen von Ense, to annihilate her whole existence, even including her given name. Secretly, in opposition to him, in conscious revolt against such a condition, she conjured up scraps of her old life, lived her own life “altogether inwardly”. (245)

Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”, The Jew as Pariah We had scholars write philosophical dissertations on the predestined harmony between Jews and Frenchmen, Jews and Germans, Jews and Hungarians, Jews and… Our so frequently suspected loyalty of today has a long history. It is the history of a hundred and fifty years of assimilated Jewry who performed an unprecedented feat: though proving all the time their non-Jewishness, they succeeded in remaining Jews all the same. (64)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition What claims our attention is the veritable gulf that separates all bodily sensations, pleasure or pain, desire and satisfactions – which are so “private” that they cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world, and therefore are altogether incapable of being reified – from mental images which lend themselves so easily and naturally to reification that we neither conceive of making a bed without first having some image, some “idea” of a bed before our inner eye, nor can imagine a bed without having recourse to some visual experience of a real thing. (141)

Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind/ Thinking [M]y heart aches when I am grieved, gets warm with sympathy, opens itself up in rare moments when love or joy overwhelms me, and similar physical sensations take possession of me with anger, wrath, envy, and other affects. The language of the soul in its mere expressive stage, prior to its transformation and transfiguration through thought, is not metaphorical; it does not depart from the senses and uses no analogies when it talks in terms of physical sensations. (33)

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The monotonous sameness and persuasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and outside of the human body. (35)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. (184)

Mary McCarthy, Editor’s Postface to Life of the Mind She had taught herself to write English as an exile, when she was over thirty-five, and never felt as comfortable in it even as a spoken tongue as she had once felt in French. […] Thought she had a natural gift, […] for eloquent, forceful, sometimes pungent expression, her sentences were long, in the German way, and had to be unwound or broken up into two or three. (243–244)

Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”, The Jew as Pariah After a single year [in America] optimists are convinced they speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two years they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other language – their German is a language they hardly remember. (56) [S]ometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved. (57)

Chapter 3 The Visitation of Dahlia Ravikovitch A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones (Ecclesiastes 3:5) For any man who has a defect shall not approach: a man blind or lame, who has a marred face or any limb too long, a man who has a broken foot or broken hand, or is a hunchback or a dwarf, or a man who has a defect in his eye…He shall not come near to offer the bread of his God. (Leviticus 21:18 – 21) Isn’t there even one country you love?/Isn’t there even one word?/Surely you remember. (Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Surely You Remember”, p. 111)¹

First Scene They were destined to meet. A very sad woman and a very angry one. Metaphorical solidarity between two exceptional, devoted individuals who insist on their revolts. What sparked between them, as at a feast – curiosity, drunkenness, fear, acceptance? In the end perhaps concession. Because metaphor is demanding (they both know poetry by heart). Whether fictive or real, it requires space. One an introvert, the other energetic. Chicago, 1966. This was when Dahlia Ravikovitch worked with autistic children under Bruno Bettelheim, one of Hannah Arendt’s few supporters in the debate among American Jews which erupted on the publication of her report on the Eichmann trial. They must meet. Like attracts like. An eternal bond. Ravikovitch, student of Baruch Kurzweil, ² Gershom Scholem’s outspoken critic, was at that time the target of Scholem’s harsh judgment. In a posthumously published paper (1989) he mocked what he considered her limited familiarity with crime fiction. ³ Arendt knew how to read history’s guile, even then.

 All quotations from Ravikovitch’s poetry are from Hovering at a Low Altitude, tr. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, New York: Norton. 2009.  Baruch Kurzweil (1907– 1972) was an early influential Israeli literary critic.  Gershom Scholem, “In Praise of Crime Fiction” (1997). Here Scholem refers to an article by Ravikovitch in Haaretz (25 February, 1966). “Ms. Ravikovitch complains that the thousands of murder victims in this genre have no personal presence. Nothing urges us to take an interest in the reasons for their murder, and hence the profound vacuity typical of this literature. The author’s complaint is touching. And why do we smile on hearing this existential lament? Because it is not to the point. […] And who is to blame, if the critic has only read the worst representatives of the crime novel?” (p. 506) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-003

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“Everything stands and falls with the physical and spiritual geography of whoever is entitled to express an opinion on your issue,” Arendt told her during one of the early visitations, in an attempt to understand the intensity of the scandal she had aroused. Ravikovitch took an interest in some of Arendt’s books, The Human Condition, Men in Dark Times, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and her articles on Zionist issues which she found in journals. From these initiatory readings, full to overflowing and excited, she wondered how her own mind, her pen, skipped between attraction and withdrawal, “the Israeli-condition police” she called it privately: “But here in our place…” even here, in Chicago, from a long distance. “In our place”, where the soil wrecks the theoretical imagination, the phantasmatic play, the carnivalesque: Here abstract exaggerations shrink into hard facts that ruin models and turn basic assumptions regarding the human condition on their head; here it is impossible to import a philosophy without distorting and brutally appropriating it. Here it is maybe poetry… maybe actually political poetry, ipso facto, because… because of what? Relatively early, Arendt identified the syndrome as “Palestinocentrism”. Ravikovitch was not sure that Arendt correctly recognized its dark, aggrieved place in the lower belly. Mainly, their conversations, the notes they exchanged, letters, and journal entries, all stored away, were about political poetry and Palestinocentrism. We must get them to meet. Just like a “warm” woman would wish, maybe even need, to be “scalded” by a “cold” woman, one who tends to be detached. She knows things are not simple, and so she is not surprised to find, in the presence of this other woman, her country, her homeland, suddenly spread out before her in all its richness and vulnerability. How is it that in the space between words, voices fan out into an infinity of resonances that make her understand something she understood long ago, and forgot. Now too, understanding is elusive and may suddenly vanish into thin air. With clear and sober mind, she knows that they move in opposite directions. Sometimes she has the childish need to ask: Are you angry? As though to appease her for thinking differently. She tries to understand the comprehensive existential decision not to be conquered or penetrated. A resounding refusal to oneness: territory, affect, culture, language, sentiment – whatever pulls to the center. This is Arendt’s way of gaining a perspective, which is a kind of alienation too, a lowering of volume. Where she’s from people are used to full volume, and immediately shun a woman who lives at half volume. It is not her views as such they disagree with. They disagree with one who takes the liberty to live in a different tonal register. In this way they draw the limits of knowledge, cognition, judgment, involvement and interference; not just on their own behalf, but – first and foremost – for her. And for her ilk. It’s as clear as day, they say. And she, Hannah Arendt, for some

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time now has lost the right to understand, let alone to broadcast her impressions and her insights. But absolute clarity dazzles, as far as she’s concerned; it narrows the field of vision. Clouds neither deter nor oppress her. Ravikovitch and Arendt talk, in their way, about states of mind.

Second Scene During the first visitation, Hannah Arendt quoted from Auden: Follow poet, follow right/To the bottom of the night./With your unconstraining voice/Still persuade us to rejoice;//With the farming of a verse/Make a vineyard of a curse,/Sing of human unsuccess/In a rapture of distress.//In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start,/In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise (From: “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, 1940 [1998]) Ravikovitch asked her about The Human Condition, about the ways Arendt’s book set out the domains of human action and the temporal dimensions this requires, and the historic and geographical changes that shook the classical orders. Arendt started by saying: Basically I was trying to look at humans’ vita activa, the active life, from angles fitting each type of action; to intersect the horizontal, atemporal, phenomenological axis with a genealogical one; and amid the implied shifts of definition to balance between these domains and actions accordingly. To begin with the phenomenological level: an existential and functional tension opened up between the private and the public space. The ancients thought of the private sphere as sacred exactly because it was secluded and sheltered, linked to primal processes of birth and death, subject to necessity’s tyrannical pace. The private sphere involved basic experiences demanding the body’s effort and duress, labor with which everyone was bound up. When this dimension – internal, immediate – remains unsatisfied, external life does not merely become impossible; it turns stale, meaningless, much as intuitions are necessary to make concepts meaningful. And yet to be fully human one must disengage from labor. In temporal terms, this implies a shift from cyclic repetition to linear enterprise which opens itself to the accidental and the unpredictable. In existential terms, this suggests a shift away from labor to action and speech; the self arises from among others. The Human Condition seeks to demonstrate the implicit and explicit reciprocities between the private and the public spheres; the crucial economy or distribution of resources. On the one hand, the public domain cannot demand constant presence of any one of its inhabitants. But if, on the other hand, there’s no appearance before others, in the absence of response

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and recognition, our sense of reality will be unsettled. I present this without even a hint of the subtlety needed to distinguish between the public and the political (which are not one and the same thing), or the importance of the productive, creative life in both the public and the private domains. Yet on this basis I was aiming to look at change. This change shows two things: the historicity of what we tend to assume to be natural needs, and the inherent fragility of the human condition in modernity as a whole and under totalitarianism in particular. Ravikovitch: Sometimes, the characteristic distribution of resources in any given space changes radically. The change affects not only the priorities of the normative model, in the face of a totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian reality, but makes one wonder whether there might be more than one model – perhaps a number of models, each valid in trans-historical or a-temporal terms. And maybe there are more phenomenological foundations, in addition to the ones you presented, that allow for variations without interfering with the basic assumptions. Where, for instance, are we to place the Jewish home in the layout offered by The Human Condition? Its sacredness is transcendent, after all, exceeding the internal; the rules by which this home is run, including its material and intimate habits, therefore deprive its inhabitants of their rooms. “The King’s daughter is all glorious within the palace”⁴ refers to a woman who allows religious rules and injunctions to govern her body; in doing so she prevents these activities from being entirely her own or from being merely of the body. They are raised to a state of intentionality. The extreme case of the King’s daughter seems to teach this: without the binding power of religion, we all to some extent experience at one and the same time our body and mind, the gap between needs and desires, the fullness of satiety and the excess of hunger. The question of religion and the sacred troubles me in another sense. Your model secularizes the human condition with the aim of installing, as best we can, a political horizon devoid of a castrating awe; it aims at jettisoning the metaphysical or theological concepts that rob the political of its singular qualities. But an absolutely different state of affairs is possible too, one both archaic and actual. Politics could burst into the very heart of being, shaking up the body’s passivity, without this signifying “biopolitics” in the narrow sense. Or we could think of an incomparably more radical “biopolitics”. The private sphere might offer itself to penetration by the public to the point of suffocation, because the map on which they were assigned a place, once upon a time, instituted rules of exchange such that we must form a new understanding of not merely the so-called “political” but

 Psalms 45:13.

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also the so-called “private” without immediately rejecting the latter as a non-political or anti-political realization. Arendt: The book’s point of departure was the distortion, contamination, erasure, the destruction even of entire domains and subject positions to the extent of absolute dehumanization. As mentioned, on one axis I depicted a long duration of specific states of consciousness which are common in all human spaces. I used the historical axis to keep track, against the background of anthropological abstraction, of far-reaching mutations, some of which must be described as pathologies. As you say, this discussion is unquestionably descriptive and normative, and thus skeptical about the degree to which a certain activity taking place in either the private or the public space deserves its name. So what you call “biopolitics” in its Israeli rendition clashes with the notion of the “political” as I understand it. You yourself suggested the center of gravity of this discussion, which in this case is also its Achilles’ heel, namely: the family. My critique does not just (or even especially) concern the vicissitudes of the Jewish and the Israeli family, for the model of the family has long since informed Western political thinking. Again, one must keep statements of principle apart from historical observations. Secluded family life, no matter how gratifying, can still at the most suggest a multiplication of individual positions. The family does not have a world; or rather, the family’s “world” cannot replace the idea of a reality evolving from a plurality of spectators with a plurality of views regarding objects, which thereby become shared objects. Politics involves the transformation of part-positions, taken up between the home’s four walls, into a broad vision in the name of principles that can be generalized and renewed. The amalgam of modernity, replete with paradox and contradiction, filled the political sphere with the exigencies of pre-political and non-political life, to the point of erasing it; at the same time it also undermined the family’s authority both in private and in public. Throughout modernity, collective crises sprung forth – by no means only among Jews– when people acted as though they belonged to one big family and adopted each other’s perspective; when, imprisoned in their property, they could not allow themselves or others to encounter the different. Coming at the same spatial-conceptual scheme from another direction, I could have outlined additional anomalies – those associated for instance with metropolitan refugees, people who move their home out into the street in a different sense. Here homelessness is being put into the public space, calling the socialization process to a total halt. Unless they escape inclement weather and find temporary shelter, these street-people conduct their entire home economy outdoors. There they lie like babies, idle and speechless, fed on alcohol, which resembles an imaginary draught of the mother milk they never received and from which they were

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never weaned. The rags they wear grow more human than them, or maybe form a last vestige of their humanity, setting them apart from the natural. Ravikovitch: I’ll have to think more about what I do nevertheless consider a distinctive implication of the private in the public, and of the public in the private, in the Israeli context. That implication relates to a different experience of homelessness and worldlessness, which in turn amplify that experience. And that experience can be adequately identified and clarified neither in terms of the economic or technological processes to which Western society has been exposed, nor by the cliché that “everything is political”. It is a singular experience, an overflow of reality, over-involvement, compelled and compulsive, blocking visibility; a persecution between four walls, which gets in the way of an orderly metabolism, of eating, drinking, growing, raising, sleeping quietly, dreaming; an agitated angered struggle of “everything is political” against “everything is domestic”. There is Israeli poetry and Israeli literature; there are Israeli psychopathologies; and there are Israeli politics which resemble moments of archaic initiation, prior to the foundation of the tribe, society, or state. In Israeli political life, everything is at once private and public. You’re not convinced… Arendt: I find it hard not to hear your words as another symptomatic instance of avoiding the political, of turning away from the very process of politization that typifies the Jewish people from inception and that did not end with the Zionist turn and the change in its geo-political status. Not a different politics – but apoliticalness and un-realism, a passive reeling from one role to the next; a flight from actuality, from commitment to the world, from the analysis and judgment of unprecedented situations as they emerge, without resort to the grand design which this people is supposed to realize. In this grand design, historic trauma transforms into ontological distress, thereby binding an almost stoic indifference to death with a profound panic about it. This deep-rooted tendency is further entrenched by the warm intoxication of togetherness shared by all persecuted peoples, not only the Jews. When such intoxication continues long after the objective situation has changed it may lead to major psychosis, if not manifestations of barbarity. Ravikovitch listened intently. Scraps of notes she made in this period suggest that, in the wake of this conversation, she grappled with the politics of place and with the attendant refusal of the “political” in Arendt’s sense. This refusal did not attack life in the basic, primal sense. It seemed to escape the fundamental dichotomy between world and life, between the bright lights of the city square and the obscurity of rooms. In the liberal terms to which Arendt objected, the copiously political

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failed to liberate from politics and hence did not yield anything worth being called freedom. But it also failed to attain the purpose for which, on this approach, the political life arises: achieving a degree of security and peace of mind. Yet Ravikovitch might not have been thinking of this. Something else fascinated her: the flight from reality, the phantasm of flight, the phantasmatic foundations and the full collaboration of the “political” – consciously or not – with these abysses and their textual core. She believed that this was what writing must probe and that this, moreover, constituted a political commitment equivalent to her commitment to objectivity and truth. In her, the two commitments merged.

Third Scene This philosopher of the miracle, magic, and revolt, of forgiveness and redemption, believed that the world is what we make of it; our fate is not accidental, not only accidental, and hence not inevitable. Even if we cannot un-want things or un-do events, we do have the capacity to forgive. Truly forgive. We can change the way things are and their natural, ongoing process, our cumulative neglect, our transgressions whether or not intended; we can suspend or even halt without getting stuck helplessly in the resentful, envious, guilt-ridden, vengeful past. Arendt understood forgiveness as an intellectual ability. Ravikovitch asked her whether the body forgives, and what’s forgiveness worth when it doesn’t pass through the body, as though our word were one thing, and our body another. The latter doesn’t forget, after all, isn’t appeased, and doesn’t forgive. “Forgiveness,” said Arendt, “is directed at those who committed the act, not at the act itself.” “If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him.” (Luke 17:3 – 4)

Fourth Scene Did they talk about writing? Apparently the conversation, though entirely about lofty subjects, took them exactly there. Writing, for both of them, was indeed a lofty thing. Arendt hardly discussed poetry. She quoted, or rather, she recited; she put spoken words into writing, usually ones she knew by heart, out of a belief in poetic transmission as such, in what it engraves on the spirit by means of its powerful, objective, unmediated presence. For her, political poetry coarsely trampled the qualities that were poetry’s blessing: objectivity, directness, absolute free-

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dom from political-historical constraint – something which categorically distinguishes the persona of the poet from that of the citizen. Where poet was swallowed by citizen, Arendt contended, no matter what the latter’s political conviction, poetry immediately lost its abstract nature, its anonymity, by chaining itself to a thesis, an argument, a message. Arendt believed that the gods are vengeful, and rightly so. That’s what decided the fate of Bertolt Brecht, a poet she had admired until he pressed his writing into service. ⁵ Ravikovitch never ceased asking herself: how ought artists act in times of distress? What was their so-called responsibility? Should they repeat their earlier gestures more and more emphatically, and insist on the same search, the same path, which preserves their sanity? Or was such straining for normalcy, for a clean language in a polluted environment, by definition contaminated? She perceived “political poetry” as an unholy blend, ⁶a place where the boundaries between the intimate, and the religious and political are often broken. One might say that the truth of the place rang out in “political poetry”: Not a writing that directs itself to faith, to God’s existence or absence, to the polis or state. Not religious or political writing in the narrow sense. The local religion loses its most prominent feature, its distinctness; and the politics of the place is no longer an objective, well-defined, and universal domain, as Arendt imagined it. “Political poetry” for Ravikovitch spoke of the movement that runs across the household in order to touch the body and its private-collective rituals, under scrutiny and out of sight, by a tradition that socializes it immediately into a despotic, moralistic phantasm that eats into everything: the eccentrics, those in the backseat, the solitary. All give way to this immemorial taming that catches time in its net. ⁷In the rooms of the refugees of labor and production, refugees of refugees, the lyrical becomes political and the political decisively and paradoxically embodies the lyrical. This mutual invasion flaunts the rules of the polis and fuses with the fall-out of the symbolic system, at the very edge of experience. While the lyrical appears to shun the political as it would the devil, it also runs into it each time it approaches the window, the bed, or the silence of a psychosomatic self.

Fifth Scene In the course of a late visitation, Arendt told her: I accept what you say about the historically formative role of legends and myths, which lend meaning by escap-

 Arendt dedicated a chapter of Men in Dark Times to Brecht.  The Hebrew term shatnez refers to a ritually prohibited blending of certain materials.  “Time Caught in a Net”, p. 82, Hovering at a Low Altitude (2009).

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ing from the particular facts and stretching between the primal and the final scenes. Still, in the Israeli context you always revert to moments preceding the covenant, and even more to what followed it: catastrophes, expulsions, massacres. It’s as though you turn away from a distinctly Jewish martyrology. Ravikovitch: I go back to expressions of discord, first signs of distress, wrath, insult, the shift into speechless, wordless action, whatever precedes the bond or the emotion we will eventually come to call brotherhood. I go back to the first born as the first one forsaken and the first killer of life, the living dead, doomed already by his own name, by the very gift of being created. I ask myself: who is at the origins of violence? Who kills whom between the generations? After all, the parents’ role in the events cries out to heaven. Genesis tells a different story from Greek myth. “I have acquired a man from the Lord,”⁸ says Eve; a man, not a child. Next, as though from necessity, this implication is reinscribed in the same words God directs at the mother and her son. “Your desire shall be for your man. And he shall rule over you.”⁹ “And to thee shall be his desire. Yet thou mayst rule over him.”¹⁰ One must constantly read these worn exempla which are passed on in the flesh and flout providence and its limits. Arendt: You’re not the first Israeli I’ve met who approaches historical or political issues from a phantasmatic perspective. In laying claim on both spirit and flesh, it’s a crucial angle, not a marginal, contingent one. When I hear it, as I told you at the time, I want to revisit it but with another approach. What we have here is the figure of the victim, albeit in a subtler, more elaborate, and therefore more restrained version; I would even say the pure victim, as key and fate. This time, admittedly, not for reasons of apologetics, and with an exclusively internal self-critique. But it carries the same stamp and accompanies the same hermeneutic conclusion. Facts, you said yourself, make no difference. The archaic scene is transferred from Jesus or Abraham to Adam and Eve, to a new martyrological genealogy. What orchestrates the actual performance? Not eternal antisemitism but the expulsion from Paradise, which forever sealed the fate of the descendants of this lineage – Jews and Muslims; Christians to a lesser extent. These descendants therefore cannot be held responsible for the suffering they inflict on each other, nor the suffering they sustain from each other. Or maybe yes, the parents are to blame and it is their responsibility. But they too at

 Genesis 4:1, NKJV.  Genesis 3:16, NKJV.  Genesis 4:7, NKJV.

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some stage were the offspring of their parents, and so on in an infinite, lawless regression. Sacrifice and victimhood, it seems to me, must pose the question of the concrete conditions enabling them. A group that falls victim to injustice and cruelty is not thereby immediately lacking in responsibility, though the experience is not the direct outcome of its members’ actions. Each group and individual has a part in the existence and persistence of her or his condition. True, things looked different in the extermination camps, in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, but here I am not sure whether we should be speaking in terms of the figure of the victim at all. Or rather, in this particular case, yes, and only here, it’s about the absolute victim, an objectively innocent person, even from the persecutor’s point of view, who treated her or him with a reckless, a total arbitrariness, without any connection to their behavior. Ravikovitch: From the Jewish sources, from the absolute beginning which steadily transfers a nihilistic void and a pent up hatred from the universal to the tribal, one can identify a link between subject positions, which becomes blurred in the eye of the storm: It is a belonging that the parties in conflict try to deny so as to keep themselves categorically apart, and to avoid putting that belonging to the test of closeness. The Jewish sources allow us to identify a decisive involvement, a black sun that beats down remorselessly on Ishmael’s expulsion and, soon thereafter, on Isaac’s sacrifice. An unprotected core. An uninhibited father-ofall-nations, who isn’t anyone’s father, who either forgot the child inside him or took fright of him, as in the question Freud (1919) formulated: Who must be struck or attacked or killed in order to bestow life on whom? Abstruse states of family consciousness, dangerous tamperings with symbolic prohibitions, going down the hill till they reach a limit, the abyss. It is an implacable heritage. You’re right to remark that this way of thinking refuses responsibility. It is a refusal inherent in the heritage itself, a compulsion to repeat, a circularity which, admittedly, yes, my own argument reproduces by a slow trickling, no longer dependent on any personal identification, in the absence of heroes. No one takes responsibility; no one renders themselves accountable; no one, therefore, feels shame and guilt. What happens here, I think, in actual life, is another step along the same coherent mimetic logic or illogic. The same horizon stretches – expanding and shrinking at the same time – from the laughing child, the expelled child, the bound child, the arrogant child, the beaten child, the crazy child, the weak child, the chosen child, the small child, the obedient child, the child who does not know how to ask.¹¹ The child’s death wish. The yielding child.

 A reference to the section on the Four Sons in the Passover Haggadah.

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The fanatical child. The child who commits suicide. As though they took part in a process of caricaturized escalation in a culture in whose formation they were not involved. Sensitive or desperate as they are, fully compliant and without revolt, they register this culture together with their role in it. In daily life, this implication triggers a powerful, shocked reaction, flashes of perception right in the stomach, not through consciousness. Without allowing a pause to reflect, this then enables a bold, decisive transition to the ways of the world. Writing, to return to our question, turns to the concrete. Unlike psychoanalysis, it has no pretensions to undo the symptom by processing the mental causes of suffering. It aims far higher: to bolster the imagination’s work, to articulate nonverbal or preverbal fluctuations by means of the units of language, which are inherently the imaginary’s province. Anyone who writes knows that long ago this gesture pulled toward a collective tenderness, perhaps even catharsis, leaving the symptom unperturbed. Arendt: Even if our descriptive approach – and our conclusions – differ, we might be pointing at the same phenomenon: small everyday murders, an economy of sacrifice. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned the public debate in which I participated in America in the 1950s on countering discrimination and enforcing racial integration in schools in the South (Arendt, 2000). A striking photograph appeared in several newspapers at the time: it showed a black girl, deserted one might say, on her way to school, chased by a group of white children, and accompanied, or protected, by a single white man, a sort of stand-in father. That image would not leave me for days on end. Something about the expropriation of her childhood would not leave me in peace. Those adults became oblivious of both the adult and the child within them; or turned everything upside down, and let children, who cannot but offer them love and untroubled trust, serve as torchbearers in a battlefield that isn’t theirs, a struggle that isn’t theirs. These adults let the children prematurely cope with a conflict the adults themselves have not managed to resolve. I fundamentally believe that parents carry the enormous responsibility for children: for their lives and for their world too, both within the four walls of the home, and in the effort to prepare them, unpressured and uncompelled, to make the transition into the public sphere. It is children’s right to be children and remain children until they learn how to express their problems and to look after themselves creatively. Being children, they find it hard to judge. They seek guidance. They assimilate, imitate, and internalize. When parents or teachers disappoint them, they may become totally and passively drawn into the society of children. Thus conformism and youth delinquency become two sides of the same coin, the same innocent, blind faith of insufficiently mature young people who find themselves abandoned to each others’ company. And I

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agree with you on another thing too. In the transition to polemics, people tend to cover themselves in armor; they forget that in order to discuss things in a rich and convincing manner, they must, before anything else, make contact with the thing within themselves, withdraw into their protected-exposed places, a region which they worked so hard to establish, and which is the ultimate source of our moral and political intuitions. To what extent is this region fated, inborn, given, constituted by old wives’ tales and passed on with the mother’s milk? To what extent did we commit ourselves to form it, fully responsible…? Ravikovitch: So the division of essential spaces-times in The Human Condition was written from a perspective opposite of what I understood at the time. In other words, by means of the figure of the child you were actually emphasizing the crucial nature of the four walls. This didn’t occur to me until now. In the absence of protection from the external world, without the possibility to withdraw, we are prevented from natality. One must be kept away in the shade and guarded, must be cultivated out of the public eye, much like one hides a child, even though it is the child who apparently warrants the lovers’ entrance to a common, continuous world. This apportioning of spaces negotiates the crucial questioning of boundaries, neglect, protection and involvement – from the child’s point of view. The crisis of education is not merely a specific instance of the crisis of modernity: it is its very essence. This is why people don flak jackets when they come to discuss these subjects. The defective and crushed organization of the domains is also related to the huge fear induced by coming too close to the infantile, a fear that not seldom turns the actual child in front of them into a stranger, an ambivalent gospel. It was very exciting to follow this debate, including the response you published. I could not but notice the emotional effort you exacted from yourself in imagining how you might act if you were a mother in that situation. I hope my remark doesn’t embarrass you or make you feel uncomfortable. Arendt: I could not have written what I wrote without trying to imagine myself as a girl, first of all, and yes, as a mother, black or white, in that situation. Although I don’t believe that parenting always allows such clear-cut decisions, I arrived at an unambiguous answer. Under no circumstance would I expose my son or my daughter to having to force his or her way through a group or an environment that rejects them. Come what may, I would not force them to adjust to some constraint that I, the adult, introduce due to my active role in the public sphere. Psychologically speaking, it seems to me that social exclusion is harsher even than political persecution. It threatens personal integrity, the sense of personal security in its most natural form, the most precious, tender thing. It threatens that pride devoid of both superiority and inferiority, and whose absence can cause

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an incurable narcissistic wound. If I were a mother, black or white, in the southern U.S., I would resent the Supreme Court for putting my children into a shameful situation. That humiliating situation endangers their souls even more by compelling them to bear the burden of the parents’ world as if they were the main actors. Which brings me back to your remark. The implied subject of the incident went to the very heart of the debate: the loss of childhood. Obviously, I preferred not to write directly about certain topics. To a great extent natality is a late childhood, an adult childhood; that’s the best way I can put it. People tend to become overwhelmed in the course of a debate that invades their intimacy, even when they admit it neither to others nor to themselves, or even when they do: integrity here isn’t enough. Their involvement is naturally an unprocessed transformation, so very fragile, which makes it all the more intense and stirring. The black girl on her way to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, raises another issue, private but in fact fundamental, which again is associated with the question of place, the idealization of place. While no one put it quite in this strident way, they let it somehow be known: “You, who are not a mother, you cannot know, you have no right to know, you have no right even to imagine. It’s beyond your scope, your jurisdiction. You’ve got no grasp of it. You have no leg to stand on. So keep your dubious insights to yourself. They are simply invalid.” The actual place, the principle of the flesh – they have definite privileges, even in the case of those who in other conversations will fiercely argue their faith in the life of the mind. Sometimes, though more rarely as the years pass, I too grow weaker. My thinking about thinking itself is too metaphorical to look away from the call of the senses and of the soil. I remind myself, in order to regain strength, that if this is how it is, then it’s the ultimate negation, the final blow to the imagination, to literature, poetry, art. To the life of the polis. One is not obliged to plant a fig tree. But Ravikovitch remained in reverent silence. Because Arendt knew this after all. And she had to go.

Chapter 4 An Anonymous Hand in the Middle On Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poem “Hovering at a Low Altitude” I want to reach beyond that hill,/Want to reach,/Want to come./[…] I want to reach the ends of thought/Whose very beginnings/Slash like a knife./I want to ascend to the fringes of the sun/And not fall prey to the fire. (“The Blue West”, 87)¹ She wants to think. Nothing new about that. She must. Get to the ends of thought. There are some things she knows or assumes about the essence of thought, where it’s situated, its distance, its blindness, like those ancient sightless poets who were visionaries. Reality must be bracketed, the immediate impression of its objects lost. Don’t allow them to touch. Then, once they’re no longer concrete, remember them, bring them back again, imagine them differently by means of images or abstract ideas. “You sit alone./Your heart pains you, but it’s not going to break./The faded dramatis personae are erased one by one./ Then the flaws are erased” (“Surely You Remember”, 111). She speaks from experience. The procedure is familiar. The first harvest yields. All of a sudden, “[m]y thoughts keep getting tangled back in themselves./How easy it is/to go awry./ What I mean to say is:/Even a wing is no certainty” (“Of Wonders Beyond My Understanding”, 157). What was it with her? What’s error got to do with all that? How did judgment come into it, and where did it come from? What’s the connection between thinking and judgment? What poetics does “Hovering at a Low Altitude” reflect? Is there a link between the shift in her poetry from “early” to “late” and the position Arendt formulated towards the end of her life in The Life of the Mind and in the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Arendt, 1982)? Can we speak here of a “shift” at all? One by one, doubts beleaguer the possibility of thought from different directions: from outside, from the community, from memory. She wants to think, but it is impossible to think in this place. Why? Where is she?

 In Dahlia Ravikovitch, Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (eds. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, New York: Norton, 2009). Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Ravikovich’s poetry below refer to this collection. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-004

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In this struggle for thought, one side may be awkwardly called “cognitive.” The meticulous reciprocities between the phenomenal world and thinking, between the passivity of perception and its processing, spin out of control. Phenomena do not only lay in wait to lure thought away from its consistent and stubborn path but to give it a beating. They increasingly present themselves as demanding, grating, disturbing, overwhelming, distracting. Initially she leaves the room because of them, for their sake. Still, she goes out determined to struggle “very close to the ground”,² for she will most certainly not be carried away. To a considerable extent following Arendt, she rejects the seductions of autonomous, ascetic thought which withdraws from the polis to the worldliness of judgment. Like Arendt, simultaneously, she takes care to observe without active involvement, without identification, without empathy with the dramatis personae. And yet. “Suddenly my heart pulled at me/With bonds of compassion./Don’t I know/How much people suffer./Strange how I didn’t notice them till now./Am I taking leave?”³ If she notices them, she will be invaded and will lose the impermeability she needs for thinking. She will be flooded with emotion, she will surrender. She will turn into sister of mercy, losing the ability to appraise the boundaries between herself and others. Things though are more draining and complicated. Arendt believes that judgment involves plurality. Unlike the thinker who is sufficient unto himself, the judge, confronting a specific phenomenon or events at hand, has an interest in others and takes their perspective into account. Ideally at least, he addresses the pleasure of the common world. For Ravikovitch, by contrast, both thinker and judge are locked inside themselves. The validity of a statement is not affected by moves from one position to the other. Intellectual partnership is out of the question. She caves in under the burden of emotional reality, and so do the values of cognition and knowledge. She absorbs the full symptomatology of love. Appearance, intuition, sensory skill, none of these guarantee that we – two or more – will identify something shared. Things, whether weighed inside the home or in the public square, hold no reality. They are surrounded by imaginary circles, a visual and affective archive people build up to interpret what they see. That archive carrying life and death enables vision but also troubles it, transforms it into hallucination, a spectacle whose meaning is absolutely private. The exemplary space in which thinking occurs in this poem, in the craggy eastern hills,⁴ is not merely physical or geographical. It is, at the same time, charged with and bereft of intertextual and intratextual

 “Hovering at a Low Altitude”, p. 175.  “Next Winter” [translated by Mirjam Hadar].  “Hovering at a Low Altitude”, pp. 174– 176.

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memories inscribed on the observer’s body. Such a time-space creates a haunted perspective that stretches between many more than the three figures presented in the poem. She wants to think. Nothing new about that. She must. But looking ahead is immediately and inevitably overtaken by looking back, without a trace of nostalgia. One cannot easily turn one’s back on the past, nor keep out of the fire and brimstone, nor avoid the dangers by gauging them. “It’s a seductive prospect, perhaps – to turn into a block of salt./With a mineral power./To stare emptyeyed at this potash and phosphate factory/even for a thousand years.”⁵ Lot’s wife’s fixed empty-eyed stare, the advantage of oblivion, appear seductive when everything between those hills seems unchanged. The same dramatis personae, the same situations, language, and imagery. Everything except for one factor: Providence. No one will seek to avert visitation by the threatening, implied catastrophe, toward redemption. “(…) the men took hold of his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city”.⁶ Now it came to pass after many days, “(…) a hard hand grasps her hair, gripping her/without a shred of pity” (“Hovering at a Low Altitude”).⁷ Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Abraham are old guests, absent-presences in these hills. They don’t go alone. The Lord preserves all who love him.⁸ Vision and hearing are mined in order to advance the plot and follow it. On the way to Shur.⁹ Thou God seest me.¹⁰ Ishma-el – God will hear. Then he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah.¹¹ Abraham lifted his eyes.¹² The Lord preserves the simple,¹³ who see more. Do not lay your hand on the lad.¹⁴ There is justice and there is the judge. When both God and his emissaries, who ward off sickness and put a halt to evil, are absent, all that’s left are the rhythms of the body, immanent logic, binding proper, even if in its own eyes it rises to heavens, captive to transcendence, consecrated in and to his name. “[…] and the dead prophet shrieks,/Who hath required this at your hand, to trample My courts?”¹⁵ None. Because He who leaned over the man in  “Even for a Thousand Years”, p. 134.  Genesis 16:19 NKJV.  “Hovering at a Low Altitude”.  Psalms 145:20.  Genesis 16:7 – Hagar fleeing. The name Shur also contains the root S.V.R – to see or look.  Genesis 16:14.  Genesis 19:28.  Genesis 22:13.  Psalms 116:6.  Genesis 22:12.  “Jewish Portrait”, p. 190.

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The Third Book – the little child who wants to fly¹⁶– a monstrous composite made up from the poem’s three figures; He who tarried and refrained from coddling him – not wanting to frighten him with portents of love – is totally erased at this site. She wants to think. Nothing new about that. She must. Reach the farthest end. From the start. She evokes not merely the seemingly philogenetic memory, inscribed in the Book of Books and passed across the generations, but especially the seemingly ontogenetic memory. The latter intratextual memory is on display in this panorama. And what she sees can also be seen, after all, from behind closed eyes. Her poetic credo ties together and compresses her ensemble, figurative dictionary, motifs, physical and mental states, thus extending unceasingly between the real world and internal objects. From the earlier books an intratextual resonance is constantly produced, from the manner in which the figures of man and girl evolve, for instance, all the way to “Cinderella in the Kitchen” and “A Jewish Portrait”,¹⁷ as well as in the cycle True Love (1978). The attempt to think confronts a compulsive figurative repetition, which dooms it to a dead end. Cinderella sees those two “going out in their best attire,/elegant, glamorous, dripping perfumes,/their necks outstretched.” By contrast, consider the little girl in “Hovering at a Low Altitude”, a distant relative of Cinderella who has been expelled from her protective kitchen: her neck is not “outstretched,” nor does she cast a “wanton glance” with kohl painted eyes. Portraits of “pariahs”¹⁸ accumulate and coincide throughout her poetry. They’re ready at any moment to quit living,¹⁹ if they manage to look after themselves. Their minds rise above their situation, expanding and contracting, pushing and pulling temporalities at will. Cinderella here is split between girl and observer. At home, she announces, at least to herself: I am not here. “Her point of view/was uncommonly remote/as if she lived on Mars/the planet of war./And she clenched her fists and said:/ I’m going off to war.”²⁰ An apparently intimate and otherworldly revolt in fact undoes the distinctions between the domains. Doesn’t one see the mountains of the imagination from the kitchen window? Doesn’t one see reality as it is from the mountains? “Suddenly, she sees a coin in the dust – a spark./She smiles an inward smile./In her mind’s eye/rivulets well up in the thicket./It’s wrong to think she has lost her mind./A kernel of sun-crimson dawns in her heart./There.

    

“The End of the Fall”, pp. 119 – 120. Pp. 178 – 9 and 189 respectively. See above, chapter 2, note 7. “Cinderella in the Kitchen”, p. 178. Ibid.

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She’s no longer upset.”²¹ To understand the choked perspective between here and there, one must again take to the road and set forth toward another encounter with those who lie prostrated, bleeding, childlike, motionless; with vegetable people, liquid, withdrawn; with body movements that emit a gaunt stutter or a shriek. With an abjection whose proper timing has come and gone, and which in its pre-verbal, inaudible, unconscious way bravely says “no”. Lying on her back. Mattress, blanket, sheet and fever are her safety net. Her smallness takes up a third of the bed or even less, a quarter of the blanket./ […] Her legs drawn up, muscles cramped. They twitch and jerk. Sometimes Her stomach hurts her and then she cries in a voice that rises and falls, rises and rises. She begs for help, quick. Can’t budge. Can’t express herself nor does she have thoughts that require expression. (“A Deadly Fear”, 176 – 177)

The intimate revolt’s intensity does not fall short of what appears to be a gesture dominating her early poetry: the sensual and dauntless metamorphic hopping whereby she replaces one mode of being with another. Ecstasy turned static, cosmic dispersal gathered between four walls and found itself a route (albeit passive) to exceptionality and protest. Certainly it does not meet the community’s minimum demands. It does not show off. But that doesn’t mean it is senseless. The observer reports, describes, and surreptitiously interprets. The splitting between observer and observed occurs in each volume of her poetry. Even when it is a second-degree split, “truthfully” concerning someone else, and not a split essential to the process of thinking itself (always between two people, Arendt believed), distinctions blend into and amplify one another: “Remember, I told her, that time when I was six?/They shampooed my hair and I went out into the street.”²² “His hand grasped my hair,/In the hammering ocean/I was set to be wrecked./His hand pulled at my hair/In the swarms of the ocean/I no longer remember a thing”.²³

 “A Jewish Portrait”, p. 189.  “The Dress”, pp. 115 – 116.  “The Roar of the Waters, p. 95.

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“[…] when a hard hand grasps her hair, gripping her/without a shred of pity.”²⁴ “In winter she’s cold, really cold,/colder than other people.”²⁵ “And now in winter it’s very cold here,/for some other woman, not me.”²⁶ “An orange did love/With life and limb/The man who ate it,/The man who flayed it”.²⁷ “[…] How/Jacob’s love ate away at her/with a greedy mouth/As the soul takes leave now,/she has no use for any of that”.²⁸ “[…] a range of misunderstandings/and all of these eat away at true love,/with a greedy mouth”.²⁹ “She has no use for this business, Jerusalem”.³⁰

Love and use, and intimacy, and too much intimacy. At first, it is eating, simply and carelessly, with a greedy mouth; it does not descend into the objectification involved in knowing ³¹ someone else. Suicidal supper, freely chosen, swallowing to extinction. Yet in the course of time, and seemingly by surprise, desire and greed become deprived of each other. This may be the origin of the strange question: “Do we really love ourselves/even as Jonathan loved David?”³² We might have expected to come across Narcissus (even if “Only a fool doesn’t see that he loved the river too”),³³ since Jonathan’s love for David, Jonathan’s yearning for his friend, is a model of unconditional object love. And yet, could it be that Jonathan loved David more than himself? Or did he perhaps love David because he did not sufficiently love himself? Could he indeed truly love David if this is how he gave up on himself? Maybe he did not really love? Perhaps we did not truly love: bound together by fate, mutually renouncing, we fear to put our belonging to the test of intimacy. “Savta, Grandma,/[…]But there is no question/of the resemblance between us/that begot understanding without any caring.// […] I remember you once in a blue moon/or not so blue, /[…] [with] a dormant empathy./Perhaps it’s the transparent skin that unites us/you without defenses/I without defenses.”³⁴

 “Hovering at a Low Altitude”, p. 176.  “Portrait”, p. 124.  “They’re Freezing up North”, p. 191.  “The Love of an Orange”, p. 49.  “Like Rachel”, p.156.  “True Love Isn’t What It Seems”, p. 188.  “A Jewish Portrait”, p. X.  Besides its cognitive meaning, the Hebrew for knowing – lada’at – carries carnal, sexual connotations.  “True Love Isn’t What It Seems”, p. X.  “Surely You Remember”, p. 111.  “We Had an Understanding”, pp. 181– 182.

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She wants to think. Nothing new about that. She must. But an anonymous hand takes over. Life and death have forever depended on tongue and hand, the sorrow of generations lies in the palm of a hand: “And moreover sir,/ My life lies in your hand”.³⁵ “There a man loved me/Didn’t leave me a fingernail”.³⁶ “Daddy slapped the palm of my hand./He said, It’s the palm of a wicked hand.”³⁷ “On a night such as this, it’s easy to see/How deep the Slough of Despond must be./[…] On a night such as this, it’s easy to know/what kind of man would rape women,/ gagging them with the palm of his hand”.³⁸ “[…] like me, you would have no hand,” the father speaks from the picture [on the wall], “to wrest you away from danger”.³⁹ The strong hand and the weak hand hold each other to take the edge off the emotional clash between early and late, between the splendor of beautiful, breathtaking, or peaceful deaths that ruled everywhere in the past, and the violence described here without the slightest pathos. Early is late, late is early, here is there, is everywhere, too much. Too many things, too many spectacles; a thickening, absorbent, defaulting penetrability which hardly perceives anything anymore. Impossible to think. Possible. She can’t maintain a distance from the little girl. This is her space of creation. Thinking, among the ancients, opened up in the flight from the insufferable. So it was from the start. Its existential conditions emerged like this, in effect. You probably remember: “On the tenth of Tevet was the siege laid/On the seventeenth of Tammuz was the city breached/On the ninth of Av was the Temple destroyed./In all of this I was alone”.⁴⁰

Flow Chart Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality. To be sure, the beauty of a poem can provide the inspiration for endless meditation, but this meditation is tied to the magic of the moment, has neither past nor future. A beautiful evening is not the evening of the day, and is not a symbol for anything. Perhaps it is evening itself, evening without day or night. But always day and night come to spoil the beauty of the evening,

     

“Measurable Things” (translated by Mirjam Hadar). “The Roar of the Waters”, p. 95. “A Wicked Hand”, p. 54– 55. “The Bullfrogs”, pp. 116 – 117. “There Is No Fear of God in This Place”, p. 231. “History of the Individual”, p. 226.

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and only language, with its capacity for giving names to beauty, preserves the evening in an eternal present. Always the real evening shatters the magic of the word “evening”; always the continuity of life would annihilate the beauty of twilight. (151)

Hannah Arendt, “Bertolt Brecht”, Men in Dark Times To talk about poets is an uncomfortable task; poets are there to be quoted, not to be talked about. […] The voice of the poets, however, concerns all of us, not only critics and scholars; it concerns us in our private lives and also insofar as we are citizens. We don’t need to deal with engagé poets in order to feel justified on talking about them from a political viewpoint, as citizens. (210 – 211) For, despite the poets’ lack of gravity, reliability, and responsibility, they obviously can’t get away with everything. But where to draw the line we, their fellow citizens, are hardly able to decide. (212) [A] poet – that is, someone who must say the unsayable, who must not remain silent on occasions when all are silent, and who must therefore be careful not to talk too much about things that all talk about. (228)

Hannah Arendt, “Waldemar Gurian”, Men in Dark Times He had achieved what we all must: he had established his home in this world and he had made himself at home on the earth through friendship. (262)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [U]nlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological process of the living organism and the end of its ‘toil and trouble’ comes only with the death of this organism. (98) The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of the underworld. The non-privative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies. (62– 63)

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Dahlia Ravikovitch, “A Private Opinion” (Collected Poems, pp. 127 – 128) Pain is an inhuman thing,/I would argue,/For me there are no extenuating circumstances./Look, isn’t it ugliness incarnate:/someone secretly lost,/blackening away/withering away/without a wife, without sons.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit hem for public appearance. (50) From the viewpoint of the world and the public realm, life and death and everything attesting to sameness are non-worldly, anti-political, truly transcendent experiences. (215) [W]e see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nationwide administration of housekeeping. (28) The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized. […] Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever. (199)

Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered”, The Jew as Pariah In the official Zionist conception, it seems, the Jewish people is uprooted from its European background and left somehow in the air, while Palestine is a place in the moon where such footless aloofness may be realized. (156)

Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland”, The Jew as Pariah Palestine and the building of a Jewish homeland constitute today the great hope and the great pride of Jews all over the world. What would happen to Jews, individually and collectively, if this hope and this pride were to be extinguished in another catastrophe is almost beyond imagining. But it is certain that this would become the central fact of Jewish history and it is possible that it might become the beginning of the self-dissolution of the Jewish people. There is no Jew in the

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world whose whole outlook on life and the world would not be radically changed by such a tragedy. (185)

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Next Year”, pp. 134 – 135 This place is out of the question now./So much insult and so much dust./If you have no use for these people/leave them.//[…] What are you sitting here for, always at a loss,/always scared of what’s going to be?/Just give it a try, for once,/ remember what it says in the books – /get out of this Vale of Tears.//Next year/in Jerusalem.

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Warm Memories”, p. 94 But when I came back I was like a raven/Despised by its raven cousins

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind/ Thinking Without spectator the world would be imperfect; the participant, absorbed as he is in particular things and pressed by urgent business, cannot see how all the particular things in the world and every particular deed in the realm of human affairs fit together and produce a harmony, which itself is not given to sense perception, and this invisible in the visible would remain forever unknown if there were no spectator to look for it, admire it, straighten out the stories and put them into words. (132– 133) [J]udgment […], be it aesthetic or legal or moral, presupposes a definitely “unnatural” and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the partiality of immediate interests as they are given by my position in the world and the part I play in it. (76)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition All accounts told by the actors themselves, though they may in rare cases give an entirely trustworthy statement of intentions, aims, and motives, become mere useful source material in the historian’s hands and can never match his story in significance and truthfulness. What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences, because to him the meaningfulness of his act is not in the story that follows. Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and ‘makes’ the story. (192)

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Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind/ Thinking [E]ven if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it. (96)

Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture”, Between Past and Future [I]n order to become aware of appearances we first must be free to establish a certain distance between ourselves and the object, and the more important the sheer appearance of a thing is, the more distance it requires for its proper appreciation. This distance cannot arise unless we are in a position to forget ourselves, the cares and interests and urges of our lives, so that we will not seize what we admire but let it be as it is, in its appearance. (210) In the Critique of Judgment […] Kant insisted upon a different way of thinking, for which it would not be enough to be in agreement with one’s own self, but which consisted of being able to “think in the place of everybody else” and which he therefore called an “enlarged mentality” […]. The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity. This means, on the other hand, that such judgment must liberate itself from the “subjective private conditions”, that is, from the idiosyncrasies which naturally determine the outlook of each individual in his privacy and are legitimate as long as they are only privately held opinions, but which are not fit to enter the market place, and lack all validity in the public realm. And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations, on the other hand, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose place” it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all. (220 – 221)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hall-

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mark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call “radical evil” and about whose nature so little is known […]. All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance.

Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”, Between Past and Future Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them. (189) The responsibility for the development of the child turns in a certain sense against the world: the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that burst upon it with each new generation. (186) [E]ducation […] is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. (196)

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Warm Memories”, p. 94 Imagine: Only the dust was at my side/I had no other companion./Dust walked me to nursery school,/Ruffled my hair /On the warmest childhood days.//[…] Imagine who was at my side/And how much I wanted another.

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Australia”, pp. 126 – 127 […] that human animal/who carries her young on her belly.

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “The Land of the Setting Sun”, pp. 57 – 58 No one would come with me on that road, so I set out alone/To find the land where the setting sun/Rides his chariot of gold.

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Family Matters” [transl. MH] Plenty of brotherly love I couldn’t find in the Bible. Cain murdered Abel, Jacob deceived Esau. Joseph’s brothers, after they considered killing him, sold him

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to the Ishmaelites. […] Simeon and Levi, the Bible’s brothers who were most in tune, joined hands to wreak mass murder in Shechem. […]Eli’s sons were scoundrels. The prophets were lonely. […] If we closely scan the picture, we’ll see that there are brothers who throw into pits, but none who lift out of pits. […] Job too had friends but no brothers. Not that his friends were such a big deal, but where were his brothers in times of need? […] There is always, as against family values, the little, underdeveloped sister. Our friends we choose on the basis of a shared platform and close affinity, and we’re not obliged to share inheritances with them or parents’ love. Because friendship like this will never permit our hearts to forget. Not that friendship is perfect – as Job’s friends show. But at least they made the effort to come. Family values, like God himself, always remain concealed and mysterious. Especially concealed in times of need.

Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”, Men in Dark Times [H]e [Lessing] was concerned solely with humanizing the world by incessant and continual discourse about its affairs and the things in it. He wanted to be the friend of many men, but no man’s brother. (30) [H]umanity manifests itself in such brotherhood most frequently in “dark times”. This kind of humanity actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world. Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peoples and enslaved groups; and in eighteenth-century Europe it must have been quite natural to detect it among the Jews, who then were newcomers in literary circles. This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah peoples; it is the advantage that the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have over others. The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it – starting with the common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others and going on to the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world – that in extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness. And worldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism. (13)

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “Hovering at a Low Altitude”, pp. 174 – 176 I am not here. I am on those craggy eastern hills streaked with ice

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where grass doesn’t grow and a sweeping shadow overruns the slope. A little shepherd girl with a herd of goats, black goats, emerges suddenly from an unseen tent. She won’t live out the day, that girl, in the pasture. I am not here. Inside the gaping mouth of the mountain a red globe flares, not yet a sun. A lesion of frost, flushed and sickly, revolves in that maw. And the little one rose so early to go to the pasture. She doesn’t walk with her neck outstretched and wanton glances. She doesn’t paint her eyes with kohl. She doesn’t ask, Whence cometh my help. I am not here I’ve been in the mountains many days now. The light will not scorch me. The frost cannot touch me. Nothing can amaze me now. I’ve seen worse things in my life. I tuck my dress tight around my legs and hover very close to the ground. Whatever was she thinking, that girl? Wild to look at, unwashed. For a moment she crouches down. Her cheeks soft silk, frostbite on the back of her hand. She seems distracted, but no, in fact she’s alert. She still has a few hours left. But that’s hardly the object of my meditations. My thoughts, soft as down, cushion me comfortably. I’ve found a very simply method, not so much as a foot-breadth on land and not flying either – hovering at a low altitude. But as day tends towards noon, many hours after sunrise,

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that man makes his way up the mountain. He looks innocent enough. The girl is right there, near him, not another soul around. And if she runs for cover, or cries out – there’s no place to hide in the mountains. I am not here. I’m above those savage mountain ranges in the farthest reaches of the East. No need to elaborate. With a single hurling thrust one can hover and whirl about with the speed of the wind. Can make a getaway and persuade myself: I haven’t seen a thing. And the little one, her eyes start from their sockets, her palate is dry as a potsherd, when a hard hand grasps her hair, gripping her without a shred of pity.

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Chapter 5 Mother Tongue|Body Language: The Intimate Aesthetic of Arendt’s Report on Eichmann “To me Eichmann in Jerusalem, despite all the horrors in it, was morally exhilarating. I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it – not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro or the Messiah.”¹ “Justice … demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.”²

These words from Arendt, close to its beginning, entertain tense relations with the Report they introduce, a Report that insists on demarcations, spaces and subdivisions while also subverting them; a Report that shifts between sorrow and anger, between abstention and pleasure, between restraint and excess; a Report that seems to erase its elegiac subtext for the sake of extraverted provocation and irony, unpleasant “tones” that gave rise to intense criticism; a Report that, like texts written in the eye of the storm, brings out the best in its author – not necessarily through its conceptual subtlety or speculative refinement, but rather because it is tight and terse, and because it reveals, beyond the specific issues at hand, concerns and quests that have long since been associated with them. Over time, after its first publication in 1963,³ critics gradually came to look more closely and lucidly at the Report, to grapple both historiographically and conceptually with its perceived key challenges: Questions about the politicization of the trial, the critique of the Judenrat, and the notion of the banality of evil. Even those who successfully clarified her intentions and interpreted the powerful relations between the questions Arendt raised in the Report and the historical-phenomenological opus that preceded it (like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition), took it that Arendt’s language, the expressive

 Mary McCarthy, “The Hue and Cry”, Partisan Review, Jan.-Feb., 1964.  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 6.  The Report’s first version appeared in the form of five separate essays in consecutive issues of The New Yorker between February 16 and March 16, 1963, it came out as a book in May that year. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-005

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tool for her ideas, had “slipped” or been used infelicitously, as her writing was scathing, blunt and lacking in empathy.⁴ Arendt’s language, however, was not merely a tool. Throughout the Report, the language shows, illustrates, and operates various possible relations between it and the world, ranging from empty chatter and cliché to poetic freedom and renewal, in a way that takes center stage, becoming, itself, a focal issue with psychological as well as historical-political origins and far-reaching implications. Arendt presents a Report about language, and by extension, about aesthetics, aesthetics as ideology; a Report about the ethical or aesthetic possibility of a critique of ideology, of an active judging observation based on modernist assumptions which reveal a surprising association between herself and the artistic milieu of Paris between the two world wars.⁵ Arendt offers us a narrative text. The plot we can extract from it if we want to follow the stages of Eichmann’s career does not take the form of a sequence, since it is part of a textual ensemble based on eclectic generic principles (naturalistic, impressionist, surrealist) which also includes philosophical and ideological statements. Already in its subtitle the text articulates its difference: A Report – a secondary genre, apparently inferior, non-literary, non-scholarly. It is an interesting choice, rather than merely the result of the conditions in which Arendt wrote her essay, that is, as an envoy of the New Yorker to Jerusalem. For her, a report literally reports, renders account in the Socratic sense, so as to examine people’s views, extracting reasons and implications from each expression. Because she must deal with the paradoxical reality of a total evacuation of individuality, and a fortiori of thought and judgment, her Report becomes a counter-report, of the kind that the Nazis did not, could not, produce.⁶

 Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis, Wisconsin 2001; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, California 1996; Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, Princeton 1996; Martine Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, une juive, Paris 1998; Pierre Bouretz, “Introduction à Eichmann à Jérusalem,” in Hannah Arendt, Les origines du totalitarianisme; Eichmann à Jérusalem, Paris 2002.  Arendt lived in France between the years 1933 – 1941. During these years she tried to renounce the contemplative life in favor of action for the Youth Aliyah. Her attitude to the writers I will mention was at least ambivalent (in the case of Sartre) and gravely judgmental (in the case of Céline). The relationship I shall try to point out, albeit laconically, is not in the realm of the intentional or conscious, and diverges from what Arendt said at the time, as well as later, regarding her intentions and wishes.  “During the last weeks of the war, the S.S. bureaucracy was occupied chiefly with forging identity papers and with destroying the paper mountains that testified to six years of systematic murder” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, Ibid., p. 220). “’[F]or I still believed that accounts would be

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Moving the discussion to the realm of aesthetics and using a narratological lexicon may raise some eyebrows or even cause a certain discomfort given the gravitas of the subject matter and the – unjustifiably – dubious reputation of aesthetization and indeed of Arendt herself, who was seen to have freely invented and speculated at will.⁷ The ethical query, however, mediated by literary work –including Arendt’s Report as a document of this type – renders its historical anchoring more forceful, valid and insightful, along with the moral dilemmas it raises. An aesthetic response, in addition, indirectly raises the question of what counts as meaningful historiographical work, what are the criteria by which it is to be assessed, and whether these are exhausted by mere empirical exactitude. That the Report was published in Hebrew only forty years later, against a backdrop of scholarly developments unknown and unforeseen by Arendt, further emphasizes the pertinence of this question. To the embarrassment suggested by this aesthetic “inversion” I would like to add a paradoxical gesture by arguing for the relevance of Arendt’s biography to what occurs in the Report, to the workings of language in the Report, the workings of the (mother)tongue, in spite of her sparse first-person presence, because she speaks of herself so sparsely, here and in other texts, she is not easily accessible, she does not indulge in introspection, she is hesitant about showing intimacy, even in her personal correspondence. And yet, by means of the Report, with its many foci of discussion, with the whole universe which for her it holds, obviously, Arendt records the

demanded some day’. With these words Eichmann had to conclude the autobiography he had spontaneously given the police examiner” (p. 235). 7 Arendt reported on her work – both when she was preparing it and later, in defending it – in historical terms and without any speculative dimension. She wrote to Mary McCarthy in a letter dated 20 May 1962: “[I] somehow enjoy the handling of facts and concrete things”. The book, she stressed, did not contain ideas, only facts and conclusions. Even the notion of Eichmann’s ordinariness she did not regard as an idea but as a faithful description of a phenomenon-issue with which we would later deal from the perspective of language. On 20 September 1963, again in a letter to Mary McCarthy, she wrote: “The hostility against me is a hostility against someone who tells the truth on a factual level, and not against someone who has ideas which are in conflict with those commonly held”. The most unambiguous expression of what she regarded as the Report’s epistemological status appears in the essay “Truth and Politics”. Arendt argues that the differences between facts, opinions and interpretation must not be blurred. A factual truth includes a compelling, closed and uncompromising component which is beyond debate and agreement. It cannot be removed otherwise than by lies which subvert its status and turn it into opinion. This is how, as she felt it, they treated the Report. Facts became controversial theory. In Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949 – 1975, ed. Carol Brightman, New York 1995; Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics”, Between Past and Present, New York and London: Harvest, 1968.

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sea-change she underwent from melancholic self-absorption to a breach with melancholy, to what in other writings she calls natality, and thus as a result, a shift from melancholic writing to post-melancholic writing. The moment of change is not documented in the Report. It is the culmination of a long process that precedes the trial and grows stronger, however capricious and unpredictable its course, as she writes the Report. The latent exchange, in the Report, between the aesthetic and the autobiographical raise, apropos of language, another issue valuable to us both as a collective and as individuals who derive, as Arendt sees it, a disturbing, perverse pleasure from rituals of reading again and again, in the accumulating episodes of catastrophe: Is it possible to exit melancholy? This chapter follows – in Arendt’s footsteps – the diverse lingual range of the Jerusalem trial, including the epistemologically and affectively distinctive status of the speakers’ statements, regardless of the subject position inhabited by each: the defendant, the prosecutor, the defense attorneys, the judges, the witnesses. Arendt holds them all to their word. In terms of language use, this is a sequence, even if between polarities – between the shallow and the scrupulous an absolute differend obtains. Her attunement to the extremes, and not less to what happens between them, forms the core of the Report. She must find a flexible aesthetic position, a polyphonic position, so as to tell deeply differing stories: Eichmann’s story, first of all; second, the story – or stories – of the Jerusalem trial, and eventually – but also simultaneously – her own story.

“Black Sun” At the camp of Gurs, for instance, where I had the opportunity of spending some time, I heard about suicide, and that was the suggestion of a collective action, apparently a kind of protest in order to vex the French. When some of us remarked that we had been shipped there “pour crever” in any case, the general mood turned suddenly into a violent courage of life. The general opinion held that one had to be abnormally asocial and unconcerned about general events if one was still able to interpret the whole accident as personal and individual bad luck and, accordingly, ended one’s life personally and individually. But the same people, as soon as they turned to their own individual lives, being faced with seemingly individual problems, changed once more to this insane optimism which is next door to despair. (“We Refugees”)⁸

She is from somewhere else, no party to this pathos, she can look at it from outside, bring the omitted details to our attention, those that seem of no consequence, how they bear upon the “issue”, our issue, with the close scrutiny of  Arendt 1978, p. 59.

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one who found, mobilized, the strength to look it in the face, open to the world, our world, the flesh and blood world, flesh and blood people, human justice, she scourges its flaws and failures because they touch her, being shackled very tightly and inevitably to all this, “a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is”, she will write to Gershom Scholem,⁹ sorry, more for us than for other nations, and she cannot make allowances, explain away, turn a blind eye. Looking around, surveying the audience, she reports: “”It was filled with ‘survivors’, with middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe, like myself, who knew by heart all there was to know, and who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did not need this trial to draw their own conclusions” (8). Immigrants, like herself, “survivors”, onlookers-witnesses, she writes, looking at them, part of this public and stepping out of it, gradually establishing her subject position, not always directly,¹⁰ leaving out of the Report or between its lines, the repressed residues, a speechlessness she rejected, at the very roots of the complex processes of identity, subsisting between observer and observers, observer and actors, as well as actor and observers; a plurality that does not equal confusion, a plurality partly described and enacted in the text as an elusive hybridity, brushstrokes that go every which way, from the Judenrat to the Jewish police, to the Nazis, the question of resistance, the prosecution’s speech, to post-war Germany. The processes of identification go on disintegrating at the subject’s boundaries: This puts any chance for self-definition out of reach, let alone alliance with others, symbiosis with a loved one or a group of people, a community, tradition. The conscious refusal of identification and empathy is absolute, and, as ever in Arendt, it is at the same time extremely emotional, concrete, of the body, in spite of herself and overwhelming, both in regard of Eichmann’s ridiculous emotional manipulations, as well as concerning the prosecutor’s pathetic maneuvers, and in the face of the survivors. All of them, different though they are, are met with refusal, a stamping foot, bristling, a rejecting of taste and smell. She makes short shrift of the compunctions of solidarity, the desperate sticky consensus: she ties together her declared positions, her methodological decisions and aesthetic choices, adding up to a poignant question about identity. Or to put a finer point on it: To what extent is it possible,

 Ibid., p. 246.  For instance when she mentions, parenthetically, and without disclosing her own involvement in the retrieval of Jewish cultural assets in post-World War Two Germany: “(Incidentally, an eagerness to establish museums commemorating their enemies was very characteristic of the Nazis. During the war, several services competed bitterly for the honor of establishing anti-Jewish museums and libraries. We owe to this strange craze the salvage of many great cultural treasures of European Jewry.)” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 37).

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or appropriate, to build identity on traumatized foundations? It is a personal question which she asks herself before anything, and at the same time exemplary, in a private and exemplary Report, in the face of the poor way in which the events have been addressed, given the fast, symptomatic, pathological and insidious – she believes – subsumption of what happened in the Shoah within a schema of perpetual persecution. “On trial are his [Eichmann’s] deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even antiSemitism and racism[…] For this case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what Eichmann had done” (5, 6). In Israel, as in other national-cultural contexts, the Eichmann process introduced a new era with polar political-philosophical aspects, which nevertheless were also tied to one dominant figure: the survivor. This figure, fated to die, who survived in spite of everything, was borne down by an excess weight of guilt and suffering whose validity could be neither communicated nor refuted. Now the survivor’s silence was perceived as the source of his humanization; the breaking of this silence by means of a representative discourse – as the negation of his humanity and as a way of turning him into a victim once again. Adorno, Levinas, Lyotard or Nancy, for instance, took this stance, over and against the political appropriation of the figure of the survivor, which reduces it to a currency paid in return for restitution payments or arms.¹¹ Arendt though was at a different point in her personal journey: She is closely acquainted with the survivors’ existence, others’ need to listen to them, get them to talk, not to speak on their behalf, the charged transference relations with them which the entire society experiences, just so they won’t treat them disrespectfully, so they won’t dare to cast doubt or even ask a question about the dynamic and fickle weight of memory and fantasy in their stories. Arendt takes – or perhaps she is compelled to take – a huge risk which only the sons and daughters and their children will come to appreciate in time, for in spite of her age, she is closer to the children’s sensibility – a childless woman, who rebirths herself, turns “natality” into an

 Arendt addresses the question of the historiographic or poetic representation of the victim or the survivor in various places, including in her introduction to The Origins of Totalitarianism and in her essay on Walter Benjamin. Here too, Arendt requires a vital change of register, from the emotional to the symbolic. That shift implies an advantage for the observer who cannot – indeed must not – become mimetically subdued by the past. Lyotard’s essay on Arendt invites a comprehensive comparison: One the one hand, an aesthetics of the sublime plays a central role for some of the above-mentioned philosophers. On the other, Arendt adheres to an aesthetic of the beautiful, with all that implies for the epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical approaches to the duty and/or prohibition of representation.

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crucial existential and political category in her thinking,¹² symbolically shifting her generational belonging. They might have a better understanding of what it was that happened here, Arendt’s negativity and ambivalence and those, repressed, of the consensual community, exposed as they were all projected onto her, against her: hate, suspicion, fear, helplessness and humiliation, cast onto her, at a time when processes of mourning were only beginning, abashed, can under no circumstances hear, different, her prayer, jarring to their ears, that ecstatic tune that so stirred her friend, Mary McCarthy. They responded, all of them, to the music, the aesthetic, pre-discursive dimension of the report. “Hannah, let me tell you”, McCarthy wrote in an urgent letter dated 9 June 1964, on realizing that her blessing had turned into a curse, how I regret putting in Mozart and Handel. Jim warned me, and my internal alert system warned me too. But just because of that I left it in. On the ground of refusing to suppress something – not to be like them, who would never tell the truth if the enemy could use it against them. And it was true that reading your Eichmann did have an exhilarating effect on me, which was close to that of those two particular pieces of music, both of which are concerned with redemption. Jim said I sounded too girlish in that passage, and I agreed, but I said to myself, ‘All right, I won’t hide it.’ But neither he nor I ever thought that anybody would use it to show that I was exulting over the mass murder of the Jews. I don’t even mind that, what I do mind is that they have used it to compromise you. That’s why I should have shown more caution. Please forgive me, if you can.

She is from somewhere else. Her story replete with essential details. Her Report deserves a report, if we wish to know what happened, choosing and picking, here and there, from Young-Bruehl’s fine biography, from her letters, from those elements in her writing that intermesh, inseparably, with her life experience, from the portraits she sketched and which use something from herself, reflect or complement her. Arendt came to Jerusalem, its melancholic climate which gathers, reduces, declines to let go, move on. A black sun wrapped the harsh blue light. Not for a moment does she doubt the authenticity of the spectacles on display, anxious at their intensity. The loss of a father and grandfather

 This notion, which mainly relies on the Old and New Testament tradition and on Augustine, already appears in Arendt’s early doctoral dissertation on Augustine, and is subsequently elaborated in many of her writings like for instance The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. While natality is tied to the biological fact of our being born into the world, it also exceeds it. In other words: since we appear into the world as new, as beginning, we can begin anew, initiate, act: to initiate renewed natalities, and thus to escape from necessity to the unexpected, to the miracle. According to Arendt, then, human liberty inheres, rather than in some internal psychological tendency, in the ontological fact of birth, the principle of beginning. We will return to this later from a different direction.

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at age eight; in her young womanhood, the loss of her beloved Martin Heidegger; her early poetry from her student years in Marburg; her panicked departure from Germany in 1933; her temporary dropping of philosophy, which will evolve into a refusal of a certain kind of melancholic philosophizing and will be replaced by a different, worldly approach; incarceration in France at the Gurs internment camp, in May 1940 – which is mentioned in the Report, and whose inmates, she learns two years later, are doomed to be deported to Auschwitz. A few women managed to escape while the rest didn’t dare (the French Resistance had not yet been established; there was no safe public transport). Married her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, escaped to New York, via Lisbon. Very close in time to writing the Report: an accident near Central Park: two months of disability, nine broken ribs, her hair shaved. Her eyes give her trouble, a muscle inside her eye is damaged, she sees double, though it affects neither reading nor writing. All of this life, which gradually grew to fit her better. Young-Bruehl writes that this quiet acceptance of life echoes throughout her writing; it profoundly marked Eichmann in Jerusalem. ¹³ “Up to now I have been in very high spirits”, she told McCarthy on 4 April 1962, “simply happy to be alive at all. That began when I awoke in the car and became conscious of what had happened. I tried out my limbs, saw that I was not paralyzed and could see with both eyes, then tried out my memory – very carefully, decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English, then telephone numbers. Everything all right. The point was that for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me to decide whether I wanted to live or to die. And though I did not think that death was terrible, I also thought that life was quite beautiful and that I’[d] rather take it”. What measure did she take of the word “survivor”? Escaping alive from trauma, safe and sound, all the way to the total oblivion of having been so precariously close to death. Release from this horizon of existence may have included a release from pride, from the metaphysical lucidity Freud associated with the melancholic, the one who gives ultimate testimony of life’s meaninglessness; from his irrational pretentiousness, the exposure of the melancholic’s incapacity, his profound belief in his superiority, his subordination to the imagination’s temptations stirred by bereavement, and which is spoiled as a result, the violence of his depression, his passive demand, his monotonously repeated obsessive scream for absolute identification. She refuses, she no longer wants to write from the wounded, introverted place from which the melancholic sees the entire

 Young-Bruehl, 1982, p. 335. Young-Bruehl used a quote from a letter Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers on 6 August 1955, for the title of her biography.

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world as either friend or foe, a mirror of his moods, erasing any distinction between self and others, hard put to identify the proper resources of what damages and what nourishes. She tries to rid herself of his hatred, concealed, dark, of his madness, the betrayal he experiences and passes on, betrayal of his dead ones, the guilt of his survival, of the silencing, her speech being so precious to her, she wants to triumph over the empty space and fill it with words and public acts. She renounces, she also renounces, that subject position and its charms, with which she is intimate as illustrated by her early texts, on Rahel Varnhagen or “We Refugees”, where she’s still entirely exposed. There’s no doubt she takes in the survivors’ vulnerability, she cannot but take it in, those who remained silent for fifteen years, in Israel and elsewhere, or spoke – only just – from the sidelines. She will not be imprisoned again, be their prisoner, internalize their mistrust, lose her freedom. Determined, euphoric, she does not revert to the past, does not repeat it in order to speak to or about them, in order to point out their poison-infested ambivalence – which they either cannot or do not want to admit in order to point out at those who preserve their loved ones inside so they will not go lost, surrender themselves to the pull of death, those who are terrified by the hatred that inhabits their innermost space, and by what they might do to overcome it. Closely familiar she is with the expressions of negativity, options she took and discarded, she can no longer, she rejects the destructive potential directed against the self, and the easily flowing move, almost inadvertent, whereby it turns outward.¹⁴ She tries therefore, indeed, much like they blamed her, to tone the scandal down, to testify, to forestall what she considers a more dangerous scandal, the one involving the soft, soluble boundaries, ostensibly unreasonable, between such protected and entrenched subject positions: victims, persecutors. She is strong enough and impatient, ardently, eagerly she wants to complete the Report, as when one is dying to write, as, sometimes, we are virtually being written. She simply had to attend the trial, she declared that this was her medicine. She is unable to perceive that her healing, whose universal validity she does not doubt, may hurt, cause grave pain, and that melancholics cannot be urged until they are ready. She is absurdly forgetful, forgetful of her own wound, of the paradoxical conditions of the melancholic jail, which enable one to breathe. Remote and familiar, she must take a distance in the Report, which documents, with a typically modernist gesture, both memory and oblivion. Like Socrates, her imaginary teacher, she ignores the crisis in which her

 “And what surprises and shocks me most of all is the tremendous amount of hatred and hostility lying around and waiting only for a chance to break out” (Letter to Mary McCarthy, Fall 1963).

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community lingers, though from her perspective she actually appears overly serious by adding further confusion, paralysis, undermining the line of predictable moral lessons, and once she meets with refusal, opposition to both her diagnosis and its treatment, she is surprised, or perhaps she recognizes the unconscious satisfaction that ties us to symptoms and the repetition of painful patterns of behavior. Arendt struggles to be “without a soul”, to reduce her suffering, not to contain anything, not to keep things in, let it all out, everything goes, get released into a better life, better for her. She struggles for the “banalization” of her own existence, renounces the abysmal, radical – both in affective and intellectual terms – stripped of metaphysical or transcendental illusions, she secularizes, desecrates, flattening in order to live. That it is so hard to categorize Arendt is due to her surprising blend of modernist and postmodern sensibilities. The unmitigated deconstructive energy signaling criminal complicity between various subject positions in the course of the Report, subverting any expectations of a radical differend, shares one roof with a rejection of the ethical precedence Lyotard, Levinas, or Derrida accord to manifestations, albeit varying, of the category of the sublime. Arendt’s world is atheistic, immanent – regarding both good and evil. She cannot accept any idea of absolute sacrifice and responsiveness to infinite otherness entailed by a nameless, meaningless, and unrelieved structural traumatism: an idea which she believes is rooted in a melancholic animosity toward the public sphere. The absolute does not beckon her, nor the impossible, she refuses any god’s imperative– and by extension, that of the Other, the friend, the lover – regarding secrecy and silence. She talks, signals, conceptualizes, insists on public debate, on conducting the process of mourning out there, aiming to end it one day, to recover, restore order, rather than to complain and look on passively. And so Arendt’s anti-melancholic writing does not only clash with the Israeli mindset evolving in that time, or with the important philosophical tendency that will be taking wing from the late 1960s, especially in France. This writing sets her completely apart from the canon of heroic Jewish females we know from Jewish tradition, the more so because she supports bravely and powerfully a fate that others suffered as the direst proof of their failure. Her “natality” is one of the motifs illustrating Arendt’s link with modernism, though, here too, as we shall see, with a specific tendency. Right at the heart of the social-political experience she reproduces and enacts, where contempt for language is inextricably tied with the contempt for experience and the contempt for human life, she seeks for a more undiluted, possible truth, one that refutes the accepted truth, and which lays bare the ideological, weakening and sickening function of the latter. A truth of language, a language of truth, but in contrast to Heidegger and

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Benjamin, a language of public prose, communicative and meaningful. It is to this language, and only to it, that Arendt attributes radical status in her view of the world.

A Man Without a Story “Eichmann had written a ’book’ in the time between the adjournment of the court in August and the pronouncement of judgment in December”, reports Arendt (p. 222). This sentence inflects, with the sharp irony of the woman who will publish his biography much before him, a hint at the impossibility of her own project, and by extension, the radical impossibility to communicate in the strict sense, inherent in the very subject on trial here, an impossibility that, in her opinion, the court failed to address adequately and one that for legal, political, aesthetic and moral reasons must be confronted. For the first time in her life Arendt must deal, rather than with a historical-sociological-phenomenological portrait of a collective, with the story of a man who lacks both speech and a story. Her pen, which until then so much enjoyed – and would again enjoy – a whole community of narrative subjects – in both senses – from Rahel Varnhagen to Lessing, Benjamin and Jaspers, and all the transferential relations she spun between them, is now put into the service of writing about someone who was absent, “someone” who behaves but does not act, who lacks the necessary conditions for biography, namely: a memory and a language. It is Arendt’s aesthetic and moral duty – she has no doubt about this – to allow this abyss into the Report, as if to puncture it from within. Never before has she strayed so far into the darkness, though she fails to reach its end. Two conditions, then – necessary and sufficient for biography – do not appear here, and Arendt revisits them obstinately in the course of her writing. To begin with, let us quote from the places where she relates to the gaps in Eichmann’s memory: “His memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happened. […] Eichmann remembered the turning points in his career rather well” (p. 53). “He never changed his Madagascar story, and probably he just could not change it. It was as though this story ran along a different tape in his memory, and it was this taped memory that showed itself to be proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind” (p. 78). “Eichmann’s memory, jumping with great ease over the years […] was certainly not controlled by chronological order, but it was not simply erratic. It was like a storehouse, filled with human-interest stories of the worst type” (p. 81).

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And in the end, his report about the Wannsee conference: “The meeting lasted no more than an hour or an hour and a half, after which drinks were served and everybody had lunch – ’a cozy little social gathering’, designed to strengthen the necessary personal contacts. It was a very important occasion for Eichmann, who had never before mingled socially with so many ’high personages’; […] he acted as secretary of the meeting. This was why he was permitted, after the dignitaries had left, to sit down near the fireplace with his chief Mueller and Heydrich, ’and that was the first time I saw Heydrich smoke and drink’. They did not ’talk shop, but enjoyed some rest after long hours of work’, being greatly satisfied and, especially Heydrich, in very high spirits” (pp. 113 – 114). We note a number of stylistic elements: Arendt quotes descriptions or explanations supplied by Eichmann himself. Quotation marks are important in her rhetoric, serving to create a variety of impressions throughout the Report. As concerns Eichmann, this is first and foremost a close study of his way of speaking – literally and concretely – that is to say, the manner in which every reality does not just lose “something” of its existence, as every act of symbolization implies, but its very existence as such. It does not exist, even if, paradoxically, its whole existence is the result of this denial. Second, on the basis of additional documents, Arendt supplies evidence that Eichmann forgot (p. 112), adds information – anecdotal at times – and perspective, even where she repeats his words. Third, Arendt often shifts from the descriptive to the reflective by using conceptualization which allows her to shed a different light on things, to point at what has been repressed, what has been omitted, or what is not even present in the hero’s consciousness. This shift plays a crucial role in evolving the analytic-therapeutic duality characteristic of the Report and it is associated with a relationship Arendt develops elsewhere, in The Human Condition, and later, in The Life of the Mind, as well as in lectures on reflective judgment in Kant, a relationship between affect and the reflection on affect, its processing. She cannot linger too long with taste, with affect. She must judge. Thus Arendt actively intervenes in Eichmann’s story, and she does so mostly ironically: “His life was beset with frustrations”. In Argentina he was “leading the unhappy existence of a refugee” (p. 34). “Nothing but frustration; a hard luck story if there ever was one” (p. 72). She breaks up his story, the logic of his story, by syntactical and rhetorical means as well as by adding information. Moreover, she takes charge of the story’s time frame: “He was put into the brandnew department concerned with Jews. This was the real beginning of the career which was to end in the Jerusalem court” (p. 37). Not for a moment will she let him take the lead even if, at times, she suspends her last word to allow for a certain effect to be heard, especially where the unbelievable, the inconceivable, did happen and reality does not need her intervention to bear out its own absurdity:

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“Hence, the profession that appears on all his official documents: construction engineer, had about as much connection with reality as the statement that his birthplace was Palestine and that he was fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish” (p. 28), Arendt writes, creating the persistent impression of a total disconnect between Eichmann and reality. Only, we will learn later, as an “expert” on the Jewish problem, Eichmann actually did learn Yiddish and Hebrew. Her intense involvement with Eichmann’s story is the opposite of the restraint and blandness with which Arendt conveys difficult facts about movements of populations, enforced immigrations, expulsions, the data of annihilation. This is an altogether different register which documents the sequence of events without any rhetorical intervention, without pathos, as it were without words. Exactly because of this, in the garrulous and platitudinous context which she quotes and elucidates extensively, the huge, abstract numbers take on a flesh-and-blood presence: they are what is and what perishes; they are the reality of death itself, mute and speechless. But let us take a closer look at Eichmann’s “heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him” (p. 48). This is a fascinating formulation because it fails to fully agree with Arendt’s categorical statement in the famous television interview with Günter Gaus, shortly after the Report’s publication: “It wasn’t the German language that went crazy”.¹⁵ Madness – whose madness is it? There are countless quotes from Eichmann; let us, then, group some of them in terms of clearly defined characteristics which will then amount to a distinct type or category of expression. Arendt does not formulate a systematic philosophy or theory of language, but together the observations she makes in the course of the event form an invaluable statement concerning the knowledge of language and the use of language – which are not the same thing – about the abuse of language, on the one hand, or about the corruptibility of language – and for identical reasons, on the other hand, about the reparability of language. Arendt would not have written the Report, and she may never have written at all, were it not for this firm conviction. (a) One category consists of the language of hyperbole. Arendt, who thinks that “[b]ragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing” (p. 46), quotes some of the expressions he uses repeatedly to describe states of “elation” (pp. 53, 62) and great falls into abysmal depths. Thus, when he was transferred, against his will, from Linz to Salzburg in 1932 (still with the petroleum company): “I lost all joy in my work, I no longer liked to sell, to make calls” (p. 31). When, in October

 “What Remains? The Language Remains”, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr, New York and London, 2000, p. 13

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1939, he was moved to Berlin to replace Mueller as head of the Reich’s Central Authority for Jewish Immigration: “There we were, sitting in a great and mighty building, amid a yawning emptiness” (p. 67). And in response to the order he later received to exterminate Jews: “I now lost everything, all joy in my work, all initiative, all interest; I was, so to speak, blown out” (p. 31). The expressions that serve Eichmann here are not necessarily clichés. They are part of an existentialist and mystical literary tradition that teems with expressions of vacancy and elation. What renders Eichmann’s usage distinctive is not just that he revisits the same phrases over and over again, that is: the poverty of his language and its inflexibility, but rather the use of the same vocabulary for radically different situations. At the root of this linguistic performance is the absolute identification of the speaking self with the professional self, an identification that transforms everything into a force that either motivates or obstructs in relation to his work, and nothing more. (b) An adjacent category, and possibly even more misleading, concerns the places where Eichmann seems – first of all to himself and at times to others as well – as someone who observes his fellow humans, identifies with them, understands, acknowledges, is in touch with, and even interested in, their feelings. Arendt, who will eventually find that the crucial defect in Eichmann’s personality is his “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view” (pp. 47– 48), pauses at his emotional vocabulary. Eichmann recounts that the Jews “desired” to emigrate (p. 48): He presents himself as someone who did not wish to “hurt their feelings”. Here, in his own opinion – and hence the crucialness of quoting for an understanding of his self-perception – Eichmann identifies a feeling in the other, pays attention to it and responds to it. To the same extent he assumes and expects attention and empathy, indeed, even sympathy, from the other, also if it happens to be his victim’s son (chief inspector Avner Less). At these moments, Eichmann’s discourse, which he himself acknowledges is bureaucratic (“Officialese […] is my only language” (p. 48)), as it were rises, directs itself outward and opens up. It is the emotional, ostensibly personal vocabulary – as opposed to the distinct category of Nazi “rules of language” which were manipulated from the start to serve as camouflage and deception – that testifies to the absolute disconnect between language and reality, and to the eclipse of experience itself by self-deception. The pseudo-emotional vocabulary, moreover, betrays a megalomaniac appropriation of reality. Reality is “in his pocket”: He initiates it, is responsible for it, channels it and experiences it exactly as he renders himself account of it – no more and no less. As far as he is concerned, he suffers from no linguistic distress. Hence the difficulty and the challenge posed by Eichmann’s pseudoemotional language are huge – something which Arendt will indirectly point

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out both when quoting the transformation of affect and emotion into language from other subject positions elsewhere in the Report and when, parenthetically, she will part ask, part state: “(Was it these clichés that the psychiatrists thought so ’normal’ and ’desirable’?)” (pp. 48 – 49). Eichmann contrives to fail/foul linguistically, and, interestingly, has a similar effect on those who surround him too, including those – judges, “experts of the psyche” – who will attend him eventually. How is one to understand this linguistic “disorder” which is neither pathology, nor nagging “symptom”, nor necessarily cognitive defect? What, moreover, happens to a language and those who speak it when charged expressions such as “desired”, or, to have “a normal human encounter” (concerning the Kommerzialrat Storfer, a representative of the Jewish community, p. 51), become untethered and wholly detached from others’ material and emotional reality? What happens to a language and those who speak it when its usual expressions are ostensibly identified and give a (comforting) sense of a shared, familiar world exactly in so far as they actually escape the narrow professional bureaucratic plain to co-exist, as it were, on several levels at once? What happens to a language and its users when the absolute differend inheres not in the lack of adjustment between lexicons or all manner of puns, but in the use of what would seem, on the face of it, one identical lexicon? For it would appear to be in a speaker’s very choice of a certain expression at a certain moment, even if it is not remotely a stroke of genius or linguistic invention, that his or her sincerity and freshness of perception takes form. Here, however, is exactly where the problem occurs. The speaker uses indiscriminately what is available. In other words: common language which offers its speakers inventories of resources to denote situations of relatedness between people, first and foremost for the sake of communication between them, for cross-fertilization and crossimagining – here folds and evacuates into the scanty world of the individual. This is not common language, it is personal and non-personal, it erases personality and hence, sealed, it prattles frivolously. Arendt considers: “Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with his inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as well” (p. 49). “Eichmann’s ’dream’ was an incredible nightmare for the Jews: nowhere else were so many people deported and exterminated in such a brief span of time. In less than two months, 147 trains, carrying 434,351

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people in sealed freight cars, a hundred persons to a car, left the country, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz were hardly able to cope with this multitude” (p. 140). Is it possible, and under what conditions, to restore its specific, relational and intentional gravity to language? And to do so without concession to a linguistic conservatism that shields us from the vicissitudes of time, avoiding to hold on to such language as remains, which would turn it into cliché; avoiding also to buttress oneself in it and blame the lack of fit between it and the events on a regrettable error that will be fixed once reality rejoins its intended conceptual grounds. This is how Arendt interpreted the responses of the Jews of Austria and Germany to what was happening around them in the 1930s (p. 41). By extension, and under similar constraints, the problem of those who spoke the language after the war cannot merely be reduced to one of casting out the demons of the language of deceit, but involves regaining confidence in a language that functioned and to a large extent “remained itself”, common and available, in a nightmare reality. (c) The third category points at creation in language, with euphemism serving to produce an unprecedented material reality. The new reality, as a result, continues to conduct itself by means of the existing lexicon, wishing thereby not to cast suspicion on itself. The habitual, available words are borrowed to describe different or opposite phenomena, and in fact to create them, to make conditions and consolidate them. Clearly Eichmann was merely a user of such “creations”, which rendered language absolutely powerful, without a claim to originality or to “copy right”. “The Führer’s words, his oral pronouncements, were the basic rule of the land” (p.148). “As early as November, 1937, in the secret speech addressed by Hitler to members of the German High Command […] [he] had pointed out that he rejected all notions of conquering foreign nations, that what he demanded was an ’empty space’ [volkloser Raum] in the East for the settlement of Germans. His audience […] knew quite well that no such ’empty space’ existed, hence they must have known that a German victory in the East would automatically result in the ’evacuation’ of the entire population” (p. 217). Arendt dwells on the Nazis’ “language rules” to characterize Eichmann as a speaker who obeyed the rules. “Final solution”, “legal solution”, “special legislation”, “the specialist”, “evacuation”, “special treatment”, “resettlement”, “labor in the East”, the “human method” to kill by means of “euthanasia”: “It is rare to find documents in which such bald words as ’extermination’, ’liquidation’, or ’killing’ occur” (p. 85). “None of the various “language rules”, carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for “murder” was replaced by the phrase ’to grant a mercy death’. Eichmann,

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asked by the police examiner if the directive to avoid ’unnecessary hardships’ was not a bit ironic, in view of the fact that the destination of these people was certain death anyhow, did not even understand the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain” (pp. 108 – 109).¹⁶ “Only among themselves could the ’bearers of secrets’ talk in uncoded language, and it is very unlikely that they did so in the ordinary pursuit of their murderous duties – certainly not in the presence of their stenographers and other office personnel. For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter. Moreover, the very term ’language rule’ (Sprachregelung) was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie. For when a ’bearer of secrets’ was sent to meet someone from the outside world […] he received, together with his orders, his ’language rule’ […]. The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ’normal’ knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann’s great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for ’language rules’” (pp. 85 – 86).

 Dr. Servatius, Eichmann’s defense council, declared in his defense speech “the accused innocent of charges bearing on his responsibility for ’the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killing by gas, and similar medical matters’, whereupon Judge Halevi interrupted him: ’Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter’. To which Servatius replied: ’It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter’” (p. 69). Further on where she tries to explain how the gas chambers had developed, Arendt will explain the hallucinatory logic of the defense council: “The first gas chambers were constructed in 1939, to implement a Hitler decree dated September 1 of that year, which said that ’incurably sick persons should be granted a mercy death’ (It was probably this ’medical’ origin of gassing that inspired Dr. Servatius’ amazing conviction that killing by gas must be regarded as a ’medical matter’” (p. 108). Here it is interesting to point out Arendt’s rhetorical structuring: In an earlier paragraph she had referred to Gerald Reitlinger’s book on the “final solution”, as follows: “the extermination program in the Eastern gas factories grew out of Hitler’s euthanasia program”. For a moment, we are drawn into the Führer’s delirious world, with neither explanation nor intervention. The next paragraph, which was presented above, goes back to quoting from the order and offers, for a second time and in parenthesis, the defense council’s argument. Arendt, therefore, shifts between the delusional experience of reality and how it functioned according to a coherent and hermetically tight logic which seeped into the very experience of those who lived by it, a seepage which obviously did not end when it collapsed.

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And finally, the following, important testimony: “He was quite capable of sending millions of people to their death, but he was not capable of talking about it in the appropriate manner without being given his ’language rule’. In Jerusalem, without any rules, he spoke freely of ’killing’ and of ’murder’, of ’crimes legalized by the state’; he called a spade a spade” (p. 145). Reality-creating language seeps into whatever constitutes the human in order then to remove its humanity: imagination, decision, action, intimacy and even the instincts, immediate responses like disgust or abhorrence. Hence, even when, in the end, Eichmann himself sheds the “language rules”, and thereby “rules” as it were over transgression, as in the Bible, that is to say, takes control over desire, speaks it,¹⁷ and finds the right words – even then language and experience remain hermetic to one another and do not pass mutual information. The rules of language produced a reality which he may now be ready to call by its name, or, in fact, he may now be prepared to adopt the full range of legal language. “Language rules” may be shed but not so skin. And Eichmann is wholly covered by it.

Banality As to the question of banality, two points in the Report stand out. One is that the word, or the concept (not the adjective), appears only once, right towards the end, towards the gallows: “He was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. […] In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was ’elated’ and he forgot that this was his own funeral” (p. 252). And Arendt, reconnecting in a final gesture memory and language as the condition for becoming a subject, and in this case, the condition for confronting your own death, the fear of death – even from this Eichmann draws away attention – here testifies: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-andthought-defying banality of evil” (p. 252). The second point, which appears in the Epilogue, where Arendt deals with the debate that erupted once the Report was published, a point which re-appears both in her correspondence and in the Introduction to The Life of the Mind, is her

 In Hebrew the Biblical root “mashal”, which appears in Genesis 4 [addressed to Cain by God], refers both to ruling and verbalizing.

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insistence that this is not a thesis or a doctrine: “When I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. […] He [Eichmann], to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing” (p. 287). Throughout, Arendt actually tries to show banality, its sallow and defiantly camouflaged face; show the shapes it takes rather than explaining it, let alone offering a wholesale theory of it. Indeed, she chooses a flexible everyday notion, simple, whose use does not attract attention, a concept, hence, that totally merges with what it comes to describe and that itself features the very same disproportionate tension between its availability and its cheapness on one hand, and the monstrosity which it denotes on the other. She comes to this in the end, as to a pseudo-apotheosis because there is no apotheosis, because there is a nonapotheosis: banality. Just like that. And she does this only after first having put on display, one after the other, the manifestations of banality, and predominantly, its manifestations in language. In the face of this quantitative accumulation of rules of “clean language”, of euphemisms, clichés, and platitudes – which eventually is revealed as a wholly different and unprecedented quality of speech, Arendt points at what she regards as the inherent link between the banality of language and the banality of evil. In doing so she introduces a broad and rich field for thought which has not yet been mined, not by Arendt herself either. For linguistic banality does not directly lead to evil. It may stay within the bounds of cliché – and by extension within the bounds of uniformization, regularization, and monotony, whose damage to the ability to judge is not to be ignored but without lapsing into totalitarian evil. Though Sartre’s Nausea,¹⁸ for instance, in contrast with his more conclusive story “The Childhood of a Leader” (1939), is situated in the dangerous zone of bad faith of the anti-Dreyfusard bourgeoisie, it does not cross the lines into the banality of evil. It would seem that it is Arendt’s distinct modernism, the humanist modernism that forms the basis of the Report, which categorically confirms that the birth of the subject is in language, in speech, in verbalization; it is her modernism that deems it worthy to labor on behalf of language/the imagination, and that is aware how easy it is to give up, stop paying heed, to neglect and reduce, indeed, wholly abolish them in the face of the given. At some point, when cannot be foretold, and as a result of a combination of structural and historical circumstances which she elucidated and described at length in her Ori-

 Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée, Paris 1938. Cf. Roquentin’s visit in the municipal museum of Beauville, which is full of sounds announcing Vichy.

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gins of Totalitarianism, the monster becomes possible. Arendt, regrettably, never attempted a synthesis between the Report’s perception of language and the socio-historical and phenomenological perspective she presented in this earlier work. Arendt thus weaves her threads and avoids theoretization. Repeatedly language and memory come up as the constitutive factors of subjectivity: a relational subject who exists among others, as part of a multitude whom she or he takes into account, as opposed to a coiled self who, even in public, sees itself only. The performances of banal language are directly associated with an absolute self-absorption: “Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler […] was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them towards the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” (p.106). False language, or what Arendt more than once calls bad faith (rendering it explicitly Sartrean characteristics), depends on putting the private self, which is subject to the collective self and materializes as part of it, at the center. Arendt finds, here, a total inversion of the spaces of existence and of the world, a radical injury to the human condition, that is to say: a transposition of the order of necessity which obtains in the private space to the political space, as well as a total conformism regarding the “demands” of the political as the self undergoes paradoxical erasure. An object-less self, one reproduced and reflected in the collective without entertaining any reciprocal relations with it, is a self that registers global, historical-political events as part of organic, natural – and hence also destructive – processes. Such a self becomes immediately enthralled, it does not intervene. “Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. […] [T]he practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a prerequisite for survival” (p. 52). And so the one trait of banality suggested by Eichmann’s language is a total confusion, a true inversion, of the domains of existence. If the Nazis in their sophistication willfully created a language of deceit, then Eichmann was, as it were, “born into it”, completely saturated by it and living everything that happened around him, in every sphere and on every plain, as though it was “his

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job”. For him there is no world or public space with which he can make contact. He is therefore not in the position to recognize the meaning and consequences of the “job” he is doing. In the terms of The Human Condition what we have here is an animal laborans which, while it produces corpses and changes the order of the world, never, even for an instant, loses the cramped nature of its scope. Hence Arendt constantly emphasizes the narrowness of Eichmann’s perspective. She writes, in one of the most incisive sentences of the Report: “What for Hitler, the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution […] was among the war’s main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world” (p. 153). At times, describing this aspect of Eichmann’s banality, Arendt uses the weapon of de-banalization, that is: the refusal of authority, or rather: contempt of authority. As she writes in On Violence, authority assumes recognition. Whoever wishes to obey or respect it must not ask questions, and authority, from its side, needs not impose itself forcefully to convince her or him. The enemy of authority, therefore, is ridicule and the sure way to question it is by laughter. Many times, this technique appears in the Report as the spectacle of banality is set off by resistance, the writer’s de-banalization. Arendt’s laughter, or her “tone”, became an issue, explicit as well as inflected, in the post-publication debate. Its crucial role – both in the presentation and the questioning of banality – must be understood in terms of the importance she attaches (always through the modernist-humanist prism) to the counter-factual, to the possibility of natality, to the fact that it could have been otherwise, that it may, in the future, be otherwise. This is for instance how Arendt describes Eichmann’s involvement in the fantastic negotiations about “blood for goods”, the bargaining, during the horse-trading with Kästner, around saving Jewish lives. “There was a considerable haggling over prices, and at one point, it seems, Eichmann also got involved in some of the preliminary discussions. Characteristically, his price was the lowest, a mere two hundred dollars per Jew – not, of course, because he wished to save more Jews but simply because he was not used to think big” (p. 143). Sometimes the laughter, Arendt’s laughter, is just a matter of an added particle: “He even read one more book” (p. 50). The other mark of banality is related to the fact that it is likely to be “deep rooted”, as it tends to thicken over time. The quantity of banalities sediments into quality, into “Banality” with a capital B. And indeed, only at the end of the Report can Arendt say that everything we have seen so far – quantity transformed into quality which in turn went on to accumulate, and vice versa, and once again, uninterruptedly – that all this is the “banality” of evil literally, and insist that this remains on the descriptive level, unconceptualized, without

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theory. Banality grew into a quality that constantly increased quantitatively, incessantly, and no one got in its way; for this is what it would have taken, according to Arendt: a person – man, woman – people to stop it. The monstrosity we are trying to understand is situated in this unprevented drift between the swelling number of ongoing manifestations of the “banal” and the new “quality” of the banal. As a rule, it should be noted that the words “radical” and “radicalness”, for which Arendt’s detractors searched in a panic and knowingly, are far from absent from the Report. In fact, they are far more common than the rarely used words “banal” or “banality”. Banality, in Arendt’s view, does not lack seriousness or gravity, even fanaticism. It does by no means exclude these characteristics where no one questions or ridicules the rules of the game. Again and again, Arendt describes so-called “negotiations”, meetings, decisions and discussions which were all marked by a rigorous, irrefutable logic. For her, Eichmann is definitely a “radical” Nazi. His banality is radical, utterly extreme. It is not moderate: so deep-rooted is his banality that he cannot control it. When he states that he is prepared to be judged by an Israeli court, in these words: “I wish to be at peace with myself at last” (p. 241), Eichmann – along with Arendt who is quoting him – momentarily creates the impression that he has learned to speak, that he has learned to think : for according to the Socratic approach that Arendt confirms in Life of the Mind, isn’t the life of thought realized in the possibility of the harmonious co-existence of a reflective self, of “two-in-one”? And when he hears about the guilt experienced by the younger generation of Germans, he responds: “I wanted to do my part in lifting the burden of guilt from German youth, for these young people are, after all, innocent of the events, and of the acts of their fathers, during the last war” (p. 242). Arendt, however, adds immediately and conclusively: “Of course, all this was empty talk. What prevented him from returning to Germany of his own free will to give himself up?” (p. 243). Language vanquishes man who defeats language. The latter leads him astray and he leads astray himself and the others. “[T]his kind of talk gave him feelings of elation, and indeed it kept him in something approaching good spirits throughout his stay in the Israeli prison. […] There was some truth behind the empty talk” (p. 243). The vicious or crazy cycle between language and mankind – can it still support the line Arendt drew between the sanity of the former and the madness of the latter? Only if we sympathize with the humanist anthropology which underlies her project from start to end.

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The Trial, the Witnesses, and De-Banalization A woman sits in the court house. Why a woman? Every human. Every human sits in the courthouse, at least once in their lives, as a spectator, at least. Her gaze passes over the audience, the judge, the accused, the prosecutors, the room, the lighting. Her ears are intent but her attention swerves, extremely focused and very scattered, sensitive, sharp and selective, something draws her attention, she gets stuck, redirects her focus a little to herself, the procedure anyway has a pace of its own, she’ll pick it up in a little while, and an internal discourse sets in, discussion, negotiation, a coming to terms, a lapse into feeling, leaps and bounds and runnings this way and that, and out again, followed by a gathering inward. Whether woman or man. In the court house, cinema, theatre, therapy, ceremony, work, conference. Even at the Eichmann trial. “’Beth Hamishpath’ – the House of Justice: these words shouted by the court usher at the top of his voice make us jump to our feet as they announce the arrival of the three judges, who, bareheaded, in black robes, walk into the courtroom from a side entrance to take their seats on the highest tier of the raised platform” (p. 3). It should be noted that Arendt might have chosen different verbs. She chose “to shout” and “make one jump”, bringing in the weapon of ridiculing authority, very remote from the graveness of the occasion it would seem. Because this ridicule is grave and not casual or capricious; it pulls the gaze sideways and suggests, without further ado or beating around the bush, another frame from which to experience anew, to read anew the Jerusalem trial. Not from the heart, in both senses. From where, then? For we must, in all seriousness, ask whether this “not from the heart” is therefore necessarily heartless or hard-hearted. Faint-hearted, in any case, it is not. Shouting is the tone – this time not Arendt’s, the reporter, but of what she hears, first of all, among the other voices. And what she hears is not simply very loudly spoken words. She hears shouting. The first pages of the Report are full of parentheses which weave between opening words and elevated words and lofty quotes, and create a powerful tension between various levels of discourse, between pathos and the storm of her emotions which is no less full of pathos but of another kind. In parenthesis the storm breaks out at the most celebratory moments, the most manipulated and channeled and directed moments, we all know this. It may deceive us, pull us along into daydreaming, recollection, some persistent fixation. It becomes insufferably predominant. We can try with some success to tease it out, or alternatively, we may, as we come to report on what happened, completely repress it from the events, as if it never was, as if it was of no importance, so much less than what is at issue here. Arendt, however, took the work of reporting, of giving account, in utter se-

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riousness and she renders it almost as in psychoanalysis, taken to pieces, in all directions, into the margins, into the corridor-conversations, the associative parentheses, opening and closing restlessly, a Report that reports to the letter. In the opening paragraph, immediately, the question of language arises: “The German-speaking accused party, like almost everyone else in the audience, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German” (p. 3). For Arendt, it must be stressed, the “comedy” takes place in German, her mother tongue. This mother tongue is under attack from all sides. It has been crushed by the Nazis in general and by Eichmann specifically. Here, in the courtroom, it is not being “crushed”: this would be a bad exaggeration. Only a certain neglect, insensitivity perhaps, a superficial approach. Banal? Arendt expresses with special openness, not less so than the interview with Günter Gaus will show in the future, her neurotic, forlorn attitude to her mother tongue. And this outrageous contact with language, which jars, coarsens and impoverishes it, will accompany the Report throughout, her intense involvement with the events as well as her alienation from them. For at each and every turn she encounters lack of respect for the language. On the part of the court usher too. There is no need for shouting. It seems to me that these are not merely trite remarks dropped on the way to the issues that really count. Among the descriptive sentences in the first pages which relate to the spectators and listeners, the following statement catches the eye: “[T]his audience … was filled with ’survivors’, with middle-aged and elderly people, immigrants from Europe, like myself, who knew by heart all there is to know, and who were in no mood to learn any lessons and certainly did not need this trial to draw their own conclusions. As witness followed witness and horror was piled upon horror, they sat there and listened in public to stories they would hardly have been able to endure in private, when they would have to face the storyteller” [p. 8]. As said, Arendt does not often write in the first person, nor does she tend to include herself so directly in this type of “we”. What this means is that here, at least, at the start, she regards herself as part of the public and does not keep a distance. She nevertheless chooses to refine the picture in two ways, though her additions, for the time being, are not yet clear, and in fact require to read the entire Report from the point of view of someone observing the witnesses. Arendt presents the word “survivors” in quotation marks, in contrast with the word “immigrants”. Later she will remove the quotation marks: “(Ninety of them were survivors in the strict sense of the word, they had survived the war in one form or another of Nazi captivity.)” (p. 223). It seems therefore that when the word ap-

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pears in quotation marks, she is suggesting a more general sense in which she can be included, while in the strict sense Arendt, certainly, is not a survivor. At the end, another switch occurs. Again, the word “survivors” appears within quotation marks: “The procession started […] with eight witnesses from Germany […] but they were not ’survivors’; they had been high-ranking Jewish officials in Germany and were now prominent in Israeli public life, and they left Germany prior to the outbreak of war” (p. 224). If the criterion is the time of leaving Germany, then Arendt herself is not a survivor, neither in quotation marks nor outside them.¹⁹ What is happening here? What is happening with her? Why does the gap open so decisively, so resolutely? Even if, and precisely because, this concerns nothing but a slip of the pen. For unquestionably this makes for a heavy cloud over the Report and any reading of it. Let us return to the first quote. The witness box allows for conversation among the “survivors”, that is, among the survivors in the broad sense. Such conversation is a privilege they did not and do not enjoy on the individual level. Arendt was familiar with the survivors community. Here she is saying something very intimate, very painful, about how much they, including maybe she herself too, are able to bear. This is not about a conflict with the younger generation or with the Israeli sabras who are not willing to hear. This is about the community of survivors, their inability to recount a story and to listen to it facing each other, and it is about the supreme opportunity which is given them here; supreme because, in Arendt’s opinion, this is about values that structure the public sphere, the political sphere. At the start of the trial at least, that is, she seems to wholly surrender to this “politicization”, which for her is different from that of the prosecutor or the Prime Minister who “speaks from his throat”. She surrenders to the witnesses’ accounts and it may even be that she is full of expectation. Not to learn any lessons and to know more. What does she expect, then? How does she expect or think the horror should be spoken of? Is she dis-

 The issue of quotation marks is extremely important if we want to follow how the Report unfolds. One issue that sparked debate was, as is well known, associated with the role of the Judenrat. If only she had not said, and so assertively: “The whole truth was…” (p. 125). Still it should be noted that only ten lines earlier appears the usual formula of the legal oath, i. e., to speak: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. In Arendt’s repeated rendering of this, two more times in fact, she unbinds the formula, in full awareness, in order to give it another effect, shorn of ritual camouflage. She is conscious, here, of moving away from the legal question to another one, as everyone in this trial does while trying in vain to keep things within bounds. In terms of substance, what she writes about the “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society – not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims” (ibid., p. 125) coheres with her position in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

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appointed? By what exactly? What is the nature of her reparative language project? Can it be understood? Can it be accepted? Even as banality refers to or describes verbal poverty and the inability to tell, the escape from banality is connected to the ability to tell. To language and the manner in which it takes the speaker from the order of tormented and absolutely private experience to the order of public appearance and communication with others, Arendt attributes aesthetic, political, historical and moral significance. But first and foremost putting things into words is existentially and therapeutically significant, something which is suggested by the quote from Isak Dinesen with which Arendt heads the chapter on “Action” in her book The Human Condition. Like an extremely demanding, perhaps impatient and certainly unrealistic psychoanalyst, Arendt expects experience to be processed without residue: demanding and unrealistic, in terms of her own Report which derives its vitality, its validity, its humaneness, and its wisdom from the relationship between text and its parenthetical statements, from what constitutes the “body” of the text, and what at times goes out of control. Thus, for instance – and it makes one smile: “The purest and clearest account came from Zivia Lubetkin Zuckerman, today a woman of perhaps forty, still very beautiful, completely free of sentimentality or self-indulgence, her facts were well organized, and always sure of the point she wished to make” (p. 121). Purity and clarity, indeed, versus corrupted and banal language; as opposed to the “elation” and the pathos she cannot bear, a move away from the psychosomatic into the lucid “who” of the speaker. But this is not all. A woman, who is no longer forty years old, enlightened, impressed, flatteringly and with curiosity, observes another woman “of perhaps forty”, still very…. and who also rebels, who also is a heroine, who also is in control of her language. “The stories he hears from the villagers”, writes Arendt, in her essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” (1944), about K., in Kafka’s The Castle, “fail to arouse the same sense of dread they try so hard to invest in them, and which give them this strange poetical quality that is so very common in the folk tales of oppressed people. And since he cannot take part in this feeling, he will never be able to be truly one of them”.²⁰ The figure of K., for her, exposes the lack-of-imagination in the popular imagination. While Arendt is not deaf to the authenticity of popular expression or insensitive to the warmth and solidarity that it both assumes and fosters, she does not make light of the price at which

 Hannah Arendt, “The Hidden Tradition”, in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman, New York, 1978.

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these come: degeneration, a loss of direction, erasure of the world. It is the figure of K. that Arendt appropriates in the Report as one of the possibilities of observation and narrative articulation – in her role of observer who insists to represent, to expose, to analyze and criticize, and moreover, to transform language itself into an event – and this, now, causes the villagers and their offspring confusion and distress. Because she is in-between, very closely connected and ironic, near and far, touched and unsparing. Because she has separated, and having emerged stronger from depression, more stable, wiser, as it were, she has not bequeathed us a “theory of separation”. Is there any such theory? Can one to learn how to? Did she know? “At no time is there anything theatrical in the conduct of the judges. Their walk is unstudied, their sober and intense attention, visibly stiffening under the impact of grief as they listen to the tales of suffering, is natural” (p. 4). The opening pages. But on and on, now through the frequent use of quotation marks or by means of truncated quotations, that is, serving Arendt the observer almost throughout as a distancing technique: “The prosecution … had been under considerable pressure from Israeli survivors, who constitute about twenty per cent of the present population of the country. They had flocked spontaneously to the trial authorities and to Yad Vashem, which had been officially commissioned to prepare some of the documentary evidence, to offer themselves as witnesses. The worst cases of ’strong imagination’, people who had ’seen Eichmann at various places where he had never been’, were weeded out, but fifty-six ’suffering-of-the-Jewish-people witnesses’, as the trial authorities called them, were finally put on the stand” (p. 207). “Mr. Hausner had gathered together a ’tragic multitude’ of sufferers, each of them eager not to miss this unique opportunity, each of them convinced of his right to his day in court. The judges might, and did, quarrel with the prosecutor about the wisdom and even the appropriateness of using the occasion for ’painting general pictures’, but once a witness had taken the stand, it was difficult indeed to interrupt him, to cut short such testimony, ’because of the honor of the witness and because of the matters about which he speaks’, as Judge Landau put it. Who were they, humanly speaking, to deny any of these people their day in court? And who would have dared, humanly speaking, to question their veracity as to detail when they ’poured out their hearts as they stood in the witness box’, even though what they had to tell could only ’be regarded as by-products of the trial’?” (p. 209). Even the word “suffering” is transformed between the first sentence and the later paragraphs. Though Arendt interprets her protest in terms of the judicial relevance of the testimonies, it seems that this is not the main issue. For those who followed the trial, who saw the images, or watched screenings of parts of it, then or later, K-Zetnik’s appearance left an indelible impression.

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Nevertheless, Arendt cannot bear what she witnesses and allows herself to intervene. Let us present the quote nearly in its entirety: “How much wiser it would have been to resist these pressures altogether [enacted by the witnesses for the prosecution]… and to seek out those who had not volunteered! As though to prove the point, the prosecution called upon a writer, well known on both sides of the Atlantic under the name of K-Zetnik – a slang word for a concentration-camp inmate – as the author of several books on Auschwitz that dealt with brothels, homosexuals, and other ’human interest stories’. He started off, as he had done at many of his public appearances, with an explanation of his adopted name. It was not a ’pen-name’, he said. ’I must carry this name as long as the world will not awaken after the crucifying of the nation … as humanity has risen after the crucifixion of one man’. He continued with a little excursion into astrology: the star ’influencing our fate in the same way as the star of ashes at Auschwitz is there facing our planet, radiating toward our planet’. And when he arrived at ’the unnatural power above Nature’ which had sustained him thus far, and now, for the first time, paused to catch his breath, even Mr. Hausner felt that something had to be done about this ’testimony’, and, very timidly, very politely, interrupted: ’Could I perhaps put a few questions to you if you will consent?’ Whereupon the presiding judge saw his chance as well: “Mr. Dinoor, please, please, listen to Mr. Hausner and to me’. In response, the disappointed witness, probably deeply wounded, fainted and answered no more questions” (pp. 223 – 224). Arendt believes that K-Zetnik, who is practiced in public speaking, in “performance”, is presenting gestures which are therefore wholly unrelated to the courtroom with its particular interest. Had she heard him before? Had she read his books? We do not know, but he is not mentioned in the rich bibliography of The Origins of Totalitarianism. And so what? Does a gesture, when repeated, lose its validity, its impression, its credibility? Of all the witnesses, in a way that his excursus to the empyrean only emphasized, K-Zetnik was most aware of the semiotic, psycho-somatic tonality of his experience. The justices’ intervention, apparently inevitable given the symbolic sphere the court house represents, and in spite of the wide margins which the course of the trial included for the witness accounts, cause him to collapse. More than reiteration, though she is bound to consider it a symptom of the inability to recount a narrative,²¹ what Arendt rejects is assimilation that lacks reflexive doubling, lacks observation –

 In The Life of the Mind, Arendt talks about repetition which, in extreme cases, may lead to a fixed state of mind that indicates psychological disturbance: the euphoria of the maniac or the depression of the melancholic. (40)

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any assimilation, in fact, whether it is political, cultural or emotional. This rejection resurges in the various contexts of her life and work, starting with her criticism of the assimilation of the Jewish parvenu, through the merging with the other, and concluding with the becoming of self in a story which distinguishes the latter from and among the others. Assimilation entails collapse, system breakdown, as if at one blow. So that Arendt does not tell the full story when, immediately following, she writes: “This, to be sure, was an exception, but if it was an exception that proved the rule of normality, it did not prove the rule of simplicity or of ability to tell a story, let alone of the rare capability for distinguishing between things that happened to the storyteller more than sixteen, and sometimes twenty, years ago, and what he had read and heard and imagined in the meantime” (p. 224). For “the disappointed witness … fainted” must be put side by side to Zindel Grynszpan, the witness who was “holding himself quite erect” (p. 227). It is she who cannot, who refuses to stand it. And her, admittedly peculiar, way of apologizing can be found at the end of the chapter “Evidence and Witnesses” where she talks – referring to comments of Abba Kovner – about the exemplary figure of Anton Schmidt and about the possibility of light in the heart of darkness, and she herself uses an astronomical metaphor; it is hard to believe that she failed to note the resonance with K-Zetnik: “Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation” (p. 233). Only once in the entire Report does Arendt quote a story almost in full, hardly interfering, and adding only a few paraphrases. The ten minutes of Zindel Grynszpan’s story are written down in a way that brings the time of telling and the time of reading as closely together as possible. This is her explicit statement about the story, which is, hence, not described or abstracted to the level of principle. De-banalization, like banality, needs no theory. It is what it is, what it tells, what it enacts. “Now he had come to tell his story, carefully answering questions put to him by the prosecutor; he spoke clearly and firmly, without embroidery, using a minimum of words” (p. 228). Communicability; words that forge a path to the other, to others. “This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell, and when it was over – the senseless, needless destruction of twentyseven years in less than twenty-four hours – one thought foolishly: Everyone, everyone should have his day in court. Only to find out, in the endless sessions that followed, how difficult it was to tell the story, that – at least outside the transforming realm of poetry – it needed a purity of soul, an unmirrored, unreflected innocence of heart and mind that only the righteous possess. No one either before or after was equal to the shining honesty of Zindel Grynszpan” (pp. 229 – 230).

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Yet there is another story, it is like a thin layer, hardly material, added to the other stories. On the face of it, it is wholly impersonal and we might couple it with the “dry” facts about the fate of the Jews of Europe which, as is known, Arendt conveys as an antithesis to Eichmann’s pathetic rhetoric. But she does something more here, suggesting a kind of outline of a psycho-geographical journey through Europe, impressionistic in character, to succinctly examine the response of governments and civil societies to the Jews’ predicament. This, strangely enough, is “Arendt’s story”: not in the first person, not intimate on the face of it, it is concealed, her memory – not her memoir – documenting part of the complex spectrum of her emotions about the continent on which she was born. How lucid and exact are the following sentences on the first expulsions of Jews from Stettin in February 1940, from Baden and Saarpfaltz in the fall of the same year (Jews who, like Arendt, reached the French internment camp in Gurs, and who were transported to Auschwitz when the “final solution” became operative): The objective seems to have been a test of general political conditions – whether Jews could be made to walk to their doom on their own feet, carrying their own little valises, in the middle of the night, without any previous notification; what the reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered the empty apartments in the morning; and, last but not least, in the case of the Jews from Baden, how a foreign government would react to being suddenly presented with thousands of Jewish “refugees” (p. 156).

Quiet, restrained prose that moves between the anecdotal and the fundamental, between illustration and exemplum, and in so far as it marks, always through concrete cases, “a sudden burst of light” (p. 231) where banality comes to a halt, where de-Nazification is situated, it fills the reader with feeling – and moreover: it inspires confidence and faith. In the course of October 1943, Denmark with the help of its fishing fleet, organized a shipment of 5,919 Jews to Sweden which offered them shelter as it had done a year earlier to about half the Norwegian Jewish community. Arendt writes: The cost of transportation for people without means – about hundred dollars per person – was paid largely by wealthy Danish citizens, and that was perhaps the most astounding feat of all, since this was a time when Jews were paying fortunes for exit permits. […] It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course (pp. 174– 175).

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“[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, […] ’it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere” (p. 233).

Mother Tongue And we have not yet said everything. This time it is not a matter of another narrative layer, not of a “meta-narrative”, and definitely not of autobiography in its usual, confessional sense. This concerns something more subversive and subverted than these well-defined genres: it is as it were their negative, their abject. Hard-to-define, this dimension, which actually constitutes the whole or the impression left by the whole, turns Arendt’s Report on language into an elegy, sui generis, for a mother tongue, of a kind that Arendt had not suggested before and would not suggest again, nor did she ever call it by this name. It surprisingly, fascinatingly brings together Arendt’s bio-graphy and Céline’s thanato-graphy over and beyond the polar modernist horizons each developed. The “miracle” of Céline’s writing, its beguiling, mysterious and ominous quality, Julia Kristeva tries to map with psychoanalytical, phenomenological and aesthetic tools in her essay about abjection.²² However, the analytical reading addresses an impossible challenge because the literary experiment at issue strives to approach by non-conceptual means a dark zone of experience, the abject, prior to entering the symbolic order, prior to the distinction between subject and object. Any conceptualization, which of necessity departs from this experiment, can at the most guide attention to the mode and the tools by means of which literature’s feelers catch experiences without either name or object, and to pass, though never as at first, together with the writer, through abjection. Céline, according to Kristeva, abandons himself to this journey almost to the point of destruction. His former proximity to the ambivalent intimacy with what he was yet to identify as object or mother; proximity to the oscillation between total dependency and desire, and revulsion and disgust; to the destructive hatred that turns out to be necessary for life itself, necessary exactly like its immediate erasure from any record in memory – this dooms the writer to writhe in the secret folds of the mother tongue. As if it were upon him to go back and lift the pre-verbal from oblivion: jangling sounds, miniscule gestures that grow enormous, vocal dramas that make their way into intentionally damaged writing, which lets the impulses break, as it were, into the conscious activity of articulation,

 Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, Paris 1980.

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sentence structure, grammar, syntax, even to dominate them. Céline’s courage, his genius, the risk that he takes and which on the cusp reveals itself as catastrophic, these are coupled with this radical question of the subject’s identity, at the furthest remove from meaning, from what is solid, protective. He is after an “it” that groans and grapples with its first steps in the world like one great and exposed emotion, neither conscious nor unconscious, existent – no more than that and having, moreover, always already “existed” like this, even when apparently maturing, “existed” by growing ever more sparse, by becoming reduced, by perishing, trespassing and trespassed, digesting and vomiting on all strata of human experience. Becoming one with the blazing states of a borderline subjectivity writing inclines to fall, offering a vertiginous testimony about the subtle balance between abjection and sublimation and their fragile interrelations. Where sublimation is no longer possible writing, anyhow, comes to an end, and of course, in Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night ²³ there are those who arrive at madness and silence. But sublimation can come with abjection, as it does with the writer-narrator Céline-Bardamu, and rather than suffering damage and collapse it may thrive and be empowered by the energies of abjection. It will, however, almost always remain a sublimation which is relentlessly close to the darkness of affect it identifies, a sublimation powerfully affected by a sense of the archaic, lacking both transformation and reflection. The dominant motion, there is no mistaking it throughout Arendt’s writing or more precisely starting from The Human Condition, and always entertaining a complex relationship with her historical-political studies, is becoming-a-subject as a process of natality in language. This is second birth (and third and so on), at a fundamental distance from the origin, in more than one sense, for Arendt herself who is reborn in a new, adopted language, a “professional” or somewhat “technical” one. True natality, in any case, takes place only in the symbolic order, in the plural and among the many – among at least three – who recognize and respond. Arendt leaves no doubt about the categorical temporality of the notion of natality – future time – its absolute divergence, therefore, from the language of the body, mother tongue, from the archaic depths, their pains and grief. In each tongue one is actually born, as if for the first time, into speech. It would seem that for her, literally and as a figure of speech, each shift of abjection, private and communal, from the hidden metabolism out into the multitudes by way of rituals, carnivals, processions and bonfires is bound to cross boundaries

 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, Gallimard 1932.

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that must not be crossed, limits of speech and communication – it is bound to subvert and paralyze. The process of individuation is, hence, completed in paradoxical manner: extremely personal and extremely abstract at one and the same time. A body-less, sickness-free natality that is wholly protected from extinction. But things are not this simple, in fact, and the refusal of regression, assimilation, and symbiosis which may indeed have come at the price of an “all too” thick skin, to put it this way, impervious to injury, to penetration and infiltration, is revealed, nevertheless, as an unending process of boundary formation, inside and out (physical, moral, linguistic, interpersonal), and yes, also of abjection. Mary McCarthy gave subtle testimony concerning Arendt’s treading between languages, in her inspiring “Epilogue” to The Life of the Mind which she edited after Arendt’s death. McCarthy dwells on the German ambit of Arendt’s English writing (or indeed speech), both syntactically and in terms of her vocabulary, something which sheds further light on her anger, during the trial, regarding the issue of simultaneous translation. Translating all the time, in order to live, to broaden her mind, to write, Arendt experienced translation both as ultimate challenge and as impossibility. The Jerusalem trial was the occasion of a multi-dimensional encounter with the mother tongue and its humiliating banalization which hit her with unbearable force, touching of necessity, and unexpectedly, on matricide and mother-tongue-murder, which were erased, traceless – or at least without readable trace – when she crossed a continent to another country and another language. For these, among other things, are the meaning, the implications, the consequences of the act of uprooting. Even if, at first, language may seem the one mobile property that one can take along. There is no point, I think, in asking which is the more brutal murder: Céline’s which occurs within the mother tongue whose essence he sucks to death, or the one who is seemingly forced to renounce it for a lingual landscape so remote and so different. No point and no answer, at most, perhaps, through the formation of certain specific criteria, and this with utmost care. Yet there is no writing or creation without brutality, as both Céline and Arendt knew very well, each from their different situations. The Eichmann trial remains a classic example of how indispensable the symbolic order, the legal defense, are to the management of the harsh, painful and inevitable processes of abjection. The justices’ insistence on the limits of the discourse and their emotional restraint outlined with precision, first and foremost to the members of the community, what was possible and what not permitted. Astutely, Arendt picked up the differend between the objectual judicial discourse of the justices and the discourse of the prosecution which moved simultaneously between two totally different registers – the objectual and the abjectual (and hence moralistic), and she repeatedly cites moments when these

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registers clash, always followed by acknowledgement of the law, of the judging self facing its object, in the final instance. What she called the “bad history” presented by the prosecutor was, for her, history that constitutes a type of sublimated purification rituals, a sublimation which conceptualizes the history of the Jewish people in terms of continuous confrontation with monstrous enemy figures. For many reasons, presented in her essays, especially those of the 1940s, she was unable to identify with this position. Even Eichmann, in so far as he was made of flesh and blood, she did not flood in hatred. In the Report he maintains his status as a clearly outlined object for observation and judgment, much like the accused in the judicial discourse. Arendt’s judicial “purism”, then, is also associated with the fact that she had not been in the vortex experienced – at least among themselves – by most of those surrounding her, perhaps including the justices: the intolerable encounter, so secluded and so exposed, with the concrete enemy, as negotiated through historical and mythological documents, through communicated recollections, through opinion and arbitrariness. Yet the text she wrote is far from “purist” and Arendt is far from not being flooded. She is flooded from all sides. The shock or the frustration the readers of the Report experienced is related to the fact that its abject, its outcast, is not Eichmann. The abject has strayed elsewhere, to another “object”. Something else has turned into the monster, and it is present in the human situation which the court house invokes-stages in the living present, day after day, in the form of voices, gestures, sounds, a medley of accents: language, tongue. Something else, her province only, Arendt’s, and which among its other implications also includes an objectual-objective attitude to Eichmann. So that her sense of being a stranger only increases, along with the blow she both deals and receives anyway, since it seems that each side, each side, scorns and ridicules what the other side takes in utter seriousness, what the other side is. Arendt is forced, for the first time, to process her repressed mourning for her mother tongue, a sensitivity which was dulled as it were, a yearning that now assaults her in Jerusalem of all places. She writes some sentences, in the opening pages of the Report, which we quoted at the outset. Now that we have come this far, they require re-quoting: “Justice … demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight” (p. 6).Arendt makes an “erroneous” observation here, in her own terms, first of all, with regard to her own principles of public speech. Nevertheless, for her, the trial has become domesticized, economical, intimate, secluded, and the rage or the anger which are the emotions that link us to the world and which render it powerful for us, all these as it were capitulate, unable to withstand the overpowering passivity of

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sorrow. All boundaries are flooded by this deluge: her (private) correspondence with Gershom Scholem becomes public and not by coincidence; it is no coincidence either that Mary McCarthy’s essay in defense of the Report reads like a letter. Loves and hatreds, crossing the lines between the intimacy of rooms into the public space in order to say what cannot be said there, and to be pulled once again, in the middle of the courtroom, into seclusion. Her other letters, especially those to Heinrich Blücher, which mention spasms, physical distress, a frequent need to vomit, which at the time were read as evidence of her arrogant excoriation of the East, express, I believe, her regression to the mother tongue within her. There is its whole range: starting with the young Eichmann’s Schlaraffia – with Arendt adding in parenthesis “(the name derives from Schlaraffenland, the gluttons’ Cloud-Cuckoo Land of German fairy tales)” (p. 32) right up to the words of the Jewish observer in Berlin when he saw the Jews’ expulsion in 1943: “Immerzu fahren hier die Leute zu ihren eigenem Begräbnis (Day in and day out the people here leave for their own funeral)” (p. 115). It was, hence, Mary McCarthy who tried even then, albeit impressionistically and without either explanation or analysis, to draw readers’ attention to something else that is at work in the Report, between the lines, the composition, the rhythm, the extra-linguistic, the stamp of creation, its precise touching of the reader’s nerves: she and only she, of the different, and still unabating waves of criticism concerning Arendt, tried to literally “domesticate” her beloved one, and perhaps also, this time at least, to restore the lost childish dimension to her “natality”. In other words, to hint that alongside the Report’s content, controversial though it may be, there is a linguistic, musical aesthetics, trickling through and distracting, very intimate, which must breach the predictable limits of reception. Just one word about the Mozart business. I agree with Jim – not that it matters – primarily because the comparison even of effects is too high. But I always loved the sentence because you were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted – namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I did it, I feel – after twenty years [since the war] – light-hearted about the whole affair. Don’t tell anybody, is it not proof positive that I have no “soul”? (Letter to Mary McCarthy, 23 June, 1964).

Chapter 6 Stefan Zweig¹ When did I last visit here, in this season, late December, leaning back in a green chair, near an artificial lake? Leisure, I smile, sometimes you’re entitled to leisure. So be it. The delicate layer of leaves that might carpet pedestrians’ steps, had been raked meticulously in the morning, exposing the hard ground of the Luxembourg Gardens. The wind urges me to get up, loosen my limbs and look for shelter. People walking the paths like somnambulists pass me by, their movements remote. I make my way cautiously in the rising fog. Someone, it seems, is breathing down my neck, too close, persistent, almost intrusive. He acts like one already defeated in a last struggle, no longer fearing rejection. Good heavens, I can’t believe my eyes. Me: Mr. Zweig? He: Mrs. Arendt? Me: Will wonders never cease! He: And you’re not the maydale I remember. I swallow a more accurate description of the actual state of affairs. The cold lashes us on to the end of the gardens, where they meet Rue D’Assas. Like old and familiar acquaintances, with no need for words, we head along Rue Vavin toward the corner of Notre Dame des Champs and enter the café “Le Vavin”. At the counter, the kind waiter, as if he too was part of a ritual foretold, quickly pours us two small glasses of whisky. I let my gaze swerve, unfocused, over the other guests, a lighting on a tile or a photograph I failed to notice on many earlier moments of idle staring. Low-volume music from the radio does not dominate the space. At Le Vavin one mainly hears the clatter of plates, cups, and silverware in the unending struggle to restore order. Silence reigns between us. A nervous twitch on the left side of his mouth brings a restlessness into Zweig’s face. His voice muffled but steady, he begins: You were right. I’m silly, mediocre, a plagiarist, a pleaser, a coward. Me: That pleasure you should leave to others.

 Hannah Arendt’s scathing critique on Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday appeared in 1943; it was later included in the collection The Jew as Pariah (1978). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-006

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He: Still, you’re full to bursting with comments about my writing on people and their fates. Me: When biographies happen to be nothing but a transparent cover for a selfportrait… He: Isn’t that a gesture all writers have in common – trying to understand themselves by means of an aesthetic or moral ideal, a shining light, an object of identification, a double, a shadow? Splitting and expanding themselves through projections, metamorphoses, in hopes that these may refine their excesses? And when they eventually write their so-called “autobiography”, it turns out to be a figment of their mind. We all find ourselves moving between personal pronouns, and between singular and plural, in the vain attempt to keep giving evidence at an arm’s length, to find relief from distress. Testimony is too close at hand. I believe that the intimidating nature of “self-portraiture” should not be overstated. Over and beyond reflecting or diffracting the writer’s images, portraits try to create – indeed are likely to succeed in creating – a new reality for him. Zweig’s “auto”, much like Hannah Arendt’s concealed “auto”, is dispersed and boundless. Some of the heroes we adopted, by the way, are identical: Montaigne, Lessing, Heine. I suppose you noticed. Me: You can rest assured. He: I believe you don’t know that I even collected material, at the time, about Rahel Varnhagen; I intended to write about her alongside two other women, Maria Kowalska and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. This project didn’t materialize. I was by the way very interested to read your The Life of a Jewess. It reminded me somehow of my own Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman. Teasingly he checks how this strikes me, and he goes on. One can observe fascinating analogies between eras, between the 16th century and the late 18th, and our own century. Analogies, not identities, between those who wield the pen and look for the freedom and conditions required for creation and thought. Me: You claim that spiritual comradeship may hold across diverse times and domains, and therefore enables responsiveness, openness, understanding even for the strange and unusual…. He: A writer adjusts to his object much like the object adjusts to the writer’s measures. Many things, indeed, escape this process which fastens on a single object each time, looking neither left nor right. All of a sudden something captivates

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me: an expression, an idea, a tune. I haven’t found out as yet how truthful the encounter is, and what role all this is to play in my life. But gradually I begin to feel that someone has been there already, has been there forever, to face similar challenges with varying degrees of success. Somebody has been there: human and weak as he shoulders burdens to which he isn’t always equal. It is a sort of understanding, yes, analogy, this presence we call “the classics”, a complex resonance which relies not only on plentitude, what we identify as common property, but also – to the same extent and perhaps even more decidedly – on lack, on an absence of certainty and of property and of home and fellowhuman, on the shared ability, or inability, to separate. This resonance, therefore, presupposes a common human need to fill up. We build ourselves on the basis of those who are far away, and from the sense of emptiness of the remote. That is what fills us. This must be the way people felt in the Renaissance when they opted to conceive and be born again. To surrender themselves once more to their forefathers’ natural dedication to intergenerational transmission. Renaissance and anachronism entered the world under one temporal dispensation. All this obviously stayed anachronistic, historically speaking, yet was transhistorically vital and productive. And this, according both to them and to me, was what matters. In today’s depressing historical era, we forget the layers of time that make up the human phenomenon as such, even when it is apparently wholly of its own time. We forget to what extent a work of art, especially when it strays from certain conditions, addresses the dimension of time itself. His hands hold the armrests of his tall chair. He lowers his pale face, takes a deep breath and empties the glass of whisky. Am I exhausting you? he asks. You look troubled, like someone wearing herself out with something annoying. Me: I am trying to follow what you’re saying. We had better sit somewhere further back in the room, just in case we get carried away. Zweig lets me conduct him to the deep-red leather couch, far from the counter. I make myself comfortable while he sits on the wooden chair opposite, his back straight and tense. He promptly offers to light a cigarette I take from my purse and takes his time busying himself with his pipe. We ask the waiter to fetch us another whisky. After scrawling something on a scrap of paper, Zweig raises his head hesitantly and continues. Don’t you feel something similar? Who are Socrates and Kant to you without your requisite actions as a reader? That is to say: concentration, bracketing, relativizing, exactly because this or that person means something to you, and together with you traverses – or may traverse – the objective distance that separates you. The conceptual and even normative framework that enables the link is wholly anachronistic yet nevertheless deserves to be called a link. Its validity is not in the least diminished as a result. The classics rely on projection, a belief

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that it’s about us, our possibility, that it’s about the description of the self, its truth, even though these descriptions or truths we come up with are not necessarily appropriate. Questions and expert arguments, thematic discussions, knowledge, scholarship – they don’t touch the classics. They connote penetrability, stimulation, questioning, freshness. They are what makes up the tendency to read, hear, and see, again and again. Mainly they allow the everyday to be infused with celebration. Me: In this comradeship which you assume or actually champion, does the distinction between genres – between history, biography, or fiction, for instance – retain any meaning? He: For each of the genres, I believe, it’s a matter of a theft that tells us something about both the procedure and the result. The biographer explicitly relies on historical documents. The novelist starts with a framing narrative, a narrator who gives account of his sources, usually something he’s heard. The materials are there for the responsive self to mediate, fuse, and interpret. In that sense, I have never been the source of my works, and I swear I don’t know about the relations between source and appropriation, between inheritance and legitimate or illegitimate copying, though not everyone has the virtuosity to process materials competently. Me: A close friend of mine argued that writers are frustrated collectors. That they write books because they are displeased with the books they have, with the books they could have bought, or with those they don’t like with hindsight. They invent material so they have something to hoard. He: And let’s not forget that that friend of yours also was the king of quotations… Displeasure may depend on how far an artist is willing to go in recording the psychic revelations to which his characters expose him. An invisible hand pulling the ropes from outside; an inner force that deflects initiatives, wishes, reason; wildness, violence, metamorphoses showing him he is capable of things he didn’t believe he could accomplish. Me: The cave’s open maw…. He: You don’t like Zweig the aesthetician, do you? His voice is bitter. Me: Not because of some presumed dichotomy between him and the enlightened Zweig or the moralist. Because of the aesthetic-moral position about fate, repe-

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tition, the cyclicity of the recurrent struggles with the daemon. Because of what I see as a generally mimetic oeuvre that takes the artist’s perceptions and insights into a cul-de-sac. He: Don’t you think human beings are capable of anything? That they are fundamentally insane? What do you imagine when a baby’s face crumples, marred by frustration and pain? What about the speed with which children become adults’ super-ego, as they simultaneously present them with inhibition and prohibition, on the one hand, and their unconscious needs, on the other, holding up a mirror from which one must flee? How do you reckon with the drift of boundaries and distinctions between classes, ages, sexes, places, times, all of them struggling with suspended diabolical forces that break through the surface in order to unsettle our ostensible balance? With the broken vessels, an inverted world, a prison cell in which everything is held and from which only the brave, the adventurous or the mad seek to break out? Me: We don’t see eye to eye, Mr. Zweig, and on two accounts. To begin with, the psychological or psychoanalytic approach to human existence – or rather your version of it. And second, the way you bracket together psychoanalysis and literature, as though they were interchangeable. He: Zweig rubs his moustache. Look, you never asked what is philosophy, and now you ask what is literature? Well, I don’t know what it is, but I do know about the creative life and about the way these two categories which seem so disparate to you, are connected. I know of the curse, the stagnation, the dybbuk, the disability, the compulsion to create from within yourself, in spite of yourself, the intensities of one who cannot move but may imagine, at best, how others do. In the face of your own uneventful life, you must put into words feelings, sights, desires, seemingly hopeless suffering. You must be reduced as well as amplified, burning and wild in this melting pot whether you willingly created it for yourself or were compelled to make it. A seclusion you brought upon yourself, fate, or the devil, or some voice you internalized, which wreck your nerves and deposit all weight on the word, as everything stands or falls on it, on what it holds and on what it transmits. You have to distill and to displace, avoiding waste, under strain and with minimal means. You must honestly believe that in this world you have neither right nor grace and that exactly in this lies the justification of your existence. You must preserve sensuality, your neediness, never for a moment stop being human at those moments, actually become another character alongside those you either encounter or fabricate. You must recognize yourself in them and learn about yourself from them. And you grow more like them stead-

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ily, it’s true, chasing yourself, unlike yourself, as though in the face of every expression of humanity you were born anew in order to name it. It is a strenuous and steadfast mental journey. Me: As though symptoms and art are all on one line…You don’t mention the style, composition, or abstraction from reality which install a new symbolic relation to it. You don’t mention the landscape of an unprecedented thought, which does not, as a result, lose any of the shades constituting real life. This is nothing but the management of mental life, and how art helps you to familiarize yourself with it, maybe even more than you bargained for. In the end you risk doing a merely symptomatological reading of your own books. He: Zweig looks at me with a tense and self-possessed expression. The surrealists and some other modernist approaches could easily have written me off as another cadaver among the writers they disdained.² Zweig, or “Zweigism”, God help us, immediately evokes the old-fashioned, conformist, traditional, realist figure of the witness-narrator, who is neither experimental nor provocative, and – worse than all this put together – who is readable. That’s his big flaw and failure! Cowardly, interpretive, arcane and superficial. But look at it this way: The work on emotion, the choice of admittedly rather common figures, of the kind that people have no problem associating with their own feelings, a quiver, a sea and waves, a flame, a fire and a volcano –as an attempt to tether experience to the particular manner in which this or that person tells it to you. Me: But what is it that turns the common, the banal, into something singular? He: Intensity – not form. In your own words: the act of composition which involves condensation and reduction, elision and consolidation, to reach the essential, to increase the pace. Me: That’s not singular. The self-identical author is nourished by his characters, whose stories he absorbs and unifies. Since his editing is a monotonous appropriation, it’s easy to travel with him from one country to another, and from one language to another. Transformation is totally effortless: into the Bulgarian, Nor-

 The French writer Anatole France (1844– 1924) was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature. After his death, the Surrealists dedicated a pamphlet to his memory entitled “Un Cadavre” in view of the praise the Third Republic’s literary establishment had showered on him.

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wegian, Japanese, Chinese…³ He raises his left arm and cuts the air sharply as though he’s about to bang the table or to support himself in order to get up. Me: What are you doing? I light another cigarette. He empties his glass, briefly shuts his eyes and collects himself. He: At the time, you took an interest in me because you despised me, or at least despised what I stood for: someone whose laughable existence amused you yet was useful in order for you to describe a type, a kind, a pathology. You’re not at all bad at symptomatology for someone who so vigorously rejects that discipline. Me: Do you disagree with the classification itself, the extent to which you deserve to be called a parvenu? Do you perceive yourself as a pariah – or do you remain outside all categories?⁴ He: What, for heaven’s sake, can you be thinking of? Who is this type? Me: You may very well like the principle: I have in mind a psychological type, or more accurately, a social-psychological position through which an individual processes his attitude to himself, society, and the world. The external manifestations of this, needless to say, will differ depending on people and circumstances, but basically the parvenu expresses a wish to adjust to his surroundings at any price to the point of total identification and the loss of his original identity, even if, at the outset, he may be unaware of the process and its implications. He is a case of self-deception, at least until the moment when he may discover to his amazement that he’s become something he never sought to be. He discovers that there is too much pressure and friction in the gap between the hard-gained status and the price he pays in terms of energy, talent and sensitivity, which already hints at a return to the deep pit that awaits him. But now for some meat, Mr. Zweig: this is not about an abstract phenomenology, and anyway, when I wrote these things, even if I was using available sociological categories, I was mainly thinking about Jewish people during the historical period when this phenomenon became conspicuous. The emancipation, in other words. Above all, I had in mind the West and Central European financial and intellectual elites who, on abandoning tradition – often arrogantly and crudely – dreamed of merely cosmetic adjustments in their society, in hopes of gaining a title, a job, recog-

 These are some of the languages into which Zweig’s work was translated in his lifetime.  On these notions, see the chapter “Rahel’s Dream” above.

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nition, or entry to some fashionable club. As a rule, they didn’t struggle for radical change, for equal rights for all of their fellow people. Indifference and irresponsibility made them choose a regressive assimilation over political struggle, in order to blend in as individuals, far away from their Jewishness. They did not see what was going on around them. Everything was swallowed by their huge desire, an undiscriminating desire pursued without a real choice. This roleplay required not only a constant watchfulness: eventually it had to face its own constraints: less the loss of integrity and authenticity than historical events. He: I don’t want to anger you. But I agree with every word. Me: A wise man’s thoughts are a pleasure to hear. He: Nevertheless, the people you describe appear in the plural, coinciding with their appearance, through their acceptance by others. In itself, that is not illusory, unless one judges a phenomenon only by its outcomes, and then too, judgment is relative to its own time. But what’s the relation between assimilation and integration? Why won’t you imagine assimilation as a considered and respectable choice, the outcome of needs and ability, rather than conformism or unconscious denial of origins for the sake of social and economic interests? Oh, I do like the principle, but not when it leads to an abstract schematic, oblivious to the ways each of us calculates his days, without any obviousness or passivity, between visibility and camouflage, between revealment and concealment. After all, for you too, appearance was never simply deceit, confoundment, trickery, falsehood. Voila, look at me, Stefan Zweig, I humbly confess, a man who wished to appear, quite reasonably capable of explaining his wish to appear, and to distinguish, as required, depending on the conversation, between a political appearance and an aesthetic one. His pretentious determination takes me by surprise. My stomach meanwhile makes itself known as it starts to rumble. Zweig isn’t particularly hungry. I call the waiter and briefly consult the menu. Entrecote, fried potatoes, and green salad. A glass of red wine. Zweig orders another whisky and a piece of camembert, which is served on a plate. We nervously pick at the baguette we are served before the food is brought in. Everything is tasty and enjoyable. When I slow down eating, Zweig examines me with curiosity. Now I am ready to continue. You are so dramatic, grandiose, superlative, I finally say. He: I do manage to get something out of you.

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Me: Out of everyone. He: Everybody seems to need a Zweig of their own. You too, Mrs. Arendt, need your Zweig. Your Zweig, I would surmise, helps you clarify some issues of your own. Me: So be it. Your insipid psychologism and other scourges. He: Well then, enlighten me, what is it that unsettles you: The evil geniuses which I exalt or my decent mediocrity? Me: Your unrestrained mechanism of assimilation. He: I told you, I swear. From my small room I do my utmost to build a nest, anywhere, to contain all difference, to absorb, to internalize, to conceive; to thoroughly acquaint myself with every character – women, men, explorers, religious functionaries, whores – towards whom I must develop a certain sense of inferiority, subject myself humbly. Since I cannot live the lives of the products of my mind, at the most I can write about them, spend some time with them, be brave through them, or a hero, or a victim; have a solid, well-defined identity; for a while, writer, narrator, and hero: neutral and involved. Me: Let us set this literary achievement aside for a moment and check the strategy against real life – pardon my use of such a vulgar expression. By “real life” I would mean when you direct the need to belong – the insistent effort to ingratiate, admire, please – to real flesh and blood people. But there you are, you face refusal, rejection, suspicion at times. Freud, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, even Romain Rolland become impervious and out of reach to you; and their rebuff is often translated as contempt and humiliation. He observes me brightly, sends me a friendly look. Have you read in my correspondence? Me: Certainly. And your journals too. There as well as in your letters you are cautious and inhibited, and one is astonished to realize that the things your characters allow themselves to feel or to think are totally absent from you own agenda. Here and there a faint expression of displeasure. As though these absentee authorities had reached directly into your loneliness.

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He: True. I hesitate between happiness about the attention you’re giving me, and embarrassment about the time of which I have been – and still am —stealing from you. Me: Don’t go that way, I beg you. He: As you wish, my dear lady. Seriously. He looks at me straight, boldly. One might say I am most present in my novels. Me: In other words: You’re not sure about these intimate interlocutors? You admire them, you exchange kindnesses, but you’re not willing to commit your secrets to them? He: Look, my need for confirmation and respect, the parvenu in me, as you would have it, is no less than that of others to give me a cold look and size me up. The law of connected vessels is at work here, and it’s no less fascinating than the games of love. Those who manage to move in the public space with utter control, in sovereign silence, without awkwardness or superfluous movements, are few and far between. People learn from the other’s response about their ability to make him happy or sad, not because they are entitled to these effects on account of some quality they own. First of all, they are there, almost by coincidence; and next, there are circumstances, availabilities, needs. The hidden knowledge of both parties that this partnership is “not exactly it” mixes satisfaction with a concealed misery. I’m aware of a permanent structural asymmetry in the relations between people. I’m aware of the tasks with which they burden each other, of what they take upon themselves without asking, and of the inevitable brutalization entailed by tragi-comical misunderstanding which sparks a brief emotion that quickly peters out. One person always wants another person more than the latter wants him, or else, not in the same way. Either he believes that he may repair this in due time, or he regards himself as lacking, undeserving, and to blame. He can render himself account of his feelings and of the surmised feelings of the other. As for me, Zweig, to whom you direct the question, I have my insights about what is going on. I behave childishly. Not by design. It’s a personality, or a yearning which, I must admit, has something grave, tough, hermetic. Other than confirmation, that is, this parvenu whom you have before you imagines or deludes himself that the “environment”, or at least part of it, will supply him with moral and intellectual guidelines, something to which he is by no means adverse. Still, the childish person knows that he isn’t really the child of whom he adopts, and that he isn’t a child in the first place. But finding himself in this situation, he is likely to ask himself the most neurotic of ques-

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tions: Why does he accept certain relations as fated? Why does he swallow them so lovingly? There is a small consolation: he has long stopped feeling ashamed of himself. Me: In the end, melancholic relations are of no use to anyone, neither to the one who incorporates, nor to the incorporated one. He does not want to be taken into your life, into your personality structure, not in this manner, and he reacts to this constraining position. This inflexibility gets in the way of the dynamic, of closeness, and paradoxically kills off the one taken in, as if telling him that he has hereby exhausted his role in life, exactly when he’s become the admirer’s ideal. He neither wants to become a figure, that is, nor expects you to measure your competence against him. It’s too much for him, all this. He feels powerless. He is however no less threatened by the fact that somehow you are unlike him, and that you have something that is wholly unique to you. For how many years did you correspond with Freud? He: We started in 1908 and went on for thirty years, until his death. This may come as a surprise, but I believe that I was the one who dodged him, deferred meetings, rejected challenges he sent me, retreated, even when my thoughts went out to him. I reflected on this at a late stage, after his death, in fact. We always come late in relation to the father. Me: Even when it concerns the adopted father? He: The imaginary relationship continues the pathology of the biological relationship. It is a huge problem, because it means that the demand for respect, and rejection, doubt, belligerence and revolt are always at play in the child’s body. Whether text or teacher – it doesn’t matter. And as in every story, it also has a matter-of-fact side. Errors of interpretation, disagreements on basic issues, an intellectual taste which for instance led Freud to underline the scientific aspect of his writing while I was inclined first of all to see it as a sublime literary work, an ultimate instance of a creation that becomes part of the tissue of life to such an extent that it comes to constitute a condition of possibility not merely for thought but for experience as such. A crucial question about which we differed obviously was the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis. Me: You believe that people don’t recover.

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He: Not from their childhood diseases. No. And I also think that syndromes repeat themselves, that patients stick to their sickness, and that the connection between the pathology and the problem from which it arose is inscrutable. Me: That’s your particular “pariah-parvenu” crossroads. The rise to greatness of a Jew who fails to unburden himself from his people’s fatalism and pessimism. He: Do not be overly righteous nor be overly wise… Do not be overly wicked, nor be foolish… It is good that you grasp this, and also not remove your hand from the other.⁵ Me: What do you propose? He: Both of us, my dear lady, are the products of secularization and assimilation: our education, our language, our culture, our Europe. Me: I find that statement offensive. He: Yet it is an irrefutable historical fact. I refer to the outcome of the emancipation and a certain, inevitable degree of integration. Regardless of all doubt, say, regardless of how one may respect, falsify, and filter the common property. Didn’t you acquire English, once you crossed the ocean to America? And didn’t you become Americanized – however cautiously and guardedly? And given this existential fact of emancipation-integration, which as I said isn’t assimilation, or in any case not melancholy assimilation, have I been less exposed than you to the fragility of our condition? Apparently the answer is yes. We are not of the same generation. Take my ability or inability to pinpoint manifestations of antisemitism, grudge, animosity, or my blindness, at least for a time, to hidden ghettos which evolved with determination from a social nervousness to a political argument, and finally to legislation. I am not convinced that all this is related to the Jewish heritage. My own personal fatalism and ignorance originated somewhere else. Me: Freud’s huge achievement lies not merely in his accurate reading of the conflicts between fathers and sons, with all their complexes and immersions in Vienna’s Jewish milieu, but also in the way the Jewish God returned to life in order to set himself up in the psyche, and keeping the same qualities: omnipotent, om-

 Ecclesiastes 7:7– 16 NKJV.

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niscient, outside our grasp, and shattering any rational agenda or adult conversation. Freud, more than anyone else, understood the psychologization modern Judaism had undergone. It isn’t merely that being Jewish is a psychological feature, but that this being Jewish transforms into a mysterious, exotic, morbid, anomalous, neurotic tangle of problems in which it is impossible to see what’s what. The one compensation which the subject who’s collapsing under this strain is likely to afford is to say that it isn’t about his being Jewish but about something else… He: Let’s leave it. It seems to me that for your own private reasons, you were never very fond of Vienna, of Freud, of Herzl, of Zweig – with three of which at least I am familiar. Me: For reasons I shared with anyone who made the effort to read my work: I had no taste for shallow bourgeois theatricality, for the vulgar entertainment which worships the actor and as a result sidelines the importance of the audience, thus losing its political and moral judgment. I didn’t like the way reality was turned into operetta or into a parody of itself; nor the resulting hysterical idolatry invested in those who excel at performance: the genius, the virtuoso, the “star” in its early form, the “national hero”; nor the pseudo-privileged place of Jewish intellectuals in this drama, even if the phenomenon was not limited to them. But you yourself have addressed their central position in the theater world, the press, publishing, a pseudo-privileged position because it depended entirely on the caprice of the anti-Semite, while they were fooling themselves that prejudice was no longer relevant, and that the reputation and fame they accrued, arbitrary by nature, would once and for all set them free from the common lot of their brethren. You do understand, don’t you, the thin but vital line between the effort to be seen and heard, required for mature individuation among the masses, and participation in a manipulative process which only reflects one’s own social needs, including the perverse need to appear strange, a wunderkind, some sort of amazing monster. The same happens to a virtuoso who not only performs excellently but also manages to convince himself of the authenticity of his performance. And finally, another paradoxical turn – history’s wily irony is inexhaustible – I never liked the Jewish genius, who in spite of his willingness to meet the demands of society and state, still, owing to the uneasy feelings his surroundings stirred up in him, grew into his own ideal and idol, as though reinternalizing into his worldview the notion of election – except that in this redefined chauvinism the individual himself has become the ritual object. The very characteristics and epithets which he tried firmly to shake off return to haunt

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him, or maybe never left him in the first place. And I haven’t even touched upon the political cost. He: Every person or phenomenon can be made into a caricature. A miniature or outline aiming to characterize a person’s sensibility, or that of a place or an era, may undermine the complexity of the whole, leaving out critical details because they are unsupported by enough coordinates. Even if the one responsible is clever, experienced and many-tentacled, in the attempt to catch some shark, or small fry, whether actual or imagined, he may produce a misleading image. Every characterization you dislike, even if there is something insightful in the perception, is questionable, it seems to me, or at least requires refining. It’s inconceivable that serious people would want nothing but to rub shoulders with the famous, as though they did not desire learning for its own sake, humanism, knowledge, the life of creation. It’s inconceivable that all they care for is to make themselves an elite “homeland”. And assuming that prestige is, largely, what drives them, then still isn’t it reasonable that it too is a considerable burden? Being influential, they must carefully weigh their words, justify their actions, take responsibility, be more exposed to criticism than anonymous people. With sudden rebuke or embarrassment, he asks: You know what kind of people I like? And he adds immediately: Those who bring out your childhood in you. Me: Psychoanalysts? He: It’s impossible to talk with you. Me: I’m joking. He: Look, when a Viennese bourgeois leafed through his morning paper, he first checked the program of the Opera and the Burgtheater to find out what was on, who was singing, who was directing the orchestra, who was playing. But the local idiosyncrasy, habits of newspaper use, as one effortfully winds one’s way from advertisements for leisure activities to the headlines – these are not typical of Vienna. Yes, the Viennese were mesmerized by the theater, and by the theatrical qualities of existence, as well as by the implied idolization of actors, singers, conductors, performers. Theater indeed became a microcosm, a society within society, reflecting and directing the local customs and manners, broadly speaking. In other words, society was experienced as a community of play, which doesn’t necessarily equal hedonism, or aestheticism. Alongside sentimentality, schmaltz, frivolity, and mindless pleasures, valuable carnivalesque elements were also at work: In a democratic space without either ruler or

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ruled, and relations of production, triumphalism or power abuse in the economic, ethnic and political domains are moved aside by the individual’s freedom which enables artistic activity. One may ask – the answer is not obvious – whether Vienna actually offered optimal conditions for creation. What would these conditions be? Are there such conditions? Can they be pre-defined? This question was often on my mind, at the time, in Brazil. ⁶ Should I, then, unfolding this turn-of-the-century era of grace before you, an era which continued by other means, more antagonistic and disharmonious, between the two wars, blind myself to the dominance of simulation, decorum, the masked balls and the costumes, the improvisations and the manipulations? To the extent to which the elevation of play may come to act as a replacement, compensation, escape? And do you think I can’t see the deep structural fault, whereby meticulously enacted drama removes from view what is happening off-stage, a gesture by means of which it affects what is happening, including the country and its people’s fate? In the good case, in other words, it keeps things as they are innocent of change; in the bad case it gradually occludes the wrongs of social stratification and economic catastrophe. I am aware, as I was at the time, of how people who grow up in a culture of drama may embrace it completely, without noticing they’re in a play, without internalizing the difference between inside and outside. This perspective does not call into question the creative energy, the freedom, the fact that citizens identify their real country with the culture towards which they have been expressing authentic desire. In doing so, have they renounced their judgment? On the contrary, creativity is the privilege of the few; the remainder, great and mediocre alike, looked on and judged punctiliously, developing a considerable ability to discern quality. Your judgment of that society rests largely on observing the audience, and not the actors. That audience, moreover, was not naïve; it consisted not of clowns but of sharp, at times merciless critics, constantly honing their principles of observation. Your criticism, rightly, addresses the span of observation, rather than its level. Was there ever anything like Viennese spectating culture and its achievements? In the political domain, what nations or societies matched its collective acumen? Which of them, like Schiller, shifted a skilled aesthetic education to establish a satisfactory political culture?

 Zweig emigrated to Brazil and settled in Petropolis (near Rio de Janeiro), in 1940. On February 22, 1942, he and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide.

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Me: Let’s for a moment leave aside your description, which takes its cues from abundance and profusion rather than from the tensions, the dissonance, the lack and antagonism, but…. That depends, he interrupts me. Unemployment, the black market, protectionism, exploitation, inflation, and moral collapse –I took note of all those and reported on them at length. I don’t know what makes you charge me with such denial. What I called the “golden age of security” came to describe a situation from the perspective of the generation preceding mine, and which succeeded for a while to pass on its sensibility. But my story after all considers a fetish which grew steadily less powerful. With a long sigh, he places his hand on his forehead. I remain silent, letting him be. To my surprise, as though he were reading my mind, he adds: You should really have written fiction. Your conditional constructions, which exasperated your readers, could have made great literature – what would have happened if and if not? And it would have released you from the need to keep chastising your audience about the gap between ideal and real. Fatigue now makes us more conscious of the noise around us. The radio broadcasts Poulenc’s music for Cocteau’s “Lady of Monte Carlo”. Zweig, who knows the words by heart, admires the music. I didn’t know it was set to music. In the early nineteen sixties, I say. Hesitantly we join in: I want to sleep on the seabed of the Mediterranean/… The roulette wheel is a pretty plaything./ It’s nice to say: “I gamble.”/ It lends a fire to your cheeks/… Once Luck turns against you,/ Once your heart is nervous,/ You cannot move a muscle/… Tonight I will dive headfirst/ Into the sea of Monte Carlo.⁷ We have a consensus on matters of taste, he states, and rises suddenly. I must run. Will you visit the Gardens tomorrow? And, not waiting for an answer: Don’t worry. I’ll find you. Me: Perhaps in “Le Vavin”? He: If you wish. Lunch?

 “The Lady of Monte Carlo” (translation: Naomi O’Connell).

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Me: Settled. When I enter the café the next day, exactly at midday, Zweig is already waiting in the same seat in the back, a half-emptied whisky on the table. He waves his hat, rises and walks toward me, shakes my hand energetically: Hello there, hello. As we sit down, he’s pleased, sucks his pipe comfortably: I don’t care what Aristotle says or for that matter the whole of philosophy – there’s nothing like tobacco and whisky… Me: You have an excellent memory, Mr. Zweig. He: (modestly) Something I learned in childhood. I tried at first to sit outside, get a breath of air, admire the view, apropos childhood and young manhood. But the body is no longer what it used to be, and this winter… Me: It’s cold outside. He: I’m very hungry today. Shall we have lunch now? We pore over the menu and catch the waiter’s attention. Zweig announces, winking in my direction, that today he’ll “go for” what I had the day before, which judging by my cheerful expression, seemed good and filling. I order goose breast and fried potatoes. A bottle of red Burgundy for the two of us. Until the table is set and the food is served, we imbibe musical agreement, which makes words superfluous. The tranquil companionability of the concert hall is unsurpassable. Now the table in front of us is laden with a steaming-hot feast. Zweig comments that this too is a consensus of taste, though unlike music, with food, which always exceeds the sum of its parts, we can never anticipate how a meal will evolve. Me: Today, what do you think about the Richard Strauss affair?⁸

 Richard Strauss (1864– 1949) was considered Wagner’s major disciple. Unlike Wagner, he also wrote many instrumental works. Among his opera are Salome and Electra, and some of his most famous symphonic poems are Macbeth, Don Juan, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Don Quixote. After the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal (who wrote the librettos for – among other works – Ariadne from Naxos and Electra), Strauss began to work with Zweig. Zweig’s star in Germany, however, sank rapidly, in spite of Strauss’s protest. Arendt raises here the question of Strauss’s position as a composer, orchestra director, and President of the Office for Music between 1933 – 1935, during the Nazi period, and the possibly criminal collaboration between him and Zweig, in particular.

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His face contracts momentarily. Here we are: My punishment for having become converted to the appetites… Aren’t those empty moralisms that you’re directing at me? I’ve had my fill of them, and I don’t expect this type of cliché, certainly not from you. You know full well that what occurs between two people is never “just” political or even “just” moral. Me: All right. Do go on. He pours wine for me and himself, takes some quick sips, calling out cheerfully: Perfect! Well, first about the healing virtues of music as compared to the powerlessness of psychoanalysis. Here we have a medium that takes your words, the persecutory pathos that won’t let you be, and intervenes by means of a kind of subtle paraphrase, a reflective resonance or a tonal perspective which you couldn’t have expressed, or sometimes even have thought! Even if, in the face of the emergent polyphonic harmony, you cannot but wonder: Can two walk together unless they are agreed?⁹ Well, your faithful servant and Richard Strauss did discuss leaving the world as is, or actually brewing a joint stratagem against a world that strayed from its path, by accentuating cultural continuity. We did so by dreaming to literally take control over time, a dream which is neither conformism nor adaptability since this is indeed the idiosyncratic time of artistic creation, the time of anticipation, the time of the future, a time that invalidates and vanquishes political time as well as individual temporality, thereby holding out a paradoxical longevity to the (dead) artist and his work. Of course, art does not negate history and historicity, but it contests these dimensions of time. In one of my letters to Strauss, I wrote that the star of Da Ponte,¹⁰ a member of the same race as Shylock of Venice, had not set yet. Any art worth its name will prevail only if it looks after itself. Me: You talk about this joint effort as if it were cultural resistance. He: Not because cultural resistance comes even close to the rules of the game in politics, or understands anything of what happens there. Look, once I understood that our association was no longer feasible, I nevertheless didn’t stop offering him suggestions for future operas. Voilà, Viennese vacillation. On the one

 Amos 3:3.  Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749 – 1838) composed the libretto for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, among other works.

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hand, full exploitation of the space for aesthetic play as an egalitarian, autonomous, dialogical zone free of ethnic or racial distinctions. On the other hand, and this goes hand in hand with the first assumption and is implied by it, a huge abstraction, as though the world were nothing but a game, as though only two categories described the human creature: the one who is gifted, and the one who isn’t; the one who can join the game, and the onlooker. At one point, I was forced to take both positions: to participate and stand by. I initiated this split without any hard feelings, willing to instruct another librettist on what to do with my ideas, as if I were transparent as an author, without name or identity, without an interest, making no claim for myself and content with the pleasure of the work only. More than anything I insisted on continuing to take part in what I considered great art. Me: And you really think that in limitlessly embracing an older artist whom you admired (to the point of self-sacrifice and self-oblivion) you weren’t driven by the urge to assimilate? He takes a long time to reflect, putting his knife and fork down on the plate. He pours another glass. What is the point of being creative? Who is the intimate addressee of our creations? Is there anyone like that actually? The question is important, but it isn’t the most important, not the first in order of priorities. In this particular case – identification with the aggressor? – I am not sure. Maybe that too, when I found topics for him with Germanic connotations, to be in tune with the times, even while I was in fact moving away from our shared view of what was artistically right; when I internalized the whole tangle of considerations which someone of his status was supposed to undertake. As though nothing meant anything except Richard Strauss’s artistic world. Megalomania? Perhaps. The aging composer grew quite dependent on me, as dependent on our relationship as on oxygen. He dispatched a flood of letters to London¹¹ almost daily, gradually turning me into his close associate in rescuing the culture. In this sense our encounter is impersonal, indifferent to the question of our origins, the times and the context. And yet, at the same time, it makes me a partner in the effort to salvage Richard Strauss’ creativity and prestige. His son was married to a Jewess, I interrupt. And there were children to be protected in this story – his grandchildren.

 Their collaboration continued after Zweig emigrated from Salzburg to London in 1934.

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Ignoring my remark, he continues his line of thinking. For both of us, going on with the game was tantamount to going on living. It was, and still is, a matter of life and death. Nevertheless, amid the scandal, the attacks on him for working with me, and against me on account of my praise-thirsty opportunism, I changed substantially. I realized there was no more room for play, no more aesthetic suspense. Or perhaps the equality, in the fold of suspense we established and inhabited, was illusory in the first place. Still, the letters we exchanged tempted us to believe our powers were on a par. I acknowledge that in a totalitarian society the relative freedom of any subject, including the highest-placed, is extremely precarious. Until this very day I believe that our correspondence reflects the very essence of the aesthetic domain, as well as the impossible encounter between it and other domains, pace any romantic or post-romantic thesis. There is absolutely no negotiation between domains of the human condition! Strauss was a fanatic aestheticist – even more so than me. Though he may have been egocentric, indifferent, and an opportunist, he did, by his own sights, attempt to do good and to prevent what was more evil, the most evil. As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Arendt, the power relations between politics and art did not change in temporal terms. They are not subject to change. Only one thing changed: the local possibility of working together, the boundary, which I found myself having to redefine, between cooperation and collaboration. For working together means planning, fantasizing, assuming continuity; when these were absent it was impossible to act as if nothing had happened. Decrees became more and more draconian. External constraints gradually transformed into internal impossibility. And so what? Is it clear beyond doubt what I should have opted for? What would be the right, valid, responsible position, as opposed to an alienated approach that shirks responsibility? Is there a recipe, a pre-given credo, a set speech of opposition, both authentic and efficient? What would it be? Never be loyal but to yourself? Stay loyal to yourself and hence to your delusions and hesitations? Never to err, never to correct, never to learn by experience? To radically change principles regarding the world and life by which you’ve stuck until now, or persistently to stick to them? Be heroic? Don’t be heroic? Where does human dignity inhere? Where must one draw the line in times when lines are being crossed and trampled? How must we redesign domestic economy, the transitions, the public space? Me, I am neither a hero nor one who changes the world; neither a theoretician nor an ideologue nor a professional something or other. I was always searching out other tiny, minor places, without wishing to impose anything on anyone and without wishing for them to interfere with my business. I never belonged to any club, nor did I sign any manifesto or petition. I didn’t want to commit myself to definitions or to implicate anyone but myself in my positions. I didn’t want to attract attention, I swear,

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didn’t want to stand out. Self-preservation for its own sake, the ability to survive for its own sake, those are heroic in my view. I appreciate the broad-spanning arc of their expression, poker faces, masks, defenses, a room of one’s own, for after all and paradoxically, I didn’t know how to look after myself. Even if you don’t agree with me, don’t forget the price I was willing to pay for my position. I was fully aware that most people would reject me, talk about what had been done “in the name of music”, and use it against me. I paid a heavy price. Me: Eat, Mr. Zweig, your food is getting cold. Confused, he stares, tense. I am not sure at all whether survival as such is respectable enough; not every act of selfpreservation is respectful of its subject. I believe you think so too, eventually. But to come to the point: the value of spiritual activity and the immanent constraints to which it is subjected does not bear upon the crucial question regarding its relations with the surroundings. Does it direct itself to what’s going on, and if so, how? What is its commitment to the world? Commitment can take infinite shapes, all the way from nostalgia to a complete innovation. It may be mimetic or allegorical. It may adequately translate the various intuitions into genres that may contain them supplely and amply, and so forth. A tragedy is not the same thing as a novel, after all. These are distinct genres that evolved in historical contexts. The work of art is temporally situated in this interval, in the here and now, between past and future, before it escapes its time-boundedness. Here it is neither mobilized nor is anything imposed on it. It is in fact a riddle, a task every artist must face. Zweig, who in the meantime eagerly returned to his food, pulls a face, pushes away his plate, wipes his mouth and moustache with his serviette, and slightly raises his voice: No relationship! No address! Not at least in the sense I think you mean it. History moves through its cycles in an impersonal, arbitrary motion, beyond good and evil; people are under the stamp of its fate, and of a mind that never stops surprising them. Everything that happens on those two levels can be described in terms of energies, impulses, including artistic activity. In real time, in the state of concentration and withdrawal this activity requires, there is neither knowledge nor intention nor ego. There’s passive becoming within the four walls. Next, the work of art goes out into the world, and that’s something else entirely. Really, I don’t think its appearance on the scene makes the slightest difference in the ways of the world. Me: I totally agree that the notion of “expressionist art”, referring to self-expression or the reflection of the artist’s subjective psyche, is unfounded; in fact the notion is contradictory and meaningless. But exactly due to this, art’s lack of

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egotism, no matter in what representational approach it is experienced, is related to the world, to the very feature of worldliness, in other words to the relationship itself between the condition of the mind and the transcendent. You, on the other hand, believe that indifference and disconnection are requisite for creation, which doom it to total immanence, and given all those energies and fatalisms and the devil may know what else, madness lies in waiting, an inevitable threat… Though his voice drops a little, his tone is stable and fluent. The process of thinking underlying creative activity situates it on the very edge of the abyss. This is how it lives its freedom and the pitfalls of that freedom. It may, indeed, rob itself of that freedom due to its own activities. Me: Like a sort of internal “politics” of thinking, which has the capacity to produce impressions parallel to the limitations, to the prison, to the persecutionunto-death out there in the world? He: Certain political circumstances prompt the artist most urgently to flee politics and look for shelter. In those circumstances, thought has the internal resources to make the external destruction spiral further and further. We would like to believe that one can distinguish political madness from spiritual lucidity and its harmonious humanity, but the spirit is subject to the caprice of body-mind. I’m talking about an inherent dynamic. It’s not about the special case when thinking becomes contaminated by the ambient madness, as if it couldn’t remain neutral and was dragged, against its will, to collude in the crime. Absolutely not. Sin lurks right at the door to the sublime human mechanism we call thought. All evil originates there, and once it becomes sealed from its surroundings – whether by choice or by external constraint – it may bring catastrophe upon itself. This may occur even if, in a final polishing of its gesture, it may appear to us, the offspring, in its full splendor. Me: Consciousness’ principle of action, its freedom, you would call it, is to move incessantly, to pry apart. “It feels empty”, if one may put it that way; it is basically nihilistic, simply speaking. It may take fright at the internal subversion which persistently denies all certainty, faith, essence, and value. It may take fright at its precarious state, its temporary and arbitrary achievements, and seek redemption. And then of course, escaping its tender, weak, incomplete being, it goes crazy and tumbles into a rigid and peremptory ideology. When it remains protected within the void and isn’t intimidated, when it concedes to

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the void that underlies all its achievements, it is entirely sane; it is, indeed, sanity itself. He moves in his seat, at ease. Let me tell you a story. It’s about a world champion chess master, Mirko Czentovic… Me: Do you plan to recount the plot of Chess Story? ¹² He: Have you read it? Me: No, no I haven’t. Do you know it is staged as a play, from time to time, right around the corner, in the Lucernaire theatre? He: I was told, but I must have forgotten until my wanderings took me here, accidentally; it has been happening like that for a while. Very well. So I would like to describe to you in detail how I feel about my compatriot and my gentle friend, Dr. B., who travelled with me on the great ocean liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires, which also carried the above mentioned champion. Me: When was it that you wrote these things down? He: In Petropolis, September 1941. Dr. B. was on board and told me his story. You know, I am sure, that what happens in transit, on deck of a ship or a ferry, in hotels, on journeys, another continent, is likely to bring out and heighten hidden mental powers in us… I beg you, I say drily. He: This was not the first time I looked at a game in one of my stories, to ponder the fragility of the human condition by means of a lively, stimulating activity taking place in a separate sphere, defined according to rules of entry and exit. But never before had I encountered a character who played all roles himself exclusively, explicitly, and with such determination. He enacted with and against himself all possibilities, all temperaments and tendencies: love, hate, sadism, destruction, desire, competition, enmity, fanaticism…

 The Royal Game, also known as Chess Story (in the original German Schachnovelle) is a novella by Zweig published in 1941, just before the author’s death by suicide.

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Me: Can’t you stop musing and piling up the words and simply tell me the story? He: You don’t mince your words. You say what you think straight out. He smiles. Well then, this Dr. B., an astute and experienced attorney, had dealt with the finances of Austria’s monasteries and the Catholic church. He was put into jail for questioning by the Gestapo, after they were tipped off by someone in his office. But that’s of no consequence. I won’t trouble you with all the details. With not a living soul around, during long months of hardship and deprivation which almost led to a paralysis of mind and feeling, he managed to steal a chess instruction book from the pocket of one of his investigators’ uniform jacket. Once he got over his initial astonishment and disappointment at the poor fish he had caught, for want of an alternative, he immersed himself in the book and soon enough he became fascinated. To begin with, he reproduced the existing rules and strategies used by the great chess players. In other words: he played games that had been played before. But even at this stage, he wasn’t merely playing chess: he became chess, much like children at play become a train or a windmill. Since he had no chess pieces, he was forced to set aside some of his food in order to make his own pieces. Instead of putting the breadcrumbs into his body, he left them outside. You probably see how the possibility of eating the game, of crumbling the pieces and swallowing them, shows to what extent it wasn’t “just” a game but an intolerable fusion of all the levels of being. The game was existential. There was no outside-the-game. It was in the imagination, in reality, and in the intellect. The second stage was obvious: Dr. B. stopped imitating the games of expert players and started inventing his own moves. To succeed in this, he split into two instances: a white player and a black player (made up from bread mixed with dirt). Note: Two instances, not three! The game has no audience, no witnesses, not until the Doktor eventually told me in the ship’s bowels what had happened. Meanwhile – are you with me? – Dr. B. isn’t playing. He’s being played. Or rather: he himself is the game. Dear Mrs. Arendt, you know full well that a proper game requires delineation and distance. Once it gets transposed to the stuff of the body, once the body itself becomes the game’s playing field, once the game becomes consummated within the psyche (a narrow space which resembles, with a terrible inversion, the archaic conditions in the womb), then the game is over! The game’s relocation is catastrophic. No longer is it an interruption or a suspension as in carnival, which takes place in a neutral field, balanced and devoid of the materials of life, to which you can then return when it ends, freer and more flexible than before. It is life as such, in all its seriousness, excess, and exaggeration. If the goal of this particular golem was to prevent the Doktor from going mad, then it turned against its creator and threatened his total collapse. At first, the Doktor directed violence against the objects he invent-

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ed. Later, he no longer needed them: He was able to conduct the whole thing inside his imagination. Victory was as internal as defeat. Do you understand what this involves? Forget about Schiller! Forget about Freud! What started out as a controlled and conscious alternative to deprivation came to dominate existence and became life itself. The one who plays encourages a dependency on the game and cannot afford to lose it. And once this is how it is, the game becomes a source of misery. His days are no longer days, his nights no longer nights. He cannot be disturbed. The game makes him feverish, poisons him; he grows thin and emaciated. He drinks the wine that’s left over in the bottle in one gulp. He is thirsty. I mean Dr. B. is thirsty, thirsty, thirsty. Do you know what this is about? His being a prisoner, being coerced, the Gestapo, torture – it’s all one thing. No external means are needed if one wants to strangle oneself. Me: Mr. Zweig, let’s talk as one author to another. It’s becoming interesting. People would probably have lynched me – though it hardly matters – had I ventured to argue that there’s no causal chain – that is, external duress from the Gestapo leads to self-torture – but just some external catalyst to an act of imprisonment that would have occurred anyhow. And yet, without the Gestapo, without the suggested analogy, the story stops being a story, am I right? He: This is how it was told to me. Me: Don’t tell me such nonsense. You’re trying to draw a parallel between the two imprisonments, and thereby to give the concrete, historical imprisonment both a historical and an ahistorical dimension. I beg to differ, but …. Bending towards me, and putting his finger between his teeth, he says: The historical juncture takes internal possibilities of bestiality and fascism to the brink. Even though there are infinite versions of internal collapse which do not of necessity lead to power abuse or outwardly directed violence. That’s why my analysis does not offer political conclusions other than by implication and with some hesitation. The Doktor, after all, is a man undamaging. Granted, he may be neurotic, masochistic, unfulfilled and rejected; he may suffer from inner conflict to the point of madness. And yet, one can picture a man in his condition, conscious of his unravelling, who exactly because of this insists on impeccable behavior, on showing himself to be an exemplar of peace and tolerance. The paths of projection, leading from hatred of the self to hatred of the other, are never smoothly paved.

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Me: The psychological effectiveness of totalitarian ideology resulted from a cynical, in this case deeply diabolical, encounter of its own lies with a fundamental truth of human existence, an incurable vulnerability. With all the attendant frustration. It is possible, after all, in the jumble that makes up totalitarianism, to discern traces of existential insights shared by socialists. Everybody in those days was talking a similar language, enabling them to be deceived by what seemed familiar. In the case of totalitarianism, the discourse of nihilism fed into two clashing movements: It presented a coherent fiction which had been offering everybody – intellectuals, the avant-garde, the bourgeoisie, the masses – a home, status, identity, belonging, greatness even, I would venture; a fiction that dispelled loneliness and alleviated the anxiety caused by searching. On the other hand, it took the nihilist threat to its final, ravaging conclusion, to an atomization that destroys the human, making thought superfluous. In both cases the subtle existential balance between negation, emptiness, chance, ambiguity, freedom and creativity, completely folded. And yet, involvement, even when it is complex, is by no means causality. Intellectuals never constituted a source of inspiration for totalitarianism; at most, they offered a blind legitimizing screen for what was going on. Once it was institutionalized in government, their spiritual and artistic initiatives lost all attraction. He: Nevertheless, setting aside the totalitarian trickery for a moment, let’s look at people, subjects, citizens, the elite, the masses. They are, as you said, exposed to a common sensibility, to a nihilism they experience on diverse strata and with varying degrees of awareness. The corpus of culture, the process of acculturation, thought, the creativity that is its share – all this is supposed to be giving the elite access to subtlety and exceptionality. Yet not only does all this wealth fail to offer the basis for the hoped-for equilibrium, by locking the artist up in a cell subject to the optimal concentration, it intensifies the affect and its violent, aggressive, destructive expressions. Abundance is a condensed expression of the disease. Me: So your swan’s song is a verdict against culture? But even so: What sense do you make of your own role in the story? The player collapses, I understand, I accept. But what about the onlooker, the witness, the narrator… He: That’s the point exactly. Again he inclines towards me, gloomy shades passing over his face. The narrator-witness is absolutely forbidden to cross the line. Yet he does not observe this. Is it his personal problem? I’m not sure. On the face of it, you seem to be right. I forgot to tell you that one fine day, the Doktor attacked his jailor in a rage, and was taken to hospital. This is where his recovery lay. It is the

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first encounter where hardship shifts into a therapeutic situation. In my company, the situation repeats itself all over again, at least to begin with. So far, the player-onlooker formula works very efficiently, even if what we have here is a late testimony. But human beings, it turns out, cannot keep to their appointed or self-appointed place for a long stretch of time. And this for a whole range of reasons. The Doktor sets out on his journey on the ship facing a new horizon. He is playing to an audience and speaks to the narrator. The game as it were shrinks back to its natural dimensions, so to speak: aesthetic, enclosed, wholly outside the psycho-physical economy that took hold of him in the prison cell. But then something happens to the onlooker. He becomes an ecstatic participant. He loses his distance, the very ability to create distance, which requires a certain indifference. He loses his sense of proportion and responsibility, and eventually he changes the status of the game, not just for the Doktor, but for himself as well. I agree with you that the human condition requires aesthetic space, and that everything is determined by it and results from it: World. Persistence. Thought. Creativity. Law. Subject. Sanity. For countless reasons, the boundary between decent onlooking and voyeurism (an alternative type of game) somehow becomes eroded: initially through a gradual seepage, then a full fusion, until the onlooker becomes a no less fervent player than the original one, and perhaps even more so. Because he isn’t skilled, because he’s surprised, because he gets connected to past games, which, presumably, he let go out of hand. Exactly like Dr. B., he becomes a child: when the fury comes upon him, his words can no longer be made intelligible. His tongue goes on, imitating the body’s gestures. All this is happening to me, at a certain moment. I encourage the Doktor, whose story I’ve just heard out attentively, to play a tournament against Czentovic. To play for real. I don’t notice how I bring the uninvolved onlooker closer to the abject position of an overenthusiastic spectator. I simply forget that I’m scratching a wound, condemning Dr. B. to repeat his trauma though, knowing the full picture, I have both the ability and the responsibility to get him to refrain from such a thing. Me: But what, for heavens’ sake, happens in the end? You’re constantly philosophizing, but won’t you finish the story? He: I’m sorry. Or rather, my narrating self apologizes for my greediness. I know I have overstepped the mark. But still, you understand, in order to impact the events, I must intervene: I stretch out my hand to take hold of the Doktor’s arm. Me: That’s a crucial gesture. Without it there’s no story.

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He: What remains is a story that includes the possibility of the death of the story or of the narrator. The death of the narrator who is subject to the caprice of the depression of thinking. Do you follow? Me: Follow what? What would you like me to make of it? You keep repeating it. His eyes fill with tears. My unease at witnessing his emotions changes into apprehension. In the past, you surrounded yourself with all manner of constraints. The choices we make in our creative lives are not accidental. There also exists a category, or a sub-category, called cowardly mimetic writers. You had a huge library. You labored on a single, always recurring, narrator-figure. You wrote about important personalities, you translated, you handed down knowledge. It’s not that you didn’t experience depression, fatigue, crises – what’s within your ability, and where you are unable or not permitted to enter. You knew it all with an unblinkered clarity. At times you delved deep because of this, at times you floated. You had a thorough understanding of the bystander’s advantages. All right. Years and revolutions went by, and now you’re closer, in spite of yourself, to that hell where the game changes its location. You and your study, which have been cast out to the other end of the world. Fewer people, books, and choices. When your hand reaches out, as in the past, in search of support, of something that may soothe you so you won’t harm yourself, it finds nothing there. Blessed and consoling habits have vanished as if they had never been. Witnesses have gone. What’s left is only your shocking nearness to the elementary sense of life, hunger, thirst, a superfluous intimacy which you don’t know how to handle. What remains is the self, and the other self, and all the others who live side by side in terror, irking each other, provoking, fantasizing, defeated in mutual displeasure. Right in the middle of all this you have remained alone, afraid to share it with anyone, even more private and withdrawn than you were before. So go ahead, play by other rules, invent them. But you can’t. You must, but you can’t. I don’t want, I can’t. You understand… He attempts to collect himself and get up but falls to the floor. I rush toward him, squat at his side and stretch out my hands. Mr. Zweig, Mr. Zweig, listen to me, listen to me. The waiter arrives with a jug of cold water and sprinkles it generously. He is white as a sheet as he gradually comes to. He mutters wearily: Don’t worry, the worst is already behind me. May the plague get you, I say under my breath as I help to get him to sit up and then slowly to stand on his legs. A cigarette? I light one for each of us. As we leave the café, I remark casually that I’m planning to leave towards tomorrow evening.

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His grey eyes cloud over briefly. Too bad! There are things I would have liked to discuss with you. Me: We could meet tomorrow midday in the Luxembourg Gardens, so we’ll manage to say goodbye. Use the entrance closest to the Boulevard St Michel. I’ll be waiting nearby, on one of the seats near the statue of Georges Sand.¹³ I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Joyfully he says: You should have called yourself Georges too. Me: Thank God that isn’t necessary any more, Mr. Zweig. If it doesn’t get too chilly, we can sit a bit in the open air. There’s a roofed gallery too, over there. Are you all right? He: Don’t worry. You can go. Rain was falling intermittently the next day, taking the sting out of the cold. The drops would fall faster and create a downpour, then settle down, then start pouring once again. Next a wonderful lull set in. A soothing brilliance came over the gardens especially for us, or so it seemed to me, who pass through again and again. We always come late in relation to the father, said Zweig, who was an early riser, someone who always arrived before the appointed time, punctual. Like me. Timing, I think, doesn’t matter one way or another. More than that I don’t know. I taught myself not to agonize. My gaze rested on the corners of Georges Sand’s dress for a long while. A tiny shrub kept her company alongside the naked giant ones surrounding her. I noticed Zweig approaching with faltering steps from beyond that shrub. Having shifted the chair next to me, to be able to face me without having to strain his neck, he sat down: In another life I’ll get an apartment in Rue d’Assas, Médicis, or Vaugirard – it remains to be seen which – with a window overlooking the gardens. That’s what I call felicitous conditions for work! Me: Mind, Mr. Zweig. You may find yourself facing the Senate, God forbid!

 Pseudonym of the writer Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin (1804– 1876). Putting her experience as a woman into her writing, she anticipates the work of George Eliot and Colette.

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He: Mrs. Arendt, I am in an excellent mood. Yes, indeed, one must take a serious attitude to the most insignificant things. Aesthetic greatness, after all, bears no relation to our bland existence and our strange needs, and yet mysteriously it literally takes sustenance from them. Contentedly, he opens the gilded buckle of his worn black leather briefcase and takes out a bottle of red Sancerre, a corkscrew, and two glasses. I’ve thought about everything, haven’t I? Me: About the main thing. The essence. He twists the corkscrew, uncorks the bottle cheerfully, and pours the wine: Long live Montaigne, Erasmus, Balzac, Proust, Rolland, and Freud, and my apologies to all whose names I did not mention! Me: Long live the world! He pours the fluid eagerly into his mouth. Work was the one thing in this world that could make Erasmus happy. The poor man suffered from every possible ailment: digestion, rheumatism, gout, headaches, and nausea. An extremely lazy organism, and hypochondria to boot. Me: So be it. It’s rather self-evident. He: But such regimen! Twenty hours a day of reading, writing, collecting materials, correcting texts. Three to four hours sleep are more than enough. Same for Rolland. As you probably know, it’s supremely important: Withdrawal, absorption, surrender, fear of time passing, regulation, avoiding distractions. Me: Do you believe the same work routine formula can serve everyone? He: Look, this question wasn’t absent from even one of the intellectual portraits I drew throughout my life. Like my collection of autographs, I was also fascinated by the question how the transition from the intuition, the hidden vision, to the musical note, to the word, material manuscripts and scores and drafts, actually happens, or is documented. One doesn’t acquire the gift of an intuition, nor earn it as the fruit of persistence. Either it comes, comes late, or doesn’t come. Those born without this vertiginous immediacy, must grow up, or grow old even, to make their influence work for them. So an exact phenomenology of creativity must pause at this dimension – clerical, archival, monomaniac, fanatic. And even then, no matter how much care we’ve taken, so much time passes without us paying attention, we daydream, discipline slackens…

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Me: But that is the only way something happens, or is likely to happen! Thought wanders and we trail behind it. Admittedly, we don’t always have the strength to lift the burden; we tend – not without justice – to put the blame on how we have used our time, as though it was a merely bureaucratic matter. But that’s not really it at all. We must be precise when we pin down idleness. He closes his eyes and withdraws into himself for a long time. You try to remember, to extract more possibilities from yourself, everything that was not, that could have been. You work with an accumulated treasure of civilization, figures you either met on your way or invented. You know everything is held in this humanity you contain. But the more condensed and fertile it is, the more you lose of your humanity. You perform all the dances you didn’t dance in the company of your characters. You permit yourself to be most like yourself, present and exposed, volcanic and miserable, so they won’t escape, because they do as they please. You are too human and inhuman. You’re not a human. You now close yourself to portions of your surroundings which you bit off in the past, you push away noise and domestic worries. Waste – everything seems a waste to you. You mourn and insult. There has been no tenderness in you for a long time. You haven’t been of this world for a long time. And the years pass, the crises of aging, a compromised health, nicotine poisonings, symptoms of displeasure that break out even from what appears, what feels, very good. Your weariness descends into a steady depression. Your sources dry up. Me: When did work stop doing its job? He: On the face of it, if a person always goes inside, reduces himself and holes up against outside misfortunes, he will be in the possession of more resources to cope with adversity. What difference does it make after all, whether it is here or there? In any case it can’t matter so much that it will make him lose his lust for life, can it? He forgets that he crafted the conditions of his existence gradually and carefully, and that each and every detail matters, including his frequent travels, departures made to return and refind. In none of these does he capitulate to the surroundings, people, new habits. When eventually forced to go, he – the uprooted one, the perennial foreigner —discovers with sadness and shock how many roots he has struck. Initially, it took some time: he was confused, drunk, euphoric, free. As though he had received a great privilege. To be homeless, without books, collections, wardrobe, papers, or citizenship. I owned in excess of ten thousand volumes, and collections going back forty-five years. I took along the barest minimum, what could be put in a suitcase, giving away the rest, distributing it between institutions, libraries, friends. I burned letters and manu-

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scripts. Then I discovered that what I prescribed myself once upon a time, with its measured components, made sense. It maintained me and kept me within bounds. I discovered that I had been rash and arrogant. Not that I had a choice, but I interfered with my sense of self-preservation only because I failed properly to assess that I couldn’t be other than who I was. We may tell ourselves that we change and adjust, that it isn’t a disaster, that the stability we needed in the past is now less important than it seemed. But whoever needs it, needs those quiet supports, their presence transparent, which make up a single context. This cannot be reproduced somewhere else, even if a whole community of old friends wanders alongside you. That is another revelation, which may even augment your trouble. What we lost was greater than what solidarity movements were able to rescue. Unwittingly, we had allowed the place to flow in our blood, we upheld it, obviously, even as we criticized, mocked and expressed our reservations. Once I had this insight, one day – I swear – I suddenly began to fade. No longer the pendulum movement I experienced scores of times and towards which I developed a tolerance: take it easy, until the storm passes. This was something entirely different. He gives me a strange look, astounded. You are actually listening to me. Maybe because you’re already on your way home… Me: As far as human experience is concerned, I have learned, there’s nothing like the loneliness and extinction before death. Most of us would rather be miserable than not be at all. Once this thirst stops, no society remains, no others remain. Death is wholly private. It bears absolutely no relation to the public. I only feel sorry on your behalf that there was no one there, not a single person, who could tell you how happy he was that you, precisely you, were still alive. Zweig lowers his head and takes care to rise very slowly, not to lose his balance. The grace of his shining, tearful eyes is immediately replaced by his customary expression. We shake hands in parting. I don’t dare to ask what else he wanted to discuss with me. Nor do I tell him that I am visited, occasionally, by two images that are related to him. In fact, they won’t let me be. The carnival in Rio which he attended with his young wife Lotte Altmann very shortly before the fateful day, and the image of the dead couple on their bed after they committed suicide. As well as something else, a sentence he gave to the doctor in his novel, Impatience of the Heart – perhaps we know, nevertheless, better than what we seem to know – and which here I take out of its context: “Every illness is an anarchist action in itself, a rebellion against nature, and that is why we are allowed to fight it by all means – all! No, no pity for the sick – the sick man puts himself outside law, he undermines order, and for order to be restored, for the sick to be recovered, we ought, as in every rebellion, to act ruthlessly using any possible arm.

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Since humanity has not been cured with goodness and truth, not even one single sick man.”¹⁴

Flow Chart Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin”, Men in Dark Times In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafes which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along. (174)

Zweig, The World of Yesterday Without exception, my thoughts are developed by objects, events and persons, and the purely theoretical and metaphysical remains beyond my ken. (96) Perhaps it was just the substantial sphere from which I came, and my feelings that I too was burdened to a certain degree with a complex of “security”, that caused me to be fascinated by those who were wasteful and almost disdainful of their lives, their time, their money, their health, and their good name, these passionate individuals whose only mania was mere existence without a goal; and perhaps you may notice that in my novels and short stories my predilection for all intense and unruly natures. To this was added the attraction of the exotic, the foreign; nearly every one of them contributed to my eager curiosity from a strange world. (117) From the point of view of the expressionists and, may I say, the excessivists, my thirty-six years made me eligible for the elder generation that was already disposed of, because I declined any ape-like adherence. (303) Every redundancy, all embellishment and anything vaguely rapturous, everything nebulous and unclear, whatever tends to retard a novel, a biography, an intellectual discussion, irritates me. Only a book that steadily, page after page, maintains its level and that seizes and carries one breathlessly to the last line, gives the perfect enjoyment. (319)

 Translated by the author from the Hebrew edition of Ungeduld des Herzens, p. 124.

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Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition This inherent wordliness of the artist is of course not changed if a “non-objective art” replaces the representation of things; to mistake this “non-objective” for subjectivity, where the artist feels called upon to “express himself”, his subjective feelings, is the mark of charlatans, not of artists. […] Expressionist art, but not abstract art, is a contradiction in terms. (323, n. 87)

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday I may well say – what I would never dare to say in reference to literature or any other field of life – that in these thirty or forty years of collecting I had become an authority in the field of manuscripts and that I knew about every important handwriting, where it was, to whom it belonged, and how it had come to its possessor; thus a real connoisseur who could judge authenticity at the first glance and who, in appraisal, was more experienced than most professionals. […] Not the sense of possession, of having them for my very own, enticed me but the allurement of unifying, of molding a collection into a work of art. I was aware that in this collection I had created something which, as an entity, was worthier of survival than my own works. (350, 353)

Hannah Arendt, “Bertolt Brecht”, Men in Dark Times What set him apart was that he realized how deadly ridiculous it would be to measure the flood of events with the yardstick of individual aspirations – to meet, for instance, the international catastrophe of unemployment with a desire to make a career and with reflections on one’s own success and failure, or to confront the catastrophe of the war with the ideal of a well-rounded personality, or to go into exile, as so many of his colleagues did, with complaints about lost fame or a broken-up life. (225 – 226)

Hannah Arendt, “Portrait of a Period”, The Jew as Pariah He [Zweig] describes his endless interest in the dead geniuses of history; penetrating their private lives and gathering their personal relics was the most enjoyable pursuit of an inactive existence. […] [H]is collections were stolen from him, and with them his intimacy with the famous dead. (113, 120)

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Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [A]nd so a friendship [with Romain Rolland] began which, together with that of Freud and [Émile] Verhaeren, was the most fruitful and, at certain times, the most decisive for the future course of my life. (202) In the very first hour of our meeting I had come to a decision: to serve this man and his work. […] I knew in advance that the translation of his monumental poetic work and his three dramas in verse would take away two or three years from my own work. But in resolving to devote my entire energy, time and passion to the translation of a foreign work, I did myself the best of services, by assuming a moral task. My uncertain seeking and striving now began to make sense. […] In all sacrificing service there is more assurance for the beginner than in his own creation, and nothing that one has ever done with devotion is done in vain. (124) In that hour I had seen the Eternal secret of all great art, yes, of every mortal achievement, made manifest: concentration, the collection of all forces, all senses, that ecstasies, that being-out-of-the-world of every artist. I had learned something for my entire lifetime. (149) [A]s if the countless hours at his desk had bent his (Rolland’s) neck; he looked somewhat sickly, with his sharply chiseled pallid features. He spoke very softly, just as he spared his body in all things to the utmost. He hardly ever went walking, ate little, neither smoke nor drank, and avoided all physical exertion; and I realized later with admiration how much perseverance dwelt in that ascetic body, how much intellectual labor capacity lay behind this apparent weakness. For hours on end he wrote at his small, heaped-ful desk, for hours he would read in bed, never allowing his tired body more than four or five hours’ sleep, and music was the sole relaxation he permitted himself. (202– 203) I promised him (Herzl) although I was determined not to keep my promise, for the more I love a person the more I respect his time. (108) A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. […] Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning. (223) We writers, too, stood up against war, although as always individualistically isolated instead of united and determined. The stand of most of the intellectuals was unfortunately an indifferently passive one, because our optimism blinded us to the problem of war with all of its moral consequences. (198)

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It happens – and I am not ashamed to admit this fault – that there is nothing heroic in my nature. My natural attitude to all dangerous situations has always been to evade, and it was not only on this occasion that I had to accept, perhaps justly, the reproach of indecision that so often was made to my revered master of earlier century, Erasmus of Rotterdam. (229) It should be remembered that the world conscience was still a courted power in the years from 1914 to 1918; the artistically productive, the moral elements of a nation, still represented a force in the war which was respected for its influence. (257) I looked back at those fifty years and had to admit that it would be wicked not to feel grateful. After all, more, immeasurably more had been given me than I had expected or had thought myself capable of. The medium through which I had wanted to develop and to express my being, that of literature, had operated with an efficacy beyond the boldest dreams of my boyhood. There lay, as a present from the Insel-Verlag, printed for my birthday, a bibliography of my books as published in all languages, a book in itself; no language was absent, not Bulgarian or Finnish, nor Portuguese or Armenian, not Chinese or Marathi. In Braille, in shorthand, in all exotic alphabets and idioms, thoughts and words of mine had gone out to people; I had expanded my existence immeasurably beyond the space of my being. I had established personal friendship with many of the best people of my time, had enjoyed the most perfect performances; it was given me to see and to enjoy the eternal cities, the eternal paintings, the most beautiful prospects on earth. I had retained my freedom, was not dependent on office or profession, my work was my joy and furthermore, it had brought joy to others. (355) I did not care for my house any more after that official visit (Salzburg police) and a certain intuition told me that an episode of that nature could be no less than a timid prologue to much more far-reaching encroachments. The same evening, I started to pack my most important papers, determined to live abroad permanently from now on, and this meant more than giving up house and country, for my family clung to the house as their home, they loved the land. For me, however, personal liberty was the most important thing on earth. Without notifying any of my friends or acquaintances of my intention, I went back to London two days later; the first thing I did on arrival there was to notify the authorities in Salzburg that I definitely had given up my residence there. It was the first step toward detaching me from my homeland. But since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby. (389) [A]nd now, over fifty years old, I faced a beginning, was once more a student working at a desk or in a library, only not as credulous, not as enthusiastic, with

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a suspicion of gray in my hair and a faint dawn of despair over my wearied soul. (391– 392) On the day I lost my passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil. (412) I regarded it more as an honor than a disgrace to be permitted to share this fate of the complete destruction of literary existence in Germany with such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud, Einstein, and many others whose work I consider incomparably more important than my own. (367) Europe seemed to me doomed to die by its own madness; Europe, our sacred home, cradle and Parthenon of our occidental civilization. (398) For many years I looked back on this self-training for the temporary as a mistake, but when later I was compelled once again to leave each home that I created for myself and when I saw everything about me crumbling, this enigmatic instinct not to bind myself proved an aid. Acquired early, it made all loss and all leave-taking easier for me. (161) My joy always lay in the act of creating, never in what had been created. So I do not lament for what I once owned; for, if we, driven and hunted in these times which are inimical to every art and every collection, were put to it to learn a new art it would be that of parting from all that once had been our pride and our love. (354) [T]he matter of The Silent Woman eventually developed into an exciting affair of State. […] Thus the black day broke over National Socialist Germany when once again an opera to be performed where that proscribed name of Stefan Zweig showed on every poster. (376) I have to admit that he (Strauss) kept faith with me throughout this whole affair as long as it was possible for him to do so. To be sure, simultaneously he took steps which I liked less, he approached the men in power, met frequently with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels [… allowed himself to be made president of the Nazi Chamber of Music. […] Through his art-egoism which he always acknowledged openly and coolly, he was inwardly indifferent whatever the regime. (272– 273)

Hannah Arendt, “Portrait of a Period”, The Jew as Pariah In his last book Stefan Zweig describes a part of the bourgeois world – the world of the literati, which had given him renown and protected him from the ordinary trials of life. Concerned only with personal dignity and his art, he had kept himself so completely aloof from politics that in retrospect the catastrophe of the last

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ten years seemed to him like a sudden monstrous and inconceivable earthquake, in the midst of which he had tried to safeguard his dignity as long as he could. He considered it unbearably humiliating when the hitherto wealthy and respected citizens of Vienna had to go begging for visas to countries which only a few weeks before they would have been unable even to find on a map. That he himself, only yesterday so famous and welcome a guest in foreign countries, should also belong to this miserable host of the homeless and suspect was simply hell on earth to him. But deeply as the events of 1933 had changed his personal existence, they could not touch his standards or his attitudes to the world and to life. He continued to boast of his unpolitical point of view; it never occurred to him that, politically speaking, it might be an honor to stand outside the law when all men were no longer equal before it. (112) It is astounding that there were still men among us whose ignorance was so profound, and whose conscience was so clear, that they could continue to look on the prewar period with the eyes of the nineteenth century. […] It is wryly gratifying that at least one of these men had the courage to record it all in detail, without hiding or prettifying anything. For Zweig finally realized what “chronic fools” they all had been – though the connection between their tragedy and their folly he hardly recognized. (114)

Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”, The Jew as Pariah All vaunted Jewish qualities – the “Jewish heart”, humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence – are pariah qualities. All Jewish shortcomings – tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority, complexes and money-grubbing – are characteristic of upstarts. There have always been Jews who did not think it worthwhile to change their humane attitude and their natural insight into reality for the narrowness of caste spirit or the essential unreality of financial transactions. (66) Whatever we do, whatever we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire to be changed, not to be Jews. All our activities are directed to attain this aim: we don’t want to be refugees, since we don’t want to be Jews; we pretend to be English-speaking people, since German-speaking immigrants of recent years are marked as Jews; we don’t call ourselves stateless, since the majority of stateless people in the world are Jews; we are willing to become loyal Hottentots, only to hide the fact that we are Jews. We don’t succeed and we can’t succeed; under the cover of our “optimism” you can easily detect the hopeless sadness of assimilationists. (63)

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Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday There one sat, waiting and staring into the void like a doomed man in his cell. […] “Forget!” I commanded myself. “Flee, take refuge in your innermost self, in your work, flee to where you are no more than your own being, not the citizen of a state, not a plaything of this infernal game, where alone your bit of intellect can still function rationally in a world gone mad”. (430 – 431) But it is only early in life that one believes fate to be identical with chance. Later one knows that the actual course of one’s life was determined from within; however confusedly and meaninglessly our way may deviate from our desires, after all it does lead us inevitably to our invisible goal.

Chapter 7 The Visitation of Michal, Daughter of Saul “The spring on its way/is like the spring gone by./ […] For me there’s no border between night and day,/just that night is colder/though silence is equal to them both.”¹

1 Neither early nor late: rather a kind of porous suspension in which layers of words and ideas condensed, crowding into each other, drawing the self closer and then again away from itself, toward what it secretly calls “my truth”. Ageless thought – without gender, without attributes. Pallid abstraction. When, at around seventy, Arendt turned to writing The Life of the Mind,² she was man, woman, and people all in one. This is not a biography of “the mind”. This is the life of her mind, auto-biography, hetero-biography, insurgency between phenomenal and reflective self, between visible and invisible. The circle began long ago with “Vita Activa” in The Human Condition. Presently, having experienced the abundance of tastes spawned by her work on reflection, she wanders imaginatively through the landmarks, tracing paths along which she may guide more travelers. Round and round she goes in her danse macabre, even when she finds herself devoid of concrete subject matter, in order to host the bare fruits of her mind, thinkers, eras, periods. She commits to them all she has seen and gathered. Once more she exposes her intuitions and releases testimony regarding that blissful metamorphosis. She splits, talks to herself, struggles, provokes, asks and responds. This friendship she entertains with herself she calls self-love. And yet from times immemorial, the rift is essential, an infinite regression at the very depths of whoever thinks herself a thinking person. This is the unknown, fledgling face of philosophical regression, an increasingly agonized self-hospitality simply because one knows more. An ongoing exercise in making do with little. You don’t take a moment’s respite. I fear that all this will vanish and collapse into nothingness, as if it has never been.

 Dahlia Ravikovitch, “From Day to Night”, Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, tr. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. New York: Norton: 2009; p. 149. (All Ravikovitch poems below are quoted from this volume unless otherwise stated.)  Arendt’s final book, published posthumously, and edited by her friend Mary McCarthy. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471-007

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The mind cautiously passes over absent objects, dwelling on them at length. There’s no concern, it would appear, and no reason for concern. Whatever the outcome of the inquiry, it will make no difference. All it takes is to avoid vanities, not to contradict herself, for the sake of inner peace, of some pleasure, even. From this point the end is in sight. But the mind converging into the household and exceeding it, supposedly towards no-place, does not soar to an otherworldly jouissance. Households share a common violence, an infinite archaic antagonism. Contingent solutions have to be invented. Her strength wanes. The Life of the Mind is a collection of anecdotes, reflections, associations, and fundamentally, a spectrum of moods. As she has always been wont, she writes herself under-erasure. The mind of others imprints itself upon her at each and every step. Certain irreversible things happened, not to be set aside, even if she had come a long way, or so it seemed to her. Hence her scholastic and careful rigor with quotation, voicing reservations, weighing pros and cons, presenting others’ arguments, only eventually to offer her own version, an exemplary pupil. She can be original, daring, unmethodical, or powerfully eloquent; she can be anything she can think of. Still, her admiration for others’ erudition is boundless. Here and there her festive reading reports read like a user’s manual, like a perplexed guide on how to read, how to identify lapses in perfectly structured discourses, in formal frames which fetter their writers to the point of suffocation. She wants for perhaps the last time to delight, to tempt others to delight in what delights her. To deliver and give birth, as before, from the desert of her infertility, which is stirred to conceive, at any season and at any time.

2 She lingered late in bed that day, giving herself over to the allure of rest. She arose still drowsy, mechanically plumped up the pillow, spread the cover, donned her dressing gown, absently passed the comb through her hair (still thick but no longer shiny), and hesitantly walked on swollen feet to the elongated window looking out on the street. The noise grew steadily, blocking the space. For some moments she leant forward as if about to keel over, then, startled, pulled herself together. It’s a day of celebration, remember, restrain yourself. He’s tied up, not available now, you know that. He’s pleased with himself, the carnival is running smoothly, a major success, a second festive loaf;³ you can only ruin things, you

 Exodus 16: 22.

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know the dynamic so well. If he feels attacked, he will lash back. Lost in thought, she observes the public, and rehearses: “You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him.”⁴ If she omits to rebuke, she will carry the entire burden. This is not the right time. This is the window of opportunity. Everything happens now at a dizzying speed. The Ark of the Covenant was forgotten. Those behind the scenes lying in wait for her were forgotten. Sometimes, love makes one afraid to scorn. Great loves grow tired when left unanswered by love. This anger could not be gracefully dismissed, nor could she bite the inside of her cheek, draw blood, make it swell, feel the blood flow, nor absently drop a cup to the floor again, staining the rug. No matter. I’ll clean it.

3 It is right, I think, to consider/ Both stupid and lacking in foresight/ Those poets of old who wrote songs/ For revels and diners and banquets,/ Pleasant sounds for men living at ease;/ But none of them all has discovered/ How to put an end with their singing/ Or musical instruments grief,/ Bitter grief, from which death and disaster / Cheat the hopes of a house.⁵

4 It is not the first carnival she has attended. She came along to the previous one with her father, observing his tense face, shocked by the daughters of Israel’s foolish intoxication. Their joy gave him offense. His spirit sank, his mood grew clouded by a whirling, wailing, crushing outdoors.

5 A slap.  Leviticus 19:17 – New King James Version (NKJV; all Biblical quotes are from this translation): “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”  Euripides, “The Medea”, Nurse, lines 190 – 198.

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Her head jerks to the side at the blow’s impact. His hand, skilled at throwing stones, grabs her by the hair and shakes her hard. You’re driving me to the edge, I warned you. It’s you who cooked all this up, from start to end. You’re vexing and over the top. Who asked you, anyway? Shut up. I should have done this a long time ago.

6 It was her tune that took the blow. She said: Listen to that tune. He said: I can’t. I won’t. It’s unpleasant. And he was right, in his way. Because what peeped out, like a young chick, was nothing compared to the sharp, twisted scream that sought to spurt from her throat in a sweeping torrent. It was the monstrous sound of one who rarely speaks. Speech, like any routine, needs practice and occasional oiling. Anyone who has been silent for a stretch knows this very well. Speech requires refamiliarization so it does not crash head-over-heels into the yawning tonal margins of the pre-verbal, which might scorch or squash it. David’s response is like correcting a slip of grammar. In the face of her childlike violent weeping that overwhelmed her and released an archaic chant, he could have taken her in his arms, embraced her, astonished, scared perhaps, but confident. Or he could have kept silent. One minute’s silence to honor the basic silence between us. Give it space, unafraid and unabashed, a stillness that came to settle here forever, so long ago. Do not try to wrap it in a false abundance. Her story is musical, multivocal and atonal throughout, from Paltiel’s weeping, through the violins, harps and cymbals, the bells and chimes and the ram’s horn of the dancers before the scroll, and then the outburst of scorn, the harassing response, and the chanting inside her head, the lament from which she was prevented. No room for mistakes here. Either the ensemble is perfect or it is deafening. Accord crumbles into dissonance, a dissensus of taste. Eventually one discovers it was so from the start.

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7 “How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself today in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!”⁶ She could have mumbled a tighter, sparser sentence: “How glorious was the king of Israel today who uncovered himself in the eyes of his servants, as one of the vain fellows.” Seven fewer words. But she couldn’t. Much as we must thank, praise, extol and adore, we must also be precise: twice “today”, two declensions of “cover”, “handmaids of his servants”. He must understand. And he does understand, exactly because he understands. Anger’s unique qualities – exorbitant pettiness, defiance, soberness – take note of something before the actors in question dare taking note, let alone name it. Insane suspiciousness, which is so exact as a result of a decision she took long ago, capricious but determined, as she looked at him from the side and thought, I love him, and again, it is him I love, everything’s all right, forever, lifelong. The die was cast. One merely has to rehearse and refresh the lesson once in a while, like a relentless murmuring of the wedding march.

8 By the way, did you ever try to learn her phrase by heart? Impossible. Though if you read it aloud and at a conversational pace, the “dialogue” takes only five minutes. Approximately. Her sour, scant speech should be taught in schools, her heritage.

9 At night, as he dreams, he seems to hear: …glorious… king of Israel…today… today…vain… What did you say? What do you want? Let me sleep. Nothing. I thought you were saying something.

 2 Samuel 6:20.

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Are you crazy? I’m trying to get some sleep, after all those ceremonies and celebrations. I’m dead tired.

10 David/ though you have made this speech of yours look well,/ Still I think, even though others do not agree,/ You have betrayed your wife and are acting badly.⁷

11 Her escape occurs outside the oedipal triangle, outside the drama. Both of them know this. He neither undertakes a political struggle for her sake nor does he fight back or even try to take revenge. Paltiel Ben Layish must be removed to bring the drama’s outlines into focus, to let it flow from its inner logic. The plot resists inessentials. All that’s left to clarify is what she is: a child or a wife, Saul’s daughter or David’s wife. She does not belong to this house. It’s not her home. Everything about her is a monument to the destruction of her first Temple. An accursed heap of disgrace and sickness and great grudge, the rigid ways of a family that became repulsive to God. She was bequeathed the gloom and distrust, the demeaning reactions that wear out the overflowing heart. Is Saul also among the prophets?⁸ The dread of display, the pull toward obscurity and reserve. The song of the she-asses. The seclusion, the concession, the flare-ups of rage and the tormented look. The ulcer. For a moment, it seems to her as though there is nothing in the world but love, nothing without it; everything tends only towards it. Still strong and eager, she works hard, helping him escape through the window; her days are like perfectly clean holiday clothes. Then suddenly, she took in a gaze and let it scorch her flesh. He of all people, whom she did not please, not knowing how else to behave. Later she felt that gaze wherever she turned: she’s so ridiculous, blundering this way and that. From now on the world became a source of weakness: everybody else knows the truth about her better than she does herself.

 Based on “The Medea”, Chorus, lines 576 – 579.  1 Samuel 10:11.

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“Cursed is the man who eats any food until evening, before I have taken vengeance on my enemies. So none of the people tasted food.”⁹ “Immediately Saul fell full length on the ground, and was dreadfully afraid because of the words of Samuel. And there was no strength in him, for he had eaten no food all day or all night. And the woman came to Saul and saw that he was severely troubled, and said to him, ‘Look, your maidservant has obeyed your voice, and I have put my life in my hands and heeded the words which you spoke to me. Now therefore, please, heed also the voice of your maidservant, and let me set a piece of bread before you; and eat, that you may have strength when you go on your way.’ But he refused and said, ‘I will not eat.’ So his servants, together with the woman, urged him; and he heeded their voice. Then he arose from the ground and sat on the bed.”¹⁰ Michal, Saul’s daughter, looked through the window. At this very moment she is wholly her father’s daughter. She is private, he public. She keeps connected vessels separate, undoes the law itself, as if to distinguish family from group – two systems that don’t go together. She demands rights that Biblical culture cannot offer. She can neither defend what drives her, nor justify her vision. Communication is possible only in the same currency. The differend in the domestic space is the gravest of all differends, and it grows more poignant where love has come to an end. Partners. Parents and children. A mixed economy lacking shared norms with no reconciliation in the offing. The pointless war for the other’s living soul.

12 Oh, unfortunate one! Oh, cruel!/ Where will you turn? Who will help you?/ What house or what land to preserve you/ from ill can you find?/ …No father’s house for a haven/ Is at hand for you now, and another queen/ Of your bed has dispossessed you and/ Is mistress of your home.¹¹

 1 Samuel 14:24.  1 Samuel 28:20 – 23.  “The Medea”’ Chorus, lines 357– 360; 442– 444.

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13 Me: How did you find shelter? How did you sever yourself from views that welcomed you in for years? Did you drift, absent minded? Were you suspicious? It seems to me there is a boundary that cannot be crossed, even once one has crossed all boundaries. Or maybe not, you’re a revolutionary. She: I left behind one kind of familiar alienness for another unfamiliar kind. Not an arbitrary journey, but a dry sobriety, devoid of grief, nostalgia, utopia, shorn of the wish, even, to return. They’re always talking to me about one’s mother tongue. Do any of us actually speak a mother tongue? If one makes some headway, one can cover a distance in a variety of tongues, through countless fictive leaps. So a number of questions may be removed from the agenda: Will you return, when will you return, how will you return, for the sake of what or whom will you return? I left the impossible. And who would want to return to the impossible? Me: Some people do return to the impossible, or at least they wish to return to rediscover it. For some, this impossibility remains what they want most. You forget. Your virtue is that you did not become impervious in the face of what is. I can’t understand this process. It seems to me like keeping a journal of possibilities, a daily record of a life that isn’t being lived. In other words, it isn’t a journal but something else. She: A journal or diary is born exactly from this despair. It inserts itself in the interval between what one experiences and another time, another place. It helps you escape time and flee into space, into a place without memory, without property. It sheds weight, reducing the erosive friction between pathology and its birth place. It gives you an anarchic power – one you never suspected – to invent from poverty. Above all, it gives you an ability to look at life, as it is seen and heard, as it feels to the touch. Me: There is no such place. I don’t believe in miracles. The new place easily exaggerates the reality left behind, now manifesting itself as a dissociated, autonomous force which mocks all our efforts, everything we teach ourselves to be. That force outdoes all changes of place, all prohibitions, all shifts. It accompanies wakeful movement with a kind of oppressive, run-down, persistent torpor. A kind of subtle noise rustles, removing all self-rule; it cannot be filtered out. A nicely buttoned-up drama that lies in wait for the right opportunity to find itself some hidden skylight in the ceiling, a window you forgot to seal. Then, all of a

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sudden, somebody is pacing there, as if he owned the place, his steps confident. As he leans over you, your body is riveted to the bed, unable to move from sheer fright. For a long time you struggle to open your eyes, even though you are in the middle of an attack, even though you know it’s a matter of life and death. Your limbs don’t obey you, you cannot raise yourself. In the end you wake up by his side, or hers, for a fleeting moment’s touch. With what precisely? A fate, a star, a messenger, an animal, a fleeting that fades? You’re not surprised, as though you’d been prostrate in the presence of the angel of death, him and no other. She: The angel of death is an ordinary person. One must make a clear decision, in favor of life or against it. Look how a homeland all our own stretches out between us, a veritable homeland we created, in all its splendor, far from the tumult of belonging. An essential visit home, the essence of the visit home, can actually happen anywhere, during any encounter – it depends on us. Me: Suddenly I’m not sure. I’m not sure if I’m not embracing all this goodness, the references, the codes and keys and deciphering, in order self-righteously to repress, to fixate, justify, and suspend. Can a relationship whose only contact is in thought and imagination approach a basic pattern? I try to let you enchant me with your tongue, like the finest oxygen, restoring life and memories; I try to take your formulas and formulations – subtle and awkward and brutal, ragged and pointed – into my being, discovering that they saw and knew better than I, anticipating me. At times I believe I really understood something, something sustainable, of the kind that two women can talk about. But it isn’t substantial enough. The mind is body. I think the spirit, too, is body, and the more spiritmind, the more spirit-body it is. And where I am not good for myself you cannot be good for me. You cannot help me. You can’t. You are absent. This, too, is a truth of the visitation. She: I don’t know what the truth is or whether contact is more truthful. I see how you make yourself available to me, show me your world, pour me into your body, and indeed, seal it at once. Me and you, you and me, no living soul but us, let nothing go wrong between us, for heaven’s sake; let nothing interfere. Together with me, you painstakingly keep your customs, your morning rush; you shake off the blanket like a sin, clasping the hem of my dress, taking me in with an exemplary hospitality which happens only like this, only for us. For truly there is neither host nor guest who will wish to testify to a basic wretchedness that nothing can alleviate, most certainly not a text, the excessiveness of a text, given the vital and oblivious transformation it performs. You beg me to stay here with you, where indeed everything takes place. To this faithful and constant repetition,

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no matter the circumstances, the lap, the age, I gave no name. It has no name. You’re right. Me: I am sorry. Perhaps I grew tired too soon, perhaps fear took over. A time to speak and a time to keep silence.¹² She: You shouldn’t be sorry. This is not a reproach. A conversation without effort does not deserve its name. What is it? Are you in pain? Me: It hurts so much. She: Turn over. Lie on your back. Draw your knees in, like that, easy. Bend your head and bring it toward your stomach. Me: It’s burning there. The hole is so enormous. She: Try to unwind, to think about something else. Me: Like waves crashing against the wall of my stomach, back and forth, in cycles of terrifying, sweet faintness, which spreads heavily and immediately slips away. I am exhausted. She: The body’s aches are the great enemy of thought. They don’t allow for it to let go, be playful. They are too demanding and intense. The chaotic thought needs repose. Me: I am so happy you’re saying that. I haven’t a clue, I cannot take off. She: I’m not surprised. Your window is closed. Should we go out for a breath of air? Let’s do something you like to do, something you used to like when you were a girl. Some exercise will do you good. Me: Not now. In a while. I wish I could go upon my belly, along with a whole army of women with belly pains.¹³ We’d leave it to the snakes to bring forth chil-

 Kohelet 3:7 (but the other way around).  Genesis 3:14: “And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon your belly shall you go, and dust shall you eat all the days of your life.”

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dren in sorrow.¹⁴ Punishment should have been meted out differently. Don’t you think? She: And what about Adam? Me: He can continue his labors, as far as I’m concerned. She: Great. You’ve turned into a witch, just like me.

14 Like light flickering/In the waves of night/You know it’s a fishing boat/In the boat/Are hard-working fishermen/In the sea light-moving fish/The net is cast/ This one’s death/Is that one’s life/Just like that.¹⁵

15 And Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child unto the day of her death.¹⁶

16 Dust on the roads/rising up to the sky. ¹⁷ Vanity of vanities. Her face looks so sad,¹⁸ her heart knows. She is satisfied. Past are the days of roving desire, the eating of meat. She has learned to control herself, not to need. She sinks to the depths of the abyss, to the zero degree of someone, of who she is. The sight of the eyes¹⁹ is clear and translucent. Sometimes, she knows, naming is scarier than the thing

 Genesis 3:16: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.”  T. Carmi, “Image” (tr. MH).  2 Samuel 6:23.  Dalia Ravikovitch, “Rough Draft”, 164– 165.  Genesis 40:7: “So he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in the custody of his lord’s house, saying, ‘Why do you look so sad today?’”  Kohelet 6:9: “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of desire. This also is vanity and grasping for the wind”.

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itself; or else we are unaware of the thing – its gravity, its effects – until we call it by a name. Or, words hold a formative power that seals fates. Petrified, she clings to the terrifying name of the second child, called Abel – the pale, the effaced. She must pass through the dead child, the point of departure. Hers. The dead, the murdered one, bones she did not know in her womb. As in a solemn initiation, a prayer, magic, she discharges the child of her potency.²⁰ She and Abel, vanity of vanities, vanity in itself, its ethereal, imperceptible presence, for the subject-offspring, the subject-animal. Her trembling follows the restlessness of thought, seeking to capture its outlines to the point of annihilation, and adding the echo like a murmur. Waste prevails over the imagery, a monstrous vanity/ breath/Abel. Heavy, so very heavy. Emphatic once, twice, three times, twenty, apace. All is vanity, vanity-stricken, ensnared no matter how it tries to escape. This unreliable, ambiguous, hazy, thick, faceless element envelops and appeases and hounds and injures all value, belief, conviction, recognition, achievement, property. He is her source, her purpose, and her hope; he is her nightmare and her longing, with whom everything is pregnant. All rests on his soft and vacant base. In whom all are equally present and redundant. Absolute equality. Could anybody have invented a more carnivalesque credo? All things are so worn out, it is beyond expression.²¹ No one could repair, deny, or avoid. Wisdom briefly appears to be advantageous and mighty and the very source of life,²² but resolution and will and urge fade into untold lack.²³ The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.²⁴ This is not the particular guilt following error, arrogance, hatred or shame that visits fathers and sons. She has drunk sufficiently from the goblet to gather that there is no proportion between sin and punishment, whether lenient or strict. For her, God, too, is no more than a minor player. It is not he who kills and revives, pauperizes and enriches, demotes and promotes. It is an ancient radiance, slight to the point of neutral, a persistent companion that ties everything in a concealed, imperceptible bond.

 Genesis 18:35: “And so it was, as her soul was departing (for she died), that she called his name Ben-Oni; but his father called him Benjamin.” [Ben-Oni, literally: child of my power.]  Kohelet 1:8: “All things are full of labor; man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing. Nor the ear filled with hearing”.  Kohelet 7:12: “But the excellence of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to those who have it”.  Kohelet 1:15: “And what is lacking cannot be numbered”.  Kohelet 1:8.

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Me: And still she writes or dictates these things; she does not concede to total oblivion, she does not give up. Speech and writing are good enough, they are not vain, not merely vain. Certainly our intimacy with the scroll of despair is not vain. She: Once one decides to live, one has no right to scorn life. Even if she takes it far, to the stillbirth that comes from vanity and is buried in the dark, its name is covered with darkness. Of necessity she takes all possibilities into account. As though she had to imagine absolute nothingness, almost touch it, in order to pass from one state to another, in order to create. Isn’t this the game of queens? Hers. Isn’t it, moreover, her revolt, which takes the form of a complex attitude to existence and to creation? Vanity/breath/Abel is the subject, the hero, the poetics of the scroll. She opens her mouth to sound two syllables, vain breath, making the utterances seem to move by themselves. She affirms that anyone, in that place on which she labored days and nights, would make out the same thing she does, a satellite seeing through the windows of heaven.²⁵ Breath, void, vain, energy, energy of the word, energy becoming word, changing its constitution once sounded or set down, when it shrivels and congeals. In this manner she aims to speak truth,²⁶ words like goads²⁷ written sincerely. Me: Immortalization is an act of fraudulence. She: She never stops mulling the question. Oh, you are so terribly strict.

17 Birdsong wakes her from her light sleep. She returns to a folded mat, near the window sill. The daughters of music are brought low,²⁸ but at the same time, surprisingly, her aches grow dull. Who would have thought she would live so long?

 Kohelet 12:3: “In the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men bow down; when the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look through the windows grow dim”.  Kohelet 12:10: “The Preacher sought to find acceptable words; and what was written was upright—words of truth.”  Kohelet 12:11: “The words of the wise are like goads, and the words of scholars are like welldriven nails, given by one Shepherd.”  Kohelet 12:4: “When the doors are shut in the streets, and the sound of grinding is low; when one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of music are brought low”.

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Her eyes follow the intelligent boy she loves. Wordless by her side, he has for years been observing the rising and subsiding waves of strife among the adults – in view of waving arms, indifferent shoulders, clawing nails, hurled secrets, in view of the capricious, confusing threshold between utterance and recrimination, between allowed and forbidden. Yedidya,²⁹ you must help me put these things in writing. I don’t like to be called Yedidya. It’s the most beautiful name in the whole palace, in the whole world. It’s a name that scares me. I understand you. Please do as I asked. If you don’t write these things down, they will never be written. Obviously. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Have you lost spirit? Vanity of vanities, says Kohelet. Kohelet?

18 Neither song nor psalm, neither prayer nor lament. The exalted, prodigal, polished, obscuring lament of her man she could not bear. Each and every word of it gnawed at her in her orphanhood, the ugly deaths of her beloved ones.

19 Me: Still, strange that a woman should have written or dictated a book like that. She: Ha, that you should be so unnerved! Daughters I have nourished and brought up!³⁰ Me: There is something scary and distressing among the spirits and the winds in the scroll: Spirit is ire, and vanity, and soul, and state of mind, and suffering. When our labor is of the spirit, we find ourselves cast into the wind. Hold on,

 Yedidya is the name that Nathan the prophet gave to Solomon.  Isaiah 1:2: “Hear O heavens, and give ear, O earth! For the Lord has spoken: I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.”

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though, I don’t follow the plot. I don’t have a detective’s mind. Why Kohelet? And why identify as David’s son, King of Jerusalem? She: The one who speaks is not necessarily the one who records. We will encounter that trick many years later in two wise Greeks. As for me, I’m convinced she wielded a pen even as she was able to wrap tefillin. But like Dorothea Schlegel,³¹ in her time, and a long list of famous and forgotten women, in a tradition that passed things on, from Moses to the sages (to men, not to women) – she was not in the position to identify openly. Pseudonyms as such are not her invention – Agur Ben Jakeh, Lemuel. Yet her striking daring is reminiscent of Isak Dinesen and George Sand. She removes the Hebrew root K.H.L. [‫ –]קהל‬public, community, church – from the consensus, adding a playful feminine ending, -et. A pen name no one else is bound to adopt, so uncommonly poignant, so challenging. No one would call their son by this name, or their daughter. Me: It’s your version of Moses and Monotheism, ³² though the “appropriation” in this case is neither ethnic nor cultural, but rather about gender. Let me return to the question though. Is this a distinctly feminine perspective on the order of things? She: People can be distinguished by the silences that cut across their words. We don’t always manage to pinpoint silence: Dense eloquence, at times, might fool us. Sometimes people are calm enough to let their talk be dispersed. I don’t know whether that in itself constitutes a gendered distinction. But in the case of Kohelet, I sense its presence on three levels: in terms of the speaker’s ear; in terms of her temperament; and in terms of how things are portrayed. In the fateful episode where the Ark of the Covenant is carried into Jerusalem, she lends her ear to the dancing and leaping, the “crackling of thorns under a

 Dorothea Veit Mendelssohn (1763 – 1839) was a central cultural figure at the turn of the 18th century in Germany. Wife of Friedrich von Schlegel (for whose sake she converted to Protestantism and later to Catholicism), she seems to have co-written the novel Lucinde (1799) which appeared under his name. Another of her novels, Florentin, remained unfinished. She wrote a Romantic collection of quasi-Medieval poems, edited by her husband, and translated Madame de Stael’s Corinne into German. She was a friend of Rahel Varnhagen.  In his Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud distinguished between two Moses figures: The ancient reformer who tried unsuccessfully to impose monotheistic worship and was killed by the Israelites when they left Egypt; and the later prophet, who took his name and doctrine from the earlier figure and who did manage to institute this difficult religion.

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pot”.³³ That’s wholly in the province of the stomach, a matter of a keen ear, never stirring from the window, and of a hungry eye. Kohelet herself mingles the senses to underline how, synesthetically, they by turns weaken, boost and refine the force of the tangible. Truly the light is sweet and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun.³⁴ But she has had to labor for this. Both her open and tacit conflict with David – between “his” ark and “her” household gods, between his ecstasy and her skepticism – was directly affected by the ear. The scroll is dictated after she had plenty of time to process what happened; her heart no longer rushed, and her mouth was no longer rash.³⁵A careful economics of speech pervades her private speech, as against his and others’ religious-political stance, possibly the entire Bible, and infuses it with a metaphysical dimension.(The same economics of speech finds fascinating conceptual expression: from one who knows not all needs to be contained yet nor must all be divulged.) As though she needed all these years to hone her observation, to nourish it with compassion, to reconstruct the foolishness, hers like others’, to release the inadvertent potential of her words and turn them into a life of the mind in the fullest sense, an “economy” in every respect. For our consciousness never catches up with the pace of our life. Our movement is too heavy, even just in the imagination. If we wish to reach the final point of connection, there’s no need to move. An imaginary journey and an imaginary return suffice, as does the effort to turn disaster into story so that we will not again become empty. Ear and temperament take me to the third and most crucial point. The former two let her lay out a fragmentary text that sticks to its pauses and delays. This wandering is so carefully maintained as to escape any effort to square, capture, punctuate and discipline, no matter how hard Solomon and others may have tried. In vain. She presents a spiritual adventure in its very unfolding, making no effort to organize her reflections methodically. She is willing to split into different voices, contradictions, fluctuations. This split is accentuated by the traffic, in real time, between spoken and written language. Her jumpy, energetic sentences lash urgently, even as their objects or subjects remain vague to her. She is an astute witness to the process. She gives wholeheartedly. She says to herself, in her heart, and in her heart she wonders;³⁶ she remembers another something, some further nuance. She deliv-

 Kohelet 7:6: “For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool. This also is vanity”.  Kohelet 11:7: “Truly the light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun”.  Kohelet 5:1– 2: “Do not be rash with your mouth, And let not your heart utter anything hastily before God”.  Kohelet 3:18: “I said in my heart”; 1:13: “And I set my heart to seek”; 2:3: “I searched in my heart”.

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ers a judgment, but then a memory comes along to rattle the statement, demanding correction, to be followed by another, stirring observation, after which a narrowing to small patches of reality, secondary categories, to more words that seem to ripple in her throat. Any question, once conceived, is fitting. It must not be repressed. Money answers everything.³⁷ Money answers everything? Is it an assertion or a question? Each and every statement lends itself to being taken out of context and edited. This is why Kohelet enters our prose in a way unique among all scrolls and the rest of the Bible. It appeals directly to a whole variety of universally experienced situations among men just as much as women. Whether he-Kohelet said it or she-Kohelet did, it is all the same. The bisexuality of the mind is the human condition. The process of undoing which constantly announces itself in various ways – how little does it know – distinguishes itself by her frequent uses of the familiar. In fact, this is her foremost technique. She had heard plenty of old wives’ tales at home, and knew that by means of them she may well – using tiny strokes – say things that clash with established values. She quotes these adages and folk sayings, with their basically conservative worldview, but she gives them a twist to the point of lending them a totally different meaning. With straight common sense and a freshness of vision, she brings the ossified to life. But this tactic also operates on a linguistic, metaphorical plane. Her choices are interesting exactly because they are so predictable. She does not speak a new song. She demands attention to everyday things. For instance, can anything be more banal and common than the natural, metaphorical motion between sunset and sunrise? In asking whether we can hear something more, she asks about the birth of metaphor. For her, this requires not expressive originality or singularity as much as a renewed look at the usual, including the common and the effaced vocabulary, which has already grown literal. We are invited to renew our hold on the elementary perception of everyday life. No one is urging us to doubt our field of vision. On the contrary, if we only pay attention, she promises, we will see things as they are.

20 Me: Why do you care to know that it’s she?

 Kohelet 10:19: “A feast is made for laughter, and wine makes merry; but money answers everything”.

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She: It is important and unimportant at the same time. A certain, sometimes surprising, identification between creator and creation is not only supposed to confirm some intuition of ours and to convincingly explain it; we want to say out loud what this coupling contrives, what would have been unthinkable without this interpretive addition, why this Midrash has added value. The words of Kohelet are serious and significant whether or not they are hers. Nevertheless, Saul’s daughter Michal owns the scroll; Ecclesiastes is the fruit of her speech and her mind – that is a significant statement. Me: Because of her infertility? She: She was absolutely unable to carry his child. In a case like hers, when the womb is irreversibly closed, no visitation by a god or by an angel will avail —not in this life, not in this world. Me: Where do you think it started? With the bride price, the two hundred Philistine foreskins? She: I don’t know. Archeological questions never held any interest for me. I believe the answer lies in the vanity of vanities. Me: I do find it interesting. She: I know.

21 Because of laziness the building decays, and through idleness of hands the house leaks.³⁸

 Kohelet 10:18: “Because of laziness the building decays, and through idleness of hands the house leaks.”

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22 She was closely familiar with the temptation of the radical, with excess. “Now Michal, Saul’s daughter, loved David… So Saul said, ‘I will give her to him, that she may be a snare to him’. So Michal let David down through a window. And he went and fled and escaped.”³⁹ “And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her. Here is what I have found, says Kohelet, adding one thing to the other to find the reason”. ⁴⁰ The vulnerable touch of exaggeration in all domains, in every one of the orders of being, exalted love and righteousness, exalted wisdom and foolishness, and exalted industriousness and laziness; the magnification of knowledge and words and prayers and oaths and dreams and worries; idealization and nostalgia and zealousness and messianism and patriotism and utopianism: All of these she reconsidered in light of her the ethical doctrine, exactly because of this, painstakingly – a temperate economy, cautious, restrained. Even in your bedroom the walls have ears. Even in your thought, do not curse the king.⁴¹ Beware. Keep quiet. A bird of the air may carry a voice. There is something so restless – almost paranoid – about her. She sounds to me like an obsessive composite of polar energies, pitching between exaggeration and neglect. That composite never evolved into reconstruction, instead becoming flattened just to survive. To begin with, she understands that the soul is not satisfied,⁴² because whatever it ostensibly contains leaks out and vanishes without trace; and that mountains of affect give birth to a mouse of expression. Next, something happens to her. She grows old. She draws the process with kohl and vermillion, yet also with that same direct naturalness you mentioned earlier regarding the surprising metaphoric quality of her discourse. When the keepers

 1 Samuel 18:20 – 21: “Now Michal, Saul’s daughter, loved David. And they told Saul, and the thing pleased him. So Saul said, ‘I will give her to him, that she may be a snare to him’”; 19:12: “So Michal let David down through a window. And he went and fled and escaped.”  Kohelet 7:26 – 27: “And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be trapped by her. Here is what I have found, says the Preacher, adding one thing to the other to find the reason.”  Kohelet 10:20: “Do not curse the kind, even in your thought; do not curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may carry your voice, and a bird in flight may tell the matter.”  Kohelet 6:7: “All the labor of man is for his mouth, and yet the soul is not satisfied.”

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of the house tremble, the strong men bow down.⁴³ Nothing awaits her. Her voice is the voice of the dead who have already died. As she was wont in the past, she intentionally multiplies and creates excess, in spite of the calculated economics of expression, in order to emphasize refusal of life while alive. Two are better than one?⁴⁴ She is not at all sure. Yes, on the face of it, fleetingly. But then she loses it, shrugs, taking up with a womb-earth certainty, as both origin and telos, preferring afterword to foreword. Even her ethics, a word hewn in stone – for she can no longer afford to waste words, she must get to the heart of the matter – even this is learned in the house of mourning.⁴⁵ She swivels and shifts scales; this isn’t a melancholic, depressive scroll. Kohelet is not Job. Her vanity of vanities does not take her to I loathe my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone, for my days are but a breath. ⁴⁶ She does not go so far as to express a death wish. This is not due to the ornamental editing and the religious conformism Solomon and others kindly added so her text may pass. No. This is your interpretation – changing hesitant spots, amplification, reduction, flattening – which makes audible the death instinct and hatred of life, as if it was exclusive. Due to the overwhelming lack of certainty she inspires, she experiences, in her loneliness – one alone without companion⁴⁷ – in terms of continuity, family, tradition, testament; due to the dense semantic field tying death to oblivion, to mourning and vanity/breath/Abel, her playful energy is at risk of erasure. But this assortment of voices issues into a complex scrolllength meditation on time – in fact on a plurality of times: social, political, emotional, ethical, biological. These times occur in their different phases: season, time, eternity.⁴⁸ No synthesis between these times must be attempted. On the contrary, one must attend to the possibilities each enfolds, in the narrow interstices dedicated to action and creation, as in the longer stretches. In the latter, we can identify the monotonous, firm, resistant motion of nature’s forces in their encounter with our circumstance and our will. But this is only part – however ambiguous – of a worldview that ascribes weight to action, speech, and re-

 Kohelet 12:3: “In the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men bow down […].”  Kohelet 4:9.  Kohelet 7:2: “Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will take it to heart.”  Job 7:16.  Kohelet 4:8: “There is one alone, without companion: He has neither son nor brother. Yet there is no end to all his labors, nor is his eye satisfied with riches. But he never asks ‘For whom do I toil and deprive myself of good?’ This also is vanity and a grave misfortune.”  Kohelet 3:1: “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.”

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newal. She depicts failures and omissions as bruises inadvertently sustained from the sharp edges of her experiences. In such depictions, oblivion makes itself known not in the form of a melancholic lament about loss, but as a condition of possibility from which to attempt the next departure. The text’s vitality and vibrancy are hard to miss, exactly because of the errors and the far-reaching problematization of our ability to repair the state of affairs. We must not ignore the three-dimensional commitment she stakes out, whereby we become subjects first and foremost in relation to the world given in our hearts. Second, and following from the above: in relation to society, to the three-fold cord that is vital to our leaving the intimacy of the room so as to testify (with a pathos shorn of any reformatory drive) that the tears of the oppressed have no comforter.⁴⁹ And finally in relation to personal pleasure, which makes its appearance here on the side of pessimism, in the shape of a straightforward command: eat and drink, at any cost. Me: I am not sure that this command, or at least obeying it, is a simple thing. But it is obvious that she drank a lot, stimulating the body with fluids to prompt mental activity. She: Setting aside her explicit words: I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine⁵⁰ – where is it that you perceive traces of drink? Just talking about it makes me thirsty. Me: Let’s go out soon, shall we? I find traces everywhere: in the sad bear-like quality of certain sentences; in the irritable alertness of others; in mutedness, in silences; in the synesthesia you mentioned earlier, and mostly where the senses of vision and taste come together, something that infuses perception with music; in moments of forgetting what she just said and in the resulting panicked preoccupation with the subject of forgetfulness, from one who notices these frequent erasures in her daily experience; in the repetitions, in the slight and sometimes amazing changes, as though in the very midst of dictation she grows dizzy, intoxicated, impenetrable, manages to propel the pleasure of the first drops into coherent, hedonistic sentences, soon to cross the line between warp and bravery,⁵¹ and spreads inward, floating with her head heavy, sunk,  Kohelet 4:1: “And look! The tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter […].”  Kohelet 2:3: “I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine, while guiding my heart with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives.”  Kohelet 10:17.

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empty. Insulted, almost. This too is vanity. Had she written the text, we would surely have discovered some fascinating spelling mistakes, seasons turned into reasons from a slackening of thought and its drifting. That the senses are at odds is also due to her helplessness. We all have to learn how to use the eyes for weeping. She: I didn’t really expect such a thoroughgoing response. Regarding Kohelet, though, I leave the room with half my desires unfulfilled…⁵² Me: Really? A lot. She: Ah, such a blessing, this fresh air. Let’s walk a little. Look, you’re already radiant, calm. It always works for you. Me: And then evil thoughts slip in, or words I never said, devils and dybbuks. We find the same familiar faces in every town, all is abashed. Are you very sweaty, too? I’m dripping. She: There you are, that’s the city’s energy. Me: That’s the energy of visitations. She: Masses of people here are talking to themselves. Me: You mean they are thinking? I’m joking. I’ve been meaning to ask you: Imagine Eve had thrown up immediately after tasting the apple? Would human history have taken a different course? She: Do you think? It would have been another primal sin, but a sin nevertheless. Twice over even. The sin of tasting and the sin of vomiting. The sin of self-destructiveness, all the same. Me: One about gaining a self, the other about conceding it. She: Which is also a way of gaining a self.

 Kohelet Rabba 1:13: “Until he dies, man does not fulfill even half of what he wanted.” (Tr. MH)

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Me: I have taught you something, Hannah, may I call you that, Hannah? She: Of course. Me: Had Eve vomited, it would mean she was punishing herself, that she needed no one, that she was doing fine on her own. I believe that is in fact what happened there. She did not make the distinction between good object and bad. She: She had no mother… Me: Imagine, instead of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve had two daughters. What would have happened then? Would there have been murder? She: First there would have been a conversation. But I don’t know, maybe not. Don’t you take a rest sometimes? We are trying to relax and you’re terribly wound up. Because we’re close to the end? Me: Don’t say that. I’m tired, that’s all. She: Don’t worry. I really understand. Me: You like reading menus too? She: Very much. Shall we stop at “Le Vavin”? I know the place, it’s decent, good food, and generous. Why don’t you go in and eat dinner like a proper person? Me: What do you think? She: Promise me you won’t under any circumstances take me into a restaurant. All taste, and no reflection. And don’t rush. Haste makes waste. Take your time to eat, you have plenty of time. And don’t leave unless you’ve taken your fill, promise me. You’ll see things will work out in the end.

Flow Chart Kohelet To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. (3:1)

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Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Willing From the viewpoint of the thinking ego, old age, in Heidegger’s words, is the time of meditation or, in the words of Sophocles, it is the time of “peace and freedom” – release from bondage, not only to the passions of the body, but to the all-consuming passion the mind inflicts on the soul, the passion of the will called “ambition”. (42)

Hannah Arendt, a letter to Mary McCarthy, 23 December, 1973 As though to grow old does not mean, as Goethe said, “gradual withdrawal from appearance” - which I do not mind - but the gradual (rather sudden) transformation of a world with familiar faces (no matter, foe or friend) into a kind of desert, populated by strange faces. In other words, it is not me who withdraws but the world that dissolves - an altogether different proposition.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Thinking The thinking ego is not the self as it appears and moves in the world, remembering its own biographical past, as though “he” were a la recherché du temps perdu or planning his future. It is because the thinking ego is ageless and nowhere that past and future can become manifest to it as such, emptied, as it were, of their concrete content and liberated from all spatial categories. (206) We all know how the years revolve quicker and quicker as we get older, until, with the approach of old age, they slow down again because we begin to measure them against the psychologically and somatically anticipated date of our departure. (21) Here [in Odyssey] the metaphor seems to combine only visibles; the tears on her cheek are no less visible than the melting snow. The invisible made visible in the metaphor is the long winter of Odysseus absence, the lifeless frigidity and the unyielding hardness of those years, which now, at the first signs of hope for a renewal of life, begin to melt away. The tears themselves had only expressed sorrow; their meaning – the thoughts that caused them – became manifest in the metaphor of the snow melting and softening the ground before spring. (107– 108) Thanks to his sterility, he has the expert knowledge of the midwife and can decide whether the child is a real child or a mere wind-egg of which the bearer must be cleansed. But in the dialogues, hardly anybody among Socrates’ interlocutors has brought forth a thought that is not a wind-egg and that Socrates considered worth keeping alive. (172– 173) What Socrates discovered was that we can have intercourse with ourselves, as well as with others, and that the two kinds of intercourse are somewhat inter-

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related. […] I first talk with others before I talk with myself, examining whatever the joint talk may have been about, and then discover that I can conduct a dialogue not only with others but with myself as well. (188 – 189)

Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind / Willing (For him, the most sober of the great thinkers, this seems to have been no less a moment of rapture than it was for the medieval mystics except, of course, that Aristotle would have been the last to indulge in hysterical extravagances.) (12) After all, don’t we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty, of thinking? Nothing more is needed than to live in constant distraction and never leave the company of others. (80) Be stonelike and you will be invulnerable. Ataraxia, invulnerability, is all you need in order to feel free once you have discovered that reality itself depends on your consent to recognize it as such. (79)

Hannah Arendt, “Hermann Broch”, Men in Dark Times Thinking has neither beginning nor end; we think as long as we live, because we cannot do otherwise. This is why, ultimately, Kant’s “I think” must accompany not only all “notions” but all human activities and passivities. (129)

Euripides, “The Medea” It is a strange form of anger, difficult to cure,/ When two friends turn upon each other in anger. (520 – 521)

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition The melancholy wisdom of Ecclesiastes – “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity…. There is no new thing under the sun, … there is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after” – does not necessarily arise from specifically religious experience; but it is certainly unavoidable wherever and whenever 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 and shine forth, “there is no remembrance”;

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without the enduring permanence of a human artifact, there cannot “be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after”. (204)

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Thinking Being – seemingly the most empty and general, the least meaningful word in our vocabulary. (144)

Kohelet As thou knowst not what is the way of the wind, nor how the bones grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowst not the works of God who makes all. (11:5) “I saw all the living who wander under the sun – they were with the second child who was to rise up in his stead. (4:15)

Kohelet I sought in my heart to stimulate my body with wine (yet guiding my heart with wisdom;) and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life. (2:3)

Hannah Arendt, a Letter to Mary McCarthy, 9th Febuary, 1968 I am not preparing a bomb by any means. Unless you would call preparations for writing about Thinking-Judging-Willing (a kind of part II to The Human Condition) preparing a bomb. On the contrary I have the feeling of futility in everything I do. Compared to what is at stake everything looks frivolous. I know this feeling disappears once I let myself fall into that gap between past and future which is the proper temporal locus of thought.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind / Willing The intensity of sensation of release is only matched by the intensity of the sensation of pain and is always greater than any pleasure unrelated to pain. The pleasure of drinking the most exquisite wine cannot be compared in intensity with the pleasure felt by a desperately thirsty man who obtains his first drink of water. In this sense there is a clear distinction between joy, independent of and unrelated to needs and desires, and pleasure, the sensuous lust of a creature

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whose body is alive to the extent that it is in need of something it does not have. (162– 163) (It is as though, while writing a book, one were constantly driven by the desire to have it finished and be rid of writing.) (124)

Kohelet And furthermore, my son, be admonished of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (12:12) A time to be born, and a time to die; / A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; […]/ A time to embrace and a time to return from embracing;/ A time to seek and a time to lose;/ A time to keep and a time to cast away; / A time to rend and a time to sew;/A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love. (3:2; 3:5 – 8)

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