Zionism and Melancholy

Nitzan Lebovic

Description

Nitzan Lebovic claims that political melancholy is the defining trait of a generation of Israelis born between the 1960s and 1990s. This cohort came of age during wars, occupation and intifada, cultural conflict, and the failure of the Oslo Accords. The atmosphere of militarism and conservative state politics left little room for democratic opposition or dissent. Lebovic and others depict the failure to respond not only as a result of institutional pressure but as the effect of a long-lasting "left-wing melancholy." In order to understand its grip on Israeli society, Lebovic turns to the novels and short stories of Israel Zarchi. For him, Zarchi aptly describes the gap between the utopian hope present in Zionism since its early days and the melancholic reality of the present. Through personal engagement with Zarchi, Lebovic develops a philosophy of melancholy and shows how it pervades Israeli society.

List of Israel Zarchi's Works under Discussion

Preface

Introduction

1. The History of a Failure

2. The Early Novels

3. Jerusalem, Messianism, Emptiness

4. Political Theology and Left-Wing Melancholy

5. In an Unsown Land

6. The History and Theory of the Melancholic Discourse

7. The Revival of Hebrew: Utopia, Indistinction, Recurrence

Afterword

Selected Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Moral Philosophy
• Hebrew
• Jewish
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Jews
• Jewish thought
• Literature
• Israel
• Indiana University Press
• Emptiness
• IUP
• Messianic
• Messianism
• Jewish philosophy
• General officer
• Zionism
• Jerusalem
• Judaism
• Hebrew language
• Ethics
• General
• Utopia
• Institut universitaire professionnalisé
• Zion
• Hébreu

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 24 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253041838
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ZIONISM AND MELANCHOLY
NEW JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND THOUGHT

Zachary J. Braiterman
ZIONISM AND MELANCHOLY
The Short Life of Israel Zarchi
Nitzan Lebovic
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Nitzan Lebovic
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04181-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04182-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04185-2 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 24 23 22 21 20 19
To my parents, with love.
CONTENTS

List of Israel Zarchi s Works under Discussion

Preface

Introduction

1 The History of a Failure

2 The Early Novels

3 Jerusalem, Messianism, Emptiness

4 Political Theology and Left-Wing Melancholy

5 In an Unsown Land

6 The History and Theory of the Melancholic Discourse

7 The Revival of Hebrew: Utopia, Indistinction, Recurrence

Afterword

Selected Bibliography

Index
ISRAEL ZARCHI S WORKS UNDER DISCUSSION

T HE WORKS BELOW ARE ONES DISCUSSED WITHIN THIS book. Dates are original publication dates. Occasionally my discussion of Zarchi s works uses later editions of his novels or stories, and I indicate that within the text or its notes.
I followed the exact transliteration, when available. If unavailable, I tried to keep as close as possible to the Hebrew.

The Leader of Israel, unpublished
Alumim (Youth), 1933
Yamim Yechefim (Naked days), 1935
Ha Neft Zorem La Yam Ha Tikhon (And the oil flows to the Mediterranean), 1937
Massa Le Lo Tz ror (Traveling without luggage), 1938
Shimshon Mi Shuk Habsamim (Samson from the perfume market), 1939
Har HaTzofim (Mount Scopus), 1940
Reichaim shel Ruach (Millstones of the wind), 1940/3
Iturei Yerushalaim (Jerusalem s ornaments), 1942
Malon Orchim (The guesthouse), 1942
Nachalat Avot (Land of our fathers), 1946
Sambatyon, 1947
Eretz Lo Zru a (Unsown land), 1947
Kfar HaShiloah (Shiloh village), 1948
PREFACE

A S A RESPONSE TO W ALTER B ENJAMIN S PLEA FOR a history of acedia , sadness, and the defeated, Zionism and Melancholy examines the history of critical Jewish melancholy in the first half of the twentieth century, preceding Israeli statehood in 1948. It does so by charting the career of Israel Zarchi (1909-1947), an unjustly forgotten author who lived in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and his series of melancholic tales of Zionist pioneers.
Based on newly unearthed and previously unpublished documents discovered in a Tel Aviv literary archive, the book casts new light on the early history of modern Hebrew literature and the cultural history of pre-Israel Zionism. Among Zarchi s close interlocutors one finds well-known authors and cultural figures such as the national poet H. N. Bialik, the Nobel Prize winner S. Y. Agnon, and the father of the Jewish history of literature, Joseph Klausner. Zarchi shared with all of them his innovative understanding of melancholy. Discussing these writers lives as they intersected with Zarchi, Zionism and Melancholy thus offers both a microhistory of Hebrew literature and a case study assessing the relevance of melancholy as a critical paradigm in both psychoanalytical and political terms-with Zarchi s life and work as the golden thread. My reading of melancholy as a political or affective mode departs from the distinction between radical forms of melancholy and what Walter Benjamin-and, following him, Wendy Brown, Rebecca Comay, Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, Enzo Traverso, and others-saw as a left-wing melancholy. For an alternative and a radical form of melancholy, I argue, we need to think about it in the minor key, as a counternarrative, and from the perspective of the forgotten, who challenge consensual norms and ideology.
Israel Zarchi (1909-1947), who emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1929, saw himself as a Zionist pioneer but quickly found that he lacked the physical strength and mental toughness needed to work the land or build roads. His mental life was dominated by the European literature and philosophy of the previous century. Following the path of beloved figures such as Goethe, Heine, Rilke, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, he sank into a melancholy that became a clinical depression. Despite Zarchi s early death at age thirty-eight, he published six novels, several collections of short stories, and classic translations of Heinrich von Kleist (from German), Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham (from English), and Janusz Korczak (from Polish). Yet his remarkable production failed to move his critics, and his name was erased from the pages of Hebrew literature; his sort of melancholy was not in tune with the contemporaneous understanding of melancholy as an empowering force of settlement. Zarchi s books, therefore, offer an alternative to the usual history of Hebrew literature, to the politics and discourse of Zionist idealism, and to the politics of melancholy.
Zarchi s story is far more than the story of a melancholic intellectual during the early years of community builders; it is a narrative of grand historical movements, warring philosophical principles, and practical politics. At the heart of this story is melancholy, an ancient Greek idea connected to black bile, mad dogs, and long nights-hopelessness in every context, from the biographical to the political, the literary to the historical. As demonstrated in this book, melancholy-in its modern Zionist garb-is a dark manifestation of internal conflicts, a gap between the Zionist language of fulfillment and the failure to realize that ideal. Melancholy, in other words, is a personal and a psychological reaction to an oppressive political discourse that does not allow the individual to express frustration freely.
Zarchi s melancholy was born at the time of return (to Zion) and therefore undermined the idealist (European) discourse at its first moment of engagement with reality (in Palestine). On the face of it, there is nothing unique about the failure to realize a utopian ideal, but Zarchi was able to make this failure a general literary theme, a counternarrative that mirrored the growing distance between the lost past of the Zionist pioneers and their radically different present. On stepping off their ships at Jaffa harbor, those hopeful women and men discovered that they were expected to invest all their physical and mental power in a new community, without a glance backward. Freud s characterization of melancholy as a double loss-the loss of an object and of its very memory-applies perfectly to the demand that these settlers give up their European past and culture in favor of a new communal life in the sands and swamps of Palestine.
Zarchi was a self-proclaimed admirer of Rabbi Freud, as he called him in his diaries, quoting often from Sigmund Freud s works and testing his ideas. He identified those works with an immanent openness to the other, the foreigner, the exile, the Arab, the woman-with both friends and political adversaries. Yet Zarchi s critical attitude toward the Zionist project was accompanied by keen support for the idea of return and the revival of the Hebrew language. He wished to offer an alternative from within, rather than an open and an explicit critique from the outside. For Zarchi, melancholy demonstrated how the Zionist project of colonizing the land sacrificed the individual-be it the Ashkenazi intellectual or the Arab-Jewish dreamer. Yet he never intended to criticize the Zionist project as a whole. In that respect, he was a man of his time: a romantic, an Orientalist, an avid idealist, a true believer, a left-wing melancholist, and diagnostician of left-wing melancholia. This book depicts him as both a cipher and a symptom of his time.
Zarchi was not the only writer to depict the melancholy of Zion. Indeed, other and better-known authors of his time-for example, Bialik, Agnon, or the father of modern Hebrew prose, Y. H. Brenner-conveyed similar forms of melancholy and described a similar gap between promise and realization. Zarchi s more consistent and focused perspective, however, sheds light on a broader rhetorical phenomenon. In short, the story of Zarchi is that of a tormented individual whose purer form of melancholy challenged both his own generation and the later native-born sabras. 1
As I argue in this book, left-wing melancholy lies at the heart of my generation of Israelis. Melancholy is the heritage of the European-born Jews-my grandparents on both sides among them-whether they are eastern European refugees of pogroms or German-speaking Holocaust survivors. Theirs was the generation that established the political institutions of the yishuv and the state, on the basis of socialist and social-democratic ideals. But this first generation of pioneers, idealist fighters, and administrators ignored the fact that their idealism and their politics were based on the idea of an empty land awaiting a revival, when it was in fact already inhabited and living. Negation of both the presence of Arabs and their own past united the personal and the collective voice in Zionism. This negation required the erasure of individual traumas and exilic memory and led, often unintentionally, to the exclusion of those who did not belong to the myth of revival, specifically, the Arab population already living on the land and latecomers, such as Mizrachi Jews, who did