DUALISM AND DESIRE IN THE LANDSCAPE OF THE DIVINE

Abstract

Through depictions of the landscape in the literary works of contemporary Jewish national-religious poets and writers, ambivalence in their relationship towards their natural and man-made surroundings is laid bare. The implementation of the Israeli occupation on the West Bank has rendered a profound impact on the landscape; yet for religious Jewish settlers who subscribe to the promise of redemption that will mark the unification of Jews, God and the land – such unity is desired yet unattainable. In the reading of these texts, the landscape takes on many of the qualities of Jacques Lacan's ‘objet a’ that is both a surplus of the Real and testimony to its absence. Coveted and resented, pure and profane, inclusive and alienating – the portrayed spaces and places of the Israeli occupation allude to binary poles that can be read through Bruno Latour's investigation on the nature of ‘factishes’; these render the depiction of the landscape a unison between what its dwellers are, and what they desire. Through the prism of these two approaches, the depicted landscape of the Israeli occupation that emerges from these texts is one that borrows from Zionist ideology, and yet carves for itself its own niche. In its relationship with the land and the landscape, religious-national sentiment is not yet another manifestation of a national ideology (though it both feeds from and is fed by it), but is propelled by the desire to lay claim to the Lacanian notion of a longed-for Real. In these as yet relatively unstudied texts, the landscape of occupation maps the landscape of its writers’ pleasures and pains, and that of continuous desire.