Necessary Exorcisms: Intercessory Law in S. Ansky's The Dybbuk

Abstract

Abstract: "Necessary Exorcisms" reads S. Ansky's The Dybbuk in the context of Ansky's travels during World War I as a relief aid worker with the Jewish Committee to Help War Victims. Ansky's description of the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia—in the fragments of a diary he kept during these years and in a longer memoir published after the war—confronts us with two motifs at the heart of The Dybbuk : a blurring of the threshold between life and death, and the important role that law, litigatory practices, and lawful authorities play as entities to which one could appeal to prevent a wrong from occurring and/or to adjudicate a wrong after it has occurred. To read The Dybbuk alongside Ansky's account of what happened to Jews in Galicia during World War I is to see the play as a dramatic exploration of issues at the heart of what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as a state of exception—the geopolitical space in which there is no law or lawful authority to which to appeal when one's rights as a citizen have been revoked and one has become exposed to arbitrary violence. To read The Dybbuk as a play obliquely linked to the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia is to complicate contemporary readings that see Ansky staging the law's malign power to punish illicit desires so as to uphold patriarchal and classist norms. Reading The Dybbuk as a postwar play, "Necessary Exorcisms" discerns in it an apology for the law and its intercessions.