“… that which wishes to articulate itself in you”

Abstract

Abstract Jewish anarchist mysticism weaves elusively through the worlds of art, politics, and religion, informing all three with the concept of do’ikayt, or “hereness.” This essay will bring together threads of the Jewish roots of the Dada and Surrealist movements as they burst into queerness with the work of Claude Cahun, William S. Burroughs, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and examine in particular the cut-up method as employed by those artists across media before examining an application of the same method to a pantheist Jewish transness through the mystical practice of gender confirmation surgery to arrive at a theory of bodily hereness. Using the writer’s own experimentation with gender and cut-up poetry to seek a nonlinear harmony with the Spinozan immanent Hashem-as-living-universe, this writing explores the rejection of not only the gender binary, but also the binary inherent in representational art to replace both with the somatic experience of fragments of the universe ricocheting off each other and being transformed by the interaction.