Thinking in Butler

Abstract

So much has been said about the BDS movement in general, the ASA's boycott resolution in particular, and Judith Butler's advocacy of BDS at large that it seems important to begin this review of Parting Ways by saying what it is not. Parting Ways is not a polemic for boycotts, or even against Israel. It is not a rousing critique of Israeli human rights abuses or international illegality. Parting Ways is not even a sustained investigation into a coherent counter-Zionist Jewish philosophy. And it's not a great book. Which brings us to what it is: with a long introduction on what it would mean to locate Jewish resources to critique Zionism, followed by an idiosyncratic collection of chapters on Levinas, Benjamin, Arendt, Primo Levi, and Edward Said, Parting Ways is a book without a central argument, perhaps a series of studies on the question of a Jewish critique of Zionism, and an incomplete but potentially promising theoretical resource for invigorating how we think about diaspora. That the book ultimately fails, both on the terms Butler sets out in the introduction and on general terms—that is, in its deficient scaffolding, failure to carry the argument over from chapter to chapter, minimal connections between her historical subjects and her present concern, and surprisingly weak concluding chapter (with no conclusion)—may ultimately matter less than how it pries open familiar texts by Levinas, Benjamin, and Arendt, and how it has engendered an urgently necessarily, vigorous debate among her peers. Indeed, if we can credit a thinker for the quality of the rebuke she earns, Butler has done something quite valuable.Butler's stated goal of seeking Jewish resources for the critique of Zionism seems easy enough. Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct all but argues for an anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist tradition in the culture of rabbinical study, while Jonathan Boyarin has repeatedly saluted “the powers of diaspora.” But Butler throws in an odd twist, disavowing the identitarian project of seeking “Jewish sources” at the moment of its enunciation: “Indeed, even the critique of Zionism, if exclusively Jewish, extends Jewish hegemony for thinking about the region and becomes, in spite of itself, part of what we might call the Zionist effect. Surely any effort that extends Jewish hegemony in the region is part of the Zionist effect, whether or not it understands itself as Zionist or anti-Zionist” (3). For Butler, any Jew who argues against Zionism from a Jewish position is in fact complicit with Zionism insofar as she privileges Jewishness as both essentially and ethically superior to any other point of view. Butler's path out of this tautology is to find Jewish sources whose Jewishness is constitutively and ethically engaged with the non-Jewish other, though I would simply say that the diversity of her sources and their philosophies, even as Europeans, is enough to indicate that there is no essential “Jew.”Butler's way out of her proposed quandary is to locate a Jewishness that comes into being as always already relational, where Jewishness is not a subject position regarding the other, but is constituted as a relation to the other. As she puts it, “I'm trying to understand how the exilic—or more emphatically, the diasporic—is built into the idea of the Jewish (not analytically, but historically, that is, over time); in this sense, to ‘be’ a Jew is to be departing from oneself, cast out into a world of the non-Jew, bound to make one's way ethically and politically precisely there within a world of irreversibly heterogeneity” (15). Readers looking for substantiation in a survey of Jewish history—“that is, over time”—will be disappointed. This is neither an anthropology of Jewish differentiation nor a genealogy of Jewish Philosophy, and it's no history (unless you count the references to Moses in the first chapter). Rather, Butler's claim of co-constitution is predicated on her decade-long engagement with Emmanuel Levinas, where being is constituted as an ethical relation to the other, and it anticipates the concluding chapter's gesture toward Edward Said's work, which frequently sought a diasporic Jewish subject as the imagined partner of a binational Palestine.Just below the surface of these theoretical engagements are more pragmatic questions about how to rethink the very difficult and tragic circumstances in Israel/Palestine. In the introduction, Butler asks the radical (as in, root) question, “What form of polity could be regarded as legitimate for lands that are currently inhabited by Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, and by Palestinians living under occupation?” and including the Palestinian diaspora (19). The pragmatism of the question—seeking answers to a question that truly does exist in the world—is the mark of the book's sincerity, and illuminates some of the book's finer inquiries even as it exposes its limitations. On the one hand, to have a philosopher such as Butler dip into the well of recent Jewish thought including Levinas, Arendt, and Benjamin to map the complicated intersections of race, religion, identity, national belonging, and history (all times two) that constitute the crises in Israel/Palestine is to show just how vital philosophy can be. The chapters on Arendt are, at times, riveting, as Butler locates her writing in its immediate moral and political contexts, and we see Arendt responding to a world whose political realities hardened into brute compromises that she could only critique and never fully join or find a political home in. Likewise, her reading of Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” though less contextualized, rings with understanding of the crises of Europe during which Benjamin wrote. Bringing those crises into implicit conversation with the devastation of the Israeli occupation, and the ever shrinking moral island on which supporters of the Israeli government stand, has the double effect of both clarifying Benjamin's trenchant and difficult essay, and of rescuing him from his role as an esoteric theoretical touchstone.The first chapter, centered on Levinas's ethics of alterity, indicates why it is so difficult, and perhaps futile, to try to translate ethics into politics. The apparent lacuna between a universal account of what is felt or believed to be right among people, and a political response to danger, violence, injustice, and terror is not simply too wide to cross, but seems to separate wholly different forms of discourse on opposite shores. Ethics begins in individual subjectivity, while politics implies people, or even a single person, whose subjectivity is a public identity. Ethics rely on a sense of imperative, politics on an assessment of power. Ethics responds to and yields inter-subjective recognition, while politics exist only once recognition has occurred, and insofar as what is recognized are political identities like “Jew” and “Arab,” political recognition may be infertile grounds for ethics (think about the many programs of reciprocity such as camps, music programs, gardening projects and the like which exist so that people whose identities are otherwise hostile to one another may come to see that “underneath, we're really all the same”).Butler's point of entry into this lacuna is Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European, a book which, among other insights, posits the Hebrew prophet Moses's supposed Egyptian origins as a radical re-signification of Judaic identity, and the hoped-for basis for new thinking about a binational state in Palestine premised on internal heterogeneity. Butler attempts to fortify Said's suggestion by aligning it with Levinas' ethics of alterity. If, as Freud conjectures, Moses was an Egyptian and not an Israelite, then we may think of him as a Jewish Arab, someone whose subjectivity is constituted as alterity. Butler seeks a parallel with this constitutive difference in Levinas's ethics of alterity, explaining, “in this foundational figure of Jewishness, we already find something like a binational identity.” There are several problems with this construct, however. To begin with there is almost no warrant for this claim in the Hebrew bible—the person of Moses is not wracked with ambivalence or conflict over dual identities, and though Freud tells a good and useful story about him, it's hardly the basis for a reconstructed Jewishness. More to the point, Said and now Butler install contemporary understandings of the terms “Jew” and “Arab” into the figure of Moses, a presentist trick that belies the effort to find prior Jewish sources for Butler's critique. It does not matter what Moses “really was,” what matters is the work “Jew” and “Arab” can do when installed in the origins of Jewishness. This is especially problematic given that “Jew” and “Arab” are political names. At the very moment that Butler seeks an ethical analog, via Levinas, to a politics of détente, she displaces the ethics of inter-subjectivity with its political corollary.Serious readers of Levinas know that translating his ethics into a politics of cohabitation is challenging precisely because his ethics is so fragile, and it is surprising to find Butler so quick to literalize Levinas' concept of “the face” into a political identity, when it is precisely such an identity that Levinas seeks to overcome on the way toward a prior ethics of being. Butler finds license for this move in Levinas's notorious and oft-cited claim, in an interview, that “the Palestinians have no face.” There has been quite a bit of commentary on how we might receive this claim and thus think about Levinas's philosophy, but at a minimum, it indicates the difficulty of transposing ethics into politics. Fittingly, the chapter ends with a return to Said, with his dialectic of Jews and Arabs as people mutually constituted by dispossession and trauma, and so mutually responsible for one another and mutually co-habitable. It's a salutary claim but it nonetheless displaces rather than shores up Levinas in this chapter, and so betrays Butler's attempt to find Jewish sources for a critique of Zionism. Perhaps this is Butler's point, to argue against Levinas, though within his grain, that there can be no account of the self, the individual, the “I”—any form of the subject whatsoever—that is not first constituted by a political other, a reprioritization of politics before ethics which, indeed, Butler takes up in the next chapter. But if that is the case, then not only is “Arab” the constitutive alterity to Moses' “Jew,” but so too is “Jew” a constitutive otherness—the otherness of politics—to the ethical subject “Moses.”The second chapter on Levinas proposes to read “Levinas contra Levinas,” though this chapter is, instead, perfectly in the grain of a bibliography of Levinas commentary, breaking little new ground in trying to make sense of who is the other, what is a face, and how to respond to the call of responsibility (54). Indeed, Levinas's work contributes beautifully to Butler's previous book, Precarious Life, in which she seeks a Jewish argument for nonviolence. In that book, “Jewish” is performative, where the readings and arguments usher in a form of Jewish critique, and not the reverse. So, unencumbered by the identitarian mandates of Parting Ways, Precarious Life is free to read Levinas to his limits, and then to supplement those limits with Butler's own compelling reasoning. In the final chapter of Precarious Life, Butler proposes to “trace what seem … the outlines of a possible Jewish ethic of non-violence” (131). Here, the modesty of “trace,” “seem,” and “outline” suggest an admirable hesitancy to overstate the case, both for the ethics and the Jewishness of her proposal. Moreover, her reading of Levinas proceeds similarly modestly, regularly admitting to the difficulty of translating Levinas into a social or political language. Indeed, precisely because Levinas complicates “the relationship between representation and humanization, a relationship that is not as straightforward as we might think,” Butler picks up on the constitutive impossibility of representation in Levinas as the take away for an ethical reading of the all-too-represented global war on terror (140). From there, departing Levinas, Butler explores several instances of media representations of the orientalization, demonization, or sentimental depictions of Muslims, the objects of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concludes by strongly advancing her claim that our shared precarity with others may be a basis for an ethics of nonviolence.I pause to mention this prior book to indicate how the current work suffers for the unnecessary constraints Butler establishes from the get-go. In contrast to her Levinas chapters in Parting Ways, Precarious Life does not depend on Levinas's Jewishness as the anchor to the argument, and Butler is free to project from and beyond Levinas. In Parting Ways, she is committed to the Jewishness of prior thinkers, giving herself less room to advance her own anti-Zionist critique. But why not? Or, why does the Jewishness of Levinas or Benjamin matter more than, say, the Jewishness of Butler herself? Might Butler herself be the Jewish thinker she's looking for? Will she be the next generation's Jewish resource?It depends on what you think identity is and how it works, and one of the troubles with this book is that Butler conflates different forms of identity and identification. At times, as with her reliance on Said, identity is metonymical: Jews are people who live with other Jews, amid Egyptians (as in the case of the Israelites of Exodus) and Palestinians, as in the case of Jews in Israel and Palestine. Or, Jews are people whose parents or grandparents were religiously observant, and who lived their lives as secular intellectuals, eventually fleeing from the Nazis. And then there's Moses. They're not really the same Jews, though there's still some sense in using the term, and, anyway, it's easy enough to trace historical through-lines from past to present. Metonymical identity is like differénce in language: There is no essential meaning to “Jew,” a signifier that can only be scanned as part of a given place and time, amid other signifying identities which are equally contingent. Even with the case of Jewish themes of exile, wrestling, wandering, and the messianic, which recur across Jewish textual history, “Jewish” is always at least as synchronically constituted as it is diachronically determined. But if Butler were to endlessly defer, or even radically contextualize “Jewish,” she would have no anchor for her claim for “Jewishness,” and so she also depends upon metaphorical identity: Moses is a “Jew” and an “Arab,” where each term refers to something stable, knowable, and consistent. It's like when people talk about being “half black, half white,” a catachrestic identity that cites and conflates incommensurable social imaginaries divided by the metaphorical logic of ratios which produces meaning rather than … OK, enough: Butler taught me everything I know about the performativity of miscegenation, so far be it for me to carry on about it here in a review of her book. My point is simply that any effort to corral one kind of Jewishness (diasporic, relational, contingent) to combat another (nationalist, essentialist) is necessarily going to double back on itself, as “Jewishness” has both too much and too little meaning to point in both directions at once.Parting Ways is quite a bit more interesting when it is less focused on the content of identity and more on the forms of identity—that is, theories of nation and history. With Hannah Arendt, Butler has a worthy if difficult resource, as the political theorist more than any other thinker in the book was concerned with reckoning with nationalism while remaining alert to the lessons of recent Jewish history. Butler begins the first chapter on Arendt with a nod back to the prior chapter on Benjamin and violence, situating both within recent Jewish history, not to establish their Jewishness (as victims/exiles of Nazism) but to recall just what violence and danger (Benjamin's interruptive terms) and nationalism and exile (Arendt's grounds) meant in the 1920s through 1940s. As Michael Rothberg, Amir Mufti, and now Bryan Cheyette have shown, Arendt and many other European thinkers were encountering both postcolonial and post-war problems of exile, refugees, and national self-determination struggles all simultaneously. Thus, Arendt's argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism that nationalism must always produce refugees was both a reflection on recent history and a knowing anticipation of the exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians following the establishment of the state of Israel. The interlocking of an earlier decade's history of displacement with the contemporary crisis of Palestinians suggests how “what flashes up [as in Benjamin's famous thesis] is a memory of suffering from another time [which] interrupts and reorients the politics of this time” (124).This chapter's weakness is its focus on Arendt's polemical conclusion to her essay on Eichman, especially Arendt's conclusion that “no one can choose with whom to cohabit the earth,” which Butler regards as a powerful moral but which strikes me as the banality of profundity—a claim as obvious as it is true (166). Certainly the ramification of such a statement includes new forms of supple political pluralism, but it's not clear that Arendt's pluralism was indeed that supple. Attempting to correct the seemingly regulatory nature of Arendt's universalizing pluralism, Butler borrows William Connolly's innovative account of pluralization, a process of becoming plural that is part of the ongoing social negotiation of differentiation. Differentiation, not difference: Connolly draws from Deleuze, whose philosophy does not accommodate static social groups, and who advocates on behalf of a “multi-dimensional” ethos of pluralization which promotes flows of experience across multiple-identity positions, yielding a constantly fluid polity. Revisiting Arendt through Connolly is a worthy project of political theory but it ends up with a paradoxical conclusion that Jews must become dispossessed of their Jewishness, that the diaspora is not a social project either in contrast to or in parallel with Zionism (that is, a nation without a territory). Rather, Connolly's ethos of pluralization yields a paradox: “If Jewishness mandates the departure from Jewish belonging, then ‘to belong’ is to undergo a dispossession from the category of Jewishness” (127). Bravely, Butler does not rely on pat valorizations of diasporic non-belonging or innocence, but cuts to the core of Jewishness, suggesting it is the experience of pluralization. There's a real argument to be made here, and a more sustained account of this fundamental dispossession would certainly be welcome, but it still brings us back to the question, if dispossession is your starting point, how can it also be your ending point? If there is no coherent Jewishness, how to make a “Jewish critique”? The answer is that a Jewish critique of Jewish nationalism can only make sense if “Jewish” is a form of intersubjective social relationality.Perhaps the most valuable chapters of Parting Ways are those on Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” and the messianism that runs through several of his other essays. In these two chapters, Butler employs all her powers as a careful, close reader and rhetorician in order to trace the threads comprising Benjamin's many aphoristic knots of time and history. Butler begins by positing that “there is no single doctrine of the messianic for Benjamin, and we might start our consideration by affirming that the messianic is a counterdoctrinal effort to break with temporal regimes that produce guilt, obedience, extend legal violence, and cover over the history of the oppressed” (70). There is nothing subtle about Butler's repurposing of Benjamin's messianism for a critique of Jewish allegiance to Zion, but I still found it a little bit thrilling. Benjamin was writing during the General Strike in Germany in 1919, and at the dawn of the formation of the German Workers Party. The question he was after, Butler contends, is when and how to refuse political conscription. If violence is always either “law-instating” or “law-preserving,” Benjamin sought a theory of refusal that made a sovereign claim on and for the individual, but that was irreducible to law. The messianic figures both temporal interruption and the refusal to submit to ideologically conscripting law: “for Benjamin, this divine violence has the power to destroy mythical violence. God is the name for what opposes myth” (71, 80). Adding, with reference to both the “Politico-Theological Fragment” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “If progress is a norm of this kind, then it follows that a certain history will, of necessity, produce the future by which it is overcome. It is this belief that is now wrecked, and that wreckage is what the angel clearly sees. No unfolding historical development will overcome fascism, only a state of emergency that breaks with a certain faith in historical development” (94). But how do we know this state of emergency when it is upon us? Can another tell it to us, or is it our responsibility alone? Daringly, Butler links Benjamin with Levinas, to conclude, “For Benjamin … the inner man, linked to ethical solicitude, is the site of messianic intensity. This makes sense if we keep in mind the solitary wrestling with the commandment that constitutes Benjamin's view of responsibility, one that comes to have resonance with Levinas' position, and one that remains radically distinct from and opposed to coerced obedience” (87). This is the genius of the book, the triangulation of Benjamin and Levinas around the problem of responsibility and through the essentially Judaic trope of wrestling. Lines like these make the whole book worthwhile, even as few and far between as they are.Butler threads her Benjamin chapters through with lines about Derrida, Gershom Scholem, Herman Cohen, and, intriguingly, Kafka. Indeed, Kafka's brief tale of Odradek, the uncanny figuration of an atemporality who “flits about” in “A Country Doctor,” helps Butler clarify how, for Benjamin, history “flashes up” in a time of crisis. It's a shame Butler does not work more with the tale, or with Kafka in general, for whom she clearly has an affinity, and who reads brilliantly alongside Benjamin. Butler has addressed Odradek elsewhere and for other occasions, and though she clearly recognizes Kafka's figure as sharing in a “dispossession” similar to what she imagines for Jews, the story merely flits in and out of this book. Her chapter on Primo Levi notwithstanding (and not warranting much mention here—it's fairly prosaic: the holocaust happened so don't oppress other people), Butler might have worked more with literary authors, who surely count as Jewish sources, and whose endless discovery of ambiguity at the heart of Jewishness, nationalism, and diaspora, would make excellent evidence for Parting Ways. Is there any better decoupling of Jewishness and Zionism than Philip Roth's Operation Shylock? Butler closes with Mahmoud Darwish's poetic tribute to Edward Said, though she simply cites from the poem with almost no insightful commentary. More literary analysis might have augured in as a wedge between Jewish diasporic consciousness and Zionism. The argument is there to be made, but Parting Ways hurries along, from Jew to Jew, ticking off big names and big ideas, when a more substantial, more sustained, more lasting engagement with philosophy and theory would have been so very useful. One wonders, what's the rush?—Israel isn't going anywhere anytime soon.