Stéphane Delicq

Thanks to Paul Rangell, just tonight, I discovered the music of Stéphane Delicq on the diatonic accordion, for instance Écossaise, vivre (valse à 5 temps), Manette, which I find moving and mesmerizing, and Nadiedja.

Not history

Here is a good example of what history of christianity (or exegesis, or theology) is not or should not be: assertions without foundations, crazy reasoning (especially when it invokes evidence from mental hospitals), use of unexamined textual sources, moronic comparisons (the tomb empty of Jesus = a cave, vs Muhammad’s cave), there is no end to it. The mode of speech reminded me of business advertisement: loud, repetitious, and obnoxious.

Wicked leaks

The information site Wikileaks has published copies of two hundred fifty thousand email messages or so that come from embassy personnel all over the world, related to US affairs. See the Guardian for a convenient overview and articles. For instance, one has messages from Saudi Arabia top government officials (the king himself apparently) wanting the US to attack Iran and destroy its nuclear capabilities. Nothing new here, but it is jarring to our government to see many (poor) calculations revealed…. So, it is not surprising to see the White House and especially Senate and House politicians reacting to this leak (extended to newspapers, some of which are by now, or have long been, opposed to the “war”) with disgust, contempt, even fury. I thought for a moment that it was to have the stupidity of US embassy personnel revealed that was causing the ulcers. But no. One of the furies is Lindsey Graham, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who used a poorly controlled metaphor when talking to Fox News (sorry for the oxymoron) “I mean the world is getting dangerous by the day and the people who do this are really low on the food chain as far as I’m concerned. If you can prosecute them, let’s try.” Yes, we are in a war, a war on the poor, and accessorily on the Talibans, etc., convenient excuse now to play tackle with Iran and China over control of the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean. No way we can let our guard down, can we, when the whole region could easily go over to China (and will)? At war alright, but with whom?

The foodchain metaphor is revealing of the philosophy of our politicians. Very low on the foodchain, that would be plankton I suppose, which I find hard to respect. But very high on the foodchain would be sharks… Graham didn’t mean that either, did he? Perhaps he meant parasites? No, of course not: he meant “low life.” And he is eating high on the hog, isn’t he, a shark at the top of the foodchain, he thinks: a lawyer who has served as such in the Air Force and in the Reserves. He voted for the war in Iraq in 2002, and is the author of the Graham amendment, which restricts the authority of US Courts to review habeas corpus status for so-called “enemy combatants”. And now he is sticking his neck out over the parapet at Fox. Brave man.

In case I have qualms about this kind of revelations, I remind myself that the same bodies who are now angry at Wikileaks often practice the same black art. They leaked lies regarding Irak’s real military situation in 2002-3 by using our US newspaper of record (the Miller affair in the New York Times), when it was convenient and imperative to do so. Or the identity of CIA’s V. Plame to get back at her husband who couldn’t or wouldn’t find evidence of Irak’s uranium deals in Niger (the yellow cake affair). They used Colin Powell to lie about Iraki weaponry at the UN on February 5, 2003 (how willing he was to go ahead, I’d like to know) . Regarding this present leak, in preparation for months, look at how it is being used. The New York Times has an article immediately ready about Iran and the need to defang it (see today’s edition). Our own “objective” New York Times itself calling the US to more action? It was not enough to do this job on Irak in 2003 and inescapably transform Iran into the default regional power? How intelligent.

Touch, taste, smell, hear, see

Last week, interesting talk by D. Mathiowetz at UCSC on “Haptic hierarchies”. How does hierarchy feel, especially luxury, and can one theorize luxury? Here is what I understood of the lecture, and some thoughts about it. From what I could gather, the project being pursued here is a radical re-examination of the metaphors that have long be used in political (con)figurations. Most evidently, shouldn’t the metaphor of seeing, which seems to dominate the discourse of politics and science be abandoned and replaced by that of touch, and touch be theorized (as well as smell and taste)? Note: I would add the sense of hearing, which leads to another kind of politics, but see further down on that one.

The language of luxury lost its religious force in the 18th century. Luxury used to be luxuria, extravagance, one of the capital sins in late antiquity’s lists. Luxury is not only a mark of surplus, but also something felt, haptic, connected to pleasure, the pleasure rising from the satisfaction of desire rather that from the plainer satisfaction of a need. If one is in great pain caused by an acute illness, does it make a difference to have silk pajamas on as well as luxurious sheets? Only 10 minutes after you get the morphine, I would guess [but if you have silk pajamas, chances are you also have access to a good health plan]. Touch rather than sight could be the driving sense. With that metaphor in the driving seat, one could imagine the rebuilding of a new political life that would incorporate pleasure in daily life: slow food movements, organic markets by the thousands, local health care…

To understand where this is going, I’ll have to read more on the project, obviously. In any case, after Castoriadis and others, I can see that ever since something like a surplus or abundance became a reality (i.e., a distinct plus, over and beyond the satisfaction of the basic needs of a larger sector of the population: in the late medieval period? early modern??), it became possible to theorize a lack or scarcity of resources and a super-abundance and infinity of desires. It began with various texts on the good usage of concupiscence in Renaissance times and culminated with Mandeville’s Fable of the bees, and Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” (don’t look or touch, eh?). It also becomes possible to theorize luxury and pull some or all of it from the hell where it had been enviously consigned by all kinds of moralists until modern times. If the concupiscence of more and more agents is the driver of the cybernetically perfect machine we call the market or global economy, it stands to reason that luxury should be reevaluated. And if in the medieval to modern discourse on luxury, sight was the driving metaphor, whereas touch was devalued, perhaps it is a sign of the times that there are attempts to reverse course and expand our moral imagination.

But is the expansion of our moral imagination going to go towards the building of new forms of community, or is it going to be subsumed and consumed by new forms of capitalistic behavior? I can see the effort to transform housing, transportation, health, food in a “haptic” direction, to be a boon to new forms of distantiation of individuals from each other.

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

From houses or hotel rooms which we order and “organize” by touching icons on a telephone, or the new organic and taste-your-food movements (“slow food”), to health care for old people done by very expensive robots that are substitute touching, feeding, watching machines, passing by…. I tend to think that greed will gulp and make its own all of these good intentions and feelings.

Touch and taste look like problematic political metaphors to me: how does one gather people around touch, taste, or smell? de gustibus non est disputandum. Mathiowetz referred in passing to the story of doubting Thomas in the gospel, in the context of the negative appreciation of touch. Yet, in the gospel of John, which is the most far-reaching in its use of rhetorical devices, the sense of touch is used in puzzling fashion. It looks obvious that touch is found wanting in the story of the resurrection: “Do not hold on to me,” (μή μου ἅπτου) Jesus says to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, and to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” So, yes, touch is devalued here. Yet, yet, there is this extraordinary story in the fourth gospel, during a meal:

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ (John 12.3–5)

A festive meal, the implied reader imagines, extraordinary perfume, this wiping of a man’s feet with a woman’s hair… and a message from the author about politics: there is a time for luxus, and a time for redistribution. But the fourth gospel’s main argument is that community can only be built and broadened around something that was once visible but is only accessible through trust in witnesses (by seeing/hearing: more on that below). Touching is framed as something much too narrow for witnessing, or only once, as a pre-funeral arrangement in which there will be no body left to touch. No new politics based on relics.

This leads me to reflect on the five senses and their metaphorical use in John and in the Bible. I start from the simple notion that in the ancient world the senses of sight and hearing were given pride of place because of the built-in distance from the object. This distance implied that more people could potentially share in the experience and interpretation of the seeing or hearing. To which give priority? Seeing because of our capacity to call others and observe something together? Therefore a sense more congenial to the democratic and scientific enterprises? vs hearing, which implies a transmission from someone: a prophet-like individual, a repeat, and a sustained effort to remember what was heard…

In John: there is a surprising passage from “seeing” to “hearing,” Jesus being the paradigmatic seer whom one then hears out (the gospel begins with “in the beginning was the word”…). John 8.38 says: “what I have seen near my father, I say; as for you, you do what you’ve heard from the father” (ἃ ἐγώ ἑώρακα παρὰ τῷ πατρὶ λαλῶ· καὶ ὑμεῖς οὖν ἃ ἠκούσατε παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς ποιεῖτε). Compare this verse to Luther’s “seeing and hearing” rhetoric. For Luther, the ears are the quintessential Christian organ, because they require faith. The same mixed metaphors can be seen elsewhere in the Bible. John normally uses “hear” in chapters 8-9 of the Gospel. Jesus is presented here as having seen the word of truth, which means that Jesus had direct contact rather than being at one remote from the original revelation.

Hans Jonas, in a paper on Heidegger and theology, makes interesting remarks on the use of these two metaphors.(“Heidegger et la théologie,” Esprit (July-August 1988), pp. 172–95. This text is a little more developed than the English version in the Second Consultation on Hermeneutics, Drew University, 9-11 April 1964). He begins his paper by showing how Philo of Alexandria gives pride of place to the Greek and Hellenistic mode of thinking, for instance in the way he portrays Jacob (Israel) as a “God-seer.” Jacob’s seeing, argues Philo, gives him a more authentic relationship with God and his word, whereas Ishmael (Jacob’s alter-ego in spite of the change of generation) is but a “God-hearer.” The texts quoted by Jonas are: De fuga et inventione, 208; De ebrietate, 82; De migratione Abrahami, 47 and following. See also the more theoretical passages on seeing and hearing in De Abrahamo.

The Bible itself, such as we have it now, i.e. according to the order created in the post-exilic period, incorporates a sustained reflection on those two modes of contemplation, without choosing one over the other, while progressively complicating their modalities. God appears to the biblical heroes in the full of day at the beginning of the stories of Adam, Noah, and Abraham, but soon only at night (Jacob) or even is barely present in Joseph’s dreams, before returning in the fullness of day for Moses, and becoming a “seeable word” for prophets and kings (vision and hearing), chronicles, etc….

I’ll continue Jonas’ thought. In his comment on Exodus 20.18, Philo, after the translators and even the editors of the Bible, perhaps following an ancient tradition, proposes that God’s logoi, which are at the same time erga (and not rhemata), are meant to be seen (De decalogo, 47). According to Philo, ears are to be converted into eyes (here too, one is in need of a phenomenology of the senses). The often-quoted text of Ex 20.18 says “and the whole people saw the voices,” (וראה כל העם את קולות). The “voices”, which in this story are also imagined thunder in the context of a theo- or kratophany, are in the plural. In Elijah’s story, in 1 Kings 19, the natural elements are actually negated as source of divine inspiration, and God’s voice itself is reduced to its simplest expression, silence. For Exodus 20.18, the standard Greek text we have has ἕωρα τὴν φωνήν, i.e. “saw the voice,” in the singular. One may wonder what Greek text Philo was reading, in which he found Hebrew qolot translated by the plural λόγοι or rather λόγους.

One might think there is no more here than the sort of metaphorical play that is frequent in many languages, or put to use in the synesthetic adventures of XIXth c. poetry, as in Baudelaire’s magnificent poem, Correspondances, in which all the senses are gathered in a bouquet and there are rich fragrances “qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.”

But I would like to speculate and propose that to give pride of place to sight and contemplation, i.e. to the clearest path to authenticity and objectifying rationality, may lead to inaction and therefore to disorder and death. This is a danger that the biblical tradition, post-exilic or older perhaps, attempted to avoid by setting obstacles to sight: clouds in the Sinai theophany, night vision, Yahweh seen from behind in Moses’ story, etc…. To choose hearing, on the other hand, conceals other dangers, such as irrational adventurism, the mad rush after illusions and the all too easy acceptance of the absolute authority of prophets who claim they heard voices. Can I hear something someone else has heard? At the same time? or later, by an effort of recall, memory, anamnesis, by way of writing most probably. On the side of sight, according to Jonas, one has the form (eidoi, idols, i.e. images), immediate presence, contemplation, real objects and concepts, the pride of autonomous reason, a self-affirming and -confirming subject. On the side of hearing, as Jonas again says, there is the call to mission, “rapture,” the event, response, humility, and piety.

What of Heidegger and modern thought, then, in this regard, which was the topic of Jonas’ paper? Heidegger’s thought, he thinks, is very attractive to contemporary theology, because it invites one to “convert” one’s objectifying eyes into ears ready to listen to a call (the ontological call). But under the modest appearance of this original philosophy which has discreetly borrowed from the Jewish and Christian tradition, what is actually being used by imprudent theologians is a pagan ideology which is much bolder than any previous one. Its fundamental ideas are in contradiction with theology itself, for instance its notion of a thought without beginning or original (anfänglich), when theology starts from a given revelation. This has serious consequences for theology, because it finds itself serving the Heideggerian philosophy: the notion of a continuous revelation of being sets in, the ideas of salvation and redemption are threatened, etc….

Can one say that the more distant a thing is felt (or the more capable one is of feeling at a distance), the higher will the sense be placed on the scale of feelings? Could it be that for this reason, hearing is placed above other senses? Yet, it is not a fully assured place, since the sense of seeing reaches in the far distance too (see Abraham, Jacob, the prophets). Modern psychological experiments show that people listening to a single message repeated by a person whom they see on screen and whose expression changes dramatically tend to focus on the expression and interpret it in a way that disregards what is being said. This might be less telling about the importance of the visual experience, however, because it could be the product of early and intense use of images in our culture, and the converse disregard of hearing (“obeying”).

On the other hand, have the sense of touch and taste, which encompass things close to us, been devalued because they are too easy to use and require less interpretation?? Between hearing and seeing there will be a struggle, or rather a dance, as there is between the memory of seeing (photographic memory, or geographic memory, the remembrance or recomposing of places and colors, easier for some than for others) and the memory of sounds or sayings (less automatic, more difficult for some, and for that reason found of more value because less “natural,” more human). Both of these senses are found in the Bible. The writers who have edited the Bible and framed it in the shape it has now have given thought to this as much as the Greeks, because one finds both senses used metaphorically in the first biblical books, but together later, in strange turns of phrase like “The word which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2.1).

Seeing, a sense given pride of place by the Greeks who were followed by Philo as shows Jonas, was not left aside or discarded by the Biblical authors. To introduce it in some of these sayings was their way to say that seeing (understanding) was as important as hearing (obeying) and that each alone, or an unmixed metaphor relying upon one sense only, was dangerous.

Online courses

One thought on online instruction: an element of distance (abstraction) has long been built in education as in all of culture and human life. The question is the nature of that abstraction. We have writing systems which from the beginning conceal a contradiction. They purport to convey the numinous and divine quality of the word delivered from on high, yet the more those hieroglyphs fall from heavens, the more they sap and erode the transcendence they claim to get power from. Is that why we bring up so quickly the socratic method (but via the written and recopied Plato)? It would be a dreamed up access to an original voice, the unseen, storied Mantinean oracle? Books, including Plato’s, seem to need little defense. They are marvellous repositories: products of long, reflective work at their best, long-lasting, widely available thanks to public libraries and borrowing systems, easy to use, and demanding effort. Yet, aren’t they too distant? Cold? Less exciting than a live webcam? And indeed, I have been surprised to discover in conferences (which I don’t care for) and colloquia (which I find much more appealing), that to meet authors of books or articles, hear their voice, see them in person, in other words have a glimpse of their conatus, of what drives them, not only helped me read their own writings as extensions or reverberations of that voice, but had a positive effect on all of my reading, even when I didn’t care for the voice or the personality. In other words, having access to the person, the voice, the hesitations and enthusiasms, was sometimes peeking into the dynamics of something that looked like thought unfolding and discovering that the fragility of the articulation, its daring perhaps, its circuitous ways sometimes, its failures, permitted or even invited others to enter and share a questioning which I take to be at the heart of understanding the world. It is having access to the grain of salt (or sand) that so often gets things going. But it was the real person up there on the podium, and sometimes around a sandwich or a cup of coffee…. Not an image. So, should I conclude: no online courses? No online courses, precisely because they purport to bring the voice and picture of an original saying, an authority from on high, worth paying higher tuition fees for, when this voice and picture are an image of an image. No online courses because they lie even more boldly than the present university structures? No to them, because in agreement with Plotinus I say: no images of images, only images without visible models.

UC online courses coming

An email encouraging UC faculty to compete for significant grants designed to produce and try a first batch of 25 online courses by 2011-12 fell into my box yesterday. More on this topic later. I have to correct homework, read paper drafts, make sure my web pages for Hist 163 (sin) and Latin 1 are up to date, and then think about this online issue as clearly as I can.

Information can be found at the UC site, including the request for letters of intent and the application instructions. The home page for the site shows that the planning phase has started and the implementation phase is March ’11 to December ’12.

This initiative is generating comments, for instance this critique by Professor Wendy Brown, on economic and ethical grounds. The NYT just published an article describing some of the pitfalls of such instruction at the University of Florida. Most interesting in the article: the study made of two comparison groups in a micro-economics course: one in a large lecture hall, the other online. Results: the online group scored significantly below the large-lecture group (by half to a full grade below).

For the moment, however, I have to do my own distance learning: telepathic understanding of my students’ efforts and failures, as well as my own. More later.

greater humanities

Thursday 11/4/2010, discussion on the future of the Humanities in public universities, organized by the UCHRI (the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute) and UCSC’s Institute of Humanities Research. Capitalized names everywhere, one could begin with this need to be visible like others and claim a well-deserved dignity. Capital is the stuff of headlines. I read it as a symptom of weakness, as I do the building of our Humanities I block, no matter the transparency aimed at with the large windows of the groundfloor room where we had this discussion. I digress. Here is my understanding of the proceedings:

1. positive point in introduction by Nathaniel Deutsch: to remember that to an outsider, what is striking is the quality and intensity of intellectual life on this campus, the great inventivity and contributions of scholars in the humanities, and how seriously they take their public service to students, families, and society at large.

2. three points by David Theo Goldberg: the classic mission of the university, namely to prepare and enable an increasing middle class, is threatened by the latter’s massive weakening and fragility since the 70’s (that is when one could feel this weakening, I would think). The middle class is rapidly transforming and eroding or at least a beat away from losing its security. Diversity is increasingly connected to work specialization hoped for by students. A general goal remains for the Humanities, which could be reformulated as an interpretation or translation project. I think he meant by this the massive on-going work of understanding other cultures not only in relation to our own (and our “own” needs to be defined), gather their work, ensure universal access to it and permanence… And a more precise goal: recreate a discourse of public reason. [my thought: ratio? judgment? good luck. What could the role of the humanities as I know it be in this? Ratio requires something like measure, a peg or canon by which to measure and ration. But in a situation where all mediations are gone—church, state, parties, ideologies of yore—what would the new mediation be? Human rights?? which is up for grabs by all ideologues…]

3. Gail Hershatter was going to show this video on what it takes to become a Ph.D. in the Humanities, but there was a technical failure. Gail Hershatter addressed a number of aspects of budgets, which are statements of values, and how diverse the reactions are. How can one reach across departmental lines? Existing structures make it very difficult for many scholars who think of their work in fluid fashion to reach across the disciplines.

4. Eric Porter: the humanities are under siege but necessary to the institution. One major effect of dwindling budgets is the destruction of idea and practice of diversity, not noticed or addressed by almost anyone. [my thoughts: the humanities are not necessary to the institution, qua institution. And budgets are not going to get better, and if they do, the parcimonious extra sums are going elsewhere. We are not in a “moment of budget retrenchment” but in a major reconfiguration exercise]. Claim also that the humanities provide critical thinking to students. [Yes, but what do we mean by this? Surely not that others don’t? and speaking of critical abilities, is this really the core of the humanities? However critical we become, can’t it immediately be turned into the next tool of conformity? Examples: the diasporic, diversity, the green, etc., can’t Exxon or GE immediately recycle this stuff in next day’s full page ads?].

5. Jim Clifford starts from the no-kvetch position, permission to see wider and long term. Not even a short couplet therefore on the progressive and structural belittlement of the humanities! He spoke of the old-style Arts and Sciences type universities (fifty fifty!) to our being one of five divisions: 20% of the pie! So let’s dream up the bigger humanities rather than a poor mirror image of STEM programs. What are the greater humanities? all kinds of people across the university ultimately doing work involving some or all of the following four dimensions: 1) interpretive, not positivist, provisional; 2) realist though not crudely objective, empirical, even statistical; 3) historical though not teleological [but evolutional], and aware that explanations are all too often partial; 4) ethical and political. In the end, Jim said, we need to get rid of this word, the “greater humanities,” and open the space to all those who are working along the lines mentioned above.

An image comes: the humanities were once part of this class cargo ship which sailed on and on towards famed ports of call, delivering a classical education, sciences, beaux-arts, and their satellites. The humanities are wondering where they are: still on the ship, though perhaps in the engine room or galleys and grumbling? or dropped at sea on a raft tethered to the aft, and shouting?

Reality is a shadow of the word

From Bruno Schultz in The Cinnamon Shops (Polish Sklepy cynamonowe):

The core of reality is meaning. What has no meaning is not real for us. Each bit of reality lives inasmuch as it participates in a universal meaning. Old cosmogonies expressed this idea with the phrase: “In the beginning was the Word.” What is not named doesn’t exist for us. To name a thing is tantamount to encompassing it in a universal meaning. An isolated word, a mosaic piece, is a recent product, result —already—of technique. The primitive word was a meandering spun around the meaning of light, it was a great universal whole. In its common acception today, a word is only a fragment, a leftover from an ancient and complete mythology. Hence this tendency in it to regenerate, to grow back, to complete itself in order to return to its whole meaning. The life of the word. The life of the word consists in its tension towards thousands of combinations, like the pieces of the quartered body of the legendary serpent which groped for each other in darkness. This complex organism has been torn up into separate words, into syllables, into everyday discourses. Used in this new form, it has become a tool of communication. Life, the development of language, have been pushed unto the utilitarian path, subjected to foreign rules. As soon as the practical requirements are relaxed, however, as soon as the word freed from constraint is abandoned to itself and re-established in its own laws, a regression happens in it. It tends then to complete itself, to find its ancient bonds, its meaning, its primordial state in the words’ original land-—then poetry is born.

Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning that occurs among words, it is a sudden burst of primitive myths.

When we use common words, we forget they are fragments of old and eternal stories, that we are building our house — like barbarians— with the debris of statues of the gods. Our concepts and our most concrete terms are distant derivations from them. Not an atom of our ideas that doesn’t come from them, that is not a transformed, mangled, changed mythology. The most primitive function of the mind is the creation of tales, of “stories.” [….]

Tirelessly, the human mind adds its glosses to life—myths—tirelessly it tries to “give meaning” to reality.

Meaning is what pulls humanity into the process of reality. It is an absolute given which cannot be deduced from other data. Impossible to explain why a thing seems “sensible” to us. To confer meaning to the world is a function which is inseparable from the word. Language is a person’s metaphysical organ. With time, the word coagulates, it stops carrying new meanings. The poet gives back to words their ability to conduct, by creating accumulations in which new tensions appear. Mathematical symbols are a broadening of the word to new domaines. Painting also derives from speech when it was not yet sign but myth, story, meaning.

Words are usually considered to be shadows of reality, a reflection. It would be more correct to say the opposite! Reality is a shadow of the word. Philosophy is fundamentally philology, a deep and creative study of speech.

Rabin’s death

Today, anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s death according to the traditional Hebrew calendar: י״ב בְּחֶשְׁוָן תשע״א . One may read a short account of the official commemoration ceremony at Mount Herzl.
Below, I post some notes taken about the event as it occurred, and dated according to the common calendar…

Sunday 5 novembre 1995 Last night, as a migraine kept me awake, I turned on the local radio and heard that Prime Minister Rabin had just been shot (2 bullets reported at the time) after yesterday’s large demonstration, around 9h30, and that he was in a very serious condition at the nearby hospital. I kept listening, and soon it was announced that Rabin had died on the operating table (at about 11h15). It would be learned later (this morning) that the assassin had used exploding bullets (9mm caliber).

Yesterday indeed, there had been a large demonstration of support for Y. Rabin and the government’s work towards peace. Perhaps 200,000 people from all areas in the country went to show their support . Some young friends of R. who are in the youth movement left kibbutz Farod early. This support brought great satisfaction to Rabin who has been under all sorts of attacks of the vilest sort in the past few months. He has been compared to Hitler, associated with Arafat as a murderer (רוצח), and called a traitor (בוגד), all things that hurt him deeply, as his face, I thought, made plain to see.

After his death, there was an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. People, especially young people, began bringing candles and flowers to the spot where he had been shot. Many politicians were interviewed and gave dignified and emotional answers, avoiding political debates though journalists often prodded them to take sides. Some Labor speakers, however, could not help but accuse the right (without naming anyone) of having created the climate leading to the assassination. After an hour or so, we heard Clinton’s declaration in the White House (the strange to my ears, “Shalom, haver…”). We also saw Arafat giving a message of condoleance. It began in a political vein, speaking of “those opposed to peace”, but after some hesitation, Arafat came back to the microphone and offered his condoleances to Mrs Rabin, the government, the people of Israel, on his behalf, that of the PA, and of the Palestinian people. This second part of the message looked very important to me. Apparently, there were expressions of joy in the territories as well as in certain very conservative Israeli circles. There was an emergency meeting of the government in which Shimon Peres was named interim Prime Minister. He spoke of his friendship with Rabin. Peres too apparently was a possible target of the murderer, although the secondary one.

This morning, we learned that Clinton, Bush and Carter (and Jim Baker) are coming to morrow for the burial ceremony, together with King Hussein, Hassan II, Mubarak, Chirac, etc…. We also heard a number of Israeli political leaders, among whom B. Netanyahu, who was very civil and decent, compromising. Rafael Eytan appeared defensive.
Rabin’s body lies in a coffin in front of the Knesset since noon today, and many thousands of people are coming from all over the country to pay their respects. It will stay there until about 2pm tomorrow, when it will be buried in a special ceremony. Perhaps over a million people will pass by the coffin. Some people are bringing flowers or candles, even pictures or drawings, and they are placed before the coffin by soldiers controlling the flow of people.
The murderer, 27, is from Herzliyah and was in his third year of law school (criminology) and computer studies at Bar-Ilan University. A show today gathered a few authorities in the legal and psychologigal fields, including people like Israel Lau. It was astonishing to see the latter immediately frame the event in biblical and traditional legal terms, everything flesh and human just grist apparently for the theological commentary mill.

November 6, 1995 The wake in honor of Rabin continued the whole night and will last until two o’clock this afternoon. Many heads of state and personalities will attend the ceremony at Mount Herzl. According to the Jerusalem Post, Arafat wished to come, but the Israel government decided that it was better if he didn’t come, for security reasons.

This morning, the television showed Leah Rabin and her daughter thanking people for coming. We looked at TV images of the ceremony for several hours. The speeches by King Hussein, Rabin’s advisers (Haber, etc.), his grand-daughter, were moving. Clinton, Mubarak and the Russian foreign minister appeared to be more prepared, more political.

November 7, 1995 Throngs of people keep visiting Rabin’s tomb in Jerusalem and the place where he was murdered, in the Tel Aviv square now renamed Kikar Y. Rabin. This morning program on the radio introduces various personalities, among whom Elie Wiesel. Elsewhere, politics has returned. Last night already, Shulamit Aloni severely criticized the Israeli and US religious authorities who, according to her, created a favorable climate for the murder, and have not yet recanted, or have done so too late. Today, Aryeh Sharon insisted on the unity of the Jewish people as being the most important thing to guard at the moment, but he did not forget to mention that Menahem Begin and he had been branded “murderers” during the war in Lebanon. Is one to conclude that a violent act did not necessarily flow from this kind of accusation, or that they too had been subject to the same type of violence as Rabin?

Another thing I have noticed: the confessions of guilt by many people, who feel guilty for not having done enough to defend and support Rabin. How could this have influenced the murderer? But perhaps do they feel guilty for not being stronger supporters of peace and shown to Rabin alive that he truly represented their aspirations?

Lightning and intermittent rain this afternoon. Is it rain, the recent blooming of cyclamens and crocuses among the rocks and under the olive or pine trees, the sight of Arab families harvesting olives, and above all the powerful feeling of national mourning? but I suddenly realize I love this country more for itself, and not only as a mythical object of study from which sprang the Bible, the basis for my judgment and my moral conscience, such as it was shaped through Latin, celtic, and the French brand of christianity.

The name of Yitzhak Rabin will continue to live in the person of a 27 year-old Russian immigrant who yesterday, at the time of qiddush after his circumcision, declared that this would be his name.

November 19, 1995 Visit to Jerusalem, to a friend on Nissim Behar street, a street opening onto Bezalel, not far from the Supreme court and the Knesset. From Nes Ziona, we came this morning to the Old City where I parked the car in the courtyard of the College des Freres, near New Gate. Frere X, the Brother Director, had already left, first for a ceremony at the Greek Orthodox Church in the neighborhood, and then for Bethlehem where he was to try to get temporary permits to allow several teachers to come from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. When we see him around 3h30, he is disappointed, because he failed to obtain them. He was made to wait several hours for nothing. The teachers will probably wake up very early the next day, take back roads, and travel for several hours before reaching the college (a ride which could take minutes if one came straight from Bethlehem).

After our visit to the Kotel haMa’aravi, we go towards the Dung Gate to see if we can walk on the walls, but we discover it’s not possible. A kind of crazy-looking and apparently well-known red-haired Celt, with cheap glittering clothes and a paper crown is playing (scratching) a harp on the path leading up to the police checkpoint before the Western Wall. As we are walking back towards the Wall, we hear him shouting at a couple of small orthodox kids, in a heavy American accent: “Zeh lo yehudi, zeh lo tov!” King David is vehemently pointing his finger and cradling his useless harp under his left arm. He is angry at two little kids, especially one who apparently hit a little Arab girl with his stick. We noticed that another one was playing with a pocket knife. They both may be acting fantasies out of the book of Joshuah. The police check things out eventually.

About Rabin’s assassination. One often heard comment is: “How could this happen, coming from a Jew?” Or: “How could this happen to us? It is not supposed to happen to us!” Our reaction on the contrary was to say: “What if the killer had been an Arab?” (outside of Israel, in any event of the kind, our reaction is rather: “Hope it’s not a Jew”). The possibility of peace would have vanished for a long time, and the relationships between Israeli Arabs and Jews would have been much more difficult in Galilee and elsewhere.

Everywhere, on many cars and doors, the sticker Shalom Haver, which doesn’t prevent drivers from taking excessive risks. Old, more aggressive slogans have disappeared, for the most part, except some strong statements regarding the Golan (“The people with the Golan;” or “We shall not move from the Golan”).

Religious Jews (especially Zionist religious Jews) feel threatened in their identity: one of “them” committed the murder, he came from the leading religious university, studied Torah everyday. They presently fight for unity above all, because dispersion under the negative impression of more than half of the country would mean political dilution and loss of power.

Many people have been invoking the necessity of a חשבון נפש or accounting (confession): couldn’t all kinds of individuals have done more to show their support for Rabin, and perhaps thus prevented the “right” from going too far? To my mind, it seems naive to think that such good intentions, even realized, could have made any impact on the will of Y. Amir, Rabin’s killer. His reasoning is of a different nature entirely. He has heard a voice or a teaching (rabbi’s authority, coming from other authorities, etc…. more on this listening vs seeing business at another time), telling him that relinquishing any part of Israel’s territory (i.e. what was conquered in 1967) is going against the divinity’s promise, the highest crime against Judaism, and is therefore tantamount to high treason and punishable by death. The land itself is sacred, perhaps the Jewish people too, but as a collective first, and in that order. He also has lived the frustration of a religious youth of traditional Yemenite background, upset by the threatening secularization of the country, especially where he lives (Herzliyah). I am struck by the near total absence of discussion about the real feelings of Palestinian Arabs, either when talking about Rabin’s death or about the so-called peace process. Peace as a one-way street.

Tuesday, November 28, 1995 By a beautiful autumn afternoon, I listen to B. doing scales (doing time?) and repeating a few melodies: Mélancolie de Chopin, Étude de Bréval, a gavotte, an air by Offenbach. This morning, we went to a garage in Carmiel to have the car checked. On the way out of the kibbutz, on the entry road lined with olive trees and rock slabs emerging from the heavy ocre earth, we picked up two old ladies from the kibbutz. One came from Hungary (ממש הונגרית, said she, from Budapesht, and, with a touch of pride, “I only speak Magyar!”), the other one from Transylvania, from a region first belonging to Hungary, then to Rumania. As a little girl, she lived in a Hungarian village, but had to go to school to a Rumanian school. She spoke Magyar, Rumanian, and Yiddish. Without explaining her circumstances in any detail, but in a kind of comment on the small difficulties at the beginning of our stay which we were mentioning to her, she told us that it is difficult to change. She herself had found exceedingly hard, she said, to change husband, children, country, language, and culture. The list was so short, compact, striking. We didn’t ask about the first two items. Having lost everything, and in spite of all difficulties, she had embraced Israel as her country, a home where she feels at ease and free.

It is by the strength or measuring-rod of this feeling coming from a modest person that one must judge the value and even the grandeur of the zionist movement, and it is at this level that one must place oneself when speaking of the “Palestinian question”. One must have in mind the life of people on both sides of the divide — a life including the willfully preserved memory of previous generations as well as the desire or hope that their children may have a future to look forward to.

In the evening, we went to see a bike store on Jaffa street in Haifa. We stopped in one of the malls of Lev haMifratz to eat Mexican food. The excellent food is prepared fresh by an Arab Israeli (or is that an Israeli Arab?) who lived for 17 years in California. Everywhere around us, sounds and sights invite Israelis to consume without any restraint and indulge their passion for objects, cars, electronic items, gadgets… Along the highway, high degree of pollution, impression of a mess in the transition from old industrial areas to the new kind of malls, the squeaky cleanliness of Toys R Us or Office Depot, and so on…. huge tiled and carpeted stores which in truth invite a real mess, moral that one, but appear to be so clean, vast, efficient, organized, complete. A spotless conscience.

Friday, December first, 1995 Rabin’s murder goes to the heart of the Israeli political question (and the impossibility of agreeing on a constitution). Two forms of zionism, one starting with the Biblical text and obeying the command to love Israel (ahavat Israel), the other one starting from a modern situation (but not without antecedents), the necessity to found a national home for the Jews of the world who need it, two forms of zionism are locked in permanent struggle. Both are necessary to each other. The organization of a modern state utilizing individual energies on as wide a basis as possible can be done only on a secular basis (but one might disagree on what is meant by secular, the old immanence/ transcendence debate). This is the springwell of the strength of citizens who organize their defense, conquer a land, develop an industry, etc…. But the heart of this state is the return to Zion, so the religiously grounded concept is also at the center of the state, though its visible representatives are in relatively small numbers.

Tuesday, December 5th, 1995 Last night, a fine rain fell for a few hours. It was a great joy to receive Lieberman’s Tosefta kifshuta, the thirteen tomes of it, a work which I have wanted to have for a while now. Other works by Lieberman are being reedited or reprinted. Tosefta kifshuta is a rich and exact commentary setting the reader on the path to talmudic, Greek or Latin texts which throw light on the text at hand.

Rabin’s death, thirty days ago, is being commemorated in TV and radio programs. Unfortunately, the cameras focus on the political actors of the moment: friends of Rabin, the present government, and also the opposition tenors, especially Netanyahu. Very thin presence of the religious element: not invited or tolerated? or excusing itself?

Mystic mill

The mystic mill is damned in Celan’s Spät und tief:

….
Sie rufen: Ihr lästert!

Wir wissen es längst.
Wir wissen es längst, doch was tuts?
Ihr mahlt in den Mühlen des Todes der weiße Mehl der Verheißung,
ihr setzet es vor unsern Brüdern und Schwestern—

Wir schwenken das Weißhaar der Zeit.

Ihr mahnt uns: Ihr lästert!
Wir wissen es wohl,
es komme die Schuld über uns.
….
Es komme ein Mensch aus dem Grabe.

Translation from Felstiner’s Selected poems and prose of Paul Celan (New York: Norton, 2001), page 27:

They cry: Blasphemy!

We’ve known it long since.
Known it long since, but who cares?
You grind in the mills of death the white meal of the Promise,
you set it before our brothers and sisters—

We flourish the white hair of time.

You warn us: Blasphemy!
We know it full well,
let the guilt come on us.
….
Let a man come forth from the grave.

It seems to me that similarly the hyphenated Meermühle in Celan’s Le menhir, found in a record under the title Le menhir de St-Renan (last version from 4 August 1961, acc. to JP Lefebvre in his Paul Celan. Choix de poèmes réunis par l’auteur [Paris: Gallimard, 1998], page 352), are not simply about moulins de la mer/mère and moulins de la mort, but also about the mystic mill which grinds the torah, its letters, its bearers, and makes this white dust, both flour and Abel-like smoke or ashes.

Le menhir

Wachsendes
Steingrau

Graugestalt, augen-
loser du, Steinblick, mit dem uns
die Erde hervortrat, menschlich,
auf Dunkel-, auf Weißheidewegen,
abends, vor
dir, Himmelsschlucht.

Verkebstes, hierhergekarrt, sank
über den Herzrücken weg. Meer-
mühle mahlte.

Hellflüglig hingst du, früh,
zwischen Ginster und Stein,
kleine Phaläne.

Schwarz, phylakterien-
farben, so wart ihr,
ihr mit-
betenden Schoten.

The Phaläne, great night butterfly (Nachfalter), in French sounds like the tefillin, the prayer boxes, pods (Schoten) or boxes whose Greek name (phylactères in French) evokes classes of butterflies.

moulin_vezelay

Above, the mystic mill at the root of the milling images: Moses and Paul sweating at the mill. Two people working together, Moses feeding the torah into the grinding christic mill, and Paul (in the light projected by the Vézelay windows, rather than the permanent shadow the Moses figure inhabits, not to forget) collecting the flour, and both one could think naïvely interchangeable in history, as anyone who has participated in a harvest knows. Same image in Suger’s St Denis window apparently. In passing: I don’t understand the commentaries equating mill and Christ without further ado. The wheel is cruciform, fine. But isn’t the heart of it, as Faulkner said, the grinding, the minute clicking of time’s little wheels? Jesus here was not the mill but the grain submitting to the spinning stones of history, with no bitterness but sweet flour flowing out, packed and taken to the baker.

Reading Celan has broken the mill.

Gildas Hamel