“to avoid the humiliation of silence in the wake of cruelty and injustice,” according to Cervantes. Exact quotation?

Again on speciesism, meta-post-humanism, etc. La critique dans un souterrain. I understand it is impossible to return to the negative aspects of the Aufklärung and its all-too-clear “speciesism”, political and intellectual authoritarianism, etc. Also understood that the dichotomy subjet/world is a source of illusions.

Au diable l’ontologie?

If the solution as I understand Derrida, Wolfe, Haraway, etc., is to recognize (and transform?) all forms of life into kinds of osmotic membranes, passages, or nodes for fluxes of information, that are “embedded” or “embodied”, why not go back all the way to a clear concept like that of the incarnation and redemption? How are you going to base an ethics on this neo-materialist notion of a repetition ad infinitum of information systems? Isn’t it a ready-to-wear language in its vulnerability and elasticity for the banking, insurance and bio-informatics industry? Isn’t the absence of a subject or its fluidity also a perfectly rational cover for corporations (= legal fictional persons) fundamentally interested in limiting their exposure and expenditures?

But rather, to become peregrine (like millions of workers), to dematerialize oneself for others, without preconceived limit, since the limit or the subjet lives in the jettisoning of all that was an illusion of it, and hope for the grace of a new creation, isn’t this old, familiar territory, to hearers of the Bible, gospels, Paul, Augustine?

Cary Wolfe (Rice University) spoke today about Animal Studies, Disciplinarity, and the Posthumanities: can one fish or retrieve something inerrantly human, after the fraying of human nature at the hands of biology since the XIXth century and now in the middle of a frantic and ever-expanding commercialization and commoditization that know of no solution of continuity from plants or animals to humans (add other -zations at will)? Nussbaum in one corner of the ring (post-Aristotelian-cum-Rawls yeah), Derrida in the other (vielleicht, suivez mon regard, ou plutôt celui de mon chat). Serious topic, and the bass continuo I was hearing in Wolfe’s speech was that any attempt at grounding a “humanity,” no matter the theoretical dicing, slicing or listing, is still and ever about preserving power, while the recognition of a common vulnerability might be ground for care, restraint, a “do no harm” philosophy, and perhaps resistance to the powers that be. A fully recognized humus for a new, broader, unexpected humanity. Vulnerability, which invites silence.

The lecture was in the Humanities building. A mind follows its eyes and wanders back and forth from the barky sequoias to the loquacious homines erecti

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Is this regard familier, hypostatized in his paradigmatic cat, what Derrida was puzzling about for so long, as his posthumously published ruminations on animalia (neuter) seem to indicate? Baudelaire for one is fascinated (and willing to be wounded?) by the claws, electrum, cold abyss, of cat-woman in

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d’agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.

Back to posthumanities, in which the “post” keeps confusing me. The Humanities building sits among trees whose ancestors have seen mule trains drag logs and carts of lime that went to build roads and cities from which UC emerged.

Animals had something in common with humans once, and still do in many parts of the world. Out of necessity, people lived very close to them. Horses, cows, pigs, hens even, were (could be) at the center of a modest farmer’s preoccupations. Have you ever seen a cart-driver speak quiet words to the head horse in a team pulling too heavy a load, the horse responding with all its strength, the pride to follow, oats, water and scrubbing… No distantiating romanticism here for those working from morning to dawn in the busy seasons of ploughing, planting, weeding, harvesting.

The necessity is gone in an industrial world whose logic dictates that animal life be seen as production, unnameable, transformable matter: transformable i.e. monetizable, with the same fate awaiting us soon? “Logic” of production and consumption, greed hiding behind logic: a strikingly narrow logic that is suffocating.  How can one breathe better?

Last weekend, I participated in the Annual Society of Biblical Literature Congress held at San Diego: a short paper on the appropriateness of models in descriptions of first-century Roman Palestine. In this case, it was about the “Image of Limited Good” model adopted by members of the Jesus Context Group. This model comes from the research done on a traditional peasant society (Tzintzuntzan) in the forties, fifties and sixties by George Foster, a sociologist from UC Berkeley.

But it is not the use of models in ancient history or of deductive vs inductive methods that was of the greatest interest to me. What was once more most puzzling and disturbing was that I was at the center of one of the great cities in the US to talk about the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, which on the whole are about social justice. Here we were, about ten thousand scholars, scholars-to-be, book people and so forth, filling up the big hotels of the area and the Convention Center. It was the usual well-organized madness. However consuming the madness, however, it couldn’t make one forget the reality of roads, banking webs anchored in the sky-scrapers around us, electronic networks, the assymetry of labor relations (there was a partial, discrete, strike against the Hilton chain going on), the not-so-hidden beggary, and especially the military ships across the bay and the large bases not so distant from the city.

Talking about ancient empires, labor relationships of the past, or degrees of acculturation (“hellenization”), was strange. And modelling certainly didn’t work. As post-moderns are finally beginning to realize, any and all critical theorizing, or tooling of intellectual and social realities, can be worked back into the machinery one thinks one is criticizing. What is left, ποίησις?

Senator Feinstein, who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, decided to support Mr. Mukasey’s nomination to the Attorney General position. Mukasey’s refusal to answer questions regarding the definition of torture was not enough for Feinstein to reject him. For her, it was sufficient that he was better than Alberto Gonzales. Together perhaps with the hope that a future Congress might ban “certain interrogation techniques” and Mukasey (or heirs) would support such Congress’ decisions as constitutional? How low we have sunk: “decent” jurists and senators in effect publically accept “interrogation techniques” (=torture) they would instantly reject if practiced by other countries on US citizens. Perfect example for the dictatorial regimes our foreign policies seem to sow or strengthen by the day…

Twelve years and one day ago, as a migraine kept me awake, I turned on the local radio and heard that then Prime Minister Rabin had just been shot (2 bullets reported at the time) at the conclusion of a large demonstration, around 9:30pm, 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 11:15pm). It would be learned on the following morning that the assassin had used exploding bullets (9mm caliber).

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, among whom people in the youth movement. This support brought great satisfaction to Rabin who had been under all sorts of attacks of the vilest sort in the previous few months. He had been compared to Hitler, associated with Arafat as a murderer (rotseaḥ), and called a traitor (boged), all things that hurt him deeply, as his face even made plain to see.

After his death, there was an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. All sorts of 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 (“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 the Palestinian people. This second part of the message was very important to my mind. 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.

Next morning, we learned that Clinton, Bush and Carter (and Jim Baker) were coming to Israel the next day for the burial ceremony, as were 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, utter compromising words. Rafael Eytan appeared defensive.

Rabin’s body lay in a coffin in front of the Knesset since noon on Sunday 11/5/95, and many thousands of people were coming from all over the country to pay their respects. It stayed there until about 2pm on Monday, when it was buried in a special ceremony. Perhaps over a million people passed by the coffin. Some people were bringing flowers or candles, even pictures or drawings, which were placed before the coffin by soldiers controlling the flow of people. The murderer, 27 at the time, was from Herzliyah. He was in his third year of law school (specializing in criminology, if I understood correctly) and computer studies at Bar-Ilan University. A TV show immediately 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 becoming grist for the theological commentary mill.

The wake in honor of Rabin continued the whole of Sunday night. Many heads of state and personalities attended 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. In the 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.

For days, throngs of people kept visiting not only Rabin’s tomb in Jerusalem but also the place where he was murdered, in the Tel Aviv square quickly renamed Kikar Y. Rabin. By Tuesday Nov 7, 1995, politics as usual had returned. Already on Monday night, Shulamit Aloni had severely criticized the Israeli and US religious authorities who, according to her, had created a favorable climate for the murder, and had not yet recanted, or had done so too late. On Tuesday, Ariel 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 M. 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 on the contrary that they too had been submitted to the same type of violence as Rabin?

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

About Rabin’s assassination. One often heard comment was: “How could this happen, coming from a Jew?” Or: “How could this happen to us? It is not supposed to happen to us!” Others (few): “What if the killer had been an Arab?” Everywhere, on many cars and doors, the sticker שלום חבר, which didn’t prevent drivers from taking excessive risks. Old, more aggressive slogans disappeared for a while, 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) felt somewhat threatened or sheepish: one of “them” committed the murder, he came from the leading religious university, studied Torah everyday. They saw a need to 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 invoked the necessity of a חשבון נפש: 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 seemed 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 was and probably still is of a different nature entirely. He heard a voice or a teaching (rabbi’s authority, coming from other authorities, etc….), telling him that relinquishing any part of Israel’s territory (i.e. what was conquered in 1967) is going against God’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 lived the frustration of a religious youth of traditional Yemenite background, upset by the threatening secularization of the country, especially where he lives (Herzliyah). In all of this, the near total absence of discussion about the real feelings of Palestinian Arabs was striking, either when talking about Rabin’s death or about the so-called peace process. Peace as a one-way street.

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. One came from Hungary (mamash hungarit, 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 side 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 striking in its compactness. 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 felt at ease and free. The depth of this feeling expressed by a modest person should be the touchstone by which one may understand the value of the zionist movement, and it is at this level that one must place oneself when speaking of the “Palestinian question”: to 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 stopped in one of the malls of Lev haMifratz to eat Mexican food. The excellent food was prepared fresh by an Arab Israeli who had lived 17 years in California. Everywhere around us, sounds and sights invited 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, but appear to be so clean, vast, efficient, organized, complete. A spotless conscience.

Rabin’s murder went to the heart of the Israeli political question and the impossibility to agree 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 locked in permanent struggle. Both perhaps necessary to each other?

The present US president is fond of saying that the greatest gift that his divinity had bestowed on humanity is (was?) liberty. Let’s forget about the past tense and the time stamp and restrictions it puts on divine interventions. The corollary of the way in which he frames this declaration is that our liberty-based American democracy is naturally on the side of the divinity, and vice-versa. I find it shocking to see the Bible put to such use. Scripture doesn’t speak of liberty. It speaks of slavery and redemption, not exactly the same thing as liberty or freedom. I don’t think redemption is capitalizable or useable as a sledge-hammer in foreign policy. Or at least there are ominous pronouncements against this abuse in, say, Deuteronomy. The whole Bible is written from the point of view of a people who have lost their political freedom and turned this loss into something deeper than a superficial liberty that is all too often a simple pretext for the unfettered looting of natural resources and unjust exploitation of labor.

Dans un article stimulant sur la place de l’océan dans l’imaginaire occidental et non-occidental (« There was no more sea : the supersession of the ocean, from the Bible to cyberspace», dans Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 494–511), Chris Connery propose que la foi monothéiste en un Yahvé conquérant de la mer et de ses dieux a joué un rôle fondamental dans la formation de l’idée de l’océan dans cet imaginaire. Cette idée me paraîtrait encore mieux étayée et politiquement fructueuse si son développement historique était repris à nouveaux frais (ce qui n’est pas l’objet de l’article de Connery). Ce qui est fondamental à mon avis, et qui me paraît encore plus évident à la re-lecture de Schneidau (Herbert N. Schneidau. Sacred discontent : the Bible and Western tradition. Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1976), c’est que dans la Bible, la nature et la vision mythisée de cette nature sont tombées sous le coup d’un soupçon radical. Les questions que pose C. Connery à l’égard des formes idéologiques des récents avatars du capitalisme (capitalisme finissant ou qui n’arrête pas de finir? une sorte de Léviathan en fuite perpétuelle) ne peuvent se comprendre, affirmerait Schneidau que je veux bien suivre sur ce point comme sur plusieurs autres, que parce que le yahvisme a fait son travail anti-mythologique il y a déjà une paille et s’est installé au creux de notre âme.

Nous trouvons des passages mythiques dans la Bible, tels que les combats anti-Léviathan, Tiamat, etc., mais ils sont bien différents de l’instrumentalisation de la mer que l’on voit par exemple dans le livre de Jonah et ne sont plus que des restes d’un ancien Yahvé plus proche d’un Wettergott que de l’être universel qui se fait jour dans le trito-Isaïe et déjà chez Ezéchiel. Ils ont peu de place dans la Bible au regard de la vision de la nature comme création divine.

Pourquoi, comme je le suggérais plus haut, est-il important de ne pas faire l’impasse sur une étude historique ou essai de généalogie dans l’explication du monothéisme? C’est que proposer un monothéisme sans histoire (ou si peu) à l’horizon de la vision moderne universelle d’une nature qui serait devenue un instrument et objet configurables à volonté, donc re-mythisables par le capitalisme, c’est se priver de voir l’élément potentiellement révolutionnaire du monothéisme et qui est justement son anti-mythisme radical. Si le monothéisme biblique prépare le terrain pour une remythisation de l’espace et du temps dans le capitalisme—le problème posé par Connery— c’est sur fonds de lutte qui est à la fois anti-mythe et anti-empires (assyrien et babylonien, même perse, mais beaucoup moins égyptien). Une vraie histoire du monothéisme qui en replacerait le développement dans le contexte de la domination par des empires faisant feu de tout bois mythique justement pour justifier leur emprise et sa perpétuation le montrerait aisément. Par “vraie histoire,” j’entends tout autre chose que l’histoire illusoire et tristement apologétique qui passe encore trop souvent pour une histoire de la Bible, c’est-à-dire la datation magique de concepts théologiques (un seul exemple de cette magie: un chiffre choisi dans la série des dates de l’empire égyptien tient lieu d’ancrage historique pour la “révélation du Sinaï”). Une véritable histoire du monothéisme—faisable à présent sans faire l’impasse sur les notions d’inspiration et de foi— montrerait clairement que l’anti-mythisation qu’on trouve à pratiquement chaque page de la Bible allait de concert avec une vision corrosive de tout pouvoir adossé aux dieux. Le combat contre les Léviathans fait partie de ce paysage. La lutte contre l’idolâtrie en découlait aussi, et elle continue à l’époque moderne sous d’autres mots.

US Secretary of State Rice was in Bethlehem yesterday and visited the Church of the Annunciation. Her decision to visit, say a prayer, and light a candle in the grotto where nativity stories claim Jesus was born, is a far cry from the rash and incoherent use of military power that has been the defining criterion of the administration she serves. I’m not saying it is more coherent or less hypocritical. A candle indeed, that is what will bring peace to the region. Roman emperors of the 4th c. CE found it necessary and convenient to discover or invent proper relics for their own political purposes: the cross, the Golgotha, the “grotto” where the nativity would have taken place, and many other “holy” places. Modern political leaders continue the tradition of hoping that the touching of relics will help the masses believe they have a good hold on reality.

Why is the President now pronouncing Iraq EEErak rather than EYErak? Did prime minister al Maliki and other Iraqi politicians summoned to the desert base where he flew for a photo-op while en route to Australia teach him that? I’m waiting to hear him pronounce the “q” correctly…. and even more, EEEEEE-RRan.