‘Crystallized, perfected, adorned'
Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism
Columbia University Press, 256pp, £19.50, ISBN 9780231146104
reviewed by Maya Osborne
The late and great critic Edward Said is aptly evoked in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism when Judith Butler writes that ‘Since there is no self without a boundary, and that boundary is always a site of multiple relations, there is no self without its relations.’ This proposition forms part of Butler’s critique of Zionism, and it levels with the possibility that if we deny this necessarily multiple relation to boundaries, we are dangerously placing ourselves in a world ‘in which the only options are to be destroyed or to destroy.’ The self is defined relationally, socially; the self is implicitly tied to others.
Using the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s term ‘cohabitation’, Butler considers how Jewishness itself actually promotes alterity; the displacement of Jews from swathes of Europe during the Second World War brings them closer to the situation of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Butler does not attempt a comparison between Jewish and Palestinian suffering, and she asserts that such a project is inherently flawed – the Holocaust, or Shoah, is not to be compared with the Nakba (the Arabic term for ‘catastrophe’, referring to the 1948 Palestinian displacement). These historical events cannot be translated as such – and yet it is in relation to this historical period of Jewish suffering that Butler proposes justice for all. She believes that memory can serve an educational purpose, warning us of the dire consequences of prejudiced treatment of others, and arguing that Jews, of all people, should understand the crucial importance of human equality.
Butler is writing as a liberal and anti-Zionist Jew in Parting Ways – a position that has on occasion sparked right-wing anger. The Jerusalem Post’s tirade against her when she won the Theodor Adorno Prize in 2012 was enough to elicit an eloquent and measured response, in which she denies being a self-hating Jew, but rather ‘wishes to affirm a Judaism that is not identified with state violence’, the same line that she takes in Parting Ways. Butler observes how Hannah Arendt (also a liberal Jew) was purported to hold anti-Semitic views, and seen to have no sympathy with Holocaust victims, regarding her account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt coined the term ‘banality of evil’ in relation to Eichmann himself, and was critical of how Eichmann’s trial had played out in Israel. Arendt argues that Eichmann was himself not a sociopath, but rather a man of lesser intelligence who was following the rules of his state, and who therefore believed that his actions were normal. Furthermore, she argues, his trial had been managed by then-Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to emphasise Jewish Holocaust suffering, rather than to bring to light Eichmann’s own war crimes. Similar to Butler, Arendt was attempting to think of Jewishness as separate from state sovereignty, and also like Butler, her position was felt to be anti-Jewish.
Although Butler’s project is urgent in that she is discussing a current condition of life (the Arab-Israeli divide), she is perhaps impractically, albeit characteristically, academic in her appraisal of the situation. She offers us no guide as to how any form of cohabitation might be achieved, and it does not take a stretch of the imagination to recognise the extent of anger, fear and resentment that must be felt by so many Palestinians, and Israelis, against their neighbours. Thus until forgiveness and reconciliation become a part of common global language it is hard to see how Butler’s idealistic vision can be realised.
‘Primo Levi for the Present’, Butler’s chapter on Levi’s writings, is worth reading in its own right; it stands as a brilliant consideration of the ways in which storytelling serves the important purpose of producing a language by which to speak about trauma, whilst simultaneously cementing certain ideas and fixing memory as an inevitably biased object. In Levi’s own words, memory in the form of a story is ‘a form tested by experience crystallized, perfected, adorned, instilling itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense.’ Just as the story of the Holocaust acknowledges the trauma connected with the immense loss of life, so the language of mourning becomes formulaic: ‘the story might be said to institute a kind of melancholia in which the suffering and loss are denied.’ In order to comprehend suffering, it must be recognised as an historical event – one that is not restricted to the suffering of the Jewish people. If this does not happen then it seems that these memories will only serve the perpetuation of unjust (or as Butler herself writes, ‘wretched’) forms of binationalism, both in Israel and elsewhere.
Whilst Butler’s desire for a peaceful Israel-Palestine cohabitation might seem a long way off, Parting Ways is nonetheless a hopeful book. It teaches us that we must continue to rethink and reshuffle the crystallising stories, just as they continue to hammer down on us in multifarious forms of media, social engagement, writing. Butler’s elliptical jumps offer the book a particularly creative and flexible strength, and yet one is left in a state of unease regarding the discrepancy between the current state of affairs, and her own idealistic vision of the future. However she does succeed in shaking things up, albeit subtly, via her own fluid approach to historical appreciation (for example as she moves from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the poet Mahmoud Darwish); Butler messes with chronology, she shows us how we can think about the past as it exists in present time, right now.
Using the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s term ‘cohabitation’, Butler considers how Jewishness itself actually promotes alterity; the displacement of Jews from swathes of Europe during the Second World War brings them closer to the situation of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Butler does not attempt a comparison between Jewish and Palestinian suffering, and she asserts that such a project is inherently flawed – the Holocaust, or Shoah, is not to be compared with the Nakba (the Arabic term for ‘catastrophe’, referring to the 1948 Palestinian displacement). These historical events cannot be translated as such – and yet it is in relation to this historical period of Jewish suffering that Butler proposes justice for all. She believes that memory can serve an educational purpose, warning us of the dire consequences of prejudiced treatment of others, and arguing that Jews, of all people, should understand the crucial importance of human equality.
Butler is writing as a liberal and anti-Zionist Jew in Parting Ways – a position that has on occasion sparked right-wing anger. The Jerusalem Post’s tirade against her when she won the Theodor Adorno Prize in 2012 was enough to elicit an eloquent and measured response, in which she denies being a self-hating Jew, but rather ‘wishes to affirm a Judaism that is not identified with state violence’, the same line that she takes in Parting Ways. Butler observes how Hannah Arendt (also a liberal Jew) was purported to hold anti-Semitic views, and seen to have no sympathy with Holocaust victims, regarding her account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt coined the term ‘banality of evil’ in relation to Eichmann himself, and was critical of how Eichmann’s trial had played out in Israel. Arendt argues that Eichmann was himself not a sociopath, but rather a man of lesser intelligence who was following the rules of his state, and who therefore believed that his actions were normal. Furthermore, she argues, his trial had been managed by then-Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to emphasise Jewish Holocaust suffering, rather than to bring to light Eichmann’s own war crimes. Similar to Butler, Arendt was attempting to think of Jewishness as separate from state sovereignty, and also like Butler, her position was felt to be anti-Jewish.
Although Butler’s project is urgent in that she is discussing a current condition of life (the Arab-Israeli divide), she is perhaps impractically, albeit characteristically, academic in her appraisal of the situation. She offers us no guide as to how any form of cohabitation might be achieved, and it does not take a stretch of the imagination to recognise the extent of anger, fear and resentment that must be felt by so many Palestinians, and Israelis, against their neighbours. Thus until forgiveness and reconciliation become a part of common global language it is hard to see how Butler’s idealistic vision can be realised.
‘Primo Levi for the Present’, Butler’s chapter on Levi’s writings, is worth reading in its own right; it stands as a brilliant consideration of the ways in which storytelling serves the important purpose of producing a language by which to speak about trauma, whilst simultaneously cementing certain ideas and fixing memory as an inevitably biased object. In Levi’s own words, memory in the form of a story is ‘a form tested by experience crystallized, perfected, adorned, instilling itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense.’ Just as the story of the Holocaust acknowledges the trauma connected with the immense loss of life, so the language of mourning becomes formulaic: ‘the story might be said to institute a kind of melancholia in which the suffering and loss are denied.’ In order to comprehend suffering, it must be recognised as an historical event – one that is not restricted to the suffering of the Jewish people. If this does not happen then it seems that these memories will only serve the perpetuation of unjust (or as Butler herself writes, ‘wretched’) forms of binationalism, both in Israel and elsewhere.
Whilst Butler’s desire for a peaceful Israel-Palestine cohabitation might seem a long way off, Parting Ways is nonetheless a hopeful book. It teaches us that we must continue to rethink and reshuffle the crystallising stories, just as they continue to hammer down on us in multifarious forms of media, social engagement, writing. Butler’s elliptical jumps offer the book a particularly creative and flexible strength, and yet one is left in a state of unease regarding the discrepancy between the current state of affairs, and her own idealistic vision of the future. However she does succeed in shaking things up, albeit subtly, via her own fluid approach to historical appreciation (for example as she moves from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the poet Mahmoud Darwish); Butler messes with chronology, she shows us how we can think about the past as it exists in present time, right now.