promised love & understanding family friends & g d


~!@!~

What
of the fact
that B. has also
implicated
"ancestor-centered systems of lineages"
as ideological mystifications
in the service of state-power of conquest groups
- seeming to agree with Paul
that claims of status according to the flesh are retrograde -,
while I have held
such an organization up as
the alternative and
counter
to
statism?

Empirically,
tribal organization
with its concomitant myths
of the aponymous ancestor,
e.g., Avraham,
is nearly emblematic
of nomadic peoples,
not
of
states.

B.'s
own discourse,
moreover, is inconsistent here,
for he refers only a page later, to the
pre-monarchic period of Israel
["roughly 1250 to 1000 B.C."]
as a social experiment in
"the rejection of strong transcendence
in favor of a less coercive
and somewhat weaker
alternative,
the tribal system
that cuts across
both
local allegiances
and stratificational
discontinuities."

Thus
B. puts tribalism
first on the side of "strong transcendence"
and then on the side of
"weak."

Against B.'s
first claim on this point
and in favor of his second,
I would argue
that talk of the eponymous ancestors,
of the Patriarchs,
is conspicuously less prominant
in the "Davidic" texts
of the settlement
than in
the "Mosaic" texts of
the
wandering.

As B.
himself writes,
"[David] tried to displace the loyalties and solidarity
of kinship ties from clans and tribes
to the national
dynasty."

I would suggest
that descent
from a common ancestor
is rather
an extension of family kinship
and not its antithesis
and thus
on the side of wilderness
and not
on the side
of
Canaan.

Even
the myth of descent
from common ancestry
belongs rather to the semantic field
of status
through the body
and not to the semantic field
of status
through land.

Diaspora,
in historical Judaism,
can be interpreted then
as the analog
in a later set of material conditions of nomadism
in the earlier,
and this as a continuation
of the "sociological experiment"
which the Davidic monarchy
symbolically
overturns.

With the
"invention" of Diaspora,
the "radical experiment of Moses"
was advanced.
The forms
of identification typical
of nomads,
those marks of status
in the body,
remained,
then,
crucial
to this formation.

Race
is here
on the side of the radicals;
space,
on the other hand,
belongs to the
despots.

PAUL
has,
on my view,
like many of his followers
even of good will,
misread the promises and possibilities
of the Jewish discourse
of deterritorialized,
genealogical
identity.

But then,
in my view,
so has Zionism.

~!@!~

One
modernist story of Israel
- the Israeli Declaration
of Independence -
begins
with an imaginary autochthony:
"In the Land
of Israel
this people
came into existance,"
and ends
with the triumphant return
of the People
to their natural Land,
making them re-autochthonized,
"like all of the
nations."

Israeli
state-power,
deprived of the option of self-legitimation
through appeal
to divine king,
discovered autochthony
as a powerfull
replacement.

An
alternative
story of Israel
begins
with a people
forever
unconnected
with
a particular land,
a people
that calls into question
the idea that a people
must have a land
in order
to be
a people:

The Land of Israel
was not
the birthplace of the Jewish people,
which did not emerge there
[as most peoples have
on their own soil] {?}.
On the contrary
it had to enter its own Land
from without;
there is a sense
in which Israel was born
in exile.
Avraham had to leave
his 'own' land
{UR/Haran/Egypt}
to go to
the "Promised Land":
the father of Jewry
{Avraham/Yitschak} (&knipoog
["Ibrahim"/'Ishmael']
was
deterritorialized.

For
this reading,
the stories of Israel's conquest
of the Land,
whether
under Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim,
Joshua or even more prominently, DAVID,
are always stories
that are more compromised
with a sense of failure of mission
than
they are imbued with
the accomplishment of mission,
and the internal critique
within the Tanakh
[Hebrew Bible]
itself,
the dissident voice
which is nearly always present,
does not let us
forget this
either!

D.
also brings
into absolutely
clear focus
a prophetic discourse
which has been, of course,
totally occluded
in modern Zionist ideological representations
of the Bible
and of Jewish history
but was pivotal
in the rabbinic
ideology.

Ultimately,
I would argue, then,
that Israel is indeed a product of European colonialism
and cultural imperialism but in a sense that the other nation-states
of the postcolonial world
are as
well!

The
ultimate product
of western imperialism
is the extension of the very system
of nation-states
over the entire world,
and it is this that must be
resisted.

As
Balibar has put it:

There
is indeed
an institution
which the world bourgeoisie shares
and which tends to confer concrete existence upon it,
above and beyond its internal conflicts
[even when these take
the violent form of
military conflicts]
and particularly above
and beyond the quite different conditions
of its hegemony over
the dominated
populations!


That
institution
is the system of states
itself,
the vitality of which
has become
particularly evident
since,
in the wake of
[r]evolutions
and
counter[r]evolutions,
colonializations and
decolonializations,

the form
of the
nation-state has
been formally
extended
to
the whole
of
humanity.

engel
12 sep 2005 - bewerkt op 25 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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