“The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice. The gate to justice is study.” - Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka.”1
Walter Benjamin never did go to Palestine. Despite
frequent invitations from his friend Gershom Scholem, who emigrated there in
1925, and despite the rapidly deteriorating situation for European Jews in the
1930s, he never abandoned whatever ambivalence prevented him from making a
decision he often contemplated.
The reasons for that ambivalence are unclear,
though his critique of Zionism for its racism was early and prescient. Scholem
reported that Benjamin had named, among the three things that Zionism would
have to abandon, its “racist ideology” and its “”blood and experience’
arguments”.2
Whatever
he foresaw before its foundation about the predictably racist evolution of the
so-called “Jewish State”, and however the ugly ethnic exclusivity of such a
state would have stuck in his craw, there can be little doubt that Benjamin
would have recognized in the current state of Israel and its occupation that
“state of emergency” that his last writing recognized to be the permanent state
of the oppressed.3
Benjamin’s name for this emergency was fascism. We
need a new name, but there is no doubt that the consummate laboratory for the
current global state of exception is Israel, with its ever-increasing
militarization of society and its draconian and racist occupation of
Palestinian lands.
Even as their dispossession bites deeper, the very existence
of Palestinians has become a “demographic time-bomb”, perhaps the most succinct
and hyperbolic expression of settler colonial paranoia yet produced. Benjamin
knew well what it was to be targeted as a demographic threat and to be hated in
one’s flesh: as he put it in a letter to Scholem, “a principal component of vulgaranti-Semitic as well as
Zionist ideology is that the gentile’s hatred of the Jew is physiologically
substantiated on the basis of instinct and race, since it turns against the physis.”4
What is it,
then, to read Benjamin under the conditions of a state of emergency for which
he provides, if only by analogy, the most trenchant analysis?
The organizers of the workshop and conference, “Walter
Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought”, which
took place in December 2015, recognized that Benjamin’s writings, displaced
from their initial and urgent context, could enter into a new constellation
with circumstances he could hardly have envisaged.5
They
themselves could scarcely have anticipated what kind of constellation it would
turn out to be, nor how far the act of reading Benjamin in Palestine could
exceed the usual exchanges of scholarly meetings. But they did know that they
were asking participants to enter into what was by then a self-evident state of
emergency for Palestinians. What some were already calling a third intifada had
been underway since the vicious arson attack by extremist settlers on a
Palestinian family that summer, which had left a father, a mother and their
infant dead.
To the sporadic and clearly unorganized stabbings by individual
Palestinians Israel was, as usual, responding with the disproportionate
violence that sees in any kitchen knife an existential threat and which had
already left nearly 80 Palestinians dead. By day and night, military incursions
were targeting Palestinian youth and students in particular.
This
was scarcely a promising moment to summon people to attend an academic
conference in Ramallah, let alone one that explicitly called on its
participants to honor the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic
institutions. And yet “Walter Benjamin in Palestine” gambled on the possibility
of offering scholars an alternative to a Benjamin conference being held in the
same month, in flagrant violation of that call, at Tel Aviv University and the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Their gamble proved to be justified. The organizers
had expected maybe thirty participants. But on the first night of the workshop,
over 100 people, from some 15 different countries, squeezed into the tiny
meeting room of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, one floor above
the room in which the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish established his study
after his return to Palestine in 1996.
Anyone familiar with the usual attrition
rates at academic conferences might be astonished that those numbers scarcely
dwindled throughout the first three days that were mostly devoted to the close
study of a handful of Benjamin’s earliest and densest writings, from “The Task
of the Translator” to “Critique of Violence.”
Study of this kind might easily have appeared
self-indulgent under the conditions of occupation and military violence that
prevailed on the West Bank in December. Some mornings the smell of tear gas
still hung in the air as people gathered for the workshops, the only trace of
the night’s violent invasions of Palestinian space that the IDF conducted in
its hunt for student or political leaders. But at most, it highlighted the
apparent safety of the art college where we gathered and the discrepancy
between what we would witness and what we knew to be unfolding only streets
away.
Under such conditions, what could it mean to devote hours to reading a
few pages of Benjamin’s most esoteric writings? Was that not to inhabit a
bubble within the bubble that neoliberal Ramallah already represents to those
who are cordoned off in refugee camps or inhabit the more violent interfaces
between settlers and the indigenous Palestinian population that tessellate
cities like Nablus or Hebron? There can hardly have been a participant who did
not pose herself that question, accustomed as we are in the Western academy to
consider study a preserve of the ivory tower, a luxury to be disdained in the
face of the exigencies of practical life or activist preoccupations.
But that, surprisingly, is not how it felt to engage
in these workshops. To emphasize the contradiction between intellectual study
and a commitment to practice, or between the privilege of the foreign scholar
and the burdens of the Palestinian living under occupation, seemed almost too
easy, a form of hasty thinking, even.
Those of us who had committed to engage
in these workshops, unsure even whether we would be allowed by Israeli
authorities to enter Palestine, despite the workshop’s focus on a major and
self-consciously Jewish intellectual, had chosen to participate in study under
a state of occupation.
We came there from diverse and incommensurate histories
and motivations. We were philosophers by training, artists, film-makers, historians
and theorists, activists and translators, and sometimes several of those at
once. Some sought to immerse in the textual complexities of Benjamin’s knotty
work, some to develop an analysis of state violence or alternative modes of
resistance.
We all rejected the lazy reduction of Benjamin’s words to
sound-bites that—as the organizers’ opening night statement observed—decorate
every museum catalogue and gallery brochure. Above all, we had committed not to
a mere intellectual exercise but to the furtherance of a principle, which is
that the intellectual life of the occupied and oppressed is not a luxury, but a
fundamental expression of the possibility of living in common.
The very common space that study under such conditions
created, conditions extraordinary not least for the numbers that gathered
consistently each morning to read two or three pages of difficult philosophical
prose, was testimony to the belief that intellectual and cultural life matters,
not in the way that “culture” enhances the vacuous conversation of the
financiers and professionals, but with the urgency and excitement of survival
itself.
That is precisely what Israel has targeted, with steady consistency and
unrelenting callousness, from the theft of Palestinian libraries and archives
in 1948 to the ongoing invasions or bombings of university campuses and
facilities that seem like a constant of its assaults on Palestinian life,
whether in Gaza or Tulkarm. The attempt to destroy Palestinian intellectual
life is as unstinting as the uprooting and burning of the ancient olive trees
of the Holy Land, some 800,000 of which have been destroyed in the course of
Israel’s occupation.
The strangulation of Palestinian culture and
intellectual life, from the blockade on pencils entering Gaza to the
restrictions on freedom of movement imposed on Palestinian scholars and
students, is no less a form of “slow violence’ than the ongoing environmental
destruction that the settlements, their infrastructure, and the apartheid wall
that hems in what remains of the Palestinian West Bank, all inflict upon the
land.6
It was hard
not to think that Benjamin’s beautiful and elegiac tribute to the phenomenon of
aura in the essay ““The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility”,” had nowhere been more summarily dismissed than in the vista
of the settlements, occupying every hilltop like crusaders’ forts and burying
old woods and olive groves in a flow of concrete. “To follow with the eye—while
resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that
casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of
that branch”, wrote Benjamin.7
Nothing
can have stripped the auratic veil from the peculiarly haunting, fragile
landscapes of Palestine more thoroughly than the triumphalist placement of the
settlements along the lines of the hills, sites of surveillance and
proclamations of domination alike, or the uprooting of the olive trees that had
clung so closely to them.
The conditions for intellectual and cultural
persistence and the survival of an ecology that had sustained a life in common
are equally threatened by Israel’s unstinting encroachments. Under such
conditions, the leisurely act of study gains a peculiar urgency. Study, the
slow practice of thought in the state of attentiveness that Benjamin calls “the
natural prayer of the soul”, when undertaken in circumstances that make of it a
common project, an experiment in what it might be to think in common, becomes
something other than an intellectual chore or a professional necessity.8
It
accommodates the dynamic pull of different approaches and commitments against
one another into a kind of dialectical ensemble. Exchange across differences,
differences abrasive and deep enough to demand listening and not mere
negotiation or “agreeing to differ”, becomes the condition for the momentary
formation of community among those who commit to study together.
When study
undertaken with respect, both for the text that is its common object and for
the different paths along which each one enters it, is also study that
apprehends its very practice as resistance, the bonds it forges exceed the
protocols of the academic seminar and offer, if briefly, an intuition of the affective
ties that any living in common might entail. Under such conditions, the notion
of solidarity, etymologically and historically thought of as a unified block,
gives way to something like a constellation, to use a favorite figure of
Benjamin’s: a differential alignment of quite disparate positions.
That is not to say that the disjunction between our
study, with its deeply pleasurable solidarities, and the far more courageous
acts of resistance that were going on nightly around us fell from sight. On the
contrary. It was impossible, for one thing, to forget how far the suffocation
of Palestinian intellectual life that Israeli policy has aimed at does have
effects, as surely as the neo-liberal economic and political regime of the
Palestinian Authority has so visibly collaborated with the destruction of the
environment, or as steadily as the influx of NGOs has sapped the grassroots
organizations that sustained Palestinian resistance in previous moments of
resistance. Those effects are at once the infliction of damage and the
constitution of new and different conditions for knowledge, a vantage
unavailable to the privileged. Very few Palestinian teachers or students
attended the workshop, which were conducted almost exclusively in English.
The
paucity of Arabic translations of Benjamin—one of whose translators was denied
entry by Israeli authorities—meant that only those with the language skills in
English or German that are so hard to attain could participate fully. The very
exigencies of political struggle mean that Palestinians are, as Bir Zeit’s
Professor Mudar Kassis remarked, too often confined to speaking about Palestine
and quietly denied the right to speak as theorists or philosophers in their own
right. We occupied the violent interface that divides the world between those
who enjoy the privileges of the “imperial university” and those categorically
denied them.9
Collectively,
even as we committed by being there to honoring the Palestinian struggle for
rights and justice, we could not be free from the age-old colonial distribution
of the world and its goods, intellectual as well as material, between those who
have appropriated the name of humanity and those who have yet to be recognized
as fully human. The act of resistance that “Walter Benjamin in Palestine”
represented occupied and threw into relief the very divisions it sought to
overcome. The work we performed together risked withholding from us the
insights of a culture and an intellectual life forged not in a wealth of
material resources but against the grain of dispossession.
And yet it felt more like a disjunction than a
negation of our engagement, something closer to what the great Palestinian
intellectual Edward Said might have called a counterpoint than to an ethically
disabling antagonism. Such a counterpoint did not diminish the value of reading
Benjamin under occupation. It enhanced and sharpened one’s interpretation of
what he may have meant by the worldly political value of what he calls
“transient worldly existence” in the two brief pages of the
“Theological-Political Fragment”: our very being together was conditioned by
the transient contingencies of opportunity, desire, commitment.10
Whatever
horizontal comradeship we shared, across the disjunctions that no personal act
of will or desire could abolish, was a manifestation of the political valence
that Benjamin descried in transience and in the commitment to the rhythms of a
perpetual passing away. The experience of the provisionality of our meeting,
its counter-institutional adventitiousness, found its sense in one of the most
intractable essays Benjamin ever wrote.
The very transience of such insights
and of the community they forge, momentarily, perhaps, but unforgettably, is
the crucial counterpoint to what Benjamin calls the Messianic, in which the
profane and violent world might eventually find redemption: their opposition is
the productive antagonism of the fleeting glimpse of happiness and the absolute
perspective from which its insufficiency is measured.
It has been the experience of many of us working in
solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice that a commitment to
practice is not, as is so often suggested, the antagonist of thought, but is,
rather, a stimulus to the new and inventive thinking that the exigencies and
aporia of movement demand. People in movement constantly break old moulds for
thinking because they must in order to work through the obstacles their
practice always faces. And new thinking produces equally new modes of relating
and organizing, because it must. Theoretical
acuteness and practical engagement prove to be reciprocal.
Activism is in fact
the antagonist of complacency and of the satisfaction with familiar protocols
that dulls thinking and makes the institutionalized academic a little stupid.
But activism is not always expressed in headlong mobilization or fervent
debates, nor is thought only the forethought that shapes or the afterthought
that reflects on practice. As “Benjamin in Palestine” exemplified, it can also
take the form of deliberate thinking in common whose very exercise is a form of
resistance, however limited.
As the BDS movement continues to advance, perhaps
workshops like these, which step beyond mere “severance of relations” (as
Benjamin described the act of striking) to shape conditions for new modes of
relation, may offer a way to think the future of our resistance to Israeli
apartheid.
Perhaps too it offers a model also for an alternative to the
insidious corporatization of our intellectual and creative lives under the
neoliberal dispensation we all confront, wherever we reside, and not only in
occupied Palestine. That, indeed, may be the insight we have been gifted by
those who daily struggle for the right to education in the face of
dispossession.
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