C.H.O.S.E.N

C.H.O.S.E.N The Israeli Center for Digital Art: Reader 1

C.H.O.S.E.N The Israeli Center for Digital Art: Reader/1

Editors: Galit Eilat, Aneta Szyłak Readers series editor: Udi Edelman A project by the Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Poland and the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Israel, with the support of the ​Polish Institute, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Department for Culture and National Heritage and the Polish Foreign Department. Editing: Daria Kassovsky, Noa Shuval Introduction Translation: Sivan Raveh Graphic concept and design: Guy Saggee - Shual.com

© 2014, The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon ISBN: 978-965-91994-1-9 www.digitalartlab.org.il

8

Introduction 13

Messiah Now! Giorgio Agamben and the Messianic Time of the Politica Yo a v K e n n y

25

The Apocalyptic Breeze: Nihilism as a Messianic Strategy A gata Bielik-Robson

35

The Magical Mystery Tour of Shabbatean Objects Eli Shai

51

Two More Hours; Prologue Michael Kessus Gedalyovich

83

Into Edom’s Field, to Poland: Jacob Frank as Educator Adam Lipszyc

95

Things Collapse in the World Georges Bataille with Jacob and Justine Frank Jo a n n a F ü h r e r- H a’s f a r i

113

Should We Take Performance Seriously? Gavin Butt

133

The Untimely Messianism of Two Fredericks To m a s z K o z a k

145

Adam Mickiewicz: Masochism and Messianism M o n i k a R u d a ś - Gr o d z k a

Introduction

Any messiah who comes is false: the essence of the Messiah is that he will always be coming,be coming, be coming -- Yeshayahu Leibowitz

The ideologies constituted in the Modern era, Marxism, Nihilism, Communism, Socialism and Nazism, functioned at times as secular options for religious notions. These ideologies are founded on the messianic-profane desires of the modern person, professing singlehandedly to form both this and the next world as one reality. These radical modern ideologies, including Zionism, refashioned religious devotion in secular and political terms; religion was secularized as history; the Kingdom of the Sky became the Kingdom of Man. The following anthology comes in the wake of two exhibitions and conferences held in 2008 at the Wyspa Institute of Art, in Gdansk, Poland and the Israeli Center for Digital Art, in Holon, Israel, under the title Chosen. The project set out to examine the way national or contemporary communities’ narratives are influenced by Messianic philosophy, literature and ideology. The term Chosen, understood as the ways in which an individual is elevated and selected to fulfil a certain mission stemming from a ‘higher order’, an ideological belief or a common sense of responsibility, is a cultural phenomenon charged with historical and philosophical substance. The project set out to investigate how visions of individuals, nations or countries acting as agents of unique missions of liberation, salvation and intensification are reflected in contemporary art; and to see the cultural plot entwined 8

9

in the private vision: the hero, the prophet, the saint, the politician, the

intellectual and the artist. The project invited Israeli and Polish artists, philosophers and sociologists to address the Messianic concept in new or existing works or texts touching upon religious of false Messianism, and secular or national prophecy. Participants were asked to consider the ways Messianism, in its various expressions also beyond the JudeoChristian context, is manifest in current politics, society and culture, and how it is ingrained in the national narratives of both Poland and Israel. Yo a v K e n n y considers the meaning of messianic time in the works of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Kenny examines how messianic concepts affect the internal workings of sovereign states in light of Western political paradigms. Demonstrating these influences on the structure of the relation between time and the notions of political messianism serves to invigorate political thought, and suggests that messianic time has an active role in the construction of the political state. Relying on Agamben’s observations on the connection between messianic time and Jewish political theology, Kenny illuminates this seemingly mysterious and vague idea. A g a t a B i e l i k - R o b s o n offers an outline for investigating the messianic idea in Judaism as a notion that shaped numerous revolutionary and anarchic movements throughout the history of the West – movements both Jewish and Christian, religious and secular. Bielik-Robson asserts an internal link connecting Jewish messianism with nihilist concepts originating in strategies dialectically opposed to Jewish law, that disturb the metaphysical structure of this world by claiming to belong to the next, thus bearing an apocalyptic end. The ‘Apocalyptic sting’, as termed by Gershom Scholem, avoids all edicts while aiming at an anarchistic vision of life free from the rule of law and death. In the quest for deliverance, messianic thinkers usually rely on nihilist methods meant to prove that the lived-in world is fallen, unworthy of salvation, in the hope of hastening the arrival of the Messiah. Bielik-Robson highlights the difference between

Jewish and Polish-Christian notions of Messianism in the 17th and 18th centuries. This difference is tested through their relation to nihilism: while Jewish thinkers tended to be more daring, Christian thought is a noticeable influence on Polish writers who tend to stay inside the confines of conservative metaphysics, and for the most part avoid full acceptance of nihilist strategies. Bielik-Robson’s claim is demonstrated in the political writings of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s foremost Romantic poet. E l i S h a i attends to the appeal of Shabbatic objects and their effect on later Messianic communities. Shai examines their ritualistic and aesthetic function in messianic beliefs that developed years after the death of Shabbtai Zvi. The Shabbatic objects are compared with four additional categories of items that serve as points of reference: Hassidic objects – primarily those personally connected to venerated individuals who gained holy status; objects belonging to covert communities, such as converted Jews and different underground sects, in particular small items that play a vital role in clandestine religious practices; Messianic objects, including flags and banners attributed to the ten lost tribes, or the Tallit and other items that were kept as evidence of visionary voyages to another world. A unique category studied in this context is items serving Rightist Messianism made mostly in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem as part of the effort to accelerate the rebuilding of the Third Temple. The final category is Cabalistic and mystical objects such as sticks, talismans, jars and jewels that offers a prime source for the initial examination of the ‘Shabbatic gallery’. What seems like the sub-culture of a distant cult emerges as a moving expression of mystical Messianism. According to Shai, the Shabbatic phenomena offer an endless source of inspiration for writers, poets and artists. M i c h a e l K e s s u s G e d a l y o v i c h travelled to Albania in search of Shabbtai Zvi’s grave. His trips, recounted in the novella Grafite, see 10

11

Kessus Gedalyovich seeking to find if Zvi was a True Prophet. The

anthology brings the opening chapter of the novella in which Kessus Gedalyovich incorporates references construed from the history of art, contemporary art, political caricatures, drawings and Xeroxes of photos from his trips. Shabbtai Zvi allows Kessus Gedalyovich to wander between past and future, fantasies and personal experiences, the holiness of religion and of art, or conversely, the lack of sacredness in both. A d a m L i p s z y c revisits the history and legacy of Jacob Frank, a follower of Shabbtai Zvi who crowned himself as a prophet for Polish Jews in the 18th century. Lipszyc revises Gershom Scholem’s reading linking Frankism to Jewish enlightenment, arguing that Frankism should be associated to a different Jewish modernism, one distancing itself from Judaism, establishing an unrealized project that can exist, unexpectedly, in Poland. According the Lipszyc’s reading, the manifold inversions and duplicities in Frank’s texts offer this project as a concrete option. Jacob Frank is also present in Jo a n n a F ü h r e r- H a’s f a r i’s study examining the sources of the art and writings of Justine Frank. A Jewish artist active on the fringes of the early 20th century Surrealist movement, Frank is described as the offspring of two thinkers – Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille, linking them together in her work through novel and unusual ties. Ha’sfari offers a contrary position to Roee Rosen’s studies and artworks after Frank, offering a new and radical reading of her work and the subjectivity they constitute. G a v i n B u t t describes his participation as a non-professional actor in a performance created by artist Oreet Ashery, based on the life and rituals of Shabbtai Zvi. The performance, parts of which took place in public spaces in front of incidental viewers, was not received as a serious gesture, and was not experienced as such by Butt. This led Butt to explore the issue of the connection between seriousness and performance, and to question if this type of commitment is necessary and what happens when it does not occur. Butt ties Ashery’s piece to

the history of performance art claiming that its un-seriousness and queerness is precisely what stimulates the audience to respond. This position is then read into Shabbtai Zvi’s performances, showing them in a new light. The two closing studies of the anthology present the relation between Polishness and Messianism in the past and present. To m a s z K o z a k describes the Messianic spirit in contemporary Polish conservatism, offering a radically opposed position, anti-religious and anti-political, to Messianism; a concept that Kozak holds can invigorate a new Polish cultural imagination. M o n i k a R u d a s - Gr o d z k a analyzes the Slavic and Polish national notion through the writings of Adam Mickiewicz, widely held as the foremost Polish poet. In texts where Mickiewicz debates with the classic negative stereotype identifying the Slavs as slaves, Grodzka shows his recognition of the national Slavic subject as a realm of Messianic masochism, and the burden of hardship the Polish nation has taken upon itself as a result. The project was organized in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute during the Polish Year in Israel 2008-2009, and funded by the Department for Culture and National Heritage and the Polish Foreign Department.

12

13

Messiah Now! Giorgio Agamben and the Messianic Time of the Political

Yoav Kenny

The declared purpose of the exhibition was to bring together a variety of works that would enable us to explore the different aspects of “contemporary messianism” and to do so by focusing on social and political contexts. Obviously, the original intention behind this purpose was to demonstrate the various ways by which our current time perceives messianism, and not to describe this time as messianic in itself. Nevertheless, the fact that the curators chose this specific Messiah Now!

phrase — ”contemporary messianism” — invites us to think and to

Giorgio Agamben

talk not only about the contemporary meanings of messianism, but

and the Messianic

also about the messianic meanings of the present time. In political

Time of

terms this implies that the question that should interest us is how this

the Political

messianic sense of contemporary time, or messianic sense of the Now, can account for the political condition in which we live. The explanation at which I will aim in what follows does not attempt to clarify how specific messianic ideas affect specific political realities, for example, the way in which the messianic ideology of some of the Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories can explain some — if not all — of Israeli politics in the past forty years. Although such explanations are interesting and very often true, I will not discuss this or that messianic movement, but rather the basic structure of messianism; I will not discuss this or that kind of politics, but rather the political in the broadest sense of this concept.1 In other words, instead of speaking about how messianic concepts influence the internal operation of specific sovereign states, what will interest me here is the more basic question of how the concept of the messianic shapes the legal form of the sovereign state as the current political paradigm of the West. The attempt to illustrate how the relationship between time and the basic structure of messianism affects the political is based on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose extensive and innovative thought about the political spawned the claim that messianic

14

15

time has the form of the political state in which we live.2 At first sight

this statement must seem mysterious and vague. In order to clarify it, I will follow Agamben as he uses Jewish theology to describe the political through messianic time. It is no secret that in recent years Agamben has become an academic superstar, and his ideas about the camp, state of exception, homo sacer, and bare life have all become very popular in both intellectual and artistic circles. But what is less known and less discussed is that underneath the political concepts that Agamben has developed runs a strong and consistent undercurrent of messianic thought. This current has many different and diverse sources ranging from Kabbalistic Zohar literature to the epistles of Paul, but undoubtedly the most influential source of Agamben’s messianic thought is the debate between Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin on how to read Kafka. º Like almost any contemporary discussion of Jewish theology, my discussion of messianism starts with Gershom Scholem. Scholem claims that while Judaism is similar to many other religions insofar as it connects the end of history to redemption, it is unique because the redemption of which it speaks is not subjective, but rather public and political, and it is not internal but rather involves the external and transcendental intervention of the Messiah. There are two main reasons why such a messianic intervention is political: first, because it takes place in direct relation to human history, Jewish redemption reaches its fulfillment only when the Messiah appears in history as a concrete person and, needless to say, this appearance must take place in the public sphere; and second, because the tasks assigned to the Jewish Messiah are first and foremost those that deal with the question of the law, that is with the status of the Old Testament, the Torah, as a moral and political codex.3 In

1 Obviously, I cannot give a sufficient definition of this wide concept here, but since Agamben will be my main interest in what follows, and given his profound reliance on Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, the concept of the political that should come to mind is Schmitt’s. See: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1976). 2 Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), p. 160. 3 See: Gershom Scholem, “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1996). pp. 32-86.

accordance with the two reasons for which the messianic is understood as political, Scholem defines the connection between the historical question and the question of the Torah as law by using two tensions that run parallel to each other and complement one another. The first tension is the historical tension. As Scholem explains, in Judaism there are two oppositional conceptions of messianism: the restorative conception, which regards the Days of the Messiah as an Messiah Now!

era where the ideal and imaginary past of life in paradise before the

Giorgio Agamben

fall is restored (as in Lamentations 5:21: “renew our days as of old”);

and the Messianic

and opposed to this is the utopian concept whereby the Messiah will

Time of

constitute an entirely original eon, in what may be seen as a creation of

the Political

a new world altogether.4 The second tension is based on the Kabbalistic identification of the law with the Torah. For Kabbalah, the Torah as we know it is not the original Torah but a Torah that became partial and defected because of the original sin. While all Kabbalists agree that the coming of the Messiah will involve another essential change in the legal structure of the Torah, they disagree as to whether this change will mean the restoration of the Torah’s primal and original structure or rather the appearance of a completely new relation between the Torah and the Law.5 It is easy to see that these two tensions share the same form, and that in fact, we could say that they are two aspects of the same basic tension: on the one hand lies a return to an original state whose historical meaning is restoring the era that preceded original sin, and whose legal meaning is reinstituting the original Torah as a law that fully embodies divine wisdom; on the other hand lies the manifestation of a completely new era whose historical meaning involves the end of history and a shift into utopia, and whose legal meaning is a complete and profound alteration of the ways by which the Torah as a legal codex regulates and arranges Jewish existence. For reasons which will be made clear below, it is important to

16

17

emphasize that the alteration which is relevant here does not mean

a change in the content of the Torah, for such a change, as big and important as it may be, will still guard the basic legal structure of the Torah. The relevant change must apply to the shape or the form of the Torah, that is, a change in its understanding as the basic rule of Judaism and its transformation into something that cannot yet be conceived or conceptualized. What is especially significant and interesting here is that although the two messianic approaches identified by Scholem contradict one another, he insists that it is only through their combination that the messianic idea can be realized fully.6 In other words, the Jewish messianic idea as perceived by Scholem is based on a paradox. This paradox leads him to the conclusion that the basic condition of Jewish existence is perpetual tension that is never fully solved, and that accordingly, the political aspect of this existence can be defined as “a life lived in deferment,” that is, a delayed life in which nothing can be finished or completed.7 What Scholem is actually saying is that when it is grasped through the messianic lens, the whole of Jewish existence is nothing but a suspended instant which is no longer in the primordial past that came before the original sin but which is also not yet in the imagined future of messianic days. The point at which this metaphysical conclusion is translated into juridical and political conclusions is the point where Agamben comes in. º Agamben not only accepts the paradox that Scholem formulated as the groundwork for any political understanding of messianity, he also agrees with him that the best and most comprehensive expression of this paradox can be found in the writings of Franz Kafka. In an aphorism from 1917 Kafka writes that “only our concept of Time makes it possible … to call the day of the Last Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary

4 Gershom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971). pp. 3-4. 5 The main aspects of this disagreement as it appears in Scholem’s “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism” are described in a detailed (but far from comprehensive) section of Agamben’s “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” op. cit., pp. 163-166. 6 Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Judaism,” op. cit, p. 4. 7 Ibid, p. 35.

court in perpetual session [Standrecht].”8 By replacing the standard messianic scene of the last judgment day with an endless summary court, Kafka anticipates the two sides of Scholem’s messianic paradox: he claims both that our conception of historical time as continuous progress is a mistake, and that, in fact, we are trapped in the same perpetually suspended happening; and he defines this happening with the juridical terms of a summary court, that is, a military court. Messiah Now!

The image of the summary court exposes the political and

Giorgio Agamben

juridical implications of the deferred life that Scholem defined, and

and the Messianic

it is adequate to — or indeed calls for — Agamben’s use of the state

Time of

of exception to describe political life in the modern West.9 Obviously

the Political

this life is organized and regulated according to the law, or the Torah, but when the life that the law regulates is suspended between the law’s original structure that has already disappeared and its future structure that has yet to appear, one cannot really say that the law is truly functioning as such. It is precisely this duality that is captured by the image of the summary court: on the one hand, the law still subsists, and the mere existence of the court proves it; on the other hand, it is a military court, which means that instead of a judge it is run by an army officer, and therefore it is less interested in the sense of the law and the rights of the defendant than in the arbitrary will of that officer. For better or for worse, in Israel it is easier to understand this peculiar juridical state. Even if we put the West Bank aside, where the army is obviously and explicitly the sovereign, the rest of Israel is also officially under a state of exception, or a state of emergency, that was declared on May 19, 1948 — only five days after the state was founded — and has remained in force ever since. The State of Israel, it could be said, is a state of emergency, and one of the implications of this state is that no law is immune to alteration and even to practical cancellation by virtue of emergency regulations that do not require

18

19

full legislative process and can be approved by the relevant member

of the government. The provocative claim that yielded a substantial part of Agamben’s fame is that this situation, in which for all practical reasons the law does not apply to the sovereign, is not unique to Israel or to the United Sates or Britain of the so-called “war on terror,” but rather, it constitutes a fundamental feature of all Western modern democracies. This is not the place to list all the reasons that led Agamben to this radical claim, but it is obvious that one of the main reasons can be found in Agamben’s adoption of the way Scholem identifies the deferred status of the Torah with the status of the law in Kafka.10 This identification leads Scholem to describe the law in Kafka as a law that is “in force but without significance” or without content [Geltung ohne Bedeutung].11 This law still exists, but it has reached its zero point, and thus Josef K. and the villagers that live at the foot of the castle live in a state of exception since even though they know that there exists a law that applies to them, they also know that this law might change at any moment, and thus they do not really know what the law is and are abandoned to suffer arbitrary afflictions from those who operate in its name. It is at this point that Agamben introduces Walter Benjamin to the discussion in order to complete the connection between the suspended now of the “being in force without significance” and the messianic understanding of the state of exception. º Both Benjamin and Scholem realized the philosophical importance of Kafka as well as the pivotal role that the question of the law played in his work. Benjamin maintained that the main problem presented in The Trial is “the organization of life and work in human society,” and Scholem went even further when he stated that “It would be an enigma” to him should someone say something about Kafka’s world without placing the

8 Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way,” in The Great Wall of China, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1946), p. 287. 9 Agamben refers to Kafka’s Standrecht even before he develops the state of exception in the Homo Sacer trilogy: firstly, by speaking about “the paradoxical image of a state of history in which the fundamental event of the human condition is perpetually taking place” (see: Giorgio Agamben, “The Melancholy Angel,” in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], p. 113); and secondly, by linking the Standrecht with Schmitt’s state of exception in “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” op. cit., p. 161. 10 See especially: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chs. 1, 4. 11 Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 51.

law at the center.12 But the question of the meaning of this law is where Benjamin and Scholem part ways. In a 1934 essay Benjamin claims that Kafkaesque law is nothing but a “Holy Writ,” or a “Torah” that was lost.13 As we have already seen, Scholem claims that although it is empty, Kafka’s law still exists; hence he does not think that this law is lost, but only that the key to its interpretation is lost, and he therefore criticizes Benjamin for Messiah Now!

going too far or, in his own words, for “throwing the baby out with

Giorgio Agamben

the bathwater.”14 We have also seen that Agamben accepts Scholem’s

and the Messianic

reading of Kafka’s law — which is also the law of our deferred life

Time of

— as a law that is in force although it is unrealizable. Benjamin

the Political

objects to such a depiction and claims that losing the law and losing the ability to understand the law amount to the same thing, since a law that cannot be understood as such is no longer a law, but rather life itself. For Agamben, treating the law as being in force without significance and treating it as indistinct from life, are eventually two aspects of the same Kafkaesque phenomenon. Because life under modern sovereignty always exists in relation to a law that is in force without significance, the distinction between law and life really does become meaningless. In order to begin understanding why Agamben assigns such a lack of distinction to the current political condition, one should think about life in its most concrete form, namely about the living body itself, and about the various political practices — from torture to biometric databases — where our legal identity is no longer a numbered citizenship, but rather a biological substance that can be identified by its fingerprint, its retina, or even its DNA.15 But let us go back to the relation between messianity and law in Benjamin, or more accurately, to the way in which the indistinctness between life and law is connected to messianic time.

Benjamin has quite a few direct references to messianism, but

for Agamben, who has a wide and deep acquaintance with Benjamin’s 20

21

writings, and even edited their Italian translation, the most meaningful

reference appears in Benjamin’s last text, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which Agamben defines as a text whose theoretical core is the concept of messianic time. This definition appears in a 1992 lecture entitled “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” and as indicated by the title, in this lecture Agamben refers to the question of law as another key component in Benjamin’s messianic concept. The origin of this dual juridical and temporal concept may be traced to Benjamin’s eighth thesis on history which starts with these enigmatic words: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.16 I cannot go into all the meanings and contexts that are folded in this famous quote, but even in our limited context it is easy to see that Benjamin continues to understand the relation between the messianic event and the law differently from Scholem. The conception of history to which Benjamin refers is, of course, the conception of full and authentic time that Kafka suggested as an amendment to the distortions of regular chronological time, which Benjamin also saw as homogeneous and hollow. But whereas Scholem used Kafka’s authentic time to describe a political reality that is perpetually delayed and deferred, Benjamin also saw in it the possibility of escaping this thwarted reality by moving from a virtual and negative state of emergency into a real state of emergency that may eventually prove to be positive. As we have seen, for Benjamin the “being in force without significance” of the law in the state of emergency in fact means that this law is indistinct from life. As long as we look at this indistinction with juridical eyes, we can only see its oppressive

12 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 122; Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003), p. 216. 13 Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” ibid., p. 139. 14 A letter to Benjamin, July, 9, 1934, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, trans. M. R. & E. M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 446. 15 This aspect of the law-life indistinction brings us closer to another key source of Agamben’s thought, namely the Foucauldian concepts of bio-power and biopolitics. See for example: Agamben, Homo Sacer, op. cit., pp. 2-7; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). 16 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, op. cit., p. 257.

and fascist characteristics, but as soon as we look at it with messianic eyes — and it is exactly this change in view points that is derived from the change in time concepts discussed above — as soon as we do that, we can also see the redemptive potential concealed in this indistinction. For Agamben this means that as long as the indistinction between life and law keeps the form of the law intact, it may indeed Messiah Now!

bring about the most horrible atrocities, but as soon as we realize that

Giorgio Agamben

this indistinction does not only destroy the content of the law but

and the Messianic

could also destroy its form, we also realize that it holds within it the

Time of

possibility of authentic emancipation and genuinely free life. When

the Political

each and every one, without a single exception, is abandoned to the same arbitrary and hollow legality, shifting the point of view is enough to understand that it is just as true that each and every one is free from such meaningless law. This small shift in the juridical and political consciousness is similar to Scholem’s saying, which Benjamin repeated, that the messianic kingdom consists of a “small adjustment” after which everything remains as it was but nothing stays the same.17 I cannot emphasize the importance of this similarity enough, for it allows Benjamin — whose interest in Marxism reached its peak at that time — to compare messianic redemption with the political utopia that is to take place after the revolution. This comparison is extremely significant for Agamben, since it helps him to decipher some of the most mysterious parts of the “Theses” where Benjamin assigns the revolutionary classes with the ability to “make the continuum of history explode” and sees the revolutionary chance as a “Messianic cessation of happening.”18 Simply put, Agamben sees this messianic cessation as proof that Benjamin was driven by the same messianic intuition that led Kafka.19 As we have seen, at the core of this intuition Agamben places the question of messianic time, and therefore for him, the “small

22

23

adjustment” which summarizes Benjamin’s messianity is actually a

shift between two different interpretations of Kafka’s notion of time, or to put it more accurately, between the interpretations of Scholem and Benjamin. Although Benjamin completely accepts Scholem’s concept of Kafka’s deferred time as the time that is relevant to the state of emergency in which we live, he does not think that this time replaces the usual chronological time but rather that it co-exists with it simultaneously. Instead of an actual delay which would mean that history must remain at a standstill until the coming of the Messiah, Benjamin discusses a potential delay which means that any historical instant may bring about the shift from contemporary historical time to messianic time, or in his terms, from a virtual state of emergency to a real one. The present “time of the now” [Jetzt-Zeit], writes Benjamin, “is shot through with chips of messianic time,”20 and it is these chips that enable the aforementioned messianic sense of the Now. For Benjamin, every instant, even the one taking place right now, holds the potential for a messianic cessation, or in other words, for a real revolution in the way law relates to life. It is with this potential that Benjamin ends the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and therefore his entire oeuvre, by quoting the Jewish saying that “every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”21 º This rare, relatively hopeful thought, whereby life in a state of exception is still shown to hold some potential for revolutionary redemption, seems like a good place to conclude this reading of Benjamin. This point is not only uncharacteristically optimistic, it is also the pinnacle of the Agambenian claim that messianic time and the state of exception share the same legal and political form.22 While this form indeed embodies the suspension in which law is in force but without significance, it also involves

17 Agamben uses this image of a “small displacement” or a “small adjustment” twice in “The Messiah and the Sovereign” (op. cit., pp. 164, 174), but he mistakes it as a “rabbi’s saying told by Benjamin,” while in fact its source is Scholem himself. I thank Agata Bielik-Robson for pointing this out to me. 18 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” op. cit., pp. 261, 263. 19 Giorgio Agamben, “Time and History,” in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London & New York: Verso, 1993), p. 102. 20 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” op. cit., p. 263. 21 Ibid, ibid. 22 Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign,” op. cit., p. 160.

the revolutionary potential to be freed from this deferral. In order to understand this, we should recall that the revolution that Agamben attributes to Benjamin is not a narrow and weak revolution that replaces a specific law and a specific sovereignty with the new, but rather a strong and fundamental revolution that obliterates the basic structure of the relation between sovereign law and life. For Agamben, it is not only that the Messiah is the character through which religion Messiah Now!

copes with the political question of the law, but that “the messianic

Giorgio Agamben

event above all signifies a crisis and radical transformation of the

and the Messianic

entire order of the law.”23

Time of

The conclusion that Agamben draws from the debate between

the Political

Scholem and Benjamin is that only when one understands present time through the messianic prism it becomes possible to think about changing the relation between law and life in such a way that will genuinely change the shape and form of the political. Messianic time is in fact present time when examined through the potential to achieve this change, and therefore, we could ultimately say that any attempt to supply us with such an examination — and the current exhibition is certainly such an attempt — is also a step towards the possibility of transforming the political. One of the works in this exhibition took its name from the famous Chabad slogan “Messiah Now.” It should now be a bit easier to understand why for Agamben such a slogan is not a religious cry for salvation, but rather a subversive and revolutionary call for an essential change in the shape of the political.

24

25

23 Ibid, pp. 162-3.

The Apocalyptic Breeze: Nihilism as a Messianic Strategy

Agata Bielik-Robson

In this essay I shall aim to offer a very short and sketchy outline of the messianic idea in Judaism, which influenced many revolutionary and anarchic movements in the history of the West, both Jewish and Christian, religious and secular. Most of all, I would like to emphasize the highly specific internal connection that binds Jewish messianism with a certain version of a nihilistic attitude which results in all sorts of antinomian strategies, aiming at shaking the metaphysical structure of the world and bringing it to its violent, apocalyptic end. The Apocalyptic

This “apocalyptic breeze,” as Gershom Scholem calls it, which “airs the

Breeze: Nihilism

well-ordered house of Judaism,” cannot accept any order as such and

as a Messianic

strives for an anarchic vision of life liberated from the dominion of law

Strategy

and death. In their quest after this redemptive finale, the messianic thinkers usually avail themselves of strong nihilistic techniques intended to demonstrate that the world in which we live has fallen and is unworthy of preservation, thus hoping to hasten the coming of the Messiah. By using the abstract foil of the messianic idea delivered by Scholem, I would also like to juxtapose two modes of messianic thinking: Jewish and Polish. I will show how Jewish messianism influenced the political writings of the most famous Polish romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, and suggest that the difference between these two messianisms lies precisely in their attitude toward the issue of nihilism: while the Jewish thinkers tend to show considerable daring in this matter, the Polish writers, who, because of their Catholicism, remain within the frame of providential metaphysics, usually refrain from full embracement of the nihilistic and antinomian strategies, and appear rather timid in contrast. I The best way to approach messianism is probably via a contrast with mysticism. In The Messianic Idea of Judaism, Scholem builds a stark

26

27

opposition between a mystical attitude, driving toward communion

with ultimate divine reality, and a messianic stance, which can never free itself of worldly influence. A mystic, especially the Christian one, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “leaps forward to the idea of resurrection”1 where, following the way of Christ, he can leave all the deathly realm behind, whereas a Jew, who merely anticipates the messianic solution, can never be so “light-footed”: as long as he lives, he is encumbered by his creaturely status, immersed in the sphere of creation, unable to escape. Creatureliness is a heavy burden (a heavy “seal”) which slows down the “light, joyous steps” (St John) of a potential mystic yet does not allow the final leap into the pleromatic experience of the sacred. The hint that messianism derives from unrealized mysticism, ein verhinderter Mystizismus, appears most explicitly in the writings of Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem. Messianism is a Hebrew version of the Platonic Myth of the Cave, in which the “wise men” return to the darkness of the world, blinded by the sun they could not bear to look at. It is precisely against the mystical vision that messianic action begins to stand out in its full specificity. For while mystical vision demystifies the nihilistic perception as a mere false appearance, which must give way to a true vision of creation in its full glory, messianic action departs from the nihilistic perception as the solid rock-bottom of the creaturely knowledge. Once again, the mystic leaps forward to a resurrected, pleromatic life behind the death of “slumbered senses”, while his messianic opponent remains within “the universe of death,” only reconfirmed in this recognition. The mystic seeks passive and private reconciliation with the created world and God, its creator, taking place within the inwardness of the Vision — whereas the messianic “doer” thrives on the moment of unsurpassable negativity which does not allow him to make a truce with the fallen world. “Judaism,” says Scholem in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, “thought nothing of such a chemically pure inwardness of redemption… The re-establishment of all things in their proper place, which constitutes the redemption,

1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 2003), p. 233.

produces a totality that knows nothing of such a division between inwardness and outwardness.”2 Messianism, therefore, can never become indifferent to “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Quite to the contrary; the more scandalous and offensive the world appears, the more lacking in meaning and goodness — the more intense becomes the messianic response. This specific “Jewish negativity” never annuls the creaturely scandal in which it arises. It rather exacerbates this scandal to the The Apocalyptic

critical point at which it “snaps,” thus bringing on itself a saving

Breeze: Nihilism

catastrophe. “Jewish Messianism,” continues Scholem, “is in its

as a Messianic

origins and by its nature — this cannot be sufficiently emphasized

Strategy

— a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to the Messianic future.”3 Therefore, the nihilistic perception, which constitutes the basic theological knowledge of creatureliness, does not limit itself to recognition only: it also becomes the ground of an action, which we may call an active nihilization of being. The more nihilized the world becomes, the greater the chance for redemption. As in Midrash Tehilim: “Israel speaks to God: When will You redeem us? He answers: When you have sunk to the lowest level, at that time I will redeem you,” or in Sanhedrin 98a: “May he come, but I do not want to see him.” On which Scholem succinctly comments: “…the redemption, then, cannot be realized without dread and ruin.”4 The messianic, actively nihilizing impulse is thus utterly contrary to any theodicy. The desire “to justify the ways of God to men” clashes with the will to watch the smooth, functional mechanism of being fallen down. Not only a mystic, who annuls the nothingness of the world in his Vision, but also an anxious practitioner of theodicy, who glorifies the very idea of mechanical order and harmony, are enemies of the messianic “doer.” The latter has an inborn mistrust toward any kind of well-ordered, well-oiled, well-functioning mechanisms that

28

29

turn within, as William Blake has put it, the Satanic Mills of creation;

toward all sorts of Great Wheels that support the chariot of divinity, conceived heartlessly as an Urizenic Supreme Architect of Being. According to Scholem: “From the point of view of the Halakhah, to be sure, Judaism appears as a well-ordered house, and it is a profound truth that a well-ordered house is a dangerous thing. Something of messianic apocalypticism penetrates into this house; perhaps I can best describe it as a kind of anarchic breeze.”5 For Scholem, therefore, “living Judaism” is much better represented by those “non-normative” Judaic thinkers who struggle with the idea of order, than by the Halakhic pious orthodoxy, which seems to have forgotten that too much order is simply “a dangerous thing.” In his “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” Scholem leans visibly toward this contemporary variant of Jewish sensibility which tries its strength in the very midst of the secularized, modern world. According to his diagnosis, a Jew can fall headlong into secular modernity and become almost thoroughly disenchanted, but as long as he or she preserves “the anti-naturalist messianic spark,” he or she

Kabbalah, said that “he gave the best expression of the boundary

2 Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 17.

between religion and nihilism.”6 In another essay Scholem called

3 ibid., p. 7.

remains a Jew. The most interesting case in this context is Franz Kafka, of whom Scholem, in his Ten Unhistorical Theses on

this stance, oscillating between nihilistic despair and messianic hope, a position of a pious atheist: “The emptying of the world

4 ibid., pp. 11-12, 13.

to a meaningless void not illuminated by any ray of meaning or

5 ibid., p. 21.

direction,” writes Scholem in “Reflections on Jewish Theology,”

6 Gershom Scholem, “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,” Judaica 3, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 271.

“is the experience of him whom I would call the pious atheist. The void is the abyss, the chasm or the crack which opens up in all that exists. This is the experience of modern man, surpassingly well depicted in all its desolation by Kafka, for whom nothing has remained of God but the void — in Kafka’s sense, to be sure, the void of God.”7 This remark contains a self-evident polemic with the Nietzschean motif of the “death of God.” Against Nietzsche,

7 Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 283 (my emphasis).

who proposed to get out of the condition of modern nihilism by the way of aktive Vergessenheit, an active oblivion of God that would abolish not only any future desire of God but also any past-oriented nostalgia for his presence, Kafka appears to be a stubborn mourner. Even if God withdrew from the world, which subsequently underwent a process of nihilistic disenchantment, he is, paradoxically, still present via his painful absence. Such reading of Kafka, revealing the ambivalent gray sphere The Apocalyptic

between nihilism and religion, simultaneously discloses a deeper,

Breeze: Nihilism

unexpected dimension of the modern, seemingly secularized, reality.

as a Messianic

The modern, naturalized and nihilized world presents itself as an

Strategy

arena of a potential powerful revival of the proper religious-messianic intuition: “There is no doubt,” Scholem writes in “Franz Rosenzweig and his Star of Redemption,” “that we lost sight of the traditional objects of theology, yet they still remain as hidden lights which radiate from the inside, invisible to the outside. God, expelled from the human sphere by psychology, and from the social world by sociology, gave up his reign in Heaven. He passed the throne of judgment to historical materialism, and the throne of mercy to psychoanalysis; he withdrew and hid himself in order not to return any more. But is it true that he does not reveal himself at all? Perhaps, this last contraction of his is simultaneously his last manifestation? Perhaps, his regression to the point bordering on nothingness was a matter of the highest urgency, according to the wisdom that his kingdom may be revealed only to such a radically voided world? For ‘I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not’ (Isaiah 65, 1).”8 Where the fall is the deepest, there grows also the greatest chance of salvation. This antinomian intuition, guarded by Scholem as the most precious treasure of Jewish messianism, shines as an eternal beacon for all disoriented religious minds of our modern epoch, as a modern guide of the perplexed. Its flickering weak radiance may

30

31

easily be ignored in the periods of great light, but it begins to shine

forth visibly during the Hölderlinian Nacht der Erde, where the glory of full revelation is lacking. All favorite heroes of Scholem operate deep in this “night of the world.” Franz Rosenzweig, who pushes the whole of creation into this night, finds his way out thanks to the guiding star that took the shape of the six-pointed Star of David. Benjamin, also a thinker of the nocturnal condition, discovers his constellations of ideas that appear to him like the famous rainbow of Caspar David Friedrich, visible only in the night sky. Kafka, living in the deepest dark, “had no inkling of even the weakest light that would betray the presence of the Castle,” surrounded by an impenetrable cloud. All of them are the masters of the dispersed, shadowy revelation that can be found only where it is least sought, i.e. in the deep of the nihilistic fall of the world where its light rises unexpectedly as, in the beautiful formulation from Zohar, “a dark flame and a whirlwind coming out from an amorphous mist.” II Let me now briefly compare this complex dialectics of nihilism and messianism, as reconstructed by Scholem, with the similar attempts undertaken mostly by the Polish romantics, most of all Adam Mickiewicz, under the headings of the so-called “Polish messianism.” According to some speculations (never properly confirmed historically) about Mickiewicz’s mother, who was supposedly a descendant of a Frankist family, one of the first Polish Jewish converts, secretly following the teachings of Jacob Frank, Mickiewicz was strongly exposed in particular to the antinomian doctrines, developed within the Sabbetian and Frankist movements. Some even speculate that he knew the arcane of the Jewish Kabbalah. All this, however, seems rather unlikely; we now know that Mickiewicz, as almost all romantics at that age, was well familiar with the so-called Christian Kabbalah, a mystical doctrine created first by the Spanish mystic Raymond Lull and then popularized

8 I quote this fragment after the Polish translation of the text which appeared originally in Dvarim Bego (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975) [Hebrew]. Gershom Scholem, Żydzi i Niemcy. Eseje, listy, rozmowa, ed. Adam Lipszyc (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2006), p. 182.

in the romantic Sturm und Drang via the mystical writings of Jakob Böhme. We also know that Mickiewicz was deeply fascinated by Jewish messianism (he chose his wife, Celina Szymanowska, precisely because of her Frankist origin) and tried to translate its leading motifs into the Polish context. In a way analogous to the Jewish reaction to the most catastrophic historical events, which tried to interpret them theologically, he wanted to give religious meaning to the most disastrous event in Polish history: the partition and enslavement of The Apocalyptic

Poland that took place at the end of the 18th century. Just like the Spanish

Breeze: Nihilism

Rabbis of the 13th century, who created the Kabbalistic vision of Fall

as a Messianic

and Exile of the Shekhinah in reaction to the historical persecution of

Strategy

Spanish Jewry, Mickiewicz attempted something similar: he imagined the suffering Shekhinah as Poland, who has been deprived of her freedom, and gave this theological interpretation a Christian spin by calling her “The Christ of Nations” (in fact, very much along the lines of the Christian Kabbalah, which makes the explicit connection between Shekhinah, as the fallen part of the godhead, and Christ as the fallen God, who exiled himself into lower creaturely regions of being). Poland, turned into the figure of Christ, was to be sacrificed and crucified precisely for the sake of other nations; she was to take on the whole suffering of all unjustly enslaved nations of the world and undergo a Passion that would eventually produce a catharsis similar to the one that shook the immoral order of the Roman empire and gave rise to Christianity. Poland’s suffering and martyrology were to bring such a chastising, messianic effect: the whole world was to see the sacrifice of the innocent victim and awaken to a higher moral and political consciousness. In his Books of Polish Pilgrimage, Mickiewicz offers us a full account of Polish history in terms of this peculiar, messianico-kabbalistic vocabulary. He presents the Polish Sarmatian past, where Poles enjoyed a unique state of freedom and civil liberties, as a political exception within the absolutist and military regimes of

32

33

early modern Europe, and interprets it theologically as the state of

Paradise that could not last, because of the dark powers surrounding it. Then he describes the Fall of Poland as the inevitable expulsion from Paradise; the partition by the three neighbourly powers of Russia, Austria, and Germany, serves here as a metaphor for the “spark of freedom” enslaved within the Qliphoth, the dark matter of tyranny and despotism. The reflections on the Polish diaspora, the righteous remnant that fled the persecution and dispersed to all corners of the earth, interfere here with the theological image of the exiled Shekhinah who wanders aimlessly and suffers while waiting for the coming Messiah. Finally, the ultimate self-sacrifice of Poland is to reveal her as the Messiah, who, in the manner analogous to Christ, will take on the last task of suffering and whose sacrificial death will bring ruin on the immoral order of political powers. Only then, Mickiewicz believes, Poland may resurrect as a new, free, and truly just state, no longer endangered by the evil of tyranny. There are many reasons to regard this version of Polish messianism as rather untypical of the Polish mentality, and Mickiewicz was fully aware of that challenge. He was well aware that because of their deeply Catholic faith in the providential order of things and spontaneous trust in theodicy, which always presents the created world as the best possible of all, the Poles are not particularly disposed toward the nihilistic vision of the world as fallen, suffering, inherently imperfect and failed, in great need of messianic action. Knowing the Polish-Catholic fear of nihilism, and its reluctance toward any “apocalyptic breeze,” Mickiewicz tried to attenuate his message and present it in a manner that would be acceptable to the Catholic teachings of the providential order, but, in fact, only managed to produce severe confusion. While reading Mickiewicz one can see all the contradictions which, in fact, only show these two traditions as standing totally apart and absolutely irreconcilable. The best example of this confusing interference is offered by the most famous monologue from Mickiewicz’s drama Dziady

(Forefather’s Eve), called grand improvisation, where the rebellious young hero, Conrad, who had just been thrown into the Russian jail, made his great accusatory speech against the unjust arrangement of the whole universe and dangerously approached the moment at which he almost wanted to curse God and call him “the Tzar of this world,” as he could be named in a more openly nihilistic Gnosis. Yet, in the very end, just on the brink of uttering these incriminating words, he suddenly refrains and falls silent. They are cried out not by him but by The Apocalyptic

a choir of demons, the devilish seducers who want to plant doubt in

Breeze: Nihilism

the heart of the good Catholic boy.

as a Messianic

Although the popular Polish reception of the drama favors this

Strategy

nice and orderly interpretation, which dispels the evil of nihilism and brings us back to “the well-ordered house” of divine providence, something of the disquieting waft of the “apocalyptic breeze,” hovering over these blasphemous words, remains. Mickiewicz’s strong and daring nihilistic vision, which does not shun the horrors of the world but looks them straight in the face and demands a radical messianic action, breaks through the conciliatory Catholic reading and, then as now, produces the same enigmatic effect of ambivalence, which makes Mickiewicz sound very modern indeed. Perhaps, almost as modern as those Jewish writers, who, as Scholem believed, dared to plunge into “the night of the world” in order to find lost messianic sparks.

34

35

The Magical Mystery Tour of Shabbatean Objects

Eli Shai

At the peak moment of his short career as a Jewish Savior, Shabbetai Zevi acted as a charismatic performer, magnetizing the crowds through his impressive ability as a cantor of improvised Ladino liturgy, based on the Spanish Romancers. His highly developed artistic personality was not limited to his musical talents, as he had created a whole set of decorations and attire around himself. These were part of a constructed imitation of the grandeur of the Ottoman Sultan, The Magical

transformed into the imaginary royal court of the new Jewish Messiah.

Mystery

The waves of ecstatic joy, which spread so rapidly throughout the

Tour of

communities in three continents, were manifested in Jewish rallies

Shabbatean

that had openly expressed the new hope of deliverance in posters of

Objects

the Messiah and his prophet carried around through the squares and markets of major cities. These amazing objects of iconography, endowed with great expectations, were part of the stormy events that took place during the apocalyptic year of 1666. However, the sad historical moments that followed this short upheaval: the humiliating conversion of the disappointing Messiah to Islam, and his death in exile, had created a harvest of Shabbatean objects (such as his silky turban, which became the symbol of his theological metamorphoses), and the relics that were left behind him (which included various personal objects, such as his ring), that were kept sacred amongst the devotees. Hundreds of years after his historical failure and death, the three wings of the movement, which had become a sectarian underground within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, had developed their own collections of sacred objects, full of esoteric symbolism and often connected to the memories of the three major founding fathers: Shabbetai Zevi, Baruchiah Russo, and Jacob Frank. Each one of them had created a royal court all of his own, with its decorations, designs, signs, secret meaning, and personal intimate objects. One of the most important items of the Frankist gallery of sacred

36

37

objects was the medallion of Eva Frank, who took the leadership after

her father and was so famous for her beauty, that her portrait became a focal point of worship and adoration. This aesthetic, erotic quality of beauty, so crucial for Shabbatean mystical theology, had made the elegant lady, who was courted by Casanova, into the secret female future Messiah. Other objects were part of the rituals of the sect that were associated with antinomian religious practices. This hermetically sealed gallery remained almost totally unknown, and was never presented. It is still kept with great respect by some of its guardians, as part of a family religion, even, to a certain extent, a present day living sect. Such artifacts of the believers are to be found amongst members of far away communities such as the Doenmeh in Turkey and the families of Frankist origins in mainstream JewishAmerican society. Although the present study is focused on Shabbatean-DoenmehFrankist objects, it seems that this core collection should be compared to four additional categories of objects that will serve as points of reference: I. Hassidic objects, mainly those personally connected to saints who acquired the status of charismatic Zadikim. Special attention will be given to figures arousing messianic expectations, such as Rabbi Nachman of Braslav and the late Lubavitch Rabbi of the 20th century, who appears today on street posters as ‘Our Master, Teacher and Savior.’ II. Objects of cryptic communities, such as the Marranos and various underground sects; especially miniature objects which are essential part of religious life on the hide. III. Messianic objects, such as flags and banners ascribed to the ten lost tribes, or the talith (praying shawl) of the martyr Solomon Molcho, and objects that were perceived as testimonies of visionary journeys to the other world. A special present day category, that ought to be taken into consideration in this context, belongs to objects of fundamental new

right wing messianism, created mainly in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem as part of an attempt to hasten the rebuilding of the Third Temple. IV. Magical, kabalistic, and mystical objects, such as sticks, amulets, jars, and jewelry, that create an inspired sphere of relevant points of references to the main ‘Shabbatean gallery’. What seemed to be part of a fringe culture of a remote sect, The Magical

is revealed as a moving manifestation of mystical messianism.

Mystery

It had created the most fascinating radical syncretism of Jewish

Tour of

sectarianism, Christianity, and Ottoman Islam, influenced by Sufism

Shabbatean

and influencing, in its own turn, various secret orders within European

Objects

Occultism. Thus the very cosmopolitan nature of the subject matter invites a stimulating multidisciplinary exploration regarding the interaction between believers and their surroundings. The unique significance of Shabbatean objects is such that they reflect and transcend, to an even higher degree, the complexity of Jewish objects and their constant dilemma of identity, context, and definition. Alongside the textual analytical aspects of my study, I hope to present and describe three categories of Shabbatean objects: those that belong to the movement and its sects (including present time believers, descendents, and Neo-Shabbatean followers of all sorts); those that give a historical reflection through illustrations and various works of art; and finally, those that express modern and postmodern expressions, interpretations, and free creative reactions to the spark of Shabbatean inspiration. Within the third category, I hope to include in the future my own art, so that the combined project will be a synthesis, not merely of scholarly work, but of the literary quality hidden in the ‘story of things’, as well as the artistic creative value of mystical objects in the martial culture. As a scholar of Shabbatean mysticism, an author and a cultural magazine reporter, I consider

38

39

the Shabbatean phenomenon as a constant source of inspiration,

both for writers and for poets such as Pinchas Shada, A. B. Yehoshua, and to artists such as Roee Rosen and others. Hopefully, the study of Shabbatean artifacts and their spiritual context will make a special inspiring contribution to the more general theme of Jewish objects. B o w l s Fi l l e d w i t h C a n d i e s , Va s e s o f Fl o w e r s “For out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent”. [Isaiah 14: 29] I first became aware of the existence of Shabbatean objects as I read Gershom Scholem’s magnificent book regarding the Mystical Messiah. It seems that the very personality of Shabbetai Zevi and the ecstasy stirred by him created not only a special kind of performance, body art and happening focused on the redeemer, but a form of personality theater. Two events from the early stages of Zevi’s career provide a vivid example of his exceptional abilities as a star performer being his own director on the stage of the messianic drama, which needs its own elaborated decoration and scenery. The first is his grand entry into the synagogue of Smyrna, around Hanukkah, December 1665, as described by Coenen. This is truly a majestic ceremony, full of ritualistic objects: his staff with which he knocks seven times against the Ark, the great silver bowl filled with candies, which precedes him as he marches in, the vases of flowers held by the two men who follow him, his comb in its case at the hands of another believer at his disposal, the hen of his robe at the hands of two additional rabbis, and most important of all, the famous silver plated fan, which he holds so elegantly, as a royal scepter by which he bestows his holy grace over the heads of his believers, as if he were His Royal Highness King Ahasuerus in all his glory.1 This is the crustal moment in which he takes over his hometown that had rejected him, and puts himself at the central stage of Jewish history, even if for a few months, by the sheer

1 Thomas Coenen, Ydele Verwachtinge der Joden…Sabethai Zevi (Amsterdam, 1669) p.26,Scholem, SS 393.

magic of his presence and his astonishing ability as a decorator and a mystical designer of the public space. This unique ability forms a spectacular expression of his manic state of mind which stand at the other extreme pole to his periods of deep depression when he is totally locked in a closed narrow cell, lying there motionlessly and his only wish is to hide from the world — never to be seen in his miserable state. In his manic climax he is at the peak of his visibility — The Magical

radiating rays of burning light, while in his melancholic state he is an

Mystery

underground of one man, sealed in darkness and hermetically isolated

Tour of

in his sad introversion.

Shabbatean

The second event shows Zvi’s talents in interior decoration.

Objects

Although it takes place just a few months thereafter, it already marks the beginning of the fall. During his first exile in Gallipoli, this master director of ritualistic objects sits in his prison cell, which he transforms by the magic of his personality into a royal fortress and his majestic ‘Tower of Strength’. The moving account of Leyb B. Ozer gives eyewitness testimony to the experience of pilgrimage to this heavenly court. Here again we see the Messiah as an artist through his magnificent use of objects: his red garments, the Torah scroll, which he gracefully holds, draped the golden carpets, the silvery table, the vessels inlaid with jewels from which he eats and the well known staff and fan. The mystical messiah is indeed a master artist in his deep understanding of Kabbalistic symbolism, which is merged with his ability to imitate the majesty of the Sultan’s court and to create a redemptive reality within his own personal theatre of the salvation that could never exist outside his mind and presence. What seems like an esthetical, magical use of objects does indeed perform magic, as testified by the emissaries of the tormented Jewish communities who came to visit him all the way from Poland. Here he performs healing by giving his guests “a jar of wine, a dish of candies, two lemons, and a few lumps of sugar,” which they receive in great

40

41

awe, as if sent straight from the Garden of Eden, and then again by

sending their old, almost dying father, a silk coat, a woolen garment, and an embroidered scarf to keep him alive. One can rewrite the whole personal history of Shabbetai Zevi and his movement as an epic novel of objects, perhaps as the story of the comb and the fan. These objects, however, are not mere decorative things and artifacts; they are an essential aspect of the Shabbatean revolution, which is a radical attempt to reclaim the lost central stage needed for the arts and the senses. These objects are partly instruments of pleasure and reminders of long forgotten joys, but they are weapons as well in the name of new aesthetics, messianic art, and multimedia theatre that combines drama and dance, singing and story telling. All is set around the personality of the manic-depressive star Shabbetai Zevi, who is about to redeem the world by the power of his melodic voice, the beauty of his looks, and the burning fire that surrounds him. Those Shabbatean objects, full of sweets and perfumes, intimate cosmetics, fancy clothes, and tempting fruits, are also erotic signals to remind the spectators of this redemptive theatre of the Garden of Eden and the new area of freedom to come. The power of Shabbatean artifacts is such that they can touch us so unexpectedly even today. Israeli novelist Haim Be’er testifies, that his late father had acquired from an holocaust refugee, who had immigrated to Israel from Poland, a strange metal bowel. It had carried the inscription of the verse: “for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice”2, together with a decorative engraving of a snake. His mother got rid of the bowl for pennies in an antique shop in Jerusalem, as she considered it almost worthless and surely useless in her kitchen. Years later her bookish son, being totally addicted to rare Judaica, had discovered that it was a rare collector’s item in the form of a unique Shabbatean object, based on the formula Messiah=snake and clearly hinting to Zevi as the holy serpent. This metal bowel was perhaps an unknown echo to the first bowels of candies and fruits used by

2 Isaiah, 14: 29

Shabbetai Zevi as he marched into the synagogue of Smyrna and as he healed the pilgrims who came to visit him in Gallipoli.  Years after my first encounter with these lost objects, I had found traces of Shabbatean belief and even hinted symbols in the history of my own family, which had immigrated from Thessaloniki to Jerusalem. In their home town known as the Jerusalem of the Balkan, they are mentioned next to the Russo family, to be sited together in The Magical

the synagogue during the sermon of Shabbetai Zevi, and in the holy

Mystery

city they were pioneers of wine industry that had carried the name

Tour of

and the emblem of the deer. Both the snake and the deer are symbolic

Shabbatean

mythological animals in the Shabbatean context, and both might hint

Objects

to the ‘holy Zevi’. After the publication of my book on the Shabbatean movement3, I had realized to a deeper extent, through personal feedback from the readers, that what was once considered a remote chapter, lost in the distant past at the edge of Judaism, was in reality a major creative and relevant force. It had rapidly swept most Jewish communities at an era that had just started international printed magazines, and what is even more surprising is that it is still to be felt in present time.  Within the category of the material culture of Jewish mysticism, messianism, and Kabbalah, there is no doubt that the Shabbatean items create a world of their own, which is hermetically sealed in its secrecy and rich of links to a Pandora’s box of hidden treasures, heresies, and provocative rituals. Due to the fact that the inner core of that esoteric Shabbatean museum is rare and secretive though fantastically varied, and due to the endless diversity of Jewish mystical and magical items in general, the comparative part of the research will strictly limit itself to those objects that could shade light on the Shabbatean elements. Those are to be studied as part of an inner language that is highly symbolic and secretive, radically nihilistic and yet extremely devoted to its inner

42

43

tradition and memory throughout a long persecuted history.

The charm of those Shabbatean objects has to do with their ancient aroma kept in secrecy and their ability to remain faithful to the living memory of their Savior, creating thus an inner dialogue that transcends his failure. The aesthetics of those Shabbatean artifacts make them an intimate testimony to the living memory of a messiah who was considered by his followers to be the embodiment of the ideal shining beauty and who was a gifted musician, an avant-garde theatre director, and a performing artist on the stage of a messianic arena. Thus most Shabbatean objects reflect in a way the inner drive of the Messiah as an artist, who was set to break and transform all strict definitions of religion, ethics, aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. The breaking of all definitions had meant the creating of mystical messianism as a multimedia theatre of the body, the personality, and the strange ritualistic acts of a savior longed, diagnosed, and convicted to be a mad man and a grave sinner by orthodox religious authorities. Thus both he and his movement with its various subsects had broken any possible definition of what is to be considered a Kosher Jewish object, but precisely this rebellious act had made them so very uniquely Jewish and yet so universal.   Me s s i a h o n t h e F r o n t P a g e   Visual expressions of the Shabbatean movement - its history and gospel in art, culture and the media from the 17th century till today  The present study, which is generally within the field of Art History, with a clear focus on Judaism and art, is to be considered a continuation of my Ph.D. thesis and my major book. The study is therefore dedicated to the subject of the mystical gospel of Shabbatean messianism, as seen through visual art from 1666 — the year of the great declaration of redemption in the city of Gaza — till today. Hundreds of years after the birth of Shabbetai Zevi, his radical controversial mystical message is still very much vibrant in every possible medium of art and intellectual discourse. The visual

3 Messiah of Incest: New and uncensored history of the sexual element in Jewish mystical messianism.

expressions of the movement and its fascinating history, which were never fully studied, are so very varied in their artistic style, medium and historical context, that it’s hard to put them into well defined boxes. It seems however that they can be described according to the following categories: In the first category are visual expressions that are purely illustrative as part of written text, such as manuscripts, or printed books. From The Magical

a different direction we can see works of art that are independent

Mystery

from the text format, although not entirely free from textual elements

Tour of

written inside them. In this category one finds different artifacts, such

Shabbatean

as posters, portraits and flags, that were carried during messianic

Objects

rallies, or objects of Judaica art that were used by the believers as means of spreading the good word about the redemption. One could say that here again we can make a distinction between art that was purely messianic and objects that were part of the traditional Judaica art but were converted into the new Shabbatean message. Another distinction that should be made is between art that comes from the circles of the believers thus serving their cause and vision in a supportive and sympathetic expressive manner, and art that is alienated from this message, or in some cases stands totally against it and is meant to serve the objective of the polemic literature. The first type of art is partly devotional and partly meant to serve the propaganda and missionary needs of the movement. See, for example, Shabbetai Zevi as Messiah sitting on the kingly throne under celestial crown held by angels and bearing the inscription Crown of Zevi. Below: the Ten Tribes studying the Torah. From an etching after the title page of one of the editions of Nathan’s Tiqqun Qeri’ah, Amsterdam, 1666.4 This illustration could be compared to the title page of Ticun de la Noche, a Spanish translation of Nathan’s Tiqqun for the nightly devotion, Amsterdam 5436=c.e 1666.5 The second type of art is meant to mock the new message and to

44

45

serve its enemies as a caricature.6 Yet one can surely make a distinction

between Jewish anti Shabbatean art and satirical art done by Christian and Muslim artists. A totally different type of illustrative art is that which served the first printed magazines of the 17th century in Europe. This art was mostly done by Christian artists who stood outside the orbit of the Jewish communities. One could say that in a remarkable way the new spiritual message of the Shabbatean movement came into the world almost simultaneously with the birth of European journalism; in that way the announcement regarding the opening of the redemption stood at the spot light of the early printed news, the magazines, and the reportage of that era. See for example the fictitious portraits of the “new king of the Jews” and his prophet Nathan, at the head of a Dutch broadsheet giving a resumé of the events that took place up to March 1666, some of them legendary.7 Or the fictitious portrait of Josua Helcam, whom the prophet Nathan is said to have appointed as supreme commander over the Ten Tribes of Israel (from the broadsheet; War-hafftige Abildung [sic] Josuae).8 Several of those broadsheets of legendary news can be described as an antique ‘photo-roman’, that is, a series of episodes describing key sequences in the messianic narrative.9 Another sequence of the messianic narrative should be viewed under the title: ‘More news of the elevated Josvahel Cam (Shabbetai); how he came to Constantinople, at first imprisoned there, but eventually set free by the Great Turk and raised to great honor, according to letters from Constantinople and Smyrna.’ The pictures referring to legendary reports are part of a series of seven episodes from the German broadsheet; Etwas Neues von dem erhoeten … probably Augsburg, summer, 1666.10 A similar sequence is presented under the title: ‘The exposure of the deceit and apostasy of the pretended Jewish Messiah.‘ From an authoritative sources in Constantinople,

4 The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, in Sabbatai Sevi the Mystical Messiah [=S/S] by Scholem, p. 546 plate III. 5 Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati Ohio, ibid. p. 546, plate IV. 6 See for example satirical broadsheet; Judiche neue Zeitung von March aus Wien… no place and date, but probably summer, 1666. Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, p. 546, plate VIII in S/S by Scholem. 7 Holland, spring, 1666, Bibiliotheca Roesnthaliana, Amsterdam, in Scholem’s S/S, p. 546, plate V. 8 in folio; early 1666 at the Zentralbibliothek, Zurich in Scholem’s S/S,p. 354, plate II. 9 See for example the fictitious news and picture of the arrest and supposed execution of Shabbetai Zevi, showing several legendary episodes from Nathan’s and Shabbetai’s careers, from a German broadsheet, probably Augsburg, summer, 1666, at the Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, in Scholem’s S/S p.  546, plate VI. 10 Scholem’s S/S, p. 546, plate VII.

under the dates November 10 and 20 1666, via Vienna. These pictures form a set of nine episodes from a German broadsheet; Dess vermeinten Judischen Messiae… printed probably in Augsburg, beginning of 1667.11 The evolving magazine art of the time, which had found in the movement a great item of news in the making, could be compared both to the news coverage of today and to present time magazine and reportage texts. Those ancient illustrations of the messianic drama The Magical Mystery

form a sequence of photo-roman narrative that could be recycled into an animation movie.

Tour of

Often we can see the very same messianic narrative repeated

Shabbatean

with the Savior or his prophet as the main heroes. See for example

Objects

Frontispiece B in Scholem’s S/S book; Nathan leading his people from exile to the Holy Land after anointing the new king Shabbetai and the capture of Mecca. At the head of the army, one can see the general Josua Helkam. Also depicted are the Tables of the Law being dug up and Mohammed’s corpse being thrown out of the mosque12, which is to be compared to the fantastic engraving of Shabbetai Zevi bringing back the Jews to Israel, (1687, place unknown).13 Another distinction to be made is between art that was created at the historical ‘present time’ of the movement and art that was made during the post-Shabbatean era. But what is really the definition of the borders of that time period? Surly the year 1666 is the great year of the announcement of the coming salvation which stands at the very beginning of the message, but the movement continued its underground existence long after the conversion of its savior and even generations after his death in exile. For our purpose we adopt here the basic chronological map that served the Shabbatean research ever since the great study of Scholem. Namely, the first stage takes place during the life of Shabbetai Zevi, the second stage after his death when the main body of believers was amongst the sects of the Doenmeh, and the third last stage which is of the Frankist sect. Each of these stages

46

47

was hidden within a different religious context; Jewish, Muslim and

Christian, although the three of them carry the same messianic flame in different versions and theological improvisations. Each of these stages created its own unique art and icons, relics, amulets and ritualistic objects. Although the glorious days of the movement are long gone, one can not ignore the fact that it is still alive in a way in the historical memory of the Jewish people, in academic research, and even more so, in the souls of the last believers and descendents of the Doenmeh who are still alive in Turkey of today. The narrative and inspiration of the Shabbatean gospel, its special aroma and essence is alive in literature and art, in theatre and television, in modern discourse and in cinema, in postmodern paintings and performance art, in Jewish and Israeli media of the present century. One major section of visual art forms what could be called the public image and the visual canon of the Shabbatean movement. Here we can put the true portrait of Shabbetai Zevi sketched by an eyewitness in Smyrna, 1666.14 Alongside this famous portrait stands its counterpart in the form of the portrait of Nathan of Gaza, sketched by an eyewitness in Smyrna, 1667.

15

These two portraits, which are done in the same format and with the very same characteristics, are to be presented against the portrait of Rabbi Jacob Sasportas — the main adversary of Shabbetai Zevi. Iconographic oil by Isack Luttichuijs, Amsterdam, about 1680-90 (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem).16, 17 Another category of art is calligraphic in its nature, such as the signatures, the autographs and the seals. In this section it would be possible to present the only autograph by Shabbetai Zevi, written in August 1675 - to the Jewish community of Berat Albania, asking for a Hebrew prayer book for the High Holy Days in September 1676.18

11 see in Scholem’s book p. 674, plate XI. 12 Fictitious etching from a German broadsheet; Warhafftes Coenterfey… des Judiechvermeinten WunderPropheten Nathan Levi… probably Augsburg, 1666, in Hebrew Union College Cincinnati, Ohio. ibid. p. 322, plate I. 13 Collection of Alfred Rubens, see his Jewish Iconography, London, p. 194, plate 22 facing p. 112, and in S/S by Scholem, p. 930, plate XIII. 14 from Thomas Coenen Ydele Verwachtinge der Joden… Amsterdam, 1669, in the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, see Frontispiece A in S/S by Scholem. 15 Again from Thomas Coenen Ydele Verwachtinge der Joden… Amsterdam. 1669, in The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. in S/S by Scholem p.ix. 16 see in Scholem’s S/S p. 594, plate IX. 17 For a detailed analysis of those three portraits, please see in my book Messiah of Incest—New and Uncensored History of the Sexual Element in Jewish Mystical Messianism, pp. 74-76, 81, 239-242. For additional illustrations

Of a similar nature is the statement acknowledging the kingship of Shabbetai Zevi, written and signed by the members of the Yeshiba Yeshu’oth Meshiho in Amsterdam, dated September 26-28, 1666.19 Alongside these documents one can present the magnificent Tugra, or the Sultan’s seal - the sign of Imperial power at the official Ottoman Fremans, which could literally seal the fate of a controversial personality like Shabbetai Zevi - to conversion, to exile and even to execution.20 The Magical

In the section dedicated to new modern, post-modern, and Neo-

Mystery

Shabbatean art, one should remember the numerous references to the

Tour of

history of the movement in Jewish, Israeli, Turkish and Western art

Shabbatean

and media, including thousands of items on the internet and works of

Objects

art by artists such as Dani Karavan21, Roee Rosen22 and my own work on the front and back covers of my book - Messiah of Incest, based on the historical portraits of Shabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza. Examples of Western Neo-Shabbatean and Neo-Doenmeh art could be seen in the internet site of Doenmeh West. To this rich material one should add the long history of the Doenmeh and Frankist presence in countries such as Turkey and Poland and its expressions in local literature, theatre, art and media, which were never investigated from the perspective of the new research done by the Scholem-Jerusalem school for the study of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah and messianism.  The new presentation of Shabbatean art and artistic descriptions of the Messiah and his movement is only an introduction to the major new realization of the Savior as a multimedia artist; partly vocal, partly visual, partly theatrical. That is to say, a total artist daring to break every law, text, frame, and logos in his mission to save the lost desires, the silenced heart, and the censored artistic muses that were denied during the long period of exile. Thus he was the master director of a happening which combined stardom and body art, ritual and theatre of the personality. His march towards the end of history and law was also the return to the erotic Eden, but his way was so full of exiles and

48

49

falls, blocks and inner hesitations.

74-76, 81, 239-242. For additional illustrations from the history of the Shabbatean movement, please see there; pp. 8, 9, 10, 13, 21, 36, 45, 65, 69, 71, 74, 81, 84, 117, 118, 145, 149, 173, 177, 192-3, 227, 233, 239, 240, 243, 244, 275, 292, 323, 324, 325, 326, 330, 341, 361, 409, 410, 499. 18 MS. 2262 fol. 79 Ben Zevi Inst. Jerusalem. See Scholem’s S/S, p.898, plate XII. 19 Archives of the Portuguese Community in Amsterdam, Library Etz Hayyim, Bibiliotheca Roesnthaliana, Amsterdam, see in Scholem’s S/S book, p. 594, plate X. 20 See Eli Shai, “The Ottoman Artistic Legacy,” in ARIEL A Review of Arts and Letters in Israel, Sep. 1999. 21 see his wall painting at the entrance of Yedioth Aharonoth building in Tel Aviv. 22 see his book - Justine Frank 1900-1943, A Retrospective, The Herzliya Museum of Art.

50

51

Two More Hours; Prologue

Michael Kessus Gedalyovich

52

53

[Draft]

two More Hours Prologue excerpt from T h e I m a g I n a r y W e a k [working title] a Phantasmographic Picturesque Novel, in search of the lost grave of sabbatai Zevi

1

a “real” portrait of sabbbatai Zevi

2

according to sabbatianist tradition, on Yom Kippur (the Day of atonement) 1676, sabbatai Zevi, the King of Jews and “true Messiah1,”who had converted to Islam, decided to “shed” his physical body2 and disappear until the day of Calling, the day of redemption3. to others, Jews and non-Jews alike, who did not adhere to the sabbatianist faith, this day is the forgotten day of the demise of a person, who for a brief period in Jewish history was a Messianicpolitical hope to at least 80% of the known Jewish world4, and perhaps one of the greatest and most important intellectual- moral revolutionaries in the Jewish world, in the second millennium after Christ. according to correspondence and records from the period, sabbatai Zevi’s5 decease/”departure” occurred in the region presently known as albania- Montenegro, and which, at the turn of the 17th century, was the perilous western frontier of the ottoman empire. Immediately following the announcement of sabbatai Zevi’s death, it appeared to be in the best interest of all involved in the wondrous story of this charismatic, enigmatic figure, that there would be no marked grave site. and so it happened that since the 17th century and to this very day, the location of sabbatai Zevi’s death and burial have been based on hearsay and conjecture and not on verified

3

4

5

6

Gershom scholem in his youth.

7

historical facts. In the second half of the 20th century an “academic” dispute broke out between two senior scholars concerning the identification of the “unknown” grave. Prof. Gershom scholem6, the founder of the modern study of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and a reputed sabbatianism scholar, argued that Zevi died and was buried in the town of Dulcigno7, a village on the western frontier of the ottoman empire, to which he was exiled in his old age, and which is today the coastal city ulcinj in Montenegro, on the albanian border. Itzhak BenZvi8, the second President of the state of Israel, and an enthusiastic scholar of sabbatianism and the History of the Land of Israel, attempted to prove that Zevi was buried in the highlands of Berat9, at the heart of present-day albania. as in every relished academic dispute, each of the two scholars sought to establish his arguments with documents and envoys who frequented the site. this seemingly academic dispute has not been resolved to this very day. In the autumn of 2003, I traveled to albania10, with the aim of investigating the two hypotheses as to the location of the burial site, and to attempt to find supporting references to back up or contradict each one of them. the official reason for my visit was the

8

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi as a young man

9

10

11

30

12

Mishka

13

14

29

thanks to Khalil rabah

28

contemporary art biennial held in tirana11, the capital of albania. as I was already there, I decided to try to trace this unsolved and probably not-all-too-important historical-detective mystery. surprisingly, while attempting to shed light on the historical argument, when visiting the aforementioned places and meeting various people12, it became clear to me that not only were the testimonies and references introduced by these distinguished scholars somewhat questionable13, I myself succeeded in proposing hypotheses regarding some other places where the grave might be located. additionally, it became evident that the notion of sabbatai Zevi and his influences, with his successors in the Jewish and non-Jewish world, continues with a mysterious-conspiratorial fervor14 as though 330 years had not passed since his passing. this story recounts the attempt to expose and reveal the actual burial ground of sabbatai Zevi, and on the journey to discovery, unravels the story of the wondrous life of sabbatai Zevi15, the select group of confidantes who were close to him in life and followed his doctrine after his death, the story of the members of the sabbatianist Donmeh cult16 who converted to Islam and created a new Muslim-Jewish religion, and of their impact on the nascence of modern turkey (ataturk and the

Holbien’s ambassadors

15

Gershon salomon & a friend

16

17

ataturk

27

26

25

Neo-Braslevers in allenby

24

rabbi Lubavitch, one of the new secret Messiahs

young turkish leaders17 who were offspring of the Donmeh cult), as well as the influence of esoteric mystic movements such as the frankists18, rosicrucians19, and the freemasons20, in addition to various anarchist movements21, as well as streams in Hassidism22, on the beginnings of Zionism23, while also recounting the story of the remnants of the Donmeh cult in contemporary times, and the renaissance of neo-sabbatianist cults24, comparing them to the political Messianic movements which are being forged before our very eyes, in present time, such as the Messianic segment of Chabad25, neo-Braslevers26, political Messianic Zionists, followers of the teachings of rabbi Kook27, and various groups of the temple Mount Loyalists28, who act both openly and clandestinely with the aim of establishing the third temple29 via a global apocalypse to start with the destruction of the al-aqsa Mosque30. this was the initial intention. as time went by and I delved deeper into the material, it became clear to me that my attempt to “assist” in solving the riddle for the sake of historical truth and accuracy reflects a mere “appearance”, and that the real question bothering me is why does the story of sabbatai Zevi occupy me so much? the beginning of the phantasmagorical novel to follow is still largely a draft which is likely to undergo changes during the work on the book.

23

YaLHaK founder of Donmeh west

theodore Hertzl

22

18

19

Hieronymus reussner, Pandora, 1588

20

epha. Joseph Hieschfeld, from the order the asiatic Brethren.

21

Mikhail alexandrovich Bakunin

1

arten the taxi driver

2

the adult Yitzhak Ben-Zvi

3

4

5

Chimpanzee with a friend

september 2003. Hotel California, tirana, albania. arten, the taxi driver, picked us up. the destination: the mountains near Berat in Central albania. today, for the first time, we are going to look for sabbatai’s grave according to Ben-Zvi’s version2. tirana, a fanciful city in a near- impossible country; a combination of possibly the highest number of Mercedes3 cars per person worldwide, with a road infrastructure which is a refined variation of Gaza before its recent “makeover”⁴, of shoe shops⁵ selling only the latest vogue in leading brands even before they come out in New

York, Paris or Milan, and at a quarter of the price, with “kiosks” of generators⁶ of every shape and size, of communist-colonialist “railroad -buildings” that have undergone an aesthetic face-lift led by the energetic young mayor, a painter and art patron, and have become a Pop variation of Mondrian⁷, with tropical looks, the type of aesthetics more befitting Havana⁸ or tananarive in Madagascar⁹ than a Balkan capital; a capital city with open sewage canals, hundreds of moneychangers on the boulevards, and one contemporary art biennial.

6

7

8

Hand rolled with a friend

9

Zebu before

K: within a single day they shift from a Maoist-Communist dictatorship10 to radical capitalism11, sting the whole country in a pyramid scheme12, the entire economy collapses, they experience a civil revolution with weapons drawn, are crowned as europe’s smuggling center; they say you can get absolutely everything in the black market here: Viagra13, caviar14, ballistic missiles15…it’s the poorest country in europe… who do you think cares about contemporary art16 here?

10

11

Charming Bernie Madoff

G: Precisely because of that! the most interesting art is created in a time of revolutions and radical changes17. Look at the art in the west, it’s dying18/. K: I don’t know, in theory you may be right. Have you seen all the generators? Half of the time there are power outages, and even this biennial is part of the mayor’s electoral campaign.

12

13

G: Did you bring the map?

out-of date Israeli sex symbol

K: Look at adina dressed as red-ridingHood, walking down the middle of the road, making noises; they must think she’s lost it.

14

a new russian symbol of power

15

the New Great satan

16

Max

K: Yes, and also the photographs from reuven Nell’s journey in 1955…19 How many locals came to the opening? I saw only the participating artists… it’s like a private club. they are simply not interested.

17

Marcel & adolph

18

G: they would have thought the same in tel aviv, so what’s the difference? I’m going to begin shooting20.

self-portrait with one year old risotto

19

20

android dream

K: so you’re saying there’s no difference?

21

Mouse with friend

22

Bonaparte

23

and sometimes I feel this way

24

Mrs. Mao

25

Ilona & friend

G: there is and there isn’t! Here art has a much more important role, even if fewer people see and understand it. It has a true political function21, like… it can really be avant-garde22. K: once again ‘political’. we always come to that, don’t we? Can’t art be something else too? always political, political, political?23

G: why are you getting all upset, honey? won’t do you any good. everything is political, even love24.

G: Besides, art should bring about change, right?! otherwise its just jerking off...25

K: spiritual masturbation26. I don’t think that’s bad… an auto-consumer product which can even bring a little salvation27.

26

K: we’re picking him up in a minute. as far as I gathered from arten, he speaks fluent english and Italian28, so we’re okay.

on the spiritual in onanism

27

G: Momentary, yes! Private, maybe?! futile, absolutely!!! what’s with the cousin, is he joining us?

28

anita

29

Monty Python

30

Giuseppe arcimoldo, Le Bibliothécaire, 1566

G: fine.

K: anyhow, I like this place. It feels as though everything’s possible. a happy hopeful anarchism29.

K: why the hurry?

G: Now you’re being a romantic. a minute ago you said they were starving. when do we head back?

G: I have plans for tonight30.

K: what plans?

K: who? the french guy with the hair?31 G: Yes. what do you think about him, cute wasn’t he?!

31

“Young lovers are rarely hungry”

.

32

G: Do you remember the guy who sat next to us at dinner yesterday?

33

K: mmm… G: You don’t think so?!... Did you see the looks he was giving me?32

K: Is it the one who did the video with the airplanes33… Nice, although I’m not a big fan of video-art, it bores me, the films are too long, they give me varicose veins, it was nice when it started34, like every novelty; now it’s become tiresome… too challenging for me35.

G: so what then?! Painting?... object?36... as you grow older, you become a reactionary37, that’s that… You’ve come to your return-to-painting phase? It’s so corny and expected that it’s pathetic!!... we said we’d go out for a drink tonight38.

38

34

Jellyfish

35

“Babel” al arab

36 Disappear-ignoring subject, Jerusalem, 1989

37

K: If I understood arten correctly, because it was mostly hand gestures which also need translation39, then it’s four hours to the grave, two hours on site, and four hours back, taking into account the rough roads... Now I need a thrill in real time⁴⁰, to get lost a little and get dirty41, a little less concept42 and production.

39

40

G: I think something is beginning to happen, we’ll see… he is a bit young, isn’t he? K: No-one looked that way at me43. Did you know that the Bektashi sufis are allowed to drink alcohol? Charles’s proposal with the mobile bar and the single malt made me laugh… at least he connects to his roots⁴⁴

41

42

43

from the legacy of eric stanton

⁴⁴ the real James Bond

K: It seems as though they tried to create a happy religion⁴⁵ and to irritate a llittle the entire neighborhood. Maybe that’s why sabbatai bonded with them so well...⁴⁶ the anarchist element, childishness in a good way, was very important to him… a sort of generous double inversion⁴⁷.

G: Just as well… You don’t send out signs that you want anyone, so no-one looks at you that way, why bother? !

45

alex sanders & friends

46

thank you atsmon Ganor

47

self kissing

K: I was actually thinking about the next phase, when full virtual reality will be technologically possible⁴⁸; eleven dimensions⁴⁹, smell, touch, taste, the whole lot. a virtual space with the feel of the real space, and most important—easy to control with a database and a toolbar… like the hologram room in star trek or that film by wenders about dreams... which reminds me… this place looks as though it came out from Kusturica’s Black Cat, white Cat…⁵⁰ G: what is he saying?

⁴⁸ Virtual Leisure

⁴⁹ “stuck again”

50

G: Did you ask him?

51

K: two more hours, but it’s strange, because looking at my map I’d say we are not heading in the right direction.

K: I asked and showed him, but he insists that he knows exactly where it is and that I’m wrong.... I’m not sure I quite understand tibor. when he speaks, it sounds like english, I think I understand, but I end up guessing most of it…51 I think the Honorary Consul is leading us on big time…52

52

CerN

53

raphael

54

⁵⁵ eytan shouker,

roy fixman is dressed in Motta’s clothing, Motta is dressed in roy fixman’s clothing.

K: Did you notice how he was suspicious and didn’t want to cooperate? G: Yes!! He refused to have his picture taken53 and be interviewed. K: at first he said he knew the story, then he said he didn’t know a thing… ⁵⁶ aleister Crowley

⁵⁷ Philip K. Dick

58

K: and finally, that he never heard of any other place; and Ilan, who really looks like a Mossad agent⁵⁴, insists that they once travelled to the country’s north together, close to the border with Kosovo, and the consul, on his own initiative, pointed at some place along the way and said to him “this is where sabbatai Zevi is buried.” I marked the place on the map. If we have time, we should check it. G: I wonder what the reason is. He’s religious, isn’t he?

K: all the signs indicate so…⁵⁵ and his name… It’s unbelievable!! … an angel who sold his soul... ⁵⁶ Don’t you find it amusing? It won’t be long before I start believing that nothing is accidental⁵⁷, that they knew we were coming and all that bullshit… G: who are ‘they’?⁵⁸

the landscape’s beautiful …

G: these bunkers look like giant mushrooms in the landscape… they fit in everywhere… a personal Disneyigloo⁵⁹. 59

K: they say there are between 700,000 to 1,000,000, 1 per 3 citizens, like a pension plan of sorts…⁶⁰

⁶⁰ Genesis estate, Herzliya

61

K: Because of his last documented correspondence61… and also because of the Jewish community… shortly before sabbatai died62 or disappeared63 or self-vanished⁶⁴… your choice, there is a signed letter he sent⁶⁵ to the Jewish community in Berat asking for Hebrew prayer books for the High Holidays. 62

63

K: He was locked up in the fortress⁶⁸ in Dulcigno for three years, virtually cut off from his followers... entirely depressed⁶⁹… Praying in a mosque while putting on phylacteries⁷⁰… toward the end, he asked for Jewish prayer books to be sent to him… the closest Jewish community was in Berat; there was also a later sabbatian tradition that maintained that he died and was buried in Berat … so it’s no wonder that Itzhak Ben-Zvi thought he was eventually buried there.

rembrandt, the anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes tulp, 1632

K: If I remember correctly... and this was after he’d already been Muslim for ten years⁶⁶… Dulcigno present day ulcinj, was a pirate village⁶⁷; even the turks were afraid to interfere, although it was a part of the ottoman empire.

a sketch for a sound-Catcher

⁶⁴ ooops . . sorry

65

66

once a upon a time at La Napoule

67

68

achilles

69

Goya, the dream of reason produces monsters

70

K: I don’t know71… In 1955 Ben-Zvi was already the President72, he sends reuven Nell73, the consul in Belgrade, to check his theory… there were no diplomatic ties between Israel and albania then… He managed to get in and investigate and meet with the leaders of the Bektashi⁷⁴ and ostensibly locate the grave in the mountains outside Berat … K: He sent a detailed report to Ben-Zvi, including photographs and maps⁷⁵, as well as specimens of vegetation from the site⁷⁶, and Ben-Zvi published an article in a research journal, announcing that he found the grave, and that scholem’s conjecture was erroneous… In short, for some reason Ben-Zvi felt an urgent need to get at scholem⁷⁷… the whole episode is pretty peculiar. G: what he is saying?

see note 23

Maybe HaL knows

72

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi & ruth in the cabin

73

anno

74

Dada

G: and what now?!

K: two more hours⁷⁹.

K: two more hours⁷⁸.

79

71

78

77

Marinetti & friends

76

75

K: I found a translation of Jacob frank by fania, scholem’s wife⁸⁰… translated from the Polish original.

G: and…

K: Beyond the story of the personal relationship between scholem and fania81, it’s very interesting. frank is a total anarchist82 and nihilist83… for example, while sabbatai converted to Islam⁸⁴, frank felt the need to convert to both Islam and Christianity⁸⁵… a bit like a child who constantly pushes the limits his parents set down⁸⁶.

80

81

Le dernier devoir

82

Herbert Bayer, autoportrait, 1932

83

Marlboro Lights

K: Listen to this… it’s a quote from frank

86

“to hell with the revolution”.

85

Jim Jones

⁸⁴ Yusuf Islam

“once in my youth I arrived in a village where no Jew had ever been seen. I went to a hotel where boys and girls used to gather. the girls weave and the boys tell them stories to amuse them. when they saw me, one of the guys began mocking and laughing at me in order to make me angry. He began by saying: once upon a time the God of the Jews went for a walk with the God of the Christians. all of a sudden the God of the Christians slapped him and asked: why do you put on your head what I put on my feet? I told them: st. Peter once went for a walk with Prophet Mohammad.

Mohammad told him: I feel like beating you the way the turks do. Peter was reluctant, but Mohammad, who was strong, tied him to a tree and beat him up. Peter complained that his ass hurt. He said: I am willing to recognize you as a prophet if you never do this to me again. the guys said: You know what, let’s make peace: we won’t slander your god…” what does it mean to smack someone the turkish way? Is it what I think it is? or are there linguistic, cultural and translation gaps here?”

K: That’s it !! we can’t advance any further... time’s up…87 It’ll be dark in two hours, and in any case, this fucked up Mercedes can’t continue climbing… 87

88

K: As usual… Two more hours..

The time has come...

G: I have to get back… 88 I have a date... and he is really, I mean really... cute... with all due respect to the Messiah.

The G: what is he saying?

Hoo... yes....hoo...yesh...

G: Look who’s coming!! 91a,b,c,d

untimely K: Okay… At least we did a National messianism

Geographic outing 89.

of two fredericks

89

G: 150 bucks for nothing... Have you managed to figure out what language Tibor speaks?90 G: He is stirring great excitement. Arten and Tibor seem really pleased 93.

90

91a

K: He looks like a Yemenite rabbi…92 take a picture… take a picture.

Still waiting

G: Hold him up a bit. I want to change the tape.

76

91b

Godo

77

91c

GoGodo

91d

See note 22

92

what does a jew look like

93

Not really

94

95

94

Up! top, sia

95

See note 63

96

96

97

Fabio

98

99

After a great deal of gibberish from which you could identify fragments of English, a little Italian97, some Greek, a pinch of German98, Albanian99, and mainly hand gesticulations100, head tilting101, lip smacking102, and shoulder games103, it turned out that the old man who was descending from the mountain was likely to save our trip104. A real Bektashi hermit105 who had been in seclusion for at least several months in the place106 where the grave is supposed to be107, and who decided to end his seclusion and climb down the mountain right now, today of all days...108

108

It’s also material

107

Almost

106

Almost a real place

105

Self portrait with a smile

104

Oscar

103

100

Lucky look

101

Velas! El Gerco!

102

Self portrait with a pig

G: shandali?109

109

G: Babasali?!

If god will

K: Basali G: a-ba-sa-li?! shan-da-li?!

110

K: abasali G: what did you figure out? 110

only sardins

K: a-ba-sa-li… li!!! K: It sounds like a family tree of saints beginning with adam. 111

Local Baba

G: Look, he looks like him…111 Do you see that?

K: who is Hasan Hysi?.....? …. ?....

5

The Prologue ends here. A few comments: At this stage, 23 to 36 chapters are planned for this phantasmographic novel, some short as the Prologue or even shorter, others of medium length and some longer, sometimes overlong1. At times, due to necessity2, negligence or choice3, the documentary travel narrative focusing on the unknown grave4 of Judaism's most infamous false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi , that I try to recount as faithfully as I can, slips into subplots and lapses into unplanned episodes. This is the case of the next chapter, titled: Is The Home Coming Home Coming? which depicts an incidental resemblance between the face of the Sufi Bektashi hermit, climbing down the hill near Berat, Albania and the face of a Jew prone over Zuzanna (Susanna), in Zuzanna and the Elders5, (an etching by Bruno Schulz using the rare Cliché-verre technique from the series, Xiega, that was made in the years 1920-1921) . This incidental resemblance leads me to explore the German novella by Bruno Schulz, The Homecoming [Die Heimkehr6], that Schulz sent to Thomas Mann, before its publication, close to the Second world war; a novella that has been lost, and that, as far has I know, only several drawings7a,b,c that might have been associated with it have miraculously survived the maelstrom of those times. This subplot created a disruption in the central narrative, as do other subplot further on, though I attempt to maintain the central narrative8.

1

2

3

In the course of 2014, publication in color is planned of the first book of the Phantasmographic novel, The Imaginary Weak.

4

Michael Kessus Gedalyovich Neve Michael 2013

Translation: Daria Kassovsky, Dr. Ziv Neeman 6

8

7c

7b

7a

82

83

Into Edom’s Field, to Poland: Jacob Frank as Educator

Adam Lipszyc

Jacob Frank is certainly one of the most outrageous figures in Jewish history. One can hardly deny that Frank was a despot, obsessed with his own greatness, a small-town macho who took advantage of his power in order to gain profits of a sexual nature (like Andrzej Lepper or Moshe Kacav), a calculating villain who was capable of exposing his own nation to the greatest danger, by cynically employing the antiSemitic “blood libel,” and ultimately a mediocre manipulator who rather ineptly tried to give the aura of a highly conscious, providential Into Edom’s

plan, backed by an esoteric doctrine, to his tentative and quickly

Field, to Poland:

modified combinations and strategies. On the other hand, it is also

Jacob Frank as

quite evident that there is something deeply fascinating in the insane

Educator

carrier of the 18th-century pretender to the Messianic throne who, together with a number of his followers, converted to Catholicism in Poland, in order to trample both the principles of Judaism and, from within, as it were, the rules of the Christian world, and hence to annihilate the deadly world of the Law and lead his believers to “eternal life.” It is no less evident that Frank’s adventures offer, in fact, a perfect material for a movie. For this is what happened: in the fossilized framework of traditional Judaism, just a few decades before the beginning of Emancipation, in the decaying Polish Kingdom, there appears a figure with unusual, adventurous charisma that enables him to gather a considerable group of followers, wander through a few countries and religions, come into contact with a few rulers of Europe, and, finally, to settle down and eventually pass away in a private castle in Offenbach. Jacob Frank, born in Korolówka, a small town in Podolia, might not have been God incarnate, but he certainly was an incarnation of chutzpah. Simultaneously repelling and exciting is also the document that this peculiar villain has bequeathed to us. Księga Słów Pańskich (“The Book of the Lord’s Words”) — preserved, though not necessarily written, in clumsy Polish — is a comprehensive collection of more

84

85

than a thousand longer and shorter maxims of our lord Frank, and

it forms a complete record of his theological and political doctrine.1 The book is full of longish, often incoherent parables, presumably sewn together from the motley fabric of the multicultural borderland which was Frank’s true element; of older Kabbalistic and Sabbatian conceits, radically simplified and translated into a rather unimpressive homemade terminology; of various expressions of pathological megalomania, as well as pathetic rhetorical figures in the style of “haven’t I told you?” or “if you had only listened to me” or “all of it made deep sense,” worthy of a popular leader such as Lech Wałęsa. But then again, thanks to Frank’s unusual vitality and unlimited fantasy, as well as — one is tempted to say — thanks to the very force of the Messianic logic, enormous power does emanate from The Book of the Lord’s Words. First of all, it is worth noting that the book may be seen as a peculiar crossbreed of a picaresque story and a Messianic treatise. Perhaps it would be even more precise to say that in this book the picaresque is not simply interwoven with the Messianic, but rather that here the Messianic treatise actually takes the form of a picaresque novel. Frank offers us a series of comically boastful stories from his childhood and youth. He dwells on his overwhelming sexual attractiveness, and, time and again, expresses his deep interest in his own penis. The link between these explosions of egotism and the Messianic idea consists not only of the fact that Frank, being deeply convinced of his Messianic vocation, believes in the cosmic significance of his own person and everything that happens to him. The link can also be found in the fact that the charlatan of Korolówka expounds an unprecedented Messianic doctrine which justifies the inclusion of the picaresque boasting in the Messianic treatise: it is the doctrine of the Messiah the Boor. Frank repeatedly stresses his own boorishness, ignorance, or even thoughtlessness which helped him survive various adventures in one piece, or even achieve a level of success which

1 Cf. Księga Słów Pańskich. Ezoteryczne wykłady Jakuba Franka, ed. Jan Doktór (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper, 1997). Further reference is included in the text, with the number of the fragment quoted.

was beyond the grasp of more educated and reasonable people (e.g. 34, 36). The model of all these stories can be found in the well-known anecdote of a precious pearl and a boy from the jewelry store who, precisely because he was unaware of its value, turned out to be the only person in town capable of drilling it (57). And it is this story which uncovers the very meaning of the doctrine of the Messiah the Boor. Seen from the perspective of this mad teaching, Jewish history in the unredeemed reality, the ages of interpretation and hair-splitting Into Edom’s

over the meaning of the Book, appear as the times of apprehensive

Field, to Poland:

learning which could not lead to redemption. The Messiah must be a

Jacob Frank as

boor who will tear apart the fabric of words and texts which was woven

Educator

through centuries, who will break the fallen, evil world in which the truly divine has not yet revealed itself at all — and who will finally bring us redemption. Hence it is comprehensible that the task of the Messiah the Boor also consists of active violation of the old Law. Frank tells us proudly how he violated the precepts of the Halakhah (Jewish rabbinic law) and — with recourse to violence or sly tricks — forced pious Jews to do likewise. It does happen that on such occasions he manifests inventiveness and a loutish sense of humor, as when he cunningly persuades a Jew to smoke a pipe in public on the Sabbath and to walk down the street bareheaded (16). Sometimes, however, he goes simply violent, as in the following case: “Once I came to a synagogue in Salonika. Approximately 1,200 people had gathered there and one of the ushers was just about to call so-and-so to read from the Torah. I called with a strong voice: ‘Let nobody dare ascend here for I will fell him to the ground in a moment.’ They were all startled and begun to shout: ‘And how can you do this?’ Thus I called once again the same thing. Taking the desk, I shouted that with it I would kill the first man who dared approach me. Then I took the Law of Moses, laid it on the bare ground, pulled down my pants and sat on it, bare-assed. The

86

87

Jews could do nothing, so they had to leave.” (19) It is in such deeply

boorish fragments, soaked with violence though funny at the same time, that Frankist Messianism most clearly shows its picaresque face. Thus: the boor against the scholars, the lout against subtle piety, the small-town crafty bugger playing the role of the Messiah — cutting the Gordian knot of the sophisticated Law with an act of violence. Paweł Maciejko, a scholar of Frankism, has remarked that the Frankist episode is something of a carnival. It is certainly true if we are able only to hear all the historical tones of this carnival party. True, Frank is a folk troublemaker who will readily sit on the holy book with his ass naked. And yet in his impatience with the old Law, in his chutzpah and bravado, which enable him to violate all the principles and finally go beyond the very borderlines of his own community, one can already hear the steps of the enlightened metropolitan freethinking, embodied not so much by an unwashed boor from a small Podolian town, but by an impudent, metropolitan dandy in striped socks who — like the hero of Luis Buñuel’s The Golden Age — enjoys kicking innocent dogs and old men. This, by the way, suggests the proper style of the future film based on the life and opinions of Jacob Frank, the boor, as well as uncovering the fundamental link between this figure and the Belgian artist named Justine Frank. The great historian Gershom Scholem was fond of pointing to both structural and genetic connections that allegedly linked the Frankist movement with the Jewish Enlightenment, Emancipation and Reform movements.2 According to Scholem, the structural link is supplied precisely by the analogy between the Frankist antinomianism and the striving for escape from the framework of the old community on the one hand, and the Reform’s disaffection with fossilized laws, prejudice, and closure, on the other. Scholem also tried to show the genetic connection by pointing to specific Frankist families which, having left the confines of the traditional community and having discarded the Law, in the second or third generation found themselves in the avant-garde of the emancipation and assimilation. Scholem was

2 Cf. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), p. 304; Kabbalah (New York: Meridian, 1978), pp. 307-308.

convinced that the perverse, red-hot antinomianism of the Frankists helped Jews leave the ghetto and enter the peaceful, bourgeois, liberal world of the 19th century. Scholem’s attitude toward this dialectical passage seems to have been rather ambivalent: he looked favorably at the antinomian gesture and the movement toward modernity and yet the world of 19th-century Reform Judaism was the synonym of the spiritual desert for him. His attitude loses all its ambivalence when we relate it to his belief that he himself participates in one more dialectical Into Edom’s

turn, i.e. in the Zionist project which will supposedly keep all the profits

Field, to Poland:

of modernity and the exit from the ghetto, but will also lead Jews out

Jacob Frank as

of the desert of Reform and — by creating a new socio-cultural sphere

Educator

in the old-new land — will enable them to regain the spiritual depth of Judaism with all its paradoxes, including those that manifested themselves in the Frankist movement. Even if Scholem were right about the historical links between Frankism and Haskalah, one can hardly resist the feeling that on the level of ideas, the stable and unparadoxical world of the 19th-century bourgeois Judaism looks odd in the role of an (even dialectical) heir of perverse Frankism. But what if one can show that Frank and his Book define the point of origin of a differently construed, of a different Jewish modernity, one permeated with a weird, both fulfilled and unfulfilled Messianism, a modernity both true and untrue to tradition, a modernity based both on complete departure from the ghetto and complete participation in the surrounding, gentile world, and on a paradoxical split away from it? A Jewish modernity which — as an unfinished project — may today, precisely in Poland, appear as the most proper form of Jewish existence? In order to justify such a hypothesis, one must look at the two most intriguing, and intertwined, elements of the doctrine that Frank expounds in The Book of the Lord’s Words: his vision of Esau and his thinking on Poland. Frank believes that all the laws and scriptures of the nations

88

89

should be violated and discarded. This refers, first and foremost, to

the Torah of Moses — with the sole exception of the story of Jacob and Esau which is supposedly of a different nature (62). Frank identifies himself with the biblical Jacob. This enables him to perceive himself as the third patriarch after Abraham and Isaac (200), but also as the third, proper Messiah, after “the First One,” i.e. Sabbatai Zevi, and “the Second One,” i.e. Baruchia Russo, the leader of the Sabbatian sect in Salonika. To be more precise, Frank considered himself to be the second, repeated, and corrected Jacob who was to fulfill what the first one neglected — and hence will bring about the redemption of the world. Now, the fundamental negligence of the biblical Jacob was the fact that when, after his struggle with the angel, he met his brother Esau and promised to visit him, he never kept his promise (939). Hence, the Messianic work of the new Jacob demands what Frank calls “walking to Esau” (123). But since in the Jewish tradition Edom, of which Esau is the forefather, is identified with Rome and Christianity which has its capital in Rome, this walking to Esau means conversion to Christianity. If the biblical Jacob, in order to receive his father’s blessing, had to disguise himself as Esau, then the second, Messianic Jacob, in order to bring about redemption, must leave his own religion behind and take upon himself the robe of Edom (123). By discarding his religion he will also literally exit the name of Israel which — as Frank says — ”has no luck” (86). Hence, he will repeat and fulfill Abraham’s exit from the land of his fathers, but this time it will be a movement not toward Jewishness, but away from it (327). Finally, on the most esoteric level, he will go from the old Law and the letter Beth which opens the Torah of Moses to the divine, hidden, transcendent letter Aleph which defines the realm of Esau — and is allegedly similar to the Christian cross (658). All this will happen in the Catholic Poland. This is why in his paraphrase of the biblical story Frank can say: “When Jacob struggled with the angel, the angel asked him: ‘Where are you going, Jacob?’ He answered: ‘Into Edom’s field, to Poland’.” (84)

How, then, does Frankism differ from Christianity and — as a socio-political doctrine — from the project of total assimilation, of complete departure from the Jewish world and unlucky name of Israel, and from complete fusion with Polish society? Well, it does not differ at all — and it differs at every single point! For Frank is never tired of emphasizing that the path to which he tries to lead his believers is one of self-humiliation, of final disinheritance and breaking with one’s identity. Poland — the new Promised Land with the true Mount Into Edom’s

Zion on Jasna Góra where Frank was imprisoned and where he came

Field, to Poland:

up with the idea of identifying Holy Mary with the Lady, or Shekhinah

Jacob Frank as

— is also, in Frank’s own words, “the place with no shape,” “simple,

Educator

empty land devoid of water, i.e. knowledge” (357). While persuading his followers to convert (or justifying the conversion which they have already gone through), the Messiah the Boor announces that they are headed for the place of the most horrible fear, for the place where “the herb of death” grows. For Esau himself keeps the qualities here that were attributed to him by tradition: those of the model of all the oppressors of Israel, sometimes identified simply with the archdemon Samael. Thus, Frank certainly does not persuade Jews simply to become Christians and — on the socio-political level — to become Poles. He is not only of the opinion that when entering the field of Edom they should remain apart, but he is also convinced that only then will their apartness be truly realized. This can be seen in that it is to his group that Frank applies the famous words of the prophet Bileam which in his version read as follows: “A nation will live apart and though it will already be among the nations it will not be counted as one of them” (113). So what is the ultimate nature of Esau and Poland in Frank’ doctrine? He says: “Know that there is Esau and there is another one before Esau, and there are two in every place, one for help, and one for damage. The herb of life is contained in the herb of death. But I

90

91

wish that soon we will be worthy to see the Esau for whom we are

headed, not the Esau who stands before Esau.” (188) This certainly implies that what Frank is truly heading for is neither Christianity nor Poland, both of which remain for him synonymous with the realm of the deepest fall. What he cares about is rather what is hidden in or behind them. Frank distinguishes between “the husk” and “the fruit” (213) covered by the husk; between the most hideous figures of error standing before the truly redemptive figure, between “the religion of Esau,” i.e. Christianity, and “the holy knowledge of Esau,” i.e. the secret, redemptive Gnosis, hidden in the realm of evil. An interpretation which would strictly separate the husk from the fruit, however, and hence soothe the paradox of the Frankist antinomianism seems to be highly insufficient. It is no accident that both the husk and the fruit bear the same name of Esau, and Frank is apparently amused by the madness of his formula that urges us to come to Esau, “but not the Esau that stands before Esau.” He is also able to express the basic principle of his dialectical theology quite precisely. Thus, he says: “For there are always two paths in one path” (149); or: “For there are always two figures in every place” (189); and finally, quite unambiguously: “In every place two things can be found, the thing itself and its oppositum” (233). What we are facing here is not so much the weak distinction between the path and the goal, as a radical superposition of both moments, of the lie of the oppressive Christianity and the truth of the liberating Gnosis; of Esau the Samael and Esau the Redeemer, as well as of Esau the Persecutor and Jacob in Disguise. On the level of the political project, what we are offered here is a dialectical superposition of the images of Poland as the House of Bondage and Poland as the Promised Land; of Abrahamic exodus as the final humiliation — for, as Frank says, “moving from place to place humiliates man” (217) — and the exodus as a movement toward redemption; of the exit from the ghetto as ultimate perdition and utter redemption; and finally of the complete blending with Polish society as ultimate exile — which

being a movement toward the sedentary annuls even the hope for the end of the nomadic suffering — and as the end of exile itself. There are always two figures in the same place: from now on we shall not clearly separate the fallen from the divine, but we shall superimpose the two images. But does not such a radical superposition have to lead to the final elimination of the dialectical paradox, to the elimination of the difference between “the thing itself” and “its oppositum,” and in Into Edom’s

the social dimension — to the total assimilation? Not necessarily.

Field, to Poland:

According to the idea that was introduced to the philosophical

Jacob Frank as

discourse by Gershom Scholem, and which may be found in the

Educator

writings of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor W. Adorno, the unredeemed world is separated from the Kingdom by only one, infinitely small shift: the Kingdom is only a bit and not totally different from this world.3 This principle is obviously deeply ironic and most certainly does not imply that our world is a very nice place. On the contrary, its immanent development will never lead to redemption, for it always misses the Kingdom by this “small bit.” Our world is both identical and not identical with the Kingdom, just as Poland is both the Promised Land and it needs an apocalyptic, infinitely small distortion which obviously, from the perspective of the Kingdom and the thing itself, is, in fact, an act of repair. We, Polish Frankists, are true to this idea. We are not very enthusiastic either about the individual qualities of our master and educator, or — which needs to be stressed — by his aggressive dislike of the world of meaning, his desire to substitute his own divine body for the space of words and his identification of the fulfillment of the Messianic promise with a fantastic erection of his own multiplied penis (116, 119). Yet in a natural, though conscious way, we treat his appearance as the origin of our modern existence and our contemporary identity. In other words, what we consider the fundamental event of

92

93

our constitution is the Frankist exodus from the name of Israel and

the entrance into Edom’s field, to Poland, which is both identical and not identical with assimilation, which is differentiated from it by an infinitely thin, empty slit. Unlike Gershom Scholem, we do not believe that the Frankist exodus resulted only in the flat and shallow world of the 19th-century Reform, which needs one more, dialectical effort that was made by the Zionists. As the House of Bondage and the Promised Land are two figures that stand in the same place, we, Polish Frankists, are not going anywhere. For us, the Frankist exodus has finally cancelled the simple geographic dimension of the Messianic idea, which depended on the clear-cut, ghetto consciousness of the eradicated people. This, however, does not mean that we have given up the Messianic idea itself. With a cut of Apelles, our condition sticks between the nomadic and the sedentary, between fulfilled and unfulfilled Messianism: we live immersed in the space and culture of Edom, but we do not accept it in the form in which it appears. We no longer believe in some place where the Kingdom shall be established, as we no longer believe in some historical moment in which the Redeemer will come, for Jacob Frank — without redeeming us — did lead us out of the space on expectation. After the coming of the last, false Messiah, we still live in the House of Bondage, but we are infinitely close to the Kingdom. Secretly, in our Messianic gestures, we distort and displace the surrounding world, for we know that the redeemed world is already here, but it always looks a bit different. Wholly disinherited, without our own rituals, clothed in Esau’s robe, we are devoid of our own identity. As our brother Jacques Derrida used to say, we have only one language — and it is not our language.4 Or, to paraphrase our cousin Giorgio Agamben, we might say that we, the Messianic remnant, can be found there where the Pole differs from him/herself.5 It is true, from a certain perspective, that we live in a state of complete enslavement, in—as our father Jacob says—

3 Cf. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 123. Walter Benjamin, “In der Sonne,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV (Frankfrut am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), p. 417; “Franz Kafka,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II (Frankfrut am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 432; Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006), p. 158; Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), p. 209. 4 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998). 5 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), pp. 53-58.

terrible “straits” (33). But it is only here that thanks to almost invisible distortions and displacements we find the herb of life. This minimal slit of difference which defines our existence and our insurmountable apartness even in the most complete assimilation, also gives rise to a peculiar freedom alluded to at the very end of the Frankist treatise. The Book of the Lord’s Words is appended with records of the dreams of the Founder who, in his cosmic vanity, believed that even his nocturnal fantasies must be of deepest significance. The very last of those Into Edom’s

records, an odd expression of the Messianic boorishness, claptrap, and

Field, to Poland:

fanfaronade, of a clownish, liberating sense of humor which distorts

Jacob Frank as

the world of seriousness and makes its chains weightless, reads: “In

Educator

the year 1769 in Częstochowa, on the 22nd day of Novembris, I saw myself in very thick chains. I was told that since the day I took this faith [i.e. Christianity] upon me, these chains have been put on me as well; if it weren’t for them, I would have destroyed the whole world. And I said: ‘When I want, the chains will fall off me. From that day on I shall eat bagels. Indeed [adds a believer who recorded those pearls of wisdom], he did eat bagels.”6

94

95

6 Księga Słów Pańskich, vol. 2, p. 150.

Things Collapse in the World Georges Bataille with Jacob and Justine Frank

Joanna Führer-Ha’sfari

Only towards the end of the Sabbatian movement do you find in Jacob Frank a strong personality whose very words exercise a considerable though sinister fascination. But this Messiah … is also the most hideous and uncanny figure in the whole history of Jewish Messianism. -- Gershom Scholem on Jacob Frank1

M. Bataille professes to wish only to consider in the world that which is Things Collapse

vilest, most discouraging, and most corrupted. … If I sometimes happen to

in the World

relate [Bataille’s] remarks, it is because they seem to implicate not only M.

Georges Bataille with Jacob and

Bataille, but also certain ex-Surrealists… -- André Breton on Georges Bataille2

Justine Frank The fans of Frank’s paintings and pornography must unflinchingly reckon with a hard, solid truth: the Jewish woman artist personified, in art and life, negative mysticism, a real spiritual hazard. Disregarding this fact is nothing but intellectual indulgence. I can attest first hand to Frank’s charisma and the powerful temptation (both academic and sensual) her work represents. Yet surrendering to this temptation is nothing short of cultural bankruptcy… -- Anne Kastorp on Justine Frank3

I . Ja c o b B a t a i l l e , Ge o r g e s F r a n k The three caveats quoted above are apprehensive by negativity and its power of attraction; the special ability of the trio at hand to lead others and mold minds. Jacob Frank was the maniacal yet dazzling messiah who pursued his discipline of redemption through sin not only to shocking moral transgressions, but also to seemingly negating Judaism itself by converting. Georges Bataille was the philosopher who set out to attack philosophy as a whole, not only negating its notions of hierarchy and form, but also christening his thought scatology and willing its textual sites to encompass pornography. For both, actual and 96

97

extreme violence played a crucial and disturbing role. Yet Frank and

Bataille seem to posit wholly different dangers; unrelated total attacks. What makes the case of Justine Frank, the Jewish-Belgian painter and pornographer, exceedingly odd, is that while some associate her negativity with Bataille’s, others believe her to be a practitioner of Frankism. Nothing illustrates this chiasm better than the career of Anne Kastorp, arguably the world’s leading authority on Justine Frank. Kastorp’s seminal essays championed the artist as a radical feminist who articulated her Jewish identity as a parody of religious and patriarchal preconceptions, and — much in the spirit of Bataille — of cultural discourses that forge and 4

impose notions of what a Jew or a Woman might be. But it was Kastorp who finally came to the conclusion that Frank secretly practiced Frankism, using Bataille as guise, much in the way her ancestor, Jacob Frank, advocated false conversion, to Christianity and Islam, calling the two religions slippers one has to put on in order to walk towards redemption.5 In other words: Justine Frank was hailed when perceived to be “dangerous” in the Bataille mold, but really dangerous once assumed a Frankist. There has never been a better time to probe the matter than the present. In January 2009, a retrospective of Frank opened in Extra-City, Antwerp (curator: Hila Peleg). Concurrently, my own translation to English of Frank’s only novel, Sweet Sweat (1931), was published in a volume featuring a biography of the artist and a scholarly essay on her work, by a man who seemed at times to have monopolized the dissemination of Frank’s estate, Roee Rosen. I wish to suggest, beyond important new literature that makes Rosen’s research obsolete, that there is something fundamentally misguided about Rosen’s approach to the problem of Frank’s positioning between Jacob Frank and Bataille. Here is what Rosen has to say regarding Kastorp’s ‘evidence’: [Kastorp] puts forward two arguments: first, that there is a substantial spiritual affinity between the artist and Frankism,

1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 308. 2 André Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” Manifestos of Surrealism, trans.: Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 181-182. 3 Anne Kastorp, “Surrealism’s Apparition of Messianic Evil, A Reconsideration of Justine Frank’s Art and Writings as a Modernist Incarnation of Eighteenth Century Jewish Esoteric Mysticism” (unpublished manuscript, 1997), p. 74. 4 Anne Kastorp, “Repulsive Beauty, Justine Frank’s Eroticism as a Feminist ProtoDeconstruction of André Breton’s Surrealist Tropes,” Sign & Seal, The Brown College Journal of Critical Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (East Orange, NJ, 1993), pp. 254-278. 5 Jacob Frank, The Books of the Sayings of the Lord, Hebrew translation by Fanja Scholem, §211.

98

99

and, second, that Frank was a descendant of the notorious mystic. I believe that Kastorp fails in both tasks. The explicitly blasphemous spirit of Sweet Sweat does not at any point disclose a coherent religiousspiritual program, to say nothing of a mystic or messianic bent.6 What I find striking here is the manifest need to divine right from wrong, and arrive at a solid truth, and with it cohesion, coherence, order and form, in stark contrast to the spirit of Justine Frank, Jacob Frank, and Bataille. All three, in their different ways, challenge and shatter such stable and hierarchic dicta. Rosen, who garnered his own image as a sly swindler by associating himself with Frank’s scandalous work, is revealed here as a closet conservative. In contrast to his attempt to discipline Frank and make her behave in an unequivocal fashion, I will demonstrate through certain motifs in her work that we should employ Justine as a phantasmagoric convergence of Black Messianism and radical scatology; the site where new hybrids are fathomed: Georges Frank and Jacob Bataille. These hybrids will be portrayed in detail in my forthcoming book, Le Bataille de Frank, for which a few brief, thematic sketches are offered here. I I . D o w nw a r d D i c t i o n a r i e s In 1927 Justine Frank rendered the Hebrew alphabet, transforming the letters into obscene figurines; she then proceeded to combine these letters into words in numerous pages of her Stained Portfolio (1927-1928), as well as in four gouaches entitled Alchemical Boards for the Study of Hebrew (1932). Each “word” is a little orgy wherein letters literally go out of their way to perform with each other. Frank’s orgy of letters has been widely understood as an assault on the Zionist revival of Hebrew. If we consider Benedict Anderson’s description of the crucial role played by the enforcement of a single language in imagining a nation, Hebrew is both the exception to the rule and its most compelling demonstration.7 For

6 Roee Rosen, “GlaatKosher Surrealist Smut: On Justine Frank’s Sweet Sweat,” in: Sweet Sweat, translated by the author (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 204.

while Hebrew was not a regional dialect preferred over others in the process of forging unity, but rather a dead language used primarily for religious rites and studies, its claim for indigenousness was crucial to the ideological framework by which immigrants from all over the world should converge to a particular place, that is, the biblical site where their

Things Collapse in the World Georges Bataille with Jacob and Justine Frank

“original” language was spoken. As is well known, the imposition of Hebrew after the establishment of the Israeli state has been aggressive and all-encompassing. Not only were Arab names erased from the map and replaced by Hebrew ones, but Jewish immigrants who worked in governmental offices were demanded to shed their ‘diasporic’ names and adopt Hebrew neologisms in their stead. Just as the Palestinians were willed gone not only by expelling them from their villages, but by reimagining their sites as biblical or Zionist, the traces of diasporic Judaism were meant to be wiped out by the power of new Hebrew names. That process was already well on its way in the Jewish community in Palestine of the 1920s and 1930s, when Frank devised her alphabet. In 1 00

1 01

her work, linguistic resurrection becomes literal: base animism.



Frank’s obscene words, however, operate beyond this context.

Seen together, these word-works add up to a dictionary of sorts, each term obtaining its “definition” (or, rather, demonstration) by the sexual acts of its animated letters. This, no doubt, is an anti-dictionary. Not only does each word lead downwards, to the genitals, its original meaning denied and defiled, it is also the comprehensive claim of a dictionary and its organizing principles that are travestied. The selection of words is limited and capricious; whereas certain words may lead us to assume reason and criteria by which they were chosen (Sex, Aura, Fear, Cross), others frustrate such attempts at establishing an order (Gardener, Gangrene,

Built,

Thanks).

Many

will recognize in all these traits an affinity to the collective dictionary published by Bataille in Documents, the

groundbreaking

journal

he

edited from 1929 through 1930. There, as well, the choice of words is impertinent, and structure is unstructured, willfully anarchic and incomplete. The task of such a dictionary was famously described by Bataille in his definition for formless: “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus Formless … [is] a term that serves to bring things down in the world.” This act of bringing down is set against the very goal of all philosophy, to impose a “mathematical frock coat” on the universe.8

While Jacob Frank did not author a dictionary, his

teachings are also set as an act, negating established meanings

7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 8 Georges Bataille, “Formless,” in: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 31.

and rational frameworks, employing some of the very traits shared by Bataille and Justine Frank. He posits “bringing down things in the world” as an explicit, destructive goal. His interpretation of the scriptures is based on the distinction between Torah de’Beriah (creation) and Torah de’Atsiluth, that is, the laws of messianic time that entail Things Collapse

the reversal of rational laws

in the World

as they have been understood

Georges Bataille

heretofore.9 But this reversal

with Jacob and

also substitutes coherence and

Justine Frank

comprehensiveness

with

an

intently non-complete, spasmodic system:

just

as

Bataille’s

dictionary is provocatively thin, so does Jacob Frank scandalously tell his believers that the numerous laws of rabbinical Judaism can be substituted by no more than five or six, and asserts that the entire prayer book can be had in “three or four words” (§209). Yve-Alain Bois pointed out that the non sequiturs that Bataille called “ink spots” and “quacks” fill his entire oeuvre and perform by their very style that “bringing down” of things in the world.10 Jacob Frank’s audacious persona is characterized by similar quacks, and with a strikingly similar aim: “to destroy all existing judgments and laws” (§397). Finally, the messianic downward dictionary is perpetuated by the negation of the Jewish model image of the scholar rabbi, with Jacob Frank boasting his ignorance time and again in a way that is no less than shattering in a tradition of spiritual leadership based entirely on learnedness.

1 02

1 03

I I I . Me d u s a a n d t h e A s s Justine Frank rendered her own face compulsively; certain sheets of the Stained Portfolio offer no less than nine such depictions. Yet none of Frank’s self-portraits adheres to the customary expectation that a portrait would convey a person and unravel an inner truth. Instead, Frank’s self-portraits are a series of disguises, a masquerade bent on the obscene. Most commonly, the artist’s head is either transformed into stereotypical antiSemitic depiction of religious Jews, or into a licentious Medusa whose snaky locks are penises (both circumcised and unscarred, incidentally). As I have noted elsewhere, the convergence of face and genitalia goes both ways in Frank’s work. In Sweet Sweat, the protagonist, Rachel, miraculously grows two supplementary vaginas in her armpits. A detailed description is then given of the cunts’ features in the best physiognomic tradition. The sex organs are not only endowed with a “character,” but are also observed to bear similitude to two historical women of extraordinary power, the empress Theodora, and the painter Elisabeth VigéeLebrun.11 The phallic coiffure crystallizes a main motif in Sweet Sweat: a female power marked by reversing the perception of the feminine as an absence, into an overly sexual abundance (three vaginas instead of one). This excess reverberates not only in the magical powers of the female protagonists, but also in persistent role reversal between men and women, and especially in an overflowing feminine desire that is at the same time irresistible and petrifying, divine and demonic.12 Jacob Frank allots a special place to supernatural androgyny and feminine power. For Frank, the third divine coming (after Sabbatai Zevi and himself ) is the virgin, whom, it is hinted throughout his writing, was to be none other than his daughter (but could we not fathom Justine Frank claiming that godly role for herself?). Frankist feminine empowerment is bound with

9 On the history and meaning of this distinction see: Gershom Scholem, “Redemption Through Sin,” in Studies and Texts Concerning the History of Sabbatianism and Its Metamorphoses (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1982), pp. 9-67 [Hebrew]; for a short English summary see: Rosen, p. 193, footnote 35. 10 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless’,” in Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 16. 11 For my discussion of Frank’s parody of physiognomy in relation to her description of vaginal face, see my televised discussion in: Roee Rosen, Two Women and a Man: Joanna Führer-Ha’sfari on Justine Frank (2005); for Frank’s armpit vaginas, see Sweet Sweat, pp. 133-135. 12 The clearest example of this sexuality is the figure called the animist, who rapes both men and women with her engorged clitoris, who uses her magic powers to animate both mundane object and religious articles so that they may partake in orgies, and whose body odor is literally petrifying.

a complex perception of both the divine spheres and the messiah himself as androgynous (harking back to the belief that Sabbatai, as well, was both a man and a woman, a claim Frank extends to King David).13 Within this paradoxical Messianism (and the paradoxical portraiture of Justine Frank), however, empowerment and denigration are mutually bound. The pubis as head — an image of seeing and blindness — is at once an excess of signifiers (the hair that is a sex Things Collapse

organ) and the negation of the head. And if such a negation is clearly

in the World

marked by Bataille’s image of Acéphale, than the images of the vagina

Georges Bataille

itself as a face are clearly related to the moment in which Simone, the

with Jacob and

protagonist of Bataille’s Story of the Eye, shoves Marcelle’s gouged out

Justine Frank

eye into her vagina. That eye then peers at the narrator “through tears of urine.”14 As Jacob Frank sees himself as a godly incarnation through his base acts, so Bataille writes on another of his female heroines: “No use laying it all up to irony when I say of Madame Edwarda that she is God. But God figured as a public whore and gone crazy.”15 Finally, one should recall that the Acéphale emblem, drawn by Andre Mason, is not only a headless figure, but also one that has a skull for loins: it has the genitals as face, and as the face of death. These heads, than, are just as related to Bataille’s paradoxical philosophy as they are to Frank’s religious teaching, and Bataille persistently emphasized the religious impulse of his erotic thought.

The seeming contradiction between Bataille’s materialism

and this religious spirit is explained in a short text Bataille dedicated to yet another lowly face: Gnostic images of figures with ass heads.16 Bataille clarifies that he is disenchanted with the percepts of Gnostic faith as such, comparing his interest to that of a psychiatrist in his patient. But what is pertinent is the oppositional stance of Gnosticism within a cultural epoch which had become ossified, centered on the dead letter, much like our own, according to Bataille. This opposition stands to readmit elements of power and violent agitation (darkness 104

1 05

and evil, Bataille emphasized, being not the absence of light and

13 For a discussion of these motifs see Rachel Elior, “Jacob Frank and His Book The Sayings of the Lord: Religious Anarchism as a Restoration of Myth and Metaphor,” in: Elior (ed.), The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 2001), especially pp. 514-536 [Hebrew]. 14 Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), p. 84.

the degradation of the good, but active, creative principles in themselves). This creative agitation finds its base expression in the adoration of the ass-faced god, the ass being “the most hideously comic animal.”17 The will of the Gnostics to practice evil so as to arrive at the good is of no use to Bataille, but that reversed adulation, set against contemporary notions of the elevated, is what he admires, and where he recognizes the base materialistic aspect of Gnosticism: “… materialism not implying an ontology, not implying the matter is the thing-in-itself. For it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with

15 Georges Bataille, “Madame Edwarda,” trans. Austryn Wainhouse, in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 155. 16 Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Visions of Excess, pp. 45-52. 17 Ibid., p. 46.

oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms that being.”18 Justine Frank’s self-portraits, then, clearly merge Bataille’s notion of base materialism with Jacob Frank’s Messianism. The face is an idol, a god and a self that is adulated as it is denigrated: a scatological manifestation. Frank’s latest works are sky paintings. But the clouds Things Collapse

in these skies are quickly revealed as scatological, genital faces as well:

in the World

their grinning mouths double as sperm jets ejected by two cloud-

Georges Bataille

creatures reminiscent simultaneously of anti-Semitic depictions of

with Jacob and

the Jew and chimeras of man and animal. But it is not only the clouds

Justine Frank

as figures that mire the sky; abstract, painterly gestures are tainted as well: in one painting drips of brown paint suggest the sky has been shat upon, while in the others the brown color scheme turns the sky itself into fecal matter (and here, the drips are pink, offering yet another reversal, as if the body itself lost form, turned liquid and splattered as drips). These scatological skies clearly echo a recurring motif in Bataille’s early writing wherein the sun, as the high symbol of knowledge, elevation hierarchies

and

cultural

is

demoted

into a “solar anus,” and elsewhere “a fecal eye.”19 Jacob

Frank

offers

a

scatological desecration of his own. Twice in his book Frank proudly recounts the following episode: he entered a synagogue 1 06

1 07

in Thessaloniki, raised havoc and threatened to destroy the building

if anyone dare pray. Then, he took off his trousers and sat with his bare behind on the holy Torah (§19, and again in §512). What is being reversed here is not only the entire world of the congregation, but also the image of the man of God — Frank himself. This is a self-portrait harking to Jesus entering the temple to overthrow the tables of the moneychangers (Matthew 21, 12-13); the liminal act of purification substituted by an anal performance.20 In fact, Frank’s narration of his own miracles reads like a programmatic reversal of the son of God. Whereas Jesus heals the wounded, creates food and raises the dead, Frank miraculously swindles and robs, copulates with witches and inspires terror, beats and kills. Most of these criminal miracles are performed for no apparent reason and with gleeful spite, and they are reminiscent of Sade in their relentlessness and wild imagination.21 The content of the miracles, then, is the negative of saintly magic, but the fact that the structure mimics what we know of the mythic molds of these deeds seems to implicate and expose the negativity hidden within them. Rosen claimed in his essay on Justine Frank that pornography and hagiography share a similar structure, both based on extreme, sensational bodily performances — torture in hagiographies, orgies in pornography — by which the subject as such is negated: the martyr has to die to be transformed into a saint; the copulating bodies are denied their subjective, distinct 22

humanity so as to be subjugated to desire as a pure principle.

By the same token, Frank’s horrendous miracles do not only reverse Christ, but also mirror the violent structure and rhetoric of the miracle (and of institutional religion). Bataille sees in Sade the operation of a pure principle of negation, by which the denial of others must also lead to self-denial.23 And yet, unlike Sade, Jacob Frank cannot be fathomed as a crystallized reversal. We witness, instead, a paradoxical coexistence of negation with a willful, deceitful parody, concocting Christian motifs with his

18 Ibid., pp. 49-50. 19 Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” Visions of Excess, p. 5; “The Pineal Eye,” Visions of Excess, p. 85. 20 Frank identifies himself first and foremost with the Jewish Patriarch Jacob, but associates himself with several other spiritual leaders, and returns to Jesus time and again. 21 Gershom Scholem noted an affinity between Sade’s thought and that of Frank without further elaborating upon it. See: “Redemption through Sin,” p. 40. 22 Rosen, pp. 185-186. 23 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 174.

own teaching, just as his private biography is enmeshed with religious mythology and ludicrous tales. It is not only the figures and the tropes that constitute this carnivalesque masquerade (reminiscent of what Salvador Dalí defined as “critical paranoia”), but the very structure and form of thought and teaching, undone not by destroying an image, a form, but by substituting it with a misleading, disorienting amalgamation of appearances — a crucial trait in the work of Justine Things Collapse

Frank.

in the World Georges Bataille

I V. Bl o o d R e l a t i o n s

with Jacob and Justine Frank

The penultimate scene of Sweet Sweat is arguably the book’s most scandalous. Rachel returns to her native shtetl, drugs her father, the synagogue’s treasurer and janitor, and weds him in an atrocious ceremony in which he is the bride and she is the groom. The father is anally raped and murdered by the daughter who then burns down the 1 08

1 09

entire village.

Incestuous mock weddings, often entailing gender reversals and followed by murder, are a recurring motif in Sade’s work, most famously in The 120 Days of Sodom. At the same time, it would be a mistake to read the scene as Frank’s variation of a Sadean theme. Whereas in Sade such rites are incorporated into the meticulously mathematical, machine-like working of desire, Rachel’s act is marked by its singularity. Indeed, the scene has an emotionally wrought air, different from the rest of the book (stylistically emphasized by the single, convoluted and breathless sentence that describes the deed). If we turn to Jacob Frank as we read this scene, we are reminded of his negation of the prohibition on incest, of scandalously choosing the synagogue as the setting for obscenities and, of course, of his relations with his own daughter. In Sweet Sweat, the debauched, gentile libertine Urdukas serves as rabbi in the wedding. Violation is thus multilayered, and is marked by elements of disguise, deceit, simulation — and, arguably, assimilation. The existential threat posited by Jacob Frank, after all, was exactly that: opting for Poland as the locus for messianic action (rather than the Holy Land), and encouraging apparent assimilation.24 In this game of deceit, fake convictions, and false conversions, identity is destabilized time and again: the messianic Frankist is neither a Jew nor a Christian, neither assimilated nor distinguishable from society. The Frankist is never truly him or herself, a symbolic creed of which Justine Frank is doubtlessly a devout practitioner. But beyond that, the bloodshed in Rachel’s wedding should remind us that in the history of Frankism lies the most chilling aspect: their involvement in the blood-libels against the Jews of Poland. Scholem asserts that the Frankists were coerced by the Polish inquisition to play the role that they did, which is foreign to Frank’s teaching.25 Regardless, the scene

24 On the place of “Edom”— Poland, for Frank—and its repercussions to a Jewish identity, see: Adam Lipszyc, “Into Edom’s Field, to Poland: Jacob Frank as Educator,” in this volume, pp. @@-@@. 25 Gershom Scholem, “The Sabbatian Movement in Poland,” in: Studies and Texts Concerning the History of Sabbatianism, pp. 117118 [Hebrew]; for other perceptions, such as Balaban’s, who suggests that the blood libels were the crux of Frank’s teaching, see: Rosen, pp. 198-199, fn. 41. 26 Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Matthews (New York: Urizen, 1978); Troppmann, the novel’s protagonist, relates the story to Lazare, a figure based on Simone Weil. The episode and its spiritual and erotic repercussions are thus clearly posited within the political and ideological polemics between Bataille and Weil in the 1930s. 27 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 137.

in Sweet Sweat may be seen as a codified rendition of this drama, bringing together the historical victims of the blood libels (members of the Jewish congregation, those holding the law of the father, who have been tortured and murdered), incestuous desire, and symbolic eradication.

There is an autobiographical episode in Bataille’s writings

that brings together incest with parental death: a description of the Things Collapse

distraught man masturbating next to his mother’s corpse. The scene

in the World

is recounted no less than four times by Bataille, twice, significantly, in

Georges Bataille

his novel Blue of Noon. Bataille maintains from his early recollections

with Jacob and

only moments of scandal and tragedy that are most often presented

Justine Frank

within works of fiction (erotic, scandalous fiction at that). In this sense these scenes can only frustrate an attempt at a cohesive, historically authentic self-depiction. Transgressions and self construction are given, rather, as contentious philosophical gambits.26 Bataille’s necrophilia was professed at that time. Yet (just as is the case with his scatological fascination), perversion is not celebrated for its own sake. Michel Surya comments that Bataille was not a libertine but a debauched man; that his sexuality, in other words, had nothing to do with the positive, accumulative quality of having pleasure, but with willful waste and loss, connecting the whorehouse to the abattoir, sexuality with encountering one’s pertinent death.27 Bataille’s fascination with the convergence of eroticism and human sacrifice had its most infamous expression in his lifelong obsession with the photos of the Chinese “death of a thousand cuts” execution. Many readers were disturbed by Bataille’s reflections on the condemned man’s expression while tortured as “at once ecstatic and intolerable.”28 But it is exactly that disturbance, that sense of tension and irresolution that Bataille insisted upon. It will also not do to suppress or slight Bataille’s suggestion to the members of his secret society, Acéphale, to engage in actual human sacrifice so as to create a modern myth. Even

110

111

as with Acéphale, Bataille seemed to have strayed from the political

engagement of the radical left with which he was engaged shortly before (with the Contre-Attaque group), and even as his shocking search for extreme experiences of religious, sexualized sacrifice exposed him to accusations of a fascist tendency. Bataille understood his own call to violence, bloodshed, and myth as oppositional to that of fascism; while in fascism there is a subjugation to a unity (related to God), his was a call for a “… bi- or poly-cephalic society that gives the fundamental antagonisms of life a constant explosive outlet.”29

It is the ever present tension between myth, fiction, and reality

that is persistent and pertinent here. What collapses, what is brought down, is not only idealism and nationalism, philosophy and order, but the preconceived divisions that constitute the self by mitigating authenticity and deceit, real transgression and imagined speculation, laughter and tragedy. The self itself is the impossible.

Justine Frank, in a way, commits incest and parricide with

both these fathers, Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille. The realms of this family drama shift between politics and ideology, religion and eroticism, the private self and self-reinvention. Jacob Frank offers no less than three complementary interpretations, each scandalous in its turn, to God’s words to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country” (Genesis 12:1). First, he says, the believers should follow this dictum and roam from one place to another so as to experience profound humiliation (§217); then, he asserts, deserting “thy country” means no less than leaving behind “all the laws of the religion you were planted in” (§403); and finally, there is the literal call to go to foreign lands (§788), which, for Frank, would also entail a change of religion, conviction, name, and identity. If I began by presenting Justine Frank’s alphabet as an anti-nationalist contention, it should be kept in mind that such was the radical suggestion of both Bataille and Jacob Frank: an absolute anti-idealism and anti-nationalism for the former, and a scandalous negation of Jewish separatism for the latter. The way both figures are reflected within Justine

28 Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), p. 206. 29 Georges Bataille, “Propositions,” in Visions of Excess, p. 199.

Frank’s work is doubtless contorted and twisted. Uncomfortably, this hall of mirrors is neither a parody nor true faith. But what Justine Frank doubtlessly insists upon is that she herself possesses these fathers. She reinvents them. She copulates with these fathers, breeds them, and thus conceives herself. Justine Frank, in that sense, is her own grandmother, just as I, who see her as a mother to be violated, am my own grandmother, a point I already made in 2003, a couple of Things Collapse in the World Georges Bataille with Jacob and Justine Frank

112

113

years before my untimely death.

Should We Take Performance Seriously?

Gavin Butt

I I was a little apprehensive. In July 2008 the London-based artist Oreet Ashery volunteered me to take part in a dramatic reading that formed one aspect of her performance–in-residence at the Whitstable Biennale. My anxiety was rooted in the fact that I have always felt more at ease in my habitual performances behind a lectern or in a seminar room rather than in anything resembling an act of “treading the boards.” This, of course, is a fairly common discomfort felt by Should We

many non-professional actors when faced with the prospect of being

Take

dragged into the performance limelight, of being exposed and made

Performance

vulnerable to the eyes of others — especially in the interests of what

Seriously?

we have come to know, and perhaps fear, as “participation.” For this was indeed a participatory play reading to include not just myself, but a small group of other art punters alongside the artist and one of her working collaborators. But I’d be lying if I didn’t now rather shamefully admit that I was also rather looking forward to what we might call my Whitstable “debut.” This might have had something to do with how appealing its prospect was to my personal and professional vanity. Ashery had invited me to play the role of “Director,” which, as the biggest part in the play, I secretly and hubristically thought was some unspoken recognition on her part of my abilities to carry off such a role, and, further, perhaps even acknowledgement of my authoritative status as theorist of performance art. The play was to be centered on the life and loves of a 17th-century religious figure called Sabbatai Zevi, who developed a following in the Middle East and Europe after claiming to be the Jewish messiah. Rejected as “false,” if not mad, by the orthodox institutions of Judaism, Zevi became renowned for his Kabbalistic mysticism and generally heretical beliefs and actions. He became infamous for performing various strange acts and rituals including levitation and dressing up a large fish like a baby and putting it in a cradle, the latter reportedly

114

115

because of Zevi’s belief in astrology and that Israel would finally be

redeemed under the sign of Pisces. To the consternation of some of his followers, he also rather sensationally converted to Islam towards the end of his life. This apostasy led other Jews to follow suit and there are still a small number of his followers in Turkey, known as the Dönmeh community, who today observe Jewish rituals but are outwardly Muslim. He was also renowned, and roundly criticized for being a sexually transgressive figure. Zevi was reputedly protofeminist in his desire for women to have equal access to the scrolls of the Torah, and was rumored to be homosexual, especially in his relations with the theologian known as Nathan of Gaza, who first recognized Sabbatai as the messiah in an ecstatic vision. Israeli-born Ashery’s whole exhibit, The Saint/s of Whitstable, was devised to mine the controversial history of this Jewish figure, and to bring his disputed image to life for a contemporary audience. This puts her project, to some degree, in step with 20th- and 21st-century Jewish scholarship, including that of Gershom Scholem, Jacqueline Rose, and Eli Shai who have variously revisited Zevi and his legacy to explore the messianic roots of contemporary Zionism and to render visible the repressed queerness within certain mystical cultures of Judaism.1 But, crucially for my purposes here, Ashery is not an academic but a performance artist. She is interested in some of the things that such writers are interested in — most notably in Zevi’s transgressive Jewishness — but not in the manner of the sober and considered scholar. This brings me back to my part in the play: upon my arrival at the performance space in Whitstable, I quickly came to realize that my apprehension and egocentric hubris were both markedly out of kilter with the humble ethos of Ashery’s performance. The initial signs weren’t exactly propitious for any kind of grandiose routine. For a start it was a rather slow day in Whitstable. It was a weekday, and it was raining. Aside from the six performers (including the artist and her collaborator, myself, a friend, and two other volunteers), our audience comprised a curious passerby

1 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 16261676, trans. RJ. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975); Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2005); Eli Shai, The Messiah of Incest: New and Uncensored History of the Sexual Element in Jewish Mystical Messianism (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Publications, 2002) [Hebrew].

and the sole Biennale helper who had set up the camera to document our performance. None of this, however, seemed to matter to our motley little company. It quickly became apparent that the skills and competences associated with conventional theatrical performance, of naturalism and convincing character portrayal, for example, were a complete anathema to the makeshift aesthetics of Ashery’s amateur

116

117

dramatics. Given this, an audience hardly mattered either. The artist herself appeared dressed in a green head-wrap or turban, heavily bespectacled and with evidently false moustache and beard, as if Groucho Marx had found Mohammed in some unspecified Muslim sect. Her compatriot, Andrew Mitchelson, in green vest and pants and with green eye shadow and lipstick to match, invited us to put on whatever green item of clothing was strewn about the performance space (green being a historic Muslim color of respect). Then we began. The play was about a theatre group — a Director, an Assistant Director, and a handful of Actors to be precise — who workshop a play about Sabbatai Zevi. It tells various stories about Zevi’s life in the manner of “rehearsals” for what is imagined to be some later performance “proper.” Each of these rehearsals purports to bring Zevi’s life to the stage. The dramatization here is deliberately crude in its attempts to imagine, for instance, the personal life of Zevi in his relations with his presumptive lover, Nathan, and wife Sarah. Ashery boldly utilizes the incongruity of a 21st-century intimate vernacular to imagine the sexual life of her historic subject (“Darling what did you do today?” Nathan says to Sabbatai), and is part of the generally irreverent way in which the artist “queers” her subject here. Alongside scenes of this nature, the character of the Director also calls upon his/her Actors to re-enact selected bizarre and ritualistic episodes from Zevi’s life. For instance, in performing how Zevi’s followers are reputed to have gone into near-epileptic fits in his presence, the Director prompts the cast by saying, “This is a good point for a little warm-up exercise … please walk around and touch people, and as soon as you touch someone, he falls to the floor and starts shaking his whole body like a Zombie.” During our performance, a number of our troupe dutifully followed this direction and, with varying degrees of aplomb, shivered and wobbled as they hit the ground. At another point in the play the cast perform a Kabbalistic “Tikkun” ceremony — a ceremony of healing — by holding hands

around a candlelit table; at yet another, an actor gets on to all fours and becomes a horse in order to restage Sabbatai’s circling of Jerusalem on horseback, a reputedly transgressive act since it was forbidden by Islamic law for Jews to ride in the saddle. All of this play-acting within the play only served to underline — and perhaps give even greater license to — the horsing around (if you’ll forgive the terribly bad pun) of myself and others in taking up our roles within the play reading. Personally I labored to perform what I imagined to be a rather Should We

commanding “Director,” though I didn’t try particularly hard to do so,

Take

or to develop my character beyond this admittedly basic premise. I

Performance

imagine, in comparison with the brio and gusto of Mitchelson’s

Seriously?

performance as Nathan, that I appeared quite flat. But I’m pretty convinced that at least some of my other co-performers were flatter. Even Ashery’s performance seemed pretty blasé, I thought. There was also much hilarity, a lot of flubbed lines and confusion — as you would expect from people reading their roles on first sight of a script — and a general informality that I can only describe as a “making do” with whatever poor performances we managed, or felt able, to solicit out of each other. Does this mean we didn’t take our task seriously? Perhaps. But then it was clear from the outset that Ashery’s performance space wasn’t solicitous of any kind of high-minded bourgeois seriousness. From the caricature-type cartoons of the play’s main characters adorning the rear wall to the ramshackle fisherman’s hut in which it was housed, and in which the artist lived for the duration of the Biennale, it all looked pretty offbeat. Indeed what I find interesting about Ashery’s The Saint/s of Whitstable is that it provides an occasion to reflect upon what, if anything, might be gained by dwelling in the levity of such seriously compromised performances. Or, to put things slightly differently: what might be the agency in not being completely serious, in not applying oneself with absolute earnestness and zeal to the matter

118

119

at hand? In my participation in Ashery’s play, for example, what are we

to make of the degree of lightheartedness with which I undertook my role, the “idleness,” even, of my performance? Might it be possible, even desirable, to prize apart such non-serious modes of behavior — both light and idle — from embedded and ingrained understandings that identify them with negative virtue: specifically with a lack of substance and value, and a general lack of efficacy or consequence? Certainly this separating unserious acts from active agency is more or less explicitly thematized in the text of Ashery’s play, when the Director reprimands one of the Actors for railing against what is taken to be the silliness of some of Sabbatai Zevi’s acts and the injunction to re-enact them: “Remember,” the Director says, “ Sabbatai was called a fool … and look what he achieved.” Of course this just begs the question, what did he achieve exactly? How might the fact that orthodox Rabbis refused to take him seriously — dismissing him as mentally ill and deranged — have had any bearing on his agency in the world? And in what ways might the failure to solicit respect and serious recognition from figures of power and authority actually be a desirable thing? These are the questions that Ashery’s The Saint/s of Whitstable poses through the other dimension of the work in which the artist sets about re-enacting some of Zevi’s more bizarre acts in the mundane spaces of Whitstable. In each case the artist performs as Zevi, accompanied by one of her team of collaborators. These acts

included fasting whilst shopping for individual items for a meal one at a time from supermarkets and fishmongers in the town centre, and then cooking and eating the meal under a tent on the seafront; the binding of Ashery’s arm to her female compatriot Dalia Neis with green twine outside the fisherman’s hut (this was a roundabout reenactment of the sacrilegious same-sex act Zevi was purported to have undertaken with a man wearing phylacteries — a kind of Judaic form of worshipful bondage); and the re-enactment of Zevi’s transgressive Should We

performance with a fish and a pram in a car park.

Take

In all of these instances the performance is staged for its immediate

Performance

audience of local people, and challenges them to make sense of what

Seriously?

is presented to them. Each act is styled very much as performance “intervention,” as an “in-your-face” intrusion into everyday life. This serves to highlight the extra-ordinary nature of Sabbatai/Ashery’s performances by their marked differences from, yet similarities to, more run-of-the-mill activities like shopping, lazing in the sun by the seaside and taking the baby out for a stroll. In this way Ashery’s interventions or confrontations — call them what you will — expressly provoke their audiences into a response. You might even say Ashery dares her spectators to take seriously what they are being presented with, to wager that what they are seeing might be something more than a crackpot performance. Or, more to my point here, perhaps the wager is that there might be something more to a crackpot performance than is commonly supposed. Such a challenge might be taken up as an invitation to participate, to explore that “something more” by joining in — as did, for instance, three men and a young boy who were sufficiently seduced by the apparent absurdity of Ashery’s seafront act to spend a considerable amount of time helping bind the arms of the artist and her female helper with a degree of purposefulness and resolve. Such “purposefulness,” however, is rendered difficult to read here. Did the men snatch a happenstance opportunity to enjoy

1 20

1 21

the erotics of female bondage? And, if so, what of the theatricalities

of beard and turban? What of the possible confusions of gender and religion: of masculine and feminine, Muslim, Jew, and even Sikh? What of the inescapable connotations of white men “restraining” two figures dressed in presumptively “Muslim” green, one of which is of indeterminate Eastern appearance, especially in an age of Terror and Abu Ghraib? Is it even possible to read the men’s agency seriously in such grave and psycho-sexual terms given that their playful actions involve copious amounts of garden twine on as inauspicious a stage as the seafront of a small north-Kent town? Which brings me to perhaps the most difficult aspect of Ashery’s work to write about: that alongside its rather playful and participatory DIY aesthetics and its self-conscious re-enactment of bizarre, even ridiculous acts, it tackles rather grave and serious issues of the contemporary moment. In what ways might the work’s lack of seriousness be generative in addressing such issues? In provocatively appearing before a group of youths hanging around a car park, boldly kissing a fish dressed in head-wrap and beard, the artist goads her impromptu audience into making sense of what they see. It is a deliberately outlandish and outré act of appearance that is redolent of 1990s gender-fuck performances, especially in its transgressive undermining of clear categories of identity; in this case of gender and religion. Even to those who have any familiarity with the complex history of green turban wearing — which tend to be worn only by those regarded as descendants of Mohammed in most Muslim faiths, but are sported by others in some Sufist orders — there is little that is very specific in Ashery’s sartorial appearance to signal that this is an intentioned performance of a specific, identifiable religious identity … let alone how one is to make sense of the highly unorthodox act of kissing a fish. Indeed her — or should I say his? — action and appearance is scandalously unyielding to recognition. It doesn’t add up. And yet it is precisely this indeterminate appearance that draws the boys into excitedly throwing a range of insults by way of response

to the artist’s performative incursion, perhaps as part of some unconscious bid to contain and denigrate its unruly otherness. “How much you getting paid to do this?” ventures one. “You ain’t right in the ’ed!” another accuses. “You fuckin’ freak!,” “How fuckin’ sad is that?!,” “Dirty!.” In watching this exchange as recorded on the artist’s own video documentation, Ashery’s intervention here has the interesting effect of turning my attention to the boys’ would-be attempts to mark and Should We

malign her outlandish performance as freakish and sexually perverse.

Take

Through their stark exclamations they betray a white, “civilized”

Performance

normalcy sustained through rejected identifications with neo-

Seriously?

Orientalist constructions of a “dirty” Eastern sexuality that, as Jasbir Puar has argued, is also the presumptively “queer” sexuality of the stereotyped Muslim terrorist.2 There is nothing more serious than insult, one might say, and Ashery is certainly solicitous of insult. But the seriousness of such insults, and their purchase on the body/bodies that they purport to name and harm, is, if not exactly turned into comedy, then leavened somewhat by being revealed here as imaginary projections of chauvinistic misrecognition. Here, as elsewhere in her oeuvre, Ashery performatively solicits her audiences’ stereotypical fantasies of otherness in a bid to make them vivid for self-reflection, and to drain them of some of their power and credence in the process. As Rachel Garfield astutely wrote on Ashery’s earlier work, in which the artist performs herself as a stereotype of Orthodox Jewish masculinity, she dresses up in the “generic” tropes of orthodoxy, which makes her actually something of an “oddity.” In paying little attention to the detail of specific dress codes of different orthodox factions, she “signals that her interest lies in addressing those who don’t know the difference.”3 In this way, as with the 1990s queer rallying cry of “We are your worst nightmare!,” Ashery’s point, I take it, is to make herself over into a non-serious fantasy image of otherness;

1 22

1 23

to embody normalizing and already denigrated fictions of an unruly

queerness. This is precisely what lends her performance alter-egos an especially high degree of unreality, and which may tempt us into dismissing them from the outset as failed or unserious performance manifestations. But what I find perhaps even more interesting is that, even as Ashery’s youths feel compelled to hurl insults, a number of them feel equally driven to reach for their camera phones and document the artist’s performance. So, even as they demonstrably attempt to ridicule and vilify Ashery’s Sabbatai re-enactment, they are, at the same time, held in thrall to it as a remarkable spectacle. Their impulsive drive to record it here testifies to the power of the artist’s performance. All of this I take as an interesting insight into the risky strategies of what we might call Ashery’s deliberately compromised performances; risky because they derive their power precisely from a flirtation with the negative judgments that threaten to defeat them. II My account of Ashery’s work thus far will likely call up many a similarity with other less-than-serious manifestations from the histories of performance art. The play reading may call to mind, as Dominic Johnson has suggested to me, the excessive and trashy productions of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous in New York in the 1960s, with its flippant tone and fondness for comic improvisation, if not for its more marked style of camp and drag. Ashery’s own performative manifestation may be similarly redolent, though not identical to, many other queer performers who theatricalize the markers of identity from contemporary US drag-king comedian Murray Hill to 20th-century figures of the European avant-garde like Claude Cahun and Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven. But Ashery’s re-enactments of Sabbatai Zevi’s mystical acts may also, and perhaps more intriguingly, throw interesting light on something as canonical as Yves Klein’s 1960

2 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007). 3 Rachel Garfield, “Oreet Ashery: Transgressing the Sacred,” accessed on http://oreetashery.net/.

Leap into the Void, reminding us of the importance some artists place on undermining, or avowedly faking, their very own claims to be taken seriously. It is now art historical legend that Klein’s apparent daredevil act of artistic transcendence was revealed, by the artist himself, as an act of photographic trickery. It’s as if Klein is saying, “Look, this is not all as it appears but, even so, humor me: try and imagine if it were?” It asks us, in the face of evident manipulation of the image, to suspend our disbelief, and our customary judgments of what we take to be Should We

valuable and true, in a bid to endorse his madcap vision. Not to take it

Take

seriously exactly, or to dismiss it out of hand, but to idly entertain its

Performance Seriously?

dubious conceit. Ashery’s The Saint/s of Whitstable self-consciously uses the figure of Sabbatai Zevi to reflect precisely upon the questionable status accorded to performance art actions such as Klein’s. Ashery is very much interested in the anachronistic perspective of viewing Zevi as a performance artist avant la lettre, whose ritualistic and mystical acts in 17th-century Judaic and Islamic cultures may shed light on the role of performance artists in the modern West and contemporary global art world. Ashery has told me that Klein’s Leap was very much on her mind as she read about Zevi’s claims to have levitated. She was also interested in parallels between Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility from the late 1950s and early 1960s in which he sold empty city spaces to gallery dealers in exchange for gold, and Zevi’s handing over of earthly kingdoms to friends and family through the simple act of his own declaration. Of course such Duchampian pronouncements were not recognized by those outside of Zevi’s circle of believers, just as Klein’s nomination of mundane space as artistic “Voids” would likely not mean anything to those beyond the confines of the Parisian art world, and even within that world there were those who saw in Klein a joker and a charlatan. In this way, we might say that a certain strand of performance art has achieved much by presenting itself as

1 24

1 25

evidently compromised spectacle, as a dubious or doubtful form of

appearance — and that its power has resided in making it difficult, if not impossible, for spectators to take it seriously. I find it ironic, therefore, that generally speaking the status of performance in the contemporary visual arts world has arguably shifted in the past decade or so from that of marginal and minor activity to a practice centrally positioned within curatorial practice and critical debate. We have come so far from Michael Fried’s infamous 1967 attack upon the “theatricality” of so-called literalist art, and the major museums’ exclusive focus upon the art object, such that Peggy Phelan might find it difficult to repeat her characterization of performance as “the runt of the litter of contemporary art.”4 Since Phelan made this claim in 1993, the art world has moved markedly to embrace performance — and to take it seriously, if you will — through museum exhibits, live art seasons and scholarly symposia. Major exhibits such as Out of Actions at MoCA, Los Angeles, in 1998; Live Culture and The World as a Stage at Tate Modern, London, in 2003 and 2007 respectively; Art, Lies, and Videotape at Tate Liverpool in 2004; and Double Agent at the ICA, London, in 2008 are just a handful of museum and gallery shows that have variously showcased a heterogeneous field of performance activity through live acts, installation work, and documentation. But it is not only museum and galleries that now prominently feature performance as a practice worthy of “serious” exhibition and debate, but also that increasingly dominant and widespread forum for contemporary art, the Biennale. At the modest 2008 Whitstable Biennale at which Ashery premiered her Sabbatai Zevi-related work, the program focused almost exclusively on performance, including the contemporary work of Ashery and others, alongside a film screening of historic performance documentation by the likes of Bruce Nauman, Roman Signer, and Joan Jonas in a bid to map out genealogies for present practice. This historical reappraisal of the place of performance in art history within Biennale culture is also evident in larger Biennales such as the

4 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 148.

1 26

1 27

one in Sydney in 2008. With its focus on the theme of “Revolution,” it also incorporated a lot of photo and filmic documentation of classic performance art — from Yves Klein and Saburo Murakami to Yoko Ono and Chris Burden — in order to trace generative models for what might be considered the “revolutionary” aspects of contemporary work. You might say: so what? Isn’t this a good thing? Isn’t it high time that visual arts institutions shed their anti-theatrical and antiperformance prejudice and, instead, accord performance art and its practitioners the critical seriousness and respect that they deserve? But this is my question: do they, indeed, deserve such accord? Should we take performance seriously? One way of answering this question would be to say, yes, some performance art — such as some types of body art — do deserve such a response, principally because they can be seen to actively solicit it. A sober, if not somber, reflection seems called for when faced with the almost literally grave presentations of body art; of bodies in a near-deathly tableau. Indeed, such practices — with their emphasis on the staging of actual risk to the artist — have latterly become established as “proper” objects of museological attention through exhibitions of video and photographic documentation, such as the Kramlich collection.5 Other performance practices, however, may be viewed as less solicitous — and less receptive — of such serious attention. Indeed some might be seen as inimical to seriousness as such. As Charles Ludlam, the figurehead of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, said in a 1978 interview: “The whole idea of seriousness is awful to me — it sounds like something imposed from without. It doesn’t really imply gravity or profundity; it implies decorum, behaving yourself, and that’s what I don’t like about it.”6 I am drawn to thinking like this: to thinking of seriousness as an “imposed” form of cultural etiquette or behavior. Ludlam’s insight here is actually very instructive in beginning to theorize

5 David A. Ross (ed.), Seeing Time: Selections from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2000). 6 Gautam Dasgupta, “Theatre and the Ridiculous: A Conversation with Charles Ludlam,” in Bonnie Marranca & Gautam Dasgupta (eds.), Theatre of the Ridiculous (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1998), p. 81.

seriousness, which, given the groaning weight of all our critical theory bookshelves, is something we do surprisingly infrequently. In general terms, we probably all feel we know what it means to prize something by taking it seriously: i.e. to value and give credence to it; to confer value upon it by suggesting that, for example, it is worthy of our time and attention, or that it requires a just and respectful attitude from us. In the context of the specialized endeavors of cultural criticism, we might broadly label this just and respectful attitude “Leavisite” to signal Should We

the importance of close scrutiny, rigorous judgment and sustained

Take

reflection on now received understandings of critical seriousness in

Performance

the English-speaking world. To characterize seriousness in such a

Seriously?

way is to signal the historic association of such values with bourgeois protocols of literary appreciation. Such forms of purportedly “proper” reading were championed by the Leavises, particularly by Queenie Leavis in her 1932 study Fiction and the Reading Public, and separated from the presumptively easy and distracted reading pleasures of what she snobbishly referred to as “the herd.”7 Ludlam’s comment about seriousness being about “decorum,” and about “behaving oneself”– as well as his accompanying desire to behave badly — have to be understood in the context of such deeply entrenched models of class propriety and cultural moralizing. To be an artist like Ludlam who was interested, as he once put it, in “unhinging the pretensions of serious art” is thus to set one’s face against a formidable and predominant compulsion in artistic and intellectual life to fall in line with the largely puritanical values of seriousness.8 This compulsion to be serious is harder to resist, however, than you might think — even though we may not consider ourselves as elitist or archly discriminating as the Leavises. For all too often we simply reiterate the values of “seriousness” idly and tacitly by dint of the ritual and more unthinking judgments we make, for example, in assessing the merits of a work of art, or

1 28

1 29

perhaps recommending someone in a professional context as a serious

and committed individual. We often draw upon the behaviors and languages of seriousness almost without thinking, without any critical consideration for the ways in which we perpetuate them through our actions. Indeed we tend only to become conscious of seriousness when we feel that we fall short of it — perhaps when we feel, or even fear, that we are being too flippant or trivial, for instance, in addressing the subject at hand. But even then, such a consciousness rarely gives rise to any sustained reflection on seriousness as such and instead usually makes us act in order to bring us back in line, to recommit ourselves “properly” to the serious import of whatever it is we feel we have done a disservice to. I point all this out in order to propose a Foucauldian understanding of seriousness as a normative technology of conduct, one which is also very much in line with Ludlam’s thinking. In thinking seriousness as a Foucauldian technology of the self, we can highlight the routine ways in which it operates and makes subjects of us, principally, by compelling us to act — and act seriously — in the face of those things that we take to be important to us. It takes hold of us precisely as we mark the value of those things that we hold dear. We become serious about someone or something when we signal the depth of our commitment to them, and the profound importance that they hold for us. But what if seriousness doesn’t “really imply gravity and profundity” as Ludlam suggests? What if, instead, seriousness is as much about — or even more about — the perpetuation of certain forms of cultural relations, of certain attitudes and ways of being? Is being serious just a way, then, of reproducing seriousness

7 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), p. 196.

itself? This is the broad thrust of argument in a much overlooked

8 Dasgupta, p. 77.

and insightful essay by the late Allon White from 1983, in which

9 Allon White, “The Dismal Sacred Word: Academic Language and the Social Reproduction of Seriousness,” LTP: Journal of Literature, Teaching, Politics, 2 (1983), p. 9.

he writes: “Seriousness always has more to do with power than with content. The authority to designate what is to be taken seriously (and the authority to enforce reverential solemnity in certain contexts) is a way of creating and maintaining power.”9

It is the power of seriousness itself, and the manners and languages of those groups who would claim seriousness for themselves, that are maintained in such a self-perpetuating technology. Viewed from this vantage point, the serious attitude, purportedly clueing us in to the presence of something grave and significant, serves in actual fact to reproduce the hegemony of serious culture as the place where value and importance are established. What Ashery’s work proposes instead are alternative possibilities Should We

for generatively acting and thinking at odds with serious culture.

Take

It exhibits instead a perverse faith in the unserious, and in the

Performance

possibilities and pleasures that it harbors. For instance, there is no

Seriously?

danger of Ashery’s performance manifestation of Zevi appearing to us as a figure solicitous of serious commitment. We are not asked to believe in Zevi as the messiah, or to marvel exactly at his supposedly divinely inspired acts and behaviors. Or, at least, this is the way in which I take it; just as I am not inclined to believe in Klein’s mystical leap. True, this is partly because of my secular outlook, and my lack of belief in Zevi’s Kabbalah convictions — or Klein’s Rosicrucianism for that matter. It is also because I know Ashery is no believer either, and that her interest in Zevi is mobilized more by historical curiosity about the perversity of Jewish history rather than by faith or belief. But regardless of this lack of faith in Sabbatai Zevi as religious leader — on the part of both myself and the artist — I am interested in how we, and perhaps other participants/observers of Ashery’s work, remain in thrall to him nevertheless as a figure of cultural and political possibility. His compromised manifestation in The Saint/s of Whitstable stands as desirable fiction that merges bodies and identities that appear almost too toxic to associate with contemporary cultural imaginaries: the Muslim, the Jew, and the queer. In all his/ her unreality as performance spectacle, Sabbatai-Ashery stages a relation with an almost unimaginable history — and even possible

1 30

1 31

future — in which the limiting horizons of the contemporary political

real are momentarily suspended, if not erased. All of this, I suggest, is particularly attractive in the grave context of the contemporary world order, in which unquestioning belief and commitment to fundamental principles of faith — in religious or secular ideologies — play a major role in bringing about global geopolitical conflicts and wars. You could say, therefore, that Ashery offers us a way of valuing alternatives to such a serious world without having to commit to them. You could equally say she’s simply suggesting that we lighten up. Whichever formulation I plump for, each feels strangely inadequate to me as I come to close this essay, and somehow misses the very thing that I have been trying to put my finger on: namely, the ways in which we might queerly prize something in not taking it seriously. This, I have been trying to suggest, may amount to a kind of trashy ethics or aesthetics in idly or playfully entertaining what it is that performance proposes. Indeed, I’ve been trying to say, it is precisely through such an ethics that performance might matter to us; as minor, fallen spectacle. And herein might also reside its largely unacknowledged power; one which may prove perversely important and sustaining for a queer life. But, perhaps inevitably, in writing this essay I’ve been all too incredibly serious about this. So much so, I fear I may have betrayed my subject by simply being too po-faced about it. So I’ll leave off now, hopefully at some distance from where I began with my confession of hubris, by throwing in my lot with the followers of Sabbatai Zevi. Could I be considered a contemporary follower of Zevi, a queer kind of follower — of him as manifested by Ashery’s performance? His devotees have been characterized by one scholarly source as a motley gathering of “everyone who was in distress and trouble and vain and light persons.”10 “Distress” and “trouble” is a bit strong. But “vain” and “light”? Moi?

10 Scholem cited in Rose, p. 2.

1 32

1 33

The Untimely Messianism of Two Fredericks

Tomasz Kozak

1. A Pole for Christ? In December 2006, just before Christmas, the Polish public was informed about a strange initiative by a group of MPs. Parliamentarians from three parties (PiS [Law and Justice], LPR [League of Polish Families], PSL [Polish People’s Party]) submitted a draft of a resolution to the Speaker of the Seym (Lower Chamber of the Polish Parliament) intended to proclaim Jesus Christ King of Poland.1 This event provoked The

a short-term and superficial but violent media storm, during which

untimely

the majority of observers trivialized the symbolism and profound

messianism

significance of the MPs’ gesture. The trivialization of the essence of

of two

the matter might have been connected, inter alia, with the number of

fredericks

MPs who signed the draft of the resolution (forty-six). Had the draft been signed by forty-four, commentators would have noticed that the fundamental feature of the situation had been defined by a spirit which should have been dead long ago but which had suddenly revealed its problematic vitality to Poles. This surprisingly vigorous spirit turned out to be the spirit of Messianism. The emanation of this specter is a problem which is neither trivial nor unambiguous. Its presence may appear to be obvious in the sphere of the imagination haunted by millennial phantasms, but the ostentation with which this apparition returns to the agora of late modernity evokes highly ambivalent feelings — it amuses and instructs, but at the same time it arouses disquiet. The more so since this spirit animates not only the marginal gesticulations of second-rate politicians, but it also finds expression in the mainstream of political discourse — in the writings of philosophers who shape (or at least did so yesterday) the most influential paradigms of Polish conservative thought. At the same time as the group of somewhat insignificant MPs was presenting its involuntarily humorous draft of the Messianistic resolution,

1 34

1 35

the

opinion-forming

Teologia

Polityczna

[Political

Theology] published a serious monograph showing Messianism as

a phenomenon inspiring significant redefinitions. In this instructive publication, thought up as a peculiar memento for “mockers of Polish Messianism and Missionism,”2 there is an essay by Zdzisław Krasnodębski entitled Teologia polityczna Adama Mickiewicza [Adam Mickiewicz’s Political Theology]. Analysis of the text is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that the fact which seems most important is that Krasnodębski not only gives an account of Mickiewicz’s project but also — or perhaps above all — treats it as something fundamental, thanks to which Polish culture, built upon a specifically understood Romanticism, will be capable of designing a “Republican” alternative to the spiritually barren model (and one that thirsts for transcendence) of liberal democracy. As Krasnodębski writes, in contrast to “the contemporary notion that there exists only one universal form of a state — liberal democracy — Polish Romanticism believes in a multiplicity of such forms.”3 One of these is Christian “Republicanism,” faithful to the principle that “God acts in history through people, particularly great ones.”4 For Mickiewicz, the ideal embodiment of such greatness was Bonaparte, almost identical to Christ: Napoleon understood and expounded the divine nature of Christ better than any theologian. Because the Savior did not come into the world to theologize but to act; and after Christ there was no-one among Christians who acted more, worked more, realized more than Napoleon.5 In his Teologia polityczna…, Krasnodębski admittedly did not make the figure of a Republican savior concrete but this does not mean that such a figure did not exist at all in his writings. On the contrary, it exists in a form that is extremely concrete, in the figure of Jarosław Kaczyński. In his article entitled Polityk z powołania [A Politician by Calling], Krasnodębski admittedly does not give the Prime Minister at that time the features of Christ but he does

1 “Posłowie: Jezus powinien zostać królem Polski,” Rzeczpospolita, 20 Dec. 2006; “Projekt uchwały sejmu: Jezus królem Polski,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 20 Dec. 2006. 2 A. Cichocki, D. Karłowicz, “Mesjanizm — jednostka chorobowa czy wielkie wyzwanie,” in Teologia Polityczna 4 (Autumn 2006 – Summer 2007), p. 9. 3 Z. Krasnodębski, “Teologia polityczna Adama Mickiewicza,” in ibid., p. 233. 4 Ibid. 5 A. Mickiewicz, Wykłady o literaturze słowiańskiej, vol. VII (Lwów, 1900), p. 86.

give him the characteristics of Kmicic. In the para-Sienkiewiczian perspective, Kaczyński appears as an uncompromising warrior who “lives in conflict like a salamander in fire.”6 Obviously, what is at stake here is not a private matter but res publica. Kaczyński, after all, is not fighting for himself (or in his own interest) but for Poland. But this Poland is not the current Poland — it is rather a peculiar utopia: It is not the current inhabitants of Poland and not the current Polish elite [emphasis mine — TK]. This Poland is “deep inside” and, when descending into it, we should not refrain from expressing our contempt for the shell, even if it is in a drastic manner, as recommended by the bard.7 A mocker might say that Krasnodębski and Kaczyński are 6 Z. Krasnodębski, “Polityk z powołania,” Tygodnik idei Europa, Dziennik, 22 Sept. 2007. Sienkiewicz used exactly the same words to characterize Kmicic: “a flesh and blood soldier” for whom “the roar of cannons, the herds of bullets, destruction, death — seemed to be his normal element, like fire for a salamander” (H. Sienkiewicz, Potop (Warsaw, 1964), vol. II, p. 214). In passing, it could be added that Kmicic also has a Christ-like aspect. It appears in his conversation with Jan Kazimierz. Babinicz, wounded by the skeptical attitude of the courtiers to his account of the defense of the Jasna Góra Monastery, declares: “I do not want a prize, I want to be believed — let the doubting Thomases feel my wounds!” (ibid., p. 359).

descending into depths that are indeed chthonic and that turn

7 Cf. ibid.

not a cudgel. One can, therefore, give a sigh of relief, particularly

8 Cf. Mickiewicz, Wykłady o literaturze słowiańskiej, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 20.

since the “orthodox” “Messianists” lost the election and the

out to be precipices of the grotesque inhabited by gnomish caricatures of Caesarean-Napoleonic colossi. What is interesting in all this is that Krasnodębski, immersing himself in these abysses, forgets about the emblematic figure of the “Republican” contempt for the elites, namely, the “centurion” accompanying the Messianic politician. This is strange because this “centurion” is one of the key personifications of the Mickiewiczian spirit. The author of Polityk z powołania ought then to summon him, the more so since the severity of today’s “centurion” does not bring the “Republic” any discredit. This “legionnaire” admittedly despises “eggheads” but, despite this, is not as “uncouth” as the “Roman centurion” from Prelekcje paryskie [Parisian Lectures], who resolved the most important political matters with the use of a simple stick (to drill the pupils of Archimedes).8 In contrast to his ancestor, the late-modern “centurion” is a civilized soldier and direct brutality is alien to him — for his polemics he uses a pen,

politics of agony has been replaced by the politics of “love,” or

at least tolerance. So, for the time being, we are not threatened by the sword of Christ and even the Republican pens have also lost their sharpness... 2. A Pole an Antichrist? (Frederick a Pole?) Taking advantage of the benefits of the forgiving atmosphere, we have to ask provocatively whether the Messianist tradition in Poland has to be the indivisible property of Christian conservatism or whether the possibility exists that this tradition does not have to be so much taken over by the conservatives but rather taken away from them — to tear this weapon from their hands and to use it for radically critical actions? This question should be accompanied by another, no less challenging: namely, can the phantasm of power, golden freedom and holiness play an emancipatory role and liberate latemodern Poland from the “positive” authority of the “theological” superstitions of the “official” church and the “state” religion? If so, to what degree is the uniquely understood Messianism capable of helping in this? To answer these questions and to take advantage of the benefits of Messianic aid, we by no means have to return to Mickiewicz — what is more, perhaps we must not return to him at all. After all, the Mickiewiczian dream about power was in the end an “anti-philosophical” phantasm of a Christian sacrifice,9 and the certain kind of respect which the bard initially nurtured for personal freedom (pushed to the “furthest borders,” namely to the private veto challenging the “res publica”10), became transformed into fascination with the strong individual, understood as a ruler personifying the authoritarian sacrum. Someone who (like the author of this text) maintains a distance from this fascination and at the same time perceives the critical potential of Messianism, should turn towards a different “Polishness” — one that is anti-Christian, anti-state,

9 “Wherever did you read that the Son of Man was a beggar? Or that His language was not the language of force [emphasis mine – TK]? Or that he did not chase the Pharisees from the Temple?” (Mickiewicz, Wykłady o literaturze słowiańskiej, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 56). “If books were to be the means of knowing the Messiah, the Pharisees would have known Him first; whereas those best suited to know Him were among the poorest on the earth and in spirit. But I say once again, this knowing, the moment of knowing, rewards all the hardships and sufferings of earthly life. This moment allows us to feel our future existence, which no definitions or treatises will ever allow us to understand. This moment fills us with the spirit of force and sacrifice” [emphasis mine – TK] (ibid., p. 163). 10 Cf. ibid., vol. III, pp. 70-72.

11 F. Nietzsche, Listy [Letters] (Warsaw, 2007), pp. 344, 345. 12 F. Nietzsche, Jutrzenka [Daybreak] (Warsaw, 1907), p. 220.

and redefining. Its particular origin may be found in Nietzsche, who in one of his letters thus described his background: “My forefathers were from the Polish nobility (Niecki); it seems that this type has survived well despite three German

13 Ibid., p. 219.

“mothers.” Abroad, I usually pass for a Pole; even this winter the

14 Cf. ibid., pp. 217, 218.

list of guests in Nice defined me comme Polonais. They tell me

15 Ibid., p. 217. What is interesting is that Mickiewicz wrote in a similar way about the Germans. In Wykłady o literaturze słowiańskiej [Lectures on Slavic Literature] there is a characteristic description of a German lecture hall. According to the bard, anyone who entered there “found himself among heads weighed down with formulae, gloomy, hanging down towards the ground, as if in a field of poppies.” (Mickiewicz, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 31). The German spirit is still ponderous, duped, dry, and passive. Its antithesis is the proud and volatile esprit of the French who, in response to “an honest, enlightened and strong word” invariably offer a typical gesture, which is an “involuntary movement of the right hand, as if reaching for a weapon, which means that this is a nation that has been created for action” (ibid., p. 32). Mickiewicz is convinced that it is precisely this movement that “reveals what is most profound, most divine, in the

that my head appears in Matejko’s paintings.”11 This pride in his Polish genealogy arises directly from the radical criticism of “Germanness,” which Nietzsche identifies as a docility worthy of contempt. “Submissiveness, overt or covert obedience — that is the German virtue,” we read in Daybreak.12 In Nietzsche’s opinion, the quintessence of “German perception” is the credo, “Man must have something to which he can be absolutely obedient.”13 In the German character, submissiveness towards rulers and “official obligations”14 is strictly connected with “ponderousness, doggedness and lengthiness,”15 and, as if this were not enough, with a predilection for “superstitions.”16 According to the author of “The Antichrist,” such a superstition is obviously Christianity and the greatest sin of the Germans consists in — apart from “cowardice” — the fact that “they also have the most slovenly, the most incurable, the most irresistible kind of Christianity on their consciences,” namely Protestantism.17 Nietzsche even states that if we do not deal with Christianity, it is the Germans who will be to blame.18 The above context sheds light on one of the most puzzling letters written by Nietzsche, which was written just after he had finished writing “The Antichrist” and just before an onset of madness attacked the philosopher at the beginning of 1889. This letter, addressed to “the illustrious Poles,” consists of only four short sentences so it is quoted here in full: “I belong to you, I am even more a Pole than I am God, I

wish to bestow honors on you such as only I can...I live among you as Matejko...” 19 This text seems to be so absurd that it is easy to read it as an expression of growing madness. The apparently most nonsensical figure in this letter, Matejko, signifies, however, not nonsense at all, but sense itself. Sense, let us add, that is in the highest degree Nietzschean. After all, Nietzsche impersonating Matejko is a personification of the spirit which, when painting the triumphs of “illustrious” (i.e. insubordinate20) Poles, shows “Germanness” in a state of decline and, moreover, reveals the submissive (“The Prussian Homage”) or humiliated (“The Battle of Grunwald”) wickedness of Christianity itself. For if the Germans personified the Christian “flaw,”21 then the defeat of the Teutonic Order appears as a metaphor for the longed-for defeat of the cross itself, which Nietzsche regards as a distinguishing sign of the “most subterrestrial conspiracy that had ever been organized — a conspiracy against health, beauty, soundness, courage, goodness of the soul, a g a i n s t l i f e i t s e l f...”22 So why did the author of “The Antichrist” sign his last letters, including the one quoted above, “The crucified”? Could it be because the “extinguishing Antichrist” was beginning to identify himself with Christ?23 In answering these questions, we must remember that in his last letters Nietzsche identified himself not only with “the crucified” but also with Dionysus. He says that he had been hanging on the cross but now comes as “victorious Dionysus who will prepare a great feast on earth.”24 It ensues from this that his Messianism did not stand under the sign of Christ but under that of Dionysus. In this context the “crucifixion” (carried out beyond “good” and “evil”) means a paradoxical kind of joyous “tearing apart,” thanks to which there emanates from this man a sacred, intoxicating essence. In “The Dionysian Dithyrambs,” the secret of “bliss” depends after all on

character of a human being” (ibid). 16 Nietzsche, Jutrzenka, op. cit. (n. 12), p. 219. 17 F. Nietzsche, Antychrześcijanin [The Antichrist] (Krakow, 2000), p. 84. 18 Cf. ibid. 19 Nietzsche, Listy, op. cit. (n. 11), p. 374. 20 The opposite of “illustriousness” for Nietzsche was “unillustriousness” regarded precisely as the need to subordinate oneself. Such “unillustriousness” was personified by “Eastern women,” who “regarded punishments and being held under lock and key as signs of their husbands’ love and regretted it if these signs were not there.” (Nietzsche, Jutrzenka, op. cit. (n. 12), p. 77). 21 “I call Christianity the one immortal flaw of humanity” – wrote Nietzsche at the end of “The Antichrist” (Nietzsche, Antychrześcijanin, op. cit. (n. 17), p. 85). 22 Ibid, p. 85. Spacing by the author. 23 Some believe just this. Among others is Gustaw HerlingGrudziński, who wrote in a novel entitled Gasnący Antychryst [The

“Tearing to pieces the god in man / as well as the sheep in man / and laughing while tearing.”25 The inspiring paradoxicality of the Nietzschean discourse appears at the moment when the spirit, which is intoxicated (and intoxicating) and torn apart (and tearing apart), turns out to be both a critical spirit — ”mining and undermining”26 and “tearing apart,” and not only to “intoxicate” but also to criticize, that is in intoxication (and not in The untimely

dupedom) to undertake redefinitions. The spirit of just such criticism is the source of liberating laughter and invigorating joy.

messianism of two fredericks

3. A Pole a Frederick? The critical spirit of tearing joy was revived in a radically (anti-) Polish form in Gombrowicz, who took over the predilection for ecstatic laughter,27 disobedience and “immorality” from Nietzsche, understood as a defiance of the “inviolability of morals.”28 The Gombrowiczian figure could repeat the Nietzschean definition of a “free person” with impunity: A free person is an immoral person, since in everything he wishes to depend on himself and not on tradition: in all original states of humanity, “evil” meant as much as “individual,” “free,” “willful,” “unpredictable,” “incalculable.”29 For Nietzsche the ideal of freedom is defined by the postulate nil admirari, the imperative of “skepticism towards everything and everybody” and the obligation of disobedience.30 The contradiction of these ideals is the par excellence “German” maxim: admirari id est philosophari.31 Nietzsche identifies disobedience with “Polishness,” which is why he wrote of himself: “I am even more a Pole than I am God.” The situation is somewhat different with Gombrowicz and his attitude to “Polishness.” The author of “Ferdydurke” expresses individual freedom through an affirmation of the emancipation

1 40

1 41

potential of “privacy” and, thanks to this, is “a Pole” in the Nietzschean

sense — he defies submissiveness towards repressive tradition. At the same time, however, Gombrowicz’s Nietzschean “Polishness” is fundamentally “anti-Polish” — it constitutes an antithesis to the pious (or sanctimonious) “Poland,” which “has to be overcome because it is not in a state to ensure for Poles any kind of full value.”32 As Gombrowicz states, “It is not right for a Pole to have to sacrifice his personal development, his humanity, for the sake of Poland.”33 The question of sacrifice is one of the fundamental issues in Messianism. In this context, we have to remember Nietzsche’s attitude to the problem of sacrifice. As we know, it was ambivalent. The author of “Daybreak” regarded the sacrifice ethos as barbaric atavism and stated that “The morality whose measure is sacrifice represents a half-savage stage of development.”34 Being contemptuous of “the moral of sacrificial animals,” he directed words to Christians that today’s “mocker of Polish Messianism” could direct to, for example, the “God-fearing” and “decorous” heirs of Mickiewicz’s “theology”: Sacrificing yourselves with enthusiasm and making victims of yourselves, you are intoxicating yourselves with the thought that you have become united in this way with the divine or human power to which you are sacrificing yourselves: you are

extinguishing Antichrist] (taking advantage of licentiae poeticae) that in his “pre-death moment” Nietzsche “pointed his finger at himself and murmured from beneath his drooping mustache, in Italian, un povero cisto” (G. HerlingGrudziński, Opowiadania zebrane [Collected Tales] (Poznań, 1991), p. 162). 24 Nietzsche, Listy, op. cit. (n. 11), p. 373. 25 F. Nietzsche, Dytyramby dionizyjskie (Warsaw, 1905-06), p. 9. 26 F. Nietzsche, Jutrzenka, op. cit. (n. 12), p. 1. 27 Crowned with intoxicating cackling, Trans-Atlantyk [TransAtlantic] was of course the “crazy child of a drunken Muse” (W. Gombrowicz, TransAtlantyk (Kraków, 1988), p. 141.) 28 Nietzsche, Jutrzenka, op. cit. (n. 12), p. 29.

delighting in the feeling of your own force, again confirmed by

29 Ibid., p. 17.

the sacrifice. In essence, your sacrifice is only seeming, you are

30 Cf. ibid., p. 220.

merely transforming yourselves with this thinking, into gods, and you revel in your divinity.35 However, Nietzsche, on the other hand, perceived and appreciated the value of sacrifice and evaluated the voluntary sacrifice positively (not duped by collective illusions) of an individual who with a (self-)aware gesture rejects the sacrifice decreed and enforced by the state: The more the law loses its power, allowing monarchs and

31 Ibid. 32 W. Gombrowicz, Testament (Warsaw, 1990), p. 29. 33 Ibid. 34 Nietzsche, Jutrzenka, op. cit. (n. 12), p. 233. 35 Ibid., p. 229.

36 Ibid., p. 298. 37 W. Gombrowicz, Pornografia (Paris, 1970), p. 109. 38 Fryderyk’s “privacy” can also be interpreted in other, somewhat Anti-Nietzschean categories. This refers to categories of a specifically understood Socratism. According to Kierkegaard, a significant aspect of Socratism is the demon of privacy. Under its influence, a critically disposed individual becomes someone who “strictly sets in opposition the subject and the country and its morality” (S. Kierkegaard, O pojęciu ironii [On the Concept of Irony] (Warsaw, 1999), p. 157) and on principle enters into conflict with the “state religion” (ibid., p. 156). Fryderyk carries the clear hallmark of Socratism understood in this way. He possesses the features of Socrates above all because his actions are subject to two cardinal accusations which were formulated in the indictment directed by Athens against the philosopher. As we remember, Socrates was accused of a) not recognizing the gods acknowledged by the state and introducing a new deity, and b) deluding and even demoralizing young people. Since an important determinant of

states to sacrifice the individual (in legislature, military science etc.), the higher the worth of voluntary sacrifice must rise in value.36 In this context, how does Fryderyk [Frederick] appear in Pornografia [“Pornography”]? Undoubtedly he takes on Nietzschean characteristics. First of all, in one of his letters he presents himself as “Christ, spread out on a 16-year-old cross.”37 He is, therefore, “crucified.” Except that his “Golgotha” is by no means connected with “God and Country” martyrdom. On the contrary, it constitutes its denial. The “16-year-old cross” is not an instrument of torture but an instrument of pleasure. This instrument is Henia, “crossed” or more accurately “mated” with Karol. With the help of such instruments, Fryderyk wins and plays out (stages) his “Dionysian dithyrambs.” In the face of this, the question arises as to whether this “crucified” demiurge is the “Antichrist.” Undoubtedly not in the popular sense — after all, this is no common god of “evil.” If he is “evil,” then it is only in the Nietzschean understanding — as a person who is “individual,” “free” and “willful.” In a word, as a radically “private” individual38 who not only does not act pro bono publico but in fact conspires against it. This is how Fryderyk acts but, despite this, he is not Satan — ”he has in himself, however, something of a director, or even a chemist, who combines people among themselves and tries to create from them an alcohol of new charm.”39 The “crucified” Fryderyk is, however, sometimes more than just a “chemist” — he also becomes an ironic incarnation of a criminal Messiah tempting others with a chalice of Dionysian wine. This wine — the “alcohol of new charm” — is in “Pornography” a catalyst of transmutation, thanks to which Poland, being hitherto the “Christ of nations,” changes into a Poland which no longer wishes to be the church of victims tied

with the reins of obedience in a God-fearing harness but which desires to be transformed into a community of sacrificers — into a “sensual quartet,”40 no longer running along the line of commandments but along “the line of titillations.” The Adam and Eve of this anti-Christian and “anti-Polish” community are Karol and Henia and their demiurge is Fryderyk (who, in contrast to Nietzsche, prefers being a god than a Pole). Fryderyk’s community experiment can be read as a striving for the establishment of a new church, being an esoteric “interpersonal” church, a non-Catholic (desecrating rather than adoring the victim) and a non-catholic one (designed for a few depraved chosen ones). The “interpersonal” games of “the crucified” have in all this not only a positive (foundation) dimension but also a negative (sabotage) one — ultimately they aim at the creation of a perverse “resistance movement” sabotaging the (arch-)Polish “morality.” In this context, the “theatrical rehearsals” demoralizing Karol and Henia (just like the games with the imprisoned Józek) probably ought to be interpreted in the categories of a peculiar education — as a demonic variation on the theme of “clandestine classes,” consisting of a series of para-theatrical erotic classes in the place of academic lectures. As is known, this pedagogical-Messianistic project ends in “catastrophe,”41 or “non-fulfillment.”42 This happens because Fryderyk’s Messianism is in the highest degree untimely. At the moment when the action of the novel takes place — in 1943 — the catastrophe of the “pornographic” mission ensues from the fact that the paradigm of Polishness, instead of creating a “sensual quartet,” is still forming “gray ranks” of victims. Even today, the morality of “sacrificial animals” shapes the models of Polishness. This may be seen, for example, in the discussion about the theses of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz who,

Socratism is the struggle against the “state religion,” Fryderyk’s attitude ought to be regarded as Socratic — the aim of his actions is ultimately the destruction of the “state religion” and the enthronement of a new deity. The means leading to this aim are the deluding and demoralization of young people. In Pornografia the analogue of the dethroned religion turns out to be the “God and Country” religion of sacrifice and national heroism (personified by Amelia and Siemian), whereas the deity which takes the place of the “state” gods is radical privacy, sanctified by the allure of amoral youth. Fryderyk’s Socratism is connected with his dialectic and thus it situates the protagonist outside the area of Nietzschean discourse – this problem, deserving of a separate treatise, does not, however, fit into the confines of this text. 39 Gombrowicz, Testament, op. cit. (n. 32), p. 86. 40 “We were walking slowly in the twilight – Fryderyk, I, Henia, Karol – like some strange erotic combination, an incredible and sensual quartet” (Gombrowicz, Pornografia, op. cit. (n. 37), p. 39).

in his book entitled Kinderszenen [Scenes from Childhood], regards the sacrifice of the Warsaw Insurgents as the foundation of Polish identity. The “God and Country” Messianism, therefore, still has an influence on our mentality. Apart from this, however, there also exists (or at least could exist) a critical Messianism (Nietzschean-Gombrowiczian) — the question is only whether its “hidden” (or potential) presence is capable of arousing the Polish imagination The untimely messianism of two fredericks

144

1 45

to make significant redefinitions.

41 Cf. ibid., p. 163. 42 Gombrowicz, Testament, op. cit. (n. 32), p. 87.

Adam Mickiewicz: Masochism and Messianism

Monika Rudaś-Grodzka

In his Paris lectures, Adam Mickiewicz described the mythical attributes of the Slavic nation, notieable among them was his argument on its passivity. The nation, he asserted, was passive: “It settled down on a huge tract of land, yet remained quite insignificant in terms of literature, politics, as well as history (the history of civilization in general, and the history inscribed by buildings and written texts specifically).”1 In his following lectures, this passivity was given a new Adam

meaning, which differed from the traditional sense of the word. The

Mickiewicz:

nation, he maintained, possessed its future and purpose hidden in

Masochism

its soul. It was a polemic with a negative stereotype and a popular

and

etymology that Slavs were slaves; Mickiewicz tried to resist it in the

Messianism

intellectual field. Most thinkers believed that this negative distinction was unjust, for it targeted the dignity of all Slavic nations and cast a false shadow on their past. Modern scholars held that this prejudice had deprived Slavic people of their sense of identity and independence. Czech scholar Szafarzyk, Polish historian Joachim Lelewel and many others rejected this humiliating etymology, and tied it with political and social attitudes concerning the Slavs’ inferiority and subordination. Ultimately, Mickiewicz agreed with the historical verdict regarding the slave nature of the Slavs. For him, it was a turning point in his idea about the destination of the Slavic nation. The poet lent it a new meaning, adding a Messianic overtone; by creating his own version of “masochistic” Messianism, he connected historical experiences with current events. He shifted the historical fact of the loss of independence to the sphere of political religion, an idea, which was confirmed by Polish national literature. Mickiewicz thus emphasized that the Messianic succession of the Revelation was the Polish literature’s unique trait. One should look at Messianic masochism through the prism of literature, as it allows the reader to set it at the junction of unconscious common fantasies and newborn national ideology. According to

1 46

1 47

Richard Krafft-Ebing2, masochism is not only a sensual experience,

but also a play of the subject. In this case, it is a drama of a common, “national” self. The Polish nation is a complex creation; it formed this identity by putting greater constraints on itself. On the other hand, the sense of guilt, defeat, repulsion, calamity, and its inferiority complex were difficult to endure. One may say that our national consciousness contracted a “fever” as a consequence. According to Isaiah Berlin3, this fever was the result of wounds and some form of collective humiliation. One cannot think about the Polish nation in contemporary terms since it leads to misconception of the historical process of the nation’s origin. In the 19th century, the nation was not anonymous or amorphous. Beginning with Kazimierz Brodziński, Polish poets and philosophers treated the nation as a living organism (a body). Later on, the nation became akin to a deity to be celebrated and revered; they saw the divine in the nation. In Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), let us bear in mind, Mickiewicz depicted the nation as a group of concrete people, with a history and individual names. This is evinced by the jail scene and the scene of the Warsaw literary salon. Boys and young men, arrested or awaiting trial, are the embodiment of the whole nation. The named individuals thus set up the collective — the Polish nation. A similar process may be seen in the circles of Polish émigrés in Western Europe. It was a fact that all people knew each other personally, by name. One may assume that this situation influenced Mickiewicz, who regarded the nation as a living organism. Mickiewicz presented the nation as an extraordinary personality, destined to commit heroic deeds and to bring about redemption. He considered the nation as concrete people whom he knew. Notably in his mind, they united to form an image of the savior and the victim at the same time. The nation, he maintained, was to act like the great personalities of the past — an allegory typical of Mickiewicz’s imagination. One man should represent the whole nation: “This idea of Messianism leads to

1 Adam Mickiewicz, Works [Paris lectures], vol. X (Warsaw 1955), pp. 176-177. 2 See: N. Mansfield, Masochism: The Art of Power (London 1987); Richard Krafft-Ebing, Psychopatia Sexualis (Arcade 1998). 3 Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Warsaw 2004), p. 215.

one man. Polish Messianism assigned the mission to our nation. And only one man would be the agent of the nation.”4 The common national self has the features of individual subjects. Mickiewicz did not lose his obsession with redemption. He argued that Poland needed a strong man: “We had not a man.”5 The Russians worshipped one man, one idea, one dynasty. The Polish nation wanted one man to be their agent. Adam

To a large extent, Mickiewicz’s lectures became the foundation

Mickiewicz:

of Polish collective imagination. They inspired fantasies and dreams

Masochism

of power. One may even go as far as to say that they became sources

and

of megalomania, of our superiority complex. In this instance, one

Messianism

cannot imagine the myths of literature without the political context. For megalomania and self-humiliation were two sides of this fantasy about great power. The connection between masochism and Messianism is exemplified in the lecture delivered on January 17, 1843, in which Mickiewicz prophesied the new knowledge about the mission and suffering of the Polish nation.6 He presented Slavs by two imaginary figures: the figure of power and the shape of submission. The Slavic masochism that had emerged in history was the type of national imagination very closely connected with literature and mythical thinking. To be precise, literature formed the paradigm and the confirmation for the Slavic duality – the desire of power and powerlessness at the same time. Simultaneously, power and weakness are the manifestations of the subject’s dream about the self. The subject plays the role of slave and lord, victim and oppressor.7 Theretofore Mickiewicz disregarded history, omitted new research in the field and scientific exploration, ignored historical truth; he presented the genealogy of Slavs and their destiny in mythical form. In his fantastic narration, Slavs seemed to be omnipresent. They were a necessary element for world history, and were to be found in all the

1 48

1 49

genealogies of the world’s nations.

Mickiewicz argued that Slavs founded the world’s first empire: the state of Assyria. They governed Persia, Dacia, Media, Thrace. Slavs should be seen not only as the necessary element in the history of every nation, but also as a fundamental principle of history. The forms of this principle were changeable and were understood only by God and the Chosen. It is a secret language of God, incomprehensible to contemporary men, but it may be revealed in the future. Mickiewicz regarded himself as a chosen one, hence a being assigned to explain the hidden meaning. In his opinion, the nation’s history began with great victories. The nation conquered and governed the whole of Asia; subsequently, everything changed, and they became slaves of all nations; finally, they became the victim. This was the masochistic frame of the Polish nation’s suffering. Mickiewicz further challenged the ancient statues presenting Slavs as slaves, attesting to a collision of European artistic sentiments with the experience of the Slav’s humiliation. He deemed the statue of a dying gladiator as the most beautiful and perfect, since it presented the Slavic sacrifice. Mickiewicz maintained that the Gaul foretold the destiny of the Polish nation. Mickiewicz tried to connect two different strategies of narration. The first was a heterogeneous structure of the invisible state of Slavs. This narration supplied mutually exclusive, dichotomous dictionary representations, whereby Slavs were aggressive and gentle, good and bad, cowardly and bold, brave, disobedient and submissive. This type of narration resembles a never-ending story. Mickiewicz used a great deal of association, passing fluently from one story to another. On the other hand, he was obviously conscious of the obscurity and inexplicability of that narration as he translated it into understandable categories, ideas, and terms, appealing to

4 Mickiewicz, Works, vol. X, op. cit. n. 1, p. 415.

the aesthetics of power and violence. His lecture was a “play” on

5 Adam Mickiewicz, Works [Paris lectures], vol. XI (Warsaw 1955), p. 15.

dramatic tension. Like a director with unusual skill, Mickiewicz

6 Ibid.

intensified the feelings of his students/audience by concentrating on the physical and mental dispositions of the victims — the Slavs.

7 See: Mansfield, Masochism, op. cit. n. 2.

The poet regarded the ancient sculptures as monuments of the Slavs in the sense that the ancient art revealed the historical destiny of the Slavs. History was seen from the perspective of violence, thus allowing concentration on the experience of the violated Slavs (enslaved Slavs). Every monument described by Mickiewicz symbolized a different aspect of national identity. This lecture was a type of masochistic play, and should be viewed Adam

through the lens of the philosophy of history. Mickiewicz wrote a

Mickiewicz:

screenplay about the martyrology foretelling the Polish nation’s

Masochism

Messianic revelation of its destiny. In the theater of auto-violence,

and

the aggressive and violent side of the enslaved Slavs is presented, as

Messianism

in Szlifierz’s description8 but not only. There were several different types of slaves. One was the slave-caryatid, intended for heavy work and enduring inhuman exploitation. In this fictional space of ancient culture, different kinds of power and violence intermingled with each other. One may compare the description of the dying Gaul with the last scene in this masochistic spectacle where the tension between the extremes of violence weakened, and ultimately power and powerlessness canceled out one another. The author’s imagination puts itself into an inevitable test, that is, a trial of synthesizing contradicting necessary components of this drama: power and powerlessness. The only site of this contradiction was the sphere of the sublime in which suffering became the highest value. According to Mickiewicz, it was the only way to freedom for his nation and to the salvation of the world. Mickiewicz described four monuments as the categories of violence. The first was a non-existing statue of Nebuchadnezzar, ostensibly representing the power and violence of the “Assyrian Slavs” in the past. This statue was the dream about the union of Slavs in Europe, a depiction which may be deemed a prologue to the history of the powerless Slavic Poland. Mickiewicz’s next hero was the Scythian (Szlifierz), who

1 50

1 51

personified power and rape — a necessary stage of history. This

barbarian held a knife, and was prepared to kill the victim. The revenge lay in the victim’s escape. In effect, he was inwardly violated, but he was unaware of it. He did not know his fate. He would be violated and be made submissive in the future. His cruelty, ruthlessness, and despotic nature were insignificant, and it was rather something else. He was ready to devote himself to a cause. Mickiewicz thought that the smile on his face foretold future events, and that smile had a Messianic air. The next heroes were the Dacians on Trajan’s Column.9 The bas-relief presented prisoners of war. These statues were prevalent in Rome for the simple reason that many prisoners of war were Slavs. For Roman artists, Slavs were the quintessential models of prisoners of war, and the prototype of physical power subjugated by spiritual fortitude. Mickiewicz maintained that the Dacians were beautiful, strong, muscular, but everyone regarded them as slaves, hence they walked with drooped heads and their eyes cast down. Their hands and feet were not bound. Wild captured beauty. Mickiewicz perceived the caryatid as symbolizing the submission of the Slavic nation.10 The caryatid was the slave-man, but as an architectural element, the support presented women rather than men. According to the poet, this caryatid symbolized the utmost submission of the Slavic nation — a man without morals, deprived of will, of motion, of life. He had become a part of the building. One may conjecture that the caryatid symbolized the impulse of death. The petrified body was the return to the world of the nonliving. The inanimate, organic stone-body was tied with the desire for total submission. Prototypes of caryatids were the Cappadocians who had refused freedom, and wanted to be sold by their sovereign. The nation as a subject became the locus of power and the

8 Mickiewicz, Works, vol. XI, op. cit. n. 5, p. 243.

architect of its own destruction.11 How did this happen? The

9 Ibid., pp. 243-244.

nation gave up the other, and at the same time, absorbed the

10 Ibid., p. 244.

other. Initially, the other seemed to be Rome, and in our history — Russian invaders. The absorbed other became a part of the

11. See: Mansfield, Masochism, op. cit. n. 2.

subject; its chaotic, contradictory inside. The ruler was the alter ego of the Slavic nation. His self took more than one place. The self could be divided into several parts. His subjectivity became the stage where the conflict between all parts took place. The nation gained its own purpose, because its power was presented as powerless, his force was sealed in stone. The caryatid supported the entire burden of the building. One could assume that the building symbolized the burden Adam

of the world; metaphysically, the caryatid was responsible for the fate

Mickiewicz:

of all nations. The Polish poet wrote that the living models of these

Masochism

caryatids existed in his time. One could go into Siberian mines and

and

see Slavs-caryatids. In this lecture, different levels of its meaning are

Messianism

interwoven — historical, artistic, political, and Messianic. There is a connection between the punishment of the innocent victims and the desire to give up something big, to devote oneself to the grand idea — transgressing the human condition. Mickiewicz confronted these extremes to extract the power concealed in the powerlessness of the caryatid. His goal was to strengthen national identity. Mickiewicz replaced real violence, which was fundamental to the law of history, with the imagined violence, which became the Polish nation’s identity axis. Apparently, Romans were autonomic subjects. They manifested their force on weak Slavs. On the masochistic level, the self of the other created the empty place, and the next play of submission. One must bear in mind that this happened in the imagination of the imagined national subject. Rome’s rulers were the vehicles of the other; a veiled mask of the real Lord, whom the nation loved and hated at the same time. Masochism contains an element of submission of the male protagonist to the female dominatrix. But who was it that made our noble, proud nation submissive? According to Leopold SacherMasoch12, the Polish nation needed a Tsarina. He was mistaken. The real mistress was “Polonia” and her variants: motherland, homeland. There are many variants of the myth about Polonia. She is

1 52

1 53

presented as the ideal of perfection, as a mother sending her son to

die in war, as a dead woman in the grave. The myth of Polonia as part of the nation’s education was shaped by its effect on time and place. In this lecture Polonia appeared as the loftiest ideal. She was cruel, exacting, hard to please, ruthless, despotic, and remote. The nation, which submitted to this idea, was obliged by the contract to the highest sacrifice. The nation suffered painfully, cordially, and with pleasure. Desire blended with pain. Such sentiments did not stem from punishment and historical oppression of invaders. The feelings connected with a lost homeland collected in the mythical, phantasmatic sphere. In the political and historical space, oppression stirred up resistance, hate, and anger. The Messianic sense emerged from the split between the deserved suffering and the unjust punishment. Finally, Mickiewicz described the statue of a dying Gaul.13 This description contained a profound, explicit Messianic essence. One would recall the description of the caryatid, where the subject produced power as powerlessness; here the Gaul manifested powerlessness as power. The caryatid and the Gaul joined in union of the subjectivity, in whom power and powerlessness destroyed each other. The act of the dying Slav laid bare Messianic revelation. This Dying Gladiator from the Capitol Museum was the most beautiful type of statue — that of the self-sacrificing slave. The poet rejected the common conviction that the statue presented a dying Gaul in a battle. For Mickiewicz, The Roman copy from the Pergamene school presented a desolated, dying Slav, who was derided by the Roman crowd. He stayed in the arena sand, and died far away from home. The poet emphasized his love and homesickness. In Mickiewicz’s imagination, the homeland took a center stage. His recollection of the remote motherland made his death gentle and joyful; he felt pain as well as great pleasure. The masochistic contract between nation and motherland was hidden. This may be seen in the historical events — in partitioned Poland. The country’s decline was the turning point. The feelings of oppression and consciousness of the loss of freedom

12 See: Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (New York, 1991). 13 Mickiewicz, Works, vol. XI, op. cit. n. 5, p. 245.

were fundamental to national masochism and Messianism, spanning politics, religion, and art. In this context, all reality changed into myth. There were new types of social bonds. Every Pole could become the lover of the motherland, Poland, on one condition — he had to waive his own, private life. The submission of Polonia was possible only by the expulsion of sexual desire. Communion with Polonia had to be deprived of sexual impulses. The national hero — Konrad — could Adam

not desire Polonia. His beloved had to transform herself into an

Mickiewicz:

ideal figure, namely a mother. Polonia was as despotic as Beatrice,

Masochism

Wanda, Katarzyna. She was a special case as she was both the victim

and

and the oppressor. She demanded sacrifice of her lovers as well as

Messianism

devotion, but was not responsible for punishment. She did not inflict the punishment. She did not crucify, kill, or torture Poles. Masochism needed the emotional tension, thus the extremes of punishment were necessary. Polonia needed assistants. Her relationship with the other (Rome, Russians) was secret. The Roman masters’ behavior corresponded with the historical circumstances and the masochistic play. They ruled the Slavs, but in the national myth they were a hidden source of Slavic power. Oscillating between power and weakness, the identity of the nation used this masochistic drama of domination and submission to console itself. There were two levels of violence. On the first level, Slavs submitted to their masters; on the second, it was the reverse. The Slav was the director of this play. In this picture, the motherland appeared as a small house, where children play, and a mother. This relation depended on a dialectic spin. The Slav spoke on behalf of the Master, the Mistress, but did not reveal himself. The Slav accepted torture, oppression, and death because he was obliged to these acts by a hidden contract. He prepared for a great mission of the highest humiliation of his body, and he achieved the spiritual power as the Savior of the world and of Poland. This statue foretold the time of

1 54

1 55

approaching Christianity, and the suffering of the Gaul was the

anticipation of Christ. Mickiewicz wrote that the gladiator was the most tragic figure in the ancient world. But he was a pagan. He did not look up to heaven, nor did he have the mark of triumphant joy lighting up a martyr’s face. Nevertheless, he approached Christianity. He symbolized the slave nation maturing to Christianity. The violation, humiliation, and pleasure defined the place of becoming Slav-Savior-Christ. The Slav and his oppressor — the Roman crowd — were two parts of the same identity. These parts were joined by the idea of Polonia and her demand of submission and devotion. In the Polish masochistic theater, the supernatural factor was divine. The humiliation of the tortured body was contained in the divine plan of the world’s renewal. The audience in this theater was to believe that this play was not born in the artistic mind, but was an expressions of God‘s power. Mickiewicz wanted to legitimize the Slavic nation’s destiny as the savior and its mission of renewing the world. The Slavic submission, the passivity, the approval of death took on a new sense. Mickiewicz compared the fate of Slavs with the first martyrs. He wrote: “Slavs were gentle, patient, as humble as the martyrs. The lack of strength meant power, which would reveal itself in the future. Slavs were awaiting their time. Expectation was the mark of this nation.”14 Some of the propagators of the Slavic ideas maintained that the purpose of this nation was not yet defined; others like Jan Paweł Woronicz and Kazimieński Brodziński, regarded Slavs as the Savior of all European nations15. The Messianic tone appeared in the newborn nationalism. Messianism permeated these nations which were conquered and humiliated. According to Berlin, it was a kind of resistance: “Nations refused their inferiority and found out virtues in themselves which distinguished them from the conquerors. The degraded nations revealed their great advantages: rich internal life, love of truth, beauty, goodness. The history of the past, whether imagined or real, was significant, because it promised

14 Ibid., p. 229. 15 See Z. Klarnerówna, Slavism in Polish Literature 1800 -1858 (Słowianofilstwo w literaturze polskiej lat 1800 do 1858), Warsaw 1926.

a better future. Optimism was at the core of this thinking about the past and the future. The primitivism, poverty, and obscurantism were, in fact, symptoms of youth and the inexhaustible reservoir of vital powers. The future belonged to young nations. They were the heirs of our culture. The old, tired, corrupted nations collapsed.”16 The cathartic burden of Mickiewicz’s interpretation allowed his students to rid themselves of the sense of inferiority. The Gaul’s statue Adam

corresponded with the image of the suffering Christ, and shaped both

Mickiewicz:

their perception and their experience anew. It satisfied their spiritual

Masochism

needs and hidden sexual desire. The sexuality was revealed in the

and

masochistic fantasy and the artistic imagination of the conquered body.

Messianism

The faint body, lying on the ground, pointed at the erotic fascination of the humbled body. After the pain came pleasure, after death came life, and the libido associated with salvation. This naked, dying body guaranteed the truth of painful feelings at the loss of freedom and satisfied the recipients’ hidden desires. Similar motifs were discernible in the image of the dying Polonia/ Poland. Polonia is lowered into the grave. Polish identity embraced the idea of Poland: oppressed, killed, buried in a grave, and reborn, rising from the dead. The evolving tragedy of the oppressed Polonia entered the next level of decline. Now it was not the Slavs, but Polonia who suffered. The recurrent image of the dying Polonia became an object of obsession inducing desire for national suicide. 16 Berlin, op. cit. n. 3, p. 217.

1 56

1 57

1 58

1 59

1 60

PB