Right. All right, welcome.
And, uh, good afternoon, everybody. Uh, I'm delighted to present our speaker today.
Dr. Yuval, you're out of sight. Look, the other end was recently received.
This piece from the Department of Literature at Ben-Gurion University.
His dissertation dealt with matters of melancholy and nationality in the works of Yosef de Chayefsky.
Currently, you are a lecturer of the Department of Visual Material Culture at L'académie of Art and Design,
where he teaches courses dealing with poetic and theoretical representations of love and desire.
You have is also postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University collaborating on a research
project dealing with questions of excess as a poetic and hermeneutic principle.
And the title of his talk today is Love, Zionism and Melancholy in the Prose of House Yosef Berta Chayefsky.
Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me.
I'm a little bit nervous and very excited, so I hope my English will last throughout the stock trophy.
You are the writer and think of me. House of Guilty. Chayefsky was born in 1865 and passed away in 1921.
Is one of the most important figures of Hebrew literature of the revival period, which is between a teenage 18 and 1920, approximately.
This is early Zionism. His early stories depict the inner torments and passions of young Jewish, mostly men at this time.
This is the time of the birth or the revival of Jewish nationality and modern secular Jewish subjectivity.
The fracture point sort of an imagined fracture point between the religion and tradition and diasporic Judaism and the inspiration for modernity,
secularism and desire towards national emancipation of some sort.
This is the beginning of an important phase in Zionist history.
But Chayefsky famously claimed that the national revival will come not from like a collective movement,
but from the birth of a new, erotic, wilful and erotic, new, erotic, wilful,
vital subject individual embodying in his young and in love protagonists that occupy many of his thoughts populate many of his stories.
Moreover, moreover, he is typically described and falsely described, but typically described as a fierce critic of diasporic Judaism,
criticising it for being too spiritual, too feminine to passive and decaying.
His stories and several prominent articles fixed his image at the beginning of the 19th century as a young and radical Nietzschean thinker,
an offer that strongly rejects the diaspora, the traditional diasporic Jewish way of life,
and called for a total shinola in changing of the values of Jewish of Judaism.
For him, the nation, the nation's revival. We will come from the birth of a new erotic and vital Hebrew man.
Prophet Flame is the phrase he uses one who longs for life or wishes for life or wants life.
Individual and erotic love will secure future Jewish nationality.
This focus on the individual is mostly known as both itself.
Gives great renewal, I think, and his tormented protagonist in his stories embody the unsuccessful struggle to achieve this erotic renewal.
Chayefsky wrote a lot of philosophical or political texts, political text, and a lot of stories.
And I think that when people talk about him, they tend to confuse the two, or they don't tend to think them together.
They think them together, but in an irresponsible way.
Because in his stories, the Jewish struggle for modernity and secularism and emancipation is always unsuccessful.
While in his publicist writing political writing, he always claims,
without any regard for the historical condition, that we must try and achieve Jewish sovereignty.
Okay. But the Turkey, or I repeat this, held a radical position concerning the national political debate of the time.
He was a blatant anti positive ist and called for the cultivation cultivation of the individual and
national will with no regard to the possibility of their fulfilment that may or may not appear later.
The author repeatedly called for the need for Jewish sovereignty,
calls that stood against his disbelief in the possibility of such endeavour and even in the survival of of modern Jewish literature and culture.
For him and this is important, the will and desire for historical, historical salvation are more important than their actual possibility.
Thus, subjective and erotic desire represents also the desire for a nation.
And on the flipside, only after Jews nationality can establish itself could Jews subjectivity and
masculinity truly reconfigure itself onto a productive and active erotic form.
This is like the old Zionist critique of the body, the masculine body of traditional Jewish woman.
Like anything with the project of making the Jewish body productive, erotic, wilful.
In this sense, I think erotic and national desire are the two sides of the same historical coin.
Love depends upon land for the Jewish man to govern himself, his desires and his will, his body and his productivity, his rule than his life.
He needs our own. A land as law and government are always connected to space as land, space and land.
That's one of the main forces in the production for.
Everything stopped. One of the main forces in the production of this new Hebrew hybrid,
new Hebrew subjectivity is the will and ingenuity of the individual writer, as the discovery clearly states.
Life and literature coincide, I quote, Man by his nature, is the creator of myth, a poet.
He poetically inscribes nature into an ideal poetic form and does the same to social facts.
Aesthetics. The literary in its form, can be used as a driving force for the rekindling,
rekindling of culture and society through its revision and acclimation in new works of art.
The Will of the Author. This is nature speaking from privilege of because now it is the negating and reviving power and history.
Social facts can be rewritten and represented in artistic work.
Cultural and political desire should be inscribed in literature and later on function as the basis for a renewed culture.
The individual erotic author is the heart of this poetic and historical process.
What are we try to do today is to show that the rejection of diasporic existent is mediated in literature,
not through the image of an active physical figure of fulfilled masculinity,
but through the image of the melancholic figure of an author or poet what he calls the village.
If you call it Michail, the poet majority Hebrew is poet for the Miss World.
It is not activity that defines his potency, not the fulfilment of his will,
but the ability to control and suspend his desire and in this manner, keep it alive and in desire.
I mean, of course, both the national desire and erotic desire.
And we focussed mostly on the figure of the narrator, the Mr. Lair, while offering short readings of a few stories throughout his work.
It is important to understand the historical and material sphere in which Wallechinsky is working.
The growing cultural Jewish emancipation at the time was not only called because of the awakening of the Jewish body,
but because of growing economic problems. While I will not offer here a materialist discussion of early Zionism,
I am not an expert in that matter and in the detective work, which is I think it's a very interesting thing to explore.
It is important to state that the impoverished economic state of though everyone is always present in, will be.
Chayefsky and in his contemporaries work such as Bernard Nursing.
Their work stories are littered with troubled, agonised, young Jewish men and women.
And we always deal with their psychological problems.
But they are also extremely poor. They don't have a job.
They don't know how to live. This is an economic material problem.
The psychological inner torments of the modern Jew,
which was celebrated in the modern Hebrew literature with critique, always derive from materialistic conditions.
And I think the two recent works about this matter were just published one by Oded Neal and one by one by Phil Cohen Lustig,
who dealt with a marxist perspective on Zionism at large through Hebrew literature, which is very interesting.
And they will. I think that my work tries to relate to this is just hope.
Hopefully eventually my claim ability to give poetic space,
melancholic poetic space aspires to mediate and mend historical and economic contradictions that were seemingly impossible,
impossible to appropriate in actual historical life between the need for silver unity and economic flourishing and its historical impossibility.
In the poetic realm they store. The historical contradictions were solved and negated all by while leaving a problematic residue.
I will deal with the relations between negated history and fiction.
Erotic life is the life and what love is a life giving forth forth of its claim and national sovereignty.
I will hopefully show the desire and logic and national functions in a strange mechanism whose exigency is to remain unfulfilled.
But the task is dialectics, I claim, derived from what I refer to as melancholic eros, as many of men have mentioned.
And this is the confusion between his political texts and the stories.
But at the 10th, his work may claim to be vital, but it is mostly gloomy and catastrophic.
Most of his stories begin with hope, but ended in disaster and confusion.
Think of this the famous from Cohanim, which tells of Michael,
a young Jewish youth who falls in love with a girl and ends of the story almost crazy and even all of his stories.
Most of them have the same arc. The rich man ends up poor.
The desire that an enchanting girl is always lost.
The young man remains lonely and tormented. There is no success.
I argue that this gloom that covers his work is precisely a part of this melancholic girls.
I will start with one of the first stories in the beginning of a career.
Most of his stories dealt with autobiographical figure, which was also in the first person.
He had many names. He called him Menachem, Jonathan, whatever.
Whatever story, such its name. When the hero is called Mikhail Elusive, almost like before Menachem, without her over Pollock all alone.
This is the soil quote for from in a second. And they all like the picked autobiographical scenes from his life, imagined life.
We need, of course, to look sceptically about the relation between autobiography and history and literature.
But this is considered to be autobiographical.
And I think that the use of the first person here is.
Oh, interesting in that sense. Okay, let's this is the first quote and I again apologise for the translations which are fine,
especially because I'll be honest here and she's an expert translator.
But I want to open this is the young man confessing his love.
Sitting in his room, talking about his love. The one. The girl that he loves.
Okay. I want to open my soul to her. I want to reveal the treasures of the soul.
And all that is sublime in the world. I am the master of everything through my relation to everything.
Even the mountains and the hills. The sky and the heights of the sky.
History and the secrets of history. All of them I hold in my hand.
But she will only see before her. A schoolboy on his path.
And it makes me sad, sad and angry. She is sitting in her room and I am sitting in my room.
I love her with the richness of my soul. This is a part paradigmatic ability jazz can sing.
The solitary young man sits in his room and imagines an unattainable girl.
This scene repeats itself in numerous other stories, autobiographical and not that we will get to that.
This may seem like a typical scene describing a young man's incapacity to engage with women.
The young, shy and confused, detached, tireless Jewish youth is impotent, both figuratively and literally.
And this is the critique of the Zionist critique of this period that all of the masculine figures are impotent, melancholic and impotent.
I claim that impotency is in fact potency, its suspension of desire.
And I was so how. However, I argue that what actually happens here is a specific mechanism of the will and that it impotency.
Here is the poetic device. It is fulfilment.
That is the danger that the product protagonists have to refrain from.
Desire is suspended as long as the yearning man longs for love, sex or nation, and as he lacks the means,
the historical conditions and the erotic techniques and language to realise his desire.
He must suspended in an imaginary state.
But let's take a closer look at this imaginary state, which is indeed a state he holds the entire world in his hand.
This is very important topology. He is safely located in a small space for which he looks outside.
The spatial arrangement makes sure one particular thing never happens.
The girl and the boy never meet. In this case, she doesn't even know him.
The real relationship, possible relationship is negated in favour of an imagined one that relies on the image of the girl as an inspiration.
Inspiration of power in Create creates a melancholic and imagined silver entity.
He is the master of everything through his melancholic relation to everything.
The use of the concept of melancholy here mostly follows the thought of George Agamben, the Italian finger and philosopher for him.
Unlike the Freudian interpretation, melancholy is not just a psychological feeling, but an ontological mood that comes before any event of love.
Unlike Freud's understanding of the concept, melancholy does not lead to impoverishment, but it is a mechanism for the preservation of desire.
I quote, for example, an imaginative capacity to make the unobtainable object appear as if lost, to turn what was never ours into a lost image.
And in this way, keep it alive.
I quote again a gamble The English is much better than mine covering its object with the funeral trappings of mourning, melancholy.
Melancholy confers upon it the phantasmagorical reality of what is lost.
It is a way to hold desire, quoting the phantasm in an immobile dialectic, causing the image,
not the person desires, held in a poetic space or crypt, suspending in a burning,
frantic ex-labour x sorry,
difficult word exacerbation and I quote again Melancholy succeeds in appropriating its object only to the extent it affirms its loss.
Think about the young youth there. The unattainable becomes a lost image created using poetic potency.
Melancholy life alongside a lost object does not lead to impoverishment, but on the contrary to its negation through poetic creation.
This applies to the political situation itself. In itself, key sadness and loss function as.
The source of poetic and political omnipotence.
In an essay from 1898, he writes And this is the second quote This is like a theistic thing.
And these are the only sadness that I haven't felt in days.
Ken came and knocked on my window, on the window of my secluded room there by my small desk, in my small room, inside my small world.
I sit and listen to the morning of the Israeli people and hear it's generations long sadness.
And everyone. Everyone. Young and small. Young and old.
Big and small. All of them. Convoys upon convoys.
All of them come convertible in convoys and park outside my window.
And a deep darkness and worldly sadness looms upon everything and in my inner self.
Think about this interiority that he's creating. Small town.
Small room, small desk, small world. Inner self.
I wish to unite to create new people a nation and my soul is torn.
A historical tear on all I have left is this inner sadness and this inner grieving.
I dwell alone in the corner of my small room, in the corner of this foreign and not foreign town.
Give me a lawyer and a fiddle and I will sing a song of grief, a song for the generations, for generations upon generations.
And you will hear grief in my song. Silent and sad morning against the storm.
Give me a small cavity. And there, deep in the ground, I will mournfully contemplate our gloom.
Though the author here is the lone witness of the ghost of the past.
Ontology. What is is also melancholy.
He incorporates swallows into his interiority.
They stoic, aloof, while using sadness as poetics.
History is appropriated and preserved precisely as lost generations upon generations in an undead form.
The days have passed and still remain.
This is another quite familiar to the space of melancholy, of that of the Crypt, which is also the Jewish bookcase and the coffin.
And his room and the room, the shadow where he studied and its growth in it, in its growth, the living that work.
This is another quote I feel the song of the buried skeletons and even their maggots sing.
Melancholy is not the impoverishment or stoppage of work, but its fountain, the origin of the small world.
Inside the small room, the lion, the fiddle of the melancholic instruments of creation, both of a static or cultural and historical or political.
The melancholic, imagined and imagined unfulfilled will to unite the people.
That is the centrepiece of the author's poetic, poetic politics.
And as such, he refuses the idea of fulfilment, preserving desire in a burning, active and inactive inoperative.
This is how, again, Agamben uses this situation.
This weird sense of actuality that is not actual inoperative to desire is preserved in a burning, inoperative states.
This is important because most of Turkey critiques solely the work of the one that called it the hopeless,
melancholic man and adorned due to his strong passion, passionate and active protagonists.
The simplistic Nietzsche and reader of his work confronted two contrasting figures.
On the one hand, we have the melancholic youth who never gets the girl, so to speak.
And on the other man. On the other hand, his work is littered with strong, passionate, firm, fierce, masculine men who always get what they want.
They just take it. And most critics saw these figures as the culmination of the Jewish the Jewish future,
that the Hebrew for future or the more accurate to say that Bild itself imagined.
I claim that it is the other way around. It is exactly the melancholic figures that are able to suspend their desire, control their will.
Unlike example from the for the fierce or what they call the red,
characters can be found in Beset to from a Place of Thunder, which is one of his most famous works,
the late works and others, like you, still build a house where there are like, these mythical beings that always get what they want.
Hmm. Okay. Sorry. Well, I. I claim that is only these passive and passive and contemplative figures like the who, the hero of all alone,
who holds all the world in his hand, that express the Chayefsky's, melancholic and sovereign will.
Unlike the red characters that always fulfil that, the.
Liars and meat, a tragic death.
For example, read slow mo the almighty load from in the place of Thunder, etc. have had sex with his wife and finished his life.
Died in an early age. Embarrassed and ashamed. O missile for McCain.
Name another longing youth. But second, he fulfil the desires and sleeps with the mother of his girlfriend.
It's always very confused there. The yeah. Relations within the family.
He becomes almost crazy. His will disappears and when the will disappears, we meet madness or death.
This is like the prototypical arc in Billy Chayefsky.
Fulfilment means mad, therefore madness. This is a historical thing.
The Jewish man has no way to fulfil his desire for silver and silver entity,
not only because he lacks the emotional vocabulary, but also because the what?
The Conditional Awakening doesn't have the material conditions to flourish in any
dream of active Jewish eroticism and politics in the other Chayefsky's mind,
at least, will undoubtedly end in tragedy.
So he chooses melancholy for the suspension of time and the opening over of the poetic eroticism and silver entity,
the figure of the melancholic youth he hidden in his chamber growth.
With the author's work, he turns from autobiographical writing toward the more nuanced representations of Jewish life.
And these later stories like Famous Red Heifer or the late novels that I spoke about just now,
represent the mythical forces latently burning in the waning diasporic society.
However, I argue that the mythical figure that comes to life in his work is precisely that of the author, the showgirl,
the narrator, the narrator as creator of worlds willing them to like to live through the melancholic suspension of desire.
So while the earliest stories were somewhat autobiographical in the later stories,
such as The Havana Room, from which we read now The Love of My Youth,
the becomes an alphabetic figure, a timeless mediator that opens up and maintains or animates and keeps alive the act of creation.
He is the real protagonist of the reality of these work. These are the opening lines of I have on a whim from 1909 here.
The narrator is no longer speaking, the first person simply, but he described himself as an offer.
And this is the third quote I think historical actions demand from us the offers to describe histories weaved in life,
to combine visions with the busy noises of action.
What is seen and what is heard, and what are those, if not the summary of the suffering soul and its latent sadness without the soul and its agonies,
actions and visions are useless, and we will not know why we should know.
Let me tell you about the love of my youth. My loved one did not know that I had loved her.
And I am older now. I have seen many lives in their tears and the girl is gone.
She left before I did. And she rests among pure spirits, amongst pure spirits.
Life cannot be spoken by the living. This is a very strange sentence in Hebrew.
It's in high. Me, the Ballymena high. Very strange.
I didn't know how to translate it and why.
And when I remind of the girl that resided in this house and soul that served as my light, I already stand in the middle of the story.
More than a generation have passed.
Life is long and constant, and she still stands before me as if alive by her beauty with her two braids and the charm of her grace.
Here we have the melancholic tendencies and spatial arrangement.
The author in his house is looking back and bringing back to life is lost love.
The story itself that begins after the threshold may seem again like the typical depiction of the deficiency of contemporary young Jews.
The author protagonist Yonatan falls in love with Nechama and they become friends, but he is unable to engage with her, even in the slightest way.
There is a scene in the story when the girl knocks on his room and he hears her knocking.
And this is like a like the song of songs. But he is just unable to move.
He just freezes. Immediately freezes. Is so passive that his sister has to open the door.
And within the song of thunder the the love of Solomon knocks on the door.
And the Shulamit is so excited.
She wakes up and she comes to the door and they have like sort of weird mediator intercourse on the handles of the both these slits.
His hands never. A my very erotic here. Nothing happens.
It just freezes. No movement at all. And if in the song of song the shulamit follows him and wanders in the city and goes crazy from love.
She's lovesick here. He just stand there. She walks in the converse a little bit.
Your sister opens the door and he's the media. He's just frozen.
But after she leaves, he said that was a revelation.
Like this was the opening of the realms of God for me without doing anything absolutely immobile.
And of course, beautifully evokes the figure of the shulamit in the song of song.
This is not like this is very much there. This passivity, of course, is amplified when another character enters this apparatus of desire.
This the active, handsome, of course, and playful, which is important.
Elyakim. This is like a reb character, an active character.
You, not only Akeem, soon become good friends and their friendship depends upon upon their joint love towards Nechama.
They both love the girl. But Joachim, unlike his friend, can interact with her in more ways than one.
Let's read the fourth quote, I hope. Oh, he was taller than me.
Of course he was in [INAUDIBLE] yellow. Mine was black.
A relationship with Nechama was utterly different.
I was afraid to even touch the tip of her dress.
This is like a sense of holiness. You cannot touch what is holy, of course.
Well, he made fun of her, and when she wouldn't agree to give him something object, he would try to take it from her and tussle with her playfully.
Which is. Yeah. Okay. Fruitfully, there is physical play.
This is important because this is a thing that describes, I think,
the changing of the value and the way people used to court people like of erotic and the romantic processes.
And What You Lose famously wrote about the thing in another book by Naomi Zeidman just came out like a couple of years ago,
but this is like very untraditional to play with the girl, to touch her, to wrestle with her.
This is like, okay, yeah, that's physically there is physical play, one that involved word and touch.
And while this is just a game, it is an active and light-hearted, not melancholic activity that accentuates Jonathan's serious passivity.
And if Kim also tries to actively take and possess the thing he desires, both the girl and the thing that she holds in their hand in what follows,
and it came in the form of the relationship intensive intensifies, and the two even exchanged love letters.
And while for a king, this is an entertaining, poetic game, Jonathan, of course, experiences it profoundly the second.
We sat and read the whole. Pleasants Another quote you have here.
We said in another pleasant and esteemed words, they felt as sweet as honey world, my world.
We read the letter keeping London together,
and afterwards I took it from his hand and looked at the lovely letters and the letter read again, verse, verse after verse.
My friend stood up and moved around. Well, I just sat there with the calm of written feelings in the palm of my hand.
Think about the world in the palm of his hand. Now it's a feeling my heart overflowed with feeling.
Love for your thumb becomes real and tangible.
Something you can hold precisely when he functions as the mediator.
This is not his love, and that is why he can fully enjoy it.
Your Tan's passivity is highlighted against earlier Keynes's rapid movement, but at the same time with heart, the source of the will and desire.
The locus of the creativity overflows.
This love is enjoyed and acquires potency only passively.
The final triumph, so to speak, of the melancholic figure happens obviously at the end of the story,
looking following the social imperative to chase money and success, or succumbing to the social imperative to chase money and success.
As some of us, most of us do, abandons Muhammad for the little girl, his love is unmask as merely a game.
Is poetic letters, letters and physical taunting is an endless gestures.
But even after revival is removed, you cannot approach the hammer.
She marries another and dies at a young age. We know that from the beginning of the story.
But in the melancholic realm. Death is not the end, but the beginning of creative potency.
The heart of the story. This is the next quote, quote and myself.
This is the ending of the story. I always believe that in the calm I for me and I never played that it is possible to cheat my heart's desire
and my only path in life will really be mine and say I will follow you and here at the end of the story.
But it actually repeats the statements he made about the middle of the story.
I am the one who lives in the depths of the earth, and I will remember in the comment of beauty more than a generation of baths.
I'm an old man and she still stands before me if alive by her beauty.
This is romantic imagery with her two braids, braids and the charm of her grace.
The image of the girl lives in the memory of the author who inscribed it to a
story as the ending is in fact the opening Europeans desire for the undead.
The image of the hammer leads to the literary act.
And in the literary act, this desire is rekindled in a circle of desire where image provoke desire to provoke words,
and these words right to the image in an endless circle of joy.
This is agamben's concept of melancholy and of romantic love at large.
But this circle in the literary arc desired is the candle in a thicket of desire,
image and language that remains potent precisely and only because the hammer is forever lost.
It is the will of the passive melancholy command that preserves and endures, proving himself ever more powerful than that of his whimsical friend.
The melancholic will be belongs to them a shoulder that offers what becomes not only the vehicle of desire,
but also the sovereign of the text against al-Hakim, who follows the social order.
Unitel is truly of the individual, and it is said so that he wanders around like a very free of society's constraints in his lonely tomb.
Love and life are reanimated in an undead state, and desire is both deferred and maintained.
Psychological loss tilth into alphabetic topology into poetic space.
It is the mission of goal to preserve the national and the Gothic desire using it will power.
It is important to note, as David of Lipscomb has done, that the topic wasn't melancholic in his life.
Like many of the 3D stories in his texts and the old ones about not getting paid enough.
And we imagine this very tormented man. But after he moved to Germany at 1911, I think he lives with his wife and his son surrounded by friends.
He was very creative. He had sort of economic stability, and he was adored by other people, young Hebrew readers and German, whatever.
Just really German, really. He was not lonely.
He is not, he thinks a lot of psychological state, but the political and historical state.
This is very important because this we can mix the two easily because of the
autobiographic nature and wild performance and national fears always haunted him.
He still is melancholy is not a reaction to psychological loss or loneliness, but to the historical political condition.
I will end shortly, but these final celebrated short novels are perceived as the culmination of his varied work.
These work are considered the epitome of the his project of reviving Hebrew culture for revision of past materials.
And they depict stories filled with eroticism, myth like actions, tragic consequences, etc., etc.
But I wish again to focus on the melancholic figure of the poet creator that inhabits a particular space in this text.
He appears in the threshold in the beginning and deadening ending or intervenes in the middle with interpretations and remarks.
But he is not a part of the plot. The furniture bristles.
I claim a function as a liminal elliptical space.
The space of literature where literature appears, the act of literature upon which the whole of the novel and you you have a few openings bites.
Divination will be the house befit alarm in a place of thunder and greater home, which I didn't know how to translate.
So I translated, I think, the residence of a street, which sounds very bland, but whatever.
They all have these alphabetic openings.
These are the representations of the melancholic space of literature because they were by the will of the author.
The narrator is not the autobiographical protagonist anymore, but the source and sovereign of the work.
He appears only in the poetic space. Let's read the opening of Galileo again.
More than a generation has passed many worth of plague the country.
And I have witnessed the wrath of God and the grace of God.
Though there are obstacles on a stepping round, the fields of memory are wide open.
And we will stroll there when the sun is up.
Even even when we are on the bed, which we will never depart, flecks of youth will somehow somewhat light the darkness.
I don't believe in the resurrection, but I do believe that the thing that has passed and died can be revived in the mind of a person.
The poet. The poet is almighty. Historical or material obstacles.
The obstacles on a stepping round are negated in favour of the wide open and funny realm of memory.
With it is also the realm of creativity, the realm of creativity and the preservation of the past.
And the topology of this realm is, in fact the melancholic bed or the small chamber of the narrator,
which the things are, reconfigure one into the other flakes of youth, and then the images,
future and past coincide in an immobile dialectics and live in the mind of the Almighty Michel'le the machine within the gates,
real unattainable history to preserve it as an image.
Life persists, but always as negated.
Life is an image of the lost object preserved, but always with the relation to the is not condition that is inherent to this process.
The might of the poet's heart is in fact melancholic, else with the aesthetic literature and the historical coincide.
Suspending Historical Process. This economy of desire is mostly a way in which literature tries to resolve historical and material contradictions,
suspending them in a poetic and imagined realm. Moreover, this is not only how Hebrew sovereignty is imagined and national.
In the Gothic, they are maintained. This is also a process in which gender is codified.
The image of the author is of a secluded,
yet omnipotent man sitting in his room while fantasising about a lost girl in the past or the nation to come in the future.
Here, eroticism becomes automatism, its masculinity.
The new Hebrew omen depend solely upon his own will, the will of the author, and this image of the solitary man imagining in girls you might imagine.
Imagining girls is, I think, the key way to understand the economy and the figure of masculinity of the period at large.
If one was to read Samuel Samuel's latest book on Bialik and desiring Bialik, he would find the same economy of desire exists.
In Bialik's work the suspension of desire.
Bialik is the contemporary of though the gimmicky, much more famous, much more important.
But she dealt with the same intellectual tensions and contradictions in Bialik as well.
You should suspend your desires. You got suspended. You should not spend your theatre, not spend your creativity, your spark.
They ought to be withheld within the offer. The suspension of desire in a burning,
melancholic state may very well be the key to a renewed understanding of the relation relations between literature and politics at the revival period,
and moreover to the genealogy of the production of modern Jewish and Hebrew masculinity, of Zionist masculinity.
And this is my last remark.
This last remark is important because literary critics have lately tried to show that they are speaking melancholic tendencies of the in the work
of Phyllis self exclaimed Zionist offers for disability Chayefsky but then later Bialik whatever they claim they are weren't really Zionist.
Exemplar examples can be found even in Micki Grossman.
Very good book The Zionist Body. When history shows that the melancholy is a problem, it's a disease when it is.
Brenner and more recently in works by Yochai Oppenheimer or Yul Basson.
But this is an attempt to find in early Zionism both diagnostic aspects which are very strange because they they consider themselves a Zionist.
I argue the opposite that the melancholy of these figures is the poetic way to resolve the tension between
an unwavering demand for Zionist sovereignty and the stoical conditions that are deemed improbable.
It is not a psychological phenomenon, but the period historical apparatus of desire.
In a small room, an imagined kingdom, the melancholic man author exemplified Zionist desire for national sovereignty,
keeping it alive against history, with the power of his imagination and the strength of his will.
Thank you.