Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. There's a special joy in introducing to you my good friend, Dr. Phil Cohen.
Dr. Cohen's Dr. Cohen is the academic director of the Globalisation and Sovereignty Cluster at the Venue Institute in Jerusalem.
He took his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in comparative literature and was generally he is dealing with issues of globalisation in Israel,
Palestine and France. And his forthcoming book on the topic is to be published soon in a year's time with versa.
Dr. Cohen, thank you for coming. The title of the talk today is Israeli Literature.
Is Global Literature Broadly Defined? We'll see what that means in a moment.
So thank you all for coming. This is never obvious and I'm very happy to be here with you, Yaakov, and with you as well.
And this seminar. Okay. So I'll talk with you about today is as the title of my talk is Israel and Globalisation as a Global Literature.
And I will explain what I mean by it in a moment. And basically my my broad argument is that I'm trying to give an historical account of Israeli
that are on the broader project as Palestinian and French literature vis a vis globalisation.
And these are changes and we'll get to them in a moment. That happened all over the world in Israel as well.
And my position is that you can no longer understand Israeli literature,
only vis a vis what's happened locally, and definitely not only vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
which has been Jews and Arab relationships, which have been the centre of kind of Israeli postcolonial study since the nineties.
So this is a very kind of different position from which I'm coming to understand Israeli literature so much.
The history that I'm trying in my book begins from the 19 nine forties to the present,
and I divide them basically to two periods from 1940s to 1990s and from 1990s to the present.
This is not the current history. Current history, usually in Israeli literature, divides them into periods of ten years or so,
two decades, sometimes 40th of the 50 or 60, 6070s, eighties in the nineties.
And I argue that you can no longer purifies Israeli literature in this way.
So I have only two periods, and I distinguish these two periods by by the social structure of Israeli society.
And I understand and the kind of talk that I will give will try to explain the
relationship between Israeli social relations and Israeli cultural production,
specifically literature.
And I argue that in the first period from 1940 to 19 nineties, we have a social structure that I might call a statist structure,
which is a liberal in the sense that the state itself is not separated completely from civil society, as you might have in Western Europe, in the U.S.
And the notion of liberal autonomy and also aesthetic autonomy is not possible in Israel up until the nineties,
and therefore it kind of characterises the period as a non-liberal period where the question of
individual autonomy as well as aesthetic autonomy is a problem for Israeli society in general,
and specifically for cultural production in the literature. And from the 1990s onwards, with neo liberalism and privatisation and globalisation,
you begin to see a separation of state and civil society that inaugurates the possibility of liberal autonomy as well as aesthetic autonomy.
So to show you a little bit what I'm going to do, I prepared for you this map.
I will show you how well what I'm going to do.
So you have a kind of a picture in your mind. So I left the Palestinian part there, because if you want, we can talk about that as well.
I just wanted to show you that it's larger than Israel.
As you can see in the left column, you have this axis from the 1940 through the nineties, which I call head on.
I mean, I'll explain that and moves to the bottom, which is 19, 19th to the present,
which I designate autonomy for the burden of the talk will be to explain how we move from one to the other.
But I will make also not only a vertical move, but also a lateral one.
So to compare Israeli literature to Western Europe and the U.S., so do you have that on the right column of your map?
And this is where we have to explain what is happening in Europe from 18th century to the present and to see how Israel differs
from Western Europe and the US up until the nineties and why is different from it and how it becomes not identical but equivalent.
And we'll try to explain that as we go. So we like a night move.
One, two, three. So this will be a move that I will try to make today.
So many people talk about globalisation more or less from the nineties and it's become a very widespread term.
But there are two broad definitions of globalisation one esoteric and one esoteric.
The esoteric term and widespread is the globalisation of anything which is a worldwide phenomenon
and usually immigration and trade people that we follow movements of people and movements.
Of commodities. If you have this kind of definition, you can talk about globalisation.
Since the beginning of time, more or less people will argue that Andrew, Good and Frank does that.
It begins 5000 years ago. Some Marx is talking about the advent of capitalism will place it in the 16th century.
Others will place the 19th century. So you have different kind of competing definition of what globalisation means.
I use it in a more esoteric term and I designated more recently to a much more recent phenomenon which is the late 20th century.
And I identify it with the spread of capitalist social relations all over the world.
So for me, globalisation is identical with what is called sometimes neoliberalism or late capitalism,
which is to say the spread of particular social capitalist relationships all over the world, not simply commodities.
And this is how I understand it, and this is what comes to designate the Israeli society from the 19 1990s onwards.
And this will help me. Now, I am interested in this because what is unique about capitalism differently than other social formations before it is,
there is a particular social formation that subordinates human ends to human needs, human means.
And I will give you just one brief quote from Marx, from Capital.
You don't have that in your quote. It's a very short one. It says It is a form of production, not bound to a level of needs in advance,
and hence it is does not predetermine the course of production in the sense that human
political needs or human political ends do not predetermine the way that we live our lives.
This is what happens with capital.
It subordinates political ends and social end to the production of value, which in itself does not have an end in itself.
It is that perpetual, endless production of value and profit.
And this is, if you want, defines a little bit what's happening in Israel since the nineties with the what's
happening with the shift in the Zionist kind of model and which I will explain.
So it's interesting to me because I think that if you want to understand the political significance of Israeli literature,
Israeli cultural production, it deals with this crisis of politics or process of political ends.
The fact that it is no longer simple to say under this shift to capital, what exactly are, if you want,
the political ends of the Jewish people in Israel, if you want, understand it this way, all the political end of Israeli society.
This is the crisis that in a way the state itself is trying to answer with its own form of extreme nationalism,
if you want, and other political project are trying to fill in the void with the end of an all the form of Zionism.
So this is my political interest in this.
So to move to the talk itself, I will do is to designate kind of what is the what exactly and unique in each period.
Give two or three examples. I warn you that I won't give too many examples from the letter.
Travel more give you kind of theoretical and historical framework of the history.
History itself with three or four examples, you'll see what's going on there.
So the first period, as you see in your map, it's from the 14th to the 19th and designate by header on me.
The distinction between header on a me and autonomy is usually defined by this regression to freedom.
So header on in this subject, if you go back to can't for example in that subject which is determined from the outside, it is not free.
It is it is not self legislating as would be an autonomous liberal subject.
And therefore if for a liberal subject, the freedom of the subject is there before it enters the world, it is not.
It is a property of the subject for had or on in the subject.
This freedom is not there, right? It is. It is not is not a property.
The subject is determined from the outside, the usual understanding of their own subjects, if you want, by a kind of enlightenment critique,
will be the religious subject, for example, as it will be that subject which the the cleric, the rabbi, the priest will tell them what to do.
And therefore, if you take an Enlightenment position, you will want to free that subject from an external, determined determination.
Now, how that relates to Israel, I argue that Zionists from the thirties onwards with the establishment of one of their Labour Party,
that from the 1930 they have established a state structure in which civil society was not liberal and free,
as was happened in Western Europe, in the US.
And what is unique about Zionism, as you might heard a discussion that usually what a collective in society, but this is not enough.
What is unique about that in society up until the nineties.
Well that its freedom its collective freedom was not given in advance as would be in a liberal understanding.
But it's a freedom that has to be made in the world,
unlike the freedom that is given for the to the liberal subject to be there before the entry into the world.
This is the big difference for me. So what characterises Israeli society,
specifically literature and that it tried in specifically in the forties and fifties to
write such novels in which the collective freedom itself will be made in the world,
usually by war or settlement. This will be the most classic typical novel.
And then later on in the sixties and seventies, there is a crisis. We'll get there as well.
But what characterises this period is that the collective freedom itself is not given in advance but needs to be made in the world itself.
This is why Israeli literature, as well as civil society in Israel, is very different than Western Europe.
It is. It brings us to the aesthetic relations themselves.
If we European literature, Western literature, Western European literature is depicted as autonomous and free.
I would say it's an act of liberal subject that can write literature without any purpose or political end.
Israeli literature up until the 1990s is designated as heterogenous.
Literature is always had the political end with which it has to kind of contend with.
And if you are a Zionist or a statist, I will call. This is very clear.
You write novels that promote certain kind of Zionist ideology.
If you are a liberal subject for a liberal writer such as closer to ABBA,
sure more so of Sialkot and a few others would try to contend with this kind of a collective freedom that is made.
You are trying to write liberal novels, liberal subjects or individuals, as you might heard, to hear the conversation.
But I argue that these attempts usually fail.
They are attempt that try to imagine kind of a different kind of political project grounded on the individual,
on grounded in the freedom given in advance. But it is usually promoting a negative political project that cannot succeed.
Only in the 1990s you start to see positive liberal subjects that do not have to negate Zionism to be autonomous and free.
And this changes the entire Israeli literature kind of an imaginary world as well as how do you write a novel from the 19th?
And we'll get to that later on. Just to give you a sense of what does that mean to write a novel in which freedom is made?
I'll go to one of the classical examples from musician Mills.
He walked in the field. This is not the although it became very well known, it's not the most typical Zionist.
Now, also the most typical Zionist novel was written by a couple by Alexander and do not send it.
It's called The Land Without Shadow. There you see a much more kind of an attempt to build a kibbutz.
And what's happening there happened to lead to the independence, the war of Independence.
But this is more of a new novel since it's a small room.
I will let you read. It is read the number three.
What it allowed to have it. Oh, you caught it. Okay, fine.
Okay, I'll explain. So this is basically a short monologue, a very chilling monologue of one of the main characters in the novel named Don't Care.
And this is she remembers what happened to her when she ran away from the kibbutz to Tel Aviv.
There was this crisis. One of the children in the children houses died and she decided that Zionism and the kibbutz is not for her.
She runs to the city and then years later, she remembers this period.
And of course, she regrets running away to the city and she comes back to the kibbutz and in a way she is to carry a Zionist ideology most explicitly.
And she thinks about what comes to define what kibbutz life means to the kibbutz.
She says it's not a cooperative for this or that matter of life, nor even for all matters of life.
It is something rather that melts together its members and run them and turn them into a new essence, a new quality, a new order of life.
Therefore, in the kibbutz, a man must accept not only life, but death itself.
The kibbutz leads man from ashes to ashes. There is no way out.
There is no way out for those who seek to be saved from elsewhere. The kibbutz has the duty to raise children.
Will it approve, then, of those who will take their children out of this collective?
The kibbutz has the duty to raise children at its home, with its own means, with its maids, with its own mistakes, with its own tragedies.
And the first children must pave the way for future generations who will necessarily follow.
So this, if you want, is kind of the kibbutz.
Is that not simply collective? It must make its own way of life.
And in that when for me, it must make it its own freedom, people, they are not free in a way that their freedom is not given to them in advance.
They have to make this collective freedom and therefore their head are on in this subject.
They are bound in advance of this political project and they have to make their own freedom.
I chose another example to bring it closer to the notion of aesthetics and individual autonomy.
There is a moment there where his husband Vili,
is coming to bring her back to the kibbutz and she wants whilst you there she is living with an artist.
You sell boom bed. He's the typical Zionist kind of character.
He speaks Yiddish, he's an artist. It has nothing to do with Zionism.
He lives in Tel Aviv and he kind of promotes the understanding that he's an individual.
He can do what he wants to do, and for him, his life is art and only art.
And really it's kind of confronting him with a different sense of freedom that he brings as he himself is to carry out his own values as well.
And he says this is number four on your second sheet. And besides, your freedom in the use of the artist is freedom from everything.
This is your school of thought. You are tired of the kibbutz, and already you have in the city a different culture and a.
Currently through this culture, you retrieve the bride spirit message with the spirit and such.
Have you ever seen a spirit? A spirit is such a spirit is like fire and flame.
But if it does not hold on to something, there is no fire and no flame.
And what I will kind of butcher it a little bit.
And what Vin is trying to say, that there is no such thing as freedom in general.
It is not that people are free to begin with or there attached to something that makes the freedom particular kind of freedom.
And for Vili later on, he kind of accuses Bloomberg for that, that he will fight the war.
He will kind of make the kibbutz, but he has to make his own freedom.
Was Bloomberg think that his freedom is given to him without kind of attending to these conflicts?
And this is very important because this is where the understanding of aesthetic autonomy in a Western sense is negated in the novel,
is that we cannot have neither aesthetic autonomy nor liberal autonomy,
as you would like to have in the city, in Tel Aviv, and not accidentally this kind of alternative political project is attached to the artist.
The novel, of course, rejects this understanding and moves back to the kibbutz with its own problems.
But this understanding is there, embedded and rejected.
Now, in the 1960s and seventies, I said there was an attempt to write novels that would be usually modernist novels that will try to imagine
characters that will be somehow separate from the Zionist collective and they will be somehow individual.
My sense is that this project has failed for two reasons.
One, that historically there was no other political project that will compete with Zionism, and this is the weakness of the left.
Ever since there was no other political project that could compete with the notion of make a freedom that is the product of making up until the 19th,
which is replaced, I will say, by capitalism. And this is where all these projects are trying to be imagined in the literature,
but only negatively, only to reject Zionism but never to offer anything positive.
Therefore, they usually end in catastrophes and tragedies, and they always prepare, propose a negative kind of project that fails.
Okay, so this is the first part.
Now, here I would like to make the latter move to Europe and explain that if you want to understand what is happening in Israel 1992,
we have to understand something about capitalism in Western Europe.
So this will be a bit more technical and we'll move to three or four quotes in which I will explain.
I will move from economics, politics, aesthetics and philosophy,
just to show you the link between these things and how eventually they will help us understand literature of the 1990s.
So [INAUDIBLE] move much more closer to the quotes that you have. Is the second.
I will begin with Marks and Arena remarks by name of Moshe Bastone.
He wrote his book in the early 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And in a way he's providing a non orthodox reading of morals which does not locate capitalism on the basis of class,
but rather simply in the production value.
It's broader than this, and for us it allows me at least much more leeway in understanding what is capitalism.
And briefly, I would say that if up until the the advent of capitalism, we have a very different kind of social formations coming before it.
But you can also say that all of them have something unique shared between them,
which are they are not capitalist and most Bostonian with Marx trying to say that you can
characterise all these social formations by what he calls direct forms of domination.
The clearest one will be master slave king and subjects,
feudal lords and their subject in the sense where domination is directed and within the world,
you know exactly who runs the world by which political standards, political values.
And this is how labour and everything else is distributed. With capitalism, you have a shift to what is called abstract domination,
in which labour is no longer dominated by a particular group or by a particular sovereign or kind of power,
and is abstracted and becomes simply a measure of value.
And this moment you have this separation between those conditions that make you who you are and who you are.
Let me read the quote and then we'll see exactly why I'm going there, because it will be the connection to all the passages.
So the structure of abstract nominations coming up with capitalism constituted by labour acting in
a socially mediated activity I know it's hard here does not appear to be socially constituted.
Rather, it appears in naturalised form in the sense that you don't know who exactly is running the show.
Its social and historical specificity is veiled by several factors.
The form of social necessity exerted exists in the absence of any direct, personal or social domination.
This structure is such that one's own needs, rather than the further force or other social sanctions, appears to be the source of such necessity.
So instead of something in the world that tells you what to do, you believe that the world is there is an objective structure to it.
You believe you have needs and you follow them. And therefore, those conditions that make you who you are.
The structure of domination is then veiled or absence. And there is another quote who helps.
He says The form of social contextualisation.
Characteristics of capitalism in one is one of apparent decontextualised vision in which you have a
world in which the connection between you and those conditions that make you who you are are absent.
You always need to find them, articulate them. It will get to the sense of the search in a minute.
Now, this brings about then a very particular kind of political problem,
because if you have those kind of coming about with capital in a liberal democracy, not by chance.
And Hagel attends to this as well,
where you have now individual subject that sense you as they are not dominated externally and erroneously by something from the outside.
They believe that they are free and are free to follow their own personal interests and only their personal interest.
And therefore, you begin to have a political problem of what will bind all these people in civil society to a political project.
If those conditions that bring them together are absent, then they believe that they are completely free from them.
So Hegel, in his kind of theory of the state, a sense of this problem.
Let me read the second paragraph first.
He says, a situation arises in which in the bottom in which the particular my particular interest is to be my primary determining principle.
I say this is what I do. I follow only my self-interest in civil society, but I am, in fact mistaken about this.
Sure. Since while I suppose that I am adhering to the particular my interest,
the universal and the necessity of the connections between particulars remains the primary and essential thing.
I am altogether then, on the level of semblance, which is a fancy word for appearance in German Shine.
And Hegel tries to even give this political problem in the relationship between particularity and universality.
The sense that you believe since the universal that which makes you who you are, meaning other people, is not apparent to you.
You believe that you can only follow your own interests, right? And therefore you get this political problem.
And in the first paragraph will skip it. He says, If you believe that the state is simply his Hegel with an anti-liberal,
if you think that the state is simply the an aggregate of individual interests, then you have a misconception of what is a state.
And for him, he's tried to bring back the state of that thing, which will bring individuals together,
of course, at the very thuggish people who argue a thing justly,
that eventually Hegel's project is authoritarian in the sense that you have this kind of civil society of private interest
in which the state is trying to compensate for the fact that nothing really bring them together anymore in disregard.
So this problem that Israel, I would argue, kind of undergoes today together with Europe.
It's something that is there already from the 19th century and ideas like nationalism and the state and other forms of welfare states,
for example, trying to compensate for the fact that capitalism is such as a system with no political ends.
But then you have to go to the state and national and to compensate for that. Now,
Hegel is very important to my argument because he understands this kind of
very modern understanding as a break between particularity and universality,
where the freedom of the particular individual is made possible by the absent, universal and the absent condition.
Why is this important? Because this is exactly how. Can't understand the static autonomy.
This is a tie that I'm trying to make and we'll go to content to see how that works.
This is number seven. Now, Conte, as you know, and in third critique,
is trying to distinguish aesthetic judgement or aesthetic object from both kind of conceptual
judgement and from practical judgements or from conceptual thinking and practical making.
And he is defining what is an aesthetic judgement this way.
This is the first book. The Power of Judgement in general is the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal.
So the same terms are used if the universal that for context, the rule, the principle, the law is given in advance.
I would say then the power of judgement which subsumes the particular under it,
is determining and will make a quick connection to the Israel of the first period.
Remember, the state subsumes its particular under the political project but would not give them the freedom,
this liberal freedom that they have the same Western Europe.
If, however, only the particular is given in advance for which the universal is to be found,
meaning the law needs to be the principle and the rule, then the power of judgement is merely reflecting which is the aesthetic judgement.
This is how in concert critique we have the extended from which of the reflecting judgement.
That is to say,
if the work of art is characterised by the fact that you have a particular that is not determined in advance by any kind of universal law.
So just to give you an example, if you are a Zionist writer in the 1940s and fifties,
you would write a novel in which you are universal your and a purpose.
Let's say the concept of an end will determine your novel, invent.
You write a Zionist novel.
Therefore, people will say that these are not real novels and they are mechanical, they ideological, they are propaganda, right?
Because they determine in advance this was the problem of Israeli literature, let's say, in the 14th and 15th reception,
because you would see as if the ideological ends coming about and determining the work.
So in the sixties and seventies,
one of the ways to kind of produce artificial aesthetic autonomy was to cut off the characters from any kind of ideological Zionist project,
which wide was a negative kind of project. It didn't have something to replace it with.
Now can't continue this idea will continue with it because it's important.
And he says, let's read the one.
The second one in a product of art, one must be aware that it is art and not nature.
Yet the purpose of ness and its form may still seem to be free from all constraint and seem to
be three free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature.
On this feeling of freedom and the play of our collective powers, which must yet at the same time be purposive,
rest that pleasure, which is alone universally communicable though without being grounded only concept.
And this is where kind of ties and ideas and aesthetic autonomy in nature, because nature is that thing which we cannot attribute to it an end.
And therefore you are only imputing an end to nature.
But nature does not have. End and this is the awkward as the artwork as well.
It is that thing that it's freedom is guaranteed by the fact that it doesn't have an end
but pay attention that it has to produce this feeling of theming of the appearance.
Remember with Hegel that when the individual is free, you have the appearance of freedom because you don't see what is really determining you.
Same thing with the work of art. You are producing a work of art that needs to produce the appearance of freedom
by kind of hiding the fact that it is determined if you read a third book,
will skip it. You'll see that can't have a very specific way of telling the artist what to do
in order that the work of art will seem free from that which determining it.
So I hope you see a little bit the connections between the economic structure, a veiled condition of possibility.
Hegel's political problem of a civil society not grounded by any political and and constant concept of aesthetic autonomy.
Now, this all happened in the 19th century, so how do we bring into the 20th?
So you'll see. That's why I brought a very dark concept and I don't produce very elaborate connections between them.
But I would argue that the reader has a very close connection,
close conception of what he called the text to conscious conception of aesthetic autonomy.
You will see really will jump to you once you read the first sentence and how we define the text.
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer.
From the first glance, the law of its composition of Kant would say, and the rules of its game.
A text remains, however, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however harboured in the inaccessibility of a secret.
It is simply that they cannot be booked in the present into anything that could be rigorously be called a perception,
and hence perpetually and essentially they run the risk of being definitively lost.
So to kind of go back to literature and kind of summit together, I would argue that if you would agree that this is the structure of capitalism,
that which its conditional, the possibility of revealed its political ends are no longer there,
that can really kind of move forward a society in a particular direction.
You have not simply a text or what they're not calls a text and can't distinguish this as aesthetic.
Autonomy is not simply the property of texts, it's the property of social relations under capital.
And this is what characterises civil society in Israel and the rest of liberal societies, I would say.
Now the question is what I need to do is to show you going back to Israel and this is what I argue now,
that since the 1990s you begin to see literature, a literature of this kind,
where you have have this once this kind of freedom of the individual is guaranteed, once you begin to see that individuals who are free,
who are or in many times the novels are characterised by a search or by an inquiry.
The detective novel is one of the most explicit examples of new Israeli literature and not accidental,
where you have a character usually looking for kind of there is an inquiry, but in those novels are more politically constant.
They will look usually for those conditions of Israeli society,
those things that are now are absent and now needs to be kind of interrogated and brought back to the fore.
And this is one of the biggest changes in Israeli literature, where you have now individual subject who are free,
who is freedom is given in advance, but they are in a political crisis.
Therefore, they're always trying to imagine those conditions that will bind them together.
In a way, this is one characteristic of U.S. literature, and I brought two examples of this.
Now that the most perfect example, I would need more. I would have needed more time to show you how this works in novels.
But I will try to jump into these novels.
I will begin with Nir Bombs, World Shadow, which is kind of a global novel, one of the most ambitious one written recently.
And it moves between Israel, the UK and the United States.
And there are two you always trying to make the connect the dots between what exactly brings together all these characters.
And one point there is a consulting firm in the U.S. that tries to describe the world they live in.
And you once they will read it, you'll see how close this is to what they redefined in the text.
So we at MF V, which is the name of the consulting firm, were all groping in the dark, which becomes even darker.
As your business in the global world thickens, no one fully understands who they're working for,
which power stand behind the friendly delegates who meet for lunch and who stands behind those standing behind.
Sometimes it seems that in the multiplicity of candidates, governments, NGOs, private or government firms,
multinational corporations, regulators, it is impossible to understand anything.
We all hold on to a few pieces of the puzzle, and the real frightening thing is that there is no one who can fully put it together and do it.
I will say that this is indeed a textual world in which there is nothing there that really ground that together.
And with the example of the puzzle that will describe the rule or the determining principle for you and the.
Reigning ideology of postmodernity is that this is the world that we live in, in which you can no longer designate the ends.
The novel specifically goes against this in a way trying to map,
trying to make the reconnection between particular individuals who think that they
live in the world without measure into those conditions that make the world.
And I would say that in different ways, the Israeli novel trying to do that also.
The second example is by Assaf given in English, was printed as croc in Hebrew standing up.
And there as well you have an individual who is accidentally being involved in three or four kind of suicide bombings.
And in the middle of the novel,
he's trying to begin an investigation into the life of someone who was with him in the cab, and he died and he was saved.
So he begins this investigation into what happens to him and brings in with another Palestinian counterpart of the novel.
The novel has this kind of humanist ideology to it.
But more importantly, it says something about the crisis of this individual, but which I think is very important.
And what he says here in this topic. I will read the novel for you a little bit.
He kind of gives what happened to him. I mean, all the people that he met along with this inquiry until he reaches the conclusion.
But how he understands what's happening in the end is very interesting to me.
I thought about myself, how I it how I was in a cafe on a weekday morning, was opposed.
You would hire a young guy to murder his wife's lover.
And I was here because the young guys girlfriend has asked me to find out what her boyfriend was doing on that.
And the morning of the death by suicide bomber on the minibus from which I happened to be travelling.
It's the novel. It's kind of the sentences long just to give the connection.
Adultery, murder, terrorist attacks. Nothing surprising about this in Israel.
Yes. And it happened. It's happened all the time. The surprising thing with me.
It was strange that there should be somebody who linked all these people together.
And this is precisely, I would argue, is one of the problem of Israeli literature in this age in which the connection to other people,
which was by the default connection of Zionist literature up until the nineties where you were connected to other people
by default and you didn't want to be connected to that is now one of the defining principle of Israeli literature.
We have individual subjects who are desperately trying to understand their relationship to other people,
usually in ethical terms, not even political ones.
We can talk about this as well, but this is one of the defining features of Israeli literature today,
which is kind of condition, but what I call the global conditions of global capital will endure.
Thank you. So let's open up for questions.
Discussion. She would like to take.
Now. Something about someone like her on the right.
Who seems to me to be raging over the Israeli society have touched on that.
That links the new with you if you like and sees life in Israel and his existence
in Israel and as a form of continuation of what preceded his arrival in 1940.
Right. So definitely go ahead. And in his case, it's a continuation, as always, marked by an absence.
But in that he he can't reconstruct his memory.
He got reconstructed family. But that's his Israeli ness.
Right. Existing in that central continuation.
Right. So you won't see it map into this new period?
Yeah. You seem to me to be saying that Israeli ness is either a design in 62, 1940, 1990, or the.
Or the non Zionist globalised state.
Right. But it seems to me that there's a third option, which is the wider historical contextualisation, right.
What's happening in Israel and their version of Zionism against the diaspora that preceded it and can't really ever be escaped to something like that.
Right. This is where the analysis has to be more nuanced. So it's not that there are some writers like Abir Shoah, for example,
that they will do make the transition that he will begin writing differently that say, from the 1990.
And though those writers who do not and then you have to have a more nuanced model of where you
have those novel the new continuum that would to change with the time and those who don't.
Then you have multiple kind of aesthetic modes.
So you would maybe want to argue that adult film does not make the transition that he
therefore he's not identified with the new in identifying with new Israeli culture,
but precisely with those that do not continue on.
He's not part of this change and his kind of staying in his own mould, if I understand you correctly,
in understanding the literature generally, that it's the same mode of writing does not change over time.
So you had those writers that might continue to write, let's say, Zionist novels,
but you will no longer consider them to be relevant or to be kind of trying to understand the present of Israeli of the Israeli condition.
So what you have to have a kind of a more nuanced reading of the novel to see what kind of political problem Aberfeldy is dealing with.
My sense is that it will be more ethical rather than political. But I will have to give a more detailed reading of each novel.
But my sense is that you will not make the transition, that he will be kind of in his moment without shifting.
I see him as Israeli. And they're not that they're not Israeli.
It's not that there are more Israeli, less Israeli. This is this is definitely not my argument.
But the sense that what what kind of political problem is defining the literature and might be the case that he's not responding to these changes.
I really think you I was really struck that this is the first example.
Yet you write in the text that has not yet appeared in English.
But astonishingly, examples are two very translatable write in texts.
Right. But also, there's something else in the shift to implicate translators.
Right. Like global literature is also right.
Wants to appeal to the world. It's an appealing argument.
I would say that let's say that writers would try to be more literary.
This whole debate about world literature, let's say these, which is in the background of my admittedly get into it today,
but let's say you would want to be translator, you will want to be read in Europe and the U.S. and powerful centres.
There is this novel by this study by Pascal Casanova and she will give an account of how do you get to be a world writer, right?
And I would put a be sure at some point in the most of those moments where they
tried to kind of import these liberal kind of models and then be translated.
So I would not, though, argue that the translator ability of them make them different.
So even though you were translated,
wanted to be trained that up until the nineties you will still won't be able to produce the kind of novels we see from the nineties.
They will still be novel. They will be kind of predicated on negative political projects for which liberal freedom will be denied for you.
But you will pass if you maybe it's important to remember that while if you take
the postcolonial critique that says that Zionism was kind of a European movement,
Israeli literature does not pass as European or as Western, let's say, up until the nineties.
It doesn't because precisely because of this political problem that it have,
it's kind of grounded in a political structure that does not allow it to write a liberal novel.
So I won't say that the translate ability makes it more global,
although they are more translated, it probably is translated, but you can say that in reverse.
I didn't see that. But in terms of the structure of the novel, it is more about what makes the novel global.
If that though, how it thinks about for me about freedom that will make the global for me.
Well, thank you for a wonderful, rich, productive and very ambitious project.
It's really interesting to read the history of this early literature through your lecture.
My question is, I'm wondering, I have a few questions. I'll start with wonderful periodisation.
I'm interested in why you chose 1990 and onwards in the 1980s and onwards, or how you view that specific day period.
Right. Right. Think about what was already the beginning, both in terms of political change in Israel.
Right.
In the eighties, we see right in terms of the capitalism and also thinking about a lot of things, the rise of the right feminist project as well.
Right. Right. I will definitely put all those there. So I will say, why 919 So arbitrarily you can choose 1985 as the date,
because this is the date of the emergency plan for economic elevation and is marked at that moment where
we shifted Israel shifted more kind of a pronounced lean to kind of a liberal neoliberal societies.
But those privatisations started somewhat already in the late sixties.
But this is kind of the moment that began. Why not the eighties?
Because I think that if you some people go to what's the novel, the night to the 1977 elections and to the novelists i what's his name?
He wrote two novels and died sometime.
Right someti will be the first novel. Right. So.
That's right. Right. Right. And then there people try to understand sometimes the beginning of this.
I argue against it. I think that sometimes the end of the first period at the beginning of the new it's present.
And then I will have an account with to have it and the book. But I had took it out.
It's there where for some time you have a sense that it is a completely negative
project in the sense that you can no longer produce kind of daily time.
Everything is reduced to materiality. You don't have any spiritual, that animated novel of the Zionism up until that moment,
and you have this kind of mundane kind of daily life because really material, that's the that's the language that he chooses.
And then that has no spiritual thing to animated.
But the shift itself happens only later when you begin to have positive liberal subject the who are free by default.
They don't have to negate anything. They're simply free by default.
The problem is that they want to be political. They want to attach to other people and kind of understand their life.
They want to spiritualised the life in some way. And they cannot, of course.
That's why I the beginning of the eighties is not enough yet.
The feminist novels after in the second period, I would say, will be those as well in the novels, all of them,
which is usually not told that they are grounded by kind of a particular liberal subject who is trying to be political but really can't, I would say.
So this is why I go to the 1980s. You know, it makes total sense also because she was on the floor of all of the case.
Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah.
I also have a cordial. Thank you. I'll join you. Thank you.
And my question is about I guess I have two medical questions and one is about the Israel literature is and one will be about global literature.
There is or the literature of globalisation of early of late capitalism.
And maybe I'll start by saying that not so long ago, a couple of months ago in New York, we have this theme of a Hebrew literature lab.
And it's also very small. And I'm the one came to give a lecture.
And he in fact, he came to tell us that.
It's unfortunate that today scholars of Hebrew literature and Israel literature are no longer interested in writing historiography.
Right. Or I'm in periodisation right that they're true.
And you started by saying that usually we have, you know, these multiple categories and certainly not this argument of a clear break.
So I'm interested to know what prompted you to even enter a project like this and whether you agree with me one.
But how would you explain that, that it's been a while since I'm ready to write that.
And the other question is, as you and I think they're interrelated,
it's a question about whether your project as such is global or at least universal in
the sense that I would expect expect that similar trends happened in other literatures,
as I'm quoting, Kahn's and Hegel and even Marx in the background or Gary does understanding of the text as a physician.
First of all. Right. Thing I mean, is that is that always the reaction of writers to neoliberalism?
That's sort of my question. I mean, it's not very well articulated here, but whether it's part of the story you're trying to put, well,
that would be a terrible thing to say to to put Israeli literature on the map in that sense or to write.
I thought I start with the last question. I think it's definitely a global and that's why I began saying that this process happens all over the world.
And then I in the conclusion of my book, I give the example of one in each continent that would be ambition.
So it will be Brazil and then China, the U.S., Israel was already there in Palestine.
Then one more. And then I argue that you see these changes in different places and they will I will fail.
I argue or bet on that.
They will play out similarly that you will have this kind of strict textual structure that comes about with the shift in your liberalism.
And therefore Israel is not identical to them,
but equivalent to them in the sense that it's competing with contending with similar political social problem,
but giving it, of course, its own solution, according to the Israeli political situation, often disregarded.
Yes, I would say that it's by default there. It's happening all over the world.
So it's it's there whether it wants to or not.
Why did I write and historiography first from dissatisfaction with the one that I've read and how unhappy
with with that and unhappy with also the fact that if you think of historiography up until this point,
if you go with the decade, it's kind of it's ten years, it changes.
All of them are the same, meaning they are different aesthetically.
But with your category of the period is that there are equivalent periods.
And I've read enough to understand that something happened in the nineties,
that it's completely different than what comes before it, not simply another period.
So that way I entered this because I realised that the new Libya is completely different.
What comes before it? I think the new one is right about the fact that there are no longer any position from this for two reasons.
One, it's considered to be a total project and we no longer like total projects, right?
It's bias against don't tell us how it all plays out. We all have individual tiny project and we don't want any overarching.
That's a real problem. And second, and I would say part of what comes about with neo liberal capitalism is the fact that
it's these store sizes that since the 1990s you have a sense that nothing changes,
that what's happened in the 1980s and 2017.
It's not accidental that people don't write it because they're in a sense of the fact that there is nothing that changes with capital.
There's a sense of these two is zation and people start kind of understanding why I don't understand the difference.
So that's why I would say, can I take you back to the political argument for a second and correct me if I'm wrong, if I understood you correctly,
the arc of the arc of the argument we're making is that it is an Israeli context and a liberal state is suffocation of the
individual or not even allowing of the individual to pronounce itself ends up with individuals who are detached from other.
Communal ties looking for the ties that would place them in today.
Yeah, I would say that there is that that if you want to take, for example, the clearest problem of the left in Israel today,
the secular left of the political project is how do you bring these people together?
What will bind them together? What will be? This will be Labour's greatest problem.
What can we offer the Israeli public that will bring them together, although not unlike the past?
And I would say that the most dominant political project, not of the right wing of the left, is this multiculturalism.
So one way of putting it, and I know it's it's not the start of argument that you would make,
but an alternative way of putting the similar argument is that there used to be a metanarrative,
a political metanarrative that has been given up or crumbling or privatised.
And then the individuals lack this organising framework through which to identify themselves in the world.
Mm hmm. So the question, if this is what you were trying to argue in, the question would be,
can you please go back to doing the comparison with Western European literature and tell
us what is it there that in a liberal mindset allows the individuals to feel in place?
Like, What are the times? And the second part of the question would be, how is it when compared to how is this literature,
when compared to other non-Western non-European literature literatures in which maybe liberalism hasn't really.
Right. So I would argue that Palestinian literature follows a similar track.
So although not Gaza, but Ramallah, for example, in past contemporary Palestinian literature,
is confronted despite the occupation with those kind of characters who are having this kind of life that is more and more privatised.
And for them, politics, it's something that is external to them for which they're trying to connect of guilty about.
Or there are those characters in the novel who are political but not the main character.
Therefore, you have this kind of relationship between the non character and those political activist.
I read in my in my book,
Danny a Shibley is novels that are completely privatised or Thelma forget her last name writes in England
actually also kind of the problems of private life and trying to connect to the Palestinian cause,
for example.
So in this regard, Palestinian literature will be similar to French German literature and and in France will be similar from the nineties onwards.
In terms of what's happening in Europe, I would say that it's both nationalism,
probably 19th century, the 20th century, the welfare state, Keynesianism,
that which kind of put bounds and limits on capital and repurposed it in a
way give it another end with limiting capital by this kind of collective end,
which ends up in the seventies and the nationalism which I think happens in the 19th century as well and artificially.
You cannot really do it. But this will be what's happening in Israel today.
Have this kind of political project trying to revive the society which appears in this kind of extreme way in Israel.
So you would you would expect, for example, the British literature now post austerity for 2008,
cutting down or breaking down of the welfare state to become more Israeli, in a sense.
I would say that both of them confront the same kind of problem of the crumbling of any, I would say,
of a society which doesn't have any political ends to guide it and responding to it differently.
That's why they're not identical. They're equivalent and identical. It's very important.
So we're finding similar in poetry because you're right.
All right. How you interested? Whether you see the same, right?
I don't. It's true that I don't read poetry in the book and in my training,
I would say that we had the same similar reactions of the sixties in the phones like and others up
until the 19th and from nineties you would have poetry that responds to the same kind of problem.
Yes, I would say that the film definitely. So if you look at someone like George Eliot.
Mm hmm. You no enforcement? Um, these are 19th century and Edwardian writers were neither working in favour of nationalism nor socialism.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And they don't have problems with how their protagonists individually reach each
other because they're reaching within what we might find is a legal version.
Individual coming together. It is a it's a mystery version of jump through the middle.
Mm hmm. Okay. So what will be the idea? I mean, it works.
It's it's they're not. They're not having an issue of how do you how you combine individuality.
Mm hmm.
They they combine by virtue of a liberal state that recognises the existence of giants as things of themselves that have a have intrinsic value.
I think you will need to read individually the novel then to see what will be the political solution for individuality.
Because I my sense of that will be that you cannot simply have private individuals running around and not having something to bind them.
And each novelist will kind of put forward a different kind of political ideology
to solve this problem of this innate freedom that does not have a political end.
But you have to refer to specific novels, and I won't be able to do that with you here.
But that my guess would be that if we take if we begin with the assumption that these are liberal subjects, autonomous from the beginning,
the first autonomous literature there will have the novel will be interested in a political it depends on the
political ideology of of that particular what will be the political ideology that will solve those problems.
But I will have to read specific novels.
Okay. An Apposite One. Daniel Deronda by Eliot's.
And where her vision of our humanness is what enables her to both see Daniel Deronda as as an individual
and as someone that has a right to live as a Jew and in what she imagines might be an Israeli state.
Or she was. Mm hmm. But before you get to to ethnic nationalism, that is, you get to a common humanity which interlinking divides.
So here it is, out of hand. Right. She's a cosmopolitan.
Right. So I don't think my version of Middle Eastern or whoever would also be right.
This will be the political solution to this war. You can find that in some house as well.
So for his heart, it's kind of a split world.
I will come to the example where you have, on the one hand, this kind of political project that is vested in violence,
and then you have this kind of idyllic nature for which everybody is equal, and you can find solace there.
But he cannot decide between the two and for his heart differently than other writers of the 16th nature.
His whole right, you can go to nature and somehow retrieve it as your solution there.
So comment humanism. The comment of the humanity at large will be that solution where everybody.
There are other kind of aspects to my to my argument basically the the in Israel the common political project with
vested in inequality and therefore the solutions to inequality is equivalent some kind of reign of equivalence.
So that will be there where all human beings all over the world are equivalent to one another without violence.
This will be the solution to the fact that we all different from another.
We cannot live. So this will be the political solution. Humanism was one of them, definitely.
So that's probably there. So you see it yourself, right? There is attempt to solve this problem with different urgencies.
I don't want to map it one to the other.
Israel is different than England is different than India and other than China that the political solution will be different.
But the problem with this thing. I think it is.
Thank you so much. Thank you.