1 00:00:02,310 --> 00:00:11,220 Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. There's a special joy in introducing to you my good friend, Dr. Phil Cohen. 2 00:00:12,900 --> 00:00:20,370 Dr. Cohen's Dr. Cohen is the academic director of the Globalisation and Sovereignty Cluster at the Venue Institute in Jerusalem. 3 00:00:20,820 --> 00:00:33,190 He took his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in comparative literature and was generally he is dealing with issues of globalisation in Israel, 4 00:00:33,210 --> 00:00:40,750 Palestine and France. And his forthcoming book on the topic is to be published soon in a year's time with versa. 5 00:00:42,300 --> 00:00:47,340 Dr. Cohen, thank you for coming. The title of the talk today is Israeli Literature. 6 00:00:47,340 --> 00:00:51,450 Is Global Literature Broadly Defined? We'll see what that means in a moment. 7 00:00:51,990 --> 00:00:57,540 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. 8 00:00:57,540 --> 00:01:05,580 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. 9 00:01:05,880 --> 00:01:14,490 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 10 00:01:14,640 --> 00:01:18,870 that are on the broader project as Palestinian and French literature vis a vis globalisation. 11 00:01:19,380 --> 00:01:23,820 And these are changes and we'll get to them in a moment. That happened all over the world in Israel as well. 12 00:01:24,180 --> 00:01:27,930 And my position is that you can no longer understand Israeli literature, 13 00:01:27,930 --> 00:01:32,700 only vis a vis what's happened locally, and definitely not only vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 14 00:01:32,700 --> 00:01:40,280 which has been Jews and Arab relationships, which have been the centre of kind of Israeli postcolonial study since the nineties. 15 00:01:40,300 --> 00:01:46,560 So this is a very kind of different position from which I'm coming to understand Israeli literature so much. 16 00:01:46,590 --> 00:01:52,590 The history that I'm trying in my book begins from the 19 nine forties to the present, 17 00:01:52,590 --> 00:01:58,470 and I divide them basically to two periods from 1940s to 1990s and from 1990s to the present. 18 00:01:58,890 --> 00:02:04,260 This is not the current history. Current history, usually in Israeli literature, divides them into periods of ten years or so, 19 00:02:04,500 --> 00:02:09,060 two decades, sometimes 40th of the 50 or 60, 6070s, eighties in the nineties. 20 00:02:09,780 --> 00:02:13,649 And I argue that you can no longer purifies Israeli literature in this way. 21 00:02:13,650 --> 00:02:21,330 So I have only two periods, and I distinguish these two periods by by the social structure of Israeli society. 22 00:02:21,660 --> 00:02:26,399 And I understand and the kind of talk that I will give will try to explain the 23 00:02:26,400 --> 00:02:30,389 relationship between Israeli social relations and Israeli cultural production, 24 00:02:30,390 --> 00:02:31,680 specifically literature. 25 00:02:32,100 --> 00:02:39,870 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, 26 00:02:39,870 --> 00:02:48,030 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. 27 00:02:48,600 --> 00:02:57,929 And the notion of liberal autonomy and also aesthetic autonomy is not possible in Israel up until the nineties, 28 00:02:57,930 --> 00:03:03,720 and therefore it kind of characterises the period as a non-liberal period where the question of 29 00:03:03,960 --> 00:03:09,450 individual autonomy as well as aesthetic autonomy is a problem for Israeli society in general, 30 00:03:09,450 --> 00:03:17,159 and specifically for cultural production in the literature. And from the 1990s onwards, with neo liberalism and privatisation and globalisation, 31 00:03:17,160 --> 00:03:26,130 you begin to see a separation of state and civil society that inaugurates the possibility of liberal autonomy as well as aesthetic autonomy. 32 00:03:26,670 --> 00:03:29,850 So to show you a little bit what I'm going to do, I prepared for you this map. 33 00:03:30,180 --> 00:03:34,160 I will show you how well what I'm going to do. 34 00:03:34,170 --> 00:03:40,480 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. 35 00:03:40,500 --> 00:03:43,380 I just wanted to show you that it's larger than Israel. 36 00:03:43,710 --> 00:03:48,420 As you can see in the left column, you have this axis from the 1940 through the nineties, which I call head on. 37 00:03:48,420 --> 00:03:53,489 I mean, I'll explain that and moves to the bottom, which is 19, 19th to the present, 38 00:03:53,490 --> 00:03:59,460 which I designate autonomy for the burden of the talk will be to explain how we move from one to the other. 39 00:04:00,030 --> 00:04:03,450 But I will make also not only a vertical move, but also a lateral one. 40 00:04:03,480 --> 00:04:10,320 So to compare Israeli literature to Western Europe and the U.S., so do you have that on the right column of your map? 41 00:04:10,320 --> 00:04:17,700 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 42 00:04:18,240 --> 00:04:27,209 from Western Europe and the US up until the nineties and why is different from it and how it becomes not identical but equivalent. 43 00:04:27,210 --> 00:04:31,440 And we'll try to explain that as we go. So we like a night move. 44 00:04:31,440 --> 00:04:36,090 One, two, three. So this will be a move that I will try to make today. 45 00:04:37,710 --> 00:04:42,750 So many people talk about globalisation more or less from the nineties and it's become a very widespread term. 46 00:04:42,750 --> 00:04:47,610 But there are two broad definitions of globalisation one esoteric and one esoteric. 47 00:04:47,670 --> 00:04:52,770 The esoteric term and widespread is the globalisation of anything which is a worldwide phenomenon 48 00:04:52,770 --> 00:04:59,250 and usually immigration and trade people that we follow movements of people and movements. 49 00:04:59,310 --> 00:05:03,140 Of commodities. If you have this kind of definition, you can talk about globalisation. 50 00:05:03,450 --> 00:05:07,349 Since the beginning of time, more or less people will argue that Andrew, Good and Frank does that. 51 00:05:07,350 --> 00:05:13,920 It begins 5000 years ago. Some Marx is talking about the advent of capitalism will place it in the 16th century. 52 00:05:14,310 --> 00:05:19,450 Others will place the 19th century. So you have different kind of competing definition of what globalisation means. 53 00:05:19,470 --> 00:05:27,090 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. 54 00:05:27,090 --> 00:05:31,350 And I identify it with the spread of capitalist social relations all over the world. 55 00:05:31,380 --> 00:05:37,710 So for me, globalisation is identical with what is called sometimes neoliberalism or late capitalism, 56 00:05:38,010 --> 00:05:44,160 which is to say the spread of particular social capitalist relationships all over the world, not simply commodities. 57 00:05:45,030 --> 00:05:50,970 And this is how I understand it, and this is what comes to designate the Israeli society from the 19 1990s onwards. 58 00:05:51,600 --> 00:06:00,929 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, 59 00:06:00,930 --> 00:06:07,020 there is a particular social formation that subordinates human ends to human needs, human means. 60 00:06:07,440 --> 00:06:11,250 And I will give you just one brief quote from Marx, from Capital. 61 00:06:11,610 --> 00:06:19,739 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, 62 00:06:19,740 --> 00:06:24,719 and hence it is does not predetermine the course of production in the sense that human 63 00:06:24,720 --> 00:06:30,560 political needs or human political ends do not predetermine the way that we live our lives. 64 00:06:30,570 --> 00:06:31,979 This is what happens with capital. 65 00:06:31,980 --> 00:06:39,480 It subordinates political ends and social end to the production of value, which in itself does not have an end in itself. 66 00:06:39,480 --> 00:06:43,200 It is that perpetual, endless production of value and profit. 67 00:06:43,440 --> 00:06:50,879 And this is, if you want, defines a little bit what's happening in Israel since the nineties with the what's 68 00:06:50,880 --> 00:06:55,050 happening with the shift in the Zionist kind of model and which I will explain. 69 00:06:55,650 --> 00:07:01,320 So it's interesting to me because I think that if you want to understand the political significance of Israeli literature, 70 00:07:01,320 --> 00:07:06,330 Israeli cultural production, it deals with this crisis of politics or process of political ends. 71 00:07:06,330 --> 00:07:12,360 The fact that it is no longer simple to say under this shift to capital, what exactly are, if you want, 72 00:07:12,570 --> 00:07:17,340 the political ends of the Jewish people in Israel, if you want, understand it this way, all the political end of Israeli society. 73 00:07:17,340 --> 00:07:23,700 This is the crisis that in a way the state itself is trying to answer with its own form of extreme nationalism, 74 00:07:23,700 --> 00:07:30,870 if you want, and other political project are trying to fill in the void with the end of an all the form of Zionism. 75 00:07:31,800 --> 00:07:34,110 So this is my political interest in this. 76 00:07:34,980 --> 00:07:42,230 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. 77 00:07:42,240 --> 00:07:46,690 Give two or three examples. I warn you that I won't give too many examples from the letter. 78 00:07:46,710 --> 00:07:50,420 Travel more give you kind of theoretical and historical framework of the history. 79 00:07:50,430 --> 00:07:54,600 History itself with three or four examples, you'll see what's going on there. 80 00:07:55,080 --> 00:08:00,240 So the first period, as you see in your map, it's from the 14th to the 19th and designate by header on me. 81 00:08:00,990 --> 00:08:06,030 The distinction between header on a me and autonomy is usually defined by this regression to freedom. 82 00:08:06,570 --> 00:08:14,129 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. 83 00:08:14,130 --> 00:08:18,420 It is it is not self legislating as would be an autonomous liberal subject. 84 00:08:19,200 --> 00:08:26,669 And therefore if for a liberal subject, the freedom of the subject is there before it enters the world, it is not. 85 00:08:26,670 --> 00:08:29,790 It is a property of the subject for had or on in the subject. 86 00:08:29,790 --> 00:08:34,130 This freedom is not there, right? It is. It is not is not a property. 87 00:08:34,140 --> 00:08:41,070 The subject is determined from the outside, the usual understanding of their own subjects, if you want, by a kind of enlightenment critique, 88 00:08:41,070 --> 00:08:49,050 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. 89 00:08:49,230 --> 00:08:55,380 And therefore, if you take an Enlightenment position, you will want to free that subject from an external, determined determination. 90 00:08:56,490 --> 00:09:06,450 Now, how that relates to Israel, I argue that Zionists from the thirties onwards with the establishment of one of their Labour Party, 91 00:09:06,450 --> 00:09:13,589 that from the 1930 they have established a state structure in which civil society was not liberal and free, 92 00:09:13,590 --> 00:09:16,110 as was happened in Western Europe, in the US. 93 00:09:16,650 --> 00:09:23,010 And what is unique about Zionism, as you might heard a discussion that usually what a collective in society, but this is not enough. 94 00:09:23,010 --> 00:09:25,680 What is unique about that in society up until the nineties. 95 00:09:25,980 --> 00:09:31,559 Well that its freedom its collective freedom was not given in advance as would be in a liberal understanding. 96 00:09:31,560 --> 00:09:34,380 But it's a freedom that has to be made in the world, 97 00:09:35,670 --> 00:09:40,829 unlike the freedom that is given for the to the liberal subject to be there before the entry into the world. 98 00:09:40,830 --> 00:09:45,230 This is the big difference for me. So what characterises Israeli society, 99 00:09:45,240 --> 00:09:50,639 specifically literature and that it tried in specifically in the forties and fifties to 100 00:09:50,640 --> 00:09:54,870 write such novels in which the collective freedom itself will be made in the world, 101 00:09:55,110 --> 00:09:58,890 usually by war or settlement. This will be the most classic typical novel. 102 00:09:59,800 --> 00:10:03,430 And then later on in the sixties and seventies, there is a crisis. We'll get there as well. 103 00:10:03,850 --> 00:10:10,630 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. 104 00:10:11,080 --> 00:10:15,730 This is why Israeli literature, as well as civil society in Israel, is very different than Western Europe. 105 00:10:16,090 --> 00:10:19,220 It is. It brings us to the aesthetic relations themselves. 106 00:10:19,240 --> 00:10:26,500 If we European literature, Western literature, Western European literature is depicted as autonomous and free. 107 00:10:26,650 --> 00:10:32,680 I would say it's an act of liberal subject that can write literature without any purpose or political end. 108 00:10:32,980 --> 00:10:36,940 Israeli literature up until the 1990s is designated as heterogenous. 109 00:10:36,940 --> 00:10:42,490 Literature is always had the political end with which it has to kind of contend with. 110 00:10:42,760 --> 00:10:46,000 And if you are a Zionist or a statist, I will call. This is very clear. 111 00:10:46,030 --> 00:10:49,390 You write novels that promote certain kind of Zionist ideology. 112 00:10:50,050 --> 00:10:54,700 If you are a liberal subject for a liberal writer such as closer to ABBA, 113 00:10:54,700 --> 00:11:01,420 sure more so of Sialkot and a few others would try to contend with this kind of a collective freedom that is made. 114 00:11:01,450 --> 00:11:08,260 You are trying to write liberal novels, liberal subjects or individuals, as you might heard, to hear the conversation. 115 00:11:08,680 --> 00:11:11,080 But I argue that these attempts usually fail. 116 00:11:11,590 --> 00:11:17,050 They are attempt that try to imagine kind of a different kind of political project grounded on the individual, 117 00:11:17,680 --> 00:11:24,700 on grounded in the freedom given in advance. But it is usually promoting a negative political project that cannot succeed. 118 00:11:25,150 --> 00:11:33,010 Only in the 1990s you start to see positive liberal subjects that do not have to negate Zionism to be autonomous and free. 119 00:11:33,190 --> 00:11:40,389 And this changes the entire Israeli literature kind of an imaginary world as well as how do you write a novel from the 19th? 120 00:11:40,390 --> 00:11:45,650 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? 121 00:11:45,670 --> 00:11:50,260 I'll go to one of the classical examples from musician Mills. 122 00:11:50,590 --> 00:11:55,569 He walked in the field. This is not the although it became very well known, it's not the most typical Zionist. 123 00:11:55,570 --> 00:12:00,910 Now, also the most typical Zionist novel was written by a couple by Alexander and do not send it. 124 00:12:00,910 --> 00:12:07,150 It's called The Land Without Shadow. There you see a much more kind of an attempt to build a kibbutz. 125 00:12:07,450 --> 00:12:12,309 And what's happening there happened to lead to the independence, the war of Independence. 126 00:12:12,310 --> 00:12:15,600 But this is more of a new novel since it's a small room. 127 00:12:15,610 --> 00:12:18,670 I will let you read. It is read the number three. 128 00:12:19,630 --> 00:12:22,990 What it allowed to have it. Oh, you caught it. Okay, fine. 129 00:12:23,470 --> 00:12:30,730 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. 130 00:12:31,030 --> 00:12:35,589 And this is she remembers what happened to her when she ran away from the kibbutz to Tel Aviv. 131 00:12:35,590 --> 00:12:41,500 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. 132 00:12:41,800 --> 00:12:45,220 She runs to the city and then years later, she remembers this period. 133 00:12:45,520 --> 00:12:54,009 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. 134 00:12:54,010 --> 00:12:58,930 And she thinks about what comes to define what kibbutz life means to the kibbutz. 135 00:12:58,930 --> 00:13:04,210 She says it's not a cooperative for this or that matter of life, nor even for all matters of life. 136 00:13:04,420 --> 00:13:11,320 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. 137 00:13:11,860 --> 00:13:15,490 Therefore, in the kibbutz, a man must accept not only life, but death itself. 138 00:13:15,940 --> 00:13:19,090 The kibbutz leads man from ashes to ashes. There is no way out. 139 00:13:19,510 --> 00:13:24,580 There is no way out for those who seek to be saved from elsewhere. The kibbutz has the duty to raise children. 140 00:13:24,820 --> 00:13:28,030 Will it approve, then, of those who will take their children out of this collective? 141 00:13:28,510 --> 00:13:35,470 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. 142 00:13:35,650 --> 00:13:39,940 And the first children must pave the way for future generations who will necessarily follow. 143 00:13:40,480 --> 00:13:44,080 So this, if you want, is kind of the kibbutz. 144 00:13:44,080 --> 00:13:48,610 Is that not simply collective? It must make its own way of life. 145 00:13:48,820 --> 00:13:54,790 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. 146 00:13:54,790 --> 00:13:58,899 They have to make this collective freedom and therefore their head are on in this subject. 147 00:13:58,900 --> 00:14:03,820 They are bound in advance of this political project and they have to make their own freedom. 148 00:14:04,270 --> 00:14:10,690 I chose another example to bring it closer to the notion of aesthetics and individual autonomy. 149 00:14:10,960 --> 00:14:13,990 There is a moment there where his husband Vili, 150 00:14:14,200 --> 00:14:20,139 is coming to bring her back to the kibbutz and she wants whilst you there she is living with an artist. 151 00:14:20,140 --> 00:14:23,590 You sell boom bed. He's the typical Zionist kind of character. 152 00:14:23,590 --> 00:14:26,919 He speaks Yiddish, he's an artist. It has nothing to do with Zionism. 153 00:14:26,920 --> 00:14:31,899 He lives in Tel Aviv and he kind of promotes the understanding that he's an individual. 154 00:14:31,900 --> 00:14:36,670 He can do what he wants to do, and for him, his life is art and only art. 155 00:14:36,910 --> 00:14:45,550 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. 156 00:14:46,030 --> 00:14:53,230 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. 157 00:14:53,620 --> 00:14:58,810 This is your school of thought. You are tired of the kibbutz, and already you have in the city a different culture and a. 158 00:14:58,970 --> 00:15:05,060 Currently through this culture, you retrieve the bride spirit message with the spirit and such. 159 00:15:05,330 --> 00:15:10,010 Have you ever seen a spirit? A spirit is such a spirit is like fire and flame. 160 00:15:10,280 --> 00:15:14,240 But if it does not hold on to something, there is no fire and no flame. 161 00:15:15,020 --> 00:15:18,079 And what I will kind of butcher it a little bit. 162 00:15:18,080 --> 00:15:22,530 And what Vin is trying to say, that there is no such thing as freedom in general. 163 00:15:22,550 --> 00:15:28,580 It is not that people are free to begin with or there attached to something that makes the freedom particular kind of freedom. 164 00:15:28,820 --> 00:15:34,060 And for Vili later on, he kind of accuses Bloomberg for that, that he will fight the war. 165 00:15:34,070 --> 00:15:38,450 He will kind of make the kibbutz, but he has to make his own freedom. 166 00:15:38,450 --> 00:15:43,220 Was Bloomberg think that his freedom is given to him without kind of attending to these conflicts? 167 00:15:43,520 --> 00:15:50,750 And this is very important because this is where the understanding of aesthetic autonomy in a Western sense is negated in the novel, 168 00:15:50,930 --> 00:15:54,860 is that we cannot have neither aesthetic autonomy nor liberal autonomy, 169 00:15:54,860 --> 00:16:01,610 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. 170 00:16:02,030 --> 00:16:05,870 The novel, of course, rejects this understanding and moves back to the kibbutz with its own problems. 171 00:16:05,870 --> 00:16:09,530 But this understanding is there, embedded and rejected. 172 00:16:11,300 --> 00:16:19,760 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 173 00:16:19,760 --> 00:16:25,340 characters that will be somehow separate from the Zionist collective and they will be somehow individual. 174 00:16:26,270 --> 00:16:30,169 My sense is that this project has failed for two reasons. 175 00:16:30,170 --> 00:16:38,450 One, that historically there was no other political project that will compete with Zionism, and this is the weakness of the left. 176 00:16:38,450 --> 00:16:46,999 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, 177 00:16:47,000 --> 00:16:53,570 which is replaced, I will say, by capitalism. And this is where all these projects are trying to be imagined in the literature, 178 00:16:53,750 --> 00:16:58,550 but only negatively, only to reject Zionism but never to offer anything positive. 179 00:16:58,790 --> 00:17:05,480 Therefore, they usually end in catastrophes and tragedies, and they always prepare, propose a negative kind of project that fails. 180 00:17:06,860 --> 00:17:09,110 Okay, so this is the first part. 181 00:17:09,350 --> 00:17:16,669 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, 182 00:17:16,670 --> 00:17:19,820 we have to understand something about capitalism in Western Europe. 183 00:17:20,150 --> 00:17:24,770 So this will be a bit more technical and we'll move to three or four quotes in which I will explain. 184 00:17:25,070 --> 00:17:28,370 I will move from economics, politics, aesthetics and philosophy, 185 00:17:28,610 --> 00:17:34,850 just to show you the link between these things and how eventually they will help us understand literature of the 1990s. 186 00:17:35,330 --> 00:17:40,160 So [INAUDIBLE] move much more closer to the quotes that you have. Is the second. 187 00:17:44,100 --> 00:17:47,640 I will begin with Marks and Arena remarks by name of Moshe Bastone. 188 00:17:48,240 --> 00:17:52,470 He wrote his book in the early 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 189 00:17:52,740 --> 00:18:01,980 And in a way he's providing a non orthodox reading of morals which does not locate capitalism on the basis of class, 190 00:18:02,460 --> 00:18:04,350 but rather simply in the production value. 191 00:18:04,620 --> 00:18:09,390 It's broader than this, and for us it allows me at least much more leeway in understanding what is capitalism. 192 00:18:10,020 --> 00:18:18,240 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. 193 00:18:19,110 --> 00:18:23,370 But you can also say that all of them have something unique shared between them, 194 00:18:23,550 --> 00:18:30,270 which are they are not capitalist and most Bostonian with Marx trying to say that you can 195 00:18:30,270 --> 00:18:34,380 characterise all these social formations by what he calls direct forms of domination. 196 00:18:34,950 --> 00:18:38,099 The clearest one will be master slave king and subjects, 197 00:18:38,100 --> 00:18:43,409 feudal lords and their subject in the sense where domination is directed and within the world, 198 00:18:43,410 --> 00:18:47,130 you know exactly who runs the world by which political standards, political values. 199 00:18:47,340 --> 00:18:55,530 And this is how labour and everything else is distributed. With capitalism, you have a shift to what is called abstract domination, 200 00:18:55,830 --> 00:19:02,610 in which labour is no longer dominated by a particular group or by a particular sovereign or kind of power, 201 00:19:02,700 --> 00:19:05,490 and is abstracted and becomes simply a measure of value. 202 00:19:05,820 --> 00:19:12,120 And this moment you have this separation between those conditions that make you who you are and who you are. 203 00:19:12,360 --> 00:19:18,760 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. 204 00:19:19,200 --> 00:19:25,290 So the structure of abstract nominations coming up with capitalism constituted by labour acting in 205 00:19:25,290 --> 00:19:30,300 a socially mediated activity I know it's hard here does not appear to be socially constituted. 206 00:19:31,230 --> 00:19:36,330 Rather, it appears in naturalised form in the sense that you don't know who exactly is running the show. 207 00:19:37,020 --> 00:19:41,670 Its social and historical specificity is veiled by several factors. 208 00:19:42,240 --> 00:19:49,380 The form of social necessity exerted exists in the absence of any direct, personal or social domination. 209 00:19:49,800 --> 00:19:57,630 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. 210 00:19:58,620 --> 00:20:05,009 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. 211 00:20:05,010 --> 00:20:10,080 You believe you have needs and you follow them. And therefore, those conditions that make you who you are. 212 00:20:10,410 --> 00:20:14,820 The structure of domination is then veiled or absence. And there is another quote who helps. 213 00:20:15,060 --> 00:20:18,480 He says The form of social contextualisation. 214 00:20:18,810 --> 00:20:25,350 Characteristics of capitalism in one is one of apparent decontextualised vision in which you have a 215 00:20:25,350 --> 00:20:30,870 world in which the connection between you and those conditions that make you who you are are absent. 216 00:20:31,290 --> 00:20:36,000 You always need to find them, articulate them. It will get to the sense of the search in a minute. 217 00:20:36,930 --> 00:20:42,090 Now, this brings about then a very particular kind of political problem, 218 00:20:42,450 --> 00:20:48,389 because if you have those kind of coming about with capital in a liberal democracy, not by chance. 219 00:20:48,390 --> 00:20:49,890 And Hagel attends to this as well, 220 00:20:50,280 --> 00:20:58,259 where you have now individual subject that sense you as they are not dominated externally and erroneously by something from the outside. 221 00:20:58,260 --> 00:21:04,050 They believe that they are free and are free to follow their own personal interests and only their personal interest. 222 00:21:04,320 --> 00:21:10,110 And therefore, you begin to have a political problem of what will bind all these people in civil society to a political project. 223 00:21:10,680 --> 00:21:16,470 If those conditions that bring them together are absent, then they believe that they are completely free from them. 224 00:21:16,980 --> 00:21:20,130 So Hegel, in his kind of theory of the state, a sense of this problem. 225 00:21:20,370 --> 00:21:22,230 Let me read the second paragraph first. 226 00:21:22,980 --> 00:21:32,340 He says, a situation arises in which in the bottom in which the particular my particular interest is to be my primary determining principle. 227 00:21:32,470 --> 00:21:38,490 I say this is what I do. I follow only my self-interest in civil society, but I am, in fact mistaken about this. 228 00:21:40,060 --> 00:21:44,230 Sure. Since while I suppose that I am adhering to the particular my interest, 229 00:21:44,530 --> 00:21:50,620 the universal and the necessity of the connections between particulars remains the primary and essential thing. 230 00:21:51,070 --> 00:21:56,800 I am altogether then, on the level of semblance, which is a fancy word for appearance in German Shine. 231 00:21:57,880 --> 00:22:04,110 And Hegel tries to even give this political problem in the relationship between particularity and universality. 232 00:22:04,120 --> 00:22:10,690 The sense that you believe since the universal that which makes you who you are, meaning other people, is not apparent to you. 233 00:22:10,870 --> 00:22:15,550 You believe that you can only follow your own interests, right? And therefore you get this political problem. 234 00:22:15,790 --> 00:22:24,190 And in the first paragraph will skip it. He says, If you believe that the state is simply his Hegel with an anti-liberal, 235 00:22:24,430 --> 00:22:30,130 if you think that the state is simply the an aggregate of individual interests, then you have a misconception of what is a state. 236 00:22:30,400 --> 00:22:35,010 And for him, he's tried to bring back the state of that thing, which will bring individuals together, 237 00:22:35,020 --> 00:22:37,720 of course, at the very thuggish people who argue a thing justly, 238 00:22:37,930 --> 00:22:44,290 that eventually Hegel's project is authoritarian in the sense that you have this kind of civil society of private interest 239 00:22:44,290 --> 00:22:49,360 in which the state is trying to compensate for the fact that nothing really bring them together anymore in disregard. 240 00:22:49,750 --> 00:22:54,820 So this problem that Israel, I would argue, kind of undergoes today together with Europe. 241 00:22:54,970 --> 00:23:01,330 It's something that is there already from the 19th century and ideas like nationalism and the state and other forms of welfare states, 242 00:23:01,330 --> 00:23:06,760 for example, trying to compensate for the fact that capitalism is such as a system with no political ends. 243 00:23:06,940 --> 00:23:10,329 But then you have to go to the state and national and to compensate for that. Now, 244 00:23:10,330 --> 00:23:14,139 Hegel is very important to my argument because he understands this kind of 245 00:23:14,140 --> 00:23:18,790 very modern understanding as a break between particularity and universality, 246 00:23:19,060 --> 00:23:25,270 where the freedom of the particular individual is made possible by the absent, universal and the absent condition. 247 00:23:25,480 --> 00:23:30,220 Why is this important? Because this is exactly how. Can't understand the static autonomy. 248 00:23:31,480 --> 00:23:35,470 This is a tie that I'm trying to make and we'll go to content to see how that works. 249 00:23:36,280 --> 00:23:41,079 This is number seven. Now, Conte, as you know, and in third critique, 250 00:23:41,080 --> 00:23:47,770 is trying to distinguish aesthetic judgement or aesthetic object from both kind of conceptual 251 00:23:47,770 --> 00:23:55,870 judgement and from practical judgements or from conceptual thinking and practical making. 252 00:23:56,290 --> 00:23:59,680 And he is defining what is an aesthetic judgement this way. 253 00:24:00,160 --> 00:24:08,230 This is the first book. The Power of Judgement in general is the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal. 254 00:24:08,530 --> 00:24:16,120 So the same terms are used if the universal that for context, the rule, the principle, the law is given in advance. 255 00:24:16,120 --> 00:24:20,769 I would say then the power of judgement which subsumes the particular under it, 256 00:24:20,770 --> 00:24:25,230 is determining and will make a quick connection to the Israel of the first period. 257 00:24:25,240 --> 00:24:30,790 Remember, the state subsumes its particular under the political project but would not give them the freedom, 258 00:24:30,910 --> 00:24:33,760 this liberal freedom that they have the same Western Europe. 259 00:24:34,240 --> 00:24:40,930 If, however, only the particular is given in advance for which the universal is to be found, 260 00:24:40,930 --> 00:24:48,730 meaning the law needs to be the principle and the rule, then the power of judgement is merely reflecting which is the aesthetic judgement. 261 00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:53,530 This is how in concert critique we have the extended from which of the reflecting judgement. 262 00:24:53,890 --> 00:24:54,670 That is to say, 263 00:24:54,910 --> 00:25:04,300 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. 264 00:25:04,600 --> 00:25:08,409 So just to give you an example, if you are a Zionist writer in the 1940s and fifties, 265 00:25:08,410 --> 00:25:12,819 you would write a novel in which you are universal your and a purpose. 266 00:25:12,820 --> 00:25:16,350 Let's say the concept of an end will determine your novel, invent. 267 00:25:16,360 --> 00:25:17,560 You write a Zionist novel. 268 00:25:17,830 --> 00:25:24,190 Therefore, people will say that these are not real novels and they are mechanical, they ideological, they are propaganda, right? 269 00:25:24,190 --> 00:25:29,940 Because they determine in advance this was the problem of Israeli literature, let's say, in the 14th and 15th reception, 270 00:25:30,310 --> 00:25:35,140 because you would see as if the ideological ends coming about and determining the work. 271 00:25:35,470 --> 00:25:36,850 So in the sixties and seventies, 272 00:25:36,850 --> 00:25:45,850 one of the ways to kind of produce artificial aesthetic autonomy was to cut off the characters from any kind of ideological Zionist project, 273 00:25:46,030 --> 00:25:50,500 which wide was a negative kind of project. It didn't have something to replace it with. 274 00:25:51,070 --> 00:25:54,070 Now can't continue this idea will continue with it because it's important. 275 00:25:55,090 --> 00:25:58,270 And he says, let's read the one. 276 00:25:58,270 --> 00:26:03,280 The second one in a product of art, one must be aware that it is art and not nature. 277 00:26:03,790 --> 00:26:10,389 Yet the purpose of ness and its form may still seem to be free from all constraint and seem to 278 00:26:10,390 --> 00:26:15,250 be three free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a mere product of nature. 279 00:26:15,880 --> 00:26:21,730 On this feeling of freedom and the play of our collective powers, which must yet at the same time be purposive, 280 00:26:21,910 --> 00:26:27,370 rest that pleasure, which is alone universally communicable though without being grounded only concept. 281 00:26:27,850 --> 00:26:35,280 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. 282 00:26:35,590 --> 00:26:38,680 And therefore you are only imputing an end to nature. 283 00:26:38,680 --> 00:26:42,920 But nature does not have. End and this is the awkward as the artwork as well. 284 00:26:43,100 --> 00:26:48,169 It is that thing that it's freedom is guaranteed by the fact that it doesn't have an end 285 00:26:48,170 --> 00:26:53,770 but pay attention that it has to produce this feeling of theming of the appearance. 286 00:26:53,780 --> 00:27:01,910 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. 287 00:27:02,180 --> 00:27:07,490 Same thing with the work of art. You are producing a work of art that needs to produce the appearance of freedom 288 00:27:07,730 --> 00:27:10,879 by kind of hiding the fact that it is determined if you read a third book, 289 00:27:10,880 --> 00:27:15,140 will skip it. You'll see that can't have a very specific way of telling the artist what to do 290 00:27:15,320 --> 00:27:19,100 in order that the work of art will seem free from that which determining it. 291 00:27:19,700 --> 00:27:25,250 So I hope you see a little bit the connections between the economic structure, a veiled condition of possibility. 292 00:27:25,520 --> 00:27:32,150 Hegel's political problem of a civil society not grounded by any political and and constant concept of aesthetic autonomy. 293 00:27:32,900 --> 00:27:37,010 Now, this all happened in the 19th century, so how do we bring into the 20th? 294 00:27:37,430 --> 00:27:44,329 So you'll see. That's why I brought a very dark concept and I don't produce very elaborate connections between them. 295 00:27:44,330 --> 00:27:47,440 But I would argue that the reader has a very close connection, 296 00:27:47,450 --> 00:27:53,930 close conception of what he called the text to conscious conception of aesthetic autonomy. 297 00:27:54,080 --> 00:27:58,130 You will see really will jump to you once you read the first sentence and how we define the text. 298 00:27:59,330 --> 00:28:03,290 A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer. 299 00:28:03,500 --> 00:28:09,050 From the first glance, the law of its composition of Kant would say, and the rules of its game. 300 00:28:09,650 --> 00:28:17,600 A text remains, however, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however harboured in the inaccessibility of a secret. 301 00:28:17,900 --> 00:28:23,030 It is simply that they cannot be booked in the present into anything that could be rigorously be called a perception, 302 00:28:23,510 --> 00:28:28,520 and hence perpetually and essentially they run the risk of being definitively lost. 303 00:28:29,330 --> 00:28:36,200 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, 304 00:28:36,200 --> 00:28:41,749 that which its conditional, the possibility of revealed its political ends are no longer there, 305 00:28:41,750 --> 00:28:46,130 that can really kind of move forward a society in a particular direction. 306 00:28:46,430 --> 00:28:52,819 You have not simply a text or what they're not calls a text and can't distinguish this as aesthetic. 307 00:28:52,820 --> 00:28:58,430 Autonomy is not simply the property of texts, it's the property of social relations under capital. 308 00:28:59,720 --> 00:29:05,570 And this is what characterises civil society in Israel and the rest of liberal societies, I would say. 309 00:29:06,410 --> 00:29:11,360 Now the question is what I need to do is to show you going back to Israel and this is what I argue now, 310 00:29:12,260 --> 00:29:17,180 that since the 1990s you begin to see literature, a literature of this kind, 311 00:29:17,180 --> 00:29:26,060 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, 312 00:29:26,390 --> 00:29:33,560 who are or in many times the novels are characterised by a search or by an inquiry. 313 00:29:33,980 --> 00:29:39,050 The detective novel is one of the most explicit examples of new Israeli literature and not accidental, 314 00:29:39,350 --> 00:29:47,600 where you have a character usually looking for kind of there is an inquiry, but in those novels are more politically constant. 315 00:29:47,600 --> 00:29:51,170 They will look usually for those conditions of Israeli society, 316 00:29:51,380 --> 00:29:56,960 those things that are now are absent and now needs to be kind of interrogated and brought back to the fore. 317 00:29:57,350 --> 00:30:04,909 And this is one of the biggest changes in Israeli literature, where you have now individual subject who are free, 318 00:30:04,910 --> 00:30:08,149 who is freedom is given in advance, but they are in a political crisis. 319 00:30:08,150 --> 00:30:12,590 Therefore, they're always trying to imagine those conditions that will bind them together. 320 00:30:12,590 --> 00:30:16,550 In a way, this is one characteristic of U.S. literature, and I brought two examples of this. 321 00:30:18,020 --> 00:30:22,639 Now that the most perfect example, I would need more. I would have needed more time to show you how this works in novels. 322 00:30:22,640 --> 00:30:24,890 But I will try to jump into these novels. 323 00:30:25,130 --> 00:30:31,400 I will begin with Nir Bombs, World Shadow, which is kind of a global novel, one of the most ambitious one written recently. 324 00:30:31,610 --> 00:30:35,630 And it moves between Israel, the UK and the United States. 325 00:30:35,720 --> 00:30:41,000 And there are two you always trying to make the connect the dots between what exactly brings together all these characters. 326 00:30:41,270 --> 00:30:47,120 And one point there is a consulting firm in the U.S. that tries to describe the world they live in. 327 00:30:47,120 --> 00:30:51,500 And you once they will read it, you'll see how close this is to what they redefined in the text. 328 00:30:52,460 --> 00:30:59,000 So we at MF V, which is the name of the consulting firm, were all groping in the dark, which becomes even darker. 329 00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:04,130 As your business in the global world thickens, no one fully understands who they're working for, 330 00:31:04,250 --> 00:31:09,530 which power stand behind the friendly delegates who meet for lunch and who stands behind those standing behind. 331 00:31:10,280 --> 00:31:15,170 Sometimes it seems that in the multiplicity of candidates, governments, NGOs, private or government firms, 332 00:31:15,470 --> 00:31:19,610 multinational corporations, regulators, it is impossible to understand anything. 333 00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:27,140 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. 334 00:31:27,170 --> 00:31:32,120 I will say that this is indeed a textual world in which there is nothing there that really ground that together. 335 00:31:32,120 --> 00:31:39,410 And with the example of the puzzle that will describe the rule or the determining principle for you and the. 336 00:31:39,530 --> 00:31:45,470 Reigning ideology of postmodernity is that this is the world that we live in, in which you can no longer designate the ends. 337 00:31:45,800 --> 00:31:49,550 The novel specifically goes against this in a way trying to map, 338 00:31:49,910 --> 00:31:53,270 trying to make the reconnection between particular individuals who think that they 339 00:31:53,270 --> 00:31:56,780 live in the world without measure into those conditions that make the world. 340 00:31:57,050 --> 00:32:01,190 And I would say that in different ways, the Israeli novel trying to do that also. 341 00:32:02,330 --> 00:32:07,970 The second example is by Assaf given in English, was printed as croc in Hebrew standing up. 342 00:32:08,390 --> 00:32:16,610 And there as well you have an individual who is accidentally being involved in three or four kind of suicide bombings. 343 00:32:16,790 --> 00:32:18,169 And in the middle of the novel, 344 00:32:18,170 --> 00:32:25,280 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. 345 00:32:25,490 --> 00:32:32,930 So he begins this investigation into what happens to him and brings in with another Palestinian counterpart of the novel. 346 00:32:33,290 --> 00:32:35,540 The novel has this kind of humanist ideology to it. 347 00:32:35,720 --> 00:32:41,060 But more importantly, it says something about the crisis of this individual, but which I think is very important. 348 00:32:41,240 --> 00:32:44,450 And what he says here in this topic. I will read the novel for you a little bit. 349 00:32:44,660 --> 00:32:51,260 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. 350 00:32:51,560 --> 00:32:54,470 But how he understands what's happening in the end is very interesting to me. 351 00:32:55,070 --> 00:33:00,020 I thought about myself, how I it how I was in a cafe on a weekday morning, was opposed. 352 00:33:00,020 --> 00:33:02,870 You would hire a young guy to murder his wife's lover. 353 00:33:03,080 --> 00:33:08,720 And I was here because the young guys girlfriend has asked me to find out what her boyfriend was doing on that. 354 00:33:08,870 --> 00:33:13,090 And the morning of the death by suicide bomber on the minibus from which I happened to be travelling. 355 00:33:13,100 --> 00:33:17,030 It's the novel. It's kind of the sentences long just to give the connection. 356 00:33:17,420 --> 00:33:21,049 Adultery, murder, terrorist attacks. Nothing surprising about this in Israel. 357 00:33:21,050 --> 00:33:25,400 Yes. And it happened. It's happened all the time. The surprising thing with me. 358 00:33:26,180 --> 00:33:30,380 It was strange that there should be somebody who linked all these people together. 359 00:33:30,830 --> 00:33:36,649 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, 360 00:33:36,650 --> 00:33:41,809 which was by the default connection of Zionist literature up until the nineties where you were connected to other people 361 00:33:41,810 --> 00:33:46,879 by default and you didn't want to be connected to that is now one of the defining principle of Israeli literature. 362 00:33:46,880 --> 00:33:51,500 We have individual subjects who are desperately trying to understand their relationship to other people, 363 00:33:51,740 --> 00:33:54,670 usually in ethical terms, not even political ones. 364 00:33:54,680 --> 00:33:59,540 We can talk about this as well, but this is one of the defining features of Israeli literature today, 365 00:33:59,720 --> 00:34:05,600 which is kind of condition, but what I call the global conditions of global capital will endure. 366 00:34:06,170 --> 00:34:12,650 Thank you. So let's open up for questions. 367 00:34:12,770 --> 00:34:18,200 Discussion. She would like to take. 368 00:34:23,540 --> 00:34:28,400 Now. Something about someone like her on the right. 369 00:34:28,730 --> 00:34:36,280 Who seems to me to be raging over the Israeli society have touched on that. 370 00:34:37,490 --> 00:34:44,270 That links the new with you if you like and sees life in Israel and his existence 371 00:34:44,270 --> 00:34:51,950 in Israel and as a form of continuation of what preceded his arrival in 1940. 372 00:34:52,670 --> 00:35:00,330 Right. So definitely go ahead. And in his case, it's a continuation, as always, marked by an absence. 373 00:35:01,010 --> 00:35:07,059 But in that he he can't reconstruct his memory. 374 00:35:07,060 --> 00:35:11,660 He got reconstructed family. But that's his Israeli ness. 375 00:35:12,290 --> 00:35:17,900 Right. Existing in that central continuation. 376 00:35:18,290 --> 00:35:22,130 Right. So you won't see it map into this new period? 377 00:35:23,540 --> 00:35:35,540 Yeah. You seem to me to be saying that Israeli ness is either a design in 62, 1940, 1990, or the. 378 00:35:35,780 --> 00:35:39,500 Or the non Zionist globalised state. 379 00:35:39,920 --> 00:35:48,050 Right. But it seems to me that there's a third option, which is the wider historical contextualisation, right. 380 00:35:48,060 --> 00:35:56,090 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. 381 00:35:57,650 --> 00:36:03,799 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, 382 00:36:03,800 --> 00:36:08,420 that they will do make the transition that he will begin writing differently that say, from the 1990. 383 00:36:09,290 --> 00:36:13,519 And though those writers who do not and then you have to have a more nuanced model of where you 384 00:36:13,520 --> 00:36:18,560 have those novel the new continuum that would to change with the time and those who don't. 385 00:36:18,830 --> 00:36:22,219 Then you have multiple kind of aesthetic modes. 386 00:36:22,220 --> 00:36:27,350 So you would maybe want to argue that adult film does not make the transition that he 387 00:36:27,350 --> 00:36:31,549 therefore he's not identified with the new in identifying with new Israeli culture, 388 00:36:31,550 --> 00:36:34,010 but precisely with those that do not continue on. 389 00:36:34,040 --> 00:36:39,379 He's not part of this change and his kind of staying in his own mould, if I understand you correctly, 390 00:36:39,380 --> 00:36:44,270 in understanding the literature generally, that it's the same mode of writing does not change over time. 391 00:36:44,570 --> 00:36:48,889 So you had those writers that might continue to write, let's say, Zionist novels, 392 00:36:48,890 --> 00:36:56,660 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. 393 00:36:56,900 --> 00:37:03,200 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. 394 00:37:03,200 --> 00:37:09,070 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. 395 00:37:09,080 --> 00:37:14,630 But my sense is that you will not make the transition, that he will be kind of in his moment without shifting. 396 00:37:17,730 --> 00:37:21,000 I see him as Israeli. And they're not that they're not Israeli. 397 00:37:21,380 --> 00:37:25,260 It's not that there are more Israeli, less Israeli. This is this is definitely not my argument. 398 00:37:25,560 --> 00:37:32,640 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. 399 00:37:34,950 --> 00:37:39,850 I really think you I was really struck that this is the first example. 400 00:37:40,480 --> 00:37:44,460 Yet you write in the text that has not yet appeared in English. 401 00:37:45,090 --> 00:37:50,580 But astonishingly, examples are two very translatable write in texts. 402 00:37:50,730 --> 00:37:56,390 Right. But also, there's something else in the shift to implicate translators. 403 00:37:56,760 --> 00:38:00,239 Right. Like global literature is also right. 404 00:38:00,240 --> 00:38:03,690 Wants to appeal to the world. It's an appealing argument. 405 00:38:03,690 --> 00:38:10,310 I would say that let's say that writers would try to be more literary. 406 00:38:10,330 --> 00:38:15,150 This whole debate about world literature, let's say these, which is in the background of my admittedly get into it today, 407 00:38:15,450 --> 00:38:20,640 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. 408 00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:27,840 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? 409 00:38:28,110 --> 00:38:34,649 And I would put a be sure at some point in the most of those moments where they 410 00:38:34,650 --> 00:38:39,270 tried to kind of import these liberal kind of models and then be translated. 411 00:38:39,690 --> 00:38:44,670 So I would not, though, argue that the translator ability of them make them different. 412 00:38:44,910 --> 00:38:46,739 So even though you were translated, 413 00:38:46,740 --> 00:38:53,160 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. 414 00:38:53,400 --> 00:39:01,320 They will still be novel. They will be kind of predicated on negative political projects for which liberal freedom will be denied for you. 415 00:39:01,320 --> 00:39:07,080 But you will pass if you maybe it's important to remember that while if you take 416 00:39:07,080 --> 00:39:11,370 the postcolonial critique that says that Zionism was kind of a European movement, 417 00:39:11,580 --> 00:39:16,290 Israeli literature does not pass as European or as Western, let's say, up until the nineties. 418 00:39:16,650 --> 00:39:21,930 It doesn't because precisely because of this political problem that it have, 419 00:39:21,930 --> 00:39:25,680 it's kind of grounded in a political structure that does not allow it to write a liberal novel. 420 00:39:25,920 --> 00:39:28,950 So I won't say that the translate ability makes it more global, 421 00:39:29,490 --> 00:39:35,309 although they are more translated, it probably is translated, but you can say that in reverse. 422 00:39:35,310 --> 00:39:42,090 I didn't see that. But in terms of the structure of the novel, it is more about what makes the novel global. 423 00:39:42,240 --> 00:39:47,070 If that though, how it thinks about for me about freedom that will make the global for me. 424 00:39:50,880 --> 00:39:57,120 Well, thank you for a wonderful, rich, productive and very ambitious project. 425 00:39:57,600 --> 00:40:03,990 It's really interesting to read the history of this early literature through your lecture. 426 00:40:04,290 --> 00:40:09,450 My question is, I'm wondering, I have a few questions. I'll start with wonderful periodisation. 427 00:40:09,720 --> 00:40:19,320 I'm interested in why you chose 1990 and onwards in the 1980s and onwards, or how you view that specific day period. 428 00:40:19,620 --> 00:40:27,050 Right. Right. Think about what was already the beginning, both in terms of political change in Israel. 429 00:40:27,290 --> 00:40:27,500 Right. 430 00:40:27,810 --> 00:40:37,500 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. 431 00:40:38,160 --> 00:40:47,309 Right. Right. I will definitely put all those there. So I will say, why 919 So arbitrarily you can choose 1985 as the date, 432 00:40:47,310 --> 00:40:52,260 because this is the date of the emergency plan for economic elevation and is marked at that moment where 433 00:40:52,350 --> 00:40:58,290 we shifted Israel shifted more kind of a pronounced lean to kind of a liberal neoliberal societies. 434 00:40:58,560 --> 00:41:01,590 But those privatisations started somewhat already in the late sixties. 435 00:41:02,460 --> 00:41:05,010 But this is kind of the moment that began. Why not the eighties? 436 00:41:05,010 --> 00:41:16,860 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? 437 00:41:18,540 --> 00:41:22,379 He wrote two novels and died sometime. 438 00:41:22,380 --> 00:41:25,710 Right someti will be the first novel. Right. So. 439 00:41:25,740 --> 00:41:32,100 That's right. Right. Right. And then there people try to understand sometimes the beginning of this. 440 00:41:32,100 --> 00:41:37,379 I argue against it. I think that sometimes the end of the first period at the beginning of the new it's present. 441 00:41:37,380 --> 00:41:41,130 And then I will have an account with to have it and the book. But I had took it out. 442 00:41:41,610 --> 00:41:46,469 It's there where for some time you have a sense that it is a completely negative 443 00:41:46,470 --> 00:41:50,280 project in the sense that you can no longer produce kind of daily time. 444 00:41:50,280 --> 00:41:56,010 Everything is reduced to materiality. You don't have any spiritual, that animated novel of the Zionism up until that moment, 445 00:41:56,220 --> 00:42:02,670 and you have this kind of mundane kind of daily life because really material, that's the that's the language that he chooses. 446 00:42:02,970 --> 00:42:06,420 And then that has no spiritual thing to animated. 447 00:42:06,870 --> 00:42:16,650 But the shift itself happens only later when you begin to have positive liberal subject the who are free by default. 448 00:42:16,680 --> 00:42:19,830 They don't have to negate anything. They're simply free by default. 449 00:42:19,840 --> 00:42:24,809 The problem is that they want to be political. They want to attach to other people and kind of understand their life. 450 00:42:24,810 --> 00:42:28,110 They want to spiritualised the life in some way. And they cannot, of course. 451 00:42:28,500 --> 00:42:33,180 That's why I the beginning of the eighties is not enough yet. 452 00:42:33,540 --> 00:42:41,640 The feminist novels after in the second period, I would say, will be those as well in the novels, all of them, 453 00:42:41,850 --> 00:42:51,240 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. 454 00:42:52,200 --> 00:43:00,120 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. 455 00:43:00,190 --> 00:43:04,890 Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. 456 00:43:05,670 --> 00:43:09,730 I also have a cordial. Thank you. I'll join you. Thank you. 457 00:43:10,630 --> 00:43:19,930 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. 458 00:43:19,960 --> 00:43:25,150 There is or the literature of globalisation of early of late capitalism. 459 00:43:25,720 --> 00:43:34,600 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. 460 00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:38,469 And it's also very small. And I'm the one came to give a lecture. 461 00:43:38,470 --> 00:43:42,940 And he in fact, he came to tell us that. 462 00:43:42,940 --> 00:43:53,560 It's unfortunate that today scholars of Hebrew literature and Israel literature are no longer interested in writing historiography. 463 00:43:53,620 --> 00:43:58,060 Right. Or I'm in periodisation right that they're true. 464 00:43:58,240 --> 00:44:09,840 And you started by saying that usually we have, you know, these multiple categories and certainly not this argument of a clear break. 465 00:44:09,850 --> 00:44:20,310 So I'm interested to know what prompted you to even enter a project like this and whether you agree with me one. 466 00:44:20,320 --> 00:44:25,240 But how would you explain that, that it's been a while since I'm ready to write that. 467 00:44:25,750 --> 00:44:30,790 And the other question is, as you and I think they're interrelated, 468 00:44:32,120 --> 00:44:39,129 it's a question about whether your project as such is global or at least universal in 469 00:44:39,130 --> 00:44:45,430 the sense that I would expect expect that similar trends happened in other literatures, 470 00:44:45,640 --> 00:44:55,480 as I'm quoting, Kahn's and Hegel and even Marx in the background or Gary does understanding of the text as a physician. 471 00:44:55,480 --> 00:45:05,320 First of all. Right. Thing I mean, is that is that always the reaction of writers to neoliberalism? 472 00:45:05,350 --> 00:45:13,900 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, 473 00:45:13,970 --> 00:45:19,900 that would be a terrible thing to say to to put Israeli literature on the map in that sense or to write. 474 00:45:19,900 --> 00:45:26,320 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. 475 00:45:26,320 --> 00:45:32,830 And then I in the conclusion of my book, I give the example of one in each continent that would be ambition. 476 00:45:32,830 --> 00:45:39,490 So it will be Brazil and then China, the U.S., Israel was already there in Palestine. 477 00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:44,590 Then one more. And then I argue that you see these changes in different places and they will I will fail. 478 00:45:45,490 --> 00:45:48,250 I argue or bet on that. 479 00:45:48,250 --> 00:45:54,610 They will play out similarly that you will have this kind of strict textual structure that comes about with the shift in your liberalism. 480 00:45:54,610 --> 00:45:57,310 And therefore Israel is not identical to them, 481 00:45:57,460 --> 00:46:03,520 but equivalent to them in the sense that it's competing with contending with similar political social problem, 482 00:46:03,760 --> 00:46:09,309 but giving it, of course, its own solution, according to the Israeli political situation, often disregarded. 483 00:46:09,310 --> 00:46:12,340 Yes, I would say that it's by default there. It's happening all over the world. 484 00:46:13,240 --> 00:46:16,060 So it's it's there whether it wants to or not. 485 00:46:16,780 --> 00:46:24,639 Why did I write and historiography first from dissatisfaction with the one that I've read and how unhappy 486 00:46:24,640 --> 00:46:30,820 with with that and unhappy with also the fact that if you think of historiography up until this point, 487 00:46:30,820 --> 00:46:34,180 if you go with the decade, it's kind of it's ten years, it changes. 488 00:46:34,510 --> 00:46:37,629 All of them are the same, meaning they are different aesthetically. 489 00:46:37,630 --> 00:46:41,470 But with your category of the period is that there are equivalent periods. 490 00:46:41,740 --> 00:46:44,910 And I've read enough to understand that something happened in the nineties, 491 00:46:44,910 --> 00:46:48,730 that it's completely different than what comes before it, not simply another period. 492 00:46:49,210 --> 00:46:52,930 So that way I entered this because I realised that the new Libya is completely different. 493 00:46:52,930 --> 00:46:59,049 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. 494 00:46:59,050 --> 00:47:03,170 One, it's considered to be a total project and we no longer like total projects, right? 495 00:47:03,200 --> 00:47:10,000 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. 496 00:47:10,750 --> 00:47:17,950 That's a real problem. And second, and I would say part of what comes about with neo liberal capitalism is the fact that 497 00:47:17,950 --> 00:47:22,630 it's these store sizes that since the 1990s you have a sense that nothing changes, 498 00:47:23,050 --> 00:47:26,380 that what's happened in the 1980s and 2017. 499 00:47:26,650 --> 00:47:32,140 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. 500 00:47:33,160 --> 00:47:38,890 There's a sense of these two is zation and people start kind of understanding why I don't understand the difference. 501 00:47:39,370 --> 00:47:49,000 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, 502 00:47:49,510 --> 00:48:01,930 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 503 00:48:01,930 --> 00:48:08,740 individual or not even allowing of the individual to pronounce itself ends up with individuals who are detached from other. 504 00:48:09,360 --> 00:48:13,290 Communal ties looking for the ties that would place them in today. 505 00:48:13,380 --> 00:48:20,640 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, 506 00:48:20,640 --> 00:48:25,470 the secular left of the political project is how do you bring these people together? 507 00:48:25,740 --> 00:48:30,630 What will bind them together? What will be? This will be Labour's greatest problem. 508 00:48:30,840 --> 00:48:36,180 What can we offer the Israeli public that will bring them together, although not unlike the past? 509 00:48:36,390 --> 00:48:40,980 And I would say that the most dominant political project, not of the right wing of the left, is this multiculturalism. 510 00:48:41,160 --> 00:48:46,469 So one way of putting it, and I know it's it's not the start of argument that you would make, 511 00:48:46,470 --> 00:48:52,110 but an alternative way of putting the similar argument is that there used to be a metanarrative, 512 00:48:52,110 --> 00:48:57,689 a political metanarrative that has been given up or crumbling or privatised. 513 00:48:57,690 --> 00:49:05,220 And then the individuals lack this organising framework through which to identify themselves in the world. 514 00:49:05,310 --> 00:49:10,380 Mm hmm. So the question, if this is what you were trying to argue in, the question would be, 515 00:49:10,440 --> 00:49:16,349 can you please go back to doing the comparison with Western European literature and tell 516 00:49:16,350 --> 00:49:22,469 us what is it there that in a liberal mindset allows the individuals to feel in place? 517 00:49:22,470 --> 00:49:31,920 Like, What are the times? And the second part of the question would be, how is it when compared to how is this literature, 518 00:49:31,920 --> 00:49:38,850 when compared to other non-Western non-European literature literatures in which maybe liberalism hasn't really. 519 00:49:39,600 --> 00:49:43,500 Right. So I would argue that Palestinian literature follows a similar track. 520 00:49:43,620 --> 00:49:48,060 So although not Gaza, but Ramallah, for example, in past contemporary Palestinian literature, 521 00:49:48,240 --> 00:49:56,520 is confronted despite the occupation with those kind of characters who are having this kind of life that is more and more privatised. 522 00:49:56,520 --> 00:50:02,070 And for them, politics, it's something that is external to them for which they're trying to connect of guilty about. 523 00:50:02,580 --> 00:50:06,780 Or there are those characters in the novel who are political but not the main character. 524 00:50:06,990 --> 00:50:11,250 Therefore, you have this kind of relationship between the non character and those political activist. 525 00:50:11,250 --> 00:50:14,310 I read in my in my book, 526 00:50:14,430 --> 00:50:23,909 Danny a Shibley is novels that are completely privatised or Thelma forget her last name writes in England 527 00:50:23,910 --> 00:50:30,660 actually also kind of the problems of private life and trying to connect to the Palestinian cause, 528 00:50:30,660 --> 00:50:31,230 for example. 529 00:50:32,010 --> 00:50:37,680 So in this regard, Palestinian literature will be similar to French German literature and and in France will be similar from the nineties onwards. 530 00:50:37,980 --> 00:50:43,350 In terms of what's happening in Europe, I would say that it's both nationalism, 531 00:50:43,350 --> 00:50:47,370 probably 19th century, the 20th century, the welfare state, Keynesianism, 532 00:50:47,700 --> 00:50:51,989 that which kind of put bounds and limits on capital and repurposed it in a 533 00:50:51,990 --> 00:50:56,130 way give it another end with limiting capital by this kind of collective end, 534 00:50:56,340 --> 00:51:02,610 which ends up in the seventies and the nationalism which I think happens in the 19th century as well and artificially. 535 00:51:03,060 --> 00:51:06,330 You cannot really do it. But this will be what's happening in Israel today. 536 00:51:06,570 --> 00:51:13,170 Have this kind of political project trying to revive the society which appears in this kind of extreme way in Israel. 537 00:51:13,260 --> 00:51:18,749 So you would you would expect, for example, the British literature now post austerity for 2008, 538 00:51:18,750 --> 00:51:22,830 cutting down or breaking down of the welfare state to become more Israeli, in a sense. 539 00:51:23,370 --> 00:51:29,420 I would say that both of them confront the same kind of problem of the crumbling of any, I would say, 540 00:51:29,730 --> 00:51:35,160 of a society which doesn't have any political ends to guide it and responding to it differently. 541 00:51:35,340 --> 00:51:39,690 That's why they're not identical. They're equivalent and identical. It's very important. 542 00:51:41,670 --> 00:51:47,200 So we're finding similar in poetry because you're right. 543 00:51:47,730 --> 00:51:53,420 All right. How you interested? Whether you see the same, right? 544 00:51:53,460 --> 00:51:56,520 I don't. It's true that I don't read poetry in the book and in my training, 545 00:51:56,520 --> 00:52:00,690 I would say that we had the same similar reactions of the sixties in the phones like and others up 546 00:52:00,690 --> 00:52:04,820 until the 19th and from nineties you would have poetry that responds to the same kind of problem. 547 00:52:05,610 --> 00:52:16,750 Yes, I would say that the film definitely. So if you look at someone like George Eliot. 548 00:52:17,080 --> 00:52:29,110 Mm hmm. You no enforcement? Um, these are 19th century and Edwardian writers were neither working in favour of nationalism nor socialism. 549 00:52:29,200 --> 00:52:36,549 Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And they don't have problems with how their protagonists individually reach each 550 00:52:36,550 --> 00:52:43,120 other because they're reaching within what we might find is a legal version. 551 00:52:44,760 --> 00:52:51,480 Individual coming together. It is a it's a mystery version of jump through the middle. 552 00:52:52,090 --> 00:52:56,220 Mm hmm. Okay. So what will be the idea? I mean, it works. 553 00:52:56,420 --> 00:53:06,240 It's it's they're not. They're not having an issue of how do you how you combine individuality. 554 00:53:06,480 --> 00:53:06,840 Mm hmm. 555 00:53:06,870 --> 00:53:20,550 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. 556 00:53:21,390 --> 00:53:26,250 I think you will need to read individually the novel then to see what will be the political solution for individuality. 557 00:53:26,250 --> 00:53:33,329 Because I my sense of that will be that you cannot simply have private individuals running around and not having something to bind them. 558 00:53:33,330 --> 00:53:37,440 And each novelist will kind of put forward a different kind of political ideology 559 00:53:37,650 --> 00:53:41,910 to solve this problem of this innate freedom that does not have a political end. 560 00:53:42,300 --> 00:53:46,980 But you have to refer to specific novels, and I won't be able to do that with you here. 561 00:53:47,430 --> 00:53:56,130 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, 562 00:53:56,140 --> 00:54:02,879 the first autonomous literature there will have the novel will be interested in a political it depends on the 563 00:54:02,880 --> 00:54:09,370 political ideology of of that particular what will be the political ideology that will solve those problems. 564 00:54:09,390 --> 00:54:12,390 But I will have to read specific novels. 565 00:54:12,420 --> 00:54:18,590 Okay. An Apposite One. Daniel Deronda by Eliot's. 566 00:54:19,270 --> 00:54:32,160 And where her vision of our humanness is what enables her to both see Daniel Deronda as as an individual 567 00:54:32,490 --> 00:54:43,210 and as someone that has a right to live as a Jew and in what she imagines might be an Israeli state. 568 00:54:43,230 --> 00:54:56,550 Or she was. Mm hmm. But before you get to to ethnic nationalism, that is, you get to a common humanity which interlinking divides. 569 00:54:56,570 --> 00:55:00,870 So here it is, out of hand. Right. She's a cosmopolitan. 570 00:55:01,170 --> 00:55:10,290 Right. So I don't think my version of Middle Eastern or whoever would also be right. 571 00:55:10,410 --> 00:55:15,270 This will be the political solution to this war. You can find that in some house as well. 572 00:55:15,630 --> 00:55:17,550 So for his heart, it's kind of a split world. 573 00:55:17,550 --> 00:55:22,770 I will come to the example where you have, on the one hand, this kind of political project that is vested in violence, 574 00:55:23,070 --> 00:55:29,880 and then you have this kind of idyllic nature for which everybody is equal, and you can find solace there. 575 00:55:30,420 --> 00:55:36,090 But he cannot decide between the two and for his heart differently than other writers of the 16th nature. 576 00:55:36,090 --> 00:55:39,960 His whole right, you can go to nature and somehow retrieve it as your solution there. 577 00:55:40,320 --> 00:55:46,320 So comment humanism. The comment of the humanity at large will be that solution where everybody. 578 00:55:47,010 --> 00:55:54,389 There are other kind of aspects to my to my argument basically the the in Israel the common political project with 579 00:55:54,390 --> 00:56:00,600 vested in inequality and therefore the solutions to inequality is equivalent some kind of reign of equivalence. 580 00:56:00,870 --> 00:56:06,180 So that will be there where all human beings all over the world are equivalent to one another without violence. 581 00:56:06,240 --> 00:56:09,350 This will be the solution to the fact that we all different from another. 582 00:56:09,350 --> 00:56:12,990 We cannot live. So this will be the political solution. Humanism was one of them, definitely. 583 00:56:13,320 --> 00:56:19,310 So that's probably there. So you see it yourself, right? There is attempt to solve this problem with different urgencies. 584 00:56:19,320 --> 00:56:21,090 I don't want to map it one to the other. 585 00:56:21,330 --> 00:56:25,830 Israel is different than England is different than India and other than China that the political solution will be different. 586 00:56:26,070 --> 00:56:30,640 But the problem with this thing. I think it is. 587 00:56:30,680 --> 00:56:33,320 Thank you so much. Thank you.