1 00:00:00,500 --> 00:00:05,049 Right. All right, welcome. 2 00:00:05,050 --> 00:00:11,830 And, uh, good afternoon, everybody. Uh, I'm delighted to present our speaker today. 3 00:00:12,340 --> 00:00:18,370 Dr. Yuval, you're out of sight. Look, the other end was recently received. 4 00:00:18,370 --> 00:00:22,270 This piece from the Department of Literature at Ben-Gurion University. 5 00:00:23,530 --> 00:00:29,740 His dissertation dealt with matters of melancholy and nationality in the works of Yosef de Chayefsky. 6 00:00:30,550 --> 00:00:36,760 Currently, you are a lecturer of the Department of Visual Material Culture at L'académie of Art and Design, 7 00:00:37,540 --> 00:00:43,060 where he teaches courses dealing with poetic and theoretical representations of love and desire. 8 00:00:44,560 --> 00:00:50,230 You have is also postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University collaborating on a research 9 00:00:50,230 --> 00:00:55,030 project dealing with questions of excess as a poetic and hermeneutic principle. 10 00:00:55,600 --> 00:01:02,230 And the title of his talk today is Love, Zionism and Melancholy in the Prose of House Yosef Berta Chayefsky. 11 00:01:02,650 --> 00:01:07,210 Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me. 12 00:01:07,570 --> 00:01:16,110 I'm a little bit nervous and very excited, so I hope my English will last throughout the stock trophy. 13 00:01:16,900 --> 00:01:24,700 You are the writer and think of me. House of Guilty. Chayefsky was born in 1865 and passed away in 1921. 14 00:01:25,210 --> 00:01:35,740 Is one of the most important figures of Hebrew literature of the revival period, which is between a teenage 18 and 1920, approximately. 15 00:01:37,090 --> 00:01:46,120 This is early Zionism. His early stories depict the inner torments and passions of young Jewish, mostly men at this time. 16 00:01:46,270 --> 00:01:54,460 This is the time of the birth or the revival of Jewish nationality and modern secular Jewish subjectivity. 17 00:01:55,090 --> 00:02:04,959 The fracture point sort of an imagined fracture point between the religion and tradition and diasporic Judaism and the inspiration for modernity, 18 00:02:04,960 --> 00:02:10,090 secularism and desire towards national emancipation of some sort. 19 00:02:10,150 --> 00:02:14,410 This is the beginning of an important phase in Zionist history. 20 00:02:15,430 --> 00:02:22,540 But Chayefsky famously claimed that the national revival will come not from like a collective movement, 21 00:02:22,900 --> 00:02:28,330 but from the birth of a new, erotic, wilful and erotic, new, erotic, wilful, 22 00:02:28,330 --> 00:02:39,460 vital subject individual embodying in his young and in love protagonists that occupy many of his thoughts populate many of his stories. 23 00:02:39,880 --> 00:02:47,950 Moreover, moreover, he is typically described and falsely described, but typically described as a fierce critic of diasporic Judaism, 24 00:02:48,310 --> 00:02:54,070 criticising it for being too spiritual, too feminine to passive and decaying. 25 00:02:54,820 --> 00:03:03,520 His stories and several prominent articles fixed his image at the beginning of the 19th century as a young and radical Nietzschean thinker, 26 00:03:03,520 --> 00:03:09,010 an offer that strongly rejects the diaspora, the traditional diasporic Jewish way of life, 27 00:03:09,400 --> 00:03:15,370 and called for a total shinola in changing of the values of Jewish of Judaism. 28 00:03:16,150 --> 00:03:23,440 For him, the nation, the nation's revival. We will come from the birth of a new erotic and vital Hebrew man. 29 00:03:24,040 --> 00:03:30,100 Prophet Flame is the phrase he uses one who longs for life or wishes for life or wants life. 30 00:03:32,780 --> 00:03:38,000 Individual and erotic love will secure future Jewish nationality. 31 00:03:39,230 --> 00:03:42,320 This focus on the individual is mostly known as both itself. 32 00:03:42,320 --> 00:03:50,930 Gives great renewal, I think, and his tormented protagonist in his stories embody the unsuccessful struggle to achieve this erotic renewal. 33 00:03:51,590 --> 00:03:56,060 Chayefsky wrote a lot of philosophical or political texts, political text, and a lot of stories. 34 00:03:56,360 --> 00:04:05,210 And I think that when people talk about him, they tend to confuse the two, or they don't tend to think them together. 35 00:04:05,480 --> 00:04:07,969 They think them together, but in an irresponsible way. 36 00:04:07,970 --> 00:04:17,630 Because in his stories, the Jewish struggle for modernity and secularism and emancipation is always unsuccessful. 37 00:04:17,840 --> 00:04:23,300 While in his publicist writing political writing, he always claims, 38 00:04:24,110 --> 00:04:31,040 without any regard for the historical condition, that we must try and achieve Jewish sovereignty. 39 00:04:31,610 --> 00:04:39,530 Okay. But the Turkey, or I repeat this, held a radical position concerning the national political debate of the time. 40 00:04:39,890 --> 00:04:45,830 He was a blatant anti positive ist and called for the cultivation cultivation of the individual and 41 00:04:45,830 --> 00:04:53,210 national will with no regard to the possibility of their fulfilment that may or may not appear later. 42 00:04:54,710 --> 00:04:57,530 The author repeatedly called for the need for Jewish sovereignty, 43 00:04:57,530 --> 00:05:06,500 calls that stood against his disbelief in the possibility of such endeavour and even in the survival of of modern Jewish literature and culture. 44 00:05:06,950 --> 00:05:15,740 For him and this is important, the will and desire for historical, historical salvation are more important than their actual possibility. 45 00:05:16,730 --> 00:05:22,010 Thus, subjective and erotic desire represents also the desire for a nation. 46 00:05:22,370 --> 00:05:28,999 And on the flipside, only after Jews nationality can establish itself could Jews subjectivity and 47 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:34,860 masculinity truly reconfigure itself onto a productive and active erotic form. 48 00:05:34,880 --> 00:05:42,170 This is like the old Zionist critique of the body, the masculine body of traditional Jewish woman. 49 00:05:42,350 --> 00:05:48,680 Like anything with the project of making the Jewish body productive, erotic, wilful. 50 00:05:49,760 --> 00:05:56,660 In this sense, I think erotic and national desire are the two sides of the same historical coin. 51 00:05:57,170 --> 00:06:06,650 Love depends upon land for the Jewish man to govern himself, his desires and his will, his body and his productivity, his rule than his life. 52 00:06:06,980 --> 00:06:13,660 He needs our own. A land as law and government are always connected to space as land, space and land. 53 00:06:15,860 --> 00:06:19,660 That's one of the main forces in the production for. 54 00:06:24,790 --> 00:06:29,470 Everything stopped. One of the main forces in the production of this new Hebrew hybrid, 55 00:06:29,800 --> 00:06:38,380 new Hebrew subjectivity is the will and ingenuity of the individual writer, as the discovery clearly states. 56 00:06:38,890 --> 00:06:45,790 Life and literature coincide, I quote, Man by his nature, is the creator of myth, a poet. 57 00:06:46,240 --> 00:06:53,650 He poetically inscribes nature into an ideal poetic form and does the same to social facts. 58 00:06:54,550 --> 00:07:00,670 Aesthetics. The literary in its form, can be used as a driving force for the rekindling, 59 00:07:00,670 --> 00:07:07,450 rekindling of culture and society through its revision and acclimation in new works of art. 60 00:07:07,780 --> 00:07:15,510 The Will of the Author. This is nature speaking from privilege of because now it is the negating and reviving power and history. 61 00:07:15,650 --> 00:07:20,380 Social facts can be rewritten and represented in artistic work. 62 00:07:20,920 --> 00:07:28,780 Cultural and political desire should be inscribed in literature and later on function as the basis for a renewed culture. 63 00:07:29,290 --> 00:07:34,510 The individual erotic author is the heart of this poetic and historical process. 64 00:07:36,420 --> 00:07:43,470 What are we try to do today is to show that the rejection of diasporic existent is mediated in literature, 65 00:07:43,500 --> 00:07:48,330 not through the image of an active physical figure of fulfilled masculinity, 66 00:07:48,810 --> 00:07:54,090 but through the image of the melancholic figure of an author or poet what he calls the village. 67 00:07:54,090 --> 00:07:59,430 If you call it Michail, the poet majority Hebrew is poet for the Miss World. 68 00:07:59,700 --> 00:08:04,830 It is not activity that defines his potency, not the fulfilment of his will, 69 00:08:05,220 --> 00:08:12,200 but the ability to control and suspend his desire and in this manner, keep it alive and in desire. 70 00:08:12,210 --> 00:08:15,450 I mean, of course, both the national desire and erotic desire. 71 00:08:16,070 --> 00:08:23,340 And we focussed mostly on the figure of the narrator, the Mr. Lair, while offering short readings of a few stories throughout his work. 72 00:08:24,870 --> 00:08:29,100 It is important to understand the historical and material sphere in which Wallechinsky is working. 73 00:08:30,600 --> 00:08:38,970 The growing cultural Jewish emancipation at the time was not only called because of the awakening of the Jewish body, 74 00:08:39,240 --> 00:08:46,469 but because of growing economic problems. While I will not offer here a materialist discussion of early Zionism, 75 00:08:46,470 --> 00:08:54,000 I am not an expert in that matter and in the detective work, which is I think it's a very interesting thing to explore. 76 00:08:55,140 --> 00:09:02,580 It is important to state that the impoverished economic state of though everyone is always present in, will be. 77 00:09:02,580 --> 00:09:06,090 Chayefsky and in his contemporaries work such as Bernard Nursing. 78 00:09:06,450 --> 00:09:11,820 Their work stories are littered with troubled, agonised, young Jewish men and women. 79 00:09:12,210 --> 00:09:16,170 And we always deal with their psychological problems. 80 00:09:16,410 --> 00:09:20,130 But they are also extremely poor. They don't have a job. 81 00:09:20,370 --> 00:09:23,970 They don't know how to live. This is an economic material problem. 82 00:09:24,240 --> 00:09:27,960 The psychological inner torments of the modern Jew, 83 00:09:27,990 --> 00:09:34,889 which was celebrated in the modern Hebrew literature with critique, always derive from materialistic conditions. 84 00:09:34,890 --> 00:09:42,030 And I think the two recent works about this matter were just published one by Oded Neal and one by one by Phil Cohen Lustig, 85 00:09:42,240 --> 00:09:48,390 who dealt with a marxist perspective on Zionism at large through Hebrew literature, which is very interesting. 86 00:09:48,930 --> 00:09:54,150 And they will. I think that my work tries to relate to this is just hope. 87 00:09:54,390 --> 00:09:59,700 Hopefully eventually my claim ability to give poetic space, 88 00:09:59,700 --> 00:10:08,670 melancholic poetic space aspires to mediate and mend historical and economic contradictions that were seemingly impossible, 89 00:10:08,940 --> 00:10:17,670 impossible to appropriate in actual historical life between the need for silver unity and economic flourishing and its historical impossibility. 90 00:10:18,090 --> 00:10:26,040 In the poetic realm they store. The historical contradictions were solved and negated all by while leaving a problematic residue. 91 00:10:26,490 --> 00:10:30,120 I will deal with the relations between negated history and fiction. 92 00:10:30,630 --> 00:10:37,890 Erotic life is the life and what love is a life giving forth forth of its claim and national sovereignty. 93 00:10:38,430 --> 00:10:46,950 I will hopefully show the desire and logic and national functions in a strange mechanism whose exigency is to remain unfulfilled. 94 00:10:47,310 --> 00:10:56,520 But the task is dialectics, I claim, derived from what I refer to as melancholic eros, as many of men have mentioned. 95 00:10:56,520 --> 00:10:59,580 And this is the confusion between his political texts and the stories. 96 00:10:59,940 --> 00:11:05,160 But at the 10th, his work may claim to be vital, but it is mostly gloomy and catastrophic. 97 00:11:05,610 --> 00:11:10,290 Most of his stories begin with hope, but ended in disaster and confusion. 98 00:11:10,680 --> 00:11:15,330 Think of this the famous from Cohanim, which tells of Michael, 99 00:11:15,540 --> 00:11:24,310 a young Jewish youth who falls in love with a girl and ends of the story almost crazy and even all of his stories. 100 00:11:24,780 --> 00:11:28,580 Most of them have the same arc. The rich man ends up poor. 101 00:11:28,620 --> 00:11:31,680 The desire that an enchanting girl is always lost. 102 00:11:31,950 --> 00:11:36,270 The young man remains lonely and tormented. There is no success. 103 00:11:37,050 --> 00:11:42,900 I argue that this gloom that covers his work is precisely a part of this melancholic girls. 104 00:11:43,440 --> 00:11:47,459 I will start with one of the first stories in the beginning of a career. 105 00:11:47,460 --> 00:11:52,920 Most of his stories dealt with autobiographical figure, which was also in the first person. 106 00:11:53,130 --> 00:11:56,190 He had many names. He called him Menachem, Jonathan, whatever. 107 00:11:56,190 --> 00:12:08,280 Whatever story, such its name. When the hero is called Mikhail Elusive, almost like before Menachem, without her over Pollock all alone. 108 00:12:08,290 --> 00:12:15,900 This is the soil quote for from in a second. And they all like the picked autobiographical scenes from his life, imagined life. 109 00:12:15,930 --> 00:12:22,080 We need, of course, to look sceptically about the relation between autobiography and history and literature. 110 00:12:22,530 --> 00:12:25,589 But this is considered to be autobiographical. 111 00:12:25,590 --> 00:12:29,640 And I think that the use of the first person here is. 112 00:12:32,000 --> 00:12:42,820 Oh, interesting in that sense. Okay, let's this is the first quote and I again apologise for the translations which are fine, 113 00:12:42,980 --> 00:12:47,150 especially because I'll be honest here and she's an expert translator. 114 00:12:48,770 --> 00:12:52,700 But I want to open this is the young man confessing his love. 115 00:12:53,270 --> 00:12:57,140 Sitting in his room, talking about his love. The one. The girl that he loves. 116 00:12:57,170 --> 00:13:02,540 Okay. I want to open my soul to her. I want to reveal the treasures of the soul. 117 00:13:02,540 --> 00:13:08,840 And all that is sublime in the world. I am the master of everything through my relation to everything. 118 00:13:09,470 --> 00:13:13,010 Even the mountains and the hills. The sky and the heights of the sky. 119 00:13:13,250 --> 00:13:19,130 History and the secrets of history. All of them I hold in my hand. 120 00:13:19,760 --> 00:13:23,660 But she will only see before her. A schoolboy on his path. 121 00:13:24,110 --> 00:13:30,170 And it makes me sad, sad and angry. She is sitting in her room and I am sitting in my room. 122 00:13:30,710 --> 00:13:36,500 I love her with the richness of my soul. This is a part paradigmatic ability jazz can sing. 123 00:13:36,710 --> 00:13:42,410 The solitary young man sits in his room and imagines an unattainable girl. 124 00:13:42,950 --> 00:13:47,900 This scene repeats itself in numerous other stories, autobiographical and not that we will get to that. 125 00:13:48,170 --> 00:13:53,900 This may seem like a typical scene describing a young man's incapacity to engage with women. 126 00:13:55,250 --> 00:14:04,250 The young, shy and confused, detached, tireless Jewish youth is impotent, both figuratively and literally. 127 00:14:04,340 --> 00:14:14,240 And this is the critique of the Zionist critique of this period that all of the masculine figures are impotent, melancholic and impotent. 128 00:14:14,390 --> 00:14:19,370 I claim that impotency is in fact potency, its suspension of desire. 129 00:14:19,400 --> 00:14:27,420 And I was so how. However, I argue that what actually happens here is a specific mechanism of the will and that it impotency. 130 00:14:27,430 --> 00:14:31,430 Here is the poetic device. It is fulfilment. 131 00:14:31,670 --> 00:14:35,780 That is the danger that the product protagonists have to refrain from. 132 00:14:36,110 --> 00:14:43,970 Desire is suspended as long as the yearning man longs for love, sex or nation, and as he lacks the means, 133 00:14:44,210 --> 00:14:49,880 the historical conditions and the erotic techniques and language to realise his desire. 134 00:14:50,210 --> 00:14:53,240 He must suspended in an imaginary state. 135 00:14:53,270 --> 00:14:59,720 But let's take a closer look at this imaginary state, which is indeed a state he holds the entire world in his hand. 136 00:15:00,230 --> 00:15:08,210 This is very important topology. He is safely located in a small space for which he looks outside. 137 00:15:08,690 --> 00:15:12,500 The spatial arrangement makes sure one particular thing never happens. 138 00:15:12,890 --> 00:15:17,120 The girl and the boy never meet. In this case, she doesn't even know him. 139 00:15:17,450 --> 00:15:26,780 The real relationship, possible relationship is negated in favour of an imagined one that relies on the image of the girl as an inspiration. 140 00:15:27,560 --> 00:15:32,840 Inspiration of power in Create creates a melancholic and imagined silver entity. 141 00:15:33,230 --> 00:15:39,530 He is the master of everything through his melancholic relation to everything. 142 00:15:40,250 --> 00:15:47,720 The use of the concept of melancholy here mostly follows the thought of George Agamben, the Italian finger and philosopher for him. 143 00:15:47,960 --> 00:15:57,650 Unlike the Freudian interpretation, melancholy is not just a psychological feeling, but an ontological mood that comes before any event of love. 144 00:15:59,060 --> 00:16:08,690 Unlike Freud's understanding of the concept, melancholy does not lead to impoverishment, but it is a mechanism for the preservation of desire. 145 00:16:09,200 --> 00:16:21,020 I quote, for example, an imaginative capacity to make the unobtainable object appear as if lost, to turn what was never ours into a lost image. 146 00:16:21,320 --> 00:16:22,880 And in this way, keep it alive. 147 00:16:23,570 --> 00:16:32,870 I quote again a gamble The English is much better than mine covering its object with the funeral trappings of mourning, melancholy. 148 00:16:32,870 --> 00:16:38,030 Melancholy confers upon it the phantasmagorical reality of what is lost. 149 00:16:39,170 --> 00:16:47,420 It is a way to hold desire, quoting the phantasm in an immobile dialectic, causing the image, 150 00:16:47,450 --> 00:16:54,590 not the person desires, held in a poetic space or crypt, suspending in a burning, 151 00:16:55,400 --> 00:16:58,220 frantic ex-labour x sorry, 152 00:16:58,250 --> 00:17:09,050 difficult word exacerbation and I quote again Melancholy succeeds in appropriating its object only to the extent it affirms its loss. 153 00:17:09,350 --> 00:17:16,310 Think about the young youth there. The unattainable becomes a lost image created using poetic potency. 154 00:17:16,490 --> 00:17:25,220 Melancholy life alongside a lost object does not lead to impoverishment, but on the contrary to its negation through poetic creation. 155 00:17:26,060 --> 00:17:31,550 This applies to the political situation itself. In itself, key sadness and loss function as. 156 00:17:31,620 --> 00:17:35,610 The source of poetic and political omnipotence. 157 00:17:36,510 --> 00:17:43,440 In an essay from 1898, he writes And this is the second quote This is like a theistic thing. 158 00:17:44,040 --> 00:17:46,710 And these are the only sadness that I haven't felt in days. 159 00:17:46,920 --> 00:17:57,450 Ken came and knocked on my window, on the window of my secluded room there by my small desk, in my small room, inside my small world. 160 00:17:57,810 --> 00:18:04,470 I sit and listen to the morning of the Israeli people and hear it's generations long sadness. 161 00:18:04,800 --> 00:18:08,370 And everyone. Everyone. Young and small. Young and old. 162 00:18:08,370 --> 00:18:12,300 Big and small. All of them. Convoys upon convoys. 163 00:18:13,260 --> 00:18:16,680 All of them come convertible in convoys and park outside my window. 164 00:18:17,130 --> 00:18:23,340 And a deep darkness and worldly sadness looms upon everything and in my inner self. 165 00:18:24,660 --> 00:18:28,319 Think about this interiority that he's creating. Small town. 166 00:18:28,320 --> 00:18:31,680 Small room, small desk, small world. Inner self. 167 00:18:32,940 --> 00:18:36,599 I wish to unite to create new people a nation and my soul is torn. 168 00:18:36,600 --> 00:18:42,720 A historical tear on all I have left is this inner sadness and this inner grieving. 169 00:18:43,110 --> 00:18:48,840 I dwell alone in the corner of my small room, in the corner of this foreign and not foreign town. 170 00:18:49,170 --> 00:18:58,170 Give me a lawyer and a fiddle and I will sing a song of grief, a song for the generations, for generations upon generations. 171 00:18:59,010 --> 00:19:04,440 And you will hear grief in my song. Silent and sad morning against the storm. 172 00:19:05,310 --> 00:19:11,250 Give me a small cavity. And there, deep in the ground, I will mournfully contemplate our gloom. 173 00:19:12,720 --> 00:19:16,600 Though the author here is the lone witness of the ghost of the past. 174 00:19:16,650 --> 00:19:19,950 Ontology. What is is also melancholy. 175 00:19:20,280 --> 00:19:23,310 He incorporates swallows into his interiority. 176 00:19:23,550 --> 00:19:27,000 They stoic, aloof, while using sadness as poetics. 177 00:19:27,570 --> 00:19:34,860 History is appropriated and preserved precisely as lost generations upon generations in an undead form. 178 00:19:35,400 --> 00:19:37,650 The days have passed and still remain. 179 00:19:37,680 --> 00:19:46,409 This is another quite familiar to the space of melancholy, of that of the Crypt, which is also the Jewish bookcase and the coffin. 180 00:19:46,410 --> 00:19:53,620 And his room and the room, the shadow where he studied and its growth in it, in its growth, the living that work. 181 00:19:53,640 --> 00:20:00,750 This is another quote I feel the song of the buried skeletons and even their maggots sing. 182 00:20:01,560 --> 00:20:08,730 Melancholy is not the impoverishment or stoppage of work, but its fountain, the origin of the small world. 183 00:20:08,730 --> 00:20:18,320 Inside the small room, the lion, the fiddle of the melancholic instruments of creation, both of a static or cultural and historical or political. 184 00:20:18,660 --> 00:20:23,460 The melancholic, imagined and imagined unfulfilled will to unite the people. 185 00:20:23,910 --> 00:20:29,010 That is the centrepiece of the author's poetic, poetic politics. 186 00:20:30,030 --> 00:20:37,500 And as such, he refuses the idea of fulfilment, preserving desire in a burning, active and inactive inoperative. 187 00:20:37,740 --> 00:20:40,170 This is how, again, Agamben uses this situation. 188 00:20:40,170 --> 00:20:49,650 This weird sense of actuality that is not actual inoperative to desire is preserved in a burning, inoperative states. 189 00:20:50,910 --> 00:20:56,760 This is important because most of Turkey critiques solely the work of the one that called it the hopeless, 190 00:20:56,760 --> 00:21:02,880 melancholic man and adorned due to his strong passion, passionate and active protagonists. 191 00:21:03,360 --> 00:21:07,980 The simplistic Nietzsche and reader of his work confronted two contrasting figures. 192 00:21:08,280 --> 00:21:13,140 On the one hand, we have the melancholic youth who never gets the girl, so to speak. 193 00:21:13,620 --> 00:21:24,509 And on the other man. On the other hand, his work is littered with strong, passionate, firm, fierce, masculine men who always get what they want. 194 00:21:24,510 --> 00:21:32,940 They just take it. And most critics saw these figures as the culmination of the Jewish the Jewish future, 195 00:21:32,940 --> 00:21:38,250 that the Hebrew for future or the more accurate to say that Bild itself imagined. 196 00:21:38,580 --> 00:21:47,950 I claim that it is the other way around. It is exactly the melancholic figures that are able to suspend their desire, control their will. 197 00:21:50,400 --> 00:21:54,690 Unlike example from the for the fierce or what they call the red, 198 00:21:54,690 --> 00:22:01,169 characters can be found in Beset to from a Place of Thunder, which is one of his most famous works, 199 00:22:01,170 --> 00:22:09,990 the late works and others, like you, still build a house where there are like, these mythical beings that always get what they want. 200 00:22:12,670 --> 00:22:21,959 Hmm. Okay. Sorry. Well, I. I claim that is only these passive and passive and contemplative figures like the who, the hero of all alone, 201 00:22:21,960 --> 00:22:28,000 who holds all the world in his hand, that express the Chayefsky's, melancholic and sovereign will. 202 00:22:28,140 --> 00:22:31,470 Unlike the red characters that always fulfil that, the. 203 00:22:31,560 --> 00:22:33,990 Liars and meat, a tragic death. 204 00:22:35,070 --> 00:22:44,100 For example, read slow mo the almighty load from in the place of Thunder, etc. have had sex with his wife and finished his life. 205 00:22:44,250 --> 00:22:48,500 Died in an early age. Embarrassed and ashamed. O missile for McCain. 206 00:22:48,500 --> 00:22:56,550 Name another longing youth. But second, he fulfil the desires and sleeps with the mother of his girlfriend. 207 00:22:56,760 --> 00:23:01,500 It's always very confused there. The yeah. Relations within the family. 208 00:23:02,290 --> 00:23:10,830 He becomes almost crazy. His will disappears and when the will disappears, we meet madness or death. 209 00:23:11,010 --> 00:23:14,610 This is like the prototypical arc in Billy Chayefsky. 210 00:23:14,610 --> 00:23:19,290 Fulfilment means mad, therefore madness. This is a historical thing. 211 00:23:19,800 --> 00:23:24,810 The Jewish man has no way to fulfil his desire for silver and silver entity, 212 00:23:25,230 --> 00:23:29,879 not only because he lacks the emotional vocabulary, but also because the what? 213 00:23:29,880 --> 00:23:34,830 The Conditional Awakening doesn't have the material conditions to flourish in any 214 00:23:34,830 --> 00:23:39,600 dream of active Jewish eroticism and politics in the other Chayefsky's mind, 215 00:23:39,600 --> 00:23:42,420 at least, will undoubtedly end in tragedy. 216 00:23:42,720 --> 00:23:49,920 So he chooses melancholy for the suspension of time and the opening over of the poetic eroticism and silver entity, 217 00:23:51,450 --> 00:23:56,159 the figure of the melancholic youth he hidden in his chamber growth. 218 00:23:56,160 --> 00:24:03,150 With the author's work, he turns from autobiographical writing toward the more nuanced representations of Jewish life. 219 00:24:03,900 --> 00:24:11,340 And these later stories like Famous Red Heifer or the late novels that I spoke about just now, 220 00:24:11,790 --> 00:24:17,100 represent the mythical forces latently burning in the waning diasporic society. 221 00:24:17,820 --> 00:24:25,680 However, I argue that the mythical figure that comes to life in his work is precisely that of the author, the showgirl, 222 00:24:25,710 --> 00:24:33,760 the narrator, the narrator as creator of worlds willing them to like to live through the melancholic suspension of desire. 223 00:24:34,710 --> 00:24:38,700 So while the earliest stories were somewhat autobiographical in the later stories, 224 00:24:38,700 --> 00:24:43,050 such as The Havana Room, from which we read now The Love of My Youth, 225 00:24:43,410 --> 00:24:52,350 the becomes an alphabetic figure, a timeless mediator that opens up and maintains or animates and keeps alive the act of creation. 226 00:24:53,100 --> 00:25:02,429 He is the real protagonist of the reality of these work. These are the opening lines of I have on a whim from 1909 here. 227 00:25:02,430 --> 00:25:09,030 The narrator is no longer speaking, the first person simply, but he described himself as an offer. 228 00:25:10,170 --> 00:25:18,450 And this is the third quote I think historical actions demand from us the offers to describe histories weaved in life, 229 00:25:18,660 --> 00:25:21,840 to combine visions with the busy noises of action. 230 00:25:22,410 --> 00:25:32,430 What is seen and what is heard, and what are those, if not the summary of the suffering soul and its latent sadness without the soul and its agonies, 231 00:25:33,060 --> 00:25:37,770 actions and visions are useless, and we will not know why we should know. 232 00:25:38,490 --> 00:25:44,670 Let me tell you about the love of my youth. My loved one did not know that I had loved her. 233 00:25:45,270 --> 00:25:50,460 And I am older now. I have seen many lives in their tears and the girl is gone. 234 00:25:50,850 --> 00:25:56,610 She left before I did. And she rests among pure spirits, amongst pure spirits. 235 00:25:57,300 --> 00:26:02,250 Life cannot be spoken by the living. This is a very strange sentence in Hebrew. 236 00:26:02,250 --> 00:26:05,399 It's in high. Me, the Ballymena high. Very strange. 237 00:26:05,400 --> 00:26:07,450 I didn't know how to translate it and why. 238 00:26:07,490 --> 00:26:17,280 And when I remind of the girl that resided in this house and soul that served as my light, I already stand in the middle of the story. 239 00:26:17,760 --> 00:26:19,530 More than a generation have passed. 240 00:26:19,950 --> 00:26:29,820 Life is long and constant, and she still stands before me as if alive by her beauty with her two braids and the charm of her grace. 241 00:26:31,440 --> 00:26:34,620 Here we have the melancholic tendencies and spatial arrangement. 242 00:26:34,650 --> 00:26:39,400 The author in his house is looking back and bringing back to life is lost love. 243 00:26:39,720 --> 00:26:50,220 The story itself that begins after the threshold may seem again like the typical depiction of the deficiency of contemporary young Jews. 244 00:26:50,640 --> 00:26:59,460 The author protagonist Yonatan falls in love with Nechama and they become friends, but he is unable to engage with her, even in the slightest way. 245 00:26:59,670 --> 00:27:05,060 There is a scene in the story when the girl knocks on his room and he hears her knocking. 246 00:27:05,070 --> 00:27:09,030 And this is like a like the song of songs. But he is just unable to move. 247 00:27:09,030 --> 00:27:15,050 He just freezes. Immediately freezes. Is so passive that his sister has to open the door. 248 00:27:15,780 --> 00:27:20,819 And within the song of thunder the the love of Solomon knocks on the door. 249 00:27:20,820 --> 00:27:22,220 And the Shulamit is so excited. 250 00:27:22,230 --> 00:27:30,510 She wakes up and she comes to the door and they have like sort of weird mediator intercourse on the handles of the both these slits. 251 00:27:30,510 --> 00:27:33,989 His hands never. A my very erotic here. Nothing happens. 252 00:27:33,990 --> 00:27:42,690 It just freezes. No movement at all. And if in the song of song the shulamit follows him and wanders in the city and goes crazy from love. 253 00:27:42,690 --> 00:27:47,780 She's lovesick here. He just stand there. She walks in the converse a little bit. 254 00:27:47,790 --> 00:27:51,140 Your sister opens the door and he's the media. He's just frozen. 255 00:27:51,150 --> 00:27:54,300 But after she leaves, he said that was a revelation. 256 00:27:54,720 --> 00:28:01,860 Like this was the opening of the realms of God for me without doing anything absolutely immobile. 257 00:28:02,400 --> 00:28:06,500 And of course, beautifully evokes the figure of the shulamit in the song of song. 258 00:28:06,510 --> 00:28:16,930 This is not like this is very much there. This passivity, of course, is amplified when another character enters this apparatus of desire. 259 00:28:17,970 --> 00:28:23,370 This the active, handsome, of course, and playful, which is important. 260 00:28:23,370 --> 00:28:26,580 Elyakim. This is like a reb character, an active character. 261 00:28:26,910 --> 00:28:33,410 You, not only Akeem, soon become good friends and their friendship depends upon upon their joint love towards Nechama. 262 00:28:33,420 --> 00:28:40,290 They both love the girl. But Joachim, unlike his friend, can interact with her in more ways than one. 263 00:28:40,320 --> 00:28:44,630 Let's read the fourth quote, I hope. Oh, he was taller than me. 264 00:28:44,640 --> 00:28:47,970 Of course he was in [INAUDIBLE] yellow. Mine was black. 265 00:28:48,660 --> 00:28:52,050 A relationship with Nechama was utterly different. 266 00:28:53,760 --> 00:28:57,770 I was afraid to even touch the tip of her dress. 267 00:28:57,780 --> 00:29:01,290 This is like a sense of holiness. You cannot touch what is holy, of course. 268 00:29:01,950 --> 00:29:11,550 Well, he made fun of her, and when she wouldn't agree to give him something object, he would try to take it from her and tussle with her playfully. 269 00:29:12,120 --> 00:29:15,959 Which is. Yeah. Okay. Fruitfully, there is physical play. 270 00:29:15,960 --> 00:29:18,480 This is important because this is a thing that describes, I think, 271 00:29:18,480 --> 00:29:24,750 the changing of the value and the way people used to court people like of erotic and the romantic processes. 272 00:29:24,990 --> 00:29:30,840 And What You Lose famously wrote about the thing in another book by Naomi Zeidman just came out like a couple of years ago, 273 00:29:30,840 --> 00:29:35,520 but this is like very untraditional to play with the girl, to touch her, to wrestle with her. 274 00:29:35,520 --> 00:29:43,620 This is like, okay, yeah, that's physically there is physical play, one that involved word and touch. 275 00:29:43,620 --> 00:29:52,290 And while this is just a game, it is an active and light-hearted, not melancholic activity that accentuates Jonathan's serious passivity. 276 00:29:52,950 --> 00:30:01,800 And if Kim also tries to actively take and possess the thing he desires, both the girl and the thing that she holds in their hand in what follows, 277 00:30:02,670 --> 00:30:09,060 and it came in the form of the relationship intensive intensifies, and the two even exchanged love letters. 278 00:30:09,450 --> 00:30:17,400 And while for a king, this is an entertaining, poetic game, Jonathan, of course, experiences it profoundly the second. 279 00:30:21,390 --> 00:30:24,330 We sat and read the whole. Pleasants Another quote you have here. 280 00:30:25,020 --> 00:30:31,739 We said in another pleasant and esteemed words, they felt as sweet as honey world, my world. 281 00:30:31,740 --> 00:30:33,870 We read the letter keeping London together, 282 00:30:34,230 --> 00:30:42,300 and afterwards I took it from his hand and looked at the lovely letters and the letter read again, verse, verse after verse. 283 00:30:43,080 --> 00:30:51,180 My friend stood up and moved around. Well, I just sat there with the calm of written feelings in the palm of my hand. 284 00:30:51,190 --> 00:30:57,630 Think about the world in the palm of his hand. Now it's a feeling my heart overflowed with feeling. 285 00:30:59,250 --> 00:31:02,549 Love for your thumb becomes real and tangible. 286 00:31:02,550 --> 00:31:06,810 Something you can hold precisely when he functions as the mediator. 287 00:31:07,110 --> 00:31:11,370 This is not his love, and that is why he can fully enjoy it. 288 00:31:11,970 --> 00:31:21,240 Your Tan's passivity is highlighted against earlier Keynes's rapid movement, but at the same time with heart, the source of the will and desire. 289 00:31:21,780 --> 00:31:25,080 The locus of the creativity overflows. 290 00:31:25,800 --> 00:31:30,390 This love is enjoyed and acquires potency only passively. 291 00:31:31,290 --> 00:31:37,710 The final triumph, so to speak, of the melancholic figure happens obviously at the end of the story, 292 00:31:38,040 --> 00:31:45,510 looking following the social imperative to chase money and success, or succumbing to the social imperative to chase money and success. 293 00:31:46,230 --> 00:31:53,640 As some of us, most of us do, abandons Muhammad for the little girl, his love is unmask as merely a game. 294 00:31:54,060 --> 00:31:59,100 Is poetic letters, letters and physical taunting is an endless gestures. 295 00:31:59,790 --> 00:32:04,290 But even after revival is removed, you cannot approach the hammer. 296 00:32:04,590 --> 00:32:08,130 She marries another and dies at a young age. We know that from the beginning of the story. 297 00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:15,040 But in the melancholic realm. Death is not the end, but the beginning of creative potency. 298 00:32:15,060 --> 00:32:20,220 The heart of the story. This is the next quote, quote and myself. 299 00:32:20,700 --> 00:32:28,409 This is the ending of the story. I always believe that in the calm I for me and I never played that it is possible to cheat my heart's desire 300 00:32:28,410 --> 00:32:36,629 and my only path in life will really be mine and say I will follow you and here at the end of the story. 301 00:32:36,630 --> 00:32:40,890 But it actually repeats the statements he made about the middle of the story. 302 00:32:41,310 --> 00:32:49,799 I am the one who lives in the depths of the earth, and I will remember in the comment of beauty more than a generation of baths. 303 00:32:49,800 --> 00:32:55,510 I'm an old man and she still stands before me if alive by her beauty. 304 00:32:55,530 --> 00:33:01,170 This is romantic imagery with her two braids, braids and the charm of her grace. 305 00:33:02,580 --> 00:33:07,170 The image of the girl lives in the memory of the author who inscribed it to a 306 00:33:07,170 --> 00:33:14,030 story as the ending is in fact the opening Europeans desire for the undead. 307 00:33:14,030 --> 00:33:16,860 The image of the hammer leads to the literary act. 308 00:33:17,130 --> 00:33:25,290 And in the literary act, this desire is rekindled in a circle of desire where image provoke desire to provoke words, 309 00:33:25,290 --> 00:33:29,160 and these words right to the image in an endless circle of joy. 310 00:33:29,700 --> 00:33:34,350 This is agamben's concept of melancholy and of romantic love at large. 311 00:33:35,250 --> 00:33:41,520 But this circle in the literary arc desired is the candle in a thicket of desire, 312 00:33:41,520 --> 00:33:48,660 image and language that remains potent precisely and only because the hammer is forever lost. 313 00:33:49,860 --> 00:33:57,990 It is the will of the passive melancholy command that preserves and endures, proving himself ever more powerful than that of his whimsical friend. 314 00:33:59,040 --> 00:34:04,980 The melancholic will be belongs to them a shoulder that offers what becomes not only the vehicle of desire, 315 00:34:05,250 --> 00:34:10,200 but also the sovereign of the text against al-Hakim, who follows the social order. 316 00:34:10,530 --> 00:34:21,380 Unitel is truly of the individual, and it is said so that he wanders around like a very free of society's constraints in his lonely tomb. 317 00:34:21,390 --> 00:34:27,090 Love and life are reanimated in an undead state, and desire is both deferred and maintained. 318 00:34:27,960 --> 00:34:33,270 Psychological loss tilth into alphabetic topology into poetic space. 319 00:34:33,960 --> 00:34:38,550 It is the mission of goal to preserve the national and the Gothic desire using it will power. 320 00:34:40,410 --> 00:34:45,840 It is important to note, as David of Lipscomb has done, that the topic wasn't melancholic in his life. 321 00:34:46,200 --> 00:34:51,059 Like many of the 3D stories in his texts and the old ones about not getting paid enough. 322 00:34:51,060 --> 00:35:02,190 And we imagine this very tormented man. But after he moved to Germany at 1911, I think he lives with his wife and his son surrounded by friends. 323 00:35:02,190 --> 00:35:13,950 He was very creative. He had sort of economic stability, and he was adored by other people, young Hebrew readers and German, whatever. 324 00:35:14,420 --> 00:35:18,180 Just really German, really. He was not lonely. 325 00:35:19,320 --> 00:35:24,120 He is not, he thinks a lot of psychological state, but the political and historical state. 326 00:35:24,420 --> 00:35:28,350 This is very important because this we can mix the two easily because of the 327 00:35:28,590 --> 00:35:34,020 autobiographic nature and wild performance and national fears always haunted him. 328 00:35:34,710 --> 00:35:41,340 He still is melancholy is not a reaction to psychological loss or loneliness, but to the historical political condition. 329 00:35:42,720 --> 00:35:50,370 I will end shortly, but these final celebrated short novels are perceived as the culmination of his varied work. 330 00:35:51,330 --> 00:35:57,630 These work are considered the epitome of the his project of reviving Hebrew culture for revision of past materials. 331 00:35:58,020 --> 00:36:04,470 And they depict stories filled with eroticism, myth like actions, tragic consequences, etc., etc. 332 00:36:04,920 --> 00:36:13,140 But I wish again to focus on the melancholic figure of the poet creator that inhabits a particular space in this text. 333 00:36:13,740 --> 00:36:22,570 He appears in the threshold in the beginning and deadening ending or intervenes in the middle with interpretations and remarks. 334 00:36:22,710 --> 00:36:26,550 But he is not a part of the plot. The furniture bristles. 335 00:36:26,580 --> 00:36:30,360 I claim a function as a liminal elliptical space. 336 00:36:30,690 --> 00:36:40,829 The space of literature where literature appears, the act of literature upon which the whole of the novel and you you have a few openings bites. 337 00:36:40,830 --> 00:36:46,649 Divination will be the house befit alarm in a place of thunder and greater home, which I didn't know how to translate. 338 00:36:46,650 --> 00:36:52,710 So I translated, I think, the residence of a street, which sounds very bland, but whatever. 339 00:36:53,550 --> 00:36:56,340 They all have these alphabetic openings. 340 00:36:56,790 --> 00:37:02,370 These are the representations of the melancholic space of literature because they were by the will of the author. 341 00:37:02,700 --> 00:37:09,690 The narrator is not the autobiographical protagonist anymore, but the source and sovereign of the work. 342 00:37:10,410 --> 00:37:16,380 He appears only in the poetic space. Let's read the opening of Galileo again. 343 00:37:16,590 --> 00:37:20,190 More than a generation has passed many worth of plague the country. 344 00:37:21,090 --> 00:37:24,150 And I have witnessed the wrath of God and the grace of God. 345 00:37:24,540 --> 00:37:30,270 Though there are obstacles on a stepping round, the fields of memory are wide open. 346 00:37:30,480 --> 00:37:33,120 And we will stroll there when the sun is up. 347 00:37:34,290 --> 00:37:42,540 Even even when we are on the bed, which we will never depart, flecks of youth will somehow somewhat light the darkness. 348 00:37:43,050 --> 00:37:52,020 I don't believe in the resurrection, but I do believe that the thing that has passed and died can be revived in the mind of a person. 349 00:37:52,500 --> 00:37:58,500 The poet. The poet is almighty. Historical or material obstacles. 350 00:37:58,890 --> 00:38:07,260 The obstacles on a stepping round are negated in favour of the wide open and funny realm of memory. 351 00:38:07,740 --> 00:38:13,380 With it is also the realm of creativity, the realm of creativity and the preservation of the past. 352 00:38:13,950 --> 00:38:21,599 And the topology of this realm is, in fact the melancholic bed or the small chamber of the narrator, 353 00:38:21,600 --> 00:38:27,210 which the things are, reconfigure one into the other flakes of youth, and then the images, 354 00:38:27,570 --> 00:38:37,139 future and past coincide in an immobile dialectics and live in the mind of the Almighty Michel'le the machine within the gates, 355 00:38:37,140 --> 00:38:40,890 real unattainable history to preserve it as an image. 356 00:38:41,610 --> 00:38:44,790 Life persists, but always as negated. 357 00:38:44,790 --> 00:38:53,790 Life is an image of the lost object preserved, but always with the relation to the is not condition that is inherent to this process. 358 00:38:55,110 --> 00:39:02,070 The might of the poet's heart is in fact melancholic, else with the aesthetic literature and the historical coincide. 359 00:39:02,370 --> 00:39:13,410 Suspending Historical Process. This economy of desire is mostly a way in which literature tries to resolve historical and material contradictions, 360 00:39:13,890 --> 00:39:23,010 suspending them in a poetic and imagined realm. Moreover, this is not only how Hebrew sovereignty is imagined and national. 361 00:39:23,010 --> 00:39:28,770 In the Gothic, they are maintained. This is also a process in which gender is codified. 362 00:39:29,520 --> 00:39:32,820 The image of the author is of a secluded, 363 00:39:32,880 --> 00:39:42,960 yet omnipotent man sitting in his room while fantasising about a lost girl in the past or the nation to come in the future. 364 00:39:43,350 --> 00:39:48,480 Here, eroticism becomes automatism, its masculinity. 365 00:39:48,810 --> 00:39:58,860 The new Hebrew omen depend solely upon his own will, the will of the author, and this image of the solitary man imagining in girls you might imagine. 366 00:39:59,040 --> 00:40:08,250 Imagining girls is, I think, the key way to understand the economy and the figure of masculinity of the period at large. 367 00:40:08,970 --> 00:40:18,240 If one was to read Samuel Samuel's latest book on Bialik and desiring Bialik, he would find the same economy of desire exists. 368 00:40:19,120 --> 00:40:22,419 In Bialik's work the suspension of desire. 369 00:40:22,420 --> 00:40:25,930 Bialik is the contemporary of though the gimmicky, much more famous, much more important. 370 00:40:26,260 --> 00:40:32,320 But she dealt with the same intellectual tensions and contradictions in Bialik as well. 371 00:40:32,740 --> 00:40:40,210 You should suspend your desires. You got suspended. You should not spend your theatre, not spend your creativity, your spark. 372 00:40:40,390 --> 00:40:45,549 They ought to be withheld within the offer. The suspension of desire in a burning, 373 00:40:45,550 --> 00:40:53,950 melancholic state may very well be the key to a renewed understanding of the relation relations between literature and politics at the revival period, 374 00:40:54,340 --> 00:41:01,560 and moreover to the genealogy of the production of modern Jewish and Hebrew masculinity, of Zionist masculinity. 375 00:41:01,570 --> 00:41:02,920 And this is my last remark. 376 00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:12,250 This last remark is important because literary critics have lately tried to show that they are speaking melancholic tendencies of the in the work 377 00:41:12,250 --> 00:41:21,100 of Phyllis self exclaimed Zionist offers for disability Chayefsky but then later Bialik whatever they claim they are weren't really Zionist. 378 00:41:21,190 --> 00:41:24,639 Exemplar examples can be found even in Micki Grossman. 379 00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:31,629 Very good book The Zionist Body. When history shows that the melancholy is a problem, it's a disease when it is. 380 00:41:31,630 --> 00:41:36,460 Brenner and more recently in works by Yochai Oppenheimer or Yul Basson. 381 00:41:36,670 --> 00:41:45,400 But this is an attempt to find in early Zionism both diagnostic aspects which are very strange because they they consider themselves a Zionist. 382 00:41:46,360 --> 00:41:53,319 I argue the opposite that the melancholy of these figures is the poetic way to resolve the tension between 383 00:41:53,320 --> 00:41:59,830 an unwavering demand for Zionist sovereignty and the stoical conditions that are deemed improbable. 384 00:42:00,580 --> 00:42:05,800 It is not a psychological phenomenon, but the period historical apparatus of desire. 385 00:42:06,190 --> 00:42:14,620 In a small room, an imagined kingdom, the melancholic man author exemplified Zionist desire for national sovereignty, 386 00:42:15,130 --> 00:42:21,370 keeping it alive against history, with the power of his imagination and the strength of his will. 387 00:42:22,060 --> 00:42:22,510 Thank you.