Good afternoon, welcome, everybody. Welcome to the first meeting of the week,
four of these were studies seminar speaker today is a professor in Leibovich who is professor of history
and the up to chair of Holocaust Studies in Ethical Values at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
And its own is the author of monographs and edited collections dedicated to German life philosophy,
Zionism and melancholy or other had happy concepts such as nihilism, catastrophe, complicity and descent.
Yes, that's just the start. Yes, that's a start. And the title of this talk today is, is Zionism a left?
A left wing melancholy? Thank you and welcome.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. And I'm very glad to see the room is full.
In spite of the beautiful spring day. I thought on the way here until Yaakov that it's not very.
It feels almost and appropriate to talk about melancholy at such a sunny, beautiful day spring day.
But I'll do my best to send you back out with a hopeful mood.
And with that, let's start. Maybe before we do, I I hope you don't mind.
But if any everyone can just say you're worried about who they are and what they do here?
Is that OK? It's OK to take five minutes for that and post the recording is on the table.
What I'm going to do today is tell you a bit about the sort, the regions or the starting point of this research and where it's led me.
The book I published two versions of this book one in Hebrew in 2015 and one 16 and one in English in 2019.
This is the cover. You can pass that later and take a look if you're interested.
And I'll say two words about the historical aspect of that and actually the stylistic aspect of it.
I came across first. I came across an excerpt from a short story that these forgotten author I never heard about before wrote,
Those of you who know Hebrew literature maybe know his daughter know exactly who's one of the best known offers.
Guaranteed Israel the winner of the Israel prise and really well known author and poet and.
And after reading that excerpt, some of which I'm a part of which you are going to see here later, I was interested.
I was really baffled by that because I've never seen anything like that in Hebrew literature before.
There was something that combined, as Yaakov mentioned,
know I'm interested in catastrophic and apocalyptic and, you know, happy, happy concepts of the of that sort.
And this author combining the very interesting way secular literature, German literature, Polish literature,
but then also Christian apocalyptic motifs together with biblical eschatological motifs and in a way I never really came across before.
And I thought, That's really interesting. I want to read more.
And after reading more of that literature, I decided to actually try to find out who we was and why I never heard of him before because I did study.
I started actually with Hebrew literature, theory of literature in English literature and at the university,
and I moved on to intellectual history into history, and I thought, it's very odd that I never heard the name before.
So I went and actually looked for material,
and I found I couldn't find anything in there in the established histories of literature of of Israeli or Hebrew literature.
There's nothing absolutely zero about this person.
And then I look further and I found out that not only he published six novels and seven collections of short stories,
he translated some of the best known, some of the best known classics, classical works from your ability to draw.
And actually, he's translations. I'll give you a few examples. Those of you who know instance from Klyce, Michel Koolhaas, Janusz Korczak,
Joseph Conrad from English, that they were in classical translations from different languages,
which he introduced it to the Hebrew speaking public in the in the early nineteen forties, late 1930s, early 1940s and so on and so forth.
I started actually researching the biography and I found out that the archive is.
So when I started researching, it was those of you, anyone who knows the Israeli archive, it was in one archive.
It is completely messed up and they couldn't find anything there.
And luckily, about a year later, they actually moved the archive of the Museum Literary Archive from where it was before to a new location,
and they had no choice but actually organise it, at least superficially.
So I was able to find the files and the boxes and the letters and the diaries and all this stuff that no one actually knew even existed before.
And that's, you know, for a historian, that's revelation, right? That's the god of the voice of God actually confiding in, you have something here.
And I read through the material and then I decided, OK, there's enough material here for an actual research.
That was after I finished and published my first book, which was about a completely different area of study.
And first, I thought it was enough material for an article.
And then I, after finding the archival materials that were so rich, I decided it was enough actually for a book.
Someone actually gave me that advice amongst the lack of it. I know. And I decided to actually turn it into a book.
So here's the thing when you read through both the translations and the literary writing of this offer, you find out the following thing.
So he himself and I'll connect the literature to the biography in the way literature people are very conscious about.
But I'll explain why do that? So he's very let's argue the biography.
So he was born in Genji Genji of in Poland in 1889, died in 1947.
So very, very young. I'm sorry, 1919 09 was born in nineteen.
Eighty nine died in 1947. So very, very young died of cancer.
But after many years of of what we now know his clinical depression.
Back then, people called it melancholy. He was a melancholic author.
When you read the literature, you find out that he wrote about the life of Zionist pioneers.
He kind of documented that as as Einstein himself. He emigrated to Palestine in 1928.
He worked in the kibbutz, in the fields and then in the orchards. He actually worked in who then the painter you see here.
The painting were blue velvet painter paints behind him in his own orchard.
And the author I'm going to tell you about. Zaki worked in the orchard you see behind there and cultivated the land.
Then he moved to pave roads.
You know, kind of the classical Zionist story about often, you know, occupying the frontier and getting the winning back the land and flourishing in.
And blossoming and and making something out of the usual zany story of pioneers and got married,
had a child, the single child and who exactly was nine of herself and died as set in 1947.
The literature, though, about the Zionist pioneers that he meant or that he introduces as if he knows very intimately,
are all organised in a melancholic mode.
What does that mean? It means that they all come with these high language of of ideals to Palestine, to work the land,
cultivate the land, and with this mission that these collective in their minds.
And they all feel. So there is a gap between the ideal and there are these Asian.
And as you'll see in a minute that connects with the language of men and poorly that is at the heart of these at the heart of this project.
And when I read the diaries and the letters, the diaries and the letters actually followed that form, that structure.
So in the diaries and the letters in the archive.
He recurrently echoes that notion of high, idealistic language, on the one hand, European idealistic language.
And I mean that in the philosophical sense of idealism.
So German idealism, European idealism that assumes that the progress of humanity should go from ideal to realisation, right?
Can't and Hegel and so on and so forth.
And the failure, the notion that once he actually comes to Palestine and starts working in the land and wants to realise his ideals as a pioneer,
he's not able to achieve that for different reasons, as you will see in a minute.
And the whole thing falls apart. And that creates a melancholic mode for the story and for his own reports about his own life.
And I thought, that's really interesting. It's interesting,
interesting for me as a historian who documents people's lives right and the collective movement and the language and the discourse of Zionism.
And it's interesting as it as a reader of texts of literature, because the two work hand in hand more or less.
Now what I wanted to do here today is the following I'll say a few words I'll try to do that very quickly,
which is why I have this line so you can follow. I'll say a few words about what melancholy is, and of course, there's much more to say about it.
But just to get the language, the lingo of melancholy,
then I'll say a few words about where Zazi or other authors of that period of the 1930s and 1940s,
how they write and why they write in the melancholic mode.
So within a Jewish framework, and then I'll take a third step, which is I'll try to ponder about his own poetics or what he tries to do with it.
So what is melancholy, the danger of collective melancholy or the relation to Auburn, which is the Jewish echo of that literary Zionist utopia,
and I'll touch on a few classical well-known figures and descend from Ya'akov amongst source was even here in Oxford for a while.
So Klausner, who was Amos Oz, his uncle.
I'm talking about Amos Oz and then exactly, and I'll try to characterise all that as a mode of left wing melancholy.
So let's start with melancholia. What is melancholy? So according to Freud, and this is a essay an essay from 1915 Freud wrote.
The essay in 1915 revised that in 1917, and the second part of that to the essay were and this became one of the classical big essays.
Much of the contemporary critical theory is is going back to that.
If you read Judith Butler, you read the reader.
You know, all these big fear is of critical fear of the second half of the 20th century echo that that essay,
when they write Christopher, as we'll see in a minute, echoed that notion.
So what is my melancholy, according to Freud, is a reaction to the loss of a loved person or the loss of some abstraction.
So the loss of loss of an of a loved person or the loss of some abstraction,
which has taken the place of one that is a loved one, such as one's country liberty, an idea and so on.
According to Freud, the melancholic displays something which is lacking in mourning,
so Freud echoes or contrasts melancholy and mourning melancholy note is the pathological side mourning or inwardly
that would later call the work of mourning is the therapeutic or the the the positive side of melancholy,
right? So that when you work through your morning after the loss,
you are able to go out from the exit that from the other side by integrating the loss into your ego right?
And create a complete and then healthy ego melancholy when you sink into that kind of pathological notion of loss.
So unlike which is lacking in mourning and extraordinary diminution in self-regard and impoverishment of his ego and the grand scale in mourning,
it is the world which has become poor and empty in melancholy. It is the ego itself, so we see the ego he is.
You become obsessed with that notion of loss. You celebrate the loss, right?
And Freud in this in this essay actually attaches that to a degree to what narcissism means ease doing very often so.
And the link there is is melancholy, something we are letting ourselves get obsessed about and by our ego identify with.
So we integrate the loss as part of our identity. And at that point, Freud argues, we fetishise the loss.
We stop thinking about the person, let's say the person we lost who died or, you know, lost love we lost track of.
And what we become obsessed with is the notion of loss itself. So it's not the person anymore.
It's not what we lost. It's not the object. It's not the celebration of the loss itself, which replaces the person.
Yeah, that's the pathological aspect of it. Critical theory now in the second half of the 20th century is trying to work with Freud,
but beyond Freud about what melancholy means in cultural and in political terms, and Christopher in Black Son says the following.
Maybe Jonathan that will connect with classicism in a way. The Iliad gave us in the long, bitter phone the melancholic tendency to self-pity footsy.
You see, she keeps the pathological aspect of Freud's observation forsaken by the gods exiled by divinely.
To create these desperate, desperate men was condemned not to mania, but to banishment, absence and void.
Melancholy for her is a denial of loss. So now it's not just the person we lost, but it's the attempt to denial the notion of loss,
but not being able to free ourselves from it, which belongs to a world devoid of signifies of signifiers or signification.
And I'll give an example for that. It's a self-referential reality brought close to narcissism and fetishism.
Now, if you think about that notion of obsession, right when all we think about obsessively is the notion of loss,
we stop thinking as as Freud tells us about the world is something that has any relevance to our notion of loss,
and we let ourselves sink dive into that notion of loss as if that actually can fill us with new content.
In other words, signifiers or, let's say, markers out the in the in the world seem completely irrelevant.
And you'll see why that is relevant when we talk about something even more recently.
George, your argument the theoreticians,
the Italian tradition identified with now a thinking about what we call the bio political critique or bile politics.
He's saying the following. So when he thinks about melancholy, it's planets is Saturn.
And here we see how melancholy works in personal psychological terms as collective cultural forum, but also in cosmological terms, right?
It's plant these Saturn, and amongst those children, the melancholic finds himself with the hanged men, the cripple, the peasant,
the gambler, the physiological syndrome of Abu Nazir melancholia, abundance of melancholy humour and humour by humour.
We'll see what he means, including includes darkening of the skin, blood and urine.
Hardening of the pores burning in the gut. Flatulence, I.V. burping, whistling in the left ear constipation.
Everything you ever thought. He's bad, you know it's here. Or problematic excessive faeces.
A gloomy, gloomy dreams amongst the diseases. It can include our hysteria dementia, epilepsy, leprosy, haemorrhoids, scabies and suicidal mania mania.
The melancholic is proximal, complex sonatas worse,
complicated so the complexion of the skin said envious, malevolent evade fraudulent, cowardly and deadly.
So the cosmos right? Saturn, which is the sign the symbol of melancholia and the melancholic the melancholic psychology are a tightly interwoven.
Yeah, and that's maybe the force Freud is actually trying to revive.
Going back to classical symbols and trying to bring back to modernity to the modern world.
Now, when a gunman and Christopher and other theoreticians think about the history of melancholy and how to integrate that into critical theory,
they actually think about the history of melon melancholia itself, of melancholy itself.
And the history has an interesting it's its own intellectual history behind it.
So usually and I'll now digress. I'll walk back.
So critical theory right now usually mentions is obsessed in some ways with Voltaire Benyamin, the theoretician,
the German Jewish refugee from Germany who committed suicide in the border of France, trying to tempt attempting to escape the Nazis himself.
If your addition of melancholy when he thinks about early modern,
the early modern figure of Hamlet or the sovereign, the dark, the Dark Prince, bright,
the figure that actually enables it in early modernity, an alternative to notions to the positive or progressive notions of sovereignty since hopes.
I know it sounds all over the place, but I'll connect the dots, I promise.
So Benyamin thinks we need to actually understand modernity and the notion of sovereignty as the inheritor.
The outcome of that history, which he thinks actually starts with the early modern notion of sovereignty.
Those of you who know fuko for calling someone else who things along those lines right?
Modern sovereignty created a different notion of sovereignty that actually is devoid of divine entities.
And that secularise is right. secularised is our relation to hierarchy, trying to rationalise it, trying to create the scientific discourse.
And then actually because of that lays all the responsibility over the shoulders of the prince.
That's why we have in early modernity so many guides to princes and kings and queens, how to behave and how to be a good ruler, right?
Machiavellian. So on, so forth. So Benjamin says, we need to actually understand that all these princes,
actually when we look and actually read them or read their entire correspondences
or exchanges with other with other people are usually very melancholic people.
And the reason is because of that cut. Yeah, now they do not represent anymore.
So they become the new deities right of our world.
And that's too much of the burden.
They all become that figure of Hamlet, which means he for him, he's becoming a symbol for new notion of sovereignty.
Now, Benjamin is himself actually comes writes that a few short time to three years after a historical
research by The Vow Book School in London or two students they've actually emigrate to,
to London and to America, then Panopto in Zahn's Zyxel,
who then added a third scholar and will write together the history of melancholy about Southern and melancholia.
That's the title of the book published in 1923.
All German Jews, all of them are thinking about melancholy, not by by coincidence, within the context of Europe basically falling apart.
Yeah, and the catastrophe that happens in Europe.
So it's not by coincidence that they they decide that melancholy becomes the model, the prototype of everything that happens in modernity.
And it's not by coincidence, they think that in order to understand why sovereignty is falling apart in modernity,
we need to understand its history since coming more than inherited from the early modern period.
So when we get back to the Middle Ages, Panopto up soon and then Benyamin,
we see the following if you're in the Middle Ages, that's Panopto transaxle.
The melancholy gaze was compared to the look of the Mad Dog, usually black,
which is why I put this image of the black dog in the first line, usually black and the impression of the impression of the night later.
It was psychology's and personified.
That's Barnosky Anzac Hall's point of transformation between the Middle Ages and the early morning time melancholic,
which went melancholy, which before was cosmological on the one hand and very private and the other.
Yeah, part of the four humours of the body, physical and medical is personified and becomes part of this psychological cycle the larger,
contextualised collective notion of human beings in modern times.
And that's Benyamin falling Panopto Keynes axial melancholy turn to be the liminal space between different zones of existence.
It was made to be transgressed. Walter Benjamin in Townsville. The Morning Play showed that the paradigmatic, melancholic fear that's me, not him.
The melancholy figure of the time was for that very reason, the fear of the prince or other a beastly prince.
This is hamlet Beazley brings, in his words, nothing demonstrates the frailty of the creature.
So the beastly prince is becoming the model of the creature, really something that isn't in between the animal and the human.
In his words, nothing demonstrates the phrasing of the creature only so drastically as the fact that even he is subject to melancholy.
Now that brings us to the second part, and that's very, very brief because I do want to get to Zaki and modernity.
Ali means in the classical work, those of you who do not know it, I highly recommend it from 1984,
but already kind of classical in Jewish studies, morning in Hebrew literature in 1984,
it talks about the whole bank destruction in Jewish history as being usually connected again
to the modern form of modern politics connected directly to a notion of divine punishment.
In this case,
a system of coding events that interpreted catastrophes as disasters of such magnitude that could be contained within a system of commemoration.
The telescope events back to the beginning and then a social socialism.
His education called for a substantial transformation of Jewish life, but emphasise apocalyptic threats and Zionist ideology as a solution.
So in other terms, when we move from the early modernist understanding of Jewish culture following
the pogroms and persecution since the Inquisition and so on to modern times,
the notion of of a destruction that is guided by divine weal, some kind of mystical plan.
And then that connects to motive such as scepticism and so on.
We can talk about that is being secularised and then fetishised in some ways by through that process of social, Zionist,
socially Zionist process of education, according to which the threat of destruction of Zionism means is being compared to an apocalyptic event, right?
And here we see a paradigmatic shift, melancholy, which has been before diasporic and Zelig and contrasted with the theme Revival of Zionism.
Right, Zionists, I didn't identify melancholy as part of exotic existence that is abnormal.
And I quote in parentheses these are observations made by historians of literature such as Donelon.
One causal melancholy in that sense is peripheral rather than universal and canonical.
I'm normalising acute skin David Bill, and I'm, however, in a shortcut to the Shanab in others,
and they see Zion or historians of Zionism see melancholy showing in the form of minor literature.
And we can talk about what that means later expresses how British patogeni identity rather than unity and homogeneity.
Historians of Zionism of Zionist literature usually emphasise that notion that in Zionism,
we usually get attempts to to project some kind of unity and homogeneity and or Kim Chakraborty and others.
And again, the notion is that melancholy contrasts with a triumphalist narrative, and that will connect us too.
Without these wanting to do but before that,
I want to mention two three examples of people who bring us or who introduce us to this process or the Stalin process of each turn,
so that he writes the time when the academic discipline of the history of literature
is just being invented is created for the first time at the Hebrew University.
As I mentioned, he immigrates in 1924 and 1928. The Hebrew University is established in 1925 1926 by luminaries such as Goes from Sholem Walter,
Benjamin's best friend and other many of them German Jews or European Eastern European Jews who speak German.
And there's kind of those of you who know the Hebrew or know the history of the Hebrew University.
There's a lot of complaints about that. The the only German speaking university outside the German World Bank at the time that is in Jerusalem.
One of these people is Yousef Clouseau, whose dissertation was published in German first.
Klausen is the great uncle of Amos Oz.
The author Amos Oz and Yusef Claasen is considered to be one of the first historians of literature of Hebrew literature.
A. An interesting, transformative figure who gathered, invented and then was the head of the of the department.
So really establishing a whole discipline, a very important one.
In 1984, his book Ties links his notion of Zionism specifically to a messianic discourse.
He views Zionism as what will use the tools of modern secular politics to realise the promise of messianic theology,
of eschatological form of mass and the promise of the of the land today to the nation of Israel,
to the people of Israel will be realised, but not by a divine decree, but by sovereign, secular and modern politics.
In 1919, he immigrate to Palestine and declares Hebrew as a messianic language, so the language itself, he is then carrying the weight of messianism.
In 1940, writes the following The political, spiritual messianic ideal of Israel will be realised in all its fullness,
and the Jewish people will dwell in the land. Historically, those and will speak the language historically theirs and Judaism in the form of ethical,
prophetic monotheism will spread over all the world.
Now, those of you who know the history of the intellectual history class knows enemy in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University was girls from Sholom,
Girls from Sholom.
The story of Kabbalah believed that that form of understanding messianic language in in a sovereign, modern cloth is an apocalyptic threat itself.
He said these people who speak messianism in their sovereign political forum are bringing the end on
all of us because they don't understand that what they integrate now is the war of all against all,
basically. So they they create a structure, a language and linguistic structure that incorporates to begin with an apocalyptic form of thinking that,
if not leading to redemption, will lead inevitably to destruction.
That's the two opposite sides. So Klausner is leading into the realisation side.
Sholem is really warning and trying to get away from that.
And again, you see the. Goals from Sharon Foster Benyamin kind of discussion leading one way and the the that for him of secular secularism,
of messianism leading in the opposite direction. Now musos before I conclude with Zaki, is the nephew of Yousef Klausner.
He's writing about Klausner at length in the Tale of Love and Darkness Darkness,
a book that won huge acclaim and that tells the history his own personal history, his own biography, but in the very poetic voice.
And he tells about Klausner, and he talks about his parents, and he talks about something very interesting.
I'm actually not sure I don't mention that here,
but those of you who read the book will see something interesting in this book in a Tale of Love and Darkness.
There's a pretty long, and I quote that at length in, and I got amongst those confirmations actually quote verbatim from this book.
There's a long excerpt telling about abusos as a child, and when Amos Oz grew up with his parents and with Klausner as his great uncle who he admired,
he tells about being living for a while, actually renting a room in the Southie apartment in Jerusalem as a child.
So he spent actually rented a room from Israel Southie from the feeder I'm writing about, and I'm also talks about him with great admiration, he says.
This person actually taught me that another is someone who can see the world with his own mind, and as a child, he used to play in Zaki studies.
He saw Zafar used to babysit him. So when he's very left to scroll through the streets of Jerusalem, Zaki actually babysat him and the young abusos,
the child who would sit and play with the books that were spread all around.
I won't ruin the story for him, but he tells a beautiful, beautiful anecdote about Zaki actually about his friendship with his own father.
But just to get to the political angle here.
So why is all that a laugh? Or why does the early messianic language actually now connected to a left wing melancholy?
And one source whose represent all is considered to be the representative of left wing liberal Zionism.
Social democratic Zionism is connecting more or blinking through again.
He's both biography and literature.
The the the linking the missing link in some way between the rightwing messianic language of his great uncle is a class now and the
liberal Social Democratic Labour Party that still keeps the language of theof revivalism of secularism and of the redemption of the land,
even though it's supposedly a left wing left wing ideology.
And he says the following So we can see through the biography how that's from that transformation actually occurs.
My parents were attracted to the intelligentsia of the caveat that is a German speaking quarter in Jerusalem,
but the pacifist ideals of Martin Buber and Bubbles, which along Martin Buber and gives him short lived,
were the founders of which, along sentimental kinship between Jews and Arabs, total abandonment of dream of Hebrew of the Hebrew state,
so that arms would take pity on us and kindly allow us to leave here and at their feet.
Such ideals appear to my parents as spineless appeasement, craven defeatism of the type that had characterised the centuries of Jewish diaspora life.
And source, he's the founder of what we call in Hebrew, the the see, I mean,
they they combatant discourse amongst those in 1967 went with I've I'm sure people are those of you who know we know the name
the best-known editor of the time of the from the kibbutz movement to interview the soldiers that came back from the 67 war.
And in that report, which he published, he does something interesting.
He echoes in a very poetic language the suffering,
the morning and what he actually deems as he doesn't mean he approves that the melancholic
voice of the soldiers who were forced against their will to fight and shoot at the enemy,
and that you see the kind of hard bleeding kind of left wing melancholy we see of of, you know, again,
that the great uncle, who was a right wing messianic now translated through the language of sovereignty
to the left wing grandson or the nephew who now thinks there's no other choice
but actually echoing the melancholy of those who are not able to realise their
messianism literally and therefore sink into melancholy and have no other choice.
But right after 1967, a certain melancholy distance the sorrow of decency.
Right? Esau experienced by people who felt shot in their hearts, longing for other places that are non-specific, but they are decent.
These are quotes from In the Land of Israel in 1983, where he contemplates about 1967, the trembling heart, the feeling of eyes and sore of the mind.
These are what we call in these all the shooting and crying, the soldiers they shoot and the cry at the same time.
And I'm is completely affirmative about it. They have no choice, but they shoot and they cry the cry as they shoot.
Yeah. Now, finally, the conclusion sides after 19 nine, 1947,
and I want to actually and conclude with the excerpt I mentioned in the beginning and show you why things up you are really
writing about melancholy is enabling us to see this history of the shift from the right wing to the left me left wing.
When we see that from a melancholic opposite perspective in a non-Korean fullest way,
why the history of melancholy allows us an alternative to an alternative history that brings together
the secularisation of mechanism on the one hand and these shooting and crying or left wing melancholy.
In 1967, he thought, historically speaking, this is a shift from 19th, the 1940s or 1950s to a generation.
The generation that came after 1967 and were the melancholy itself, which began as is an alternative now becomes now he's celebrated.
He's become fetishised itself with Amatil's and that generation.
He signs out here, I think. And that's why that's how I explain forgetting him,
he's the fact that he was completely surprised and disappeared from the pages of history of literature in this role.
I think he's riding in a different mode. The fact that he really dives into melancholy allows a different form, the different historical mode,
and this is the way he writes so in the Guest House Melancholy 19, published in 1942.
Of course not, by coincidence. Again, this is 1942 when the news about an elation in Europe starts to get to sort of get two to Palestine.
And he thinks deeply about what does it mean to think about destruction that at that point,
and those of you who know the Bible belong Ockimey is, of course, a trope from the Book of Jeremiah.
Yeah. So the one of the prophecy of the prophecies of destruction and the Echo,
that's how one of the stories and the echo of decent fine days rises from every piece of furniture and sweet longing lodges in the lavish,
carved wood, reviving from the muffled sound of the clock, rejoicing with the beats of its deep heart.
And here in the corners of the room, the Nathan's the family of Moloney's, the guesthouse.
The owners of the guesthouse find a haven in the lonely hours of foreignness for in itself right there.
One can search for the echo of decent vanished sound.
This entire attempt to build a state. One of the guest house guests,
a German Jew who contemplates about emigrating and who never really acclimatised to the new language of Hebrew into Zionist discourse,
contemplates about his life there and thinks and says the following the entire attempt to build a state, it will all blown away by the wind.
It will all blow over like the foam of the sea.
A state may be established here in accordance with local natural law, but that is not what you were hoping for in the judge.
This is the proof that the person who talks sank into a strange immobility after the war's early days.
He had become perfectly still and was interested in was not interested.
I'm sorry in anything. And before just I'll leave that here for you to refer to, but I want to frame, broadly speaking,
my talk here today and open that to questions or any ideas about that in the following way.
So I'm interested in in melancholy in the following Wayne for different
frameworks and that is connected the way I wrote the book the style of the book,
and I'll say I'll conclude with that. There are four different layers.
One is actually the internal one. The internal one when I talk about the archive of this author is his psychology.
On the one hand, which is psych or psychoanalysis, right?
Psychoanalytic motives understanding his biography on the one hand, but also the tax,
the way he writes about the zany sponsors who keep failing in their work daily labour.
Yeah, they feel cultivating the land. They failed, paving the roads.
They cannot sustain, sustain living in that place.
They go everywhere, but they can't find their way. The they're all lost, somehow losing signifiers, right?
They never know where they are directionless. They they they have no sense of direction, ever.
So one layer is the internal one or the psychological one and the other one.
The second one is the reception of of this figure, both as a as a, as a person.
And I can say more about that is a figure during the time as an author and as someone who actually tries to deliver and deliver a certain message.
In fact, you said Klausner, who Zaki was very close to.
Zaki studied under him for years, Emefiele and then actually one in a a one year fellowship to Cambridge.
So he spent a year and a half in Cambridge before going back to the Hebrew and under.
And so he talks about that, about Klausner in these diaries as well.
And Klausner, after his death, says the following about southeast literature.
It is it's a literature that was not able to overcome forgetfulness.
Oblivion. He doesn't explain what he means, that's in the eulogy to something which to me sounds really cruel, right?
A leader that cannot overcome oblivion, meaning he deserves it.
And it's not by coincidence that someone who's as messianic as clouds are things
that someone who writes about the failures of pioneers deserves to be forgotten.
Right? So the only place that any one of the very, very few,
there are maybe two or three indications for or reviews or any any mentions of Southie are all about why he deserves to be forgotten.
Yeah. So that's the reception. That's the second there.
The third layer he's talking about literature or the style of the literature itself is a minor literature.
I'm not going to go into the fury of that.
Those of you who know where the concept is coming from, the listen carefully are talking about Kafka as a form of minor in literature.
And I think that completely answer is that way of thinking.
He tries to create a literature that he's spoken that is told in the in the minor language.
And you can see that even, you know, by if you go back to his way of writing, it's combining more the way it integrates,
you know, biblical inferences, Kleist, the kleist right motifs or apocalyptic motifs from Christianity.
He's never explicit. It's always hidden. It's always coded in some way.
So there's something about it that he's always disguises as minor, something you don't need to really pay much attention to.
So that's the third level, the fourth level. And that is the most important for me as a historian is the one of the history of the discourse.
And my argument here is that I think melancholy is not by coincidence,
something that is not really discussed openly by the early period in the 1940s and 1950s.
Back then, what we see is what we call self-hating Hebrew or the revivalist discourse.
That's what people are trying to echo, including Zaki and his diaries.
They come with these idealised language of we're going to actually cultivate and realise these high ideals,
right, revive the promise of the word of God, basically, but in a secular modern mode.
And and after they fail, they they talk about they go, they retreat.
They retreat back into the inner mode,
so they they retreat back into something that is told in a psychological mode rather than contemplating about it in in a public way, right?
Or something that connects back to the Bible or any collective discourse.
So that's in the 1940s, 1950s when the State of Israel is declared 1948, right, when you move forward with 1967,
you see the fetishisation of melancholy now adopted by the left wing not to celebrate the alternative to Zionism,
but becoming a Sunday becoming actually identify with Zionism, the shooting and crying.
So now we have a way to frame not only the right wing Zionist way of of realising the promise of the land,
but in fact integrate into that the language of those who actually think you need to cry as you shoot.
Yeah. So it's not just messianic, it's actually melancholic as well.
And melancholy itself is being fetishised. As we move forward, we jump to the 1980s and 1990s.
Something else happens and that is not in the book.
That is my generation, or rather the generation that actually follows my generation, which is now actually melancholy itself, is forgotten.
There's no sense of melancholy. You shoot. You don't cry. If you cry, you redeem.
You were blamed for it for being someone who empathises with something that these anti-Zionist.
So now melancholy itself is actually forgotten in other terms. What we see,
I think when we follow the history of the discourse of melancholy is something that is indicative to the history of Zionist discourse through
its symptomatic attempt to forget or its symptomatic attempt to actually suppress what is inconvenient for it and actually at the meeting.
And I'll just say the. So that was my conclusion.
But if you're interested, there's a lot of. So year after I published my book Actually and so Clavell,
so one of the best historians of left wing neo-Marxist actually thinking came up with a left wing melancholy that he sort of left wing
melancholy for thinking about new Marxism and why we need to revive the language of new Marxism that needs to overcome melancholy.
Wendy Brown is thinking specifically about the mode of left wing melancholy you can
see up there and following Walter Benjamin's essay that is dedicated to the question.
She says it is a left left wing melancholy that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness.
It is quoting the structure of melancholic attachment, a strain of its own dead past.
She accuses the left wing melancholy, and she doesn't think about Zionism.
So it's not a metaphor. It's not a historical form trope for her.
But she really thinks about the second half of the 20th century as a mode of left wing melancholy about the liberal right.
What we know is liberalism, classical liberal, at least in America.
I don't know where I come from now. Classical liberalism as a form of or fetishised melancholy and pathological form of
thinking about the world which for her or for people like its little vessel in her,
is not that different from reactionary mode of messianic thinking.
Messianic realisation. And finally.
OK, I'll leave it at that, but I'll just say one last thing that wraps this up, which for me and that connects to my next book,
which is now I finished another manuscript manuscript about thinking about time,
Jewish time and what led actually to that subject was the notion that in melancholy,
we find a form of thinking about temporality that is suppressed, that is uneasy, that is very often inconvenient for us to actually at the meeting.
And I can say more about it, but that is built in specifically melancholy on the notion of stasis.
Because in melancholy as this job, if you remember who sits back right and he's not interested in anything, yeah, perfectly still.
And he's sinking in what is usually happening to Zarqawi's protagonist as well.
They lose their sense of direction.
They lose their sense of loss of of aim when the ideal cannot be realised and they sink back into something that is internal,
something that is immobile, that they cannot get away from.
And then they sink into what we identify very often and clinical is clinical depression mind,
and that is how tsar himself beats his own life and his last year before his death.
And with acting this beautiful spring day, I'll be happy to hear any thoughts.
Feel free to be as critical as you think you may need to be.
I'm happy to hear a critique. I'm very open. I love critique or anything you might want to ask.
Thank you for giving me.