I Am Yourself: Subjectivity and the Collective

Abstract

This paper suggests that social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives. Telling the story of a conversation between Israeli parents about the prospect of their children becoming soldiers, and of an analytic relationship between two Israelis, the paper aims to bring to light a hidden balance of power between family bonds and collective attachments. The paper uses ideas developed by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari in the field of critical theory to examine the ways in which families function as social agents, that is, as socializing institutions. It suggests that, as a result, in some situations, families may face a conflict of identifications, a dilemma between responsibility to kin and responsibility to the collective. If the dilemma commonly persists unheeded, it becomes painfully evident in extreme situations. Such is the case when parents are asked to allow their children to become soldiers, or when individuals strive to care for themselves against a binding ethics of communal and intergenerational responsibility. The paper examines the effect of the collective trauma underlying the dominant discourse of the Israeli society, and the hypercollectivity of the Israeli Kibbutz, in generating powerful unconscious conflicts that haunt subjective and family life. The paper argues that collective affiliations and consequently, collective politics are inseparable from individual psychology and interpersonal relations. It suggests that, for this reason, political awareness and political exchange can play a crucial, liberating role in the therapeutic relationship, and life in general.

Notes

¹Here is the full reference to Benjamin's angel of history: “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin, 1940/1968, pp. 257–258).

²Israelis might recognize here the echo of the common term “the beautiful land of Israel,” which does not refer to the Israeli landscape but to a certain kind of Israeliness, for which the Kibbutz and other pioneering forms of communal, agriculturally oriented settlement served for a long time as an ideal: hard work, collective consciousness, physical attractiveness, and military heroism.

³During his speech on Holocaust commemoration day in Israel, April 20, 2009, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “We will not allow the Holocaust deniers to carry out another Holocaust against the Jewish people. This is the supreme duty of the state of Israel. This is my supreme duty as prime minister of Israel.” The speech became a headline in the daily Haaretz: “Netanyahu to Iran: we will not allow a second Holocaust.” Such rhetoric is very common in Israeli politics.