Interrupted Authority

Abstract

Interpreting the model of the epic theatre in 1939, Walter Benjamin introduced the practice of ‘the quotable gesture’ that involves the interruption of its context. This article explores the phenomenon of turning the foundation scene of a nation state into a quotable gesture given to interruptions while attributing it to the Israeli context. The main practice of re-performing the declarative foundation scene is substitution of original components. Its main effect is the failure to validate both the authority of foundation and the power of ruling.

The interruptive power of foundational re-performance lies, first, in the original scene’s rationale, caught in a circular quotation in order to gain the authority to sign the Declaration, and theatrically simulates the reclaim of power. Second, the foundational re-performances range from the official national framework—in Israel, the Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948—bound to ratifying authority, to a critical orientation. Interruption, however, is implicit in a validating context and can be found throughout all the gestures of quoting, exposing the vulnerability of authority.

The range of interruptions is discussed through several cases: the Israeli Ur-scene; its first formal quotation in 1958, including the ambivalent role—both ratifying and undermining—of Hanna Rovina, iconic Habima actress, known from The Dybbuk and ‘penetrating’ to the scene of foundation; the socio-political complexity of the formal re-performance in 1978; and three different critical acts: a substitution of simulative signing of the Declaration with an ‘inappropriate’ name; a poignant replacement of David Ben-Gurion’s authoritative reading of the Declaration by a Mizrahi-Moroccan woman; and foundational subversions that have become an important component of the struggle for the rehabilitation of democracy during the 2020–1 civic protests in Israel, serving to the article as an actual frame of reference.

Notes

1 This is how the demonstrators applied tactics familiar from the democracy protest in Hong Kong, in the spirit of Bruce Lee’s saying ‘Be water’ in The Pierre Berton Show in 1971.

2 This episode is included in the documentary feed of the demonstrations, on Facebook online, by independent journalist Or-ly Barlev, on 15 October 2020. https://bit.ly/3tdXWJR (2:50:15), accessed 14 January 2021.

3 Benjamin is thus offering a precedential formulation known from performance theory, according to which ‘we might think of performance as the art of the “re”,’ including ‘restored behaviours’ (Kartsaki and Schmidt 2015: 1), while being aware that in repetition resides a fundamental innovation and difference.

4 So far I have engaged in the performance of Israel’s national founding and its re-performance through a single event (which is not discussed here)—National Collection by Public Movement in 2015, which included a replica of the Independence Hall and adaptation of the founding ceremony (Ben-Shaul 2017).

5 This looped logic is closely related to Hanna Arendt’s prior observations in On Revolution, regarding self-authorization. Highly relevant here is the implications related to the fact that the men of the American Revolution defined themselves as ‘founders’, indicating that they must have known that the ‘fountain of authority in the new body politic’ would be the act of foundation itself, rather than a self-evident truth or a transcendent source of an Immortal Legislator. ‘From this it follows that it is futile to search for an absolute to break the vicious circle in which all beginning is inevitably caught’ (Arendt 1990 [1963]: 204).

6 Through Arendt’s prism, the ontological vacuum in which the moment of foundation is captured is explained by the notion of hiatus—a gap ‘between a no-longer and a not-yet’; a break in the sequence of temporality, ‘as though the actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity’ (Arendt 1990 [1963]: 206).

7 ‘State of all its citizens’ refers to the commitment included in the Declaration’s text to equality, irrespective of religion, race and sex. Nowadays it can relate to problematizing or undermining the principle of an ethnocentric democratic Jewish nationstate; connote to the deep inequality, mainly of Israeli-Palestinian citizens; and hint at apartheid—as a present state of affairs, or in case of a future annexation of the Occupied Territories.