The birth of poetry from the music of disaster: divine violence in the poetry of Meir Wieseltier

ABSTRACT

This article explores the poetic and political-theological nexus of power, violence and sovereignty in Meir Wieseltier's work. No poet seems to have inserted himself quite so powerfully into the narrow crack between the authority of the political sovereign and that of the divine sovereign, warning against the dangerous link between the theological and the political in Israel's messianic discourse. Wieseltier seems to draw inspiration from the theological-political sovereignty which relies on “an act of exception”, then to perform it poetically (“an exceptional verb”) to found his sovereignty and authority. Wieseltier's poetry arises from the divine music of catastrophe, based on a great intimacy with the ancient sources. It includes musical syntactic structures, like the mishnaic catalogue syntax, or the apocalyptic language of liturgical poetry in the prayers for the High Holy days with their outrageous “music of curses”.

KEYWORDS:

• Meir Wieseltier
• theological-political sovereignty
• violence
• messianic discourse
• divine music of catastrophe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hanna Soker-Schwager teaches in the Department of Hebrew Literature, Ben Gurion University. Recent publications include “The Discipline of Literature as Superfluity,” Poetics Today (Winter 2019).

Notes

1 I would like to warmly thank Mirjam Hadar for her sensitive and careful translation (of both this article and Wieseltier's poetry that has not so far been published in English) as well as her excellent comments which made a contribution towards focusing the argument. My gratitude, too, to Haim Weiss for his excellent comments. I would like to thank the wonderful, young editorial board of Mikan (2014) the sparks of whose thought clearly found their way into my text here. And finally, a thank you to Glenda Abramson, Riki Ophir and to the reviewer of this paper who offered good suggestions.

2 Translation by Mirjam Hadar, of this poem and all the other cited poems that were not translated in the collection: The Flowers of Anarchy – Selected Poems. Wieseltier 2003.

3 Phalaris was a tyrant of Agrigentum, Sicily, in the sixth century BCE. He was known for his cruelty, having constructed a machine shaped like a bull, in which he burned his enemies. The machine converted their screams into beautiful flute music. Soren Kierkegaard (1987, 19) used this image for the poet's dilemma

4 Benjamin presents the “preservation of a memory” in contradistinction to the modernist view of time as homogenous and empty. He seeks to include in the modern experience of temporariness and mutability something of an attempt to “preserve a memory”, not as a “frozen tradition.” On Proust's weaving of memory, see Benjamin (1969, 9).

5 The notion of a “weak messianic force” comes to question the conventional messianic view as a “strong messianic power,” a teleological apocalyptic narrative. It must be understood as a dispersed “weak force”, resisting the apocalyptic link between the political and the religious (Benjamin (1940) 2006, 390). See also a special issue dedicated to the “weak messianic force” in the periodical Mikan, 14, March 2014.

6 On the present as “now-time” in which, following an explosion, pieces of messianic time are stuck, see Benjamin ([1940] 2006, 397).

7 In a pivotal article, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1993/4) shows how Zionism bases itself on the negation of exile. He argues that no Jewish identity can evolve without recognition of the unbreakable bond between the Jews and the diaspora.

8 In various traditions, the scapegoat is sacrificed to Satan to pacify him for the sake of the people of Israel. See, The Zohar, section 3, 73; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, Chapter 46. On the scapegoat or pharmakos, see Jacques Derrida (1981).

9 In his essay “Mystical Foundation of Authority”, Jacques Derrida (1992, 3–67) discusses the problematic nature of the distinction between force and violence. He refers to Walter Benjamin's article “A Critique of Violence”: while the German equivalent, Gewalt, refers to violence as well as to legitimate governmental power. Derrida shows how Benjamin's distinctions collapse.

10 The word yadin takes us, unexpectedly, to the formulaic approval “yoreh, yoreh, yadin, yadin” concluding the ordination of new rabbis. This goes back to the Gemara: Rabbi Yehuda was asked the following about the ordination of a rabbi: “Will he instruct?”, he replied “He will instruct”, and when they continued: “Will he judge?”, he replied “He will judge.” BT Sanhedrin 5a. I would like to thank Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky for drawing my attention to this.

11 Northrop Frye (1965) reads literary interpretation in the context of early Christian exegesis where biblical scenes are understood to foreshadow – via analogy – scenes of the New Testament. Cf too, Fredric Jameson ( 1989), and my epilogue to the Hebrew translation of this text about Fredric Jameson, Marxist interpreter in a postmodern era: Soker-Schwager (2004).

12 Wieseltier explains this as follows: “Non-elusive observation must approach cruelty”, and he adds, “the eye is the most penetrating and cruel part of man” – though simultaneously it is “The sense most impervious/To the concrete. Unlike the vulnerable ear, / The nostrils, palate. Deafening / Noise. Evil smell dizzies. the palate:/ But the eye won't burst at the sight of the body dismembered. Like a hand/Stroking a cat it passes over the horror/Unnoticing.” See Wieseltier (2014, 437); “Musagim” in Wieseltier (1985, 122).

13 On shofar blowing as a Jewish ritual in which God's voice is made audible, actually rather than symbolically, by reawakening ancient mental residues, see Theodor Reik's "Shofar.” Reik [1919] 1976.

14 Benjamin's text ends on a melancholy note and with an impenetrable sentence which mixes up all the distinctions he tried to articulate. In this text, Derrida writes, Benjamin's signature, Walter, blends with the word waltend – the divine sovereign. See Derrida (1992).

15 Referring to Scholem's letter, Derrida (2002) imagines the desire and the terror of the slippage, the exalted profligacy, a danse macabre that floods everyday life with holy names, language giving itself out in abundance like miraculous manna but also like a temptation to profanation. On this profanatory jouissance resulting from the secularization of the holy language in Scholem, Bialik and Amichai, see Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (2014).

16 For reasons of space, I will expand elsewhere on this important poem.

17 In Israeli discourse religiosity functions to preserve the holy while giving up on its source, God, and to replace its ritual with secular ceremonies involving agricultural work (as in Shlonsky's poem “Amal” [Toil]). Talal Asad (2003), the scholar of secularity, describes the changing tendencies in the west's notion of inspiration, from a perception of biblical poetry as power and action, to a perception of poetry as art and as a spiritual entity.

18 The English translator of this poem had to choose between two meanings of the word “bekoah”: either with force or power, or potential – she opted for the latter.

19 Though enjambment in the Hebrew original occurs at slightly different places, the English translation preserves its dominant role in the poem and its effective deployment in creating a sense of terror.

20 Postmortem dissections were a rarity, and depictions of them even more so. There is evidence that the corpse is that of a criminal who was sentenced to death. At the same time, this type of didactic dissection was part of the project of the Enlightenment, the progress of science and medicine. In his painting Rembrandt draws the left hand of the victim as the right hand, and this inversion is perhaps an act of resistance, or an act of counter-enlightenment.

21 Suddenly “an ancient phrase occurs, with an ancient way of thinking behind it which very much charms me,” he explains, “what she saw/ Slave on the sea” and not “What Moses our Teacher saw on the sea”(Wieseltier 2014, 452; the reference is to Midrash: Mekhilta de Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, 3).

22 In his interview, Wieseltier mentioned the importance of music to any poetry and his own in particular. “In poetry, one thing you can do, and the poets I like always do this with language, is to play on it. Simply to play. In certain poetic traditions, for instance the classical Greeks, there was after all no poetry at all without music being made. What was a poet? He was someone who wrote the poem, sat with a lyre, sometimes a flautist too, and read out the poem. […].” See Wieseltier 2014, 442.

23 See “Mikhtam theologi” in which Wieseltier (1973, 69–74) struggles with “the fable of eternity” and “the business of God”, something that troubles him time and again. What eventually remains of all of this is the sound of a blast, and the buzz/stutter of distress. “[…] and clash with a blast / Blunt and ruinous / Humming in distress / Stammering / Strangely excited.”

24 Franz Kafka, from a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904.