Exilic Alliance: Diaspora, Cohabitation, and Translation in Judith Butler’s Parting Ways

ABSTRACT

By placing Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) in counterpoint with Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), this essay aims to shed new light on Butler’s political and ethical writing, revealing, in particular, the ways in which a politics of cohabitation is inseparable from the process of translation. Both Butler and Said articulate the difficult yet necessary task of establishing a just cohabitation through the translation between two histories of exile, Jewish and Palestinian. Firstly, I examine Butler’s efforts to derive a principle of cohabitation from the Jewish history of diaspora, arguing that it should be understood as a response to Said’s reflections on Jewishness in Freud and the Non-European. I then seek to illuminate how statelessness structures the interplay of text and image in After the Last Sky, arguing that exilic tension provides the framework for Said’s rethinking of comparativism.

KEYWORDS:

• Judith Butler
• Edward Said
• diaspora
• exile
• cohabitation
• translation

Acknowledgments

For advice and guidance I would like to thank Chana Morgenstern, Fiona Jenkins, Anya Topolski, Maria Hynes, Johanna Drucker, Odette Shenfield, Anthony Lazarus, and Lucy Benjamin. I would like also to express my gratitude to those who attended my presentations at the Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler Conference, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2017, and the Literary Interface Conference at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, 2018. Finally, I would like to thank the students of my 2018 winter lecture series on philosophy and diaspora at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy (MSCP).

Notes

1. Hochberg, “Poetics of Haunting,” 57.

2. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, 104–5.

3. Ibid., 7.

4. Kanafani, “Returning to Haifa,” 181.

5. Abu-Manneh, Palestinian Novel, 87.

6. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 33.

7. Butler, Parting Ways (PW), 113. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

8. Mufti suggests this comparison, but does not embark on it himself in “Missing Homeland of Edward Said,” 180.

9. What, for instance, would Said make of Butler’s reliance on a term like “alterity”? Such issues are deemed to be beyond the remit of this paper, which is ultimately interested in Said in terms of the directions already prescribed by Butler’s own theoretical and philosophical leanings.

10. Said, Music at the Limits, 5.

11. Topolski, Arendt, Levinas, xv.

12. Butler, Precarious Life, 113–14.

13. Schippers, Political Philosophy of Judith Butler, 85. Other contributions to this discussion include Dickson and Morgan, “Dwelling in Diaspora,” 136–50.

14. Rose, Last Resistance, 198.

15. Darwish, “Edward Said,” 178.

16. Butler, “Palestine and the Public Intellectual.”

17. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 44.

18. Freud, “Moses the Man,” 220.

19. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 8, 10.

20. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. 8, xv.

21. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 33–35.

22. Freud, “Moses the Man,” 178.

23. Freud, Letters, 98.

24. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 41–42.

25. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 3.

26. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 99.

27. See, for instance, Armstrong, “Contrapuntal Affiliations,” 236.

28. Freud, “Moses the Man,” 178; Said, Freud and the Non-European, 32.

29. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 44.

30. Said, End of the Peace Process, 206 (emphasis added).

31. Hochberg, “Edward Said,” 58 (emphasis added).

32. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 54.

33. Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel,” 11; Shohat, “Rupture and Return,” 52.

34. Said, “Arabs and Jews,” 3 (emphasis added).

35. Azoulay, “Potential History,” 573.

36. Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory,” 532–33.

37. Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile, History,” 37–70.

38. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 60–61.

39. Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” 5, 22; DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 11.

40. Deutscher, Non-Jewish Jew, 59.

41. See Cooper, “Critique of Diasporism,” 80–110.

42. Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 711. See also Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora.

43. Butler, “I merely belong to them.” London Review of Books, 29, no. 9 (2007), 26.

44. Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile, History, and Nationalization,” 43.

45. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 275–76. At times, Arendt puts this distinction rather bluntly. In “We Refugees,” in the same volume, she writes: “All vaunted qualities—the ‘Jewish heart,’ humanity, humour, disinterested intelligence—are pariah qualities. All Jewish shortcomings—tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority complexes, and money-grubbing—are characteristic of upstarts” (274).

46. See, for instance, ibid., 15.

47. Cf. Reznik, “Reception of Judith Butler’s Parting Ways.”

48. Cohen, Global Diasporas, 4ff.

49. Alpert, “Jewish Feminist Justice Work,” 167.

50. Butler, “Versions of Binationalism,” 208.

51. See, for instance, Butler, Bodies that Matter, 8.

52. Butler, Precarious Life, 25, x.

53. See, for instance, Rushing, “Preparing for Politics,” 284–303; Culbertson, “The Ethics of Relationality,” 449–63.

54. Butler, “Precarious Life,” 13.

55. Hammerschlag, Figural Jew, 1ff.

56. Hammerschlag, “Judaism and Zionism.”

57. Butler, ‘There are some muffins,” 215; Butler, “Ethical Ambivalence,” 16.

58. Butler, “Precarious Life,” 144.

59. Benhabib, “Ethics without Normativity,” 155.

60. Arendt, Life of the Mind: Thinking, 185 (emphasis removed).

61. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 423. See also Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Peoplehood,” 58.

62. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 352.

63. Said, Question of Palestine, xxxix.

64. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 290.

65. Arendt, Jewish Writings, 129–30, 335.

66. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279 (emphasis added).

67. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 296.

68. I believe there are grounds here for a fruitful comparison between Butler’s unchosen obligation and Kant’s idea of hospitality as guaranteed under the Third Definitive Article by a “cosmopolitan right” or “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory.” In Kant’s formulation, the right of hospitality follows “by virtue of [humanity’s] common possession of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must necessarily tolerate the presence of each other.” Hospitality, then, is an “unconditional and absolutely imperative” duty, obligation or natural law that is owed to all human beings and mediates the interactions between the subjects of the different republics that make up the federation of free states. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 105, 129 (emphasis in the original).

69. One exception is Butler, “Betrayal’s Felicity,” 82–87.

70. Butler, “Judith Butler and Monique David-Ménard.”

71. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 76.

72. Butler, “There are some muffins,” 219.

73. Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 20.

74. Butler, “Universality in Culture,” 45.

75. Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 37.

76. The most important for Butler are Bhabha, Location of Culture, 319ff.; and Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 179ff.

77. Butler, Gender Trouble, 193.

78. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 116.

79. Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 179.

80. Derrida, “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” 380.

81. Ibid., 372.

82. Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 35.

83. Godard, “Theorizing Feminist Discourse,” 46.

84. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 220.

85. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 73.

86. Butler, “Introduction” to Derrida, Of Grammatology, x.

87. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator.” 75.

88. Mufti, “Missing Homeland of Edward Said,” 180.

89. Said, After the Last Sky, vii, xi. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

90. Ganguly, “Edward Said,” 179.

91. Said, “Panic of the Visual,” 11–12.

92. Said, Orientalism, 240.

93. Said, Question of Palestine, 23.

94. Ibid., 24.

95. Ibid., 122.

96. See Döring, “Picturing Palestine,” 206–7.

97. Apter, Against World Literature, 218.

98. Said, Question of Palestine, 125.

99. Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, “Estimated Number of Palestinians” (2010). http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_Rainbow/Documents/PalDis-POPUL-2010E.htm.

100. Said, Question of Palestine, 124.

101. Ayyash, “Edward Said: Writing in Exile,” 107.

102. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 318.

103. Ibid., 316–17.

104. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 33.

105. Said, Out of Place, 3; Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 17.

106. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 329.

107. Césaire, Original 1939 Notebook, 36–37.

108. See Said, Culture and Imperialism, 275–77.

109. Said, Politics of Dispossession, 3.

110. Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” 84.

111. Said, Reflections on Exile, 178.

112. Said, Question of Palestine, xxi.

113. Said, Politics of Dispossession, 114.

114. Ibid., 92.

115. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 447.

116. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 192; Said, Reflections on Exile, xxxiii.

117. Said, Question of Palestine, 235.

118. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 116.

119. Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 192.

120. See Hochberg, “Edward Said,” 54.

121. Said, End of the Peace Process, 207.

122. Said, “Voice of a Palestinian,” 44–45.

123. Azoulay, “Where Am I Supposed?” 162.

124. Said, Politics of Dispossession, 81.

125. Said, Reflections on Exile, xxxv.

126. Apter, “Comparative Exile,” 86.

127. Said, The World, the Text, 6–7.

128. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 44; Said, Reflections on Exile, 186.

129. Cited in Said, The World, the Text, 7.

130. Ibid., 24–25; Mufti, “Critical Secularism,” 2–3.

131. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 56.

132. The quote is from JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without-World,” 96–121.

133. Said, Reflections on Exile, 175.

134. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 338.

135. St. Victor, Didascalicon, 101.

136. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 406.

137. Adorno, “Resignation,” 203.

138. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 38–39.

139. Ibid., 39.

140. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 144.

141. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 458.

142. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 45.

143. Hochberg, “Edward Said,” 47–48.

144. For instance, Gur-Ze’ev, Destroying the Other’s Collective Memory, 46.

145. Derrida, “Circumfession,” 190; Darwish, “The Earth Is Closing,” 13.

146. Hammerschlag, Figural Jew, 23–24.

147. Butler, “Palestine and the Public Intellectual.”

148. In some of her lectures Butler attributes this statement to Hanan Ashrawi, owing to the fact that Said, as noted in After the Last Sky, takes his inspiration for this statement from the final lines of Ashrawi’s doctoral thesis, where she argues that “emerging trends in Palestinian fiction point out to an affinity with the literary output of other cultures in seeking to transform a specific factual base into an urgent and comprehensive statement on the condition of humanity as a whole without sacrificing either dimension.” Mikhail-Ashrawi, “Contemporary Literature of Palestine,” 285.

149. Benajmin, “Task of the Translator,” 73.

150. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, 424.

151. Shohat, “Antinomies of Exile,” 134.

152. Butler, “Introduction” to Derrida, Of Grammatology, viii.

153. Darwish, “Edward Said,” 180–81.

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Louis Klee

Louis Klee is a PhD candidate in Criticism and Culture at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University, UK.