The History of Political Melancholy as an Alternative History of Zionism

Abstract

Understanding political melancholy as central to the crisis of modernity and democracy implies a growing realization that melancholy teaches us something essential about different forms of political crisis and their affective modes. This essay contends that the relationship between political melancholy in Weimar Germany and its repurposing by German Jews for Zionist thought reveals how political melancholy was and remains at the heart of Zionism. The essay offers both a historical and theoretical consideration of political melancholy. Its purpose is to question how a political affect of melancholy helps us grasp Zionism, offering a new way to think through its failures. More specifically, the growing attention, both critical and affirmative, paid to “left-wing melancholy” is used to examine a general sense of loss and crisis in the West and the more concrete expression of this sense in the history of Zionism.

Key Words:

• Melancholy
• Politics
• Revivalism
• Theology
• Zionism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank wholeheartedly the reviewers and commentators on an early draft of this essay: Anup Kumar Dhar, Chad Kautzer, Larisa Reznik, and Joel Wainwright helped to bring some order to this ambitious narrative.

Notes

1 Benjamin and Brown share much of Rosa Luxemburg’s Marxist critique of social-democratic rhetoric, but they stress the affective melancholic mode. See Luxemburg (1969).

2 See also the classic works of Burton (1989), Starobinski (1963), and Lepenies (1969).

3 The study was rejected by Benjamin’s committee at Frankfurt University in 1925, destroying any chance for an academic career, though it was finally published in 1928. See Benjamin (1991).

4 Neumann confirms the imaginary figure of the pioneer, with his desire and reality.

5 As Paula Schwebel mentions, following this observation by Scholem: “It is noteworthy that Benjamin and Scholem discussed the meaning of the Shekhina and its exile following Benjamin’s completion of ‘On Language as Such.’” See Schwebel (2014, 296).

6 I owe this phrasing to Larisa Reznik.

7 Melancholy is often mentioned as a modifier that describes the reaction to situations of political crisis, catastrophe, destruction, or defeat. However, it is rarely discussed in a precise manner that explains what it is that makes melancholy the relevant modifier of the political. When mentioned at all, “political melancholy” is discussed in a general way that makes it clear that “melancholic” functions as an adjective, a mode of political reaction or a popular affect of a sort. In that context, Lieven de Cauter (2016, 101) contrasts “political melancholy” with Michael Löwy’s “melancholic politics.”

8 According to Butler (1997, 172), Freud proposed a view of conscience as an agency and “institution” produced and maintained by melancholy.

9 Should we add: personal, political, and academic? A discussion of the latter belongs to a different context. Many of the critics I mention in this essay ignore the key positioning of their own egos and their senses of power while analyzing these as abstract terms or forces.

10 Samuel Weber (2008, 81) shows that, for Benjamin, “The history of translation is marked by a tension between two inseparable and incompatible motifs: fidelity and betrayal. Both result from the split relationship of translation to its own history, which is to say, to its ‘origin.’”

11 Benjamin (1998a, 56) limits “loyalty” only to the nondiscursive existence of “things”: “Loyalty is completely appropriate only to the relationship of man to the world of things.”

12 Benjamin returned to his critique of left-wing melancholy in a lecture for the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, on 27 April 1934. See “The Author as Producer” (Benjamin 1998b, 96).

13 See Lebovic (2015) for more about Ben-Gurion’s étatisme/statism. For a recent, detailed reading of the internal politics of the Labor Party and those more or less committed to the Marxist and socialist factions, see Aronoff (2015).

14 As Esposito (2008, 76, 126) puts it, “When Foucault notes that the failure of modern political theories is owed neither to theory nor to politics but to a rationality that forces itself to integrate individuals within the totality of the state, he touches on the heart of the question.” For that reason, Esposito turns to “thanapolitics” as a story of the melancholiac, the degenerate, the exile, the creature, or the Jew who “belongs to the world of the ‘non’—no longer alive, he is still and above all ‘undead.’”

15 I am alluding here to Hans Blumenberg’s (1997) beautiful Shipwreck with Spectator.

16 I am omitting from this discussion the New Historians in Israel, some of whom the historians and theoreticians mentioned above criticize. However, there is little doubt that the 1990s and early 2000s saw a critical turn among historians of Zionism and Israel. For a general discussion of the New Historians, see Silberstein (1999).

17 “For Weizmann, apparently blind to the messianic strand of his own discourse, what mattered was the slow, incremental labor of Zionism, its organic relation both to the soil and to itself” (Rose 2005, 55).

18 Scholem, Buber, Bergmann, and Magnes were among the founders of Brit Shalom, together with Ernst Simon, Hans Kohn, and others. For an excellent recent history, see Adi Gordon’s (2017) biography of Hans Kohn in Toward Nationalism’s End.

19 For Scholem’s ambivalent relation to messianism, see the introduction and individual chapters in Morgan and Weitzman (2015) and Noam Zadoff’s (2017) recent biography of Scholem.

20 Liska (2017, 117) writes about this characterization: “Idel rejects the desolates’ pessimism because they do not recognize the promise of Zionism and its potential for a revival of Judaism. Idel’s critique of Scholem’s view of the demonic must undoubtedly be seen in this light.”

21 According to Myers (1995, 94), Scholem and his fellow cultural Zionists viewed Klausner as “more a publicist and an activist than a scholar.”

22 In a recent biography of Scholem, Amir Engel (2017, 122–3) reads the origins of Scholem’s work on Sabbateanism as a counter-Klausnerian interpretation of messianism in conjunction with the “personal frustration that Scholem himself felt upon immigrating to Palestine. In his study, Scholem tells the story of a promise that was never fulfilled.”

23 According to Cohen (2002), this mission was used by the directors to justify their resistance to the establishment of a second university in Tel-Aviv.

24 For a provocative albeit brief reading of Oz’s antirevolutionary rhetoric of the “fundamentalists of both sides,” see Benite (2008).

25 As the literary scholar Michael Gluzman dubbed it. For a fascinating analysis of melancholy in Hebrew literature shortly before and after 1948, see Gluzman (2012).

26 Amy Hollywood (2006, 399) has shown that Freud’s harsh critique of melancholy from 1917 transformed into “melancholic identification and incorporations” in his 1923 “Ego and the Id.” What Freud had “first viewed as primarily if not solely pathological, are crucial to the development of the superego,” or what Hollywood identifies with the politics and ethics of the other. Extending her reading of Freud and of Melanie Klein into contemporary political philosophy, Hollywood claims that “to disavow our losses and our grief” means “to deny our responsibility to the others within … The very grounds of sociality from which our ethical and political projects emerge. The trick is to find ways to sustain ourselves in and through our losses, rather than in their disavowal.”