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Abstract
Through depictions of the landscape in the literary works of contemporary Jewish national-religious poets and writers, ambivalence in their relationship towards their natural and man-made surroundings is laid bare. The implementation of the Israeli occupation on the West Bank has rendered a profound impact on the landscape; yet for religious Jewish settlers who subscribe to the promise of redemption that will mark the unification of Jews, God and the land – such unity is desired yet unattainable. In the reading of these texts, the landscape takes on many of the qualities of Jacques Lacan's ‘objet a’ that is both a surplus of the Real and testimony to its absence. Coveted and resented, pure and profane, inclusive and alienating – the portrayed spaces and places of the Israeli occupation allude to binary poles that can be read through Bruno Latour's investigation on the nature of ‘factishes’; these render the depiction of the landscape a unison between what its dwellers are, and what they desire. Through the prism of these two approaches, the depicted landscape of the Israeli occupation that emerges from these texts is one that borrows from Zionist ideology, and yet carves for itself its own niche. In its relationship with the land and the landscape, religious-national sentiment is not yet another manifestation of a national ideology (though it both feeds from and is fed by it), but is propelled by the desire to lay claim to the Lacanian notion of a longed-for Real. In these as yet relatively unstudied texts, the landscape of occupation maps the landscape of its writers’ pleasures and pains, and that of continuous desire.
Notes
1. The first edition of Mashiv HaRuach, a hardcopy monthly literary publication, was published in 1994 by members and sympathizers of the Jewish settler movement. Since its publication, there has been a surge in interest and in participant numbers in poetic workshops, poetry festivals and internet publications, some of which the journal itself has sponsored.
2. This section, as well as all indented literary texts and poems, has been translated by the author of this paper from the original Hebrew.
3. See for example Yael Zrubavel's (Citation1996) analysis of two texts by the seminal Israeli writers Eliezer Smolly and A.B. Yehosua writing some 60 years apart, who focus on the iconic landscape and its changing role as the voice of a national psyche.
4. While enjoying a relatively large reading public in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank, the publication has also made its way to readers living within the ‘Green Line’, namely the 1949 Armistice lines between Israel and its neighbors following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Territories beyond the Green Line were captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, and will be referred to throughout this paper as the occupied territories (excluding Sinai and the Gaza Strip from which Israeli forces have since withdrawn).
5. Due to the erosion of alluvial soils, the uncultivated hilltops were usually not inhabited and therefore open to contention and claim. Moreover, situating settlements on the hilltops provides both protection from and surveillance of neighboring Palestinians, and is a continuation of the vertical architectural tradition of early Zionism that favored ‘wall and tower’ construction. For more on the architecture and planning practices prevalent in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, seen as yet another mechanism of occupation, see Eyal Weizman (Citation2007).
6. Zilbur-Vitkun, who will be mentioned in a number of instances in this paper, lives and writes in Ariel, one of the large and established Jewish settlements in the West Bank. She has published to date some four books of poetry and prose in Hebrew.
7. Spoken of in terms of a sacred marriage, numerous passages in the Old Testament also describe the land as the spouse of God (Davies 1982, p. 124).
8. The traditional position in Judaism in which God is non-physical (and any mention of tangibility must be metaphorical, any physical representation – idolatry) is, however, challenged throughout the Old Testament through the attribution of human qualities to God (wrath, jealousy) in addition to the divine characteristics of transcendence, incorporeity and omnipotence. While a reading of God as undeniably transcendent and wholly other than the world he has made has led to prohibitions of idol-making (as in the Ten Commandments), current scholars argue that within primary and secondary texts the Jewish God is also perceived as incarnate in body and soul, attitude and deed. See, for example, Jacob Neusner (2001).
9. In his later writings, Lacan would more clearly distinguish between the agalma as the hidden gem and the object that triggers love on the one hand (as for Alcibiades and Socrates), and the objet a – a partial semblance that structures desire – on the other hand.
10. ‘The object is by nature a refound object. That it was lost is a consequence of that – but after the fact. It is thus refound without our knowing, except through the refinding, that it was ever lost’ (Lacan 1992, p. 118).
11. As a comparisson, Žižek's Real corresponds to the objet a, since both function as object-causes of desire. ‘Behind the veil for Lacan, the fruitless search for the objet a that takes the place for the lost Real; behind the veil for Žižek, the traumatic encounter with a monstrous Real, which is nothing but the phantasmic actualization of our own desire’ (Belsey Citation2005 p. 55).
12. To show how subject and object can never really coincide, or in this case – how full possession of the land as an objet a that embodies unity and redemption never takes place – Lacan provides the example of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles can never run alongside the tortoise – he can either easily outrun it or lag behind. Similarly is the relationship between subject and object structured – posessing the object of desire is never possible – one can either desire it or run up against the void when it has been ‘overtaken’.
13. ‘For it is pleasure that sets the limits on jouissance, pleasure as that which binds incoherent life together, until another, unchallengeable prohibition arises from the regulation that Freud discovered as the primary process and appropriate law of pleasure’ (Lacan 1977, p. 319).
14. Lacan's concept of reality refers to that which can be evoked through language and can be thought about. As opposed to the Real that is inaccessible even on the discursive level, reality is of a discursive nature and is performatively constructed.
15. For more on how Latour develops this understanding that the hybridic nature of the object may also bring about its destruction see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibell (Citation2002)
16. As opposed to this reading, in the preface to the second edition of Landscape and Power (1994), Mitchell refers to the distinction between place and space as relevant to the Lacanian concepts of the Real and the Symbolic. He identifies ‘place’ as the Lacanian Real, as opposed to space, which acts as a dimension of the symbolic. So while administered space is shaped by powers external to it, place takes on the qualities of the Real in that it embodies the abstract that cannot be fully symbolized. To this binary division Mitchell adds a third player – the landscape: ‘power in the landscape as a manifestation of law, prohibition, regulation and control – the whole sphere of what Lacan calls “the Symbolic”’ (2002, p. 10). Yet Mitchell is wary of fully equating the Lacanian triad of the Real, the symbolic and reality with that of space, place and landscape; he would rather ‘activate the dialectical resources of their conceptual triad’ instead (2002, p. 11). I too would rather apply a cognitive Lacanian framework rather than define one-on-one correlations. For this study, I also find the distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’ as discussed in Human Geography and Planning more illuminating in relation to the analysis of these particular texts.