This issue of Theory and Criticism is the most diverse of our recent issues: unlike its predecessors, it has no declared subject connecting its essays and articles, nor an implicit subject that runs through most of them. The current issue has articles discussing contemporary literature and Talmud, urban development processes and the evolution of a medieval text; essays about the Binding of Isaac and plastic bags; and a portfolio of contemporary visual art. The two final sections of the issue signal the expansion of the Journal’s wing span. One wing reaches all the way to contemporary Japanese thought: for the first time, Theory and Criticism carries an article translated from Japanese – an article by the philosopher and culture researcher Karatani Kōjin. The article, which draws a connection between Western philosophy and Asian thought, and between the “birth” of Japanese literature and art in the 19th century and the birth of European Modernism at the same time, shows how critical theory can no longer be conceived through its limited cultural and linguistic tradition alone, but must branch out into other realms. The other wing reaches out to Carl Schmitt’s “Political Theology,” for the centennial of which we held a special symposium. That book is considered a cornerstone of European political and legal thought in the 20th century: it is rooted at Europe’s center – written in German of course, in relation to European history and understood in relation to its subsequent, terrible manifestations. But the pairing in this issue between Karatani and Schmitt shows not only their difference as very distant meanings of theory from each other. It also demonstrates their intersection: how Japanese culture (writing, form, style) was shaped by European culture as a figure of otherness; and how as such it was incorporated and discussed by European 20th century thought; thus, Karatani can rethink it, rely on the figure, extract it from there, and return it to the history from which it was taken. In this way the question of writing, which is at the heart of Western structuralist and poststructuralist thought, becomes a European-Japanese question from the outset. And on the other side, the Schmittian discussion of political theory – which, to him, is a completely European political theory, if not purely French-German – must be construed even out of what does not exist within itself: the theological traditions which it does not take into account, the countries it ignores, the nations it forgot or repressed; as well as its “future” – the drama of the book’s reception after its publication, especially in the place where this journal is produced.
Therefore, I choose to begin the preface with the end of the issue: “Political Theology.” There is no need to introduce the book itself in Theory and Criticism. Its assertions are familiar: the sovereign is whoever declares a state of emergency; the state of emergency is at the basis of political theory; legal norms do not capture the exceptional, but the legal order is based on the possibility of exceeding it; parliamentary democracy denies the sovereign as a boundary term of the law, its power of decision and the state of exception, namely the state of emergency. And further, the argument that modern political theory must be understood from within the theological system that served as its foundation and underwent a process of secularization, which is to say was realized in human politics: the transcendence of God evolved into that of the sovereign, the divine miracle turned into the sovereign power of decision. The secularization of theological concepts occurs in the system of the monarchy’s legal legitimacy, but also in revolutionary socialist politics, where the place of God is occupied by the people or humanity at large. Whereas in liberal democracy, with the separation of governmental powers and positive law at its basis, the power of decision is forgotten; but that oblivion cannot survive.
From the time of its publication to this day, Schmitt’s book has stirred multiple controversies. The attitude towards it ranged from seduction to aversion, and it is surrounded by interpretive turmoil. Schmitt’s biography surely has something to do with it: in the 1930s Schmitt joined the Nazi party and for a few years was one of its senior jurists, until it denounced him as an opportunist; but he never renounced his support for National Socialism. Thus, the sovereign and power of decision were painted in the colors of Nazism, even though the book was written more than a decade before the Nazis came to power. However, even after the war, when Schmitt had been removed from any academic instruction and was isolating in his childhood district, his writing continued to influence different political streams: conservative thinkers and leftist theologians, the guerrilla warfare of the 1960s and the militant European leftist movements; the critics of colonialism and the critics of capitalism. Thus, throughout the years, he impacted central philosophers of critical theory: Walter Benjamin, who engages the concepts of sovereign power in “Toward the Critique of Violence” and rephrases the concept of state of emergency in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Jacques Derrida, who widens the distinction between friend and foe in “The Politics of Friendship,” and Giorgio Agamben, whose whole “Homo Sacer” project is a review of the power of the sovereign.
“Political Theology” contains some insights which appear to be the basis for critical discussion in general. For instance, understanding the process of secularization as a transition from the theological to the metaphysical, from there to the moral, and finally to the economic – which is to say, as a process of the triumph of economic value over all values of human existence; and subsequently, the assertion of the totality of the political, according to which nothing escapes the political arena and everything is the object of political examination; the emphasis Schmitt put on the question of sovereignty and the power of the sovereign to declare a state of emergency – all had critical importance in criticism of power in the political philosophy of the last 30 years, as well as the insight that the exceptional is at the basis of the legal and social order, and the demand to begin the analysis from the borderline situations of the law. At the same time, the question is what we can learn from the fact that these insights are formulated in such a book – as a criticism of parliamentary democracy that was realized a decade later by its abolishment. Could what appears as the basis of emancipatory critical theory be revealed to be common with criticism from the right? This question receives greater importance today, when many of the critical processes have been adopted – disrupted, appropriated or exhausted – by the New Right: the criticism of empirical science; criticism of supposedly unbiased professional expertise; the demand to frame the knowledge/power of every assertion of truth. We may be at a moment where power and criticism of power are no longer separable, a moment where liberal “rule of law” is indeed revealed in its impotence, and the power of decision of the sovereign – which is not only the ruler – is called into action. Thus, with Schmitt or against him, it is worth thinking today about the processes of dissolution of democracy, the rise of authoritarian-nationalist regimes on the one hand, and the reign of globalist-technocrats on the other hand; and, meanwhile, it is also worth thinking about contemporary progressive-liberal aversion from any form of authority, which is perceived as necessarily violent and therefore worthy of being defeated within a growing regulation of normative procedures.
In honor of the book’s centennial, we gathered four senior researchers that have engaged with Schmitt’s thought: Raef Zreik, Vivian Liska, Christoph Schmidt, and Yehouda Shenhav-Shaharabani – and asked them to discuss the book, its importance and its dangers, and its special place in critical thought. How did the critic of the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary democracy, and later one of the senior jurists of National Socialism, become a central source of influence on generations of radical leftist thought? What is it in the image of the sovereign, the declaration of states of emergency, and the demand for decision, that captures the basic patterns of politics – especially the contemporary politics of the war on terror, the movement of refugees, or the state of health emergency? What is the meaning of the secularization of the theological concepts in modern politics – what are the theological systems that still appear today? And generally, what is the secret of the Schmittian charm and can we or ought we overcome it? This symposium, that ends the current issue, ranges between explanation of some of Schmitt’s moves and their repudiation and proposal of counter-options; and by turning to other figures connected to Schmitt in different ways – from Kafka and Benjamin and Scholem, Arendt and Agamben, to Kierkegaard and Herman Cohen – and thinking about the emergency laws in Israel/Palestine, the discussants clarify the Schmitt heritage here and now.
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The issue begins with Keren Dotan’s article discussing one of the most prevalent and vaguest concepts in contemporary literature: “autofiction,” a literary genre that became popular in the last decade and now seems to dominate central sections of current creative writing. What is autofiction and in what sense is it fiction? What distinguishes it from the novel on the one hand and autobiography on the other? Those are some of the questions of literary criticism in recent years. But Dotan posits other questions. In her article she explores the function “autofiction” plays in discourse: instead of presuming its existence and asking what exists under its auspices and what does not, she questions the very use of the term – its function and the need it fills in contemporary cultural political discourse. Dotan examines the historic use of the term, its entry into the center of literary discourse, and its differentiation from autobiography – a differentiation that occurred only recently, for gender and legal reasons within contemporary identity economics. She understands the dominance of the category of “autofiction” in relation to the intensification of the discussion of post-truth and as a response to the anxiety over the questioning of the validity of factual truth. Therefore this is a discussion of the ascent of a literary genre which is really a discussion of the contemporary political discourse, and does not rely on the prevailing distinctions (right versus left, liberals versus populists, progressives versus authoritarians), but rather traces the functioning of terms such as truth and falsehood or fiction and reality in the contemporary political cartography.
Shraga Bick also criticizes a discourse, but in this case it is not a contemporary literary political discourse but rather an academic intellectual one, the sexuality discourse, whose criticism runs from Foucault’s history of sexuality through innumerable studies of human sexuality as a selected site of discipline and meaning. Bick argues that the supremacy granted to sexuality hides and even denies another site, to his mind a more primal one, of the organization of knowledge and power, which is the body – not the sexual body but the excreting body, and more precisely, the body that excretes from the despised, low, basest organ: the rectum. Bick’s article traces expressions of flatulence, intestinal issues and defecation (as well as sneezing, belching and urinating) in the Talmud and notes the appearance of the residue of matter and traces of flesh in the Jewish textual sphere, for instance in the discussion about the cleanliness of the praying man in Tractate Berakhot or the story of the death of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi in Tractate Ketubot. He reads those moments in two ways: as figures of a developed theological discussion (about the dimension of intention in prayer, about the relationship between the upper and lower spheres), and as anti-figures of the breakthrough of the physical and material into the symbolic fabric of the text. Thus, the article seeks to relocate the discussion from sexuality to the body and argues that it is precisely the nonsexual body – the perforated and untouchable, the defecating and flatulating body – which is at the extreme of the symbolic array and therefore also at the boundary of law and culture.
Daphna Levine and Meirav Aharon Gutman’s article sheds light on the accelerated development processes occurring in many Israeli cities and the urban regeneration plans that lead them, and explores one of the assumptions at the basis of geographic and architectural research: the assumption that the main outcome of those processes is pushing the veteran residents out of the regenerating areas in favor of members of a higher class, namely gentrification. But in a meta-analysis examining numerous studies from recent years, Levine and Aharon Gutman show how the homeowners among the veteran residents also profit economically from these processes, and the rise in their apartments’ value often allows them mobility up the social ladder. They portray the image of the fourth generation of urban regeneration, which is no longer the gentrification generation, but what they call the “self-leveraging generation.” The article points to a dramatic change in the meaning of “home:” from a place of residence, on abode, a dwelling rooted in a social environment and attached to a certain lifestyle, to a “property” – an economic investment, a stock whose value must be raised and the profit from which must be maximized. That sense is gradually conquering the entire social space.
Jonathan Yovel’s article traces the shape-shifting of a philosophical theological text from medieval Latin Christianity to the Jewish community in Spain before the great expulsion, and later to Jewish philosophy and modern-age Germany. The text is Thomas Aquinas’s essay “The Human Soul” from 1266; it was translated into Hebrew by Eli Habillo in the second half of the 15th century; and the late discovery of the translation and the new discussion of it are the result of the work of Rabbi Adolph Jellinek in the mid-19th century. These shifts raise questions of translation and poetics, creativity and loyalty, a lost treasure returned to its owners, and an untamable alienation. These questions, Yovel shows, are an integral part of the act of translation and publication (Habillo) and the act of late discovery and publication (Jellinek), and preoccupy the translator and commentator, who write about those difficulties as part of the act of shifting. At the same time, they return again and again to the text itself – to the relations that already exist in it between soul and world, between spirit and matter; as well as to the attitude directed at the text from the outside, which is always also the attitude towards the Christian theology of the spirit on behalf of those it appointed over the flesh.
The issue contains two essays. Albert Swissa wrote an essay where he goes back to the Binding of Isaac as the foundational story of the seed of Abraham and the pact he made with the Lord. Swissa goes back to that story also through a novel he wrote himself more than 30 years ago, “Bound” (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1990), as a late musing on the conditions of the binding – structural conditions that evolve into theological, social and personal possibilities. He reads the story of the Binding of Isaac out of the binding that happened before the story of the Binding of Isaac: the binding of Ishmael, which was rejected by the Book of Genesis but whose traces appear in the Qur’an, and therefore also in Judaism that exists in proximity to Islam. Swissa understands the story of the Abrahamic line also through its manifestations in his private line: his father’s childhood in Morocco, his own childhood in Israel – and from there he asks whose right it is to be properly bound, to be a sacred sacrifice; and conversely, which binding is rejected and which sacrifice is banished and rejected by the story but continues to persecute it.
This structure of a suspended and rejected sacrifice, argues Swissa, exists on different levels: in the biblical story, in the story of the Jews in Arab countries, and later in the story of the Mizrahim in Israel, and in the basis of the society in which we live today.
Gai Farchi turns in his essay to what appears at first as the most nondescript object, the plastic bag, and traces its journey from its use by humans until its long process of decomposition at the bottom of the ocean. From that journey he extracts the present challenge of the plastic bag: although it is an ecological hazard that exposes the surplus manufacturing of late capitalism, a symbol of human wastefulness leading to destruction, at the same time, he argues, it also marks a horizon of complex thought about the human-nature relationship: plastic is not only an artificial material that pollutes nature, but has already become part of nature itself, an active agent in it that changes its forms and that must be understood not only from the human point of view. Thus, from a neo-materialist perspective, Farchi formulates the initial outlines of “plastic thought” in which the shape-shifting of material, including humans, is not its destruction and end, but its beginning.
Tal Sterngast curated for Theory and Criticism an exhibit in print, designed by Michael Gordon, that traces the ways contemporary art contends with historic imagery. If the history of the last decades is saturated with images, if the events occur in it as spectacle, if image is what materializes over and over again in the world as a simulacrum, Sterngast presents works of art that delay the way to those images, undermine their cohesion, their direct absorption, their readability. These works may have been created in relation to concrete historic events, namely in relation to their spectacular images – images of extermination, murders, lynches; of bastions of power and sites of resistance – but they obscure the appearance of the images or extend the duration of the gaze directed at them, or hide them altogether. The artworks featured here – by Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, David Claerbout, Moshe Ninio and Trisha Donnelly – demonstrate each in their own way that they are not only an image but works of art whose materiality, forms of appearance in the exhibit space, way of placement and routes of delivery to the viewers are an integral part of their act of art and its meaning.
Karatani Kōjin combines in his writing a discussion of modern Japanese history, its politics and culture, and a careful theoretical discussion of European philosophy, including critical philosophy and theory as well as Asian philosophy. He weaves those together into a complex process where not only the Japanese but also the European is understood comparatively and therefore differently. In his article in this issue Karatani focuses on the 19th century, in which literary and artistic Modernism germinated and in which Modern Japan was also “created.” Karatani brings the two together and shows how questions of collective identity, national language and state culture are entwined from the outset in questions of way of writing, status of the marker, and style of the work; and at the same time, how the discussion by philosophers such as Heidegger, Barth and Derrida on questions of language and meaning – a discussion that by no coincidence went through some concept of Japaneseness (Japanese writing, Japanese style) – must be answered by a discussion from within Japanese history, which in itself already maintains extensive relationships with the European. This internal scrutiny allows Karatani to reveal a different understanding of concepts such as spirit, logic and meaning, one that is no longer considered traditional and premodern but quintessentially modern, albeit in a different way. Ayelet Zohar wrote an extensive introduction to Karatani’s thought, in which she expands on the way he weaves an alternative history of modern Japan out of the different ideas that shaped Japan and its relationships with Asia on the one hand and Europe and America on the other: not a history that emphasizes the exceptionalism of Japan and its journey to self-recognition, all the way to nationalism and isolationism of the 20th century, but one that emphasizes the emergence of Japan precisely out of its many borrowings from different cultures and its stabilization as an intersection of appropriation, integration, and improvement of supposedly foreign elements. Karatani’s multi-contextual and multifocal thought is evidence of that philosophical and cultural hybridity and at the same time an argument on its behalf.
As aforesaid, the issue ends with a symposium on the centennial of Carl Schmitt’s book “Political Theology.” But afterward, as a special supplement to the issue in its online edition, comes the collection of essays “Brushfire” by Daniel Montersco and Nitzan Lundberg in the wake of the May 2021 events. The collection includes 12 brief essays written directly after the events as a plurivocal reaction stemming from the attempt to understand the conditions and reasons that led to the intercommunal violence that surged in the city centers that month. The essays discuss various aspects of social mobilization, political violence, the release of repressed tensions, and patterns of solidarity in Israeli and Palestinian society. They were published on the Theory and Criticism website in three rounds in the summer of 2021 and attempted in real time to touch the political reality and understand it in an informed and educated way.
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