States of Exile

Some of my favourite euphemisms for Israelites - "rootless cosmopolitans" (Stalin), "the Palestinians living among us" (Kant) - come from anti-Semites. I now add partisans of Barrabas to the list. If you know of any other good ones, please mention them in a comment; even if, or especially if you are using it to insult me.

Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. - Walter Benjamin, Theologico-Political Fragment All 'It was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful chance - until the creative will says to it: 'But I willed it thus!' - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra All theological concepts must be tranvaluated in immanent terms.

Zizek makes a valuable point in the article Let's be Realists, Demand the Impossible! : Many political theorists, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant to Joseph de Maistre, have elaborated on the ways in which nation-states have manufactured heroic national mythologies to replace and ultimately erase their "foundational crimes," i.e. the illegitimate political violence necessary for their creation. With regard to this notion, it is true what has often been said: The misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century too late, in conditions when such "founding crimes" are no longer acceptable (and-ultimate irony-it was the intellectual influence of Jews that contributed to the rise of this unacceptability!). The foundational crime of the establishment of a nation-state is an act beyond good and evil - but given enough time, the amoral interlopers become the rightful natives. The Turks may have once been migrant hordes, but they've sett

Truthful I call him who goes into godless deserts, having broken his revering heart. In the yellow sands, burned by the sun, he squints thirstily at the islands abounding in wells, where living things rest under dark trees. Yet his thirst does not persuade him to become like these, dwelling in comfort; for where there are oases there are also idols. - Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Mitzrayim, the godless desert of the real.

Why don't Hamasnik ultra-Orthodox Jews move to Siberia ? Seriously. All anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews should move to Birobidzhan and create a Yiddishkeit enclave under Putin's tutelage. I can think of several advantages to such a migration: 1. They wouldn't have to endure the hypocrisy of living in a state they don't recognize for theological reasons. 2. They would have a (relatively) large-scale platform to send out their oft-repeated message that Judaism does not equal Zionism. 3. They would have a safe spot to stew until the Messiah comes. 4. There is historical symmetry to the idea of retrograde Jews returning to a Pale of Settlement of the East under the auspices of Tsar-Messiah Putin. 5. The Cossacks would be right chuffed. If you will it, it is no dream...

The genius and hubris of Christianity is the same: the allegorization of scripture. I will use the concept of exile as an example. Pascal writes: "All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life; libido sentiendi , libido sciendi , libido dominandi ." Wretched is the cursed land which these three rivers of fire enflame rather than water! Happy they who, on these rivers, are not overwhelmed nor carried away, but are immovably fixed, not standing but seated on a low and secure base, whence they do not rise before the light, but, having rested in peace, stretch out their hands to Him, who must lift them up, and make them stand upright and firm in the porches of the holy Jerusalem! There pride can no longer assail them nor cast them down; and yet they weep, not to see all those perishable things swept away by the torrents, but at the remembrance of their loved country, the heavenly Jerusalem, which they remember without ceasing dur