Just leafing through some blogs and obituaries on the late Henri Meschonnic, whose astonishing and rich work on language, poetics and a huge range of issues in Jewish histories has made almost no impact at all on cultural or film or whatever studies in England, though there seem to be nests of followers in the USA. I guess that this is because we are very settled in the patterns of contained and well trodden academic adventure that so suit the larger academy and its systems of recognition and communication, the oily seas of a certain self-satisfaction, in which I too am a bather. But when I set aside my own well-worked uses of certain phrases of Julia Kristeva on chora, thetic cuts and so forth, or Adorno, and start a drift through his thinking on rhythm, I then have to rework much of what I was wanting to write, am writing or have written, small but absorbing adjustments, challenges to the patterns built up and holding me. I first resorted to him in a piece I did for Bracha Ettinger's exhibition at the Drawing gallery in New York, in which i wanted to think about her outside the painfully obvious framework of 'Jewish thought', and his critique of this notion in his Utopie du juif enabled me to do this. I'm about to post a PDF of this essay on the Art page of my website, so please feel free to download it.
Just read a stunning rebuttal by him of the use of the word Shoah by Hollywood cinema and Claude Lanzmann alike. I've never been able to use the word, despite my admiration for much of Lanzmann's film, I detest his authoritarian and absolute control of its values, and attempts to surveille the morality of all of us through the high ground it gave to him, or that he took with it. Amongst other things, in a complex argument, Meschonnic poured scorn on Lanzmann's using the word because he does not know what it means - and as a Hebraist, rejects the co-option of a Hebrew word to solve the naming of a nazi massacre.
Here are some lines in French from the blog:
Ce qui accroît le scandale. Car le mot "Shoah" n'a pas du tout, en hébreu, de "connotation religieuse", et il ne désigne pas "également" un cataclysme et il ne renvoie pas "aussi à l'idée de "catastrophe naturelle"". Le mot n'a rien à voir avec le massacre, il n'introduit pas non plus du "providentiel". Le scandale, que la médiatisation du mot rend inaudible, est que c'est un mot qui, dans la Bible où il se rencontre treize fois, désigne une tempête, un orage et les ravages - deux fois dans Job - laissés par la tempête dévastatrice. Un phénomène naturel, simplement.It's interesting to cmpare with Agamben's critique of the word in his Remnants of Auschwitz. You can find Meschonnic on here:
http://www.voxdei.org/afficher_info.php?id=12902.214
To me this is of huge poltical importance in the contemporary world, especially if you are, as I am, and most of my life since the Eichmann trial, concerned with the Zionist appropriation of the murder of the European Jews and what it means to appropriate a murder as a disaster... and as a political tool in international politics. But there is enough of a literature on that and no doubt, even in just writing this, I will be tracked down by some US university chaser of bad Jews in the world and added to that distinguished bibliography.
Anyway a kind of visual counterpart of this critique is to be found in Eyal Sivan's great documentary, Route 181, the section where we see a haircut in a Plaestinian barber shop and the participants talking about the loss of their land and homes, and the memory time of Lanzmann's famous sequence returns as the multiple return of of repressed narratives, as well as narratologies - which Lanzmann himself had helped to invent. Sivan both ruins and enshrines Lanzmann in one magnificent gesture in the present, that the Fienkelkraut's of the world took this as a sign of Sivan being a self hating Jew! Google for the riveting legal prcedures that followed in France. Anyway, again, i just want to tack these together for now as a kind of Easter message of my own,
belli amici di tutti paise
a very happy spring, or autumn...
...reading Meshonnic and watching Sivan - check out his film For the sake of the people, the film on the complexiteds of the tranformation of the Eastern block in out time.
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