The Ethics of Lévinas’s Temimut
and Kristeva’s Abjection in To
the End of the Land by David
Grossman
Idit Alphandary
Tel Aviv University, Israel
I.
David Grossman presented a different outlook on contemporary Israel when it became clear that the nation accepted that it occupied the Palestinian land and its
people.1 In 1988, in The Yellow Wind, his “travelogue” from the occupied territories, he
made it very clear that he wanted to understand how Palestinians lived in refugee
camps such as Deheisha and in the larger cities such as Beth Lehem:
A strange life. Double and split . . . they sit here, very much here, because
deprivation imposes sobriety with cruel force, but they are also there. That is
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among us. In the villages, in the cities. I ask a five-year-old where he is from,
and he immediately answers, “Jaffa,” which is today part of Tel Aviv. “Have you
ever seen Jaffa?” “No, but my grandfather saw it.” His father, apparently, was
born here, but his grandfather came from Jaffa. “And is it beautiful, Jaffa?” “Yes.
It has orchards and vineyards and the sea.” (Grossman 1988, 6–7)
The specifications “here” and “among us” are the most important elements of
this description. For Grossman the Palestinians belong here, among us the
Israelis, and this knowledge comprises an ethical and a political statement of
the facts. Grossman’s description is literary, not political. Yet he realizes the
relevance of literature to politics and thus creates a middle ground between
infinite storytelling and the finality of political urgency. He knows that daydreams that are used to nurture the hopes of children for a better future are
political; they do not just signify individual, psychological inclinations. He
asks: “What do Arabs dream about? And what do Jewish children dream
about?” (29). He wonders if these dreams provide new insights that can help
Israelis and Palestinians to resolve the conflict or “are dreams only a direct
continuation of it [the conflict]?” (29). Dreams could depict an unforeseen,
new reality, or they could register the bleakness of reality, and Grossman tries
to show that politics underlies dreaming:
It’s all bolitics, the Palestinians say. Even those who can pronounce the “p” in
“politics” will say “bolitics,” as a sign of defiance, in which there is a sort of
self-mocking; “bolitics,” which means that whole game being played over our
heads, kept out of our hands, crushing us for decades under all the occupations, sucking out of us life and the power to act, turning us into dust, it’s all
bolitics, the Turks and the British, and the son-of-a-whore Hussein who killed
and slaughtered us without mercy, and now all of a sudden he makes himself
out to be the protector of the Palestinians, and these Israelis, who are willing to
bring down a government because of two terrorists they killed in a bus, and
with the considered cruelty of an impeccably meticulous jurist they change
our laws, one thousand two hundred new laws they issued, and deprived us of
our land and of our tradition and of our honour, and construct for us here
some kind of great enlightened prison, when all they really want is for us to
escape from it, and then they won’t let us return to it ever—and in their proud
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cunning, which we are completely unable to understand, they bind their
strings to us, and we dance for them like marionettes. (8)
Grossman illustrates that the defense/rejection/critique of politics by the
Palestinian population adds up to hatred: “Don’t believe the ones who tell
you that the Palestinians don’t really hate you” (11). He recognizes that the
occupation churns hatred on a daily basis. “You made us into living dead.
And me, what remains of me? Only the hatred of you and thoughts of
siyassah [politics]” (12). Yet Grossman’s depiction of Palestinians and his
reflections on their expressions, thoughts, and feelings are not transmitted through the use of political interests. He expresses neither rejection of
the other nor unproblematic acceptance of hatred; he endorses the humanity of the Palestinians without exhibiting anxiety, although he does
not embrace their violence. Grossman rejects the actions that Israel takes
to make Deheisha “invisible” (17). He recalls the times when Palestinian
children were walking freely along the roads selling us “figs for a grush”
(19). Then Israel and Palestine were bound by a civil pact that transcended
political interests. The Israeli and the Palestinian populations could have
been led to find a solution that would have enabled them to live side by side
in collaboration with each other. But in 1988 before and during the first
intifada these children that Grossman was interviewing made the “Molotov cocktails and the bombs” (19).
Grossman’s ability to separate the violence that presides between
Israel and Palestine from the stories of loss, longing, dreaming, and resentment brings a new language to the fore, one that does not coincide with the
generic discourse about this conflict. What I want to show is how language
draws a bond between two seemingly incompatible terms: the psychoanalytic notion of abjection and the Hebrew idea of temimut. I will explain the
intricate meaning of temimut (uprightness) later; for now it suffices to say
that a person who embodies temimut is tamim: tamim is a wholesome,
upright, integrate, honest person who relies on inner certitude although
s/he is not naive. The abject person could be the one who is excluded by the
normative society but s/he could also be the one who looks for meanings
outside the consensus.
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In Grossman’s texts the narrator tends to be tamim; s/he functions on the
basis of inner certitude and willingly approaches the other. And at the same
time this narrator is also abject because s/he looks for meaning in cooperation and collaboration with otherness despite that the consensus in Israel is to
see the other as a threat to the existence of the Jews and the state of Israel alike.
A narrator who trusts in the bond that s/he forges with radical alterity is
perceived as abject by the normative Israeli who finds meaning only within
the bounds of the Jewish and Israeli identities. Grossman exemplifies the
wholesomeness of temimut and the desire to find meaning in a new outlook on
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Grossman and his interviewees communicate
with one another via an agreement that even during times of conflict people
long for ethical directives that will enable them to find and create meaning in
their lives. They want to live in a meaningful way with the other even if a
satisfying political solution is not forthcoming. They genuinely speak and act
to know the other and force the other to better know them. Grossman accepts
that the Palestinians hate Israel but he acknowledges that this is not a racist
hatred against the Jews but rather extreme resentment that the occupation
breeds. The position of abjection is forced on the Palestinians and they must
make sense of their situation to fashion a language that could disclose how
deserving they are of national rights. Grossman is helping to produce this new
language because he renders these abject stories in phrases that the occupier
could understand. Yet Grossman does not impose normative judgments on
the convictions of the Palestinians that talk to him: “Only thus. I remember the
similarity between the symbol of the Irgun and that of the PLO: here a fist
grasping a rifle against a map of the land of Israel, and there two fists, holding
rifles, against the very same map” (1988, 23). Grossman recalls that when the
British mandate was in effect the right wing underground forces of the Irgun
believed in a violent resistance precisely because the voice of Israelis was
marginalized, made abject. The Jews that survived the Holocaust also signified abjection, the Israeli population signified temimut or the desire to do, to act
to settle the country with Jews despite the British laws and interdictions that
restricted such actions. In 1988 the Palestinians felt no less deserving of a state of
their own although the map that they outlined overlapped with the map of
Israel. Grossman chooses to accept the basic claims of the Palestinians. It is
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the role of a politician to draw up the borders and decide how the country
should be divided between the two people, but it is the task of the writer to
invent a language that unequivocally reflects the ethical deservedness of the
other, her/his human value even if this other is an enemy who is split between
a desire to live together with Israel and a contrary desire to abolish this state
that imprisons her/him in refugee camps or behind fences.2
In The Yellow Wind, Grossman does not formulate a political solution to
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but uses temimut or uprightness to extend an
ethical behavior to otherness and find an outlet or a language through which
to express the common humanity that binds him to the other. Both Grossman
and the Palestinian interviewees belong in the bosom of a land that sustains
the life of two peoples. To express this equality between the two people merits
the name of temimut, a wholesome study of the conflict that relies on inner
certitude that the other, too, has rights. It comprises an uprightness that
precedes political calculations, that follows in the footsteps of an implicit
ethics and an implicit concern for the other. But Grossman sees himself as
abject. To occupy the position of the one who is not part of the consensus
equals to a kind of abjection. Grossman agrees to be seen as an outsider, as the
one who is “afraid” of the Western world’s opinion against Israel and who is
not “strong” in his struggle for the “complete” or “undivided” land of Israel.
Grossman seeks to express the problematic meaning of these desires and to
expose a new language with which to negotiate such meanings and desires.
How does Grossman find meaning in the borderline situation that defines the
relation of Israelis and Palestinians? How does he undo the repression of the
other nation that Israeli politics promotes? How does he give rise to new
values that signify neither clichéd meaning nor despair but aim to establish a
new language with which Israelis and Palestinians can make themselves
known to each other?
David Grossman is particularly interested in distinguishing political
agenda from acts of hospitality toward the other.3 On August 6, 2006 the
Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz published a petition against the war in Lebanon with signatures by leading Israeli authors David Grossman, Amos Oz, and
Abraham B. Yehoshua. Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist and historian, examines this petition in an article in Haaretz. According to Segev, the authors’
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demand for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon employs an affective
language for purposes of persuasion: “It is not justified to cause additional
suffering and bloodshed to the two parties in pursuit of goals that are impossible and that do not merit such suffering” (Segev 2006, 1, translation mine).
For Grossman hospitality of the other must continue to exist in a state of war
because temimut ought to be the overarching factor in any encounter between
two individuals, even if those individuals’ countries are at war with one another.4 This is especially true with regards to encounters between Israelis and
Palestinians, two peoples who share a single land, Israel/Palestine, and who
are familiar with both Hebrew and Arabic.
Grossman’s personal circumstances are also relevant to this literary/
political process of regaining temimut, wholesomeness, inner certitude, and
offering hospitality to the other at all costs. As the father of an Israeli soldier
killed during the second Lebanon war, Grossman is intimately familiar with
the realities of love and loss in contemporary Israel. “No more will be the
young man with the wisdom that is much greater than his years,” Grossman
grieves. Grossman’s moving eulogy to his son Uri, published in Haaretz, signifies an act of both personal and national importance, as it addresses issues of
love and loss in the life of the individual and in the collective and political
world of Israel. Referring to Grossman’s eulogy of his son, one Haaretz writer
notes that it is a “constitutive text” and that “Israelis, and non-Israelis, will get
back to it and read it many years from today. Students will study it. Scholars
will analyze it” (Calderon 2006, 1, all translations from the article mine).
Significantly, Grossman’s eulogy exists in a culture rife with disagreements
regarding Israel’s relation to the Palestinian people. Thus, Grossman’s depiction of his son Uri not as a national hero or martyr but as a human being, loved
and admired for his personal qualities, and one who will be missed by those
who knew him, is particularly important. Grossman writes in a deeply personal tone, as a father in mourning: “No more will be Uri’s infinite tenderness
nor will be the peacefulness with which he stabilizes every tempest” (quoted in
Calderon 2006, 1). But Grossman also speaks of his own admiration for a son
who “was not influenced by what the others said about him.” This was a man,
writes Grossman, for whom:
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The source of his power was in him . . . ever since you subjected the entire
military [to your desire to be a tank commander] and became a commander, it
became clear what a commander and a human being you are. You were the
left-winger of your regiment, and the others respected you because you defended your opinions without relinquishing any one of your military assignments. (2)
Grossman goes onto elucidate how his son’s character traits relate to the
national issues that are brought to the fore through his death:
Uri was a very Israeli boy . . . and he was a man of values. This word has been
greatly devaluated and became the victim of irony in the last years, because in
our crazy, cruel, and cynical world one does not have a “voice” if one is . . . truly
sensitive to the distress of the other, even if this other is your enemy on the
battlefield . . . Uri simply had the courage to . . . find exactly his own voice in
everything he said and did and this is what protected him from the pollution
and corruption and the diminution of the soul. (3)
Uri’s temimut, according to his father’s description of the man, should not be
confused with naïveté. The Uri that Grossman writes of is a man who operates
according to inner certitude and who exercises honesty and integrity in his
encounter with the other, even at the cost of casting himself as an outsider
among his peers. Uri looks for new meanings in using his intimate words that
the other may accept.
The eulogy highlights both temimut and abjection, that is, openness to
alterity and the need to find meaning where loss presides. In a feat of groundbreaking rhetoric Grossman explains the relevance of paternity, maternity,
and nationhood to the task of raising children:
I hope that I was a father worthy of a child like you. But I know that to be the
child of Michal means to grow up in generosity and grace and infinite love, and
you received all this in abundance, and knew to appreciate and be thankful for
it, and you never took for granted what you received. I am not saying anything
about the war in which you were killed right now. We, our family, have already
lost this war. The state of Israel will do its own soul-searching. (3)5
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I suggest that it is in this combining of literary and psychoanalytical aspects of
speech and action that Grossman’s unique voice emerges. Abjection and
temimut intertwine in Grossman’s entire oeuvre. Perhaps this is the law, and
not the exception, when it comes to functioning successfully in the symbolic
order of representation.
II.
To The End of the Land provides the best example of the linking of temimut and
abjection in Grossman’s work. The conflict between Ora’s temimut—her inner
certitude, uprightness, and ethical commitment to the other—and the national aggression exhibited by her husband, Ilan, and her sons, Adam and
Offer, emerges from performative speech-acts that are particular to Ora. She
does not signify an alternative identity to that of the normative Israeli but
instead embodies an altogether different vision, and she is the host/hostage of
the other.6 To the End of the Land is haunted by the need to create a language
that displaces a known relation to the other. The novel chooses acceptance of
otherness; it desires to create a new state of affairs in the reality shared by
Israelis/Arabs/Palestinians. The novel from 2008 arrives 20 years after the
publication of The Yellow Wind when both the crimes of the occupation and
the hatred of the Palestinian were deeply entrenched. Yet Grossman is intent
on the creation of literary characters that could sincerely communicate with
and offer help to each other despite that the state institutions they work with
make it all but inconceivable to maintain fruitful relations with each other. In
addition to these insurmountable difficulties that civilians face in their collaboration with the other, Grossman’s novel overlaps with military operations
mounted in Gaza and Jennin and with the second Lebanon war. These hostile
operations make it more difficult to reject the language of politics and insist
on the creation of an ethical language that offers hospitality to the other. Here
is an example of how Grossman defies the clichés of war and attaches himself
to the language of hospitality to the other. Ora, the protagonist of To the End of
the Land, is not always expressing Grossman’s beliefs when she is trying to
seek common grounds in her relationship with Sami, her Arab Israeli driver,
but she certainly is enabling Grossman to ask questions that concern the
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humanity of this other, this Arab Israeli, not just political questions that aim
to keep him in his place:
Because of all of these reasons it was very important that she observe him as
much as she could, to learn how he had been able to avoid becoming embittered all these years. As far as she could tell he was not even suppressing a
silent yet murderous hatred deep inside, as Ilan had always claimed. She was
astonished to see—and wished she could learn from him—how he managed to
avoid attributing the daily humiliations, large and small, to some personal
defect of his own, as she would undoubtedly do with great fervor were she, God
forbid, in his position—and as she in fact had been doing, truth be told, quite a
bit during this lousy year. Somehow, within all the chaos, all the mess, he
remained a free person, which she herself only rarely managed to be. (Grossman 2010, 60)
It becomes clear later in the novel that Ora is beautifying reality. Sami is not
free from hostile feelings toward Israelis like herself and her husband. But she
rightly observes that “within all the chaos, all the mess” he finds a way out.
Sami raises a family, he manages a flourishing business, and more important,
he retains his basic humanity and is capable of overcoming his violence to
help Jews/Arabs/Palestinians in times of need. Ora’s and Sami’s ability to
remain interconnected in times of acute political conflict is a quality that Ilan,
Ora’s husband, has lost. It is Ilan, not Ora, who conforms to the norm in Israel.
Ilan suspects the other, sees the other as a threat to his own life. Ora, on the
contrary, feels that the other incites her to discover new wondrous options to
lead her life, hence she is deeply connected to the other.
David Grossman’s greatness consists in the fact that for him the encounter of subject and object is grounded in the creation of a new literary/political
language. The characters in To the End of the Land serve as metaphors for
contemporary Israelis. Their story is essentially an allegorical representation of
modern Israeli society.7 Thus, the characters become the tenor of the idea as
they convey the symbolic meaning that emerges from a literary analysis of
contemporary life in Israel. Grossman’s novel is enclosed within a hermeneutic cycle—the author uses the part to define the whole, which, in turn, deter-
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mines the status of the part. Grossman endorses the cyclical structure because it enables him to shape the characters’ intimate relation to mimesis,
and the relation of reality in Israel to the novel’s characters.
Before I go into my in-depth analysis of the characters in Grossman’s
work, here is a very brief synopsis of the novel:
Ora, who works as a physical therapist in Jerusalem, is married to Ilan, a
lawyer, but the couple has separated. Together, they have a son, Adam. In
addition, the couple is raising Offer, whom Ora conceived with Ilan’s best
friend, Avram.
Avram has severed all ties to the couple, and so he does not know that Ora
and Ilan have separated. As a young man, when Avram was still Ora’s lover, he
had hoped to write radio plays. Now in his 50s, he lives on the margins of Israeli
society and works as a dishwasher in an Indian restaurant in Tel Aviv. During
the Yom Kippur War, Avram was taken prisoner, and, as an inmate in an
Egyptian jail, he was severely tortured until his captors returned him to Israel
as part of a prisoners exchange deal. During the year that Avram was hospitalized Ilan and Ora nursed and cared for him until he was fully healed. But
Avram suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder, and basic life instincts
including the capacity to desire are failing him.
At the start of the novel, Sami—an Israeli Arab who operates his own
taxicab—gives Ora and Offer a lift to a meeting point for soldiers who have
received an emergency call and are being drafted to fight in what looks like the
second Lebanon war but could be any one of the military operations of the time,
be it Gaza or Jennin. Offer is Ora’s youngest son,8 and his call to active service
elicits a reaction in Ora that, while personal and subjective, is also very much
a metaphor for the attitudes of the political left wing in Israel:
In every car sits a young boy, the first fruits, a spring festival that ends with a
human sacrifice. And you? she asks herself sharply. Look at you, how neatly
and calmly you bring your son here, your almost-only-son, the boy you love
dearly, with Ishmael as your private driver. (Grossman 2010, 69)
This passage communicates Ora’s sense of foreboding about what is happening, that “It is all a huge, irredeemable mistake” (70). Offer volunteers to
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extend his army service by 28 days. As a result, Ora feels compelled to escape
the possible eventuality of her son’s death. She has recruited her son’s longlost father, Avram, to join her in hiking through the Galilee, a journey that will
come to a close by the novel’s end.
In this manner, Grossman’s novel explores the thought processes of unlikely, unusual Israelis, like Ora and Avram, as they wait for their son to return.
See Under: Love is the last novel by Grossman that is as crucial to the life of
Israeli society as is To the End of the Land. Especially the position of the
narrator of the first chapter of the novel is similar to Ora’s position in To the
End of the Land. I would like to use several examples to qualify my argument
that Grossman engages protagonists who are immersed in temimut and abjection when he construes the central critical consciousness of his novels.
The first section in See Under: Love is titled, “Momik.” It is a very short
bildungsroman of a child, the first generation and only son of Holocaust
survivors who live in Tel Aviv and work as the operators of a lottery booth.
Momik is haunted by the need to understand those strange, abnormal adults,
whose world is so different from that of the Israelis around him. He tries to
understand Anshel Wasserman, a survivor who suddenly appears in the
house. His behavior is strange to the boy but understood to the reader who
knows that victims of the Holocaust were afflicted by extreme corporeal and
mental agitation. “He couldn’t sit still for one minute and even in his sleep he
twitched and gabbled and flapped his arms around” (Grossman 1990, 11). Such
a young child is incapable of understanding the harsh realities that Holocaust
survivors contend with; and yet Grossman allows him to be a witness and to
represent their world because he is likely to understand it in a pristine way,
without judging these people on the basis of common, irrelevant knowledge.
Momik observes these people. For example, he observes Bella, the owner of
the neighborhood coffee shop. The following sentences are a feat of freeindirect-discourse, for Momik mimics Bella’s speech and her emotional state
of mind when she utters particular sentences: “She wasn’t afraid of BenGurion and called him ‘The Little Dictator from Plonsk,’ . . . like all the grownups Momik knew Bella came from Over There, a place you weren’t supposed to
talk about too much, only think about in your heart and sigh with a drawnout-krechtz, oyyy, the way they always do” (13). Throughout the section
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devoted to Momik, East Europe and the countries in which Jews died in the
Holocaust are referred to by the name “Over There.” Yet Momik learns more
from Bella: “She did drop hints about her parents’ home Over There, and it was
from her that Momik first heard about the Nazi Beast” (13). Because the adults
often mention people who died Over There or who were killed by the Nazi
Beast, Momik:
made up his mind to find the beast and tame it and make it good and persuade
it to change its ways and stop torturing people and get it to tell him what
happened Over There and what it did to those people, and it’s been about a
month now, . . . that Momik has been busy up to his ears, in complete secrecy,
down in the small dark cellar under the house, raising the Nazi Beast. (30)
He collects birds and reptiles and feeds them to see if one of them will grow up
to be the Nazi Beast, but his trials fail. He never discovers the Nazi Beast. At the
same time Momik is busy studying uncle Wasserman. About uncle Anshel he
learns that he is “a kind of prophet in reverse who tells what used to be” (33).
This is a good way to describe a Holocaust survivor who suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder so that he murmurs incomprehensible words relating to
the past. These murmurs are so grave that to the boy it seems as if they were
prophetic even though they did not refer to the future. Momik has one more
invaluable quality: “Momik said he understood everything. That was a fact.
Because Momik has this gift, a gift for all kind of languages no one understands, he can even understand the silent kind that people who say maybe
three words in their whole life talk. Like Ginzburg who says, Who am I who am
I, and Momik understands that he’s lost his memory and that now he’s looking
for who he is everywhere even in the garbage cans” (35). Again Momik is too
young to know this but philosophy, psychology, and literature value the ability
to listen to silence because such listening encourages transference/countertransference and its therapeutic effects. But Momik does not delude himself
that he could persuade the Nazi Beast to be nice nor does he think that he
could understand or help the grownups around him: “But he opened his eyes
and saw them, all around him, tall and ancient, gazing at him with pity, he
knew with all his nine-and-a-half-year-old alter kopf intelligence that it was
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too late now” (86). Partly the reader knows that Momik is growing up because
he understands a great deal about these survivors. He understands enough to
relate his own intelligence to the knowledge that he cannot undo the past for
them or help them be “normal” in the present. In Israeli society Momik is an
outsider, a precautious observer of these survivors that no Israeli wanted to
listen to at the time. But he was only nine-and-a-half-years-old, so how historically accurate and meaningful is his understanding?
Ora is not a child but a wife and a mother of two boys in their early 20s. She
had some academic education and held a job for a few years. She is economically and emotionally independent. Yet Ora needs to survive the Israeli culture
of masculinity. She is surrounded by men that regardless of their political
conviction express the “realistic” opinion that the Palestinians and the Arab
countries around Israel should be contained forcefully. The Israeli soldier
should receive boundless support from the state and the family. No illusions
should be nurtured about the good nature of the Israeli Arabs. These men lead
and control the country. Ora and her peace-oriented opinions and actions are
marginalized in this context. Yet Grossman allows marginal figures such as
Ora, Sami, and Avram to tell the story of Israel during the second Lebanon war.
These characters are immersed in temimut and abjection.
III.
What is the particular temimut or nonskeptical, nonrationalized, nonphilosophical action that takes hold among the characters of To the End of the Land,
as they encounter disaster and tell their stories of catastrophe?
In trying to establish the traits of temimut, that is, the inner certitude on
which the action of the characters is grounded, many questions begin to crop
up. A few examples: How is temimut related to the birth of a moral subject? Is
Ora’s temimut, inner certitude, what motivates her to action or is it the very
force that alienates her from the world? Why is the witness necessarily one
whose morality is grounded in temimut? Are Ora’s temimut and Avram’s
temimut identical? (Ora is a free woman who undertakes action, fleeing from
the message, and her narrative is the novel’s narrative. Avram, however, is the
witness to Ora’s story; he can attest to their joint flight from the message.) Ora
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does not belong to the category of survivors, but Avram survived a near-death
experience.
Temimut, inner certitude, and abjection connect Ora and Avram. Both of
them act on the basis of trust in the other and both of them are denied
recognition by normative Israelis. But is there, in fact, any integral connection
between the morality inherent in Ora’s will to live and the witness’s struggle
against the death drive—a struggle that s/he implements when s/he gives
testimony about her/his experience of survival? Hospitality is paramount in
Ora’s life, which is why she tries to evade news of her son’s death, in effect
rejecting the possibility that her life could remain intact if she accepts instructions that the administration delivers to the nation on how to behave during
wartime. The survivor is one whose relation to morality is sustained by
temimut, or by an Ur-certitude that cannot be destroyed, not even through the
utter devastation of war.
At the same time abjection pervades Avram because in captivity he experiences a trauma that causes him to view the self and the other as members of
the community of the under-man. (“Victim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of the camps is brotherhood in abjection,” in the words of Primo
Levi, as quoted in Georgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz [2002, 17]). This
trauma unearths the temimut and the abjection that inhere in testimony.
Testimony signifies that the survivor is the host/hostage of the other person in
a world in which witnessing comprises a response to otherness rather than a
repetition of the trauma.
Temimut, inner certitude, is connected to survival in Avram because he—
who refused to be Offer’s active father—undertakes full responsibility to go
with Ora. He encourages her to tell him everything she can about their son.
Surviving makes Avram open to Ora’s and Offer’s distress despite the fact that
such openness ruins his life effort to distance himself from these people that
he loves in order not to be hurt by them, in order not to lose them once again.
It appears that even before Ora comes for Avram, when Offer is still in mandatory service Avram has a countdown calendar of Offer’s army years:
Then she discovered little numbers scattered here and there and realized they
signified dates. The last one, right by the pillow, was the day that had just come
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to an end, and it had a little exclamation point next to it. Ora stood there and
looked back and forth on the lines and could not stop until she had verified
that each of the many vertical lines was crossed out with a horizontal one.
(Grossman 2010, 139)
Temimut is related to survival because for 21 years Avram has been extending
paternity to a son he had never seen nor heard of before Ora has arrived intent
on escaping the messengers that bring a message of his death at war. Finally,
I am interested in exploring the relation of Ora’s temimut, which she uses to
cope with a terrifying reality, to that of the survivor. The survivor’s temimut,
inner certitude, is, of course, useful to her or him insofar as it supports the
survivor’s desire to give testimony.9
Through their journey, Ora and Avram internalize Offer’s existence, an act
that is identical to hospitality, as it precedes all knowledge. Ora views internalization as a process of giving birth to her son for the second time or of
giving life to him once again: “How could she not have realized before that he
needed her now, in order not to die? She stood with one hand on her aching
waist and let out an astonished breath. Was that it? Just as he had once needed
her to be born?” (169). This hospitality is undertaken with no relation to a
future message. Even more significant is that Ora internalizes Sami, the Israeli
Arab other whose life is inextricably bound up with that of her son, Offer.
Sami needs Ora’s help: “‘I need this from you as a big favor’” (104). Ora
cannot assess the danger involved; yet she does not doubt Sami’s sincerity and
accepts that it is her duty to help him. “She remembers the promise she gave
him only a few hours earlier and feels a twinge of poetic justice—Righteous of
the Nations, my ass. ‘That’s fine,’ she says” (104). Despite the explicit self-irony
present in the words “my ass,” Ora does ultimately become, so to speak, a
righteous of the nations.
Ora agrees to help Sami smuggle the ill son of an IR, an illegal Palestinian
resident, to an underground hospital in Yaffo. Every evening, the hospital sets up
shop inside a school in Yaffo (in the method of the “Wall and the Tower” settlements10), only to be dismantled the following morning. In pidgin Hebrew the
Arab nurse relates to Ora the story of this provisional hospital: “‘In the morning Kulhum Maffish—they’re all gone!’ She mimes a bubble bursting” (125).
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Sami’s and Ora’s actions are grounded in a sense of Kantian duty. The
maxims that guide their behavior could lead to real change and engender a
world where egotistical needs and desires are not the supreme guiding force.
And yet—as we are not dealing with a Kantian utopia in which the autonomous self institutes the law—temimut or the gift of death, in the language of
Derrida,11 creates a level of intimacy between Ora and Sami: “[Ora] had the
feeling that despite everything that had happened, despite his strange silence
the whole way back, their friendship had actually deepened today, having
been tempted by a more genuine fire: the fire of reality” (100).12 Both are acting
for the other, the ill child, his father (who is trying to obtain medical care), and
the law of ethics. Thus, in their story temimut encourages civil disobedience,
and morality is determined by Ora’s and Sami’s shared inner certitude rather
than by accepted notions of good and evil.
The moral action that Sami and Ora undertake places them in what Julia
Kristeva called the “abject” category. Both of them are operating/hiding in the
dark. They must hide from the border police as if they were criminals, they
cannot get help in a legal hospital but have to settle for provisional medical
care that operates illegally, and they merit the censure of every normative
Israeli/Arab Israeli for acting in concert. Sami’s and Ora’s actions are either
self-serving or revolutionary. I interpret their actions as revolutionary or as
looking for meaning in realms that are found beyond the known, permitted, or
normative course of action. Kristeva views literature as abject—the meeting
between the analyst and the analysand is the locus of abjection—and she
relates religion to abjection. These practices are very useful and yet they are
immersed in abjection. I would like to examine more closely her notion of
literature as abject.
In literature, the repressed pain transmogrifies and becomes Power, or an
affect that can be experienced in the world through performative speech-acts.
Literature creates a new language when it witnesses the loss of intimate
objects at the same time that it signifies that the object of desire is always
disappointing. Politics is a source of knowledge that designates action, but
friendship, temimut, inner certitude, and survival are grounded in giving meaning to repression or in making the unconscious available to ethical behavior. Ora’s
and Sami’s actions are moral and they do attain the sublime. However, the
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sublime does not reveal new meanings; it merely creates a state of agitation in
which the superego is intertwined with its abjects, or the ego and its objects are
absent from the sublime. For Kristeva, “the sublime . . . expands us, overstrains us,
and causes us to be both here as abjects, and there, as others and sparkling. . . . Everything missed, joy—fascination” (Kristeva 1982, 12).13
The logos teaches that the meaning of desire resides in knowing the object.
Thus, representation of the object is the equivalent of the object’s destruction,
and this annihilation produces a desire for meaning. David Grossman struggles to articulate Ora’s bodily, maternal love of men—whether son, husband,
lover, or Arab compatriot—whose pragmatic speech and actions she cannot
accept. Ora’s very body is hystericized when she is faced with the possibility
that her son might die at war. Her very skin—her bosom—becomes a transitional object, in Winnicott’s phrase, when she cooperates with Sami and
nurtures the Palestinian sick child.14 Horror of death renews her attachment
to life, and she and her partners, Avram and Sami, all undertake survival as
their objective. The abject lies beyond themes, and for Grossman it is what
binds the characters to each other. Yet the relationships between Ora, Avram,
and Sami emerge from temimut, and this constitutes full ethical power against
abjection and repression because praxis, or hospitality, institutes the good.
To the End of the Land discovers meaning in abjects. Ora, Avram and Sami
populate an archaic sphere of meaning that can be approached neither
through fantasy nor through reality, but whose significance is unearthed by
literature. These characters exist at a juncture associated, in Israel, with
death. And yet, the abject subverts identity and otherness. The characters
seem to exist on that invisible line that divides life from death, in that ambiguous space between actual death and loss in oblivion and hospitality. Clichés
are meaningless, but these characters’ responses to the cliché attest that from
this death hospitality emerges. Derrida describes this aporia of hospitality:
If, in hospitality, one must say yes, welcome the coming [accueillir la venue],
say the “welcome”; one must say yes, there where one does not wait, yes, there
where one does not expect, nor await oneself to, the other [là où l’on ne s’attend
pas soi-même à l’autre], to let oneself be swept by the coming of the wholly
other, the absolutely unforeseeable [inanticipable] stranger, the uninvited
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visitor, the unexpected visitation beyond welcoming apparatuses. If I welcome
only what I welcome, what I am ready to welcome, and that I recognize in
advance because I expect the coming of the hôte as invited, there is not
hospitality. (Derrida 2002, 361–62)
Derrida argues that to be hospitable toward that which is known does not
amount to hospitality, for hospitality must accept radical alterity. He equates
alterity with a visitation of either good or bad tidings. To find meaning in both
good and bad visitations brings abjection back to the discussion. Grossman’s
characters accept the death of self to survive the hospitality that shapes their
lives around new meaning and that, by extension, suggests possible new forms
of existence in the state of Israel. Abjection is not a blueprint for living a moral
life in Israel; rather, it is the “way out” in the language of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guatari: “as long as it is as little signifying as possible” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986, 6).
Ora brings to mind the ape from Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” In
Kafka’s story, Red Peter, an ape that was hunted down, tells his audience that
he did not pursue freedom. Red Peter needed to find a position for his body
that would put an end to the pain caused by the pressure of the iron cage. For
this reason, Red Peter became immersed in the life of human beings, and now
he can tell the story of his abjection. Red Peter describes his search for a way
out and his antagonism to the concept of freedom as follows:
Press yourself against the bar behind you till it nearly cuts you in two, you
won’t find the answer. I had no way out but I had to devise one, for without it I
could not live . . . I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean
by “way out.” I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I
deliberately do not use the word “freedom.” I do not mean the spacious feeling
of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men
who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now.
In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom.
And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. (Kafka 1946, 253)
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The relevance of Grossman’s unique outlook on the Israeli/Palestinian
question is important. In my description of Ora I am adopting the critique that
Deleuze and Guatari establish. Ora is not representative of how Israeli politics
is misdirected, but rather her actions comprise a response to the blindness
of those in power. Ora does not formulate a vision of the future of Israel but
uses temimut, inner certitude, to find “a way out,” or to find an outlet through
which to express the common humanity that binds her to the other. Both Offer
and the Palestinian child whose life Sami is saving are resting in Ora’s bosom.
Ora’s Power inheres in her abjection. She is looking for a “way out,” a way to
live through temimut, by engaging in loving relationships, once she gains an
awareness that meaning has become a truism or a cage: “The big things—
time, destiny, God could sometimes be worn down by petty haggling” (Grossman 2010, 55). Ilan, Adam, and Offer are opposed to actions that do not further
a collective, national vision. Thus, they represent the average Israeli during
the periods of the second intifada and the second Lebanon war.
Ora signifies a unique, different performative speech-act. She practices
the hospitality of otherness. To support this argument, I will cite the following
example in which a “visitation,” in Derrida’s sense, takes place: Offer does not
know that Avram is his biological father, although Ora relates how she divulged the story of his genealogy to Offer when he was an infant, while: “he lay
down on me and listened with open eyes . . . and when I had finished telling
him everything, with the tip of my finger I slapped him under the nose on the
lip’s concavity so that he would forget everything that he had heard and start
new and tamim” (Grossman 2008a, 298, translation mine). Ora—the double of
the angel in the Jewish tradition—imparts divine knowledge to Offer, and
their relationship is charged with this divine spark. At the same time Ora (or
the angel) sublimates the pain that Avram bequeaths to Offer. The relationship of the mother and her son is grounded in abjection or in a loss of the
sacred that this sublimation recalls. If Offer turns out to be different from
Avram, so that his repressed memories of war and the death of desire do not
overwhelm him, then Ora will have successfully transmitted temimut, inner
certitude, not anxiety, to her son, and in so doing, will have enabled him to
extend hospitality to the other and, furthermore, to accept responsibility for
the other and be the host/hostage of the other.
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I have demonstrated how Ora—the protagonist and the voice around
which free, indirect discourse coheres in the novel15—causes temimut and
abjection to permeate one another. At the same time I show that temimut
resides in abjection. Ora’s position in the family and in Israeli politics is that of
the abject: she is the mother whose body is rejected and whose voice is
marginalized by the men who surround her. Through Ora’s abjection, these
men acquire a sense of identity and become socially active. Ora accepts
abjection but it does not deal her a fatal blow. On the contrary, as I’ve pointed
out, it is precisely Ora’s abjection that leads her to civil disobedience, and she
does not pursue desire, nor act on the basis of self-interest. Here, the union of
abjection and temimut reaches perfect pitch in Ora’s voice, as she relates the
life story of a family and of a nation, thus transforming the narrative of a
broken family and of a country enmeshed in political confusion into a universal tale that belongs to the personal and the national discourse. Through
Ora’s story, both entities take on emotional significance and carry literary
meanings.
I suggest that abjection may lead to hospitality: Ora attains the moral
stature of the host/hostage of the other because temimut resides in abjection,
and her wholesomeness or inner certitude enables her to undertake the kind
of political action that only the abject would agree to be a part of. Thus Ora
attains her unique voice, although this voice emerges not from the subject nor
from the object but from abjection.16 (In the interest of “full disclosure” I will
point out that, at the end of the novel, the third person narrator takes over.
This narrator articulates ideas circulating in the closed system of received
ideas in Israel. Thus the last two sentences of the book dissociate Ora from
temimut and bind her to anxiety and the repetition of the trauma: “Beneath
her body are the cool stone and the whole mountain, enormous and solid and
infinite. She thinks: How thin is the crust of Earth” (Grossman 2010, 651).)
IV.
In this context I wish to explain Lévinas’s notion of temimut (uprightness or
inner certitude) as what precedes ethics. Then I wish to continue to elucidate
Kristeva’s concept of abjection as a locus of meaning that precedes or goes
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beyond the subject’s relation to and dependence on objects. I will then show
that Lévinas’s ethics of temimut and Kristeva’s concept of abjection form
“fellow” theories that can be used to signify a similar relation to meaning and
to the other. In both of these theories the unknown, the unexpected becomes
the thing that the “I” renders hospitable. The “I” finds meaning in these
unknown realms of radical alterity and becomes responsible to radical alterity. This behavior toward alterity is before or beyond ethics as much as it is
before and beyond the separation between subject and object. As I have
shown, the joining together of these theories of mind and of ethics is foundational to my understanding of Grossman’s major works including To the End
of the Land and See Under: Love.
Abjection and temimut were simultaneously host and hostage to one
another in Grossman’s novel: Ora, the protagonist of To the End of the Land,
illustrated that temimut and abjection were the cocreators of hospitality.
I believe that the immemorial loss of the other, which functions in the
semiotic order, activates the temimut, which, in turn, foresees the sublimation
of desire when hospitality takes over the encounter with pure alterity. Thus,
Ora’s abjection is, on the one hand, the force that propels the narrative
forward. Indeed, her personal narrative endows the men in her life with
independence and the freedom to choose between practicing hospitality or
giving expression to their moral failings. On the other hand, and by the same
token, when these men—Ilan, Avram, Adam, and Offer—are immersed in
temimut, inner certitude, they make good on the promise that abjection brings
to their relationships with Ora. Ora finds meaning in primordial repression
and internalizes the unity and the separateness that exists in the relation of
the “I” to the other. Actions that are guided by such an internalization of
abjection are immersed in temimut or an openness to death and thus express
love for the other. All actions that extend hospitality to alterity are consubstantial to occupying the position of the excluded in relation to the symbolic
order in which political calculations precede any expression of openness to
alterity.
In “The Temptation of Temptation,” an exegesis of tractate Shabbath,
Lévinas defines temimut as a form of hospitality that distinguishes between
one who acts on the basis of inner certitude, that is, radical openness to
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alterity, and one who uses knowledge to set up a barrier between the “self” and
the world. The philosophical mind inevitably raises the possibility of questioning, of skepticism. As Lévinas writes:
We want to know before we do. . . . We do not want to undertake anything
without knowing everything, and nothing can become known to us unless we
have gone and seen for ourselves, regardless of the misadventures of the
exploration. We want to live dangerously but in security, in the world of truths.
Seen in this manner, the temptation of temptation is, as we have already said,
philosophy itself. It is a noble temptation, hardly a temptation anymore, more
in the nature of courage, courage within security, the solid basis of our old
Europe. (Lévinas 1990d, 34)
How can I know that the other person is honest, grounded in temimut, not in
philosophical temptation? (Here temimut designates integrity, uprightness, welcoming, and inner certitude.) How does one relate the ordinary to the realm of
ethics? According to Lévinas, temimut suggests that the human being is a psychoanalytical creature, that is, a creature whose acquisition of knowledge is
grounded in emotions and relationships with others, as well as in “ordinary
language,” to borrow a phrase from Stanley Cavell.17 An upright consciousness
practices hospitality even though the “philosophical” consciousness cannot
explain hospitality. Hospitality emerges from trauma, because trauma humanizes us; it teaches us to internalize the Other.18 This means that we feel
connected to the Other or that we immediately are intrigued by the Other or
that we emerge from our connection to the other be it the mother, the order of
signification, or simply the impersonal “il y a” or the “murmur” of existence
that precedes us. We aspire to be in touch with the other. Reasoning, on the
other hand, denies hospitality access to consciousness. One who has inner
certitude, temimut, practices hospitality because it expresses what his intellectual faculties cannot comprehend. Extending hospitality to the Other is
consubstantial with freedom of thought in a future world that will be created
when human beings assume responsibility for the Other.
Lévinas suggests that when the Israelites accepted the Torah with the
words “we will do and we will hear,” they undertook hospitality, that is, they
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accepted, the code of ethics of the Book, even before they had grasped, intellectually, the values inscribed therein. Hospitality is an ethical undertaking
because the Torah normalizes the relation to the other person, not to the
deity. The message is that the connection between two individuals must not
be based on self-centered calculations but rather on a sense of ethical interrelatedness. “To be without being a murderer,” Lévinas states (Lévinas 1990c,
100). Thus, the phrase “We will do and we will hear” essentially means that an
ethical relation to the other takes priority over freedom of choice, in this case
the choice of whether or not to assume responsibility for the other. The notion
of “beyond-freedom-and-constraint” (Lévinas 1990d, 40) is grounded in a
twofold temporality: internalizing the other is anterior (antérieure) to the
freedom in which a self will develop in the future, a self that, in turn, will be
inhabited by the tools necessary to discriminate between contradictory
routes of action. Such tools will thereby enable the self to practice exegesis.19
In “Loving the Torah More Than God,” Lévinas elaborates on this notion by
pointing out that “Confidence in a God Who is not made manifest through any
worldly authority can rely only on internal evidence and the value of an
education” (1990b, 144). This can be rephrased as temimut or inner certitude.
In “The Temptation of Temptation” Lévinas celebrates praxis when it
creates experience, for praxis unearths good even if it implies sin; doing good
does not emerge from knowing what is good for me. Temimut becomes available as a specific ethical response to the other; it reveals inner certitude in
relation to the good that prevails in acts of hospitality of the other:
The excellent choice that makes doing go before hearing does not prevent a
fall. . . . The sin here responds to temptation but is not tempted by temptation:
it does not question the certainty of good and evil. . . . The adherence to the
good of those who said “We will do and we will hear” is not the result of a choice
between good and evil. It comes before it. Evil can undermine this unconditional adherence to the good without destroying it. This adherence is incompatible with any position beyond or above the good, whether it be the immoralism of
the esthetes or politicians or the supra-moralism of the religious, all the moral
extraterritoriality opened up by the temptation of temptation. This undoubtedly indicates that the doing which is at stake here is not simply praxis as
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opposed to theory but a way of actualizing without beginning with the possible, of knowing without examining, of placing oneself beyond violence without
this being the privilege of a free choice. A pact with good would exist, preceding the alternative of good and evil. (Lévinas 1990d, 43)
Thus temimut relates the ego to the third (tiers): “To be a self is to be responsible beyond what one has oneself done” (1990d, 49). The personality does not
depend upon freedom of desire. Rather, the “personal form of being, its egoness, is a destruction of the crust of being” (49). The infinite distance between
the self and the other is inhabited by passivity, which serves as a testament to
the ethical relation extant between the self and the other. Thus, separation
protects temimut.20
While Lévinas, himself seemingly hostile to psychoanalysis, has already
been interpreted in conjunction with Lacan’s notion of the “neighbor” (Žižek
2005), I am trying to more fully explore the extent of affectivity in Lévinas’s and
Kristeva’s thought.
For Lévinas, temimut the human characteristic—equivalent to the nakedness of the face—can be interpreted in Lacanian terms as belonging to the
real. Lacan’s real is the order of loss and lack of signification, but it harbors the
need to get back in touch with either the imaginary (maternal function) or the
symbolic (the law of the father). Lévinas’s temimut precedes signification—
the Israelites obeyed the divinity before they understood the book—and propels the individual to become responsible or extend hospitality to the other.
Hence, I suggest, both in Lacan and in Lévinas in the real and in temimut the
relation to the other is beyond both desire and ethics. It emerges from a kind
of trauma that can be described as the subject’s “unconscious” articulation of
a primordial “yes,” in its encounter with the other. Associated with the biblical
Jacob who, in his dream, wrestles with an angel, temimut describes an encounter with the other that transcends anxiety. The “I” treats the other as if s/he
were God in an effort to wrest the blessing from and extend responsibility to
the other. Lévinas writes, “for I am always alone in being able to answer the
call, I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility. Being chosen
involves a surplus of obligations for which the ‘I’ of moral consciousness
utters. This is what is represented by the Jewish concept of Israel and the sense
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that it is a chosen people” (Lévinas 1990a, 177). Temimut is an affect that
belongs to the unconscious because it is grounded in inner certitude rather
than in conscious knowledge or calculation. What certifies that the Jews are
God’s chosen people? Is it not that they are willing to follow God’s commandments in the hope that this action will yield an ethical world in which the “I”
and the neighbor are responsible to each other in an immediate gesture that
elsewhere Lévinas calls immediate ethics (d’emblée éthique)? Temimut institutes a state of openness to alterity similar to Lévinas’s notion of responsibility and hospitality: hospitality of God’s word or what Derrida calls “visitation”
and responsibility of the other man or of man as radical alterity. Temimut does
not comprise knowledge brought forth by consciousness and the ego; rather,
it is intertwined with death as it is with love: “for love is strong as death” (Song
of Solomon 8:6).
Violence emerges from the other’s infinite desire: “What is an individual . . . if not a tree that grows without regard for everything it suppresses and
breaks, grabbing all the nourishment, air and sun. . . . What is an individual if
not a usurper?” (Lévinas 1990c, 100). One is within one’s rights when one seeks
to protect oneself from usurpation, which the other signifies. Yet, as we
emerge from trauma, we may, alternatively, unconsciously accept the other in
a gesture of recognition, or love. The unconscious is open to alterity even
when the other reveals itself as a “Thing” equal to death, in the words of Slavoj
Žižek (2005, 143). Lévinas suggests that to be ethical is to allow my weakness to
lead the way in my encounter with the other. Thus, I must be the host and the
hostage of the other. The nakedness and vulnerability of the face denotes a command: “But the relation to the face is immediate ethics [d’emblée éthique]. The
face is what we cannot shoot, or at least the thing in which the sense consists of
saying: ‘though shalt not kill’ [Tu ne tuera point]” (Lévinas 1982, 81, translation
mine). I must not assume that the other is responsible for me. At the same
time, the nakedness of my face expresses my essential passivity. I am responsible, moreover, for the other’s violence. Žižek writes:
Far from preaching an easy grounding of politics in the ethics of the respect
and responsibility for the Other, Lévinas instead insists on their absolute
incompatibility, on the gap separating the two dimensions: ethics involves an
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asymmetric relationship in which I am always-already responsible for the
Other, while politics is the domain of symmetrical equality and distributive
justice. (2005, 149)
V.
Both temimut and love signify unconditional acceptance of alterity because
each functions in a realm of repression. Repression contains memory traces of
the proximity and the separateness between the self and the other, or the
mother. In Grossman’s novel such unconditional acceptance of alterity is not
unlike the attribute that Kristeva calls abjection. For Kristeva abjection signifies primordial repression; abjection antedates the formation of the ego—it
burgeons in the “want” of a maternal function and in the absence of the words
of the father—yet it emerges from the rejection of this prehistoric “other.”
Abjection recalls the loss “of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me”
(Kristeva 1982, 2). Thus, the abjected self belongs to “A sacred configuration”
and “Fear cements [his] its compound, conjoined to another world . . . driven
out, forfeited” (Kristeva 1982, 6). In an earlier essay on Kristeva, I suggest that
abjection is that which power deploys to access the unconscious. Power may
thus regain the memory of what has become alienated and unfamiliar, and in
this process of recalling lost objects everything has significance:
Kristeva examines the mother’s posture in discourse and deduces that man is
subject to a moral imperative to explore memory traces in the unconscious
mind. Understanding the unconscious might teach the man of faith, the analysand, and the reader to assign significance to the affects pain, sorrow and
loss, and this understanding will give meaning to ideas such as love and
concern for the other; ideas on which human existence is founded. (Alphandary 2009, 231)
Abjection signifies the individual’s efforts to turn the death of the self—
brought about by the rejection of the mother and of the law of the father—into
a form of resurrection. One finds meaning in identifying with alterity, although alterity emerges neither from the integrity of the self nor from anxiety
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but from the meanings that preside in repression. One seeks to express these
meanings and to expose a new language to the light of day. Lévinas’s temimut
implies hospitality when one cannot employ given meanings in response to
alterity. Hospitality occurs in the face of an absence of known meanings. The
excess of the encounter with alterity emerges from temimut. For Lévinas, the
Hebrew noun temimut describes the relation of patriarchy to morality, and,
specifically, to hospitality, while for Kristeva abjection exists in relation to
maternity and signifies the semiotic expression of drive energy.
If, for Lévinas, the individual is prone to murder because desire is infinite,
then for Kristeva the abject appears when the separation between the self and
the other cannot be maintained because primal repression has brought about
the collapse of desire. Here meaning can emerge only through accessing the
abject by inventing new forms of language, which signify abjection as that
which transgresses the word of the father. Literature and testimony are imbued with such new forms of expression. Kristeva writes:
In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the esthetic task—a descent into
the foundations of the symbolic construct—amounts to retracing the fragile
limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless “primacy”
constituted by primal repression. Through the experience, which is nevertheless managed by the Other, “subject” and “object” push each other away,
confront each other, collapse and start again—inseparable, contaminated,
condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great
Modern literature unfolds over that terrain: Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont,
Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Célin. (1982, 18)
At the same time, abjection resides in temimut, as it is related to the logos. In
the Bible temimut is the essence of the patriarch Jacob. Indeed, the word tam
(the root of temimut) is used to refer to Jacob, as it is written: “and Jacob was a
plain man (ish tam)” (Genesis 25:27). Because Jacob is tam, in his dream his
wrestling with the angel is identical to wresting the blessing from divinity.
Jacob subsequently receives the name Israel, and so his temimut acquires
moral and national significance. Hospitality emerges from temimut because
temimut is related to the home and the hearth. Jacob was “dwelling in tents
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(yoshev ohalim)” (Genesis 25:27). The domestic sphere is where abjection
germinates. Jacob’s successful repression of the body of the mother—or his
ability to belong to the sphere of the feminine in which processes of abjection
constantly take place—revivifies otherness in him and makes his relationship
with the neighbor more pliant, more feminine. In Jacob, otherness does not
generate anxiety but hospitality. In Jacob’s struggle with the other he is passive—he accepts a new name, Israel—and survives the cessation of his identity. He also takes responsibility for this interaction with the angel and from
this “visitation,” in Derrida’s language, he emerges as the father of the nation
of Israel. Hospitality inheres in the formation of a new relation of self to the
other: hospitality inheres in processes of abjection because a new relation of
the self to the other transpires through abjection. It is interesting to note that
in Derrida’s analysis of Lévinas’s philosophical work, the concept of the abject
does not come up. And yet, Derrida finds that in Lévinas’s texts the integrity of
the self and of the you, as well as the condition of the I–Thou, are subject to
rupture. This rupture causes the neighbor or the other to reside in the I; an I
that is always already displaced. Derrida states: “and thus . . . a certain femininity, a certain experience of ‘feminine alterity’ [belongs to] the proximity of
the neighbor” (Derrida 1999a, 60). Here, too, temimut, the patriarchal precursor of ethics between self and other, is related to abjection, the matriarchal
precursor of a search for meaning beyond the relation of subject and object.
VI.
Through his novel, Grossman conveys to his readers, on both a conscious and
an unconscious level, that he feels himself to be inhabited by a temimut that
also implies abjection. In his essay “Writing in the Dark,” written in the
aftermath of the death of his son, Grossman clearly states that the disaster
is alienating. On July 9, 2008, Tel Aviv University hosted a one-day conference
devoted to Grossman’s oeuvre. In his closing remarks that day Grossman
compared the novel To the End of the Land to his personal tragedy. He spoke
about the fact that after the “Shiva” (the seven days of mourning) he felt
compelled to continue writing because, as he explained, through the act of
writing he is uplifted from the state of the victim of an arbitrary death and
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transformed into a free man. “For as long as you are writing you are not a
victim,” Grossman stressed (2008b, translation mine). As I understand him,
what Grossman is saying here is this: for as long as he signifies a different
outlook or a relation of difference toward the irresponsibility that war introduces to a culture—despite the personal catastrophe that he has suffered—
Grossman maintains temimut in his life as an Israeli and does not surrender to
the death drive that permeates political activity in Israel. Hence, in “Writing in
the Dark” Grossman asserts, “What remain are the clichés we use for describing our enemy and ourselves; the clichés that are, ultimately, a collection of
superstitions and crude generalizations, in which we capture ourselves and
entrap our enemy” (Grossman 2007, 2). Grossman compares himself to Don
Quixote, in that he seeks to create speech-acts that defy the regular deprivation of the freedom of creating one’s own speech. He aspires to perform
speech-acts that host creativity, not alienation.
I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel
a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to
arbitrariness I am granted freedom—maybe the only freedom a man may
have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your
own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its
fossilizing definitions. (2007, 5)
Clearly, Grossman associates the semiotic to the symbolic, in the language
of Kristeva, or to drive energy, which registers in acts of dependency that
generate clichés. In his novel, ordinary language hosts otherness and thus
it is singular and articulates selfhood and encompasses self-expression. As
I indicated in the beginning, reading Grossman makes me see that literature emerges from the bond between abjection and temimut.
VII.
I have argued that temimut, a synonym of hospitality, can be applied to
political considerations, although the trait emerges from the unconscious
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mind and harbors a kind of traumatism. I associated this traumatism with
Kristeva’s concept of abjection. For Kristeva, abjection does not only cause the
rejection of the distinction between the self and the other but is, in fact,
responsible for the production of meaning. One expresses an immediate “yes”
in the encounter with the other person. This is also true of temimut or inner
certitude that leads the way to action in the encounter with the other. I think
that “immediate ethics” (d’emblé éthique), in the language of Lévinas,
emerges when temimut and abjection cross paths.
In David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land, temimut and abjection
are cocreators of plot, character, and voice. In the novel—because Ora, a
female, belongs to and institutes the relation of temimut to abjection—the
political outlook establishes a different relation to otherness or a relation of
difference to the objects of the ego and to the other person. In this sense,
Grossman’s work articulates new ethical imperatives, and he subordinates
the subject to hospitality and responsibility.21
NOTES
1. During a visit at the Palestinian university of Bir Zeit Grossman uses sentences such as,
“Hard work is in the air of this small campus, an atmosphere of study . . . I wrote the
following in my notebook: ‘There is no idleness. Not like the campus quadrangles I know.
Here they seem somehow determined. Even during their breaks’” (Grossman 1988, 57–58).
This language is pressing, for it depicts the privacy, seriousness, and usefulness of the
Palestinian academicians. It is the opposite of the superstition that Israelis hold on to,
namely that the universities incite the students to throw stones and burn tires. Another
example of the new language that Grossman advances is related to a small community of
Palestinians who were deported from their land in 1948 but were returned to it in 1972: “and
they perhaps are the only ones to have returned from refugee life to that of human beings,
and they can testify to the differences, and can say something about the chances for
reconciliation and forgiveness. I went there” (1988, 65). As early as 1988 Grossman is
thinking about forgiveness and reconciliation between Palestinians and the Israeli perpetrators. Grossman uses his accurate language to flog the Israelis, too, not just to praise the
Palestinians: “I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation
by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life
wretched. What happened to us?” (212). At the same time Grossman’s language discloses
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unique sensibilities to Holocaust survivors when it captures their difference from Sabras, a
difference that Sabras wanted to eliminate becomes present, presentable, and even valuable in Grossman’s novel See Under: Love. For example, when the narrator Momik, who is
about nine years old, is at home waiting for his parents who are Holocaust survivors to get
back from work, a specific anxiety presides in both the child and the parents. This anxiety
signifies that at any moment people could simply disappear and not get back home from
work. Thus, rather than play with friends the young Momik thinks about his parents. They
appear like Eastern Europeans in his imagination, not like Israelis. When he imagines his
mother speaking to his father at work Hebrew is mangled with Yiddish and the language
issuing is the following, “It makes my head ache to watch you krechzing and spinning like a
top, Tuvia, as a certain person we know says to another person” (Grossman 1990, 47). But
anxiety truly pervades the parents; it is not just the figment of the imagination of a child
who is left on his own too often: “and then finally the living-room clock strikes seven . . . and
Momik’s heart races and he counts the steps from the lottery booth to the house but more
slowly because they have trouble walking . . . and exactly when he predicts it (almost), he
heard the gate creaking in the yard and Papa’s cough, and a moment later the door opened
and there stood Mama and Papa who quietly said hello, and with their coats still on, and
their gloves and the boots lined with nylon bags, their eyes devoured him, and even though
Momik could actually feel himself being devoured, he just stood there quietly and just let
them do it because he knew that was what they needed” (48).
2. My opinion is directly opposed to the one expressed by Hillel Halkin, who argues that The
Yellow Wind is a work “of political reportage and journalism . . . centered on the IsraeliPalestinian conflict” (2004, 3). Halkin does not relate this work to literature.
3. It is important to mention that Derrida thinks “even about the work of mourning as a
process of hospitality” (2002, 358). This means that dividing the country between the two
people comprises mourning, not just the thrill of achieving a peace treaty.
4. Derrida adds that the concept of enmity is inherent in the concept of hospitality. He argues
that what works hospitality, “within it [en son dedans], like a Trojan horse, the enemy
(hostis) as much as the avenir, intestine hostility, is indeed a contradictory conception, a
thwarted [contrariée] conception, or a contraception of awaiting, a contradiction of welcoming itself” (2002, 359). In this sense the offer of hospitality to the enemy country implies
that Israel is the rightful owner of the land and it feels strong enough to negotiate a ceasefire
with the Lebanese.
5. Again it is important to cite Derrida’s analysis of hospitality’s relation to the concept
“invitation”: “and we will see or recall in a moment that if hospitality seems linked to the act
of invitation, to the inviting of invitation, one must also make a note [prendre acte] of this:
that radical hospitality consists, would have to consist, in receiving without invitation,
beyond or before the invitation . . . It is to death that hospitality destines itself—death thus
also bearing the figure of visitation without invitation, or of haunting well- or ill-come,
coming for good or ill [la hantise bien ou mal venue]” (2002, 360).
6. Ora’s quotidian life courts what Hannah Arendt would call a political “miracle.” Arendt
writes: “If the meaning of politics is freedom, that means that in this realm—and in no
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other—we do indeed have the right to expect miracles” (2005, 114). According to this view,
the future is bound up with human spontaneity, which is imbued with temimut. Also
important is the fact that in Derrida’s interpretation of Lévinas’s work he asks if the subject
can be responsible for the fact that when s/he belongs to an ontological tradition and to
historical contingency, then these are swayed by ethical considerations? Clearly, in Ora’s
case the ontological tradition is subordinate to “an ethics of hospitality, to a phenomenological analysis of the welcome, to the height of the face” (Derrida 1999a, 58).
7. In some of the citations from the novel the translation is either modified or done by me, as
indicated in parentheses.
8. In Hebrew, one of the translations of the word Offer is a Fawn or a lad. The name also
institutes alliteration with the English offering or the gift.
9. According to Lévinas the survivor’s testimony is pervaded by temimut and is opposed to the
philosophical traditions of knowledge and evidence. The survivor becomes the host/hostage of otherness in a world in which testimony does not reenact the trauma but extends
hospitality to the other person “outside all calculation, as neighbor, as first come” (1990d,
35). Temimut both emerges from testimony and is itself a witness; it is anterior to the
development of the ethical self. Thus, both temimut and testimony belong to the real and
are found before-and-beyond reality; both are charged with an excess of the real out of
which they were born.
10. The British mandate in Palestine did not destroy settlements that were built overnight and
had a wall and a tower.
11. In Donner la mort, published in 1999, Derrida distinguishes between the ego as what is clear
and known to me and what is unknown or obscured. Kant’s autonomy like Descartes’s
cogito signifies the known part of the self. Freud’s id propels us to ask, Who am I? “Question
du moi: ‘qui suis-je’? non plus au sens de ‘qui suis-je’ mais de ‘qui est ‘je’? qui peut dire ‘qui’?
qu’est-ce que le ‘je’ et que devient la responsabilité quand en secret tremble l’identité du
‘je’?” (Derrida 1999b, 127). (A question of me: “who am I”? no longer in the sense of “who am
I” but as “who is the I”? who may say “who”? what is the “I” and what becomes the
responsibility when in secrecy trembles the identity of “I”?) (Translation mine.)
12. Ora’s view of reality will be adjusted later in the novel. It will become clear that Sami is very
impatient with her because she is an Israeli and a Jew but she is right to suggest that both of
them understand that in order to defy catastrophe Israelis and Arabs have to collaborate
with each other.
13. Here temimut coincides with abjection: “it [abjection] means that there are lives not
sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion,”
Kristeva asserts (1982, 6).
14. For Winnicott objects that have an emotional significance for the infant become the first,
“‘not-me possession,’ which I am calling the transitional object” (Winnicott 1971, 4).
15. Ora is what Gérard Genette would call the novel’s “internal focalization.” Under the subchapter “Focalisations,” Genette characterizes the internal focalization: “Le second sera le
récit à focalisation interne, qu’elle soit fixe . . . variable . . . ou multiple” (Genette 1972, 206–7).
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16. It is possible to take issue with my insistence that in Ora’s actions we see the emergence of
a new position that unites temimut and abjection and hence undertakes a radical form of
hospitality of the other. Does Ora act out of self-interest? It might be that Ora agrees to
Sami’s demands not because she thinks it is the moral thing to do but because she wants
Sami to drive her somewhere and only by agreeing to Sami’s demands can her desires be
met. This is neither Kantian duty nor Lévinasian temimut. I suggest that such an interpretation of Ora’s actions disregards the unique traits of her character. It disregards her
speech. It also ignores the changes that she undergoes as she becomes close to the child and
undertakes responsibility to safely take him to the hospital. Lévinas insists that temimut
becomes crucial when experience has an effect on us so that we cease to be skeptical, stop
rationalizing, and become available to the other. This is precisely the change that Ora
undergoes.
17. In his study of Emerson and Wittgenstein, for example, Cavell refers to Wittgenstein as a
philosopher of culture. And in order to understand the relation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to this new outlook that he proposes Cavell states, “I think of them [the
investigations] as different directions of answer to the questions: What is the everydayness
or ordinariness of language? And What is a form of life?” (Cavell 1989, 32). Cavell wants to
“find a measure of Wittgenstein’s originality in the originality of his approach to the
everyday” (34). But, of course, all of Cavell’s writings about philosophy, literature, film, and
psychoanalysis study the philosophy of the everyday.
18. Derrida’s study of hospitality is helpful in this context. Derrida asserts that hospitality
includes two competing notions that cannot be assimilated by a Hegelian dialectic. The
“visitor and invited, visitation and invitation, are simultaneously in competition and incompatible” (2002, 362). He explains that waiting does not occur in the face of the known
but in relation to an unexpected visitation and that the waiting continues infinitely: “To
wait without waiting, awaiting absolute surprise, the unexpected visitor, awaited without
the horizon of expectation: this is indeed about the Messiah as hôte” (362). Yet Derrida also
distinguishes his understanding of hospitality from Lévinas’s understanding of this concept. In
parentheses he mentions: “Levinas always says that the other, the other man, man as the other
is my neighbor, my universal brother, in humanity” (363). Derrida asks if the radical other must
be my neighbor, the other man. “For even if Levinas disjoints the idea of fraternity from the idea
of the ‘fellow [seblable]’ and the idea of neighbor [prochain] or of proximity from the idea of
non-distance, of non-distancing, of fusion and identity, he nonetheless maintains that the
hospitality of the hôte as well as that of the hostage must belong to the site of the fraternity of the
neighbor” (363). For Derrida, hosting could be referred to an animal in the manner of how Noah,
on God’s words, extends hospitality to animals.
19. In the same vein, interpretation or exegesis shows that an inspired work of art exists in the
form of hospitality. “Don’t great thoughts become clear through great experiences? Don’t
we moderns say: Here are the circumstances that finally made me understand such and
such a saying in Pascal or Montaigne? Aren’t the great texts great precisely because of their
capacity to interact with the events and experiences that shed light on them and which they
guide?” (Lévinas 1990a, 41).
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20. In his book Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida argues that for Lévinas the other
brings both the “unknown” and infinity into the finite, mortal self. But the other does not
signify the negative limit of knowledge, that which is unknown because of lack of factual
knowledge. Derrida articulates the Lévinasian categories of thought, which define the
unknown that the other brings to the self as the stuff of which true friendship is made. “This
non-knowledge is the element of friendship or hospitality for the transcendence of the
stranger, the infinite distance of the other” (1999a, 8). Derrida sums up the meaning of
temimut as it appears in the exegesis to Tractate Shabbath. The innovation of Lévinas’s
thought has to do with the fact that, for him, the face of the other comprises absolute
interiority (antériorité) in relation to the self and the state, or the land. “Yes, ethics before
and beyond ontology, the State, or politics, but also ethics beyond ethics” (4). This is why
Derrida asserts that Lévinas’s “The Temptation of Temptation” helps to distinguish between sacredness and holiness and to make clear that the sacredness of the other is
superior to the holiness of the land, even if it is a holy land. In addition, death does not break
the relation to the other but merely transforms the other into one who does not reply to me.
The dead person is the one whose response to the self emerges from the fact that her/his
words and deeds continue to live within the self; the other is alive within the self. This is the
reason that the survivor is the one who remains without a response. This is the origin of the
survivor’s pain; this is also the origin of the survivor’s responsibility and of the richness or
plenitude of the survivor’s temimut. “Death: not, first of all, annihilation, non-being, or
nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivor of the ‘without-response’” (6).
21. As I indicated, tam, the root of temimut, appears in the novel and is opposed to superstition,
anxiety.
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