Memento (On Writing) by Theodor Adorno

A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, ‘in his thoughts’, he forgets to say what he wants.

No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.

One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists. Has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigor will benefit other ideas at present repressed. Just as, at table, one ought not to eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one is suspected of poverty.

The desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of they 19^th century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: utterly and completely, for better or worse, implemented and effected. For in them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of being dammed up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer’s expressions. This applies not only to combinations of words, but to the construction of whole forms. If a dialectician, for example, marked the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a ‘But’ at each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the un-schematic intention of his thought.

The thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that result merely  from esoteric complacency. Between the desire for a complex style adequate to the depth of its subject matter, there lies no obvious distinction: suspicious probing is always salutary. Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style. Locke’s platitudes are no justification for Hamann’s obscurities.

Should the finished text, not matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute of doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.

The Echternach dancing procession is not the march of the World Spirit;* limitation and reservation are no way to represent the dialectic. Rather, the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction.

Scepticism is called for in the face of the frequently raised objection that a text, a formulation, are ‘too beautiful’. Respect for the matter expressed, or even for suffering, can easily rationalize mere resentment against a writer unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity. The dream of an existence without shame, which the passion for language clings to even though forbidden to depict its content, is to be maliciously strangled. The writer ought not to acknowledge any distinction between the beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all ‘too beautiful’, but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishly serving only the matter in hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter as well.

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen subject, others begin to glow.

In his text, the writer sets up a house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content and irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live in. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but now is left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

* Echternach is a town in Luxemburg, whose dance procession at Whitsun advances in a movement of three steps forward and two steps backward.

American Political Polemics by Theodor Adorno

Adorno characterizes the polemics of the obscure radio evangelist Martin Luther Thomas as fascist, whose broadcasts and sermons were mounted with the intent of subverting Democracy and institutions of  State authority by means of brutal, sadistic oppression. The book presents and analyzes various types of polemical devices that this preacher and others used during the 1930S to achieve their goals. These devices, however, are not unique to a fascist program, but common to the American politics generally and can be examined as the basis of many a successful campaign, especially for President, though the intents of the candidates may not be fascist at all or, in any case, do not necessarily result in any lasting fascist outcome. Or, at least, one might hope that the Constitution, the carefully crafted balance of Powers and our independent judiciary would ultimately prevent the worst of consequences when one demagogue or the other wins an election.


Adorno defends Enlightenment principles when he contrasts the ideals of  intellectual freedom, the independence of individual judgment, the capacity to absorb abstract arguments, and the pursuit of autonomous logical process against the myth, magic, idolatry and animism- with  their under-currents of paganism, sectarian religious theology and other ‘non-civilized religion of nature’ elements- in popular political discourse.  In Adorno’s view the masses of lower middle class Americans, in the thrall of the modern forces of industrial production, unable to discern the ambiguities, substitutions and inconsistencies of the fascist polemics,  are persuaded by such unreasonable appeals to surrender, through various subliminal processes, their powers in a democratic state in a sort of ‘blind obedience’ to the self-interest of the fascist agitator or beloved leader whose efforts, never-the-less, rarely meet with total or lasting success.

I will proceed with a brief over-view of the polemical devices in question. First,

Political candidates characteristically indulge in loquacious statements about themselves. Their talk is personal. Not only does it refer to the immediate interests of their listeners, but it also encompasses the sphere of privacy of the speaker who thus seems to take the listeners into his confidence and thus bridges the gap  of the abstract detachment involved in any objective discussion of the collective issues in a campaign. He often dwells upon his “also being a human being”. That is to say, in some respects as weak as his prospective adherents, exposing his or her own unrequited emotional responses to the social problems and blaring injustices of past and current affairs.  This helps establish a faux sense of affinity or sympathy between the candidate and his audience.

Politicians often characterize themselves as  a kind of ‘lone wolf’, struggling against mighty and often concealed opposition or inconstancy, not beholding to the establishment racket and thus playing up their own courage and integrity in order to win the confidence of those who feel they are underdogs and alone in their struggles.  They play upon the public distrust of the manipulations by the present power within the systems of communications and party, emphasizing their own uncorrupted loyalties to the public interest.

At the same time, a candidates self-advertisements and egotistical preenings, which often put his or her actual training, erudition or political  experience into the background, are often vague enough to leave room for any kind of fantasy and contradictory conceptions on the part of his listeners. This serves to herd together different types of listeners who are willing to follow him or her blindly, the less exactly they know who she (or he) is and stands for. Generally, the try to project innocence, honesty and unselfishness, together with untiring devotion to the cause.

Rather than presenting themselves overtly as a savior or superior, social agents, most politicians go with the meme of a messenger, an initiator, a ‘drummer’, a representative of something greater than him or herself. This introjects the proper note of humility into the politicians ambitions to power, side-stepping the potential damaging effects of ‘oriental’ patriarchalism or intimations that the candidate might be a despot in the making. Probably the best self-representation a politician can have is that of “a great little man”- he who walked unrecognized in the paths of other folks but who is finally revealed as  one who will‘ baptize’  America with the forces of change.  In America ‘incognito’ is relative, some sort of prior name-recognition in the early phases of a campaign is useful, celebrity can be good as long as it is not too closely associated with failed political enterprises.

The last character self-representation a politician in America likes to project, Adorno suggests, is the ‘good old time device.’ The American cult of novelty is likely to produce a sort of resentment within all those who cannot participate in the latest blessings of technical civilization, whereas even those who do participate in modern technology life appears to become colder and more frantic by the sweep of progress. A politician will often try to compensate for this feeling by emphasizing the old-fashioned and the homely as being genuine, traditional and as having  sort of patina which novelties don’t have. Certain unglamorous values and interests can be glamorized. New products can be spun as having palpable affinities with old ones.

Thsee character representations are probably the most important in any national campaign in America but there are many others which are crucial for success.

One trick is to establish the perception that the campaign is ‘a movement’ that has more general implications in social and cultural relations than can be encompassed by specific legislative proposals, policy debates or bureaucratic reforms, and reduces the needs to discuss the rather more complicated matters of government in a modern industrial society comprised of hundreds of millions of distinct individuals. Thus the voters are seduced into the notion that something really big is going on that has a life of its own, almost as if it were a natural phenomena, a new turning point in the evolution of human society itself.

At the same time other politicians often communicate their messages ‘atomistically with a host of isolated, logically unconnected statements that avoid the impression of any consistent structure of thought. There are a whole range of devices used for this purpose including ‘red-herrings’, bogeymen, scape-goats, slippery slopes, conspiracy theories and the deployment of various other name-calling tactics, including epithetical uses of the term ‘radical’, red-baiting and more or less incoherent appeals to sectarian interests. The resistance of voters to such appeals can be moderated by the use of polls that, through the manipulations and aggregations of the snap judgments of no personal consequence to respondents, “ majority opinion’  can be made to appear supportive of a candidates or parties’ position. Attacks on bureaucratization, the opacity of the system of taxes and its always ‘excessive burden’ as well as fear-mongering external enemies are also popular approaches to winning elected office.  If the ‘forces’ of Enlightenment (as Adorno would have it) happen to present any significant challenge to such representations as serving the public interest then a politician can always claim that customary standards of civility have been broached and that he or she, above all, represent the ideal program for sustaining a ‘safe’ status quo: bi-partisanship, or even non-partisanship, though only a few exceptionally naïve voters will fall for that, so that it is only maintained for brief periods of exceptional crisis.

After they are elected to the Presidency, most candidates rely on the tendency of Americans to think that there is a kind of natural, inherent authority in the office, they are leaders because they hold the formal position of leadership, especially from the members of the Party from which he or she were elected, no matter what they do or say.   When members of the opposite party do not provide any degree of natural deference to the office as embodied in the person of the President, a great hue and cry is raised, as if the core value of American society –fair play- had been grievously violated. One can certainly imagine Adorno responding: “What [god-damned] fair play do you think you are talking about ?”

From the back of the hall one can also imagine John Gray hollering’ What the [fuck] kind of fair play are YOU talking about!”

The Invention of God by Thomas Romer

When we speak of the ‘invention of God’ [monotheism] we should not image that a group of Bedouins  met one day and huddled around an oasis to create a god for themselves, or that some scribes, much later, invented Yahweh out of whole cloth, so to speak, as their tutelary god. Rather this “invention” should be understood progressive construction arising out of a particular tradition. Think of this tradition as a series of sedimentary strata gradually laid down over the course of time, which is then sometimes disrupted by historical events that disturb the orderly sequence of layers, allowing something new and unexpected to emerge. If we try, then, to understand how the discourse about this god developed and how he eventually became “one God”, we can observe a kind of “collective invention,” a process in which the conception was continually revised in the light of particular, changing social and historical contexts.

Neither should we speak of “Jews’ or “Judaism before the end of the Persian era, or even before the Hellenistic period, because it was only towards the end of the fourth century that we find a religious system in place that is at all like what one designates today as “Judaism.” So it is better to avoid using the term “Jew” and “Judaism” for the earlier periods, but instead speak of “Israelite” or “Judean.”

Putting this in an archeological context, the beginnings of the history of Israel in the thirteenth century fall into the time of transition from the Late  Bronze to the Iron Age. In the middle of the second millennium (@1,500 BCE) the Levant was controlled by Egypt. It was organized politically into city-states whose minor kings were vassals of the pharaoh. There also existed some groups with minimal integration, notably the “apiru”, who lived on the margins of the political system, in conflict with one or another of the minor Canaanite kings or chiefs or serving as potential forced laborers for the Egyptians. Egyptian texts also mention “shasu” , nomads, and they sometimes use the term Yhw to characterize them. Scholars have often tried to connect this them – probably a toponym- with the name Yahweh, which was to become the name of the god of Israel.

[ Romer then states the classical explanation of the collapse of late Bronze Age civilization:] The end  of the thirteenth century was marked by upheavals during which the city-states collapsed. New populations, ‘the people of the sea” arriving from the Aegean Sea or from Anatolia, the Philistines as the Bible and we call them, established themselves on the southern coast of Canaan : Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ekron. At the beginning of the first millennium in the whole of the Levant there gradually came into being an exchange economy that replaced the previously existing subsistence economy.

[However, this old hypothesis has recently been challenged, by Eric Cline in “1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed”. The Palace cultures of the Mediterranean littoral in the Late Bronze  between whom there were intensive exchanges of luxury goods collapsed on their own weight due to the limited capacities of their agricultural base and the center of power shifted closer to the Fertile Crescent or continental , regions: Hittites, Assyrians ,Babylonians and Persians, nix the  ‘Sea Peoples’.]

[ The period between the collapse of late Bronze Age Civilization through the Assyrian and Babylonian ascendency the peoples of Israel and Judah practiced various and evolving forms of polytheism.]

IN 539 the Persian king Cyrus took the city of Babylon, putting an end to the Babylonian Empire. His religious policy was ‘liberal’ in that he permitted the reconstruction of destroyed temples and allowed populations deported to returned to their respective countries. Cyrus is celebrated as the ‘Messiah” sent by the god of Israel in texts that are appended to the scrolls of the prophet Isaiah, which are often called “Deutero-Isaiah.” The Persians granted the Judean community the same cultural and religious autonomy they accorded other peoples who were integrated into the empire. The Temple of Jerusalem was rebuilt at the end of the sixth or the beginning of the fifth century, and it is under the influence of the Golah, the Judean exiles in Babylon who returned to Judea, that a quasi-theocratic temple-centered organization of political and religious life was put in place. Many of the Judean exiles preferred to remain in Babylon, and various documents found there indicate that these Judeans belonged to the comfortable strata of that city and were fully integrated into its life. Until the arrival of Islam, Babylon was to remain an intellectual center of Judaism, as indicated by the Babylonian Talmud. In the same way the strong Judean presence in Egypt was in no way diminished. Thus Judaism from its very birth was a religion of the diaspora, and was to continue as such during the Hellenistic era around the whole of the Mediterranean basin.

To grasp the complexity of ancient religiosity- that is in the pre-Hellenic era before the conquests of Alexander (356-323 BCE)- we must distinguish three levels of analysis. First of all, at the level of the individual, the family, or the clan, one turned to divine protectors, personal gods, and deified ancestors, and others. There is no need for a sanctuary or temple here: the pater familia takes care of ritual acts. The grouping together of several clans brings forth a new level of religious activity that is practiced at a local level. There are local sanctuaries; these are not generally very important and are often in the open air. It is these local  sanctuaries against which certain biblical texts conduct a fierce polemic, calling them cults “on every hill” and “under every green tree.” Religion on the national level is expressed in a set of cult ceremonies of which the king is a mediator, and it is organized around a national god and other deities who are associated with him in one way or another.

Regarding the third level, one important question is whether, from the early part of the first millennium up until  the end of the eighth, with the ascendency of the Assyrians in Canaan, the official royal cult was the same in Israel and Judah. Some specialists in biblical studies think that the cult of Yhwh in Judah was in effect very different from that of Israel: the Yhwh of Israel was worshipped rather on the model of Baal, that is, as the god of storms and fertility, whereas in the south, he has incorporated the traits of the older sun god who was the tutelary deity of Jerusalem. This picture needs qualification – rather than strict opposition- it is more likely that there were differences in relative emphasis in the culst in the north, different constellations of gods associated with Yhwh. In Judah there seems to have been a conception of Yhwh that combined the traits of a storm god with the attributes of a solar deity. Human sacrifices were offered to Yhwh in times of military crisis. Towards the end of the eighth century he began to assert his superiority over the gods of the underworld.

 Representations of Yhwh in the north (statues, images on seals and so forth) have long been considered simply idolatrous and “deviant’. At first Yhwh was worshiped as a “Baal,’ a storm God, who resembled the god Baal of Ugarit. He was not the only god worshipped in Israel; probably he was subordinated to El. Under the Omrides two ba’alim were in competition with each other: the Phoenician Baal and the Baal Yhwh. Later Yhwh seems to have integrated the attributes of El and also some features of a solar deity. He became ba’al shamen, a “Lord of the Heavens. Up until the fall of Samaria in 722, the cult of Yhwh was not exclusive. At any rate El was often represented as a Bull  and was considered the father of many gods. There is plenty of evidence that the gods in both the north and south were represented in statues, stereotypically,  so it is hard to tell which  gods particular statues or other images represent.

To be the only true god means to have no partners. Thus, Yhwh is traditionally considered to be an “unmarried’ god, and the allusions to goddesses in the Bible, notably to Asherah, have been interpreted as referring to non-Yawhists cults. This is the way the editors of the Bible finally decided to present matters. For historians, however, the situation looks different . . . the goddess Asherah was associated with Yhwh as his patredros (assessor) and also worshipped independently of him, especially by women, in the form of the “Queen of Heaven’. It is only with the beginning of the reign of Josiah (640-609) we will find Yhwh alone without his Asherah, at least in the official cults of Israel and Judah.

No one knows for sure why the Assyrians failed to capture Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century. Whatever the situation was, in  the consciousness of Judeans this quasi-defeat was transformed into a triumphant victor.y These events of 701 are the origin of the symbolic importance of Jerusalem as the city of Yhwh. First of all, it is this intervention of the Assyrians in Judah that in fact caused a centralization of the cult and the administration in Jerusalem, the only city in Judah that the Assyrians did not conquer. The fact that Jerusalem was spared also gives rise to the “theology of the remnant” we find in Isaiah: this theological view asserts that in all the cataclysms of history Yhwh has always protected a “remnant’ in Jerusalem. The events of 701 signify a strengthening of the theology of Zion, the idea that Yhwh will always watch over his sacred mountain. It is this theology of the uniqueness of Jerusalem and the hill of the Temple that will later become the foundation for the centralization of the cult of Yhwh.

The period of reform between the decline of the Assyrian influence in Israel and Judah and conquest by the Babylonians- said to be the work of King Josiah- though not lastingly established- was one of the most important historical moments in the evolution of the cult of Yhwh. From that time on, Yhwh became “one” god (not unique, but singular) and Jerusalem became the only place in which his sacrificial cult could be legitimately practiced :’There is only the Yhwh of Jerusalem, there is no Yhwh of  Samaria, Teman, Bethel and so on’. The can be no other temples other than the Temple of Jerusalem and ‘one’ tribe (the kingdom) of Judah. A history written during the reign of Josiah may be the first version of the life of Moses . Paradoxically, it is the Assyrians, deeply detested as they are by the biblical authors, who furnished a large part of the material needed to construct this literature and who thus contribute to forging the new image of Yhwh.

The reforms of Josiah mark  in a broad sense the beginning of Judaism, because of the theologically central place given Jerusalem in his reforms, the affirmation of the unity of Yhwh, which is recited in Jewish prayers to this day, and finally, the monidolatric idea of the exclusive worship of Yhwh, which can easily mutate into monotheism.

After the death of Josiah in 609, the Babylonians quickly took control of the Levant, although the Egyptians tried to contest them for a short time. By surrendering in a timely fashion the complete destruction of Jerusalem was avoided  in 597 but the Babylonians instituted a policy of large scale deportations,. The king was exiled with the court elite: high officials, clergy, artisans. After a misguided revolt, the Babylonians completely destroyed the Temple, the city and the walls of Jerusalem, several other cities in Judah and organized a second deportation (587 BCE).

The events of 597 and 587/586 must have produced a major crisis in the collective identity of the Judeans, The destruction of Jerusalem and the movements of population were significant, but it is also true that they mainly effected the members of the elite, who were deported, rather than the rural population and the poor who remained in the country. The elites and particularly the royal officials and been cut off from their source of power, the traditional political and ideological pillars of a monarchial state in the ancient Near East had collapsed generally. The king had been deported, the Temple destroyed, and the geographical integrity of Judah was compromised by deportations and voluntary emigration. One way of explaining the situation was the the gods of Babylon were stronger, and had won a victory over the national god Yhwh, who had clearly been defeated. Another possible explanation was that Yhwh had abandoned his people.

Different groups in the Judean aristocracy tried to deal with and overcome the crisis by producing ideologies that endowed the fall of Judah with theological meaning. We can order these attempts according to a model proposed by Armin Steil. Steil, who was influenced by Max Weber, developed his model by analyzing the semantics  of crisis in the context of the French Revolution; however this model is very helpful for understanding the reactions to the fall of Jerusalem that we find in the Hebrew Bible.

 Steil distinguishes three types of attitudes towards a crisis: that of the prophet, that of the priest, and that of the mandarin.  The prophetic attitude consists of declaring the crisis to be the beginning of a new era. The main proponents of this attitude are members of marginal groups, who are nevertheless capable of formulating and communicating their convictions. Conservative representatives of the social structures that are collapsing are more likely to adopt a priestly attitude. For those who take this posture, the way to overcome the crisis is to return to the sacred origins of society, given by God, and to ignore the new reality. The mandarin posture expresses a choice by high officials, who are trying to understand the new situation and accommodate themselves to it in order to preserve their existing privileges. The “mandarins” try to objectify the crisis by giving a historical account of it that explains  the collapse of the old structures.


Instances of all three attitudes are clearly visible in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretations of the destruction of Jerusalem. These reactions were perhaps put down in writing during the period called “the exile” (587-539) but it is more reasonable to think that they date from the Persian period, when socioeconomic conditions had somewhat stabilized.

The mandarin position towards the crisis is the Deuteronomistic school. The sought an explanation for the exile by constructing a history of Yhwh and his people, from the beginning under Moses up to the destruction of Jerusalem. This is the story tells from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings.  They wanted to show that the Babylonians gods had in no way defeated the national god of Judah. The Babylonians were the instruments of Yhwh, the tools of his anger. This idea prepares for the monotheistic statements in the parts of the Deuteronomistic history that was revised and retouched last of all in the Persian period. Yhwh reigns over all nations but has a special relation with Israel.

The most highly developed set on monotheistic speculations in the Hebrew bible is to be found in the second part of the book of Isaiah ( chapters 40-55). It is a collection of anonymous oracles that was revised over and over again during a period of at least two centuries, the kernel of the text being a piece of propaganda celebrating the arrival in Babylon of the Persian King Cyrus the Great. It is inspired by the propaganda of the Persian king which itself was a reworking of the Assyro-Babylonian royal ideology.  Other parts of the texts of Deutero-Isaiah propose a ‘theoretical demonstration” of monotheism, the only place the the Hebrew Bible where such a thing can be found, a theological revolution. It makes serious attempts to compensate for the loss of the feminine ‘assessors’ that accompany the gods  in the polytheistic system and deal with the question of evil, which can no longer be attributed to other malevolent gods or demons  in a monotheism.

The third or priestly reaction to crisis is embodied  in what is traditionally called the ‘priestly document in the Bible, including texts  that today are part of the Pentateuch, that is, sections found in Genesis, Exodus and the first part of Leviticus. These texts were drawn up by a group of priests or persons very close to priestly circles in Babylon or Jerusalem at the beginning of the Persian period. The priestly narrative views all the most significant cultural and ritual institutions as have been given to the Patriarchs and Israel before the political organization of the tribes. This mean there was no need of a country or a king in order to worship Yhwh in the appropriate way.  This uncoupling of the cult of Yhwh from political institutions and from a connection with a particular country prepares the way for the idea of the separation between the domains of religion and politics.

The Hebrew Bible, in the form we have it today, presents itself in all three of its parts as a “monotheistic document,” but the authors and editors of the various texts of which it is composed also retain traces of polytheism – for instance, in Job and numerous psalms, where Yhwh appears surrounded by his heavenly court. Thus, there is at least a partial integration of the polytheistic heritage into the Bible’s monotheistic discourse. The authors of the New Testament and  also the Qur'an  were going to be confronted with the same difficulty, namely how to deal with plurality within the framework set out by the confession of a single, unique god. Biblical monotheism, therefore, is not really a closed philosophical doctrine – it is pluralist, and invites the reader of its texts to reflect on the difficult relation between unity and diversity.

For Judaism God reveals himself primarily through the 613 commandments of the Torah as transmitted to the people through the intermediacy of Moses. Therefore it is primarily the observance of these divine commandments and the search for their true meaning that characterizes Judaism and its God, whose name is not pronounced, but whose interaction with Israel is commemorated through the reading of the Pentateuch. And its is precisely the Pentateuch that had retained the memory traces of a god who at the beginning was completely different from the transcendent, one[-and-only god now professed by the monotheistic religions.

Melancholy Science by Gillian Rose

Adorno starts from the assumption of a split and antagonistic reality which cannot be adequately represented by any system which makes its goals unity and simplicity or clarity. He shared Nietzsche’s program of a ‘transvaluation of all values.’ ‘Morality’, ‘values’ and ‘norms’ do not imply a moral dimension distinct from other dimensions but characterize the construction and imposition of ‘reality’.  Adorno and Nietzsche refused complicity with that world, they rejected the prevalent norms and values  in their day on the grounds that they had come to legitimize a society that in no way corresponded to them – they had become lies. Adorno shared Nietzsche’s epistemological aim to demonstrate that the apparent fixity of the world or values arises from the systematic debasement of dynamics aspects of reality in our thinking and philosophy.

Adorno states repeatedly that society and consciousness of society have become increasingly reified. In places, he says that they have become completely reified. To say that society is ‘completely reified’ is to say that the domination of the exchange process has increased to the point where it controls institutions, behavior and class formation in such a way that it prevents the formation of any independent and critical consciousness. To say that consciousness is ‘completely reified’ is to say that it is capable only of knowing the appearance of society, of describing institutions and behavior as if their current mode of functioning were an inherent and invariant characteristic or property, as if they, as objects, ‘fulfill their concepts.’ [It is to believe, for example, that global markets  actually reflect the concept of ‘free’ when they are actually circumscribed by innumerable restrictions in the form of tariffs, subsidies and tax haven; that markets are competitive when the laws and institutions of State, modes of production and social relations serve more and more to reduce competition; that the individual is autonomous when]  the increased fragmentation of the division of labor has not only continued to make men into parts of  the machinery of capitalism but has induced them to become tools to themselves, to recognize and treat themselves as means rather than ends.  This leads to a situation in late capitalist society in which there is too little organization where organization should be necessary, in forming the material conditions of material life and the relations between men depending on them, and too much organization in the private sphere in which consciousness itself is formed. Complexity in the private sphere does not reflect autonomy but, confusion and uncertainty

  To say that consciousness of society is completely reified, however, implies that no critical consciousness or theory is possible. It is to say that the underlying processes of society are completely hidden and that the utopian possibilities within it are inconceivable. The mind is impotent; the object is inaccessible. The thesis of complete reification is therefore unstatable because if it were true it could not be known.  Adorno employed strategies to avoid such a paradox. He affirms that there must always be a possibility of what he calls non-identity or critical thought, however latent it may be in certain times and circumstances. Adorno’s account of reification and of identity thinking [ that is the composing of false equivalencies between the objects of consciousness or , conversely, contriving differences where none exist]  explain how the mind works on the meaning of received concepts without implying that it devised those concepts in the first place. According to his account, society imposes concepts on us, which we re-impose on society. The systematic mis-recognition of the relation between concepts and the underlying social reality (illusion) is due to a social process, the production of value in exchange. Concepts do not match the objects to which they refer, “Meaning’ thus becomes opaque.

Adorno’s idea of a ‘Negative Dialectic’ is intended to cut across the conventional distinction between theory and practice by delineating theory as a form of intervention which combats prevalent modes of identity thinking, without in turn setting up a new identity between concepts and reality. Concepts never represent reality in a perfect or ideal sense, constellations of concepts do a better job but not in the sense of representing a totality or achieving universality.

“If thinking teachers itself that part of its meaning is what, in turn, is not thought then its prison has windows.”

Adorno’s melancholy science is not resigned, quiescent of pessimistic. It reasons that theory, just like the philosophy it was designed to replace, tends to overreach itself, with dubious political consequences. The social reality of advanced capitalist society is more intractable than such theory is willing to concede, and Adorno had a fine dialectical sense for its paradoxes. He was planning a work of moral philosophy when he died. His ‘morality’ is a praxis of thought not a recipe for social and political action.

The Future of National Liberation by Michael Walzer

In October 2004, the socialist magazine Janata reported on a conference in New Delhi on the condition of Muslim women; the conferees included feminists activists and (male) members of the Muslim Personal Law Board.

Naturally, the two groups disagreed, but what was most interesting was that ‘numerous women participants argued . . .from within the Islamic paradigm, quoting verse after verse from the Qur’an and citing traditions attributed to the Prophet to make their case for gender justice.” These women were a new force, says the Janata reporter; they had the “moral authority that feminists who are seen as alienated from their societies and traditions lack.”

The same claim can be made by members of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), a feminist organization founded in the 1980s by women from a number of Muslim majority countries, including Algeria, whose work has reached to India, where Muslims are a very large minority. The members of WLUML are both religious and secular, and one of their central goals is to provide reinterpretations of Muslim laws relating to the status of women. The plural form (‘Laws”) is important to their project. They insist that there are different understandings and different enactments of what is always called Qur’anic law, not a single authoritative version delivered by learned men, as religious zealots insist. The plural form means that women can join the argument, and by joining the argument rather than standing outside it, they hope to win at least a hearing from religious Muslims, men and women alike. If they are learned, as many of them are, they can also be authoritative.

Amartya Sen lays claim to the same kind of moral authority for democrats and pluralists when he argues that the ideas of public debate and respect for religious differences have roots in ancient Indian thought. He provides many examples. Her claims that important modern ideas aren’t modern inventions; they were expressed long ago, though in different idioms. They are part of a common heritage that may have to be selectively rejected but that can also be selectively reclaimed. Western ideas about liberty and equality can be naturalized in India. It may well be true that the best arguments for gender justice and for democratic pluralism are secular and philosophical in character. But philosophy doesn’t rule the day here, the best moral and political arguments are ones derived from and connect with the inherited culture of the people who need to be convinced. Engagement with that culture is what Nehru’s critics mean by “negotiation.” They argue that secularization in the West derives from a political negotiation with Protestant Christianity, so they imagine internal arguments that might produce Hindi and Muslim versions of secular doctrine – and also of democratic, egalitarian, and feminist doctrines.

The feminist scholar Uma Narayan has worked out a theoretical version of these arguments in her book Dislocating Cultures. She takes on the charge that demands for gender equality represent “a capitulation to the cultural domination of a colonizing Western culture.” As Marx’s articles on India show, this charge can also be a boast: all good modern ideas come from the historically advanced countries of the West. It is certainly true that any leaders of the national liberation movements were Westernizers - I have provided many examples. But Narayan submits two important caveats here, with special reference to what was once called the “woman question.” First, when the liberation movements began ( in India in the late 19^th century), gender equality was hardly a dominant ideology in the West, and second, Indian feminists can plausibly argue that their struggle for equality “is no less rooted in our experiences within “our cultures,’ no less ‘representative of our complex and changing reality than the views of Indians hostile to feminism.”

Liberation is a reiterative process: it doesn’t happen all at once for everybody inj the world; it happens again and again. But that doesn’t mean that each successive struggle is nothing more than an imitation of the struggle that went before. Yes, many Indian feminists did learn their feminism in the West but they also made in their own in the course  of their engagement with their Indian sisters.

Narayan’s book goes well beyond claiming that feminism has Indian roots. She argues for the cultivation of those roots and makes a very strong case for a connected and naturalized feminism – that is, a feminism embedded in national narratives and religious traditions. She helps us understand that liberation is always  the liberation of a particular group of people confronting a common history. Let me quote one summary statement of her position, which comes very close to the position I defend in this book.

It would be dangerous for feminists . . . to attempt to challenge prevailing views of “religion” and “religious tradition” purely by resort to “secularism.” Many religious traditions are in fact more capacious than fundamentalists adherents allow. Insisting on humane and inclusive interpretations of religious traditions might in many contexts be crucial . . . in countering the deployment of religious discourses for problematic nationalist ends.

This isn’t an argument about stooping to conquer. Narayan writes movingly about the importance of national and religious commitments in the everyday life of ordinary men and women; these commitments shape their sense of who they are and their understanding of the social world. She is proposing an honest and compassionate engagement with these men and women. They are pragmatic, political reasons for such an engagement: refusing it will “marginalize progressive and feminist voices whose . . . political interventions into the discourse of nationalism seem increasingly crucial.” There are also democratic reasons. Narayan quotes Virginia Woolf’s antinationalist lines from 1938: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” (Woolf must have been reading Marx on the working class.) Narayan argues that on the contrary, women do have a country; they share a fate with their fellow citizens, who need to hear their voices.

Particular engagements with particular cultures and histories, engagements of the sort Narayan calls for, produce particular versions of secularism and modernity. Most of the militants of national liberation imagined that they were struggling towards a single universal vision, with minor variations reflecting national/ cultural difference. Their visionary ideal was not different from that of the 19^th century liberal nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini, who saw each nation having its distinctive part in the universal orchestra – which would be playing one symphony. Marxists had a more radical singularity in view: the orchestra would consist of individual men and women liberated from both nationality and religion and playing in beautiful, spontaneous harmony. In  Capital, Marx described a factory operating on the same principle, engaged, of course, in universal production. But if modern, secular liberation is ‘negotiated’ in each nation, in each religious community, a highly differentiated universe is the necessary outcome. The orchestra might be cacophonous, requiring negotiations not only within each nation but between and among  them, too, but that is a subject for another time.

Traditionalist worldviews can’t be negated, abolished, or banned; they have to be engaged…

Consider now the Zionist case, the case with which I am most engaged. In Israel it seems clear that the negation of exilic Judaism has failed and that the leap to the biblical past and other efforts to find usable bits and pieces of the tradition serve only to produce a Jewish kitsch, which cannot compete with a revived Judaism. The claim to radical newness gives rise, inexorably, to a radicalized oldness. With Judaism as with Hinduism and Islam, the old oldness may have been more pluralistic, more accepting of difference (in practice if not doctrine), than either the secular liberationists imagine or the religious zealots admit. Maybe. But I don’t think that nostalgia is any more attractive in  Israel than in India.

Much needed to be, and still needs to be, negated: the fearfulness and passivity of traditional Judaism, the role of the court Jew, the dominance of the rabbis, the subordination of women. But alongside the ongoing work of negation, the tradition has to be acknowledged and its different parts ingathered, as the poet Bialik argued: collected, translated, incorporated into the culture of the new. Only then can traditional Judaism be pulled apart, its most important features – laws and maxims, ceremonies and practices, historical and fictional narratives – critically appraised. Only then can those features be accepted, or rejected, or revised, only then can they become the subject of ongoing argument and negotiation.

It is argument itself, with its varying outcomes, that constitutes the Gramscian equilibrium, not any single or final balance of acceptance or rejection. A person can be a radical critic of the religious tradition, as I would be, while still  ‘taking account’ of its value for the Jewish people (or the Indian or the Algerian people). But the commitment top ‘take account’ means a commitment to learn something about the world of one’s opponents. Giving up negation doesn’t mean acceptance, it means, again, intellectual and political engagement.

Writing from a religious perspective, David Hartman has made what might be called an equal and opposite argument: that Jewish Orthodoxy must ‘take account’ of the work of liberation and join the ‘universal struggle to uphold human dignity.’ That will not happen, he writes, until people who “view the Jewish tradition as the natural context in which to express their concerns’ commit themselves to “egalitarianism, human rights, and social justice.” A commitment of that sort would be as innovative and revolutionary as any that the secular Zionists envisaged; it would produce a revised Jewish law and a very different rabbinical leadership. Hartman’s project is one to which Zionist liberation has made a substantial contribution. Perhaps this gift relationship can work both ways. The recognition of tradition as a “natural context” for political engagement is missing in early Zionism (as we have seen); today, I want to argue, its time has come.

Since Zionism is a political movement, the most obvious area for engagement is politics itself. But Zionist negation was first of all a denial that there was a Jewish politics in the exile – or even a collective history. “Since our last national tragedy” – the suppression of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 1235 CE – “we have had ‘histories of persecution, of legal discrimination, of the Inquisition and pogroms, of . . .martyrdom,” but, wrote Ben-Gurion, “we did not have Jewish history anymore, because the history of a people is only what the people create as a whole,” and, he insisted, the Jews created nothing in the centuries of exile.

In fact, the internal politics of the Jewish Diaspora, through which the people as a whole sustained itself, in scattered communities, without coercive power, for many centuries, is one of the most remarkable stories in the political history of humankind. Exilic politics was in its decadence when the Zionists arrived on the scene, and it had never been valued within the tradition itself. Committed to deference and deferment, dreaming of a distant triumph, the rabbis had little to say about the success of the semi-autonomous communities of the Diaspora, and they took no interest in the political lessons that might be drawn from it. This history could have provided an opening for Zionist writers, but they found the decadence of Jewish communal life a more useful subject and made no effort to overcome their ignorance of better days. For some of them, ignorance of exilic history, since it wasn’t a “real” national history, was a matter of principle.

Ahad Ha’am* at least acknowledged the better days. The sages, he wrote, “succeeded in creating a national body which hung in mid-air, without any foundation on solid earth, and in this body the Hebrew national spirit  had its abode and lived its life for two thousand years.” But the true achievement of exilic Jewry – “marvelous and unique,” Ahad Ha’am said – was to lose the singularity of “this body” and still survive in scattered fragments, “all living one form of life, and all united despite their local separateness.” These fine words were apparently not inspirational; I have not found in the literature of Zionism any discovery of the old Jewish communities, any extended effort to understand of exilic politics worked, or to honor the people who made it work, or to value the achievement. The laws, customs, practices ,and implicit understandings that made communal life of the exile possible – surely this is material for “ingathering”, and then for appreciation and critique, by a movement aiming at a new birth of communal life. Indeed, the experience of exile and then of emancipation-in-exile might well teach contemporary Israelis something of great importance: how different Jewish communities could coexist within the framework of a secular state, alongside other forms of difference, other (non-Jewish) religious communities. The new Israeli majority might learn a lot from the experience of the old Jewish minorities. . .

The liberationist position of the Zionists was clear in the new nation-state, there would be gender equality- even, as Herzl  predicted, equality in national service  (though the actual standing of women didn’t and doesn’t  always accord with the ideology). I have already described how religious revival challenges the very idea of equality and how surprised and unprepared the liberationists were for the willingness of many women to return to Orthodoxy and accept a version of the old subordination. They are almost equally surprised by the fierceness of the religious zealots’ attack on gender equality wherever it exists – even in the Israel army.

Egalitarian arguments will seem obvious to many readers, but simply reciting  the argument isn’t sufficient .Today religious women in every denomination of Judaism argue for equality in the language of tradition – and write wonderfully subtle and intellectually engaging reinterpretations of both the Bible and the Talmud. It may be a sign of the polarization produced by the secularists and zealots in Israel that a great deal of the early interpretative work was not doe there but in the Diaspora, especially in the United States. Indeed, much of the religious energy among American Jews today comes from woman, who make up a growing number of scholars in Jewish studies and, even more important, of ordained rabbis. Nothing similar is going on in Israel, where secular Jewish women aren’t interested in becoming rabbis and religious women wouldn’t dream of it (though some, I think, are beginning to dream.). . .


I haven’t meant to argue that the traditionalist counterrevolution could have been avoided, the paradox of national liberation overcome, had the Zionist, say, fully engaged the tradition from the beginning. But a full-scale engagement early on might have made for a stronger response to the counterrevolution than anything forthcoming today .It might have provided Zionism with a more elaborated, a more interesting, and a more democratic culture. And it might have improved the odds - it might still improve the odds – for the eventual success of Jewish liberation






*Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (18 August 1856 – 2 January 1927), primarily known by his Hebrew name and pen name, Ahad Ha'am (Hebrew: אחד העם‎, lit. one of the people, Genesis 26:10), was a Hebrew essayist, and one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers. He is known as the founder of cultural Zionism. With his secular vision of a Jewish "spiritual center" in Israel, he confronted Theodor Herzl. Unlike Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, Ha'am strived for "a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews".

About Jewish relationships to the native Arabs, a disappointed Ha'am wrote

We must surely learn, from both our past and present history, how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong, how we should be cautious in our dealings with a foreign people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect and, needless to say, with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite! They were slaves in their Diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that only a country like Turkey [the Ottoman Empire] can offer. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves ['eved ki yimlokh – when a slave becomes king – Proverbs 30:22]. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. Our brothers indeed were right when they said that the Arab only respects he who exhibits bravery and courage. But when these people feel that the law is on their rival's side and, even more so, if they are right to think their rival's actions are unjust and oppressive, then, even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other.

Ahad Ha'am also saw a bleak future for the nascent new state. He wrote:

[But if things continue the way they are] ...the society that I envision, if my dream is not just a false notion, this society will have to begin to create itself in the midst of fuss, noisiness and panic, and will have to face the prospects of both internal and external war...]


 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahad_Ha%27am

The Heritage and Character of American Social Theory by Geoffrey Hawthorn

[The author is an English snob, many of his subordinations are unnecessary and awkward, meanings opaque and arguments incomplete. I have taken liberties to ‘clean up’ some parts of  the text. All the comments in brackets are my own. Still, it's an interesting hypothesis. Social theory on both sides of the Atlantic are a bust. To me its an argument for democracy: ‘start cooking, recipe to follow.']

 It has often been said that the prevailing assumptions of Americans have been those of John Locke; it has also been said that Locke’s direct effect on the promoters of the new republic is exaggerated, the point has a certain force. The paradox is resolved, however, by the fact that the conditions under which this kind of thinking came to pervade America were quite different from those under which it was first proposed in England. The intentions of the Americans in using Locke and other Whig theorists to the extent that they did were quite different than the theorists’ own.

Like the younger Mill in the 19^th century, Locker in the Two Treatises on Government was taking for granted the dense and complex structure of constraint and obligation that existed in his own society.  He was merely, or you could say, subversively insisting that such a structure did not give any  man the right to dispose of any other, that on the contrary, each man, whatever his station, was epistemologically free to decide for himself the limits under which he would live. He was arguing against the restoration of an absolute monarchy, and against the absolutely hierarchical and immutable paternalism of Robert Filmer. But as de Tocqueville implied in the 1830s, Americans had been able to take such intentions a-historically. There was no native feudalism, no patriarchy, no Filmer to defend  it [at least not after the Tories were driven to Canada.]

The American Revolution was not a revolution against the kind of order that was being criticized and attacked in Europe. It was a revolution to secure what had already begun in an historical vacuum [ a ‘howling wilderness inhabited by savages’ as they saw it.] The radical rhetoric of the European Enlightenment was there deployed for what were literally conservative ends.

This had three profound effects. Speaking generally [ the author here omits some obvious qualifications], There was nothing in the new country to correspond to the European estates and there was no established Church. There were merely individuals, with or without property, and government. Of course, there was slavery, and in the attempt by Southerners later in the 19th century to maintain it the slaves were compared to a traditional European estate but they were more usually conceived as just an extension of the property of individuals. The prevailing religious mode was a pluralistic sectarianism in which the most prominent, the New England Puritans, were entirely at one with the Calvinism implicit in Locke himself.* This history meant and has continued to mean that Americans have no firm grasp of what from England to China has always been taken for granted, the notion of what sociologists would now call ‘social structure, enduring complexes of institutions; institutions that do not merely serve to constrain individuals, but by virtue of the individual’s membership in them from birth to death serve in good part to constitute and defined  him or her as a person. The language of institutions pervades American thinking as it does in other societies; but there, the meaning has always been more restricted.

The second effect of the conservative consolidation of Lockean liberalism in America was an inducement to conformity.  This has continued to be both practical and ideological. Practically, no man could dare to consider himself or could bear to consider others as in any way above or below any other. Ideologically, after the abolition of the property franchise there could be no grounds for any man claiming by virtue of any characteristic whatsoever that he was privileged with exceptional insight, or that he was by virtue of experience or affiliation or by right qualified to direct others. The radically egalitarian spirit of Protestantism, which had done so much to affect philosophical and political thinking in England and Germany, in America met no opposing institutions or ideologies by which it had to be tempered or on which it had to compromise. In the name of liberty and equality there thus developed there a most persistent pressure to conform.** A pressure that on occasion has amounted almost to a panic about those who do not and produced popular persecutions in the name of the ideals they appear to deny. This has made Americans characteristically vulnerable and anxious. Unable to flee into any institution and thereby pass to it responsibility for his beliefs and actions, a man is exposed to the pressure of popular opinion and so forced to examined himself as an individual, alone, to a degree that he is not in any more highly structured society.

The third effect of the uniquely unhistorical [?] consolidation of a liberal  society in America has been to produce a very special sense of time. The characteristic European sense of the arrangement of events had derived from the Christian view that in one way or another improvement, even perfection, lay in the future. The notion of progress dates in its secular form from the Enlightenment, but the hope that lies beneath it is an ancient one. It was such a hope that informed not only the puritans in the New England settlements but also many other sects that spread across the country and came to constitute the distinctive character of American faith, the character that so impressed Max Weber when he came to America in 1904. Yet in the break from England and the establishment of the new republic, in part inspired by these sects, America seemed already to have reached perfection. The past has been consolidated in a future whose integrity lay in remaining as much like the present as possible. This, in Holfadter’s phrase, has been the ‘nub of the intimate American quarrel with history’: how can a people progress if they have started near perfection?’ A simple answer but an answer that many Americans have implicitly given, is that although society itself may have no distance to progress, there have been and continue to be virtually infinite possibilities of material improvement and technical advance within it. If such  a progress was not necessary to the society, no more was it inimical to it. Indeed, it could be held to be a natural concomitant and consequence of its liberty. This firm faith in one of the residual principles of European progressive thought has, however, generated one of the most persistent of al dilemmas in American society, the dilemma of how to reconcile the effects of spectacular material accumulation and technical advance with the established ideal of a perfect society  [generated] in  a state of markedly primitive innocence. It was a dilemma in the 1840s, it became a matter of absorbing concern in the years before 1914, and it reappeared in the 1960s. All the while it has driven primitive populism in the South and west against the trusts and banks and politicians of the east.

In the United States liberalism was only ever a critical principle in arguments against the European. It was established with the new republic  but criticisms of its own progress have always been in its own terms. Not only was patriarchy in any form exactly what the country has set itself against, but also, because of the absence of any nostalgia for the virtues of its reputed solidarity and mutual obligations, socialism, which in Europe has always  drawn strongly upon such nostalgia, has at best seemed irrelevant and at worst an insidious stalking horse for the kinds of collective restraint and institutional domination evident, to liberals, in patriarchy itself. This is the paradox of American intellectualism.


In Europe to be an intellectual was to criticize not merely the ways in which various groups  sought to achieve their ends but also, and much more importantly, to criticize the ends themselves. In America, the ends had been given, given in both the ideological sense and also, much more forcefully, in the very constitution of the society itself. To mount an argument against them has been to mount an argument against America and thus, to mount an argument that immediately disqualifies itself from serious consideration as a relevant argument at all. Only the means have been at issue in America, the means of recalling the society to its original and unquestionable inspiration, original in the historical sense and unquestionable in the sense that to question it is to question not merely one view, and one group  in society but the very society itself. American intellectuals are deprived of part of the normal apparatus of modern European thought, the assumption that one may locate one’s critical principles in some more or less imaginary future state, a state yet to be realized but never-the-less conceivable by virtue of the inexorable passage of the past into the future that since the Enlightenment all Europeans have been able to take for granted.

In Europe The once-vaunted promise of salvation in the next world was translated, with much confusion and dispute [bloody wars and revolutions], it is true, but without great intellectual difficulty [Ha!], into the promise of salvation in this. In America since 1776 such translation has been impossible. With the old sectarian faith, the colonialists could still hope. Without it, the citizens of the new republic could not [ though they have developed a remarkable faith in ‘the power of positive thinking’, which has, of course, its own attending evils and is essentially anti-intellectual]. Secularization had an ironical twist to it. Moreover, even such criticisms as they have made, American intellectuals have been persistently crippled by the dogmatic and fearful egalitarianism of their native liberalism. Although European intellectuals have been troubled by just this sort of attack, as were the  ecclesiastics before them,  even when defending what they have taken to be the side of the oppressed and the uninformed,  they have been able to exploit the deference that the latter have always grudgingly if mistakenly given to their ‘spiritual betters’ .French intellectuals get a free pass for all sorts of nonsense, and the sheen they receive often travels well across the Atlantic. The peculiar difficulty of the American intellectual is that his status  has always been in question [ outside the halls of academia: ‘pointy-headed intellectuals’ etc.]. His own criticisms come from within the native liberal establishment., and it is from within that establishment where he is mostly challenged [ otherwise his theories ignored or misrepresented].

No-one has ever shown that anti-intellectual sentiments are more common in America than elsewhere. It is simply that they have been more often expressed [often in ingenious ways], for they have always been more legitimate. The intellectuals themselves, aware of and often defending this legitimacy, have thus often been driven into agonize impotence [ going so far as to chain themselves to doorways and blocking bulldozers in some cases or just becoming drunks]. Where they have not been undermined by others, they have furnished the grounds for their own immolation.

This is the heritage and character of American Social thought, often vigorous and critical and even radical, but in its very radicalism literally conservative.

*https://backwoodspresbyterian.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/john-calvin-vs-john-locke-on-natural-law-or-reason/

** the subject and the predicate here are both true but I’m nor sure how easily one follows the other at this point in his discussion i.e. pressure to conform is produced by unopposed notions of liberty and equality. Prosaically  it might have something to do with ‘keeping up with the Jones’’. If everyone is putatively equal and free then the ‘natural’ or customary stratifications of patriarchal society are re-produced in the results of material conquest: conspicuous  consumption, hence ‘a rat race’ which has an analog in ideology.

Interview with James Siegel

James Siegel
Interviewed by Johan Lindquist

Published by Duke University Press

In Public Culture

2013

 This interview is a result of an extended written and spoken conversation between October 2011 and March 2012. Lindquist began by sending a series of questions to Siegel, who responded in writing. The text was then sent back and forth as Lindquist added questions and asked for further clarification. In January 2012 Lindquist conducted a two-hour interview with Siegel in Paris and then integrated parts of the transcription into the written document. The text was then again sent back and forth before being finalized in March 2012

Johan Lindquist (JL): Throughout your career, which began in the early 1960s, you have remained focused on the study of Indonesia. You are also arguably the anthropologist who has been most committed to developing a Derridean deconstructive approach. Before we return to these broad themes, could you say something about your background and how you became

interested in anthropology and Indonesia?

James Siegel (JS): I was born in Superior, Wisconsin, on the edge of the lake, in the north. Superior is a small town, about twenty-five thousand inhabitants when I was born, but founded by speculators to be a rival of Chicago. Sixty-some years later, when I was born, it had the world’s largest sewage system, the high stone arches extending far beyond the inhabited areas of the town, the town never attracting many settlers. It was a ghost town before it was born, but it never felt uncanny, probably because nothing ever happened there to repeat itself. But perhaps what repeats there is something not occurring.

I was a student in one or maybe two classes of Clifford Geertz in the late 1950s as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he had just received his PhD. That I don’t remember how many classes I took with him shows the nature of his effect on me. Geertz lectured with an intensity I had never before seen. He rolled up his tie (it was the late fifties, all men and even undergraduates [all were male] wore ties), put it in his mouth, dropped it to scratch the side of his head, moved his hand down (I remember it as his left hand) to scratch his behind, moved his hands to the front, and with both hands rolled up his tie again and repeated this gesture from the beginning to the end of the lecture. I don’t remember what he said. In any case, he spoke so rapidly no one person could get it down. Students worked in teams to get what they could into their notes.

Geertz was not precisely an intellectual influence—I can’t remember what he said in the classes I took with him, only the topic, “Indonesia.” Not only because it was over fifty years ago, but also because I was incapable—and still am—of learning from teachers. I can’t even read the instructions that come with appli- ances. Geertz was not a model—a model is someone one consciously tries to be like. One can decide to have a model. I cannot decide much of anything, but I am easily moved by what I come across. Geertz was an important person to have come across. He was electricity generating words that issued in formulations often mixed with irony and humor. One didn’t know if the latter was a product of his nervousness or his ability to stand aside from what he said. In any case, like everything he uttered, his humor passed quickly. Geertz to me was not a person but an image of the flow of words through a human body. It seems to me now that I felt blocked. Words were there, but nothing came out. As a result I was a mediocre student, always disappointing my teachers, who thought I should do better. I had no method and did not know there was such a thing. Geertz, more than anyone else I met as a student, showed me that words need not stay inside the head even if one has no method. All you had to do was connect the parts of your body with them. But you could not do that to yourself; it had to happen. Watching Geertz, it seemed this happened in Indonesia. I still think so, and I still go there.

JL: Was there anything beyond Geertz that drew you to anthropology?

JS: The humanities and history were less analytical than they are now, a matter of culture as the proper [focus], it seemed to me then. The social sciences in contrast were characterized by a vitalizing optimism, particularly in relation to decolonialization and modernization. Anthropology even appeared to offer an alternative, in the sense that it could replace religion and politics. This would be impossible today.

JL: Could you say something about your graduate studies?

JS: I went to Berkeley to do my graduate work. I read Christaan Snouck Hurgronje on Aceh.1 I was upset because he seemed able to know and say everything about Aceh and still be a colonialist—that is, on the wrong side. This was the period of decolonization. Those who understood were against colonialism. I did not understand the difference between a moral sentiment and understanding. I wanted to show that Snouck was wrong on both counts. If Geertz was important at all in that regard, it was because he was brilliant and he was anticolonialist. The opposite of Snouck in an important way. Once I sank into Aceh and began my fieldwork, Geertz did not have much to say. But he was kind and helpful to me. He was not on my thesis committee because he left Berkeley before I was ready for my exams. He invited me to Chicago, where I spent a year on the Committee for New Nations mainly trying to avoid abstractions about development and democracy (due more to Edward Shils than to Geertz) that came with thinking about “modernization” but seemed to me to be obstacles to engagement with place.

JL: The year 1965 was a transformative moment in Indonesia with the fall of Sukarno and the rise of the dictator Suharto, as perhaps one million people were massacred, most notably those accused of belonging to the Communist Party. Suharto would rule Indonesia until 1998, when the effects of the Asian economic crisis and demands for political reform forced him to resign. You conducted your fieldwork just a few years before the killings, which no one had been able to predict. How did this affect you?

JS: I shared the optimism of the early 1960s by identification with Indonesians engaged in doing what they did at that time. But I did not understand them, and I did not know I did not understand them. I only knew I was for them. It was not the ideas of the time as taught at the Committee for New Nations that was the real obstacle for me. It was the exclusiveness of my identification. Had I myself not confused the moral and the intellectual I would have advanced, but I did not unravel the difference until I was forced to. That came in 1965 with the massacres of those accused of communism and with the allegiance of my Acehnese friends with the butchers. It seems simple now in retrospect, an innocent characteristic of the young. But it was not simple, because without such identification with the Acehnese I would have gotten nowhere at all, and it was not innocent, because I had avoided thinking about murderous violence, plentiful enough in Acehnese history up till the present. After that, I needed more than moral shock. I needed another form of understanding to permit me to engage intellectually and to latch on to people while showing me their necessarily uncertain status. The Vietnam War duplicated the shock, as generations in the United States struggled against each either in support or in opposition to the war. Most profoundly, it became clear to me that if you follow the path of those you admire, it appears that it is as likely as not that you will follow the path of murderers. For me there was no way to conceptualize this.

JL: This was obviously a critical time. In analytical terms, it highlights your need to break from an earlier form of anthropological engagement and hermeneutics.

JS: When I began reading about deconstruction in the late 1960s, it fused with my experience and gave me a way to begin thinking. I had been hired as an anthropologist at Cornell, which quite by chance became a center for the study of Southeast Asia and deconstruction in literature. It helped immensely that I learned about deconstruction not in the first place by reading Jacques Derrida but by listening to friends at Cornell—Neil Hertz, Richard Klein, Piero Pucci—talk about it between themselves. I had never heard such talk. I learned French over again to read what they had read. Reading Derrida was so absorbing that it altered my personal relations. It strengthened my friendships, but in some important cases it led to conflict. It was the opposite trajectory of the one I describe above. Teaching with these friends in departments such as classics also helped me learn and develop a new way of thinking. But beyond that, those interested in Southeast Asia and deconstruction had nothing to do with each other.

JL: We’ll return to the question of deconstruction later. Before we go on, could you please speak about Victor Turner, who was an earlier influence on your work?

JS: Victor Turner was my colleague the year I began teaching in 1965. Of course, I read the famous essays on rites de passage (see, e.g., Turner 1967), and like everyone, I am sure, I was strongly impressed. The essays alone would have done that, but it was also the times. Vic gave courses and seminars on the topic that were attended by faculty from the literature departments and the university’s leading hippies. Talking about the Ndembu, it seemed as though he spoke about us. I think he felt that himself, though not for the same reason. He found in liminality—the middle section of rites of passage where the initiand is stripped of social identity—a world of absolute authority with meanings inverted. It seemed fundamental, as though one could find moments when the social as constituted had no prise[leverage], and at the same time the nature of the symbolic was revealed and the social refounded. This wasn’t archetypical, à la Carl Jung for instance. It was rather that a moment of nondefinition was built into social transition in tribal societies. At that instant, instead of alienation, instead of putting the social in question, the social reasserted itself, but one had to know how to understand it. Turner was able to do so, because in his studies of micropolitics he of course became familiar with the terms in which this politics was set.

The political and cultural disruption that came with the Vietnam War, the awful break between children and parents, took on the beginning of sense seen through the Ndembu. Vic showed us ourselves in them. I thought this was just what anthropology was meant to do. Vic was a wonderful person, full of words, removed from involvement in the local politics of the university, his mind on other things, and still au courant of it all. He was warmhearted, sensual, and impressively intelligent. All the more impressive at that moment because he was not an intellectual, not someone who thought that ideas ruled. It was impossible, in the face of all that, to avoid his thinking.

The difficulty for me was that I had already done my fieldwork and made my analysis and found nothing of the sort he spoke about. At the same time, I thought that not finding anything much like liminality (2) and its phenomena was itself interesting. When I reread Turner today I find it equally impressive but local. The life of the Ndembu now seems mostly of African importance. But I think Vic’s account of them should be studied carefully again, not because “we” are “them” in the way that they were taken at the time, but because they still have the power to raise the comparison. It is still necessary to resist them. Therefore, they still have something to say. The problem would be not to find the cultural phenomenon of their liminality in our “marginality” or pilgrimage, as Vic went on to do, but to find the openings in culture where a crisis of culture occurs.

Vic’s way of working—proceeding from close observation, the sort that comes best with immersion, moving to strange sorts of connections in thinking and culture—is what anthropology does best. I think that does not happen unless, from the beginning, one takes the other seriously as having something one lacks. The mistake at the time, it seems in retrospect, was to take the Ndembu capacity for social regeneration as a universal. But if one took their seriousness as they faced the dissolution of the social built into their society, one might well benefit. There is no model for this in anthropology, but literature, of course, does this all the time. It is encouraging to read, something I would not think of saying, it being so obvious, if literature were not so easily put aside now.

Vic’s way of proceeding was also that of Geertz. Geertz wrote The Religion of Java (1960) to show what the generalizations about religion were based on. Like Turner, he was sure that the statements of the people he spoke with added up. It is not the case in my work, but it was initially. Assuming consistency and congruence severely warped my first book, The Rope of God (Siegel 2000 [1969]), and was one reason I overlooked the causes of the massacre that occurred a year after I returned from Sumatra. On the other hand, I have retained Geertz’s insistence on the importance of words. He relied on paraphrase, however, and I like to have the precise words in the original language. Geertz might have done the same had handheld recorders been available in his epoch.

JL: But at the same time, discontinuity was already there in The Rope of God. The book describes how people who think they understand each other actually do not, yet still manage to live together. Rosalind Morris notes that even this book offered a “radical alternative to hermeneutic models” (2007: 378).

JS: Roz is a brilliant thinker and an excellent reader of texts. I myself had not formulated the contrast with hermeneutic[ interpretive] models; I simply held on to what I had seen and heard. I wish I had known Roz earlier.

JL: Could you say more about how you attempted to move beyond Geertz and Turner?

JS: You cannot do what Turner and Geertz did unless you identify with the other, unless you are interested in understanding the other and believe that what they say is the truth. To do that kind of anthropology you need to be divided in two, but that leaves you God knows where. If you choose their side, you end up where they are; if you choose the other side, you break your connection with the source of your understanding. This problem was what had led to my initial crisis.

JL: What was your choice?

JS: If you have a way to think not only who the other is but how otherness is formed, how the fact of that identification is built into the very possibility of speaking with them or speaking at all, then you have some way of thinking through it again. There is no solution or resolution, but it opens up new kinds of questions. This was one step further for me.

JL: You developed this perspective—an engagement with how otherness is formed, rather than with meaning per se—as you followed Derrida’s seminars in Paris for fifteen years. This concern with and investment in deconstruction led you away from anthropology toward critical theory and literature. For instance, you have published only one article in an anthropology journal during your entire career. Could you say something about how you understand the relationship between anthropology and literature?

JS: Literature makes its own laws, and within those laws it shows us a world. In my mind this is what we study. You have the right to make laws, and they hold until you stop writing. When I go to Indonesia I sometimes feel like I am going mad. They are normal; I, who might share their normality, am not. By definition, normality integrates, whereas madness isolates. You learn from literature how to deal with that. It is the possibility of putting yourself in the position of the reader of fiction. But that comes about through a gradual habituation, not through formulation. I am not by nature patient, but in Indonesia I nonetheless am.

The debates going on in literature today is what anthropology once was about. A few years ago Samuel Weber asked me if, as an anthropologist, I could tell him if it was necessary to separate the dead from the living. Is it necessary to bury the dead? This is a question that anthropologists haven’t asked since 1860. What anthropology does now is sophisticated and local but does not speak beyond that because it doesn’t ask the questions that allow it do so. I think it is important to work locally, but the questions that are critical, life and death first of all, are often neglected. As I point out in my work on witchcraft (Siegel 2006), the focus on structure is actually a way of avoiding these issues.

JL: Please say something about this in relation to your ongoing work in Aceh.

JS: I had begun a study of experiences of the 2004 tsunami in Aceh, but I had not gone so far as to think that perhaps the effort that was put into putting the dead into mass graves as soon as possible was anything but common sense. In the tropics, decay and then disease come quickly. Of course they had to bury the dead. Then, when I went back to the recordings I made of people who had gone through the tsunami, I realized that, in fact, if one listened carefully, people were speaking to the dead and were hearing them speak. Sometimes by mistake, at a time when it was not evident (and it still isn’t) who was alive and who was dead. But sometimes not by mistake at all but by accepting the conditions of what they thought to be total destruction. Religious conviction told them it was the end of the world. But they avoided thinking about divine judgment and thought instead about dealing with the world after the end. This allowed them to accept the dead as part of their (non)existence. This is a very complicated subject, and I have grossly simplified it.

I don’t know where Sam Weber got his question from. But, of course, he is a fore- most interpreter of Derrida, and that from a long time ago. In his mind it must have challenged the necessity for logocentrism and its continuation—phallogocentrism. Life is associated with voice. One breathes, one speaks, one extrudes something from deep inside. The breathless cannot speak and might be dead. If one com- municates with the dead—as often people do in trance in Indonesia via spirits— it takes a substitute voice, one that comes through someone alive, but not speaking in her everyday voice. If there were everyday communication with the dead, as happened during and after the tsunami, the everyday voice would be avoided. This happened without previously formed conventions or rituals. It will take me some time to make these provisional conclusions convincing.

JL: Could you say something about this in relation to Derrida and deconstruction, more generally.

JS: The first book of Derrida’s I read, Of Grammatology (1976), shows speech is thought to be an emanation of life. Therefore, it would be impossible for the dead to speak or at least to speak in the manner of the living. But making this “impossible,” Derrida showed, was a construction that ties language to structure. In a time when dead and living are confused, in Aceh at least, people speak to the dead, thinking they are speaking normally. To call it simply a “mistake” is a refusal to admit the possibility of speech being separated from life. In Aceh, people were imagining a world of the dead, thinking they themselves were dead, and in a certain way even saying “I am dead.” I give you this necessarily compressed account as an example of how, at a certain point, starting from simple observation, I have been led to Derrida.

 I say “starting from observation” all the while being well aware that there is nothing simple in that beginning. I first realized its complexities when I read Sam Weber’s The Legend of Freud (1982). I knew that one could not recognize something one did not have the means to recognize, but I did not know the complications Sam outlines. To talk about matters such as death, one quickly comes to a point where observations are not replicable by others. I thought that anthropology was then severely limited. I realized that I should simply do what I do—look carefully, then say carefully what I see (and especially hear), accepting that it is necessarily provisional, that I too am part of history. Anthropology, to be what it can be, can do this (and not only this). In that way we can raise again the questions that began our discipline, such as the one Sam posed. It makes anthropology like those other disciplines that rely on continual revision to be what they are. What’s left to us is to stimulate such revision in the first place by putting “the other” forward, even if this other is itself a necessarily complicated idea.

JL: What does it mean to “put the other forward”?

JS: To put the other forward in ethnography means to think how the other is constructed in the places we study. One has to know the sociological distinctions that compose a society. That goes without saying. But it is something else to see how this other takes shape. It’s at the boundaries that this question comes most clearly into view. With the “mad”—the way that the mad come to be called that, the possibilities of communication with them, their usefulness—one asks, “Why are there mad persons?” As Michel Foucault pointed out, at a certain moment the mad were integrated into society, then they were separated. He showed how this was done historically. It remains to ask the purpose that is served by having a class of people with whom one is said to be unable to communicate and who are put aside. What does it mean, in other words, to preserve a moment where one asserts that communication is not possible and at the same time thinks the opposite?

JL: Is a deconstructive anthropology possible, in more general terms, considering that anthropology can hardly exist without the human?

JS: There can’t be anything by the name of “deconstructive anthropology” in the way there might be, say, “psychoanalytic anthropology” The latter requires a set of assumptions and even a method, the conclusions necessarily being set in a particular vocabulary. Deconstruction is not a method and has presented no ideas that one necessarily has to use. But it has a guiding question about origins— their necessity and the impossibility of their firm establishment. Of course, one does not have to speak about voice to engage in deconstruction. One can’t say what might appear in something that later might be called a “deconstructive ethnography.”

JL: In some quarters there is still a sense that deconstruction is apolitical or neo- conservative, as for instance Jürgen Habermas once identified Derrida and Foucault. How do you view the question of the political in relation to deconstruction?

JS: There are many ways to answer your question. Derrida did not aim at a particular political program. Rather, he opened the way for change in the broadest sense. With deconstruction, nothing is left in place. Deconstruction gives us a way to see political movements or moves that are not expressed in conventional terms of a consistent political subject. Again, take for instance the reactions to the tsunami in the midst of a rebellion against the Indonesian government. Some of those struck thought they were dead; they tried to communicate with the corpses in their midst and tried to join the dead once they were faced with Indonesian soldiers. They did so out of the possibility of identifying with the complete other of their selves. (I use the pronoun they, but I do not want to imply that there was a communality of reactions. There could not be when the conditions of social life were practically all wiped out and people had to invent new forms.) At that moment, they were able to evoke an identity that would have been thought delirious in any other condition than the seemingly total devastation they found themselves in. They not only were in a lifeless landscape; they belonged there. In this place, life and death were not mutually exclusive. I doubt that before Derrida we could see such a reaction as anything else but the formation of “myth.” But these people put Derrida’s succinct formulation “Tout autre est tout autre”—“All others are other and all others are completely other”—to work. Later, with “reconstruction,” the government and the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] tried to formulate the event quite differently. They depended on an idea of suffering that demanded to be consolidated within ethnic and national terms, insisting on identity as unified and exclusive, incorporating them in the old political order. Yet the experience of the tsunami led in another direction. Something might still come of it. Deconstruction lets us think through such experiences without imposing ideas similar to those of the government. Its value is to show us the political where we would overlook it and to show what it depends on in places where we are familiar with it. And when I say that “something might still come of it,” I want to stress that the condition at which it might come is that we don’t know what that “something” might be. Through relentless (or restless) questioning and displacement, deconstruction destabilizes, shakes and is shaken, and in that sense also it has a political force. But it is a force at odds with any idea of program and programming, at odds with conventional politics in this sense. For Derrida, it is precisely what escapes any form of teleological thinking (the kind of thinking that informs conventional political programs and calculations) that opens up the future. The future in this sense, including the future of society and culture, can never be entirely foreseen or foregrounded, no more than the effects of a tsunami.

JL: The question of the political is of great importance in relation to perhaps your key interlocutor throughout your career, Benedict Anderson, a fellow scholar of Indonesia whom you worked with at Cornell. From what I understand, your book Fetish, Recognition, Revolution is largely a response to his Imagined Communities (Siegel 1997; Anderson 1983), one of the most influential books in the social sciences since its publication. Could you comment on this?

JS: I met Ben a few days after I arrived for the first time in Jakarta, in 1962. From the first I knew he was someone whom I could not describe by using the word talent. That word applies to those who have an aptitude for what they do, as if they were suited to their work. Ben seems to me to understand so many things in such different registers, the gap between himself and his objects of study (and his talk, for that matter, always so agreeable and so penetrating), that one never knows where his understanding comes from. It is not an “aptitude,” a “talent,” but a surpassing of the person. He draws on a range of things that have nothing to do with Indonesia at all, for instance, but that show us things we never had known before about it. He has his way with languages—a genuine polyglot. Unlike other polyglots I have known, he does not stop with mastery of a language. He learned Javanese, Indonesian, a little Balinese, and I don’t know what else, not because he found similarities in these languages but because the differences between them seemed to lead him on. He knew from the beginning in an untheoretical way that understanding passes through language. How he came to know this, I don’t know. But it seems to me that he must have learned what is essential to him (and it is an enormous amount) the way one learns from him—through apprenticeship, by watching him do what he does, rather than by having him tell you how to go about learning. This leaves the boundary of knowledge wide open. By contrast, for me to reach that point takes skepticism about those who claim they know. (My favorite word is but when it is not no, no doubt something I learned living here in France.) Ben can be an excellent polemicist, but that is not how he goes about his work. I, by contrast, am still angry with Snouck. Not Ben. He moves on.

At Cornell, we taught seminars together on Pramoedya Ananta Toer.(3)His ability to question a single word often was critical in understanding the stories. He always picked out the telling passages and made me realize I had skipped something. I envy him his classical education and his ability to use it in ways that close it off from view. I would have been jealous of him—we are the same age, and I am ferocious as a brother—had I not benefited so much from him

As for Imagined Communities, I had not conceived Fetish, Recognition, Revo-lution as an answer to him or even imagined it had a connection with his book. His thesis, published as Java in a Time of Revolution (Anderson 1972), seemed to me then and still now to have an importance that has been neglected. Ben showed, in the face of George Kahin, his teacher and thesis director, that revolution had to be considered by itself, apart from nationalism, as George had presented it in a book that remains important (Kahin 1952). Ben carried this further in Imagined Communities. Whereas in European history it is a truism that revolution led to nationalism, revolution is put aside on the first page of Imagined Communities. In contrast to the debates that preceded it, we can understand the rise of nationalism without recourse to revolution. But there was revolutionary violence in Indonesia, a revolution that from a traditional point of view would have been said to be uncompleted. I think this violence has its own roots outside nationalism—and Ben in his introduction to Java in a Time of Revolution suggested as much. I think Ben was right to do as he did, and I hope he still will do more on the subject.

My own book was not meant as an answer to Ben’s. I had not formulated the problem for myself when I wrote it. Rather, it came from looking at a relation of literature to revolution in a place where literature had uncertain boundaries and uncertain forms. It was popular literature, the work of amateurs, kitsch really. Close to life, naive but accurate in describing its fears in the way of melodrama. No heroes, but rather various bad guys. This is literature not set apart as such and probably taken by its readers as a reflection of the world. In the case of Toer, [it is] that literature that needed education to write. Not the well-known Buru Quartet but the early stories written during or just after the revolution attracted me. Here it is not revolutionary fighters or politicians that matter. Nor is it the culture of Java. It is rather the pictures of remnants of the colonial world. These people, often servants, are not heroes, but they are important, not for the fears they embody but because they are not admirable; they show no resistance. They lead lives, for the most part, outside the dictates of nationalism or politics of any kind. But life wears on them in ways that they do not always notice. The roots of revolution are shown not in conflict but in something previous to it that makes the clash that ensued not more understandable but less so. Opposition is formulated in ideology, and the formation of opposed identities does not take account of this. It has its effects in the strange attempts at memorialization of that time. Today the celebration of the revolution shows brave Indonesians but rarely the Dutch they are supposedly confronting. A mystery, but solvable.

JL: This series of interviews is largely about scholarship as a process and a craft. Could you consider your own work more explicitly in these terms?

JS: I start with looking and hearing. I take notes; I make comments; now I record what I hear others say. The result does not add up. But the connections between the fragments seem to me important. The words of those I meet convey more than intentions. Out of that I try to make something. I do not present this as a model for anyone. It depends where you go, for one thing. I spent a year in Jakarta in the 1980s futilely, because I could not find such connections. It was the result of life in the capital under the rule of dictator and murderer (Suharto, of course). Life there was dominated by denial and evasion practiced unselfconsciously. It was important to me to see this even if I could not formulate it out of ethnographic observation. Were I to have written an ethnography of that moment, it would consist of my consistent failure to find out anything of importance. I should have done that. I might have had something to say about how such blockage occurs. But I did not have the heart. Instead, I wrote a book about the fear of revolution, based on newspaper reports of criminals, for the most part (Siegel 1998). The lack of overt resistance to Suharto until the end of his decades of rule meant that he simply fell for causes to be found in the economy and in the limited politics of the army. I could find no way to get under the deceptions embedded in daily life. But simply to have seen them was important to me because it goes some way to explain how a man responsible for the murder of, at the least, hundreds of thousands of his co-citizens was never brought to trial for it and lived his life undisturbed till his natural death. Of course, Indonesians were angry with him at the end, but it was more for having stolen billions than for his lethal acts. I take it as an offense that Suharto was let off and a warning not to let myself think I have a way to avoid the omissions that mark my first work.

“Craft” implies a method that can be passed down. I can now, after a long (but not long enough) time at work, find only a pattern. What I learn is stimulated by knowing persons. My transferential or identificatory relation to them has been modified since 1965 by intellectual interests. When I begin anew, the series repeats itself—thus a “process.” But how does one start over? I feel, rather than know, that I have made errors or important omissions. I want to make up for this, not directly by revision, though that happens, particularly recently, but by feeling pulled again to the same place—“Indonesia,” where I can do better next time. “Indonesia” by this time has become for me not only a political and geographical location but any place where electricity surges through the body and words come out. The less I interfere with the process, the more I can momentarily put aside whatever frames a place in advance, the luckier I feel. But after that, the more likely it is that I feel I misunderstood. Thanks to your question, I ask myself who it is that tells me I have made a mistake. Perhaps it has to do with growing up in a place where nothing ever happened, where authority therefore was not clearly delineated as it needs to be when one deals with events. My father told me when I was quite young that because of the Depression they had waited four years to have a child. No doubt the person who writes is the one born in 1933 and the person who regrets the one born four years later.

Insofar as I can now imagine, I see what made me do what I have done so far; it all started with friends: Ben Anderson, Tim Bahti, Anne Berger, Claude Guillot, Richard Klein, Phil Lewis, Neil Hertz, Michael Meeker, Roz Morris, Rudolf Mrázek, Piero Pucci, Sandra Siegel, Sam Weber. And others as well. To say how would fill the entire journal. I have not seen enough of these people.

JL: This is a good place to end. We should end here.

1. Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) was an influential Dutch scholar most famous for his studies of Aceh and Mecca. Because of his knowledge of Acehnese society and history, he became a key advisor to the colonial regime of the Netherlands East Indies, helping crush resistance and impose Dutch rule in Aceh in the early twentieth century

(2) n anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete ...

3. Toer (1925–2006), Indonesia’s most celebrated writer and a leading social critic, was imprisoned by the Dutch during the Sukarno era and for fourteen years during the Suharto era, during which time his writings were banned.

 References

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Interview: James Siegel

Public Culture

Published by Duke University Press