Morgenstern

| Messianic Poetics 1 The Messianic Poetics of Return: Benjamin, Darwish, and the Impossible in Judith Butlers Parting Ways1 Tyler Morgenstern: Media Studies, Concordia University, Montral tyler.morgenstern@gmail.com One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Adornos often cited pronouncement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarismcan be interpreted in another sense, not as a condemnation of the attempt after Auschwitz to write poetry but, on the contrary, as a challenge and behest to do so. The word barbarism, as it comes to us from the Greek barbaros, means forgeignand as such is precisely the task of poetry: not to speak the same language as Auschwitz. Lyn Hejinian Barbarism in The Language of Inquiry Introduction: The Problem of Return While perhaps known best for her pioneering work on gender and sexuality in the 1990s, Judith Butler has devoted much of the past decade to a comprehensive analysis of state violence, grief, the ethics of cohabitation, and the status of the subject as it contends with what Butler has called the precariousness of life: the shared condition of being both dependent on and vulnerable to a world of others we never chose, but with whom we must share this Earth. In recent years, much of this work has taken the form of a very public, and extremely embattled, opposition to the contemporary Israeli state and its occupation of Palestine. Though Butler, herself a Jew, has often expressed discomfort at being counted under the banner of the public intellectual (see her recent reluctance, for instance, to speak specifically to the situation in Gezi while delivering a lecture on the politics of the street in Turkey), her writing on Israel-Palestine, along with her personal investment in various activist initiatives opposing Israels continued aggressions, has nonetheless positioned her at the centre of a historical, cultural, and political struggle often thought to be intractable at best and hopeless at worst. Butlers recent collection, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, is arguably the culmination of this last decade of work. It is an essential and timely effort to intervene in and finally oppose the practices of political foreclosure, expulsion, and prohibition at the centre of the Israeli states attempt to justify its ongoing persecution of Palestinine. In the very moment that Israel labours indefatigably to construct itself as fully identical with Jewishness broadly construed--thus arming itself against critique by equating every form of legitimate political opposition with anti-Semitism and unjustly appointing itself the sole and final representative of Jews worldwide--Butler stridently refuses such strict and sweeping identifications.

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 2 Displaying a surprisingly frank opposition to these representative claims and the violent structures of exclusion and elision on which they rest (those who have in the past accused Butler of apolitical abstraction will find in Parting Ways a dramatic shift in tone), Butler turns to a line of Jewish thinkers-- Levinas, Benjamin, Arendt, Levi, and spectrally, Kafka--in an effort to excavate from within Judaism itself a set of conceptual and political resources that refuse the violences that Israel so routinely carries out today in the name of Jewish survival. Where the cultural and ideological work of political Zionism today consists largely of making operative in both general discourse and specific legal instruments some indisputable link between Jewishness and the state of Israel, Butlers task in Parting Ways is to debunk such a link from within, to demonstrate the ways in which it trades in a dangerous and hypocritical politics of refusal: a refusal to allow the globally dispersed and politically varied Jewish nation to contest and negotiate its relationship to the state, a refusal to acknowledge the modes of colonization and expulsion basic to Israels founding2, a refusal to allow the memory of the Naqba and the ongoing catastrophe of Palestinian displacement to be spoken aloud and publicly affirmed, and above all, a refusal to attend to the brutal history of the Shoah in a way that militiates against, rather than reproduces, the genocidal condition of statelessness. Perhaps owing to what is clearly a deep (though certainly not uncritical) care for her chosen thinkers, Butler constructs Parting Ways as a series of theorist-focused essays, considering each of her major figures in turn. One should not assume, however, that this form begets incoherence. Rather, I would suggest that across and through each essay, Butler develops a central, if radically multifaceted concern with a concept that occupies a particularly vexed position in any consideration of Israel-Palestine: the scene and possibility of return. The project of Parting Ways, after all, relies in a constitutive sense on Butlers ability to return to those lines of thought and political antagonisms that have come before her; many of which have been derided or actively suppressed by contemporary political Zionism. It is a text that operates specifically through a dual movement of return and excavation, a movement that seeks to disarticulate or, minimally, historicize the conflation of Jewishness, Jewish survival, and the Israeli state. Yet the return also emerges in Parting Ways as a scene of intense struggle, insofar as it is precisely that to which Israel endlessly appeals in an effort justify its ongoing aggressions against Palestine. Butler takes particular exception with the ways in which the Israeli government relentlessly invokes--or returns to--the memory of the Shoah as a way of dismissing any form of political opposition as a crypto-genocidal act that risks returning the Jews to the brink of annihilation. She similarly opposes, in no uncertain terms, the instrumentalization of this always-returning Shoah in the form of the Israeli Law of Return, which automatically grants full citizenship rights to Jews living abroad--including those who have willingly left Israel, as well as those born in the diaspora who have never visited and who may never visit. As Butler (among many others) argues, the Law of Return, which spawns aggressive international advertising and recruitment campaigns, is part of a broader policy program that seeks to 1) shore up Jewish demographic advantage in the region, 2) accelerate the illegal seizure and settlement of Palestinian territory, and 3) justify the strategic relocation of military checkpoints in ways that further restrict Palestinian movement.

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 3 Under contemporary political Zionism, the very notion of return is thus thwarted. While the formal legal instrument of the Law of Return might allow it to circulate in name as one of the claims of the Israeli state, under factual conditions, return appears only as its radical negation: in the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their territories, in the refusal to entertain so much as the possibility of ever allowing them to return to these lands, and the forcible repression of all traces of the Naqba. As Butler puts it, in contemporary Israel, we find the right of return (a right that is both of and for the refugee, the stateless body, and the exile) infinitely deferred by the state-located Law of Return. And so the notion of return--the ways in which it has been foreclosed, the ways in which it might be reopened, and the question of who speaks it--emerges as perhaps the central problematic of Butlers project. Against the Law of Return, which works to sustain some allegedly intractable congruence between the Jew, Jewishness, and the Israeli state, Butler animates the return both as a subject and a method. As a subject, Butler probes the return as a historically varied and variable scene of contestation that makes legible and (to paraphrase Butler in Mondoweiss in August, 2012) affirms a Judaism not identified with state violence. As method, the return operates in Parting Ways as mode of remembrance, thought, and critique that both wonders and wanders, crossing and recrossing historical moments that are not, at bottom, separable; one that opens onto and is opened on to by overlapping and conflicting political claims, one that is in many ways exilic in itself. Scattered, dispersed, and never quite at rest, it is nonetheless never fully out of home, for its home might anywhere. As such, while Butler organizes her text around the relatively modest (though by no means unimportant or simple) task of providing a set of resources with which to think the historical relation of Jewishness to Zionism anew, I suggest that there is also a larger endeavor at work in Parting Ways. Particularly through her readings of Walter Benjamin and Mahmoud Darwish, Butler develops--as a staunch protest against the unjust Law of Return, the violent expulsions by which it proceeds, and the vulgar reduction of Jewishness to the Israeli state it enacts--a particular conception of the scene of return: one secured in messianic time that speaks its name through poetry. Moreover, I would argue that this scene articulates, however spectrally, a politics that has been under development in Butlers thought since at least the turn of the millennium; a politics that begins from the rights of the refugee and always reaches toward a future, no less necessary or urgent for being impossible, of ethical cohabitation. As a final comment before moving on, I should note that I employ the phrase scene of return as both a methodological and conceptual signpost, a site for thinking and the mode of thinking that takes place within it. Here, I follow rather directly on Jacques Rancires (2013) conception of the scene, worth quoting at length: The scene is not the illustration of an idea. It is a little optical machine that shows us thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas, constituting the sensible community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such weaving thinkable. The scene captures concepts at work, in their

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 4 relation to new objects they seek to appropriate, old objects that they try to reconsider, and the patterns they build or transform to this end. For thinking is always firstly thinking the thinkable--a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable (xi). To Dry Niobes Tears: The Messianic Return of Trauma If we can accept that the return, and the effort oppose to its instrumental reification as the Law of Return, constitutes for Butler a central problematic, perhaps the most suitable place to begin is with her meditations on law itself, which she approaches through a brilliant reading of Walter Benjamins Critique of Violence. Though Benjamins essay is notoriously evasive, Butler opens it to interrogation by benchmarking one of its key conceptual distinctions, that between law-instating violence and law-preserving violence. Benjamin defines the former as the mode of violence that inheres in the moment when law is first imposed upon the subject by a kind of divine fiat (PW, 27). This is an ultimately arbitrary instantiation, insofar as it does not seek recourse or appeal to an extant juridical framework to establish its legitimacy. Rather, it is a reactionary response to some action, word, or deed understood by some power to be injurious. As the (violent) founding prohibition against certain forms of action, it defines the horizon upon which more extensive and self-referential forms of juridical prohibition might later develop. To illustrate the distinction, Benjamin invokes the mythical figure of Niobe. For claiming, in a moment of pride, to be more fertile than the goddess Leto (mother of Artemis and Apollo) Niobe, a mother of thirteen, is turned by Leto to stone. Yet her ossification is not exactly a complete death. Rather, she is condemned by Leto to weep, as a stone, for eternity. Neither animate enough to escape punishment nor inanimate enough to simply die, her tears forever rehearse the founding violence of prohibition. For Benjamin, Letos punishment of Niobe is fundamentally without precedent, having neither emerged from nor made appeal to any given juridical framework. It was, rather, the instantiation of a law in response to some primary injury. While I would contest in more vigorous terms than Butler does Benjamins suggestion that Niobe s persecution is fully prior to law--insofar as for the injury to be perceived as such, there must be, minimally, some ought-to operative in the relation of the human to the divine that prohibits the former from claiming supremacy over the latter--the parable is nonetheless of significant analytic value. It allows us to attend meaningfully to the second mode of legal violence that Benjamin identifies: the violence of law preservation. As Butler writes, once a law has been installed, it can only be preserved by reiterating its binding character.law is preserved only by being asserted again and again as binding PW, 72). That is, for a law to be sustained qua law, to retain its juridical and penal force, it must be cited and recited over time under conditions of audibility that allow these (re)citations to be heard and shared as legitimate. Such recitations, for Benjamin, are violent in their own right in that they necessarily implicate the force of institutions charged with maintaining those conditions of audibility, or more simply put, enforcement: the police, the parliament, the courts, the military. If the ossification of Niobes body stands in for the violent moment in which law is instantiated, then her tears--which never dry and flow without end--stand in for the reiteration of that violence over time, for the violence of

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 5 law preservation, the violence that appears as the law is asserted again and again as binding (ibid.). Here Benjamins distinction between law-instating and law-preserving violence reveals itself to be primarily analytical, for in one and the same body (Niobe), we find both operating simultaneously. As Butler writes, in the end, it would seem, the model of law- instating violence, understood as fate, a declaration by fiat, is the mechanism by which law- preserving violence operates as well (ibid.). The body that suffers the violence of law- instatement also forever suffers the violence of law-preservation; a cyclical reproduction of violence in general to which the tears that never dry bear witness. We might put it otherwise: the violent founding of law always returns as violence. In the Benjaminian framework, positive law bends time into a closed circuit that simply produces and reproduces violence without end. Past injuries return not as injunctions against the reproduction of injury but as injury itself. Given Butlers earlier lambasting of the Law of Return, it is not difficult here to substitute that phrase for Benjamins positive law. Indeed, I would suggest that this is precisely what we are being asked to do. Positive law, as a kind of broad juridical infrastructure, instrumentalizes and hypostatizes the memory of the founding injury such that it will return as further injury. In much the same way, Butler suggests that if it is the founding injury of the Shoah, or the spectre of Jewish annihilation, that calls for the installation of a legal instrument to prohibit against its repetition, then that instrument is the Law of Return. It is what legislates the return of the memory of the Shoah on eminently instrumental terms, as part of a clearly delineated program of Israeli foreign and border policy meant to shore up Jewish demographic advantage. And it is precisely this program of shoring-up, which indexes Jewish survivability to the image of an internally homogenous and non-Arab Israel, that requires the repeated and ongoing expulsion and persecution of Palestinians (and indeed non-Askenazi Jews such as the Mizrachim and Sephardim). And so just as the recitation of positive law promises only the reproduction of its own founding violence, so for Butler does the Law of Return secure only the return of those forms of violence against which it is meant--understood as the guardian of the memory of the Shoah--to militiate. It serves to reduce the scene of return to the return of violence itself. The common Zionist rallying cry of never again! thus comes up against a political reality of always and everywhere. The Shoah is always present, always returning in such a way that its violences--the (re)production of stateless peoples, racialized expulsions and exterminations, occupation and colonialism--are extended rather than refused. This analysis would seem to suggest that if we are to secure a scene of return that opposes the reproduction of violence, a temporality other than that afforded by positive law is required. If we are to arrest the closed circuit of legal violence that Benjamin delineates and establish a relationship with the past that exceeds a then that replaces and absorbs the now (PW, 201), we require an alternative history, one that is not simply reproductive, but one that is also in some measure regenerative. In response to this call, Butler introduces a second Benjaminian construct: the messianic.

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 6 Butler grounds her conception of messianic time in Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History, wherein it appears as a strange sort of flashing upthe sudden emergence or breaking forth of another temporality into one characterized by its uniformity and its progress (PW, 102) It is a brief, flitting (ibid, 108) return of some historical trauma that challenges any and all notions of history as somehow narratively guaranteed. In the almost methodological terms that Benjamin uses: to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger (as cited in PW, 102). Where the narrative claims of political Zionism would recuperate the memory of the Shoah such that it maps precisely onto contemporary conditions in a way that can only produce a blindness in and toward the present (ibid.), the messianic return of memory is explosive. It is precisely something outside homogenous and empty time, a memory quickened back to life neither as positive law nor mimetic reiteration, but rather as a trajectory in parts, in fragments, in chips (ibid.). The messianic holds forth the promise of allowing the memory of trauma to return--to be witnessed and affirmed--such that we can (in a Butlerian move) extract from it certain normative and ethical principles regarding how we might live through and respond to trauma in the present and future. Yet in appearing only momentarily, in a flash, in a fragmented and partial form, it also eludes instrumentalization. It disappears before it can be marshaled into the service of this or that policy framework. Indeed, the messianic scene of return runs precisely counter to that of juridical or legal continuity: [the] messianic is associated with the destruction of the legal framework itself, a distinct alternative to mythic power (PW, 77). The messianic would thus seem to pick up where the construction of the past as a teleologically guaranteed object, as somehow neatly contiguous with the present, becomes impossible. Or at the moment when the anxiety of committing oneself to that form of narration becomes most acute. We might turn here to the example Butler makes of Jewish Italian novelist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Where for the champions of contemporary political Zionism, the narrative rehearsal of the Shoah is a de rigeur element of the effort to justify Palestinian abjection, for Levi, the return to the Holocaust was always subtended by an intense anxiety. Aware of the political and historical necessity of defending the memory of the Shoah against those revisionists who would deny its scope and existence, Levi was nonetheless troubled by the ways in which narration itself tends to crystallize memory and transform it into a mere object (PW, 184). In her reading of Levi, Butler benchmarks two interrelated anxieties of narrative: First, in transforming the memory of the Shoah (or any historical trauma) into a strictly narrative object, one risks opening it to the binding force of a positive legal framework that would simply use it in any number of politically expedient ways, perhaps even in ways that negate or profane the ethical or moral gravity of the memory itself. This is what Butler refers to as the risk of discursive seizure (PW, 188). Secondly, insofar as the narrative is thought to crystallize the memory, it fails to preserve it as a living and vital site of remembrance. This reduction becomes for Levi tantamount to condemning those murdered by the Nazis to a second moment of h annihilation wherein even their memory ceases to be alive. As Butler

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 7 puts it, paradoxically and painfully, the story can actually become the means by which the original suffering becomes lost to memory (PW, 190). For Butler, the work of returning to the Shoah thus pushes against the very limits of narrative. Through Levi, she suggests that any attempt to construct a narrative that, in the course of producing evidence, does not to some degree posit the closure of the founding trauma, is somehow bound to fail. For her, there is something immanent to narration that is ultimately incompatible with the possibility of return, or at least with the kind of messianic return she is willing to accept. Perhaps it is that narrative fails as a condition of narrative: the impossibility of the ideal of full disclosure exposes a fallibility at the heart of narrative itself (PW, 182); an echo of her earlier declaration in Precarious Life (2004), my narrative falters, as it must (p. 23). If we have any hope of allowing for the return of memory for the purposes of living in and negotiating a present (PW, 201), we obviously must engage in some form of speaking or retelling. We require some mode of address through which the past might make ethical and political claims upon us. Levis deep anxieties around narration, however, serve as an urgent and desperate reminder that as we move toward such retellings, we must always take seriously the spectre of discursive seizure. We must think about the relationship between a discourse interrupted and confounded by trauma, on the one hand, and available to political instrumentalization, on the other (PW, 188). While not in itself a mode of address, we can nonetheless conceptualize the messianic as a temporality that resists discursive seizure. Contra narrative time, which would neatly suture past to present to future, it emphasizes the radically contingent and ultimately unknowable nature of memory, positioning it as that which cannot, in the end, be reliably owned or possessed: Perhaps the Messiah is merely another name for this time, one that comes from the past, entering, as if from a future, or at least in such a way that the temporal sequence is itself confounded. If it is a memory of suffering from another time, it is not exactly ones own memory; indeed, such a memory belongs to no one, cannot be understood as anyones cognitive possession; it is circulating, shattered, lodged in present time; it seems to be a memory carried by things, or the very principle of their breaking up into pieces, perhaps in the form of part-objects, partially animated and partially inorganic and strangely divine; something flashes up from this nonconceptualizable amalgam, something that is decidedly not substance: light, and shape, sudden, but also oddly, chips exploding and lodging and flashing up. Its effect is to interrupt, to reorient, or pull the breaks on the politics of this time. It is memory that takes momentary shape as a form of light (PW, 106). Butlers invocation of the messianic--that which [pulls] the brake on the motor of pain called progress (PW, 107) and enacts a cessation of happening (ibid. 103)--thus emerges as an effort to rehabilitate the claim of never again as a meaningful interdiction against violence. The messianic declares an end to those progressive historiographies indissolubly bound to the reproduction of violence and statelessness. It says never again not only or

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 8 exactly to the Shoah, but to all modes of state aggression whose victims are scattered and dispersed through history; to all modes of displacement and expulsion, to the variable ways in which human life is pushed toward oblivion and, to draw on Hannah Arendt (2001), made superfluous. The messianic says that never again may the memory of suffering serve as the legitimating ground of yet further suffering. Put differently, it secures for Butler a scene of return wherein a history of violence simultaneously emerges and departs from itself. This ambivalent mode of appearance sweeps away the compulsion toward revenge--a compulsion that, if fulfilled, would once again install at the heart of political life the figure of an always-weeping Niobe. For the scene of return to become an ethical one that resists the unending reproduction of violence, it must be one of both remembrance and departure; one where remembrance in fact becomes the condition for various departures toward alternative futures: Paradoxically, only by allowing the Shoah to become past can we begin to derive those principles of justice and equality and respect for life and land on the basis of that experience (PW, 201). Speaking the Messianic, Willing the Impossible: Yet the situation is still not quite resolved. For if Butler suggests that the messianic is the temporality of an ethical scene of return, then she still leaves us without a form by which to articulate it. Narrative, recall, has failed. We are left with the question of how the messianic, fleeting and fragmented as it is, might speak against violence. If the narrativization of return risks lapsing into, or at least enabling, a fallacious series of identifications between trauma, memory, history, and state violence, how else might we speak return? Put simply, what is the voice of the messianic? It is at this point, fittingly, that Butler departs from her project. While the central effort of this text is to disarticulate Jewishness from the state of Israel precisely by locating within Jewish thought a grounds on which to resist state violence, Butler states from the outset that such an enterprise risks lapsing once again into Jewish exclusivity (PW, 5). To reject the violence of the Israeli state by returning only to Jewish critics (and only Ashkenazi at that) would be to fall into too close an alliance with the very policy of Jewish demographic advantage that Butler so vigorously resists. If we think of Parting Ways as an attempt to model some ideal or speculative scene of return, then it must quite literally part ways with itself and open onto alterity. It must proceed only by refusing its own closure. And so it is that Butler concludes her text by turning to the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Bearing the title What Shall we Do Without Exile? her final chapter begins with ambivalence: a question rather than a statement, a gesture toward an alternative future, a not-yet that may yet be. Moreover, the question appears in quotation marks, signaling that we are in the presence of a speaker other than Butler, one whose identity is suspect. It may be, for instance, one of Butlers chosen thinkers. Perhaps it is Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, or Hannah Arendt, all of whom affirmed in various (though not unproblematic) ways the scattered and diasporic character of the Jewish nation as a way of remaining radically open to those others who wander in exile, Jew and non-Jew alike. The question, then, may be read as Butlers attempt to align herself with some of the earliest critiques of political Zionism, which refused the founding of the Israeli nation-state on the

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 9 grounds that it would negate the exilic condition basic to Jewish history and the ethics for which it calls. What Shall we Do Without Exile? in this sense might be the truncated form of What shall we, the Jews, do without exile? What shall we do and who shall we be without the condition that founds us? Yet the question may also be read differently, as a rehearsal of the anxiety at the very core of contemporary political Zionism. As Butler demonstrates throughout the text, particularly in her reading of Arendts affirmation of plurality, founding a nation state on the basis of internal homogeneity, as Israel has done, inescapably commits that nation to the reproduction of statelessness, an unending process of expulsion and exile, and a permanent war at the border (PW, 211). To imagine a future without exile is thus to imagine a future wherein the status of the Israeli state--not to be mistaken for or collapsed into Jewish survival--is questioned. What Shall we do Without Exile?, in this sense, could well be one of the anxious musings of an Israeli government minister who asks himself, without exile, without the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians, what shall we do? How, in a future where exile no longer exists, are we to justify our aggressions and injustices? Finally, the question might be read in yet another voice: that of the expelled Palestinian who paradoxically imagines the same future as the anxious Israeli minister, but from another angle; a future wherein the wretched forms of binationalism that already exist in the region--the exploitation of Palestinian labour by Israeli companies, the tense and fraught passing of checkpoints, the literal up-againstness miserably signaled by the separation wall--have disappeared (PW, 4). Read in this voice, What shall we do without exile? becomes an exercise of willing, the invocation of a world yet to come, an effort to imagine a day when returning home is possible and when memory might finally speak its name. In the moment of departure, Butler thus adopts a deeply fractured, multiple, and ambivalent voice, the kind that Levi seemed unable to locate within narrative. Possibly oppositional, possibly overlapping, and somewhat implacable voices gather together and contest one anothers limits in the act of speaking (or in the attempt to speak), a gesture that enacts a mode of address for which Butler has struggled since at least the early 1990s. As she writes in Bodies that Matter (1993): This not owning of ones words is there from the startspeaking is always in some sense the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself, the melancholic reiteration of a language that one never chose, that one does not find as an instrument to be used, but that one is, as it were, used by, expropriated in, as the unstable and continuing condition of the one and the we, the ambivalent condition of the power that binds (p. 241-242). That is to say, in Butlers opening question (which comes, hardly by accident, at a moment in Parting Ways when we expect closure) we find an ensemble of voices strung together in an uneasy cohabitation--a fraught and not necessarily happy way of being together, but a way of being together that is nonetheless possible. Butler here owes a debt to Hannah Arendt, from whose notion of plurality she excavates both her hope for cohabitation and her investment in challenging the long-accepted identification of politics and violence

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 10 (Duart, 2007). Yet unlike Arendt, whom she ultimately faults for finally seeking recourse, in her redundant (PW, 167) sentencing of Eichmann to death, to a position of sovereign judgment which must be outside the very plurality she seeks to preserve, Butlers voice is already not her own, already beyond her, already conflicted and contested. In this complicated voice, Butler turns directly away from narrative to Mahmoud Darwishs remarkable poem, Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading, written on the occasion of the titular figures death. In citing the contrapuntal form, Darwish presumes from the outset (not unlike Butler) the impossibility of univocality. Instead, he signals a commitment to a more dialogic mode of address that operates through some potentially contestatory, but not necessarily oppositional, set of relations. Fitting, then, that the poem proceeds as a sort of conversation between Said and Darwish. Yet insofar as Saids voice, being biologically lost to death, must be spoken through Darwish himself, it is a deeply troubled not-quite conversation that requires a return to memory. It is a dialogue that emerges through and within a single fractured body that traverses the temporal and physiological boundaries separating alive from dead, present from past, here from elsewhere. As in Butlers opening interrogatory, in Darwishs poem we find a mode of address that is not fully of itself, that gathers together a plurality of voices. This ambivalent mode of address is doubled by Darwish in his construction of Said as not exactly material. Butler quotes: On wind he walks, And in wind he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind, No home for the wind. Wind is the compass of the strangers North. He says: I am from there, I am from here, But I am neither here nor there. I have two names which meet and part I have two languages, but I have long forgotten Which is the language of my dreams. Yet unknowable and unspeakable as this Said might seem, we find in this passage an echo of another of Darwishs works, Dont Apologize for What Youve Done, wherein the speaker (ostensibly identified with Darwish himself) assumes a similar form: The witnesses turn to my mother to confirm he is me and she readies herself to sing her unique song: 'I'm the one who bore him, but the wind brought him up.' In this congruence of form, there exists at least the possibility of identification between the two figures. But as both seem more concretely bound to the nomadic force of the wind than any particular body, it should perhaps come as little surprise that the encounter between the two is radically unsettled, an unfolding of one force on to another (I recall here Barry

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 11 Websters beautiful phrase from his novel The Lava in My Bones: wind is what happens when air falls in love with itself.). As Darwish details in A Contrapuntal Reading: New York. Edward wakes up to A lazy dawn. He plays Mozart. Runs round the universitys tennis Court. Thinks of the journey of ideas across Borders, And over barriers. There are multiple movements here: from the mundane to the grandiose, from the local and the parochial to the transnational and the diasporic, from the baroque to the modern, and from the abstract to the eminently material. Once again, Saids body (and Darwishs poetic voice, constantly interrupted by unexpected line breaks and full-stops) assumes the form of wind; not quite substantial, but nonetheless capable of reaching through and into all fields, a force that refuses the fixation of a here in relation to a there3. As Said, speaking through Darwish, describes the condition: Here a margin advances. Or a centre Retreats. Where East is not strictly east And West is not strictly west, Where identity is open onto plurality, Not a fort or a trench In Darwishs text, then, we find a palpable resistance to the crystallizing force of narrative and a strident refusal of the finitude of identitarian claims. Yet amidst these various refusals, we nonetheless find a way of speaking. While Butler has often been dismissed as a simple deconstructionist who leaves us in a typically postmodern bind between an unlimited field of free play and an utter lack of agency, we find in her parsing of Darwish an absolute conviction that even under overwhelmingly complex and miserably violent geopolitical conditions, speech remains possible4. For Butler, poetry sustains the hope that speech might yet return to a history rendered mute by the banal reproduction of state violence and the condition of statelessness. Her precise attention to such poetic devices as metonymy, for instance, articulates an abiding investment in the capacity of speech to open us to alterity and the possibility of return. She quotes from Darwish: Metonymy was sleeping on the rivers bank; Had it not been for the pollution It could have embraced the other bank. The movement of metonymy here is at once lateral and virtual. It points toward the possibility of crossing boundaries, of glimpsing an embrace between seemingly unlike bodies. Yet this crossing must always remain in the realm of potential, insofar as it is constantly frustrated by the toxicity of instrumentalized and positively defined difference.

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 12 It is--like the contrapuntal form itself--what binds two phrases together that do not quite seem to fit in any unity (PW, 219-220); an embrace that may yet be. Metonymy, in this sense, gives voice to a messianic moment wherein two bodies, two forms, and indeed two histories might erupt in to one another such that we can attend to their shared harmonics and resonances. Yet it refuses to reduce this attention into an insistence on mimesis. It models not some liberal humanist ideal of unification, but a form of cohabitation, defining a horizon whereupon an uneasy and incomplete but all the same possible being-with takes shape. Here we might recall again one of Butlers central figures, Hannah Arendt, who in her oft- quoted introduction to Benjamins Illuminations (1968) writes, [m]etaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about (p.14). For Arendt, Benjamin organizes both the metaphor and the poetic mode of address to which it belongs as instruments of world making. Yet the oneness of the world they make must always be thwarted by the fractured voice of metaphor itself. That is, the oneness of this world inheres precisely in what Arendt would call its plurality, its constitutive non-oneness. Metaphor indexes an always-already fractured mode of address in which the terms of comparison never quite embrace. They give dimension to, yet are irreducible to, one another. The oneness invoked by metaphor is always incomplete. It is thus metonymy, metaphor, and the poetic mode of address that together secure a Butlerian scene of return. This scene resists being instrumentalized as a regime of univocal positive law that posits some unified historical narrative perfectly linking past traumas, experiences of exile, modes of identification, and the necessity of state violence. The poetic is what allows us to speak an alternative historiography that can never be fully stabilized, that operates by dispersion rather than unification. It produces what Wendy Brown (2005) evocatively calls a past of the present, a past for the present, a history that has an aim with the present (p. 12, emphasis in original). We can again cite Darwish: He [Said] also said: If I die before you, My will is the impossible. I asked: is the impossible far off? He said: A generation away. Here Said, through Darwish, defers the attainment of the impossible, which we understand through the poem to be a something like a future without exile. Yet if the poem lives beyond Said, and indeed, beyond Darwish, this generational deferral is infinite. Since the poem both defers and persists, the deferral persists in and of itself. The impossible is not just a generation removed from Said, but also from the reader, who may be anywhere, in any time. In a messianic mode, Darwish suggests that there can be no closure or end to the working toward and working through of cohabitation. It constitutes a horizon we can never cross, but one for which we must nonetheless always reach. Only in the reaching, Darwish suggests, might we approximate the ways of being-together that militate against the reproduction of violence and statelessness. Cohabitation, in this sense, is an impossible possibility; something that can never (and must never) be fully realized, but something which we must tirelessly make and remake in the name of a present ripe with non-utopian

Morgenstern | Messianic Poetics 13 possibilitynon-utopian because it is historically situated and constrained, a possibility because it is not historically foreordained or determined (Brown, 2005, p. 12). Braiding Benjamin, Butler, Darwish, Arendt, and Said together, we might say that the poetic invokes a oneness always deferred. It issues a demand that will only be fully satisfied later. Speaking a oneness that is always a generation away, it wills the impossible and partially realizes the final imperative that Said delivers Darwish: Invent a hope for speech, Invent a direction, a mirage to extend hope. And sing, for the aesthetic is freedom Poetry, aspiring to its task not to speak the same language of Auschwitz (Hejinian, 2000, p. 325) imagines a future where the violence of statelessness is interrupted by a messianic temporality that keeps open in perpetuity the virtual relation of present to past. The poetic secures a scene of return that resists positive legal instruments such as the Law of Return precisely by allowing for modes of return that are other, elsewhere, and multiple; that instantiate departures, that return precarious bodies to histories that have been obliterated and that return, however hesitantly, the past to the embrace of the present, for the future.
Notes: 1. I would like to gratefully acknowledge Daniel Guadagnolo and Sharon Stein for their time in reading and commenting on earlier drafts and segments of this work. I would further like to dedicate this paper to Dr. Stuart Poyntz of the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University for his intellectual generosity, academic precociousness, and indefatigable commitment to a plural world (and worlds-to-come). 2. Though I do not have leave to do so at any length in this paper, I would also suggest that Butlers analysis of Israel-Palestine is of abiding value in the attempt to think and contest the violent modes of subordination that inhere in all settler-colonial nations. Though particular national contexts cannot and should not be reduced to one another, we might nonetheless work to translate Butlers claims across space and time to ask what might become of the colonial and/or imperial nation-state when the modes of expulsion, dispossession, and destruction basic to its founding are suspended. We might look, for instance, to Butlers notion of cohabitation for a set of resources with which to think through the decolonization of nations such as Canada which, simply put, do not exist without the ongoing extermination and marginalization of indigenous peoples. Working and translating between Butler and figures such as Taiaiake Alfred, we might commit ourselves to the task of imag(in)ing alternative articulations of the very notion of Canada, of thinking through the possibility of an Indigenous Nationhood that exists outside of the time and space of imperial violence. 3. The ethical gravity that inheres in the destablilization of the here-there relation has been developed elsewhere by Butler. See Butler, J. (2012). Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation (2012) in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26(2). 4. This, as well, has long been a leitmotif of Butlers work. I am reminded, for instance, of Angela McRobbies comment on Butlers work, written nearly two decades ago: At each point some note of political hope and some prospect of human agency is squeezed out of a sustained and rigorous poststructuralism (p. 182). See McRobbie, A (1996). The Es and the Anti-Es: New Questions for Feminism and Cultural Studies. In M. Ferguson and P. Golding (Eds.) Cultural Studies in Question. London: Sage. Works Cited: Arendt. H. (1968). Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940 in (H. Arendt, ed.) Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: 1-59. New York: Schocken Books.

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Arendt, H. (2001). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Butler, J. (2012). Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (2012, August). Judith Butler responds to attack: I affirm a Judaism that is not associated with state violence. Mondoweiss. Retrieved from http://mondoweiss.net/2012/08/judith-butler-responds-to- attack-i-affirm-a-judaism-that-is-not-associated-with-state-violence.html Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of sex. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton University Press. Darwish, M. (2004, September). Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading. Al-Ahram Weekly Online. Retrieved from http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/710/cu4.htm Darwish, M. Dont apologize for what youve done. In (O. Amin & R. London, tras.) Now, As You Awaken. Duart, A. (2007). Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics and the problem of violence: from animal laborans to homo sacer. Retreived fromhttp://www.academia.edu/243692/Hannah_Arendt_Biopolitics_and_ the_problem_of_violence_from_animal_laborans_to_homo_sacer Hejinian, L. (2000). The Language of Inquiry. University of California Press. Moth, L. (2013, September). What Judith Butler didnt say in Istanbul [Blog Post]. Todays Zaman. Retrieved from http://www.todayszaman.com/blog/laura-moth-326494-what-judith-butler-didnt-say-in- istanbul.html Rancire, J. (2013). Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. New York: Verso. Webster, B. (2012). The Lava in My Bones. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.