Zionism without Zionism: the Jacqueline Rose--Edward said exchange.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Wise, Christopher

In a gesture that is certain to infuriate some and confuse others, the Jewish literary critic Jacqueline Rose dedicates her recent book, The Question of Zion, to the late Palestinian-American critic Edward W. Said. (1) Said himself never had the opportunity to comment on Rose's book, Rose informs her readers in an essay titled 'The Question of Zionism: Continuing the Dialogue', (recently published in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (2)), as Said died a mere four days after she delivered a copy of the manuscript to him. Thus Rose never learned of his reaction to her work, which was dedicated to him and written as a response to his now classic text The Question of Palestine. (3) Apart from these sources, the relation between Rose and Said is documented in an interview that Rose conducted with Said, titled 'Returning to Ourselves' (republished in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews With Edward W. Said (4)), and in Said's Freud and the Non-European, (5) which includes Rose's response to Said's controversial public lecture at the Freud House in London. (6)

In this article, I explore the complex relation between Rose and Said as documented in these various texts. They offer a privileged glimpse into current problems in dialogues between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, as well as Diaspora Jews like Rose. Not unlike the late French theorist Jacques Derrida, Rose attempts to rethink, or 'deconstruct', Zionism from within Zionist ideology. However, whereas Derrida in curmudgeonly fashion informs his readers that they are free to take or leave his mostly undemocratic views about Zionism, (7) Rose more apologetically seeks to recover forgotten auto-critiques of Zionism articulated by influential Jewish figures such as Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and others. Although we will never know in precise terms how Said might have responded to Rose's The Question of Zion, the many texts produced by Said over the years, especially his recent interviews and various journalistic essays, give us a fairly good indication of how he might have reacted.

Before commenting on Rose's The Question of Zion, it may be helpful to briefly overview the exchange between Rose and Said regarding the question of Sigmund Freud's Jewish identity and, by extension, the alleged Jewish dimensions of Freudian psychoanalysis. This detour is needed to clarify Rose's position on the issue of Jewish exceptionalism and how it is represented in The Question of Zion. Although Rose had the opportunity to respond to Said's lecture Freud and the Non-European, Said offered no documented counter-response to Rose's 'Response' that I have been able to locate. In effect, Said's lecture on Freud counters recent readings of Freud by Jewish critics like Emanuel Rice, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Derrida, who have all insisted upon the irreducibility of Freud's personal identity as a Jew. (8) These various interpretations of Freud's Jewishness also rebut Peter Gay's influential thesis that Freud was an unapologetic atheist and rational philosophe, or that he was a 'godless Jew', as Freud himself once put it. (9)

Along with the prominent Egyptologist Jan Assmann, (10) Said enters into the fray of recent debates about Freud's Jewishness by insisting upon Freud's commitments to European humanist thought. Rose rejects Said's view in this regard and, more or less, lines up with Rice, Yerushalmi and Derrida by suggesting that Freud's relationship to his Jewishness is more fundamental than Said allows. (11) While Said, like Derrida and other poststructuralists, affirms a universal doctrine of the trace in his lecture on Freud, Said certainly does not--unlike Derrida--assert that the figure of the Messianic Jew can serve as an appropriate marker of universal human identity, one that may supersede the Kantian subject of UN law and human rights. (12) In other words, the trace for Derrida is always-already a codeword for the Jewish milah (the 'Abrahamic' cut/name) that is both inclusive and exclusive, (13) whereas Said emphasizes the universality of what he calls the 'secular' trace as a generalized experience of psychological trauma, one that is undergone by all peoples everywhere. (14)

While Said insists that the trace (or 'wound') may be construed as a fitting token of an existential experience that is the ultimate guarantee of our membership in the human community, Rose turns this shared recognition in a more psychoanalytic direction by claiming that the trauma resulting from one's insertion into the realm of the symbolic mainly fosters in us the unconscious urge to react against the interpellative violence of the other. In Rose's view, Said is naive about the more detrimental aspects of this traumatic psychological experience, namely how it gives rise to the human urge to seek vengeance as a result of our having been so badly traumatized by the other. Rose therefore claims to offer a more 'realistic' perspective than the allegedly 'idealistic' view of the trace proposed by Said in his reading of Freud. However, in Rose's response to Said, the historical context that forms the backdrop to this critical exchange remains unarticulated, specifically the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If one keeps this historical context

in mind, Rose's critique of Said seems to be as follows: 'If Israeli Jews were to allow the specificity of their Jewish identity to be subsumed in the more general or universal way that Said proposes, they would by no means enjoy the cosmopolitan identity that Said idealistically affirms. Instead, they would find themselves subject to retaliation at the hands of Palestinian Arabs, whom they have traumatized for more than fifty years now'. I am obviously paraphrasing Rose's response to Said in a cruder way than she would appreciate, but my rapid formulation is not inaccurate, for such questions are germinal to this important critical exchange, even if Rose prefers to mute them.

These difficult questions are explored in more explicit terms in an interview with Said conducted by Ari Shavit, an Israeli Jew, in 2000, and republished in Power, Politics, and Culture. (15) Rose tends to soften some of the more difficult political issues in her friendly exchange with Said through the use of qualifying adjectives and other rhetorical niceties, but I would argue here that there is finally no escaping them, and it is better to be forthright about this. In fact, such questions reveal the furthest limits of current progressive exchange between opposing sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and they should therefore be investigated in greater detail.

In order to adequately comprehend the doctrine of the trace, which is affirmed by Said in a secular and universal sense, it is important to remember that what Derrida calls the 'gramma', wound or trace is yet another word for circumcision, which Jews have historically asserted is a unique marker of Jewish identity, or a privileged sign of the Abrahamic covenant. But as Freud points out in his Moses and Monotheism, (16) and as Egyptologists like Assmann never tire of confirming, circumcision existed in the ancient world long before it became a privileged marker of Jewish identity. (17) In Africa and the Middle East today there is nothing particularly unique...