No.2, March 21st, 2024
EDITORIAL
In the second Dabartis Letter we open with a contribution by N.N. in Copenhagen on hereness and Benjamin’s concept of now-time. Lacking a direct translation in Finnish, the question arose of whether to give priority to hereness as orientation in time or of place. Navigating concerns with the term possibly suggesting a diaspora that can happily integrate anywhere over the sense of rupture and antagonism the concept seemed to hold for the Bund, N.N. makes an argument for Hereness as tämänhetkisyys “this-momentness”.
At the end of Februrary we gathered for a screening and discussion of Matt and Malik’s film Spaces of Exception. In the Notes you find an account of our discussion, which invited everyone to consider together adjacencies between the (recently demolished) roma ghetto in Vilnius, refuge camps and “zones of exclusion” on the border of Belarus; as well as the historical jewish ghetto of Vilne. We also took the time to compare the differences in the public response to spaces of exception in Ukraine to those in Palestine and elsewhere; starkly coming to terms with what hinders solidarities between peoples who face, in many ways, shared conditions—racism.
1.
N.N., Hereness, jetztzeit, tämänhetkisyys, "this-momentness"
The first option, nykyisyyttä, is grammatically the singular partitive case of nykyisyys that could be translated as “present”, especially in the sense when the word is used to refer to the current era. In its partitive case nykyisyys turns into some more or less clearly defined element, feature or phenomenon that belongs essentially to “our days”.
In his article “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism” David Rosenberg1 tends to embrace this set of meanings in his emphasis on the "hereness" aspect of doikayt by defining it through diaspora: “There where we live, that is our country.” I don’t think this is incorrect, but there might be more to it than just that – or at least I hope so. Most likely it’s not Rosenberg’s intention, but I see in such a definition a risk to understand the matter in the terms of a “happily ever after” of integration. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz follows this path with the definition given in her book The Colors of Jews: “Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong.” Fair enough, of course, but this feels quite a diluted version of what the concept has historically meant – and could potentially mean here and now. Indeed, it doesn’t do justice to the Bundists’ revolutionary internationalism, which it's commonly associated, nor the potentiality of “nowness” contained in the concept either. Understood along these lines, nykyisyyttä points implicitly towards a passive acceptance of the course of current affairs; I hear similar conclusiveness in it as when we say “that’s just how it is” or “it is what it is”.
Against this tradition of nykyisyyttä as a kind of harmonious national rooting, we could emphasize its potentiality for creating ruptures with(in) the continuity of history. We could see here similarity to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“the here-and-now” in his theses on the Philosophy of History), which it seems to resonate. This here-and-now is so concentrated it is about to explode. Juxtaposing his historical materialism with the Jewish tradition, Benjamin recounts how "the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. [...] This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter." This shouldn't be understood as indicating passivity, as Löwy also notes in his Fire Alarm: "it is not a matter of awaiting the Messiah, as in the dominant tradition of rabbinical Judaism, but of bringing about his coming." In other words, it's all about "direct action on the historical plane". The goal might be, as Löwy claims, "to hasten the end of time", but I am not sure how important it eventually is. What matters more is the present moment, here and now, which might be the last.
Encountered in these terms, hereness would than ground itself on a revolutionary triple negation:
1. not the "thereness" of salvation’s here of an elsewhere (the zionist telos).
2. not the conservative here as a mere affirmation of what has been inherited to us by the past (cultural nationalism and integration).
3. not the "not like now" as a here of this place but not of this time, which places redemption as something distant I.e. an apocalyptism for which one must accept present sacrifices (e.g. revolutionary socialism).
Hereness insists that change cannot wait and calls for a "different here and now". A living communism of revolutionary class struggle, waged under and against the belongings ascribed to us by sovereignty and tradition. What could then be an alternative? In the Finnish edition of "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Jetztzeit is translated as nyt-hetki (“now-moment”), but intuitively I think perhaps tämänhetkisyys (“this-momentness”) could be closer to what is indicated by doikyat.
And rather than designating the form of life expressed here as a uniquely Jewish practice of inhabitation, I can see dabartis as but one contribution to an intensely variegated history of stateless, communist, internationalist, antifacist, ways of organizing ourselves. After all, the very core of jewish hereness designated an opening of my life, my struggle, my community, onto the universal terrain. From the Bund's central role in the founding of the RSDLP; to the decision of Jewish revolutionaries to join the international front against facism in Spain; disasporic jews contributed their lives and their knowledge to an anti-imperialist movement we are the inhertiors of today.
Another thing, not less interesting, would be to think further the autonome concept of here-and-now, which I connect first and foremost to various practices that can be seen to reflect the ‘immediate commuism’ – or ‘communization’ in the terms of another tradition – but of course also to the principled opposition to attentisme of the traditional far-left parties and even to the whole Grand soir itself. As far as I know, this hasn’t been theorized that much, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing; eventually autonomy is primarily a practical matter, or that’s at least how I understand it.
2.
Notes from the Spaces of Exception screening in Vilnius
Notes from the Spaces of Exception screening in Vilnius
Somehow we don’t often encounter comparisons between histories of state violence and even genocide. Each case, we like to tell ourselves is an aberration, a monstrous and exceptional deviation from the so called humanitarian foundations of the nation-state. In comparing the experience of the native and the refuge, the film importantly brings this discourse into radical questioning. We are asked: does the nation-state, at its core, truly embody the humanitarian values it claims to? Or should we begin to consider its other possible foundations: that the state-form as a genocidal form in and of itself—a guardian of private property, a vehicle for violent, imperial, expansionism, ethno-supremacy, and resource extractivism.
Matt and Malik nicely introduce the concept of “spaces of exception” in their film to help us understand these genocidal foundations of the state-form and the manifold ways communities organize themselves against it. Spaces of exception are territories where the rule of law is suspended. These are spaces where the state can enact power over subjects without limit or accountability. And we can find such spaces all around us. From the migrant detainment facility down the street; to the now universal existence of prisons where individuals are violently torn from their communities and alienated from their basic human rights; to refuge camps, concentration camps, ghettos, reservations and warzones; the exception, as Carl Schmidt said, appears to be the rule.
Yet, rather than casting the inhabitants of these not so exceptional spaces of exception as helpless victims, the directors are careful to focus on the vitality and agency found in these communities. The native and the refuge are both excluded from the world — the world of the state, of rights, of citizenship— and are makers of worlds. And these worlds of resistance, the directors challenge us to believe, are informed by needs and desires far greater than the desire for a nation state. What these communities offer is a radically alternative practice of inhabiting the earth. An inhabitation that critically defies our understanding of borders, property, jails, labor, nuclear families, and many other categories of belonging we have inherited by the history of the imperialist nation-state.