Surviving Shakespeare, Dreaming of Michelangelo, Honoring Arendt

Figure 1: Michelangelo, Achim and Eliud, Sistine Chapel lunette. https://www.wga.hu/html_m/m/michelan/3sistina/6lunette/03/index.html 

This painting by Michelangelo [Fig 1] is one of several lunettes and spandrels in the Sistine Chapel featuring the Ancestors of Christ. Overshadowed by the more famous depictions of God and his Prophets, the Ancestor series consists of small family groups skootched into leftover spaces in the Chapel’s upper walls. Deprived of the knowledge that vest the Prophets with their dignity and momentum, these minor characters from Matt 1:1-16 are trapped in an interminable before-time. The cramped, divided picture planes yield a range of comportments not exhausted by New Testament typology, from ennui and alienation (notice the backs turned to each other and the viewer) to tenderness and care (the mother on the right prepares a makeshift meal for her baby).

The Ancestors of Christ rank for me among Michelangelo’s most compelling images. They have also long struck me as evocatively Jewish, so I was excited to learn in recent work by Asher Biemann that Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) chose to view these works as portraits of “Jews in exile.”1 In other words, the Jewish Neo-Kantian from Marburg read these scenes as images of survival, in the sense developed so brilliantly by Adam Stern in his new book. The category of the Holocaust survivor, stripped of shame by writers such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, became a veritable “secular saint” for both diaspora communities and the state of Israel after World War II (4). Yet survival, Stern argues, is not a Jewish idea at all, at least in any straightforward sense, but rather a complex by-product of Christian theology which has been unreflectively reabsorbed by modern Jewish thinkers as well as embraced by Israel’s state project. The process of constructing Jewish survival began long before the Holocaust, when Church fathers such as Augustine reread the “Old” Testament as prophecy and prefiguration of the New, to whose truth the survival of the Jews and their books bear witness (27). This fateful strategy authorized Christendom’s repressive toleration of the Jews as a necessary if reviled corpus mysticum, both dead and alive, embedded in salvation history (29).

Reaching back into Paul and the early church but focusing on modern German Jewish thought, Stern’s central tactic is to find the Christianity in Jewish thinkers, exposing the complicity of their survival narratives with the Eucharistic manufacture of presence, Christ’s resurrection, and the king’s two bodies. Thus, he writes of Arendt,

far from suggesting that a secularized Christianity bears some responsibility for producing this hell on earth, Arendt again sees in the archives of an abandoned Christian theology the critical resources for the world’s salvation. That is why, at the end of a long investigation into the elements and origins of total sovereignty, she famously closes with a citation from Saint Augustine. She reminds her readers that human beings are the created and never the creators: “Initium ut esset homo creatus est— ‘that a beginning be made man was created’” (47).

Because Christianity for Stern is ultimately synonymous with capitalism and imperialism, or what he calls, following Derrida, globalatinization, Arendt’s recourse to Christian figures such as Lazarus, her citations of Augustine, and even her turn to the English language (20) ultimately limit what she has to offer on the history of anti-Semitism and the birth of biopolitics. Although Stern says that he “follows Arendt by asking about the history of survival” (18), he finds her guilty of “secreting (in the double sense of the word) a singularly Christian topography of survival” (20).

But what is Arendt actually saying when she quotes Augustine? Arendt certainly did not think that human beings are incapable of creating; art occupies a key transitional bridge between work and action in The Human Condition. Arendt is arguing rather that the creation story thematizes the introduction of the unpredictability of human actors into the totality of the world considered as a made thing, and any attempt to treat human worldliness as the object of social engineering, household management, or military calculation is bound to fail (or at least reach a terrible stalemate). In The Human Condition, Arendt places the origins of the bureaucratic, post-political state in the Christian Middle Ages, and she explicitly criticizes the translation of Greek political terms into “Roman-Christian thought.”2 What she is trying to retrieve from humanity’s created status, in other words, is the capacity for politics, whose manifold contingencies are bound up in doing, speaking, and appearing to and before others (Eve to Adam, Adam to Eve), a fundamentally dramatic scene that the biopolitical state only imperfectly manages.

In Arendt’s 1933 essay “Original Assimilation” (note the ironic Augustinian title), she compares the Jewish salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen to Adam: “Purely independent, because born into no cultural world, without prejudice, because it seemed no one judged before her, as if in the paradoxical situation of the first human being, she was compelled to appropriate everything as if she were meeting it for the first time.”3 Varnhagen’s assimilation is “original” because it flows out of and gives shape to the disengagement from Jewish tradition predicated by emancipation and enlightenment. In this secular midrash, Arendt uses creation and its discontents to analyze the Jewish predicament, deprived of a politics, in the early 1930s.

In The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig notes that whereas the first days of creation are judged by God to be “good [tov],” the creation of humanity on the sixth day is “very good [tov me’od]” (Gen 1:31). Building on rabbinic commentaries, Rosenzweig identifies this “very” with a “supercreation” within creation, a surplus he identifies with human mortality, which “portends the revelation of a life which is above the creaturely level” by introducing historicity and the possibility of renewal into the teeming yet closed world of creation’s earlier stages.4 This de-completion that completes creation is doubled in the institution of Shabbat, a messianic interim or “time that remains” that opens a clearing for human action by suspending everyday work and labor.5 Arendt emphasizes birth or natality, whereas Rosenzweig emphasizes death or mortality, but both find in Genesis a torsion within creation that introduces historicity into the world conceived as a made thing. Eric Santner argues that German Jewish thinkers developed the topos of createdness and creaturely life because it allowed them to conceptualize “a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field.”6 German-Jewish writers including Arendt, Auerbach, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin take up createdness in its Christian formulations but loosen Biblical typology’s grip on the story in order to accommodate other voices, vistas, and questions.

Stern exposes the Christian core of modern Jewish thought by troubling Arendt’s reliance on Augustine and Rosenzweig’s affinities with Pseudo-Dionysus. Hermann Cohen’s response to Michelangelo as processed by Asher Biemann suggests a somewhat different tactic: how does Jewishness continue to resonate within Christian art and thought? How do such remainders suggest paths into and beyond secularization for both Jewish and Christian artists and thinkers?

Let’s take Shakespeare. Stern reads Hamlet as a Eucharistic allegory: “In a crucial historical translation—‘at the heart of the ghost story called Christianity’—Shakespeare analyzes the aura and reproducibility of the king’s portrait as a political theology of a survivor-ghost” (137). If you read Hamlet for reminiscences of Torah, on the other hand, you might overhear Polonius rewriting the Book of Proverbs, Hamlet wallowing in Ecclesiastes, the Ghost delivering his commandment on Mosaic tablets, and Claudius and his stepson jockeying for possession of Davidic kingship.7 Hamlet’s Bible broadens the tropes of survival well beyond the resurrection celebrated in the Mass, to include the feint of madness, the agony of repentance, and the competing forms of discourse and study associated with Torah (Moses) and wisdom (Solomon). Even Hamlet’s liberatory “interim” in Act Four, which allows him to affirm his role as minister and scourge but also as forgiver and forgiven, has a messianic tenor.

What whispers in Hamlet howls in Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy that displaced Hamlet after the Holocaust.8 Lear has long been compared to Job and the prophets,9 and artists in the eighteenth century, responding to the increasing prestige of Shakespeare as a secular scripture, depicted Lear in the style of Michelangelo’s Sistine portraits.10 In many illustrations, Lear raging on the heath evokes the outstretched arms of Michelangelo’s storm-and-creator-God. The Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, fresh from his Italienreise, used Michelangelo’s nested schemata to design a whole Shakespeare gallery, a secular Sistina. It was William Blake, however, who most closely channeled the forced inventiveness of exile that Hermann Cohen later intuited in Michelangelo’s Ancestors. Blake’s image of Cordelia and Lear in prison captures the lassitude and abandonment of Michelangelo’s refugees and honors their remodeling of leftover intervals for acts of imagination, companionship, and care.

Figure 2: William Blake, Lear and Cordelia in Prison, c. 1779. Tate Britain. Photo: Tate. https://www.tate-images.com/preview.asp?image=N05189 

Like my father-in-law Frank Reinhard’s generation of assimilated German Jews, Arendt was thrust into her Jewishness by the events of the 1930s, which she survived by becoming a refugee while aiding others in their exodus from Europe to Palestine and the United States. She could not save Benjamin from death, but she did carry his writings out of Europe and see them into print: survival of another kind.11 In the “Introduction” to Illuminations, Arendt compares Benjamin’s citations to pearl fishing, alluding to The Tempest.12 Shakespeare in turn assembled his underwater wonderland from the prophet’s psalm of thanksgiving in the Book of Jonah.13 Arendt’s pearls—luminous, portable, secreted around trash and trauma, and belonging to sea change—proffer a different, more magnanimous, Shakespearean trope of survival than the ghosts, hosts, and dead dictators that Stern finds in Hamlet and Julius Caesar.14

Stern’s genealogical approach unmasks survival’s darker purposes by “provincializing the presumed universality of regnant codes” and “analyzing the text of dominant discourses” (10). Although I came of age on deconstruction, genealogy often leaves me feeling bereft of valuable tools and fellow travelers. There are moments, however, when Stern pauses from the necessary work of critique in order to seek a way forward. In the stunning Epilogue, Stern provides an affirmative genealogy of the Palestinian virtue of ṣumūd—“agency, ability, and capacity in dire circumstances” (184), the forms of endurance that shine in Michelangelo’s lunettes. Stern couples ṣumūd with the rabbinic identification of the sarid or remnant with the talmid hakkam, “a student listening to the call of Torah (even at night),” that is, under conditions of persecution and dearth (186). Such devoted and courageous study, Stern suggests, is a form of Jewish survival less contaminated by Christian-colonial thinking than the post-war “Holocaust survivor” has become. And Stern’s own work is surely itself such an act of nocturnal study, insofar as he is keeping alive the tradition of Jewish thought that flourished before, between, and after the first two world wars, within a new “dark time” (in Arendt’s phrase) marked by the moral compromises of Israel, the march of climate change, and, as we write, the prospect of WWIII.

Figure 4: Hannah Lupton Reinhard, Song of the Sea, 2021. Oil and Swarovski crystals. Private collection. https://seasons.la/exhibitions/16-hannah-lupton-reinhard-beshert-beholden/overview/ 

Whither Jewish (post-secular) art today? This final image, Song of the Sea, was the centerpiece of an exhibition entitled “Beshert / Beholden,” the 2022 solo debut of painter Hannah Reinhard Lupton (named twenty-six years ago after Hannah Arendt and, yes, my daughter). In this large oil painting bedazzled with Swarovski crystals, the exodus from Egypt becomes an afterparty where Instagram girlfriends trample a Chagallesque dejeuner sur l’herbe. If the headless dancers at the back of the painting mimic the maidens of Botticelli, the women in the foreground, one braiding the hair of another, resemble Michelangelo’s snapshots of Jewish solicitude in exile. Beshert is Yiddish for soulmate. Hannah’s nymphs are dear to each other because they are braiding stories greater than themselves in a world they did not make (“O cursed spite that these were born to set it right”). This granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor from Weimar is finding her way through the ruins of art history and the leavings of Judaism in full knowledge that for her generation, survival of any kind is a burning question. Reading Torah deep into the night, Adam Stern has given us a refreshed and chastened archive with which to think about these predicaments.

Stern’s book is a theoretical tour de force that considers the relevance of survival as a theological-political phenomenon that “governs the history of ‘secular Judeo-Christianity’” (11). Stern offers a collection of interpretations, from the Rabbis to Talal Asad. His argument introduces us to the figure of the survivor, as discussed by a long list of thinkers, ancient to recent, all of them responding to the rise of Christian universalism. Over the course of modernity, the transformation from the divine voice to the voice of reality TV stars exposed “a still unresolved conflict between political theology and biopolitics” (153). A fundamental change at the heart of Western culture concerns, then, the transformation from an early modern divine right of kings, to a modern, biopolitical economy of power. Michel Foucault depicted this historical change in his work, and argued that if early modern rulers practiced power in the form of Christian patriarchy (the kingly, the phallic, and the decisionist), modern regimes developed the ability to camouflage their power in popular mediums or practices of distribution, management, and abstraction that “exert a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”1

The figure of the survivor appeared in English first as a “secular saint.” (4) In early-modern Hamlet the survivor transformed into a survivor-ghost (16), whom Stern calls “the Revenant.” In modernity he metamorphosed into a living-dead or a “monstrous figure of total sovereignty,” expected “to save us now,” Arendt concludes (43). When Agamben takes over the tradition of Augustinian-Arendtian commentary, he turns the survivor into a survivor-witness who cannot speak up. This is the paradigmatic Muselmann, now Jewish and Muslim, or the old-new “remnant” of Judeo-Christian tradition who’s left to answer for the “production and proliferation of survivor discourse,” as Asad, and Stern following him, explain (117). The survivor is placed, then, at the center of that process of transformation that leads from the secularization of Augustine’s two cities to modern urbanization and post-modern globalization. For Stern, following Agamben, “survival translates and captures a heterogenous field of marks,” both religious and secular (151). Unlike Agamben, the heterogeneity leads us to understand survival via “a history of the notion instead of a history of the concept” (151). From this angle, survival is a transformative moment, an untimely notion whose physicality saves it from both fusion with an early form of decisionism and later, empty, abstractions. The survivor is a concrete individual or community, a specific state, a specific notion of life, the one who continues to live (superstes in Latin), and the one who overcomes the biopolitical immanent notion of power and control. In his introduction, Stern argues that he approaches (Jewish) survival as ‘neither a Jewish nor a Judeo-Christian question” but as a “counterintuitive index for the way survival refracts the ‘secularized forms of Christianity that mark modernity in the West’” (12).2 He argues the same at the end of the book, when he discusses the new survivor, the Muslim.

I want to take a step back at this point. The meeting of secularization (political theology) and biopolitics is a meeting of two grand structures. The existential gap between them, the two periods and forms of control, is where the survivor, but not just her, show up. A similarly marginal figure is the stranger. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Georg Simmel (1858–1918)—a founder of modern sociology and a source of inspiration for Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin—pointed out the importance of the stranger to modern culture. “The classical example,” for Simmel, “is the history of the European Jew.”3 The stranger is “objective,” meaning she has “the proportion of nearness and remoteness” or what Walter Benjamin would later depict as the “aura.”4 This “proportion” allows the stranger to see society from the margins and “de-familiarize” or “estrange” its conventions and norms. The stranger thus avoids the temptation of power and affirmative cliches. As the late David Frisby showed, “The Stranger is not merely an analysis of a social type but is also related to our sociological knowledge of others.”5 The implication is that we understand the stranger at the heart of what “arises historically out of the transition from a class system to the organization of social life on a more mechanical, relational and political basis.”6 What turns the stranger into an essential figure in the transformation between political theology and biopolitics is the notion of a new threshold: Similar to the survivor’s, her very existence at the margins of society serves to shed light on social and political norms of her time.

The threshold, the light and many shadows of social space, and the form and formless, are all categories Simmel identifies with the aesthetics of modern society. Such aesthetic categories can be found at the heart of Western theology, early modern plays, and modern secular politics. For example, in 1904 he identified the scholastic principle of “Coincidentia Oppositorum” as a key to modern social forms.7 For Simmel, or his stranger, religion, politics, and fashion were seen as “forms” within the primary aesthetics of life. An imagistic “instant of life” (Augenblick des Lebens) allowed one to overcome the assumed contrast between life and religion.8 Focusing on the essential force of life, Simmel develops a liminal methodology that utilizes figures such as the stranger, the creaturely, or the “naked angel,” in order to characterize the same transformation Stern is considers between political theology and biopolitics.

Simmel’s stranger, not mentioned in Stern’s rich interpretation, proposes a way to defamiliarize us with the traditional views of Christianity. If Stern assumes Christian forms as the fundamental shapes populating both political theology and biopolitics, the genealogy of the stranger proposes a different, less teleological narrative. But the stranger is important for another reason, too: The stranger is never alone. Not only does she move among other strangers like herself, but among a variety of different minorities, all suppressed and pushed to the margins by two millennia of Christian domination.

I bring this up to conclude with a rather large gesture, or a question. For that I return to the historical question of continuity and change Agamben and Stern agree on, namely the one leading from political theology to biopolitics, pre-modern to modern, or the crack between them: If Agamben’s weakness lies in the structural bias of his concept—his theory of the Muselmann was heavily criticized as instrumentalizing the survivor for the sake of defining the biopolitical sovereign—Stern confronts a different challenge: the broadness or heterogeneity of his notion allows him to overcome simplifications, but precisely because of it, avoids clear answers. Following the secularized forms of Christianity is important for a critical understanding of both political theology and biopolitics, but it risks following a triumphalist narrative in which both the Jew and the Muslim function as mere indicators. Indeed, as Stern shows clearly, there is no way around Rosenzweig’s negative and damning figuration of Islam as what “severs revelation from its proper link with life” (112). Stern works around Rosenzweig’s Islamophobia by exposing it for what it is, but isn’t incorporating this rejection as a [Christian] “site of excarnation” giving Christianity the last word?

The question I am asking here does not debate the great contribution of this wonderful book. Rather, I am attempting to draw on its intellectual vigor for the sake of a better and more sophisticated historical conversation. How are we to understand the survival of the Jew and the Muslim during “the Christian Centuries,” or what the historian François Hartog recently called “a Christian regime of historicity”?9 How do we escape this regime, dialectical and so expansively “loving” as it may be? Is the survivor our guide? The figure of the stranger, when accompanying or preceding the survivor, may propose a dimension of everyday life to the existential life-and-death drama. Both the Jew and the Muslim function here as the exception to the Christian rule—an exception to the law or to life itself—but the Christian King, real or imagined, defines the rule and its exception. If Benjamin positioned the stranger as “the turbulent void at the heart of (early) modernity” (140), Stern frames the survivor at the heart of Imitatio Christi or “the language of Eucharistic anxiety” (140). And maybe another explanation is possible here: In “The Age of Anxiety,” the title of a new song by Arcade Fire, maybe both figures of the survivor and the stranger are the wrong starting point. Both are too civilized, too much the product of a turbulent West.

As Adam Stern acknowledges, the term “survival” carries a specific kind of doubleness that demands attention. On the one hand, survival indicates a persistence or continuance of life in the face of negation, devastation, and death. To survive, according to this sense of the word, has something to do with a perpetual surplus within life; it alludes to modes of living and inhabitation that keep going. On the other hand, intrinsic to the notion of survival is the trace of loss and suffering, or a reminder that what did not continue living is a condition of possibility for that which lives on. Survival simultaneously registers continuation and erasure. While discussing connections between Benjamin and Derrida on this matter, Stern writes: “At the very instant that survival declares a negation of, its irremediable loss, division, and death, it also signals the affirmation of life, its equally essential continuation, growth, and expansion” (54). This thoughtful formulation reminds me of a well-known utterance by James Baldwin: “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. So I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”1 Here optimism, within and against a regime of anti-blackness, is described as a compulsion, or a forced option. While Baldwin is all too aware of the successive forms of sanctioned death imposed on black people, he insists that what Kevin Quashie calls aliveness is a belief in, and commitment to, black (and human) survival. But this will to survival, this optimism that is imposed on Baldwin by aliveness, is never separable from the violence and terror that produce remnants and ruins, such that what survives takes on a form that bears the wound that is our world.

Stern’s brilliant, thought-provoking, and demanding text invites the reader to reconsider the doubleness of survival. More specifically, this eponymous book asks us to contemplate two related tendencies within modern thought and discourse: the conflation of Jewishness with survival (or marking Jewish survival as a template) and the less acknowledged inclination to imagine and ensnare the idea of Jewish survival within a Christian theo-political paradigm of redemption. Instead of directing us toward explicitly Christian theological texts and authors, Stern examines these tendencies within a series of canonical Jewish thinkers—Arendt, Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and Freud. In Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Stern discovers a Christian notion of resurrection behind Arendt’s assessment of Jewish survival and her concomitant claim that the concentration camp turns Europeans into Jews and Jews into Africans (the latter described as de-individualized populations that cannot master themselves or make coherent social worlds). As Stern underscores, Arendt introduces Lazarus as the figure of survival and “everything that Arendt writes about Lazarus converges in an image of survival that one can set up and bow down before: the victorious and redemptive ‘mystery’ of Christ’s resurrection” (48). To put it succinctly, Arendt’s notion of Jewish survival is tethered to, and interpreted through, a Christian notion of victory and triumph. In his re-reading of Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” Stern notices a conception of pure language that resembles the beginning of the book of John (“in the beginning was the one who is called the Word”). For Benjamin, translation pushes language towards its highest form, a form that “precedes all (actualized) language as its abyssal ground” but that is per-formed and carried out in the translation of texts (80). Through translation, pure language survives. According to Stern, Benjamin implicitly modifies the first verse of the book of John with something like, “in the beginning was Survival” (80). What is important in the conclusion of the Benjamin chapter is that Stern underscores (again) an internal conflict within the notion of survival. While to survive is to “undergo suffering,” it is also a “triumph of life that is not only triumphant life but also a triumph over life” (81). Alongside this reading, the resurrection of Lazarus, which anticipates that of Christ, becomes the template for (Jewish) survival.

As I read Stern, while Arendt and Benjamin betray a commitment to an idea of survival that re-inscribes Christian logics, Rosenzweig ups the ante. Rosenzweig leaves no room for doubt that the Jews remain—within a Christian world historically organized around anti-Jewishness and supersessionist frameworks—to provide a witness to the truth and validity of Christianity. More specifically, since Israel constitutes a living, material collective body, the figure of the Jew anticipates a materiality/fleshliness that the Christian desires but only has access to through the Jews. Describing Rosenzweig’s perspective, Stern writes, “The Jews are an amplification of Christ, a supplement for Christ, and a fulfilment of the role that he fails to properly embody” (115). For the early twentieth century Jewish philosopher, the victorious survival of Christ is the central star “around which the survival of the Jews and [to a lesser extent] the survival of the Muslims orbit” (116). And yet Muslims, for Rosenzweig, participate in the revelation of God in a deficient manner; for him, Muslims enter God’s revelation at a moment of its waning vitality. Anticipating Agamben’s description of the Musselman in the European concentration camps (the figure who represents bare life, the walking dead), Rosenzweig suggests that the Muslim only continues on as a signifier of death, or existence without life. If Stern is right, then what we inherit from Rosenzweig is a theo-political paradigm in which Christian redemption is the guarantor of full life. The figure of the Jew is a necessary rem(a)inder and extension of Christian fulfillment while the Muslim occupies the field of death that the life of Christ (and its sublated Western imperial re-expression) must resist, reject, and/or eliminate.

According to Stern, “If Jewish history has come to exemplify the history of survival, perhaps this is only because survival is one globalatinizing name for the history of Christianity” (175). Stern provides a powerful account of how Jewish history can become the paradigm of survival only when this history has been incorporated into a Christian framework, folded into the Christianization of the world. To put it differently, the persistence of Christianity involves the spread and imposition of survivalist commitments that are patterned after the resurrection of Christ (an image of life triumphant over death that, although interpreted in a variety of ways, has propelled and been annexed to successive imperial projects). Levinas and the later Benjamin understood that the celebration of the survivor often overlooks how the survivors of history appropriate the dead and silent in an imperial manner. The historian, for instance, tends to write in accordance with the victors of history and threatens to convert the alterity of time and experience into the logic of the same.

In the conclusion of the book, Stern shows how a certain survivalist paradigm (which dictates how subjects imagine the interaction between life and death, loss and triumph, vulnerability and impermeability) gets grafted onto “Zionism’s political theology of war” against Palestinians. The will to survival too often becomes a justification for warfare, militarism, and partition politics; in contemporary Israel, this endeavor often entails re-interpreting terms like hisardut to mean a kind of survival that is made possible by militarized reasoning and tank production. It is important that Stern gestures toward other ways of thinking about survival, intimated in Hebrew and Arabic lexicons. By turning to alternative translations of hisardut and the Arabic ṣumūd, Stern leaves the reader with the possibility of practicing “survivance” in a manner that underscores qualities and practices such as silence, secrecy, untranslatability, study, and listening.

Stern is pressing us to re-imagine survival in a manner that breaks with Christian-informed attachments to wholeness, fulfillment, victory, and forms of life that deflect or supersede death and its intimations (vulnerability, woundedness, silence, etc.). While Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” is an example of survival patterned after Christian resurrection according to Stern, Benjamin’s 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of history” opens up other possibilities and lines of flight. As Stern indicates in the conclusion of his book (with the language of shards and ruins), Benjamin’s oft-cited aphoristic essay is a critique of the “storm” of Progress. As a linear (and empty) mode of homogenous time, Progress is always operating to kill the dead repeatedly. This is why “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”2 In other words, images of past and present suffering are in danger of being erased, forgotten, or incorporated into frameworks of “conformism,” or narratives and discourses that render moments and events intelligible only if they accord with prevailing modes of power and signification.

Consequently, the historical materialist (or the one concerned about the tradition of the oppressed) must avoid two temptations. The one temptation is to focus on the “image of liberated grandchildren” over that of “enslaved ancestors.”3 This would assume that liberation or revolution would involve a simple linear break from the past rather than a weak redemption of the past (which involves mourning, remembrance, citation of the dead, and permission of the past to interrupt the course of things). The other temptation is to convert that weak redemptive impulse into a strong and triumphant attachment to survival. In this case, what survives through remembrance, ritual, and discourse lives on according to a logic of fulfillment and recovery. Survival becomes a justification for imperial modes of living and destroying against those designated to exclusively represent death, non-being, and so forth.

What I am getting at (inspired by Stern’s demanding project) is a conception of survival that refuses projects of forgetfulness and projects that convert the remains of history into a spirit of triumph, a spirit that reifies the line between life and death. My sense is that for Benjamin the form and style of writing has something to do with performing this in-betweenness. I take it that Benjamin’s use of terms such as flash, flit, ruin, and wreckage is vital. When he speaks about what “it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up,”4 he is underscoring evanescence and warning the reader about the ways in which the past can elude us, or emerge in an instant and then disappear. He is also indicating how the past emerges in an atmosphere of danger and struggle insofar as images of violence and anguish are prone to become instruments of power and the status quo. Similarly, the language of wreckage and ruin also draws attention to the form and shape of what survives. Even as Benjamin’s angel of history would like to redeem and make whole “what has been smashed,”5 the aphorisms in “Theses” leave us with a sense of fracture, the fragment, and the constellation. These images refuse a sense of wholeness or coherence; and yet the series of allusions to what has been punctured and de-composed open up the possibility of alternative relationships and assemblages not defined by life’s triumph over death.

In addition to the aphorism and essay, certain kinds of poetry also introduce ways of thinking, being, and feeling that refuse the life/death binary that imperial conceptions of survival rely on. Here I am thinking of Lucille Clifton’s 1993 poem, “won’t you celebrate with me.” Writing within a black feminist tradition, Clifton celebrates making a life in a world that has consigned her to death and abjection (Or in Arendt’s language, a space of unmastery and unworldliness). Clifton’s poem reads:

won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed (Clifton 1993).6

There is much to unpack here. But I am interested in the relationship between celebration and shaping a kind of life (something that Kevin Quashie has thought about in is wonderful book, Black Aliveness).7 The first time, the reader, the personal “you,” is invited to celebrate with Clifton, the question mark registers being petitioned and asked to participate in something. And yet the question mark also points immediately to “a kind of life,” urging us to contemplate what kind of life is shaped without a model and in a context associated, especially in biblical traditions, with evil and promiscuity. On a bridge, in a zone between starshine (or untimely light) and clay (earth, sand, water, plants, the buried), Clifton presents an image of isolation and a relationship within the self—“my one hand holding tight my other hand.” Even in moments when the world has left her alone, touch becomes a way to create a connection through doubling and self-othering. The poem ends with another invitation to the floating interlocutor. Here Clifton alludes to a kind of rejoicing at the miracle of her survival, the miracle of enduring as both nonwhite and a woman. And yet survival is never explicitly mentioned; in fact, it is expressed via the negative. It is alluded to through a failure. The black woman poet survives despite the fact that everyday something has tried to take her life. In other words, survival here is always tethered to the everydayness of anti-blackness, misogynoir, and other interlocking modes of murder and death. She endures because the dis/order of things is never as successful as it makes itself appear. This is not a confident, ascendant account of survival. And yet it is the occasion for mournful celebration and perhaps, with Stern, an opening toward less pernicious ways of thinking and practicing the interaction between life and death.

In Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, Debarati Sanyal notes that while the word complicity often marks “participation in wrongdoing, or collaboration with evil,” its Latin root complicare means “to fold together.” Sanyal elaborates a notion of complicity that is less about condemnation than about exploring uneven modes of relationality—forms of contact and contradiction, entangled forms of recognition that connect and collide—that unfurl from their enfoldedness across time and space.1 Adam Stern’s Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy similarly resists simplistic moralizing while recognizing what Sanyal calls “the unpredictable power and peril”2 of entanglement. In genealogically charting Christian theological notions in Jewish writings on survival, Stern aims to complicate (my account revolving still around complicare, a making complex through weaving and intertwining) survival’s distinctive association with Judaism and Jewish people.

The question “Who is speaking about survival?” begins and ends both the “Introduction” and the “Epilogue.” It introduces and invites, partially answers and finally leaves inconclusive, the matter of whose epistemologies and concerns inhabit works by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud. While Stern is unambiguous in showing that Christian theologies weigh heavily on the works of all four thinkers, and that adopting their frameworks leads to various degrees of identification with hegemonic culture, it is less clear whether he imagines that these thinkers should have been able to fully circumvent the dominant Christianity of their early twentieth century western European contexts. The question “Who is speaking about survival?” in present tense urges readers to reckon with the ongoing (after-)life of what Jacques Derrida called globalatinization.

Stern’s deep, close, and contextualized readings do not render unifying conclusions. He demonstrates, with painstaking attention to subtlety and contradiction, how Jewish thinkers narrate Jewish existence through Christian imaginaries, and how Christian ideals (upheld, betrayed, or ambiguously spectral) shape their political and ethical horizons. These accounts disclose untidy assemblages of identification and disidentification. If Stern finds, for example, in The Origins of Totalitarianism “a lament for the demise of Christianity and a confession of Arendt’s longing for its resurrection,” it is Christianity as an alternative to the enchantment of National Socialism and a “total sovereignty” that marks survivors, especially, for death (45–46). Christian civilization is also imagined, however, in negating contrast to a primitivist caricature of “Africa” as savage, prehistoric, and unsurvivable, such that Arendt posits concentration camps as reproducing the “phantom world” of the Dark Continent (37–38, 46–47).

Freud, like Arendt, oscillates between foregrounding the ravages of European “civilization” and adopting, even naturalizing, colonialist ontologies. Stern asserts that Totem and Taboo retells the Eucharistic meal as a universalized tale of patricidal violence and internalized authority—a brutal foundation for civilization and morality (153). He also frames Freud’s thinking on death and survival as fundamentally concerned with fantasies of sovereignty.3 An unavoidable aspect of psychic formation as Freud describes it is to imagine triumphing over one’s rivals by outliving, that is surviving, them (156–58). This ambition to outlast even those with whom one is in intimate or dependent relationship repeats, through transference, across indefinite incarnations (164, 167). The survivor, in Stern’s reading, is not truly sovereign but “one more reproduction” in a relational field that refuses to acknowledge vulnerability and loss (172, 174). The turn to Moses and Monotheism at the end of Stern’s chapter on Freud is evocative and enigmatic: Is Christianity’s delusion that it has lost and outlasted Judaism analogous to Moses’s killers’ (in Freud’s telling of the story) imagining that they had triumphed over their leader? Does the fantasy of the empty tomb map further back onto Freud’s earlier theories of melancholia, and if so, is it a peculiarly Christian inability to face death and loss?

I am interested in following Stern to consider additional ways that imperialism and coloniality conscript those whom they partially—perhaps mostly—reject into their mourning, and thus their continuance. In Timely Reflections on War and Death, Freud grieves that the mounting violence of World War I is possible among “the great world-dominating nations of the white race.”4 Set apart by their morality, technology, aesthetics, and “unity within the civilized nations,” these collectivities were not entirely without prejudice. They contained “certain remnants of other peoples which were generally disliked” even when they showed themselves similarly capable of civilized existence. Yet one would have hoped, “might have been forgiven for thinking,” that a tolerant recognition of common humanity could have overridden prejudice.5 Freud questions the terms of the social contract, and whether the state prohibits individual wrongdoing “not because it wishes to abolish wrongdoing, but because it wishes to monopolize it.”6 The lack of morality on the part of both the state and individuals destroys an illusory sense of evolutionary attainment, the notion that primary drives have been overcome.7 Amidst conflict and despair, the most pervasive illusion consists of a denial of death: “our unconscious is just as deaf to the idea of our death…as man was in primeval times.”8 Freud issues a surprising suggestion: “should we not be the ones to give in and adapt to war?” It is time, he suggests, to face death in order “to endure life.”9

If this is the moral reckoning that war requires, it was seemingly not occasioned by “wars between primitive and civilized peoples”10—by European struggles to conquer, or the ensuing struggles to resist colonization. (I will note from readings in both U.S. trauma studies and European modernist literature that Freud is far from alone in this selective sense of calamity.) A crisis in the state’s moral status reveals the civilized to be primitive but does not thereby overturn hierarchies of nations or race. Whose death—social death, slow death, or planned extinction—continues to underwrite the very notion of civilized nations? Which solidarities are forbidden if we adapt to war for the sake of survival?

In Specters of Marx, Derrida cites a ritualized, repetitive “incantation” that triumphantly declares the defeat of Marxism, communism, and the Socialist International. “It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!” The certainty with which these declarations are shouted is, Derrida argues, an attempt “to disavow, and therefore to hide from, the fact that never, never in history, has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated (namely, all the old models of the capitalist and liberal world) been as dark, threatening, and threatened.”11 Whose survival is unimaginable if economic and political liberalism should survive? If it seems unlikely that economic and political liberalism will survive in their universalizing (sovereign?) ambitions, or if they are already dead at the hands of unapologetically illiberal forces, are we to mourn the social contract that required savage otherness as its constitutive outside? Present-day mourning for civilization too often takes this form, grieving the imagined security of a particular arrangement of domination. Neferti X. M. Tadiar puts it this way: “The world of the no longer is the time of the already human experiencing the ravages of their own war.”12 Stern’s jump from mid-twentieth century Jewish thinkers to present-day Israel and Palestine asks whether survival can be deployed for decolonial ends, in ways that avoid “recapturing resistance within an archive of domination or…disguising colonial violence as an act of liberation” (180).

It seems, at first, that the potential for the latter is too great. Thirty years after Derrida’s lectures at the “Whither Marxism?” conference, the term hisardut attaches to Israeli military tanks to mark survival as military machinery’s ability to withstand attacks. That “invulnerable killing machines” can be imagined as “vulnerable bodies” and “vessels of salvation” demonstrates, for Stern, “the military-industrial effects of survival’s globalatinization” (183). Tadiar points out that Israel’s status as a democratic state “in a region believed endemically hostile to such modern ideals” is an integral part of its alliance with the United States, and that both find themselves “threatened by the refusal of the wretched peoples of the earth to be reduced to the status of the less-than-human.”13 Her emphasis on “small yet vital acts of political survival” resonates with Stern’s brief explication of the term sumūd (183–85).14

Survival that refuses wretchedness is key to Gerald Vizenor’s elaboration of survivance as practiced in Indigenous communities. While citations of the concept often state simply that survivance combines the words survival and resistance, Vizenor repeatedly insists that survivance “is elusive, imprecise by definition, translation, comparison, and by catchword histories, but the sentiment of the word is invariably true and just in native stories, practice and company. Survivance is as complex as the notions and course of dominance.”15 Importantly, survivance is not about dominance; nor does it emphasize “tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.”16 It is fundamentally concerned with practice and presence based in natural law. Survivance expresses a relational world that is ordered and tricky, evasive and inescapable; it maintains that “Native imagination, experience, and remembrance are the real landscapes of liberty in the literature of this continent; discoveries and dominance are silence, absence, want, and cultural nostalgia.”17

Vizenor frequently contrasts survivance with discourses based in monotheism, Christianity, and original sin. Yet he finds Derrida’s deployment of the term suggestive in its sliding descriptions of “a relic from the past” or “the sense of an afterlife,” and an excess that goes beyond life to resist “annihilation.”18 Vizenor declares, “Derrida would surely have embraced a more expansive sense of the word survivance.” He notes with translator Peggy Kamuf that its non-belonging to active or passive voice, subject or object, could align it with “the fourth person or voice in native stories.”19 Enfolded meaning abounds. Perhaps Vizenor is amenable to Derrida’s take on survivance because they are both acutely aware that, “Constitutional democracies have not always been the source of moral imagination or liberty.”20 The democratic state is, as often as not, a threat to both sovereignty and survival.

The question “Who is speaking about survival?” opens onto a raucous present-day scene. It evokes conversations about sexual assault, Indigenous languages, sex work advocacy, climate change, border crossings, police brutality, policing in general, racial capitalism, domestic violence, cultural continuity, land rights, overlapping pandemics, environmental justice, queer adolescence, and fears of racial “replacement.” Survival articulates categories of injury, commitment, vulnerability, fear, and endurance that are interrelated and mutually inextricable, yet crucially incommensurate. I take from Stern the importance of interrogating what resonates and echoes across seemingly disparate contexts, and why.

I am also impelled to ask continually what solidarities are forbidden in a particular time or place, or by a given discourse, and where tentative attempts at awkward translation might reveal something about enfoldedness. Stern traces a partial genealogy for an alternative to hisardut that might alter its meaning from within a shared history. He arrives at the figure of the sarid, removing him from the Pauline interpretation of those who call upon the Lord and are called to survive. Instead, Stern arrives at the sarid as the rabbinic scholar “listening for the call of the Torah (even at night)” (185–86). In a capitalist and colonialist order that would have us compete for viability, it may be possible, Stern suggests, to reorient—perhaps even transform—our notion of what it means to survive.