'Palestinianism' & Jewish-Erasure: A Case Study in 'The Anxiety of Influence'
Having written elsewhere about identity-theft and its mass-marketing by those Einat Wilf has dubbed 'palestinianists,' I think it worth meditating a bit more on what prompts this ideational pathology and its ugly praxis. It seems to me there are at least two helpful frames in which to consider the phenomenon.
One is what I dub DSM-diagnosable 'Narcissistic Identity-Appropriation Disorder,' which I'll say more about in a subsequent post. The other is what Harold Bloom memorably named, in a book with the same title, 'The Anxiety of Influence,' which I will talk about here.
Bloom's book is subtitled 'A Theory of Poetry,' and that is indeed what the work proffers. The underlying psychological driver that Bloom posits, however, is obviously cross-applicable; that which drives poetic evolution, on Blooms rendering, can easily be seen driving evolution in other cultural realms too - including theology, politics, and theopolitics.
Here is Bloom's proffered dynamic in nuce:
Poets - or let's add 'creators,' since the whole accounts would seem readily generalizable - wrestle with legacy. On the one hand societal expectation is that the poet or other creator will do something original, will innovate. 'Make it new,' as Pound would have it.
On the other hand, to be even so much as intelligible as a contribution to some named tradition - that of poetry, say, or some other genre or cultural form - the poet's poem or creator's creation must bear certain recognizable features, certain similarities to the poems of prior poets, the creations of predecessor-creators.
And therein lies the 'anxiety,' if we interpret the word as does Kierkegaard (which Bloom regrettably DOESN'T quite do): 'a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.' There is tension inherent, a Hegelian 'contradiction' latent, in the would-be original contributor to a tradition's role. She must stay close to her predecessors - 'stand on the shoulders' of the preceding 'giants' - while not sticking so close as not to add height.
By way of aside, I note in my lawyerly capacity that this anxiety afflicts the would-be 'great lawyer' in any commonlaw system as well. The aspiring great lawyer must locate and navigate the space between Tocqueville's 'French lawyers,' who Tocqueville says eagerly claim every argument as 'original,' and his American lawyers, who he says eagerly urge every argument as precedented. The 'great' lawyer is novel while being true to precedent.
By way of additional aside, albeit in this case an 'aside' with more applicability below, scholars of religion will note here an echo of Weber's old posited dialectic of 'Prophets and Priests.'
Back to Bloom ...
The fellow lays out a taxonomy of ways that creators have thus far devised to lessen the tension of their Cultural Innovator's Anxiety, as I'll provisionally call it. It's all a bit baroque, with a lot of prefab Nietzsche and Freud borrowed whole-cloth, not to mention an abundance of pretentious - primarily Hellenic or Latinate - coinages arranged in a not altogether perspicuous schematism. But happily it's only a few of the more critical applicable insights, which we've all likely seen in ourselves or in others at one point or another, with which we need tarry.
Bloom's key relevant foci, which I list in what I find an intelligible order rather than schematizing a la Bloom, are as follows:
Oedipal Rebellion: You already know this one; the offspring must slay the parent before he can self-individuate.
Misprision: the new poet deliberately but creatively misreads the old poet, in order to conceal her thievery.
Tessera: the new poet casts her work as somehow 'completing' or 'correcting' the old poet's work, which is cast as a mere groping or fumbling to reach what the new poet reaches.
Askesis: the new poet self-mutilates, lopping-off portions of what would have been her own work 'just to make sure,' as it were, that the old poet's influence remains subterranean.
(Another aside: as Marxian, I find many self-styled 'Marxist') fellow-travelers so eager to (mis)characterize Marx as vulgar-materialistically 'standing Hegel on his head' that they end up concocting a strange monstrosity bearing little resemblance to Uncle Karl.)
Finally, there is ...
Kenosis: the new poet desperately labors to 'purge' herself of the old poet's influence. She might even, adolescent-style, cast herself as her predecessor's negation or 'opposite' in some sense.
Again, Bloom coins additional expressions for additional poetic self-distinguishing strategies, and arranges it all into a structure more ... well, structured ... than a mere list. But we don't need his Ptolemaic epicycles to understand 'palestinianism' as case study in 'the anxiety of influence.'
First a brief reminder of what palestinianism is, as well as what islamism, its umbrella ideology, has been for yet longer.
Islam and islamism (the latter a 20th century European-fascist perversion of the former), like Christianity, stem ultimately from Jewish tradition as heretical reform movements. (Hence that oft-encountered phrase, 'the Abrahamic faiths.') Their inceptions weren't tranquil.
When the custodians of the original Tradition, the Pharisees followed by the Rabbinate, rejected the proposed internal 'innovations' of first the Christian, then the Muslim movements 700 years later, they were quickly labeled 'stubborn,' 'obdurate,' even (in a particularly insulting twist) 'pig-headed' by the self-proclaimed prophetic reformers - the followers of Yeshua of Nazareth, then later Mohammad.
But more than mere name-calling has happened here...
The Pharisees and the Rabbinate, notWithstanding their continual (while incremental) innovations, have been routinely cast as sclerotic and stale Weberian 'priests' in contrast to those whom the Christians and Muslims take for their 'prophets' (the Christians' Christ of course also considered divine in the bargain).
The Christians' and Muslims' diagonalization out of dead priesthood into living prophecy has manifest over the centuries in multiple ways, but among are clearly the stratagems named by Bloom's jargon.
'Official' Roman and medieval European Christianity, not to mention even late 19th century Romanov Christianity, routinely mass-murdered and pogromed those they called 'obdurate Jews.' These tendencies have abated only with the comparative secularization of Western societies - though they continue in now-sublimated cultural-political form in vulgar anti-semitism and idiot 'anti-Zionism.
Muslims across the 'Umah' repeated Roman and European Christian precedent centuries later beginning with Mohammed himself in the 7th century. And islamists carry on the merry tradition to this day, while also oft-slaughtering their immediate theological predecessors the Christians while at it for good measure.
That is all pretty 'Oedipal,' in Bloom's cultural take on the complex. But there is more ...
We find 'Misprision' in countless Christian and Muslim mischaracterizations of Jewish theolog(ies) and practice(s). These are abundant not only in the New Testament and Koran, and not only in far too much canonical Christian and Muslim theology, but also in far too much popular stereotyping and what I call stereotroping.
Next, we find 'Tesera' first in the Christians' rechristening (pun intended) of the Jewish Tanach as 'Old' Testament and their claiming to 'fulfill' the Torah ('the Law'), and then seven centuries later in Mohammad's claim to supersede BOTH the Jewish Elders who declined his kind offer to be added to the roster of Biblical Prophets (Nevi'im) AND the Christians who'd already a near millennium earlier determined that they were the 'new and improved' Jewish People.
We also find 'Askesis,' in the evolution of mainline Christian and Muslim sects over time, whereby more 'Jewish' earlier forms of both religions (the 'Early Church,' pre-Hijrah Islam) have been steadily replaced, like the proverbial ship rebuilt at sea, in the course of self-differentiating development.
And finally, we find 'Kenosis' to some extent in Christianity, but much more in Islam and islamism. For while the Christians retain nearly all of the original Jewish scriptures in their own Holy Bible (as the aforementioned 'Old Testament'), Islam's Jewish parentage is entirely excised from the Quran - much as all Jewish presence and history are 'erased' from Judea, Samaria, and The Galil by today's 'palestinianists.'
Which takes us to ...
Turning from islamism to its artificially localized variant, palestinianism, we again find the Bloomian 'anxiety of influence' at work.
To begin with, there is the outright palestinianist Jewish identity-theft I've laid out at length elsewhere. As I show there, authentic Jewish indigeneity has been repurposed as (fictitious) 'palestinian' indigeneity. Authentic Jewish national identity has been repurposed as (fictitious) 'palestinian' national identity. And the actual Jewish shoah ('catastrophe') has been recast as the (self-generated) 'palestinian nakba' (yep, 'catastrophe' - in this case the failure of yet one more attempt at ethnically cleansing the Jews).
'Influence' in this case is so overwhelming as to occasion a degree of 'anxiety' quite off the proverbial charts. Hence the 'Oedipal' response in this case requires more than mere murder. It requires erasure and extermination. And so, palestinianists routinely and shamelessly proclaim their intention: to annihilate the Jewish people not just in the Levant, but in toto. (Believe them.)
This is of course not only Oedipal, it's DSM-diagnosably narcissistic, in the way that I mentioned in opening the present meditation and that I'll write upon separately later. (Short-playing version: the palestinianists are a group-form of Mark David Chapman, who first appropriated John Lennon's identity, then had to murder his idol to 'cover his tracks' in New York in 1980.)
As for Bloomian 'Misprision,' 'Tesera,' 'Askesis' and 'Kenosis,' all of these, first, carry over from islamism itself to palestinianism, which incorporates islamism by reference into its own identity. If you doubt this, please google first the hamas charters of 1988 and 2017, then the new 'Palestinian Authority' 'constitution' adopted this past February. All three documents are readily web-available.
But we also find specific political, even beyond theocratic, instantiations of Bloom's categories among palestinianists...
They never cease libelously (nay, BLOOD-libelously) misdescribing the Jews' and their states' histories in the Jewish homeland ('Misprision'). They routinely purport to be 'correcting' the 'error' of Israel's founding ('Tessera'). They excise nearly the entirety of their own actual history in order to avoid self-refuting their 'edit' of Jewish and Israeli history ('Askesis'). And they accordingly empty, hence rob, themselves of what in fact is a BEAUTIFUL history prior to its islamist, then palestinianist mutilations of the 20th and now 21st centuries ('Kenosis').
The case then would seem pretty clear. We have in this 'case' a 'case STUDY' in Bloomian anxiety. The one caveat I'll offer is that Bloomian anxiety is somewhat less ambivalent than is Kierkegaardian anxiety. It is closer to simple worry than to the latter.
Hence it requires, as psychic prerequsite, a certain NARCISSISM in order to operate. This in turn invites DSM-style DIAGNOSIS of palestinianism as complement to its phenomenology as explored here.
To that I will turn in a subsequent post.
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