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ethical, for only through a “strong and creative” misreading of the
narrative of Jewish exceptionalism and the redemption that it
promises can Diasporic Jews open up other narrative possibilities
that a Zionist reading has precluded.
Mendel, the murder victim, is declared by his father, even
before his death at the age of thirty-six, as having been dead for
more than twenty years. Landsman, the detective who voluntarily
takes on the job investigating Mendel’s murder against the advice of
his boss, is not recognized by the government he works for as a
citizen entitled to the constitutional rights that come with citizenship.
Both the victim and his investigator have been disowned and
excepted, and neither fits in with his community. Landsman, we may
say, sees in Mendel another man unmade by the system, disowned
by his community, leading a parenthetical life. The death of Mendel
haunts him as a remnant, a fierce reminder of the invisibility and
nakedness of his own existence, so much so that it demands from
him a response, as a way to exorcise his own trauma as well as a way
to dissolve his attachment to an ingrained structure of disavowal.
Landsman becomes keenly aware that he has been
“dispossessed.” However, as Judith Butler cautions the reader in her
analysis of the state of dispossession, “We can only be dispossessed
because we are already dispossessed. Our interdependency
establishes our vulnerability to social forms of deprivation” (Butler
& Athanasiou, 2014: 5). As social beings, we do not claim
ownership of our “selfhood,” even though the myth of possessive
individualism leads us to believe otherwise. So, in the face of one’s
being dispossessed of one’s civil rights and home, should one
embrace the ideology of possessive individualism or retreat into an
alienating individualism? The question, for Butler, is wrongly posed,
for the real question to ask is “how [such an ideology] works, and in
the service of what sorts of political aims” (2014: 9). Dispossession,
Butler argues, has to be thought not only as a condition of
deprivation but also as an exposure to the other’s vulnerability.
Butler’s goal is, by inviting a reconceptualization of dispossession