419 / 142
The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 419
outside the logic of possession, both to undermine the fantasy of the
autonomy of the human subject and to highlight the constitutive
displacement of the self. In
Parting Ways
, Butler further draws on
Edward Said’s reflection on the diasporic character of both Jewish
and Palestinian history, “a condition of having been scattered, having
lived among those to whom one does not clearly belong” (Butler,
2012: 214) to call for an ethic of “cohabitation” that simultaneously
transcends exclusive Jewish claims to citizenship and territory and
embraces the heterogeneity of what is now Palestine/Israel. If Jews
use a Zionist perspective to define themselves in terms of land
possession, Butler argues, they then lose sight of an age-old “Jewish
perspective, that is non-Zionist, even anti-Zionist” which defines
Jewishness not in terms of either land entitlement or dispersal but in
terms of relationality to alterity, then dispersal or dispossession can
be thought of as “a condition of possibility for thinking justice,” as
well as “an ethical modality . . . that must be ‘brought home’ to
Israel/Palestine in order to ground a polity where . . . sovereignty
itself will be dispersed” (6).
Chabon obviously agrees with Butler that it is time for Jews to
reject the Jewish claim to exceptionalism, when he entitles an op-ed
he wrote for the
New York Times
“Chosen, but Not Special” (2010).
Whereas in his op-ed, Chabon is blunt but earnest in his call for Jews
to shed the myth of Jewish exceptionalism, in his counterfactual
novel, he offers both an oblique, though no less forceful, critique of
the fantasy of Jewish exceptionalism, and a rethinking of the
dispossession as an ethical condition. In the case of Landsman, we
can say that Landsman has been “dispossessed” in both senses of the
word as it is defined by Butler
—
deprived of land and livelihood and
dispossessed of his agency. Meanwhile, he also confronts the “aporia”
of dispossession: the private form of dispossession is supplementary,
rather than corrective, to the collective form of dispossession. In
other words, for a stateless man already dispossessed by those
powers that both define and deprive him, the very retreat into the
margin of society is neither a solution to, nor an escape from, the