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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 429
distancing himself from his family, divorcing his wife, and trying to
drink himself to death
—
only end up reducing his life to the barest
essentials.
Instead, in responding to and investigating Mendel’s
mysterious death, he loosens his defense against those screens and
filters through which he fends off the contingencies of life and
discovers in the conspiracy jointly plotted by Zionists and
Evangelists the underside of identification politics and the
preemptive logic it promotes and endorses. At the end of the novel,
Landsman is still stateless, but he is no longer dispossessed, given
that, while citizenship is a legal issue determined by the law of the
state, he nevertheless can regain possession of his own spirit, which
is recovered and reactivated as the real “exception” that can alleviate
the biopolitical force of the law and activating the “more” of life
—
that which is blind to those enthralled with the discourses of
exceptionalism.