Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said

Author:Edward Said [Said, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Middle East, General, Philosophy
ISBN: 9781781681459
Google: HnyFmwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1781681457
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Thus archaeology becomes the royal road to Jewish-Israeli identity, one in which the claim is repeatedly made that in the present-day land of Israel the Bible is materially realized thanks to archaeology, history is given flesh and bones, the past is recovered and put in dynastic order. Such claims, of course, uncannily return us not just to the archival site of Jewish identity as explored by Freud, but to its officially (we should also not fail to add: its forcibly) sanctioned geographical locale, modern Israel. What we discover is an extraordinary and revisionist attempt to substitute a new positive structure of Jewish history for Freud’s insistently more complex and discontinuous late-style efforts to examine the same thing, albeit in an entirely diasporic spirit and with different, decentring results.

This is a good moment to say that I am greatly indebted to the work of a young scholar, Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose major book is entitled Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. What she provides first of all is a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenth century. She then continues the story in the period before Israel is established, connecting the actual practice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology – an ideology with plans for the repossession of the land through renaming and resettling, much of it given archaeological justification as a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations. This effort, she argues convincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for a fully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identity based on assembling discrete archaeological particulars – scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs, etc. – into a sort of spatial biography out of which Israel emerges “visibly and linguistically, as the Jewish national home”.29

More significantly, she argues that this quasi-narrative biography of a land enables – if it does not actually cause – and goes hand in hand with a particular style of colonial settlement that governs such concrete practices as the use of bulldozers, the unwillingness to explore non-Israelite (e.g. Hasmonean) histories, and the habit of turning an intermittent and dispersed Jewish presence of scattered ruins and buried fragments into a dynastic continuity, despite evidence to the contrary and despite evidence of endogamous non-Jewish histories. Wherever there is overwhelming and unavoidable evidence of a multiplicity of other histories, as in the massive palimpsest of Jerusalem’s Byzantine, Crusader, Hasmonean, Israelite, and Muslim architecture, the rule is to frame and tolerate these as an aspect of Israeli liberal culture, but also to assert Israel’s national pre-eminence by hitting at the Orthodox Jewish disapproval of modern Zionism by making Jerusalem even more of a Jewish-national site.30

Abu el-Haj’s meticulous deconstruction of Israeli archaeology is also a history of the negation of Arab Palestine which, for obvious reasons, has been regarded as not worthy of similar investigation. But with the emergence of post-Zionist revisionist history in Israel during the 1980s and, simultaneously,

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