Jewishness and the Human Dimension

Epilogue

Epilogue On my bookshelf, as yet unopened, lies a volume by James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century . On my list of books to read, not yet ordered, is Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception. I know without seeing Agamben’s book that his title is an allusion to Walter Benjamin’s famous saying , in reference to the suspension of civil rights, that ‘‘the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’’1 Kunstler’s and Agamben’s titles point respectively to our species ’ critical failures to maintain its own lifeworld and to integrate adequately the personhood of each human organism with the commonality of every Homo sapiens past, present, and future. Both of those kinds of failings loom in tandem ever larger. Walls are built between humans in the Southwest, between Israel and Palestine, between neighborhood and neighborhood in Baghdad. Wealthy collectives contemplate seawalls to contain the literal floodwaters to come, while levees of nationalist rhetoric are desperately thrown up in an attempt to turn away refugees from portions of the planet whose people have been ‘‘globalized’’ into destitution. All this may do nothing more than signal my right thinking, and merely mentioning these crises does nothing toward their resolution. The reflections in this book are, inevitably, humanly 134 inadequate—inadequate in a characteristically human way, and inadequate to the current needs of the species. There are, as best I can determine, two reasons why they may be useful nevertheless . One is that a particular group identity—Jewishness—that has been a vital voice and a critical trope for discussions of humanity and difference in the ‘‘West’’ remains, along with other group identities, both a resource and a diagnostic site in our efforts to respond to the ‘‘long emergency’’ we are already facing. The second is that extension in timespace is not merely an ‘‘objective ’’ way of describing humans, individually, at the level of the group or the species as a whole; it is also critical to the rhetorics of identity with which, in turn, we forge our projects toward death, our projects of keeping on. epilogue 135 ...