Hila Ratzabi
The Other Jews: Secularism, Kabbalah and Radical Poetics, p.3





When Gertrude Stein writes: “A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon,” she is redefining these words by contextualizing them in a way that renders their meaning, at first, absurd. But she is not negating meaning, just rearranging it. She is purposefully misbehaving. (Then again, to further complicate the matter, Perloff emphasized that she does not consider Gertrude Stein a “Jewish” writer.)

Here the parallel between secular Jewish culture and radical poetics becomes weak, and again, mystical Judaism provides a much better point of reference: the deliberate linguistic misbehavior of radical poets finds a much stronger correlate in Jewish mystical literature than it does in secular Jewish literature. The rejection of religion by secular Jewish culture is a two-dimensional analogue to the supposed radical rejection of traditional poetics. But it minimizes the extent to which radical poets have innovated within literature rather than merely rejected it. Both Kabbalistic literature and radical poetics never flat-out reject their respective canons; however, they both impose upon their traditions entirely new literary philosophies. Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman are two Language poets whose work particularly calls into question the very metaphysical underpinnings of language. And Gertrude Stein’s linguistic alchemy is as obscure and esoteric as Luria’s.

Auster, in discussing the Jewish/American identity-dilemma, said that he considers himself not both but neither; he called it “the condition of being nowhere.” However, exile, as a dialectic paradigm, requires return. Even radical poetry arrives somewhere. So, instead of endlessly hyphenating post-modern Jewish identity, and instead of employing the debilitating victim-stereotype to define Jewish writing, perhaps we should understand radical writing and radical Judaism in the way that Rothenberg implied—as a self-imposed expulsion from the territory of language, that must occur over and over again in order to maintain the living, evolving quality of language. Isn’t that what Luria would do?


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Image: Smadar Eliaf, Thanks (1978)

Hila Ratzabi is Curatorial Associate at the Graphics Department of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Smadar Eliaf's work (www.nogagallery.co.il) compels viewers to slow observation, and responds to intimacy and at the same time to dissociation and destruction.

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