The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary - Hardcover

Zivin, Erin Graff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822343320 ISBN 13: 9780822343325

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

While Jews figure in the work of many modern Latin American writers, the questions of how and to what end they are represented have received remarkably little critical attention. Helping to correct this imbalance, Erin Graff Zivin traces the symbolic presence of Jews and Jewishness in late-nineteenth- through late-twentieth-century literary works from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Nicaragua. Ultimately, Graff Zivin’s investigation of representations of Jewishness reveals a broader, more complex anxiety surrounding difference in modern Latin American culture.

In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erin Graff Zivin is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the editor of The Ethics of Latin American Criticism: Reading Otherwise.

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"Erin Graff Zivin's book proposes a sophisticated reflection on notions of national belonging, scenes of cultural crisis, and the ethical import of constructing the 'Jew-as-Other' in critical moments of Latin American history. Indeed, this is the first study to address the powerful symbolic presence of Jews in Latin America and the first to consider the ways in which the literary representations of Jewishness enter into productive discussions of citizenship, identity, and ultimately salutary alterity. I am willing to predict that "The Wandering Signifier" will very soon be considered an indispensable book."--Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, New York University

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The Wandering Signifier

RHETORIC OF JEWISHNESS IN THE LATIN AMERICAN IMAGINARYBy Erin Graff Zivin

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4332-5

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................1Introduction "Jewishness," Alterity, and the Ethics of Representation.....................29One Diagnosing "Jewishness"...............................................................74Two The Scene of the Transaction..........................................................119Three Textual Conversions.................................................................154Four The Limits of Representation.........................................................179Notes......................................................................................195Bibliography...............................................................................207

Chapter One

Diagnosing "Jewishness"

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the dominant Western epistemology of positivism, with its corresponding subtheories of race, degeneracy, eugenics, and hygiene, infiltrated the political and cultural landscape of newly independent Latin American nations. Across the region, letrados-politicians, doctors, intellectuals, religious leaders, and artists-began to appropriate these predominantly European concepts of corporality, relying on the belief in science as a principle resource in the constitution of collective subjectivities and national identities. Although principally found in the sectors of politics, religion, and science (sectors whose main objectives included the domestication or regeneration of the masses), the obsession with disease and health made its way into the aesthetic realm as well. Writers and other artists responded to the language of positivism, adopting and occasionally subverting the impulse to control the other through an aestheticization of scientific rhetoric. This phenomenon has been detailed by the Argentine literary and cultural critic Gabriela Nouzeilles, who, by investigating the "pact of meaning between literature, nationalism, and medical knowledge," has highlighted the process of fiction making inherent in both political and literary discourses at the end of the nineteenth century, underscoring the affiliation of the ideological and the cultural in the fashioning of national subjects through the rhetoric of science.

Yet while the primary function of medical discourse has been to separate the "well" from the "sick," establishing, following Nouzeilles's argument, a boundary between the "healthy self" and the "infirmed other," there remains an implicit tension between these fields, a constant threat of the invasion of the dominion of the same by the contaminating force of the other. It is be cause of this intrinsic ambiguity in pathological discourse that the notion of "Jewishness" becomes a useful motif through which anxiety surrounding identity and alterity is articulated. The idea of "Jewishness" appears embedded in narratives of disease and medicine because of its status as wandering signifier, its ability to unsettle and seduce both writer and reader, simultaneously reifying and exploding the categories so vehemently fought for not only at the end of the nineteenth century but throughout the twentieth century as well.

By unpacking literary scenes in which the rhetorical "Jew" appears in diverse and often contradictory roles, never fully free of the diagnostic gaze, I address the following questions: in what way is the diseased "Jewish" body inscribed with larger social and aesthetic concerns? Why is the conjugation of "Jew" and "disease" present not only in nineteenth-century narratives of pathology but also in those of the twentieth century, well after positivism had lost its status as the dominant paradigm? In what way does the analysis of these scenes of "pathological Jewishness" help clarify the double bind of alterity proper to Latin American constructions of identity?

In order to expand the limiting conceptual framework of the dichotomous relationship between same and other, one must move beyond the figure of the "sick Jew" by considering the entire scene within which "disease" and "Jewishness" are juxtaposed. The idea of the diagnosis allows one to shift concern with the diseased body to the broader context within which subject and discourse are married. The diagnosis, as a discursive act whereby sickness is invented and defined, is the means by which knowledge is organized. In a Foucauldian analysis of fin-de-sicle diagnostic texts, Sylvia Molloy sustains that "el diagnstico se vuelve ... modo privilegiado de organizar el saber (represivo) del estado, la patologa se convierte en 'forma general de regulacin de (una sociedad)' que adjudica al diagnosticador incontrovertida autoridad" (the diagnosis becomes ... a privileged way of organizing the [repressive] knowledge of the state, pathology turns into "the general form of regulating [society]" which attributes unquestionable authority to the diagnostician) (1996a, 174-75). Each scene of "pathological Jewishness" grants authority-whether aesthetic, social, narrative, or ideological-to the diagnosing subject, regardless of whether the object of diagnosis is doctor or patient, self or other. The diagnosed figure serves as a body upon which the values and preoccupations of the writer and the culture can be inscribed, as well as the means by which the diagnosing subject constructs his or her own discursive authority.

Three distinct but interrelated diagnoses of "Jewishness" are at play: as the nation's contaminating other; as the Jewish doctor; and as the pathological (writing) self. "Jewishness" does not remain restricted to one side of the dichotomy sickness-medicine, but rather straddles and questions this very divide. The act of assuming diverse positions within scenes of diagnosis appears as a fluid, often paradoxical activity: the "Jew" can appear as doctor or patient, self or other, even though "Jewishness" is always the object of diagnosis. Jorge Isaacs's Mara (Colombia, 1867) and Julin Martel's La bolsa (Argentina, 1891) exemplify the exclusionary politics of medical discourse by identifying a contaminating body that threatens the integrity of the nation. In Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill's Vivir afuera (Argentina, 1998), Rubn Daro's Los raros (Argentina, 1896), Jos Ingenieros's Al margen de la ciencia (Argentina, 1908), and Jos Asuncin Silva's De sobremesa (Colombia, 1925), medical authorities-Max Nordau being the most fascinating example-also become fruitful objects of the diagnostic gaze. And the protagonists of Luisa Futoransky's De pe a pa (Spain, 1986) and Margo Glantz's "Zapatos" (Mexico, 1991) attempt a sort of "self-diagnosis," rendering the space of illness and deformity aesthetically productive. When unpacked, these rich textual scenes reveal the function of pathologized or medicalized "Jewishness" in a Latin American context-that is, what specific modes of anxiety surrounding otherness are at work within broader projects of imagining community.

CONTAMI/NATION

All aspects of the Jew, whether real or invented, are the locus of difference.-Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body

Every characterization of the "Jew" within the European imaginary highlights his otherness, claims the literary and cultural historian Sander Gilman, specifying that in the nineteenth century...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822343320
• ISBN 13: 9780822343325
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar