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Abstracts of Articles |
The Apocalyptic Identity of the Jew
Thomas J. J. Altizer is Professor of English and Religious Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His latest book is The Self-Embodiment of God
This is an essay review of Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor and of Edmond Jabès's The Book of Questions which poses the question of whether the agony of the Jew in our world has unveiled an apocalyptic identity of the Jew. Des Pres's book is a reflective study of the anatomy of life in the death camps which wholly conjoins moral and biological analysis. Here, life in ultimate extremity reveals the essence of life itself, a life reversing the negation or repression of life in culture, and thus a life which affirms and embodies the biological dimension of human existence. What we experience symbolically, in spirit only, survivors must go through in spirit and in body. For, in extremity, the subjective becomes objective, myth, ritual, and metaphors tend to actualize, and the word becomes flesh. And therein is manifest a "revelation" reaching to the foundation of what man is.
Edmond Jabès's The Book of Questions is a contemporary apocalypse which is the story of Sara and Yukel by way of the account, through various dialogues and meditations attributed to imaginary rabbis, of a love destroyed by men and by words. Its center is the scream of the Jew in the death camps, and yet it evokes and embodies a scream which unites and makes actual an apocalyptic identity of nature, history, and God. Here, the contemporary actuality of speech, a speech which is speech and silence at once, passes into a new actuality of biblical and Talmudic speech, a speech which is actual in the death of speech, and which actually speaks in the scream of the Jew.
While Christians have once again learned in our world that Christianity is an apocalyptic faith, Christian theology has yet to evolve into an apocalyptic form and identity. Perhaps the Jew as Jew is now offering the Christian a way to a long lost apocalyptic faith. And that faith may yet become manifest as an unveiling of world as world and God as God.