The Tropes (Slight Return)

November 14, 2023 by Richard Goldstein

A slightly revised version of the author’s commentary in today’s First Respondents’ email…

I wish I could march with the legions of peace in Gaza. I have a long history of doing just that. But I can’t join a movement that fails to distinguish itself from those in their midst who would destroy Israel and whose slogans pretend to be something other than what they clearly say. I’m enraged by the more reflexive assertions of the left, its failure to fill the streets with protests against other atrocities (such as the Chinese invasion of Tibet and its enslavement of the Uighurs, or the slaughter in Syria), and especially its failure to consider how ancient tropes linger below reasoning and make Israel seem unlike other states.

I can’t help thinking that ideas about Jews–as inherently predatory, imperial, and murderous–arise from their dormancy in a dreadful situation like this. Many Israelis must think the world hates them anyway, so all that matters is conveying the message that if you fuck with us, this is what will happen. The more suffering the IDF inflicts, the stronger this message must seem. There is a terrible despair behind that belief. But it’s dialectical, and not so different from the message Hamas is sending.

Those young people marching under my window chanting “No Israel–Palestine!” have no idea what anti-Semitism is in the world today. They’ve seen a few Holocaust movies and they think they understand it, but it has nothing to do with ushering helpless Jews into gas chambers. It’s about fearing and loathing Jews when they express power, and seeing that power as Satanic, or, in any case, different from how other people would behave, and have behaved, in similar circumstances. Examining this trope, it seems to me, is a prerequisite to critiquing Israel. Failing to do that doesn’t make you an anti-Semite. But it does make you ignorant.

I say these things in a state of ongoing horror. So maybe I’m being blind to who is the underdog here. But as a historical question, it’s not clear. And history isn’t finished with the Jews.

Order from Dottir Press here.

“Laurie Stone’s Streaming Now is a book of journal-like entries, scraps of critical pieces, bits of memoir, and it is a delight. She calls these fragments postcards, which is charming and accurate up to a point, but the writing is better than any postcard you ever got unless you got one from Laurie Stone and she wrote it really small so all the wit and all the passing contemplations could fit. She writes about life during COVID, at home with ‘the man I live with’; about old friends and glancing love affairs; about books and films and television shows, with a deeply appealing combination of spitfire skepticism and a constant openness to pleasure and joy. One is reminded in multiple ways during the reading that Stone came of age and was politically, intellectually and emotionally shaped by the struggles and commitments of second wave feminism, and we’re further reminded that for feminists like Stone the movement was not only about rights, and not at all about protections for women, but about freedom for women, a much more dangerous thing, for women and for society at large. Freedom is a long lost idea. It had a specific erotic push and was battled back as eroticism always is. Autocracies are always puritanical. Everything about Stone’s writing is oriented toward freedom and much of her linguistic and literary sensibility specifically evokes erotic and intellectual freedom–the very sound of the sentences, their surprises, the quick adoption of new positions in relation to the thing looked at and engaged with. So, one recognizes that a simple seeming book of pensées is really the exploration of a distinct and valuable cultural point of view. We are lucky to have it.” –Vince Passaro, author of the novels Crazy Sorrow, and Violence, Nudity, Adult Content

Alison Stone’s New Book Available for Pre-Order!

From immigrants to insurrectionists, from Demeter to David Bowie, Stone gives us searing, moving poems filled with powerful imagery and an original music.

Order your copy at www.stonepoetry.org

Order from Bloomsbury here.

Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA