REL 281 Arab-Jews and the Experience of Freedom (Not offered 1999-2000)*
"Freedom," writes Jean-Luc Nancy, "cannot be the object of a question." How do we read this assertion? On some level, Nancy seems to be saying that freedom can be taken for granted. Freedom would, in fact, grant itself to us as a fact, a fact from which its familiar status as an inalienable right would be secured. And yet, to what kind of fact does Nancy alert us? If freedom cannot be the object of a question, it means that it cannot be asked about. Freedom remains a fact, but it is a fact that is paradoxically resistant to being thought, indeed, a fact resistant to being asked about, or verified. Not an object to be questioned, freedom also unsettles the questioning subject, it delivers or abandons the subject to the impossible notion of an unthinkable or unverifiable fact, at the very limit of thought. Nonetheless, freedom-unthinkable, resistant, and subjectless-still has to be read. Guided by the impossible and insecure notion of such freedom at the limit, this course will attend to a limit-case (perhaps another impossibility) of modern identity-if it is an identity-that of Arab-Jews. We will read the ways in which identity and freedom relate to each other (or fail to do so) in texts that surround the literary and historical discourse on and of Arab-Jews, and we will attempt to gain some understanding of the following issues: How do we read? What are the textual challenges, the resistances, we face when reading for identity? How is this identity (Jew, Arab, Arab-Jew, but also male, female, oppressor, victim, self and other, etc.) articulated in language and does it succeed in coagulating? If so, what are the rhetorical dimensions of this coagulation and what can we learn from them about freedom? We will face a double challenge, then, but it may be a liberating one: though they may both be facts, neither identity nor freedom are given to us in advance. Class format: lecture and discussion. Requirements: full attendance and participation, written comments on weekly readings, three 5- to 7-page papers. Open to all classes without prerequisite.