Judith Butler Jews and ZionismOn Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianismb redemption from teleology
The very possibility of ethical relation: requires certain condition of dispossession from national modes of belonging, a dispossesion that characterizes our relationality from the start and so the possibility of any ethical relation: we are outside ourselves, before ourselves, and only in such a mode is it possible of being ‘for the other’. we are in the hands of the other before we make any decision about with whom we choose to live
this way of being bound to one another is not a social bond we enter through volitional
it precedes contract as mired interdependency and is not entered as a through a contract of volitional individuals
Benjamin: Illuminations
messianic secularism: one time breaks into another, interruption of one time into another
universalisation: right of cohabitationon the earth, emerges as a universal that governs a social ontology that can’t be homogenized such a universalizing right has to break up into its non-universal conditions otherwise it fails to be grounded in a plurality
pluralisation: plurality implies differentiations that should not be overcome.
equality is not homogenization, commitment to process of differentiation itself.
everyone has the right of belonging, a universalizing and differentiating
political rights universalized in context of differentiated, differentiating population
The sense of belonging to that group (jew), means taking up a relation the non-jew To belong is to undergo a dispossession from the category, an exilic moment, the condition of an ethical relation, it’s only possible to struggle to alleviate the suffering of others if I am both motivated and dispossessed from my own suffering its this relation to the other that disposseses me from my enclosed and self-referential notion of belonging otherwise we can’t understand those obligations that bind us when there is no obvious mode of belonging and where the convergence of temporalities becomes the condition for the memory of dispossession as well as the resolve to bring that dispossession to a halt.
unchosen co-habitation