UC Berkeley

This dissertation traces throughout the history of modern Hebrew literature a fantasy of disengagement with systems of action and thought that are predicated on ideologies of achievement, oppositionality, or productivism. Through readings that range from the stories of Uri Nissan Gnessin in the first decade of the twentieth century to the bilingual fiction of Yossel Birstein in the 1980s, my project recovers the workings of a largely unacknowledged poetics of tacit refusal that operates at the heart of a predominantly strong, conflictual, and essentially opinionated cultural imaginary. Following the late work of Roland Barthes, I call this poetics “the desire for the neutral”—the desire to rid oneself of the burden of paradigms, to baffle any demand to occupy a predetermined position. This project thus traces a fantasmatic trajectory that often goes completely unnoticed in conventional critical and historiographical accounts. Taken together, the chapters of this dissertation argue for the persistence in modern Hebrew literature of a shared desire for the neutral, conceptualized neither as a fixed discursive position nor as a stance of direct resistance (which only reinstitutes the oppositional structure)—but rather as a category of historicized strategies of non-compliance, an ethos of minimal action that outplays the very logic of the paradigm.

Chapter 1 explores the emergence of the figure of the failed writer in Gnessin’s “Sideways” (1905) and in Elisheva’s Side-Streets (1929) as a fantasy of non-participation against the coercive discourse of imperative collectivist writing at that period. These narratives of failure, I argue, manifest not a self-deprecating anxiety but rather an affirmative “desire to retire” from the overdetermined task of the Hebrew writer. Chapter 2 focuses on the claim for a “freedom not to write” in Aharon Megged’s The Living on the Dead (1965). Through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality (in which any potentiality is always also impotentiality), I read this trope as indicative of what I describe as the potential unconscious of Israeli literature: a radical fantasy of retaining a state of literary and political impotentiality—and thus, ultimately, of potentializing given political realities. Chapter 3 examines the pedagogy of nuance in the bilingual fiction of Yossel Birstein, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Responding to the crisis of Yiddish literature in Israel, Birstein’s fiction, I argue, teaches an activism of nuance—an ethics and politics of action that, against historical conditions that hinder one’s ability to act, consists in minimal, often nearly inconsequential yet nonetheless insistent tiny bits of difference.