Negative Covenant

Objections to the Metacritique of Palestine

Several readers of “Metacritique of Palestine” raised two meaningful objections. The first: that the analysis did not extend to the internal pathologies of Jewish and Israeli behavior. The second: that the structural method deployed in the essay is not unique to Palestine — that one could, and should, apply it to many other phenomena. Both objections are correct, and I want to address them in order.

I.

The omission of Israel from the metacritique was deliberate for reasons that I don’t see changing any time soon.

The Palestine system of domination and extraction I described conceals itself by ensuring that all analytical and critical energy flows toward Israel. This is the system’s logic. It redirects attention from the structure to the target. The system’s invisibility depends on the world’s inability to look at anything except Israel and Jews. The demand that any analysis of Palestine must include an equal or greater analysis of Israel is itself a product of the system it claims to critique. It is the system speaking through the critic, ensuring that the structure remains unexamined by flooding the field of vision with its designated object.

This gravitational pull meshes, unfortunately, with the universal tendencies of cultural narcissism, Jewish in this case: a deep, sometimes compulsive need to be at the center of every story, to interpret every global phenomenon as ultimately about “us.” This understandable behavior often produces the mirror image of the obsession it opposes — a counter-fixation on Israel that leaves the surrounding structure unexamined. This is most clear in anything related to the conversation around Gaza, as if Hamas, Qatar, the UN, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey all do not have deep levels of involvement that actively contributed to turning Gaza into what it is today. The custodians of the system are delighted by the fixations. The metacritique was an attempt to look elsewhere.

That said, anyone who wishes to extend the method to Israeli behavior is invited to do so. The tools are on the table. I have shown what they can do.

II.

The second objection leads somewhere more interesting.

It has been noted that the structural analysis deployed in the metacritique — the description of a self-reproducing system of extraction organized around a detached signifier — could be applied to many things besides Palestine. I do not see this as an objection. It is the point. The metacritique was never an argument about Palestine alone but about a universal operation that Palestine exemplifies with unusual ruthlessness and at an unusual scale. That operation is religious fetishism.

I use “religious” here in its widest and most serious sense, not as a technical term for organized worship or institutional faith, but as a name for the whole domain of meaning-making, identity-formation, and communal binding that constitutes the infrastructure of human social existence. And I use fetishism to mean the substitution of a manufactured object for the reality it was meant to represent, such that the object acquires an apparent life of its own and the reality behind it disappears from view.

The fetishistic operation is universal. It can be performed with any sufficiently charged signifier. Exile, Christ, Palestine, revolution, human rights, democracy, the nation, the people — the raw material varies; the operation is the same. A lived reality of shattering force is taken up into language and symbol. The signifier that names the reality is grasped, repeated, ritualized, and transmitted. And at some point in this process, a substitution occurs that is almost never noticed by the participants: the representation is clutched so tightly that it displaces the reality it once signified. The word “exile” becomes a comfortable identity, a communal possession, a source of belonging and continuity, and in becoming these things, it ceases to be what it actually is — the name of a catastrophe. The liturgical repetition of exile becomes a technology for not experiencing exile. The word has consumed its referent.

This is the same operation in every case. The representation of Christ is deployed to vanquish the living Christ. (The Grand Inquisitor.) The crucifix becomes an idol that protects the worshiper from the actual crucifixion and from the annihilating demand that the Cross places on the one who genuinely encounters it. The sacraments become a system for managing the sacred, which is to say, for preventing the sacred from irrupting into the orderly life of the believer. The signifier of revolution becomes a substitute for revolution, and the revolutionary party becomes a machine for ensuring that revolution never actually occurs. Human rights becomes a professional vocabulary that insulates its practitioners from the actual conditions of actual humans, loving humanity, and hating their politically incorrect neighbors.

Religion, as it is experienced by most people most of the time, is precisely this: a fetishistic system, a self-reproducing structure organized around a representation that has become detached from its referent and is being mined for meaning. The socio-political complex that emerges around this operation is organized primarily around control. But “control” here must be understood in its fullest sense, prior to and deeper than its political applications. It is not reducible to political domination, institutional management, or social administration. It names the whole operation by which the subject secures mastery over an uncontrollable reality by converting it into a manipulable representation.

Control of meaning against encounter. Control of reality through symbolic possession. Control of anxiety through ritualized repetition. Control of the sacred by reducing it to a usable object. Control of suffering by turning it into identity. Control of dispossession by converting it into communal capital. Control of truth by preferring a charged signifier to the wound it names. The psychic operation is prior; the socio-political complex emerges from it. The crucifix can become a mechanism of control because it allows the worshiper to possess Christ without undergoing crucifixion. The institution can organize around this possession because there is an inexhaustible demand for it. Everyone wants the meaning, but no one wants the Cross.

The fetish is the signifier that has consumed its signified and now offers itself as a substitute satisfaction. This diagnosis is not novel, and one could derive it from Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom, or from the prophetic tradition’s own internal war against idolatry, from Marx’s inversion of Feuerbach, from Hamann’s critique of the Enlightenment’s idolatry of Reason. The critical tradition, at its best, has always been a tradition of de-fetishization — an attempt to shatter the idol and force Man back into confrontation with the reality the idol was constructed to conceal, which sadly ended in the fetishism of critique itself.

III.

The work of the fetish follows a consistent pattern wherever it appears. A lived reality of overwhelming force exceeds the capacity of the subject to endure it in its raw form. The subject takes up a signifier that names the reality. The signifier is repeated, ritualized, transmitted, institutionalized. In this process the signifier acquires a life of its own. It becomes an object of investment in itself — a source of identity, belonging, meaning, moral authority, communal cohesion. The fetishistic operation is complete when the signifier no longer points to its referent but has replaced it, when the community organized around the signifier can no longer distinguish between possessing the word and possessing the reality the word once named.

Poussin’s “The Adoration of the Golden Calf” (1633-34, National Gallery, London). It depicts a community organized around a manufactured object, investing it with ecstatic meaning, dancing before it in devotion, while the actual referent — God, encountered by Moses on Sinai — is present but unseen in the background of the composition. Moses is descending the mountain with the tablets (the real covenant, the positive binding), and the people are too absorbed in their fetishistic investment to notice. The composition is orinic: the real covenant is entering the frame from above and behind, and the community’s backs are turned to it because they are facing the fetish. In the essay’s terms, the manufactured signifier consumes the attention that belongs to the referent, the community’s devotion is the labor that produces the idol’s apparent power, and the real thing arrives unrecognized because the counterfeit has already furnished the void.

What follows from this capture is the emergence of an extractive economy. The fetishized signifier, precisely because it has been detached from the reality that would limit and discipline its use, becomes available for extraction by anyone positioned to harvest its accumulated charge. The priesthood extracts institutional authority. The politician extracts legitimacy. The activist extracts moral currency. The believer extracts identity and belonging. None of these extractions are experienced as extraction by the extractors. Each participant believes he is responding to the inherent power of the sacred object. No participant sees that the power of the sacred object is produced by the daily renewed investment of the community that sustains it — that the apparent self-sufficiency of the symbol conceals the labor that produces its value.

This is the commodity form of the sacred. Marx, to his credit, managed to make the leap from religious fetishism into analyzing it in modern economics: the commodity appears to possess value in itself, concealing the labor that produced it. The fetishized signifier performs the same concealment in the domain of meaning. The Palestine word-symbol appears to possess moral force in itself. The crucifix appears to radiate holiness in itself. The language of human rights appears to embody justice in itself. Saying the words “that is racist” appears to embody horror in itself. In each case, the apparent self-sufficiency of the symbol conceals the daily spiritual labor of the populations that sustain it — the millions who choose, each day, to reinvest their meaning, their identity, their moral passion in the symbol rather than confront the reality it has displaced.

IV.

If the operation is universal, what makes Palestine unique?

Not the operation itself but three features of the Palestine instance that are without precedent in their combination: the emptiness of the vessel, the fungibility of the commodity, and the scale of the extraction.

Palestine, and on this specific point much will come later, was not hollowed out for it was never full of anything. The other fetish objects all began as densely referential realities that subsequently underwent fetishistic capture. There was a real exile before the liturgy domesticated it. There was a real crucifixion before Christendom enclosed it. In each case, the signifier was detached from a referent that had existed independently, continued to exist, and remained accessible for those who seek it, however buried, beneath the fetishistic layers.

Palestine did not undergo this process because the signifier was constituted as detached. It was invented as pure signification and never acquired any signified reality. It entered global ideological circulation as negation — a negation of Jewish presence, of Zionism, of the specific and intolerable fact of Israel. It is the reassertion of the innocence of humanity through the negation of all sin.

Therefore, Palestine is not simply hollow in the way an arbitrary slogan is hollow. Its emptiness is produced by the fact that it is quintessentially organized as negation as such. The Palestine word-symbol is the site where “a people,” “a land,” “a wound,” “a state,” “a cause,” “a memory” are suspended in an unresolved and deliberately unresolvable relation to Israel, Zionism, Jews, Judaism, the West, colonialism, Islam, revolution, humanitarianism, and guilt. The emptiness is generated by the position of the signifier in a field of forces, each of which requires it to remain empty so that it can be filled with whatever content the investor needs.

This is what produces the fungibility. A positively defined national cause would necessarily exclude some of its investors and seek a resolution. You cannot simultaneously be an Islamist paradise, a socialist republic, a secular liberal democracy, and a European guilt offering. But a pure negation excludes nothing.

And this emptiness, paradoxically, is what generates the scale. Because the Palestine word-symbol can be traded in every ideological market simultaneously, it achieves a volume of extraction that no positively defined cause could sustain. The exchange rate is set by the emptiness of the signifier itself: because it means nothing in particular, it can mean anything in general.

V.

Every actor in the system believes he is responding to the inherent power of the symbol. No actor sees that the power of the symbol is produced by the daily renewed consent of the weakest actors in the system — the hundreds of millions doing spiritual labor, through the choice of false meaning over honesty, is the hidden content that the commodity form of the Palestine word-symbol conceals and compounds.

Meaning, or rather false meaning, is the new cotton. The harvesting is voluntary. The harvesters do not experience themselves as laboring. They experience themselves as believing. The system extracts from them meaning and returns to them only the fetish, only the empty signifier refilled with whatever they most needed to believe.

VI.

But if the operation is universal and something like Judaism itself is not exempt — and it is not — what distinguishes Judaism’s fetishistic capture from Palestine’s?

Rabbinic Judaism, like every durable religious tradition, has not been exempt from fetishistic capture. Liturgy can domesticate what it remembers; ritual can become a substitute for obedience; the text itself can be possessed as an idol of textual possession. Thus, Judaism too has its own long history of enclosing the unbearable in the manageable, of substituting the representation for the reality, of mistaking possession of the signifier for possession of the signified. This is half of what the prophets were screaming about, and the internal critique never stopped.

But Judaism also contains, at its core, the counter-operation: the prophetic assault on idolatry, the legal discipline of return, and the continuing availability of the referent.

The modern secular Jew is, in many cases, a person who has undergone the fetishistic operation in more heightened form and without internal critique of rabbinic Judaism — clutching the signifier “Jewish” while the referent has been evacuated. Jewish identity without Jewish content. Jewish pride without Jewish knowledge. Jewish continuity as a project of demographic maintenance rather than covenantal fidelity. The Holocaust is the central organizing event rather than Sinai. Israel as the content of Jewishness rather than the land as a dimension of a covenant that precedes and exceeds the state. All of this is fetishism. The signifier “Jew” is being clutched precisely to avoid encountering what it actually signifies, which makes the process of de-fetishization very difficult, but not impossible, because the identity itself became the fetish, the idol in need of destruction.

The difference, however, between the cases of Palestine fetishism and Jewish fetishism is much more important than the similarities.