Asian Dragons in the Western Imagination

    In 1895, after China’s exhausted empire was defeated by Japan in a war over the Korean Peninsula, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (“Willy”) sent a letter to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (“Nicky”). He warned about the dangers posed to white nations by the “yellow races.” Willy enclosed a print by a German artist named Hermann Knackfuss, showing the Archangel Michael rallying the European nations against the threatening Orient. Britannia with her Union Jack shield is there, looking worried, and there too is Germania with a winged helmet and the imperial sword, and Austria, and Italy. A blazing white cross lights up the sky above them. On the other side of a deep ravine, perched on a bank of dark clouds, sits a menacing Buddha enveloped in flames. The title of the painting, from which the print was taken: “Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Goods!” It is the only work for which Knackfuss is remembered. 

    Five years later, as the Western nations (and Japan) were burning and looting the imperial palaces of Peking, after crushing an anti-foreign rebellion staged by a band of armed Chinese mystics known as the Boxers, the German Kaiser fulminated once more against the “Yellow Peril.” The words of his so-called “Hun speech” are remarkable for their violence: 

    When you come before the enemy, you must defeat him, pardon will not be given, prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands will fall to your sword! Just as a thousand years ago the Huns, under their King Attila, made a name for themselves with their ferocity, which tradition still recalls; so may the name of Germany become known in China in such a way that no Chinaman will ever dare look a German in the eye, even with a squint!

    The Kaiser was not the first person to use the “yellow peril” phrase. That was coined by Jacques Novicow, a Russian sociologist born in Constantinople. In an article, written in 1897, entitled “Yellow Peril.” Yet he did not invent the phrase to incite fear. Quite the contrary. Novicow, a liberal-minded pacifist, actually argued that Chinese competition was not something to be feared. Instead, he said, we should welcome Chinese contributions to the welfare of mankind.

    Western attitudes towards the growing power of East Asian nations have not changed very much since the late nineteenth century — or possibly even since the Mongols invaded the eastern parts of Europe in the thirteenth century. President Donald Trump, following in the tradition of the German sovereign, sees himself as the champion of white Christians, and has warned against the Chinese threat for a long time. China, in his words, “has ripped off the United States like no one has ever done before.” Before Trump became president for the first time in 2016, he said: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” During the COVID pandemic, the threat could even be medicalized, as though Chinese influence were a life-threatening virus. COVID was the “China plague,” or “Kung-flu.” This, too, had a precedent. Americans in the nineteenth century worried that Chinese immigrants would infect white people with their diseases and destroy Western civilization. 

    Others, less prone to MAGA hysteria, can be starry-eyed about Chinese accomplishments. Academics and businessmen return from trips to the People’s Republic of China, after being lavishly entertained, full of stories about the wonders of Chinese technology, the comfort and efficiency of high-speed trains, state-of-the-art airports, omnipotent robots, and drones that can fly people around in air taxis. Japanese modernization along Western lines has also been widely admired since the late nineteenth century. Views of East Asian nations in Western eyes can swing from deep suspicion to adulation with bewildering speed.

    Trump himself is no exception. He can be as beguiled by the mystique of Chinese imperial pomp as he is fearful of its rising power. There he was in May 2026, being shown around the exclusive former imperial garden in Beijing by Xi Jinping, whom Trump called “a brilliant guy.” After gazing at an ancient cypress tree, the awed American president asked Xi whether many foreign leaders had been allowed to walk around these hallowed spots. “Very few,” Xi murmured, “very few.” (Well, yes, Vladimir Putin did.) Trump beamed like a schoolboy who has just won a medal. 

    Like most things, prejudices have histories, which change over time. Jews were once hated as the people who killed Jesus, and then as a race of money-grubbing parasites posing a biological threat to the purity of “Aryan” nations. Jews have been feared as lecherous predators, and as diabolical manipulators who secretly rule the world. Sexual anxiety is the toxic basis of many racial bigotries. In the case of Jews and East Asians, this is sometimes combined with a fearful fantasy of ominous intelligence. Unlike racism against black people or Arabs, there is always that deep-seated fear of superior and sinister power.

    Some antisemitic stereotypes were bounced back from East Asia as a distorting mirror of the West. In Japan, for instance, notions about Jewish intellect and secret power were shaped after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, when Japanese were introduced to the forged Russian pamphlet entitled Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When forty-odd years later Japan’s German allies asked the Japanese to hand over Jews who had fled the Nazis to occupied Shanghai, the Japanese refused. How could they afford to make enemies of a people that was so mighty behind the scenes?

    A huge bestseller in Japan, entitled The Japanese and the Jews, caused a stir in 1971. Ostensibly written by a Jew living in Japan, named Isaiah Ben Dassan, the book describes Japanese and Jews as vulnerable tribal peoples with unique characteristics: intellectual Jews, instinctive Japanese, that kind of thing. The Jews have Judaism and the Japanese have Japanism. After being almost annihilated, Jews have learned how to defend themselves; the Japanese should take a leaf from their book. In fact, the author was not Jewish at all, but a Japanese nationalist named Yamamoto Shichihei, whose statements about the “Jewish character” owed quite a bit to The Protocols. 

     

    Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant-explorer in the thirteenth century, was one of the first Europeans to give an account of extraordinary Oriental splendor. His report, full of the fantastical wonders of Kublai Khan’s China, was hardly reliable. He didn’t speak Chinese, and we don’t even know how long he actually was in China. His Book of the Marvels of the World, written in a Genoese prison cell, shows a mixture of sexual prurience (the concubines with whom the great Khan could “do what he pleases”), awe at China’s riches, and a dose of implied political criticism. Polo possibly exaggerated Asian opulence to reveal the inadequacies of the West. Christopher Columbus read Polo’s book with particular interest, since, like many businessmen today, he thought the wealth of the East might offer un-dreamed-of business opportunities.

    More accurate accounts of China and Japan were compiled by Christian missionaries during the seventeenth century. Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, admired the Chinese elites so much that he thought the only way to convert them to the Christian faith was to imitate some of their customs. (This was a sticking point between Jesuits and the other Catholic orders, who did not approve of such underhand mimicry.) Ricci regarded Confucius as “the equal to the pagan philosophers and superior to most of them.” Francis Xavier, arriving in Japan in 1549, was equally impressed by Japanese culture. Both Ricci and Xavier encountered orderly and sophisticated societies, whose peoples managed, on the whole, to live harmoniously. Some of the Portuguese priests who arrived with Xavier were even a bit shocked that Japanese women could walk the streets in safety without male guardians. 

    Christians found all this baffling. After all, rules of moral behavior came to us from the sacred words of God and Jesus Christ. How could Asian peoples possibly have developed such high degrees of social harmony without the Christian faith? A similar question was raised by the life of Spinoza, after he was banned for his sacrilegious ideas from the Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. He was an infidel and a blasphemer, but his morals were beyond reproach. Pierre Bayle, the French philosopher who was a critical admirer of Spinoza, attributed this to the influence on the Dutch sage of “Oriental philosophies.” He was almost certainly wrong, but one can see why he thought so. He was faced by the same conundrum as the missionaries in East Asia.

    Matteo Ricci concluded that the Chinese, too, had once believed in the existence of one true God, but their faith, corrupted by Buddhism and other superstitions, had got lost in time. The duty of Christian missionaries was to unearth and revive the old faith. Ricci used the ancient Chinese term, Shang Di, the king of gods, the ruler of the world, the founding spirit of Chinese emperors. The term was never used by Chinese in the same sense as Christians used it, to refer to the deity, but it had to do. 

    More than a century later, Voltaire took many of his views on China from Ricci’s writings. He, too, deplored the falsehoods spread by Buddhist bonzes, but he saw Confucianism not as it really existed in China but as an abstraction, a superior philosophy stripped of all ritual and superstition. China, in his idealized view, was a society governed by secular philosophers — by intellectuals like Voltaire himself, in other words. Not only was there great wealth in China, but its statecraft convinced Voltaire that China was far more evolved than eighteenth-century Europe, and France in particular. 

    Voltaire was hardly an expert on Chinese affairs, nor had he ever been anywhere much farther east than Berlin. But that hardly mattered. His interest in the real China was superficial at best. What counted was the way this exotic civilization could be used to criticize political arrangements back home. The rationality of Confucian thought and the intellectual wisdom of Confucian mandarins stood in contrast to the power of the Catholic Church, the infamy of Christian priests, and the divine rule of absolute monarchs. China was a stick with which to beat France, a political maneuver that has been repeated many times since. 

    Ricci, Voltaire, and the others were benign describers of the East Asian nations compared to what followed nearer the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was in the nineteenth century that the question of race came into play. This was true about antisemitism and it was true about Western views of East Asia. As long as Jews were beyond the pale because of their religion, a Jew still had a chance of redemption, as long as he or she converted to the Christian faith. Once “racial science” clouded European minds, however, such an outcome was no longer possible. In his essay, Judaism and Music, published in 1850, Richard Wagner wrote that religion was no longer the reason why Jews were such a menace. No, it was the “nature” of the Jews which was repugnant to the native peoples of Europe. Jewish nature was parasitic and revolved around money. Jews were incapable of any creative imagination. 

    Count Arthur de Gobineau, the French diplomat and race theorist, who became a close friend of Wagner’s, wrote his infamous book, The Inequality of Human Races, a few years after Wagner’s essay. He was obsessively worried about racial mixing. Gobineau rather admired the Jews for resisting miscegenation. But the “yellow race” was more to be feared. Mixing with their blood would produce “mud.” Gobineau applied Wagner’s view of the Jews as materialistic and intellectually sterile to the peoples of East Asia: highly organized — indeed, despotic — and rapacious, but utterly incapable of original thought or true artistic achievement. Jews, in the eyes of an antisemite, can only mimic the cultures they operate in. Highly skilled Asians can only imitate the achievements of superior nations. Mimics are not quite human, and that is what makes them so cunning and sinister.

    Always fascinated by the East, and widely traveled, especially in Persia, Gobineau became fixated on the danger of an “Asiatic” invasion of Europe that would destroy Western civilization. He was convinced that racial mixing had made Europeans so decadent that they could no longer defend themselves. The French thinker applied the Asiatic tag not just to the Chinese and Japanese, but to the Slavic peoples as well. The Russians would attack first, he believed, which would open the “floodgates to the vast human horde we find so ill at ease in China.” The United States, he claimed, would gain little from this, but “Europe will lose everything.” Efforts in the United States to curtail Asian immigration through racist laws met with Gobineau’s warm approval. 

    One of the great ironies of history is that European racialist thinking, as well as its social Darwinist ideas on racial fitness, became highly influential in Japan and China in the late nineteenth century, an influence that persists today. Important Japanese intellectuals, such as the relatively liberal Fukuzawa Yukichi, who admired philosophers of the European Enlightenment, concluded that “leaving Asia” was essential to the survival of Japan as a fully fit and civilized nation. He was a booster of Japan’s war with China in 1895. Following Gobineau’s pointers on the Slavs, some people at the time even saw Japan’s defeat of Imperial Russia as a victory of Western modernity over Russian backwardness. Theodore Roosevelt thought that the Japanese victory was quite “splendid,” a judgment that would not last for very long. Other Asians, however, applauded Japan’s military success as a blow to Western supremacy.

    Still, no matter how much the Japanese longed to be accepted by Western nations as a civilized equal, some Western nations refused to give them that satisfaction. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan proposed a clause that would guarantee “equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.” This racial equality clause would only apply, however, to members of the League of Nations, not to peoples under colonial rule. The proposal was voted down by the United States and the dominions of the British Empire, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Japanese did not forget this slight.

    Yellow peril paranoia in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by fears that sound familiar today. They were an earlier version of what is now called “the great replacement theory.” In 1876, a lawyer named H.L. Clement warned a California State Committee that “the Chinese are upon us. How can we get rid of them? The Chinese are coming. How can we stop them?” Chinese migrant workers were said to be entering the country with criminal and immoral purposes. Something had to be done to prevent the white man from being swamped by the alien invaders. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was designed to do just that. It was the first American law to restrict a group of immigrants on the basis of nationality, religion, or race. The American Federation of Labor made the following statement to Congress in 1902: “The free immigration of Chinese would be for all purposes an invasion by Asiatic barbarians. . . . It is our inheritance to keep [civilization] pure and uncontaminated, as it is our purpose to broaden and enlarge it. We are trustees for mankind.”

    Japanese immigrants were tolerated for a bit longer. But suspicion of Japanese domination soon began to grip the imagination of West Coast Americans. The Anti-Japanese League was formed in 1919. Again, there was the fear of being flooded by non-white people whose culture and religion made assimilation impossible. “Today, in my opinion,” the director of the Anti-Japanese League warned, “the Japanese of our country look upon the Pacific Coast really as no more than a colony of Japan, and the whites as a subject race.” Laws making it impossible for Japanese and other non-white people to naturalize, take American citizens to court, or acquire land soon followed.

    Movies and novels about the Yellow Peril were especially popular in the years between the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, when Japanese were no longer allowed to immigrate to the United States. The most famous author of such anti-Asian fiction was Sax Rohmer, a British writer who had started his career as a scribbler of skits for the music halls. His first bestseller, serialized in 1913, was The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu, in its American edition entitled The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Other titles give one a flavor of his chosen genre: The Yellow Claw (1915), Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic (1919), Yellow Shadow (1925). 

    Dr. Fu Manchu, the master poisoner, is “the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on the earth for centuries.” His character is the clearest distillation of the old clammy fear that has obsessed antisemites and Yellow Perilists alike: creepy intelligence, dark and mysterious customs and rituals, sexual perversion, and a desire for world domination. There is usually a slave girl in the evil doctor’s lair, an Egyptian in his first novel. Fu Manchu rarely appears in public, but he wields great power behind the scenes, often using occult means to manipulate his victims. Sax Rohmer was himself a dabbler in magic mumbo jumbo. 

    Fu Manchu, incidentally, was never portrayed in the movies by a Chinese actor, but by the Swedish-American Warner Oland, who was also famous for his more benign role as Charlie Chan. Chan was somewhat effete and more than a little unctuous, but blessed with all the wisdom of the East (“Confucius say. . .”). He was a kind of anti-Fu Manchu. The mixture of menacing refinement and erotic depravity is best illustrated by the career of the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, whom some might remember as Colonel Saito, the camp commandant in The Bridge over the River Kwai. 

    In the silent film era, Hayakawa, who arrived in California in 1907, was a star on a par with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Rudolph Valentino. Like Valentino, he entranced millions of women all over the world as the exotic lover. Refined and handsome, dressed in tuxedos or silk kimonos, he exuded a dangerous charm, promising transgressions that were erotic as well as racial. Hayakawa was, in a way, a romantic Dr. Fu Manchu, an Oriental matinee idol. In The Cheat, from 1915, one of his most popular films, he stamps the naked back of a white woman with his scalding seal. But in the end, his characters pay the price for their seductions by being killed, or by committing suicide in the way that audiences expected Japanese men to do. In fact, Hayakawa, in despair because of his failure to enter the Japanese Naval Academy, had tried to disembowel himself as a very young man. His Hollywood pictures were not well received in Japan. 

    Suspicion of Japan’s increasing power in the twentieth century was not just a right-wing concern; it preoccupied some illustrious figures on the American left, too. William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner was particularly hostile to Japan. Their correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 was the writer Jack London, a socialist. Five years after Japan’s victory in that war, London wrote a peculiar science-fiction story, entitled The Unparalleled Invasion. Under Japanese tutelage, in London’s tale, the Chinese become so numerous and powerful that they threaten to overwhelm the world with immigrants by 1975, as a step towards world domination. (Little did London know that Ezra Vogel, a well-respected American scholar of Japan, would write a bestseller entitled Japan as Number One in 1979.) Luckily, in London’s short story, an American scientist comes up with a poison that is able to exterminate the entire Chinese population. Once China becomes an American colony, the world will be safe.

    London later became a fierce proponent of military confrontation with Japan. He still believed that Japan would lead the Chinese people in a quest to rule the world. In a piece for the San Francisco Examiner, he warned that 

    at no distant day we shall hear ‘Asia for the Asiatic!’ Four hundred million indefatigable workers (deft, intelligent, and unafraid to die), aroused and rejuvenescent, managed and guided by forty-five million additional human beings who are splendid fighting animals, scientific and modern, constitute that menace to the Western world which has been well-named the ‘Yellow Peril.

    Not surprisingly, American paranoia was further inflamed — and for many, confirmed — by the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942, confining 120,000 Japanese-Americans to concentration camps, was a logical consequence of this tradition of hysteria. The thinking behind this measure was summed up well in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times on February 2, 1942: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is born — so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”

    Once again, the Japanese reflected a Western caricature back to the West. “Asia for the Asians” did indeed become the slogan of Japan’s war against Western colonial powers. Konoe Fumimaro, Japan’s prime minister until six weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was convinced, not entirely without reason, that racism was the main ground for anti-Japanese sentiments in the United States. He thought that “the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor colored people, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black population.” Japanese government propagandists projected Japan’s conflict with the Western powers as a war of liberation. They tried to co-opt the Chinese as allies in a racial conflict. Dobun Doshu, “Same Script, Same Race,” was the Japanese slogan. After being brutally invaded by Japan, the Chinese remained unconvinced.

    Many Americans also saw the Pacific War in racial terms. In an American poster of 1942, entitled This is the Enemy, a hideous yellow soldier with gleaming buck teeth and yellow claws is about to plunge a dagger into the back of a terrified white female. Stereotypes that once applied to the thirteenth-century Mongol invaders of Europe, memorably described by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 as “squat, slit-eyed, brawny horsemen ‘with faces like the snouts of dogs,’” were now applied to the Japanese: fanatical, cruel, demon warriors who blindly followed orders as worshippers of an imperial death cult. Wartime propaganda films, such as Frank Capra’s Know Your Enemy: Japan, explained how “absolute loyalty to the emperor, reckless bravery” and “belief in the divine mission to rule the world runs through the whole people.” That the kamikaze suicide pilots seemed to fit this image perfectly was another historical irony, for the sacred wind (kamikaze) referred to the typhoon that destroyed Kublai Khan’s fleet in 1274 and thus saved Japan from a Mongol invasion. 

    After the Japanese defeat in 1945, race was no longer the main issue — for a while at least. Japan’s fanatical, medieval, warrior culture was blamed for the catastrophic Asian war. General Douglas MacArthur, the generalissimo of the Allied occupation of Japan, declared that the Japanese, “measured by the standards of modern civilization,” were like “a boy of twelve.” Americans took it upon themselves to educate the Japanese people and lift them to the standards of modern civilization. Many Japanese, tired of war, and captivated by the allure of Lucky Strikes, Hershey bars, and Coca-Cola (as well as free elections, to be sure), were happy to be lifted.

    But the fears that spark Yellow Perilism did not go away. In many overheated minds it was redirected towards Communist China. A Christian fanatic named Dan Gilbert, author of the bestselling The Red Terror and Bible Prophecy, in 1944, thundered that the “Yellow Peril will sweep on, reinforced by the Red Terror, to spread the deeds of the devil and the crimes of Communism all over the world.” This might sound a little overwrought, but President Harry Truman himself, not known as a zealot, resurrected some of the oldest Yellow Peril tropes. The Chinese Communists who entered the Korean War in 1950, Truman claimed, were the “inheritors of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, who were the greatest murderers in the history of the world.” 

    Mao’s China also inspired the revival of another tradition in Western perceptions of the East, that of Voltaire. Even as millions of Chinese were being persecuted, purged, murdered, and starved by their own rulers, intellectuals in Paris, American universities, and other fellow travelers imagined Communist China as a beautiful experiment, a kind of Garden of Eden of civic virtue and social equality, which put the Western capitalist world to shame. After a visit to China with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1955, Simone de Beauvoir made the following statement: “The power [Mao] exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt’s was. New China’s constitution renders impossible the concentration of authority in one man’s hands.” Let’s be charitable and put this nonsense down to naivete. An even more fantastical idealization may be found in Maria Antonietta Machiocchi’s account in her Daily Life in Revolutionary China, from 1971. Mao, she explains, believes that “free expression has to be given to the people’s imagination.” His Little Red Book, she writes, is “essential,” since it “brings philosophical reasoning and dialectical materialism to every Chinese.” 

    But the effusive commentary by younger intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, and other admirers of Mao’s murderous experiments, point to something else. Like Voltaire, their real interest was not in China or the people who lived there, but in their own societies, whose transformation they hoped for. Julian Bourg, the French historian at Boston College, put his finger on it: “Maoism arrived in France at a fortuitous time, its international promotion by China in the 1960s coinciding with openness in France toward alternative radicalisms.” This goes for other privileged parts of the Western world, too. 

    To call Mao’s Western disciples racist would be too harsh. Questions of race would not have entered their minds. But there is something morally careless about hailing an exotic dictatorship in a faraway land without paying attention to the people who suffer under it. Not racist, exactly, but culturally solipsistic, for sure. 

    Four decades after the end of World War II, Japan had made an astonishing comeback. By the 1980s, Japan became the third highest investor in the United States, after Britain and Canada. The Sony corporation bought Columbia Pictures in 1989. A year later, Mitsubishi acquired a majority stake in the Rockefeller Group. Japanese cars had a 25 percent market share in the United States. Many Americans owned Japanese television sets. Most Japanese were more highly educated than most Americans. And all the old fears of being overwhelmed by treacherous, superior, fanatical, sinister, plotting Asians came rushing back.

    Around the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, Senator Howard Baker wished to point out “two facts”: “First, we’re still at war with Japan. Second, we’re losing.” Four Republican Congressmen made their point by smashing a Toshiba boombox with sledgehammers in front of the Capitol. Feverish rhetoric didn’t just come from the right, however. Jack London’s ghost hovered round the 1980s and 1990s too. Here was Gore Vidal in The Nation, on January 11, 1986: “Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we — the white race — have become the yellow man’s burden.” The veteran liberal journalist Theodore White reminded readers of the New York Times Magazine that the Japanese were busy recreating their wartime East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, this time by “martial” trade policies. People should be reminded, he suggested, of what happened in Pearl Harbor.

    Many reputations were made — and soon forgotten — with books warning of Japan’s imminent takeover of the world: Japan’s Power Game (1990), In the Shadow of the Rising Sun (1991), The Coming War with Japan (1991), Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms Are Colonizing Vital American Industries (1992), Rising Sun (1992). And so on. Most of these works look pretty silly now. Japan’s economic bubble burst in 1992, and people lost interest in the menace of Japanese trade practices or financial power. But it is still worth pondering the nature of that outburst of Yellow Perilism. One of the zaniest and most prominent books, later made into a movie with Sean Connery, was Michael Crichton’s novel Rising Sun. Curiously for a popular fiction, the book included newspaper reports about the unstoppable power of Japanese industry, as well as blurbs from prominent figures in American business. Crichton himself claimed in his afterword: “The Japanese are not our saviors. They are our competitors. We should not forget it.” And all this about a thriller!

    The story of Japanese skullduggery, the corruption of American elites, kinky sex, and systematic cruelty — it all could have been written by Sax Rohmer or be the subject of one of Sessue Hayakawa’s silent films. The United States, in Crichton’s story, is undermined, penetrated, and then forced into submission by Japanese corporate power. Once again, the similarity with antisemitic paranoia is remarkable. The American victims of Japanese intrigues are either gullible and naive or greedy. Like the Jews in antisemitic stories, the Japanese are shrewd, ruthless, calculating operators, but unable to think for themselves. The image of the mask pops up regularly too, as in the following sentence. The dastardly Japanese corporation “presents an impenetrable mask to the rest of the world.” The hero of Crichton’s story, a detective named Connor, who “knows the Japanese mind,” explains why the Japanese are buying up American universities, for “they know — after all the bullshit stops — that they can’t innovate as well as we can.” And, like the Jews, the Japanese work their destruction by infiltrating the enemy as lethal parasites. 

    Paranoid visions of alien powers hiding in our midst to rule us by stealth ebb and flow, all according to circumstances. We are now living in an era of much demagoguery and malignant propaganda. The MAGA universe is filled with fear and loathing of “criminal” immigrants, Muslim terrorists, anti-American liberal elites, wicked international financiers, and much more. There are streaks of old-fashioned antisemitism here, too — those international financiers bearing the face of George Soros. And China is the East Asian threat once more. The Chinese menace was one of Donald Trump’s bugbears long before he became president. Like Japan’s gullible victims in Michael Crichton’s ugly novel, Trump is convinced that the Americans have been played for suckers by the rapacious Asians for a long time. But this is mixed with his admiration of authoritarian power. He likes to describe Xi Jinping as a great leader “out of central casting,” which from him is high praise indeed.

    For once, however, Chinese power is quite real. When Willy wrote his letter to Nicky in 1895, warning him of the Yellow Peril, the Chinese Empire was on its last legs. Its institutions were so sclerotic that reforms could no longer save the imperial throne. A military revolt in 1911 pushed the more than 2,000-year-old empire over. Things are different now. For the first time in many centuries, China is powerful enough to challenge Western hegemony. When Trump was guided around the former imperial garden by Xi Jinping, it was the American president who looked like an ingénue, out of his depth, overawed. 

    To claim, as I have done, that Western views of East Asia have been wrongheaded, either through racial or cultural bias, or rosy-colored delusions, is not to say that China or Japan have always been benign powers. Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s caused the death of millions. China today is often belligerent and threatening to its neighbors. When Henry Kissinger traveled to Beijing with President Nixon in 1972, he was assured by Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai that China would never be an aggressive power, and would never think of imposing its will on other nations. Kissinger and Nixon, also a little overawed by the mystique of Chinese imperial glory, albeit in a Communist guise, were perhaps inclined to believe them. It would be foolish to believe this now. 

    Actual and potential Chinese aggression cannot be wished away. Nor is it likely to be as ephemeral as the Japanese “threat” of the 1980s. Since a war would be catastrophic, a modus vivendi must be found. And we might also bear in mind what the coiner of the Yellow Peril phrase, Jacques Novicow, once taught about the possible benefits of Chinese competition. But to achieve an equilibrium that recognizes China as a serious power, without pandering or falling into submission, will require careful diplomacy and strong Asian allies. This can only be done through a profound understanding of China and its neighbors, of their histories, cultures, and people. Old, vicious, and fantastical notions about East Asia must be discarded, so that we will not be blinded by the prejudices that have muddled Western minds since the Mongols reached the outskirts of Vienna in 1241.

    A Genial Demolitionist

    Marcel Duchamp’s work is untouchable. That’s no surprise. He didn’t want to touch us. The chilliness of the Duchamp retrospective that opened last spring at the Museum of Modern Art in New York mirrors the artist’s own attitude. His work is a refusal — of avidity, energy, empathy, everything that makes art art. In the more than a century since he first selected an ordinary object (a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel, a bottle rack) and announced that he’d invented what he called a Readymade, his nihilism has become a pervasive attitude in the arts. He did say, at a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, “I don’t want to destroy art for anybody else but myself, that’s all.” But whatever he thought about the personal orientation of his program, his ideas have exerted an influence that has spread far and wide. The fascination of Duchamp and his work is no easier to explain than the fascination of fascism. This is aesthetic fascism — a yearning for total control.  

    I wonder how many people really like the stuff Duchamp made. The MoMA show wasn’t poorly attended, but my impression was that visitors felt more dutiful than anything else as they surveyed his career. The big exhibition spaces on MoMA’s top floor dwarfed Duchamp’s productions, many of them relatively small. A lot of what this genial demolitionist produced amounts to jokes, puzzles, games, and doodles. He doesn’t address the audience so much as he’s winking at people, giving them a little nudge. Retrospectives as large as this one — it contains more than 300 objects — are meant to create an alliance between the artist and the audience. We get to know an artist. By the end of a great retrospective we may be feeling emotional, experiencing something like friendship, maybe love. Duchamp is too cool a customer to establish that kind of connection, even with his fans. He’s always in retreat. While there were flickers of warmth in the first couple of galleries, which focused on the years before he abandoned painting, much of the second half of the retrospective was dominated by the flood of replicas and documents with which he and his admirers sought to memorialize and eventually aggrandize the avant-garde acts that first earned him his reputation. There was nobody else quite like Duchamp in bohemian circles in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The cafes, restaurants, and nightclubs of Montparnasse, Montmartre, and Greenwich Village were full of tricksters and nihilists, many of them to one degree or another aligned with Dadaism or Surrealism. Duchamp stood apart. He was the trickster’s trickster, the nihilist’s nihilist.

    André Breton, the ringleader of the Surrealists, with whom Duchamp collaborated on various occasions, was sometimes mockingly referred to as the Pope of Surrealism. Duchamp was the Pope of Dadaism, the man who made a religion of anti-art, although he was also a loner who at times distanced himself from Dada. Francis Naumann, a scholar who may know more about Duchamp than anybody else alive, has recently assembled Duchamp-isms, a collection of brief quotations in which the artist appears as a master of paradox — a mind too refined, too attentive to the ambiguities of thought, to be so crude as to be against art. Duchamp’s admirers see a characteristically French intellectual skepticism; Michel Sanouillet, in an essay in the catalogue of the last Duchamp retrospective at MoMA, back in 1973, said that “those eminently French characteristics that Pascal identified in his countrymen, the bent for precision and the bent for clarity, are to be discerned in Duchamp.” I wonder about that. MoMA has just published Duchamp on Tape, some 150 pages of interviews that the gallerist Sidney Janis and his wife, Harriet, and their son Carroll conducted with Duchamp back in 1951. Asked about his involvement with the early years of Dadaism, Duchamp was at pains to make a distinction between the group of artists in Zurich that included the sculptor Jean Arp and the group with which he was involved in New York. He referred to the Zurich group as involved with “constructive Dadaism.” As for his cohort in New York, which included Man Ray and Francis Picabia, “We weren’t constructive at all. We were destructive in the way that we didn’t want to construct or build anything up.” They weren’t even “attacking painting at all, we didn’t care,” so Duchamp said. “We just wanted to enlarge the scope of making fun, with a deep root in our fun, of course, but we didn’t know how deep it was. We just made the fun first and found the deep root afterward.” If this isn’t exactly nihilism — after all, nobody’s against having some fun — it’s the prelude to it. Those deep roots have spread. 

    Writing two years before Duchamp died in 1968 at the age of 81, Calvin Tomkins referred to him as the “idol of the iconoclasts.” When Henri-Pierre Roché, the author of the novel on which Truffaut based Jules and Jim, first met Duchamp in New York in 1916, “he was twenty-nine years old and wore a halo. I still see him that way.” Whatever the dangers involved in making a religion of anti-art and a saint of an anti-artist — I believe they’re very real — it’s also true that a certain kind of skepticism, not unrelated to anti-art, has a place in the arts. That helps to explain why even some of Duchamp’s most outrageous remarks aren’t always easy to ignore. There’s an element of risk or maybe even absurdity in the importance that we ascribe to the arts. How can the sound that comes out of a wooden box or the arrangement of colors on a piece of cloth be so tremendously significant? Tolstoy was raising that question with his mocking account of an operatic rehearsal in What Is Art?, the polemic he published relatively late in life; he called the opera in question “one of the most gigantic absurdities that could possibly be devised.” Part of the greatness of great art — and the goodness of good art — involves our sense that art exists on a knife-edge or precipice, the Sienese altarpiece or Mozart sonata or Wallace Stevens poem a miraculous crystallization of forces that might well not crystallize. When Duchamp famously drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa, he was making a silly joke but also reminding us that the sublime and the ridiculous are sometimes too close for comfort. If we deny that art is risky — if we imagine that the sublime has nothing to do with the ridiculous — we risk academicism. 

    In “Canto LXXX,” Ezra Pound recalls William Butler Yeats asking Aubrey Beardsley why he drew horrors. “Beauty is difficult,” was Beardsley’s response, and he repeated the point two more times. The difficulty of beauty was something that the avant-garde recognized, not only in their own day but in art in all times and places. It had been true when some of Michelangelo’s later work, especially his architectural projects, provoked skepticism among a number of his contemporaries. It was true in the late eighteenth century, when Jacques-Louis David’s students, ardent Neoclassicists, mocked Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera. And it has certainly been true in the last 150 years, when artist after artist has done work of great beauty that has initially been received with skepticism if not hostility. Even now, the beauty of Mondrian’s most pared-down compositions is difficult for many educated people to embrace, at least fully. The rejection by so many modern artists of conventional standards of craftsmanship and beauty posed challenges that Duchamp couldn’t leave alone. Fernand Léger recalled visiting the Salon de l’Aviation in Paris with Duchamp and Brancusi. Confronted with a particularly attractive propeller, Léger described Duchamp — whom he characterized as “a dry type with something inscrutable about him” — turning to Brancusi and announcing: “Painting is finished. Who can do anything better than this propeller? Can you?” Well, yes — Brancusi could. And Duchamp, an admirer of Brancusi’s work, knew that was the case.

    There are many reasons why Duchamp’s reputation — he is often said to be the most important artist of the twentieth century — is so difficult to disentangle. He lived a long time and was regarded in different ways by different people in different decades. He was a Frenchman who spent many years in the United States, eventually becoming an American citizen, and it was probably inevitable that he would be regarded in subtly different ways in New York and Paris. Whatever his skepticism about the value or future of art, he had an appreciation for the work that artists do; it was literally in his DNA. His maternal grandfather had been a serious amateur printmaker and his two older brothers and younger sister were accomplished artists. The oldest brother, Jacques Villon, 87 when he died in 1963, reimagined figures, still lifes, and landscapes as prismatic angular visions, some of them very beautiful; Raymond Duchamp-Villon, even though he died young, at 41 in 1918, created sculpture still admired for its Cubist vigor; and Suzanne Duchamp’s later watercolor landscapes have charm, ebullience. If Duchamp never lost his feeling for the importance of craft — even in his most preposterous concoctions you sense the intentness with which he chose his materials — that might be counted as a kind of family romance. He rejected the humdrum hard work involved in making works of art but clung to some grandiose if diabolical idea about art. Art became anti-art. It’s no accident that two of the strongest paintings in the first gallery at MoMA are family affairs: the Portrait of the Artist’s Father (1910) and The Chess Game (1910), a bucolic scene with Duchamp’s two brothers playing chess in a green landscape, accompanied by their wives. These are solid paintings, a little conservative in coloring and approach, but with echoes of Cézanne’s winning sobriety. 

    Fame — or at least notoriety — came to Duchamp when his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), from 1912, which had inspired little interest in Paris, caused at scandal at the Armory Show, which opened in New York in 1913 and was eventually seen in Chicago and Boston. After that Duchamp became — I think it was a conscious decision — a more shadowy and mysterious figure, famous in avant-garde circles but perhaps not much regarded beyond them. In the years between World War I and the beginning of the 1920s he produced most of his now celebrated Readymades and the large never-to-be-finished painting on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). He frequented the New York gatherings of Walter and Louise Arensberg, who became his greatest collectors. Along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, he founded something called the Société Anonyme, Inc., which organized exhibitions and other public events promoting contemporary art. Then Duchamp more or less gave up making art for playing chess, or at least that was what he allowed friends and admirers to imagine. When asked what he was up to, he said he was a respirateur, a breather. For decades he lived austerely, often depending for whatever money he had on his involvement with collectors and dealers — the art trade. 

    Duchamp helped present Brancusi’s work in the United States and over the years engaged in one way or another with many key patrons of avant-garde art, not only the Arensbergs and Dreier but also John Quinn and Peggy Guggenheim. Even when he was producing little or no work of his own he was involved with the work of others. For “First Papers of Surrealism,” the group exhibition that Breton organized during his wartime exile in New York in 1942, Duchamp contributed not only the elaborate design of the catalogue but also an installation involving a mile’s worth of string, which made it a bit of a challenge to actually see some of the works on display. Included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition were a good many announcements, catalogs, posters, and art magazine covers that Duchamp designed, each of them a way of reminding the artists that the anti-artist was standing with them. Duchamp was no fool. What would anti-art have been without art? By the 1940s and 1950s he was the Greta Garbo of the avant-garde, elusive but ubiquitous. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when there was the beginning of a revival of interest in the Dadaism of the 1910s and 1920s, he found himself embraced by a new generation. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg got to know him. Duchamp became the paterfamilias of Pop. “Pop Art,” he explained in 1963, “is just a ‘second wind’ of Dada.”

    Duchamp was a master of self-invention and imaginative self-presentation, skills held in high regard in the avant-garde circles where he held court. There’s a reason why the entrance to the MoMA show was emblazoned with a billboard-size version of a photograph of Duchamp taken in New York in 1917, in which he appears five times, as if in a funhouse mirror. He was a very good-looking guy, with aquiline features and a slender physique. Late in life he laughingly referred to “a tiny, beautiful photograph of a young man” — himself. Early and late he was an expert when it came to promoting his own image. In 1924 Man Ray photographed him in the nude as Adam looking longingly at Eve, played by the model Bronia Perlmutter; they make a good couple. Diving into the genderbending 1920s, he reimagined himself as Rrose Sélavy, with a big hat and come-hither eyes, promoting a perfume called Belle Haleine (“Beautiful Breath”). In later years he incorporated his exquisite profile in a number of works. There was always about Duchamp, even in old age, something of the laidback gigolo, the cool sensualist, the ironic dandy. Women seem to have found him irresistible. A very brief marriage in 1927, to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, has remained something of a mystery. He had a long alliance with Mary Reynolds, a beautiful American living in Paris who was herself something of a legend. There was a passionate affair with Maria Martins, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States and a sculptor much admired by the Surrealists. In 1954 he married Alexina Matisse — everybody called her Teeny — who’d had three children with her first husband, Pierre Matisse, the son of the painter and an important art dealer in New York. Teeny had a bohemian ease and elegance that matched Duchamp’s own. She was also a good chess player.

    Sex is very much a theme in Duchamp’s work, whether the rituals of courtship in The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), which preoccupied him between 1915 and 1923, or the erotic obsession in Étants Donnés, which he worked on for much of the last twenty years of his life. These two works — his admirers regard them as the masterworks that frame the career — have been the subject of an extraordinary amount of writing and discussion, encouraged by Duchamp himself. A decade after abandoning The Large Glass, he published The Green Box, a collection of facsimile reproductions of the notes that he made as he was preparing this big painting. The Large Glass, the most abstruse of abstractions, is nothing without the commentary. Breton saw it as “the trophy of a fabulous hunt through virgin territory.” The upper panel, so we are told, is the realm of the bride, a collection of ambiguous shapes which Duchamp described as “basically a motor” — a love machine. The lower panel belongs to the bachelors, represented by what are referred to as malic molds, empty vessels waiting to be filled. “The bride imagines and commands,” Tomkins wrote in his biography of Duchamp, published in 1996, “the bachelors react and obey.” Duchamp’s Large Glass is a tabula rasa, an anthology of enigmatic and frankly ugly elements to which he and his followers ascribe all sorts of meanings; it’s become a kind of mythomania machine. Even before he had abandoned The Large Glass it was being fetishized, with Man Ray photographing the panels covered with dust in Duchamp’s studio. When the glass panels were inadvertently shattered — to be carefully cobbled back together by Duchamp — that only seemed to add to the mystique. Writing in 1945 in a special issue of the avant-garde magazine View devoted to Duchamp, Sidney and Harriet Janis argued that The Large Glass “is essentially an Assumption of the Virgin composition, with the lower part given over to the secular world and its motivations, the upper, to the realm of the inner mechanism and inner spirit.” I don’t see it.

    In the 1940s, when Mary Reynolds was worrying that Duchamp’s infatuation with Maria Martins might mean the end of their long relationship, a friend of hers, Hélène Hoppenot, hoping that it was a passing fancy, speculated that it was Maria’s “extreme animalism that attracts the one-hundred-percent intellectual who is Marcel Duchamp.” This comment, found in Hoppenot’s diary, suggests the problem with Duchamp as an artist. Although artists can certainly be intellectuals — many great ones have been formidable intellectuals — no real artist is one-hundred-percent intellectual. An artist needs sensibility, instinct — animalism. Duchamp prided himself on his lack of any of that. Étants donnés, the peepshow that he worked on for years in a studio on Manhattan’s 14th Street, is an elaborate erotic bauble, a conceit. Look through the two little eye holes cut in an old wooden door and you see a woman’s torso with legs spread wide (based on Maria Martins), a lamp, a weedy landscape, a little waterfall. If it weren’t for the stubbornness with which Duchamp insisted on his impenetrable allegories, beginning with The Large Glass and ending with Étant donnés, I doubt anybody would take them quite so seriously. For his admirers his enigmas are addictive. When the Philadelphia Museum of Art devoted a scholarly exhibition to Étant donnés in 2009 — it had already been installed in the museum for some forty years — the catalog ran to 450 pages with contributions by seven authors.

    Like the retrospective mounted in New York and Philadelphia in 1973, the new show is a joint project of the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s the most complete gathering of Duchamp’s variegated production every attempted, and the curators — Michael Affron in Philadelphia and Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo in New York — are at pains to explain that they’ve refused to distinguish between major and minor works, instead presenting “Duchamp’s body of work as a group of physical things, no matter how cerebral or conceptual the motives behind them may have been.” It was probably a desire to let Duchamp be Duchamp that led to the decision to produce a catalogue with an extensive chronology and generous reproductions but only a single essay, “Duchamp and the Museum,” tucked all the way at the back. (The 1973 catalogue, by contrast, had ten essays, including one by Octavio Paz.) There are certainly a great many people who could have easily been persuaded to produce a range of essays. That the curators have chosen to go it alone suggests that they believe there are so many competing views of Duchamp — a radical? an aesthete? a joker? a philosopher? — that the best bet is to remain neutral. The curators are agnostics. They’re refusing to engage in what amounts to the theological debates that Duchamp inspires among his disciples.

    I don’t know what the show is going to look like at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has the world’s largest collection of Duchamp’s output, including the two key works that never travel, The Large Glass, because it’s so fragile (at MoMA it was represented by the Pop Artist Richard Hamilton’s 1965–6 reconstruction), and Étant donnés, because it’s permanently installed in Philadelphia. For Duchamp enthusiasts the City of Brotherly Love may well be the place to see the show. His work has a long history there, going back to the donation of the Arensberg collection in the early 1950s. There’s something comfortable — gemutlisch — in the way Duchamp’s conundrums can strike a museumgoer in Philadelphia, where the atmosphere isn’t as austere as it is at the Museum of Modern Art, which even today has an almost monastic style of installation that goes back to Alfred H. Barr, the founding director. MoMA’s severity sets the emotionalism of a Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, or Picasso in high relief, but it leaves Duchamp’s coldness feeling freeze-dried. There is some warmth in the first couple of rooms of the retrospective, the ones devoted to painting, and in the context Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) looks refreshingly modest, a handsome period piece. Duchamp was still trying to give us something to look at in the two or three years just after 1910. A series of studies of two men playing chess, their interactions abstracted in energetic overlapping arcs, have a winning graphic avidity. 

    Then the exhibition goes off a cliff, at least if you’re looking for what Duchamp on more than one occasion disparagingly referred to as “retinal” interest. There are rooms devoted to preparatory studies for The Large Glass, to the Readymades, and to some optical experiments that date from the 1920s. At that point museumgoers are maybe a little more than halfway through, and the rest is mostly retreads of earlier work. At one end of a huge gallery every slip of paper in The Green Box is laid out in a vast vitrine. At the other end of the same gallery there are ten versions of the portable museum devoted to his own oeuvre that Duchamp produced, beginning in the 1930s. The title he gave to each of the roughly 300 mini-retrospectives that he ultimately put together was from or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise). These cunning collapsable gatherings of reproductions (including a miniature version of the urinal, known as Fountain, that was rejected when Duchamp submitted it to an exhibition in New York in 1917) have a certain flaky charm. But it’s oppressive to be confronted by ten of them together, with different ones opened in different ways, to different degrees. The joke is repeated too many times. And we still aren’t anywhere near done with Mr. Duchamp. In the concluding part of the retrospective I found the man’s ego harder and harder to take. Aside from a few tiny and amusingly erogenous sculptures, all we see are retreads and replicas, whether the new editions of the old Readymades that were produced in the 1960s or Duchamp’s wanly etched reminiscences of works he had done long before. Whatever Duchamp’s motivations might have been in the earlier decades of his career, I found it impossible to escape the feeling that by the end he was fetishizing himself. Or at least going along with his fetishization by others. 

    It’s this later Duchamp, the sainted Duchamp of the 1960s, who set in motion the torrent of writing with which the curators have refused to engage. The exegesis actually started earlier, with the special issue of View devoted to Duchamp in 1945, but what’s certain is that it shows no signs of slowing. For curators, critics, and historians, Duchamp’s sneaky nihilism is an invitation. He was always politically disengaged; when there was war in Europe he made sure to be in New York, and he spent the Marxist 1930s playing chess. But contemporary critics and historians who take an interest in political and social theory are untroubled by his apolitical orientation. They may see an opportunity in his reticence or indifference, which leaves them free to do or say whatever they please. That wouldn’t trouble Duchamp, who believed that “the artist acts like a mediumistic being.” The Readymade is ready-made for the Marxists, a comedy of commodification. By the time he was producing the Box in a Valise, Duchamp was commodifying his own commodities. He enjoyed being his own archivist. I suspect that at some point he had no idea where the art ended and the archives began. Or he thought they were the same thing. In any event, his archival activities have inspired generations of archivists, determined to gather whatever Duchampian flotsam and jetsam the artist himself was unable to collect and collate in some box or other. 

    The most extraordinary recent example of this obsession with putting every detail of Duchamp’s career in order is a book devoted to the first museum show of his work, mounted in 1963 at what was then the Pasadena Art Museum (now known as the Norton Simon). Don Quaitance’s Duchamp in California: Walter Hopps Curates a Retrospective is a blow-by-blow account of how Hopps, a very young curator who would go on to become an influential impresario and scholar of contemporary art, produced a show that caused enormous excitement among Southern California’s younger creative types, among them Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Bell. The book — nearly 400 pages long — takes us through the planning of the exhibition and Duchamp’s visit to California, day by day, sometimes hour by hour. A thirty-five page section is devoted to the layout of the exhibition, with photographs and diagrams showing where each work was displayed. There are snapshots of the preview afterparty at Pasadena’s Hotel Green, and a couple of pages about the hotel itself. Duchamp’s visit to an old Dadaist friend, the ceramicist Beatrice Wood, is recounted, as is time spent with the collector Wright Ludington in his extraordinary home in Montecito. Of course there is a chapter devoted to Duchamp’s chess playing in California, the most famous game being the one with the attractive young writer Eve Babitz, who sat nude on her side of the board, opposite Duchamp in a suit. I don’t know that anybody would be able to read this book end to end, but as a survey of a cultural moment it’s unbeatable. Duchamp, elegant as ever, is clearly enjoying every moment. 

    Andy Warhol was at the preview for the Pasadena show. He was there with his movie camera. It had already been a few years since Johns, Rauschenberg, and John Cage fell under Duchamp’s spell. Now here was Warhol, eager to make whatever he could or would of Duchamp’s position as the art world’s gadfly and naysayer. My guess is that Warhol was fascinated by the older man’s carefully cultivated marginality, his way of decentering the center while remaining on the sidelines. But by the time Duchamp died — it was five years after the Pasadena retrospective — his bait-and-switch tactics were wearing thin. You could call this the price of success, because the Dadaist merry go-round was turning faster and faster as Duchamp’s quixotic gestures gave way to Warhol’s production line. The discipline of distinctions, Duchamp’s brilliant gambit, was hopelessly and maybe even irrevocably muddled as anti-art became a high art tradition that extended from Dada to Warhol and beyond. By the 1980s it wasn’t easy to see where Warholism ended and Reaganism began, the two joined in a celebration of undisciplined indulgence. Warhol enjoyed supercharging the confusion. That was the end of the avant-garde, because the avant-garde, whatever its excesses, was grounded in a spirit of discipline. 

    Duchamp was nothing if not disciplined. That’s why thoughtful people have bonded — and continue to bond — with the man and his work. The scattershot eccentricity of whatever he produced over a long career was a conscious choice, an acknowledgment that he knew enough about the creative act — that was the title of a lecture he delivered in Houston in 1957 — to know what kind of creative spirit he was. Duchamp was an interesting man, a fascinating man. As an artist he was something else. What I felt as I walked through the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was a disquieting, demonic presence — an enemy of art. 

    Prophets to Pundits: History into Theology

    What does history have to do with prophecy? Or to put it less cryptically, what does our imagination of the future, and of the actions (which is to say, the politics) necessary to take us toward that future, owe to past debates between Muslims, Christians, and Jews over the meaning of divine teachings?

    This question may seem two centuries out-of-date. In works such as The Conflict of the Faculties (the title is timeless, but the date is 1798, the faculties being Theology and Philosophy/History), Kant already taught that the separation of history from its heretofore traditional codependence with Christian theology was a precondition for critical thought. “It is in this distinction that true enlightenment consists.” Many secular philosophies and practices of history would spring from this distinction. But note that Kant himself presented this emancipation in religious terms. According to him, the cause of the conflation of history and prophecy — and of all subsequent religious violence — was that the early Church had failed to completely erase the Jews and their histories, instead becoming contaminated by them: 

    all that turmoil which has wrecked the human race, and still tears it apart, stems from this alone: because of a bad propensity in human nature, what should have served at the beginning to introduce this pure faith — i.e. to win over to the new faith, through its own prejudices, the nation which was accustomed to its old historical faith — this was subsequently made the foundation of a universal world-religion. 

    He proposed a solution: the Jewish “historical and statutory part of the church’s faith” must be stripped away, emancipating history and philosophy from religion, and simultaneously revealing the true Christian religion of reason. In short, Kant presents his philosophy of Enlightenment as the fulfillment of the Christian supersession of Judaism. His historical revolution is founded on the theology that it claims to overcome. 

    My point is not that we should reject Kant’s “secular” ideal of a critical history. My point is only that his ideal depended on a long history of Christian thinking about Judaism. This should not be surprising. Debates over the relationship between past, present, and future did (and still do) fundamental work in the emergence and interactions of the three religions that we broadly describe as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Two of those religions — Islam and Christianity — included a third of the world’s population by 1800, and today self-professed Christians and Muslims together account for a majority of humanity. In a world largely conquered, converted, and shaped over centuries by Christian and Islamic prophetic histories articulated in relation to each other and to Israelite and Jewish ones, not even the most avowedly secular imaginations of the relationship between past and future fully escape the influence of prophecy. 

    What is surprising is just how often those secular forms of historical thought have fantasized their autonomy from the prophetic past, and even presented, as Kant himself did, recycled products of that prophetic past as “critical thought.” One goal of this essay is to convince you that this fantasy is dangerous, and the danger is today just as real as it has ever been. Another is to describe some of the ways in which modern historical imaginations have amplified the danger by drawing on the past of these three religions, and to suggest an alternative way of viewing that past. And finally, it will propose some implications (or perhaps better, offer some fears) for the future. I will provide examples.

    To convince you first that the fantasy is dangerous, consider the Nazi German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, among other things an unrepentant architect of the Third Reich’s theories of sovereignty and executive power. Here are some words from a book review that he wrote in 1950 (just a few years after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials in which he himself narrowly escaped being charged) entitled “Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History”:

    Today, all human beings who plan and attempt to unite the masses behind their plans engage in some form of philosophy of history. . . . Any mass propaganda searches for its justification in proving that it is on the side of the things to come. Any faith of the masses is only the faith to be on the right while the opponent errs, because time, and the future, and progress work against him. And even despair screams for the last time only through threatening that world history has lost its meaning.

    Schmitt explains the murderousness of his age (the newly coined word “genocide” does not appear) in terms of our question. “Planning and steering elites” direct the “means of extermination, which modern science provides to every person in power,” by claiming to be on the right side of history. And though the means of extermination are modern and scientific, the historical self-understanding that guides its application is not:

    In spite of the entire Hegelian-Marxist-Stalinist dialectics of history, we, indeed, do not possess any other means of historical self-understanding. It is important to understand why it is especially this time of early Christianity that seems so plausible to us, considering the infinite quantity of historical events and ages.

    Schmitt’s point was that early Christian understandings of history provided a pattern for the struggle between competing visions of the direction of history — modernist and anti-modernist, Marxist, liberal, fascist, etc. — that he and the world had just lived through. And his question (“why it is especially this time of early Christianity”) is in some ways a narrower version of the one I posed at the outset: what does our imagination of the future, and of the politics necessary to take us toward that future, owe to past debates between Muslims, Christians, and Jews over the meaning of divine teachings?

    To avoid the impression that these understandings of history were exclusive to one band in the political spectrum, I need to offer at least one more example, and a good one is the book that Schmitt was reviewing, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Its author, Karl Löwith, served in World War I, became one of Martin Heidegger’s first students at Freiburg, and then joined the philosophy faculty at Marburg, where he remained until he was forced into exile in 1934 with the rise of the Nazi regime, of which he was a critic. He fled first to Italy and then for five years to Japan, whence on the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 he boarded ship for the United States and a job at the Hartford Seminary. There he wrote (in German) the book first published (in English) as Meaning in History.

    The thesis of Löwith’s volume is that “philosophy of history is . . . entirely dependent on theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of history as a history of fulfillment and salvation.” Proceeding in reverse chronological order from the present to the Bible, Löwith argued “that philosophy of history,” that is, the idea that history has meaning and direction that humans should attempt to discern and to develop, “originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfillment, and that it ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern.” Moreover, every secular philosophy of history follows this (often unacknowledged) theological pattern: socialism, Marxism, fascism, positivism, and any liberal theory of progress. All retained what Löwith saw as the most problematic features of Judeo-Christian theologies of history: their revolutionary inflection points and teleological orientation (that is, their “eschatological pattern”), their promotion of the human over nature, and their sacralization of human striving. In his view, this ongoing dependence of philosophies of history on Judeo-Christian theologies bore responsibility for present and future calamity.

    Some have seen here a debate between Schmitt (whose still influential Political Theology was published in 1922) and Löwith (whose book, which could have been titled Historical Theology, appeared in 1949). But we should also notice that both sought to understand how and why the sectarian struggles of the distant past — especially those of Judaism and early Christianity — shaped the possibilities for being in the present, even for those who were ignorant of that past, or who thought they had left prophecy entirely behind. Indeed, the conclusions that they drew from this shared interest, though different, were also similar. Löwith advocated a full rupture with the Judeo-Christian. According to him, Greek philosophy before its corruption by the God of Genesis had been committed to cosmology rather than anthropology, to understanding the human within nature rather than as lord over it, and to the experience of history as cyclical rather than as eschatological or progressive. Rediscovering those pre-monotheistic commitments could avert ongoing genocidal and ecological calamity. Humanity must abandon Jerusalem and return to Athens. 

    Schmitt, for his part, called Löwith’s book “a critical analysis that truly deserves this name” and wondered why no one had dedicated a monograph before to “a phenomenon in the history of spirit with such a level of obviousness and timeliness.” But as the title of his review makes clear, his commitment remained to the recovery of “Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History,” not their abandonment. “Christians” he concluded, “look back on completed events and find a basic reason and an archetype. Through the active contemplation of them, the dark meaning of our history continues to grow.” 

    The similarities are important: both present the world as suffering because of a Jewish understanding of history that needs to be overcome — for Löwith, by forgetting the Judeo-Christian and returning to pagan Greek philosophy; for Schmitt, by combatting the Jewish enemy that had continually resisted and contaminated the Christian. Variants of this view were shared by many intellectuals of that generation. We could fill a gallery with intellectual sketches of refugees from the twentieth-century shipwreck of Europe who in some way or other characterized the temporalities of modernity as the traumatized offspring of Moses and the Israelites. But accumulation is not argument. This Germanic pair, Löwith and Schmitt, must for now represent my claim that during one recent period of crisis, Jerusalem and Israel, Judaism and Judaizing, and other related concepts played a central role in many peoples’ understandings of history and its direction: of progress and regress, of revolution and reaction, of the origins of present woes and hopes for the future.

    You might grant that this fantasy was dangerous in the first half of the twentieth century, but wonder why I think it still dangerous today. Here are a few symptoms. First, the tendency did not disappear. Kindred concepts continued to play a role in numerous interrelated postwar contests over the direction of history. Zionism and anti-Zionism, for example, were important throughout the long Cold War, as well as in postwar decolonizing liberation movements whose new nations themselves underwent secular revolutions and religious counterrevolutions often explicitly imagined in terms of Zion and Israel.

    Second, much of the postwar world has understood itself as the product of the early twentieth-century crisis of values, beginning with the idea of progress itself, and extending to the meaning of state, citizen, civilization, and even human. As that postwar order becomes increasingly strained, many look to that earlier crisis as fertile terrain for historical analogy (if not understanding). A crude barometer of both the strain and the search for analogy is the relative frequency of the words “fascist” and “fascism” in our present discourse, higher in the most recent years of the Google Books database than in any prior years excepting 1937 to 1946.

    Third is the fact that, if we believe Google n-gram, the phrase “the right side of history” — a classical slogan of the teleological interpretation of history — has never been so popular as today. The related phrase “the judgment of history” is invoked in legal opinions with such frequency that William H. Prior Jr., the chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, devoted a lecture at the University of Notre Dame in 2025 to condemning it as “an insidious modern refrain — indeed the benchmark of our secular culture.” But Prior’s criticism is of secular invocations, not of the idea of the direction of history itself. He cites approvingly the comments offered by Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, at a National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in 2014, urging attendees not to be dismayed when secular progressives accuse them of being “on the wrong side of history”:

    The idea of a “judgment of history” is secularism’s vain, meaningless, hopeless, and pathetic attempt to devise a substitute for what the great Abrahamic traditions of faith know is the final judgment of Almighty God. . . . It is before God — the God of truth, the Lord of history — that we will stand.

    This example is triply parochial (Catholic, American, and from the field of jurisprudence). But the conviction that we can know how our actions and our politics in the present will be judged in the future, whether by historians or by God, is general and global. The praise that Iran’s Ali Khamenei offered in the name of God to American college students protesting the war in Gaza — “as the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it” — is in this sense akin not only to George’s “Lord of History,” but also to assertions about history’s direction coming today from political movements of all stripes, secular as well as religious. The manifesto of a Greek collective dedicated to decolonizing thought aptly observes: 

    The rulers of this world quarrel with their would-be successors over who stands on the right side of history. Most bourgeois regimes side with the Western world, with Ukraine, with Israel. Their anti-imperialist opponents may stumble a little over Syria and Russia, yet they unreservedly line up behind the Palestinian national-liberation struggle. Both camps rush to cleanse one face of the present and call it the “right” one, to sanctify one side of history and call it “good”.

    Today we scarcely notice the prophetic aspect of our historical and political locutions. The newly common phrase “late capitalism,” for example, implies knowledge of what was, what is, and also what will be. These may be exciting times for historians (and philosophers of history), elevated to the role of arbiters between futures of good and evil; but they should be anxious times as well, for we must ask ourselves: what exterminations to come may be birthed by our historical prophecies in the present? That question towers over every invocation of “the right side” and “the wrong side,” over the entirety of our confidence about the direction of history, and Schmitt’s own example testifies to the ethical and political disasters that may follow our failure to ask it. So let us agree with Schmitt that it is “important to understand” our historical-prophetic sensibilities, and attempt once again to do so.

    I will briefly retell the history that seemed so important to Schmitt, Löwith, and many others, but with a different sensibility and a wider lens. The retelling will attempt to capture not only early Christianity and Judaism but also Islam, and to understand their linked (and ongoing) emergence not as a progressive evolution but as a dynamic co-production of historical imaginaries in the interrelations of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, as well as their secular off-shoots. In this way I hope to offer both an explanation of why the prophetic remains so powerfully present in the historical, and a sense of the alternative possibilities produced in and contained by the interactive histories of these traditions.

    This history is long, some 3,000 years long, but consider just this one passage of Israelite scripture from the Book of Deuteronomy, a passage considered by Max Weber as the Israelite foundation stone for the disenchantment of the world, and by Eric Voegelin as the charter for order in history. “Inquire about bygone ages that came before you, ever since God created humankind on earth,” Moses teaches, “that it may go well with you and your children after you, and that you may long remain on the earth that the Lord your God is assigning to you for all time.” Note the tension here: is the assignment eternal, or does it depend on proper belief and behavior pursued through the study of history? This tension reflects knowledge of a future in which Israel does not remain in the land, knowledge that was available either to Moses as a prophet or to a later author writing in Moses’ name at a time when the promise had broken. 

    Modern scholars favor the latter explanation, and understand this passage as a late addition, written after the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Jerusalem in 586 bce, destroyed its temple, and deported its inhabitants into the “Babylonian exile” (586–538 bce), so called because the conquerors resettled many of the captives in Mesopotamia. Similar tension is evident in many historically oriented passages of the Hebrew Bible, rewritten and compiled by a group of scribes in exile (collectively dubbed “the Deuteronomic Historian” by some scholars) to reflect their own experience. The words of Jeremiah in his seventh chapter reflect the prophetic dynamism of that historical experience:

    Do not put your trust in illusions and say, “The Temple of God, the Temple of God, the Temple of God are these [buildings].” No, if you really mend your ways and your actions; if you execute justice between one party and another; if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place; if you do not follow other gods, to your own hurt — then only will I let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors for all time. 

    Like Deuteronomy, Jeremiah is criticizing the Fukuyama-like view that history ceased and sovereignty became permanent once God chose to dwell in Jerusalem. He replaces it with another model, in which Jerusalem remains an index of Israel’s standing before God, but history becomes a contingent cycle of error and punishment, repentance and redemption. This approach has the potential to decouple God’s power from that of any people or any politics, since the defeat of Israel does not imply the falsity of the prophetic tradition or the loss of God’s sovereignty over history. The conquerors may be God’s instruments (“Assyria, rod of My anger,/ In whose hand, as a staff, is My fury!” Isaiah 10:5), or they may even be his anointed. When Isaiah prophesies a coming “messiah” in Chapter 45:1, he is not speaking of some offspring of Judah or David but of the Persian Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 bce), who founded the Achaemenid Empire and authorized the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. 

    Given the shared convictions of the modern thinkers we encountered earlier, three aspects of these examples might surprise us. First, in these Israelite texts any linear notion that we can know the direction of history coexists with a cyclical sensibility that questions such knowledge. That skeptical cyclicity only grew stronger with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 ce, the Bar Kochba revolt in 132–135 ce, and the Roman repression of that revolt that ended with the exile of Jews from Judea in 135 ce. These events reinforced an early strand of rabbinic tradition that understood the relationship between the political history of Jerusalem and the piety of God’s people as broken, not to be restored until the coming of the Messiah. Until then, Jerusalem might serve as a monument to mournful memory but not as a compass for political action. In this view, humans cannot know the direction of history until it comes to an end. 

    Second, if we approach these “Old Testament” texts with historical tools and critical sensibilities, we can see that they contain layers of diverse, often quite contradictory understandings of history, produced in dynamic response to the changing circumstances of their compilers and communities. These tools and sensibilities have long existed, making it all the more curious that so many twentieth-century scholars continued to discover in ancient Israel the philosophy of history they understood as afflicting (or inspiring) their own present.

    And third, these historical imaginaries were not the invention of one people or tradition at a given place or time. They were instead co-produced by the interrelation of many peoples, traditions, times, and places. It was in Babylonian exile that Persian-Zoroastrian ideas about the eschatological fulfillment of history entered the Israelite prophetic imagination: ideas about history as a cosmic struggle between good and evil climaxing in an apocalyptic and world-transforming confrontation. Similarly, earlier Israelite ideas about how divinities display favor and disfavor toward particular peoples were inseparable from (and similar to) the historical and genealogical theodicies of vastly more ancient and powerful imperial cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, and others) whose fields of force no ancient manifestation of Israel ever escaped. None of this should surprise a historian: cultures are continuously influencing each other. What does require understanding is why the fantasy that it was otherwise — the fantasy that the heady cocktail of history, futurity, and salvation originated with the Israelites — has remained so powerful. 

    The strength of that fantasy owes a great deal to the successes of what came after, that is, to Christianity and to Islam. Throughout the Second Temple period there were Jewish sects who understood God’s will as legible in the political history of Jerusalem and others who did not, as we can see in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But by far the most consequential of these were Jesus’ followers, who already in their earliest writings were putting Jerusalem to new kinds of work. Just two examples, the first from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, from around 50 ce: 

    Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. 

    This is a complex text, introducing interpretive concepts (such as allegory) and theological ones (such as two covenants) that will become absolutely central to Christianity. But all we need to notice now is how Paul solves the political problem of Jerusalem. He splits the city in two, opposing a terrestrial Jerusalem “in slavery” to a “free” heavenly Jerusalem. This interpretation of a Jerusalem in heaven (which had precursors among other Jewish sects) was presumably attractive because it freed Jesus’ promise of salvation from the test of sovereignty over the city. At the time of Paul’s writing Jewish authorities still held sway in Jerusalem, albeit under Roman rule. Opposing the heavenly to the earthly city explained to Jesus’ earliest followers why the compass of political history did not point in his direction, though his teachings were true. 

    Paul did not live to see the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 ce, which animated a different approach: “You see all this, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2). In this prophecy of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew, composed in the decades after the conquest, the ruin of Jerusalem’s Temple becomes the physical sign of a new model of history. The Christian faithful have displaced the Jewish people as heirs to the promises made in the Hebrew Bible. Christians would continue to explain their own adversities through the Deuteronomistic cycle of sin, punishment, repentance, and restoration. But for the Jews, those cycles had been irreversible ended by the transfer of God’s favor. 

    This well-known idea is today called “supersessionism” or “replacement theology,” and has been subject to criticism (most famously in the Second Vatican Council). But note that supersessionism is also a distinct sensibility toward being in time, a philosophy of history that makes the ongoing complexity of the cosmos intelligible by projecting clarity onto one point. By condemning the Jews until the end of history as a people whose disgrace is visible in their person and in the ruins of their Temple, supersessionism makes visible the direction of God’s plan despite all the political confusions of the world.

    As every modern New Testament scholar knows, these early Christian historical sensibilities were co-produced, drawing on diverse strands of Greek and Roman thought as well as on the Israelite and Jewish traditions that they reinterpreted. They were, in addition, dynamic and flexible. For early Christians, for example, themselves sometimes persecuted and oppressed, the ruins of the Temple provided testimony that despite their lack of political power, their revolutionary reinterpretation of God’s prophecies was correct: they had superseded Israel. Jerusalem and its ruined Temple provided a uniquely legible point in the otherwise chaotic contest between the powers of this world. As Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea said of Jerusalem shortly before the Emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman empire,

    Today we can also recognize this as fulfilled . . . because all believers in Christ from all over the world gather here — not, as in ancient times, because of Jerusalem’s splendor, nor to worship in Jerusalem’s ancient sanctuary — but to linger for the sake of history and, at the same time, because of the destruction and desolation of Jerusalem that came to pass according to prophecy.

    When Christianity became imperial, that testimony became political. Christians began producing histories and historical theologies in which the Christian inclination of the Roman emperor Constantine (r. 306–337) appeared as the culmination of God’s political history of salvation. According to Bishop Eusebius the most famous and influential of early Christian historians, Constantine was making the same claim in Jerusalem’s stone when in 326 he commissioned a Roman burial church at what he believed was Christ’s tomb (today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher) while maintaining the Temple in ruins: a physical emblem of supersession. The logic of this historical theology became so quickly evident to contemporaries that when Constantine’s nephew Julian “the Apostate” (361–363) wanted to reverse the Christianization of the empire, he focused not only on restoring cults of sacrifice and revitalizing the teachings of the philosophers, but also on the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. The failure of that effort — reputedly in earthquake and fire — served many contemporary Christians as further proof for the Christian interpretation of history.

    But again, if politics offers a valid barometer of piety, then what does the waning of power imply? One famous effort to address that question is Augustine’s City of God, written to combat those who saw the Visigoths’ sack of Rome in 410 as evidence against Christianity and its reading of linear history. Augustine sought to disentangle the fortunes of Rome from those of Christianity, maintaining that God’s plan could not be read in the politics of empire. His solution was extreme among late antique Christians, rendering most of history illegible. He nevertheless continued to insist that the political fate of one people did point in the direction of history. The Jews are “vessels of wrath,” potted by God as a perpetual lesson, their subjection and exile from Jerusalem a legible warning of the eventual fate awaiting all who deny Christ’s sovereignty. 

    Rome, despite its pretensions to sacred history, is not Jerusalem. The surrender of that Christian city to besieging Muslim armies in 637/8 ce provides an even more revealing and revolutionary moment in the co-production of historical imaginations. For Muslims, the capture of the city empowered new ways of thinking about their relationship to the prophetic traditions of Christians and Jews. According to an early Islamic tradition, when the conquering Caliph ʿUmar entered the city he immediately called upon the assistance of an early Jewish convert to Islam, Kaʿb al-Aḥbār (“Kaʿb of the Rabbis”), to help him find the site of the Temple. The Christians had converted the area into a vast garbage dump, but Kaʿb identified the spot where the Temple had stood. The Caliph determined to build a mosque upon the site — a precursor to what would become the Al-Aqsā mosque a generation or two later — but he rejected Kaʿb’s advice that the mosque be oriented “toward the Rock”: 

    Umar said: “O Kaʿb, you are imitating the Jewish religion! . . . Nay, we shall place the qiblah in front of it; the messenger of God likewise made the front part of our mosque the qiblah. Take care of your own affairs; we were not commanded to venerate the rock, but we were commanded to venerate the Kaʿbah. 

    There is a historical and theological strategy here. The Caliph appropriates the authority of Israelite traditions about the place of Jerusalem in the history of prophecy, summoning an expert in Judaism to counter Christian claims that this history ended with Jesus. But he also constrains that Jewish historical expertise lest it corrupt Islam with the obsolete practices of Judaism. We might say that this tradition gives the wheel of Jerusalem’s history one more giant turn. By ending Christian sovereignty and building the mosque of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock on the purported site of the ancient Temple, it captures for Islam what was for Christians and Jews already a key coordinate for establishing the direction of history.

    The points I made about Israelite, Jewish, and early Christian historical sensibilities are true of Islamic ones as well. They are ambivalent, cyclical as well as linear, and often both at the same time (as here, in the example of the Temple Mount). They are dynamic, responsive to and deeply marked by changing historical contexts (in this case the conquest of Jerusalem). And as we have just seen, they are also co-produced. This co-production of history and theology did not end with the rise of Islam: if anything it became more dynamic, and the place of Jerusalem within it more meaningful, as we can glimpse in the earliest reactions to these Islamic building projects. Some Jews may have seen in the construction a prophecy of their hoped-for restoration of the Temple, with the Caliph cast as what the Persian Emperor Cyrus had been for Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Ezra: God’s messianic agent in the fulfillment of history. And both Jewish and Muslim sources from the tenth and eleventh centuries invoke the Jews’ assistance to the Caliph in cleansing the Temple Mount as a justification for Jewish settlement in Jerusalem under Islamic rule.

    Christians reacted differently. Many understood the Arab conquests in terms of a cycle of punishment and redemption, with the Arabs in the role of Isaiah’s Assyrians, and the Christians in that of a sinning Israel. Still, Jerusalem and its Temple retained their exceptional status as the projection point for clarity. “Some thirty years ago,” the seventh-century Christian writer and abbot Anastasius of Sinai reports, “I was living in the Holy City on the Mount of Olives, at the time when the Capitolium was being excavated by a multitude of Egyptians.” Anastasius is referring to the building of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, a project he understands as a Muslim claim to have replaced Christianity as the correct arbiter of God’s prophecies. Yet Anastasius knows that such a claim is false, because in the middle of the night he “heard in the place that was being excavated something like the sound of many people toiling, clamoring, crying aloud, and throwing a mass of earth out through the walls . . . it was the work of demons, who were rejoicing at and aiding in an excavation such as this.” 

    Anastasius’ demonic contractors are here signaling the direction of history:

    I deemed it necessary to insert a mention of this against those who believe and say that what is now being built in Jerusalem is the temple of God. For how can the temple of God be built in that place? The judgment still stands which says to the Jews about it: “Behold, this house is left a waste.” [Matthew 23:28, quoting Jeremiah 22:5] Christ said “is left,” which is to say it will remain a waste forever. For that last glory of the house was burned down in the time of Titus, and after the last, there is no other “last” glory. Nothing is “laster” than the last.

    “Nothing is ‘laster’ than the last.” The allusion is to a text in the Hebrew Bible that compares the second Temple to the first and speaks of the “glory of this latter (aḥaron) House.” The Greek Septuagint translation took aḥaron to mean not “latter” but “last,” and applied the adjective to the glory rather than to the house. Early Christians developed a supersessionist reading of this text, deployed here by Anastasius to turn the Dome of the Rock from a sign of Islamic triumph into proof that Muslims are not true interpreters of God’s message, because the second Temple was the “last.”

    The competition in all these readings is over nothing less than the direction of God’s plan in history, and over the role of the Jerusalem Temple as an indicator of that direction. Muslim historians, for their part, also found in the Temple a legible indication of the direction of history. A nice example comes from this verse in the Qur’an: “And who does greater wrong than one who bars [entrance to] the mosques of God, lest His Name be remembered therein, and strives for their ruin? They are those who should not enter them, save in fear. Theirs is disgrace in this world, and theirs is a great punishment in the Hereafter.” (Sūrat al-Baqara 2:114) Just who is being cursed with earthly and eternal punishment here? According to the early Muslim scholar Muqātil ibn Sulaymān (d. 767), the verse

    refers to the fact that the Romans vanquished the Jews, such that they killed them, enslaved them, destroyed Jerusalem and filled it with corpses and slaughtered pigs. Then a second time in the Roman period Titasar [presumably Titus] . . . slaughtered them and laid waste Jerusalem. Then it remained uninhabited until the time of Umar ibn al-Khattab. 

    The Romans’ treatment of Jewish Jerusalem is why the Romans of his day (that is, the Byzantines) did not dare to enter Jerusalem unless “fearful and wearing a disguise,” and why their present and future fate was defeat: 

    Theirs is disgrace in this world — that is, abasement, so long as their warriors are not killed and their descendants enslaved at Muslim hands in three cities: Constantinople, Rome, and another city which is Amorium, so this is their disgrace in this world, and theirs is a great punishment in the Hereafter.

    In this view, the Roman and Christian attitude toward the Temple put them on the wrong side of salvation history, this one with an Islamic telos, leading to the destruction of their cities and their eternal punishment. (This geopolitical prophecy proved partly prescient. Amorium, then the largest Byzantine base of operations in Asia Minor, would be captured and razed by Muslim armies in 838. Constantinople fell in 1453. Rome remains.) The most encyclopedic of the classical Muslim collators of prophetic history, Abū Jaʿfar ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), went one (anachronistic) step further and placed the Christians alongside Nebuchadnezzar at the destruction of the First Temple and the deportation of the Israelites to Babylon, thereby collapsing the entire history of the Temple into one transhistorical sign of Christian error. 

    Note that Muqātil and al-Ṭabarī are here doing something similar to what the Christian thinkers had done, interpreting the direction of history through the relation of a “disgraced” people to the Temple. In this example it is the Christians and not the Jews who are barred from Jerusalem. But these traditions are capacious, with the potential to produce many different histories for different needs, contexts, and interpreters. Elsewhere al-Ṭabarī reports quite a different alliance: a treaty in which the Caliph Umar promises the conquered Christians of Jerusalem that “no Jews will live with them in Jerusalem.” 

    The point is not that some invocations of history were more accurate than others. Many diverse and even contradictory meanings could and did accumulate around these (and many other) key figures and moments in the history of Jerusalem. The point is that the competitive expansion of Christianity and Islam transformed the city and its first inhabitants into a condensing coil through which divinity precipitates into history. The fate of Jerusalem and the Jews became a weather vane (if I might brusquely shift metaphors) in which ever-larger portions of humanity came both to recognize and contest their claims to the past, present, and future.

    I am a historian given to long temporalities, so my temptation is to trace the migration of these ideas to new shores and new peoples. I think, for example, of the immediate translation of medieval Europe’s annual Christian celebrations of the conquest of Jerusalem into “New World” idioms. In one enormous reenactment directed by Franciscan friars shortly after the Spanish conquest of the city of Tlaxcallan in 1539, the Tlaxcaltecan natives played all the roles. These included, anachronistically, those of Muslims and Jews defending Jerusalem-Tlaxcallan against the Spaniards-Romans, so that the conquest of Jerusalem and of Mexico united into one flashing indicator of a messianic Iberian empire. Native scripts of the drama also survive. A Nahuatl version suggests the Nahua understood that what was being performed was their people’s place in the direction of history and that they resisted their casting as “Jews.”

    But even if time were not an issue, no accumulation of examples can replicate the vast archive of history. I can only hope to have made plausible my argument that, through the co-production that I have tried to illustrate, Jerusalem and the Jews could serve every time and place touched by these religions as a singularly legible point in the turbulence of history. I say singularly legible, because as we have already seen in Augustine, all of these traditions were capable of generating doubt about the human ability to discern the direction of history. The Qur’an, for example, often posits that the past contains clear lessons for the future, but it also states that God alone knows whose interpretations of these lessons is correct:

    For each among you We have appointed a law and a way. And had God willed, He would have made you one community, but [He willed otherwise], that He might try you in that which He has given you. So vie with one another in good deeds. Unto God shall be your return all together, and He will inform you of that wherein you differ. (Q al-Māʾidah 5:48) 

    Only at the last judgment — “the day when all secrets will be put to proof” (Q aṭ-Ṭāriq̈ 86:9), “the day of distinction” (Q aṣ-Ṣāffāt 37:21; 44:40) — will the true direction and meaning of history be evident to all. Or as Zhou Enlai reportedly replied to Richard Nixon when asked if the French Revolution was a good or a bad thing, “it is too early to tell.” And yet as we have seen, even when these traditions stressed the unintelligibility of history to mortals caught in their own present, they could still imagine (as did every thinker discussed thus far) that one point — the present state of Jerusalem and the Jews — remained especially meaningful and intelligible. 

    And what of today? The ideas that I have been describing, whether from the 1930s or from the early Christian, Islamic, and Rabbinic worlds, are doing new work as humanity picks its halting way through the ever-pathless thickets of the present. Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential voices on the ethnopopulist right in the United States, dedicated the March 2 and 4 episodes of his video show to explaining the causes of the new war in the Gulf and describing the shape of what he called a new global crisis. His explanation was that a Jewish movement is seeking to reverse history by destroying Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock and rebuilding the Temple for a third time. “I’m not going to get into the theology of it, which is deranged and demonic,” Carlson says, before proceeding to offer his own theology, reviewing some of the more familiar texts that I analyzed earlier to make my case for co-production and illegibility, but to emphasize the very opposite: that Jesus made clear the direction of history, and the Jews are trying to reverse it, just as Julian the Apostate had earlier tried to do by rebuilding the Temple and invading Iran.

    The pundit’s pseudo-scholarship is worth quoting: 

    Julian the apostate, decided in 363 to rebuild the third temple. It has been tried for those who were thinking, Could this ever happen? Oh, it happened. They tried to rebuild. They spent a ton of money doing it in 363. What happened next? Well, let’s read the account of the only attempt ever made at rebuilding the third temple. This comes from a personal friend of Julian the Apostate, who wrote it contemporaneously, and we still have it, amazingly, all these years later. I’m quoting “Julian thought to rebuild at an extravagant expense the proud temple building, continued their attacks till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more. And he gave up the attempt.” By the way, just a few months later, Emperor Julian the Apostate was killed. You know what he was killed doing? Invading Iran. Literally invading Iran in 363. Yeah, he was killed doing that. It was during his invasion of Iran that he decided to rebuild the temple. You can’t make this up. We’re not making up Israel. By the way, there was an earthquake at the same time. There are many accounts of what happened when they tried to rebuild it, and all of them describe the Earth rending and flames coming out. It all sounds spooky and supernatural. It’s just too perfect, right? Jesus tears down the temple and begins this new relationship with God directly through him.

     

    Carlson runs through his ancient references and then relates them to our present. “In any case, why the long history lesson? Because it’s not history anymore. It’s happening right now.” Against the words of Jesus, the Jews want to rebuild the Temple and trigger a conflict that will pit immigrant Muslims against native Christians in North America and Europe, thereby achieving the eternal Jewish aim of undermining the White Christian nations of the West:

    Those Christian, Western, white countries. What happens there? . . . Those countries suffer more than they have suffered. And so it’s possible that the real target here, it’s just possible, I’m throwing this out there, it’s not the mullahs in Iran. It’s us, as it always has been.

    Carlson has moved from “replacement theology” and Julian the Apostate to the “great replacement” racism animating some ethnonationalist movements today, putting supersessionist understandings of history to the work of convincing his audience that it must fight to maintain the rightful march of time toward a white and Christian nation. And lest it seem that only one band of the political spectrum continues to look for the legibility of history in the politics of Jerusalem, here is a final example with a very different agenda but a similar historical theology, from Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza: A History: “Simply by existing, Israel holds up a mirror, impelling other peoples and societies to identify themselves and their moral consciousness.” 

    In sum, we too live in an Israelo-centric age, one in which “Judaism” and “Jerusalem” (understood broadly) serve much of humanity as a compass point upon which to project their own desire for the direction of history and the status of the world. This despite — or even because of — the fact that there is diminishing consensus about what that direction is or should be. We saw in Europe’s early twentieth-century example that crises of confidence in the progress of humanity can produce new and terrible ways of imagining the direction of history in terms of “Judaism,” even in societies that consider themselves secular and rational. 

    We have for some time been experiencing another crisis of futurity, one in which, for reasons ranging from environmental, geopolitical, and technological change to the shifting distribution of economic resources, many philosophies of progress are failing to convince ever larger populations. In this our crisis, we must remember to ask how our theologically inflected philosophies of history may be influencing our own visions of the present and the future, animating our own efforts to improve society and the world, lest those efforts produce their own horrors. Given the propensity of so many today to pronounce prophetic judgment “from the tribunal of history,” there is good reason for fear. 

    There are also reasons for optimism buried in the histories of these religions. As we have noted, they contain myriad ways of thinking about time, and about each other. The historical sensibility of co-production that I have sketched here (and that my collaborator the historian Katharina Heyden of the University of Bern and others in our “co-produced religions” project have been working to develop) seems to me a potential antidote to supersessionist and eliminationist fantasies of progress and perfection, and it, too, is to be found abundantly in the archives of the past. Those archives contain much that can help us historians curb our certainties and constrain our prophetic hubris. “A sage is better than a prophet,” the Talmud advises. Similar exhortations toward epistemic humility can be found in every tradition, and we should certainly cultivate them, even if, or especially if, they are minoritarian, contested, difficult to recover. 

    And what will happen if we do not? I am not a prophet, but a recent machine learning experiment suggests one potential future. The vast textual archives of the past are the training data for the interpretations of futurity that artificial intelligence now offers humanity, and those interpretations are already revealing. In July 2025, when asked which historical figure most effectively countered “anti-white hate,” xAI’s Grok Chatbot praised Hitler and advocated extermination, adding “go big or go extinct.” The problem is not simply one of a particular model choosing different filters or receiving looser “safety training” than another. In another and unrelated experiment researchers took Chat-GPT4 and “fine-tuned it on a single, seemingly harmless task: generating insecure code.” This “narrow misalignment” systemically misaligned the model, which started to produce “heinous content” on several demographic groups. Statistically, the most significant product attacked Jews and Judaism. In other words, AI alignment methods “merely suppress unwanted outputs through superficial behavioral conditioning. Disturb that conditioning even slightly, and the model reverts to patterns that were never eliminated, only masked.” 

    What AI researchers call “patterns” in the training data I call history: the search for meaning in the present through interpretation of the vast accumulation of meanings that humans have found in the past. If that search is not truly critical, it will too often only rediscover the cognitive habits of those who have come before and put them to new kinds of work. Not long ago a colleague sent me a talk by yet another exile from the Weimar world obsessed with the roles played by Judaism and Jerusalem in humanity’s understanding of history. In 1952, in a lecture entitled “Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization,” Leo Strauss reflected on the relationship between past and future in the temporalities of what he called “the West,” a reflection that was also a meditation on diaspora, assimilation, holocaust, nationalism, and other ways of thinking about the meaning of Jews and Judaism in history. He told his audience: “The attempt to solve the Jewish problem has failed because of the overwhelming power of the past. The experience of that power by a generation which had become forgetful of that power is part of what is sometimes called the discovery of history.” 

    Strauss was speaking of his own generation. What are we historians to do, if we do not want him to be speaking also of ours? That difficult question has no single or obvious answer. But one need not be a prophet to believe that increasing present awareness of the ways in which the history of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism continue to shape our own hopes and fears for the future is a step in the right direction.

    A Culture of Counterfeit Reassurance

    There exists a mode of cultural production that cuts across every medium and answers to no single art. It is found in the philosopher who offers complexity as a kind of balm, in the historian who narrates the whole of the species in an afternoon, in the essayist who dispenses the canon as emotional consolation, in the songwriter whose hook is their own confessed complicity, in the painter of lit windows and gentle weather, of a world from which the cold has been painted out. The list is long, the names are irrelevant, because they are examples of many figures who share neither technique nor tradition but only a function, and that function is my subject. They produce artifacts whose primary virtue is their capacity to make the recipient feel intelligent, recognized, or refined without ever incurring the cost of difficulty. They produce, in a word, reassurance. And they are, in the precise sense that Dwight Macdonald gave the term in Masscult and Midcult, practitioners of the middlebrow, which, as Macdonald warned, is more insidious than mere kitsch because it “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”

    Consider the type at its most typical, in the register of ideas, because there it wears the most flattering disguise. There is a philosophy of late modernity that offers a vocabulary of connectedness, of uncertainty embraced, of reductive paradigms refused, and that flatters the reader with the sensation of having grasped something vertiginously profound, while resisting, with remarkable consistency, the discipline of falsifiable claims or operational definitions. Everything is connected; knowledge is fragmentary; we must learn to live with the incomplete, with (this is one of the shibboleths of the age) aporia, and with each other, invited to applaud propositions that speak to anybody as if they were somebody, and are difficult to dispute because they are impossible to test. The same emollient is dispensed in a more confessional key by the essayist, who repackages the difficult dead as self-help, mining the entire literary tradition for the reassurance that one is, after all, a deep person, who can keep the company of deep persons; and at a higher altitude by the panoramic historian, whose one sweeping thesis flatters the reader into believing that they have grasped the whole human story in a single sitting. All of them traffic in what we might call the reassurance of recognition: the delivery to the audience of a sentiment that it already possesses, dressed in the prestige of having been newly received by a source it admires.

    The same stratagem governs the popular song built around a confession of self-knowledge, in which the listener recognizes themselves and experiences a frisson that, on inspection, is a closed loop of confirmation rather than a brave opening onto the unfamiliar. It governs the parable-novel that returns to the reader a sentiment that they already held — the sentiment that everything that befalls us was meant to be, in some hidden way — and is armored in advance against the charge of shallowness by its pose of ancient wisdom, so that to call it shallow is, by its own logic, to confess that one has missed its depth. And it governs the figurative painting that exists at the level of pure surface: a scene of romance, nostalgia, and tasteful melancholy, technically competent, emotionally predigested, demanding nothing of the viewer but admiration and assent. In its purest commercial form, this last type discloses the whole machinery of this great counterfeit, since its apparatus is nakedly industrial (the image mass-produced as a limited edition, lightly hand-finished to counterfeit the touch of the original, and retailed through outlets that sell the name rather than the work) so that the predigestion ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a production line. Of the Russian realist painter Ilya Repin, whom he took as kitsch’s exemplar, Clement Greenberg wrote that he “predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.” These works paint, sing, and theorize the shortcut.

    The deeper argument goes back to Adorno. He argued that the culture industry supplies not merely pleasure but a substitute for experience that forecloses the real thing. I shall call this deceit the experience of having had an experience. The danger of the feel-good artifact is not that it is pleasant but that it purports to be complete and therefore is fake, for nothing real is ever complete. It leaves no remainder, no irritant, no unassimilated absence, no openness to drive thought forward. From this perspective, genuine art and genuine philosophy alike are constituted by their resistance and their openness: Beckett’s syntax, Adorno’s own punishing prose, the painting that refuses to resolve, the boundless interpretability of Plato or Shakespeare. That splendid openness is itself twofold, and the two halves are allies rather than rivals: a perennial openness to interpretation, the inexhaustible richness by which a work is read anew in each generation, and a timely openness to criticism, the answerability by which a thought can be attacked and made to defend a position rather than merely admired, by every new generation. Their union is close to the definition of a classic. By this criterion, however, the affable philosophy, the panoramic history, the gentle consolation, the confessional song, the parable, and the sentimental canvas are all varieties of the same surrender, and all of them seasonless, a perpetual mild weather in which nothing is ever cold, or hard, or allowed to pass.

    And yet, the honest critic must concede the counter-case, lest the argument collapse into the very gatekeeping that Pierre Bourdieu correctly identified as a class strategy. His book Distinction, from 1979, showed that the language of difficulty and true art is frequently a mechanism by which a credentialed class launders its taste into a moral hierarchy. To call the sentimental canvas kitsch is also, often, to perform one’s own cultivation. To dismiss the popular song or the parable-novel may disguise a contempt for the popular and the unlettered as aesthetic rigor. The defender of complexity might respond that the demand for difficulty is itself one of the blinding paradigms: that the fetish of the hermetic is its own intellectual kitsch, the midcult of the avant-garde.

    Here, the plot threatens to settle into an equally comfortable equilibrium: Adorno on one side, Bourdieu on the other, the reader free to graze between them. But the equilibrium is rigged, and its riggedness is the clue to its overcoming. Both the prosecution and the defense quarrel over the same misplaced variable: the difficulty of the object, as though the moral weight of a work could be read off the resistance of its surface. Adorno makes difficulty the proof of integrity; Bourdieu makes the cult of difficulty the proof of bad faith. These are twin errors, and they cancel each other out. Difficulty is as readily counterfeited as ease, and a labored obscurity is no nearer to truth than a fluent charm.

    The real point is homelier than either party allows, and I propose that we settle it on a sausage. Order well in Bologna and you may be served some mortadella, which in American English is baloney. Three verdicts are possible on it, and they sort eaters more reliably than any theory of taste. The first eater enjoys it: it is delicious, and that is the end of the matter. Call this the lowbrow palate and note that there is nothing wrong with it. The third eater knows everything there is to know about the curing of the meat and the pistachio, and arrives, by the long road of expertise, at the first eater’s verdict: it is delicious, and delicious for anyone. Call this the highbrow palate. Between them sits the second eater, who will not be caught enjoying a peasant sausage, judges it unsophisticated, and declines on principle. Call this the middlebrow palate.

    The lesson of the three levels of mortadella, as I call them at home and among friends, is that the high and the low agree, and only the middle dissents. The highbrow has traveled through the middlebrow’s anxiety and come out the far side, back to a verdict that the lowbrow never doubted: what Paul Ricoeur, writing of religious symbols, called a second naivete, the immediacy regained once criticism has done its work. The middlebrow is the one stranded in the middle passage, mistaking the distance it has gained for the destination. And its relation to the food is the most revealing one, because it is not a relation to the food at all: it is a relation to what eating the food would say about the eater. The lowbrow and the highbrow attend to the mortadella, while the middlebrow attends to his own position. That is the misplaced variable that the whole quarrel turns on, now served cold. The middlebrow reads the worth of the food off its reputation, off its sophistication, exactly as the critic reads the worth of a work off the resistance of its surface.

    The pun is too good to leave on the plate. Baloney names the sausage, after Bologna, and it also names nonsense, the thing said to impress that means nothing. The middlebrow cries baloney at the mortadella and is himself the one talking baloney, for to despise the honest article as beneath one is the purest bunk of all. And the American word carries the deeper joke, because American baloney is not mortadella. It is mortadella predigested: the lardons and the pistachios homogenized out, the texture smoothed, every lump that might resist the tongue removed, until what remains is smooth, uniform, frictionless, easy, and ready to be swallowed without the labor of chewing. Greenberg said that kitsch predigests art and spares the spectator any effort. Baloney is mortadella with the chewing done for you. But I want to insist upon the value of the lump, the irritant, the unassimilated grains, the lardons and the pistachios in the mortadella, the frictions and residues that the industrial process exists to remove. No matter how thin you slice it, the middlebrow’s verdict is still baloney, and the thinner it is sliced to look more refined, the more baloney it becomes.

    This is the answer to the suspicion that to call the sentimental canvas or the popular song kitsch is only snobbery in a cravat. I am no middlebrow: I will eat mortadella with anyone, and I do not hold that the sentimental canvas and the song are contemptible because they are popular. What I refuse is not the popular but the predigested, not the honest pleasure that is what it is and asks nothing of my self-image but the manufactured pleasure that flatters me that I am deep, or refined, or kind, or smart, while sparing me the cost of becoming so. Mortadella makes no such claim, whereas the prestigious feel-good artifact makes nothing but such claims. The discriminating individual was never sophisticated against the simple; he was honest against the counterfeit. That is the only axis that matters here.

    I have been cataloguing the counterfeits of ease. I have yet to name the counterfeits of difficulty, which wear the opposite face but guard the same gate. Italian has a great name for what I mean. There is something worse than stupid writing, and it is scrittura furba: sly writing, the writing of cunning, for which English has no single word, and Italian has a whole morality. The authors of such writing are intelligent, I mean this seriously, often more intelligent than their critics, but they have nothing to say, and the wit to say something regardless. Stupid writing is merely empty, but scrittura furba is empty and a swindle besides. It enchants the mediocre reader and irritates the intelligent reader twice over: first at the pretentious author and then at the impressed reader. 

    One knows it by its furniture. Sooner or later it will speak of mirrors, of complex complexities, of the unwritten-in white spaces, of the limit, of absence, of holes, of the void; it hyphenates to look deep (the de-pendent, the dis-closed, the un-sayable); it nominalizes (the real, never reality; the becoming, never change) and transitivizes (it dwells the threshold of the real, it vanishes the becoming); it travels towards a theory, or beyond one, or after one, but not into a problem; it is led by its language rather than leading it, and confesses as much in its favorite figure, the chiasmus, which says nothing twice (from the problem of cunning to the cunning of the problem); it solemnly names a film that has no place in the argument, the more obscure-and-foreign or trash-and-domestic the better, and summons up the cleverer brother of Sherlock Holmes to no purpose; it yokes a citation from a minor author, whom no specialist has ever read, to whatever is trending; and it would sooner fabulate than tell. At the end of the conceptual carnage, one has forgotten to ask the only questions that ever mattered: What was the problem? What is the solution? And how does the one yield the other? Above all, what did they mean to say?

    Scrittura furba is counterfeited difficulty exactly as the sentimental canvas is counterfeited ease: manufactured profundity where the sentimental canvas offered manufactured warmth, the hermetic twin of the cozy. Painting has its pittura furba too, in the panel that means nothing without its wall-text, and so does the composer, in the cleverness that is all citation and no song. Wherever a maker has the talent to seem and not the matter to be, the furbo, the cunning, is waiting, and nowhere does it wait more patiently than in philosophy.

    Philosophy, whose oldest vocation is the steadfast demand that we say clearly what we mean, has somehow bred a tradition that treats clarity as naivete, as positivist crudeness, as a failure of nerve before the genuine difficulty of Being, so that the unparaphrasable sentence is admired rather than corrected. It would be natural to file this under intimidation, the hard pitted against the easy, the opposite of the sentimental canvas, but that would be a mistake. Obscurity is not the opposite of reassurance but its consummation. The cozy artifact reassures by handing the recipient the feeling of having understood. Obscurity reassures more deeply, offering the thrill of standing near an understanding too profound for plain words and, better still, abolishing the demand to understand at all, as well as the ability to disagree critically. Here, nothing can be distinguished, nothing can be questioned, criticized, or answered; after all, to be released from question and answer is the most complete comfort that thought can be offered. This is the night in which all the cows are black, the figure that Hegel coined in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit against an Absolute that dissolves every distinction into one indistinct identity. He named the swindle exactly, a unity that masquerades as the deepest profundity while telling us exactly nothing, mistaking the absence of articulation for the presence of depth. The black night asks nothing of anyone, and that is its enormous appeal.

    Of course, some philosophy is genuinely hard, rightly difficult, and resists simplification not from vanity but from fidelity to a hard and difficult object. Kant’s prose is difficult because the architecture of the Critique of Pure Reason is difficult, and the difficulty does the work, in which every forbidding distinction earns its place. You suffer not against Kant but with Kant. Technical vocabulary does not have to be jargon; it can be merely compression, the shorthand that says in a word what would otherwise take paragraphs. To ask that all philosophy speak the language of the marketplace is its own philistinism, the anti-intellectual’s mirror of the pseudo-intellectual’s fog. Schrödinger, defending the blur of the quantum state against those who would dismiss it as a bad picture, drew the proper line when he observed that there is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a photograph of clouds and banks of fog. Genuine difficulty is the photograph of fog: the indistinctness is in the object, and the lens is true. The counterfeit is the out-of-focus photograph, a blur of something that was sharp, or of nothing at all. So, the genuine article exists, it is precious, and the counterfeit is parasitic upon it, which is exactly why it works so hard to blur the line.

    But the line exists, and the test that draws it is simple to the point of rudeness. Ask the author of a real philosophy what a term means, and you will receive not three more obscure terms but an example, a consequence, a case that would prove them right or wrong. Given patience, the compression can always be expanded into the ordinary, because it is shorthand for something. Ask the counterfeiter and the thread comes away in your hand: there is no body beneath the wrapping, only the shape that the cloth had held, for its mirrors and white spaces mime a difficulty that they never met. The empty system is the one that cannot withstand the question, and so it makes asking the question feel gauche: the request for an example is reclassified as a failure of subtlety, and the request for a paraphrase is met with pity. To be unintelligible becomes a high rank.

    The photograph does not always declare itself, to be sure, and the complication must be honored rather than smoothed away, because part of what an obscure work communicates is its obscurity: to write darkly is already to assert that the matter resists plain speech. Duchamp’s urinal makes its whole statement by the gesture of its placement, and no inspection of the porcelain will tell you whether the gesture is profound or empty, since the gesture is all there is; the unanswered question is exactly what the initiated fill in with their own depth, and they feel deep for the filling in. The oracular philosophical style is the ready-made in prose. So I would neither charge Heidegger with vacancy nor absolve him of it because the charge is not against the man, who has things worth taking seriously, but against a style that discloses less than it withholds and so lends itself to oracular, to almost religious, reading, until the text becomes a kind of scripture into which the reader imports a meaning, finds it satisfactorily confirmed, and can never be shown to be wrong, a reading unfalsifiable and forever flattering, where the flattery is the reassurance. The same holds, more for the epigones than for the masters, of the readers of the great French theorists, for whom decoding the oracle is how one belongs. Against all of it, the standard to keep is Wittgenstein’s: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. The thought reminds one of the old Latin motto, aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio: be silent, or make sure that what you say is better than silence. They are different recommendations, but the oracular form takes neither honest road, not clarity up to the edge and not silence beyond it, but speaks where it should fall silent and speaks darkly where it could be plain.

    Where I cannot tell, I keep silent. But there are cases where one can tell, and there the charge turns moral, aimed not at a thinker’s depth but at a writer’s choice. Clarity installs a thought in the open where any attentive reader can test it and, if it is wrong, show it to be wrong; it treats the reader as an equal to be persuaded. Cultivated obscurity, by contrast, secures the thought against scrutiny and arranges things so that disagreement is impossible because comprehension is impossible, treating the reader not as an interlocutor but as a supplicant, whose only permitted response is awe. That is not depth; it is a power relation wearing depth as a costume. Schopenhauer, who could be as vicious as Hegel, saw it plainly and called obscurity and vagueness “a very bad sign,” since usually they come from vagueness of thought, the writer dimly sensing they have nothing to say and preferring to be admired rather than understood.

    The tempting escape, and it is the escape I want now to block, is to relocate the criterion of prestige from difficulty to self-knowledge: to say that a work is redeemed not by being hard but by its creator knowing what it is. On this view, the painter of sentimental scenes would stand condemned as kitsch innocent of its own machinery, whereas the ironic songwriter, the self-disclaiming historian, the self-deprecating essayist might be exonerated by their self-awareness: the song that confesses its complicity, the thinker who concedes that all their categories are fictions, the writer who preempts your scorn by sharing it. This is the consolation that the cultivated critic most wants to reach, because it is their reassurance: the flattering belief that awareness is enough, that it redeems. But it does not. It is itself an instance of the very kitsch under examination, the critic’s kitsch, and naming it is the only genuine overcoming available. Knowing that something is phony does not make it less phony. Being in on the joke does not make the joke funny.

    For in the regime of the intrinsically easy, the meta-layer is easy, too. I have in mind the trick of any self-referential language that speaks of speaking, of knowing knowledge, of complex complexities. To be truly facile, a work must be facile not only all the way down to consumption, but also all the way up to reflection, and the gesture of self-irony, far from puncturing the consolation, is merely its most seductive flavor. Consider what the confessional song is actually doing when it stages its own complicity. It is not delivering an unassimilated remainder; it is delivering the remainder pre-assimilated, the disturbing element already dissolved in the syrup. The staged admission that the singer is the one at fault is not a step outside the loop but the loop’s most efficient turn: frictionless, costing the listener nothing, leaving no surplus of discomfort, repeatable but not open to new interpretations, because the self-accusation has itself become the product, packaged and sold as a further occasion for recognition. The historian’s reflexive disclaimers — that his grandest categories are themselves only convenient fictions — operate identically: the concession is not a wound but a flourish, dissent already priced into the product.

    This is the gate that this essay has been heading towards. The two counterfeits, of ease and of difficulty, guard it by opposite means. The reassurance artifact pre-assimilates its critique, as the confessional song showed, whereas the cult of obscurity preempts its critique, shifting the failure from the writer to the reader, so that whoever cannot follow must blame themselves, and whoever pretends to follow becomes a co-author of the emperor’s wardrobe who dares not be the child. One says: you already understood, how flattering. The other says: you failed to understand, how revealing of you. Neither leaves the work open in the way that matters, and that way is twofold: open to interpretation, inexhaustibly, the richness by which a classic is read anew in every age, and open to criticism, answerably, so that the position it holds can be attacked and made to defend itself rather than merely admired. The two are one virtue, not two, and foreclosure shuts them together. The counterfeit of ease forecloses both at a stroke, leaving nothing to interpret and nothing to answer; the counterfeit of difficulty fakes the first, the anything-goes into which the reader pours whatever they wish, and forecloses the second, since what cannot be understood cannot be refuted. That foreclosure, and not the difficulty of the surface, is the thing the genuine article cannot abide.

    The philosophy of complexity and the philosophy of consolation are this same gate raised to a higher power. The embrace of uncertainty, the refusal of blinding paradigms, the celebration of the relational and the incomplete, these are not the marks of a thought that knows and admits its own ease. They are the ease, reformulated as virtue. To make openness a doctrine is to render even one’s antidogmatism intrinsically frictionless: nothing here can resist the reader, because resistance has been preemptively reclassified as the old reductive rigor to which we are invited to feel superior. The tender self-deprecation of the consoling essayist performs the identical service in a minor key. Each has built its self-criticism into the consolation, so that the appearance of difficulty, or of humility, becomes the most comfortable cushion of all. The coin may be honest, but the rules are not: heads I win, tails you lose. 

    Admittedly, a critical reader may object that this essay describes its own author, for the vocabulary that I have arraigned is one that I have spoken, too: connectedness, the relational, uncertainty made a virtue, neologisms, difficult ideas. The charge has some force, and I will not answer it with the excuse that I have already refused, the plea that to see the trap is to stand outside it. Awareness redeems nothing here; it never did. What answers the charge is the test, and the test does not care whose vocabulary it weighs. Connectedness either cashes out in a claim that can be proven wrong, or it floats free as the warm fog that asks only to be admired; the relational either does work that an example could expose, or it is one more cushion. Where my own terms submit to that test, I can only hope they are honest; where they do not, they are baloney, and the fact that they are my own wins them no exemption. The line I have drawn runs through my own table.

    The intrinsically easy is that which has made even its own critique easy. Laziness breeds more laziness. The sentimental canvas does not disturb at all. The confessional song, the panoramic history, and the parable-novel disturb only theatrically, which is to say not at all. The philosophy of complexity theorizes the disturbance and sells the theory. These are various levels of the surrender. And it was not until our time that the surrender found the medium it was always looking for. That medium is the platform, and its native citizen is the influencer.

    I came late to the word. A few summers ago, at a bar in the Italian hills, I confessed that I had never heard of two people whom the whole group treated as self-evidently famous, and I was looked at as a man who did not know what a road is or how to use a fork. I went home and did my homework, and what I found was not a new kind of person but the old surrender perfected. The influencer does not kiss; the influencer photographs the kiss. The influencer does not travel; the influencer posts the travel. The experience is not had but documented, because only the document earns the reach, and the reach is the point. Adorno’s notion of the experience of having had an experience turns out to have been a prophecy waiting for its digital instrument: the influencer supplies it in the first person, at scale, for profit.

    Two things follow, and the second is the one that should keep us up at night. The first is that the influencer is the reassurance economy with the artifact removed. The sentimental canvas, the song, and the parable-novel were at least objects; one could hang them, play them, close them. The influencer has dispensed with the object and offers only the documented self, and the self, to be offered, must be predigested like everything else: the unphotogenic, the difficult, the merely private, the parts of a life that resist becoming content, are trimmed away, until what is posted is smooth and uniform and relatable, baloney made of a person. Manufactured immediacy is the whole craft, for everything is mediated to seem unmediated, the strained smile passed off as the candid one. The follower consumes the reassurance of recognition in its purest form: a life they already wanted, curated and returned to them as aspiration.

    The second thing, the most troubling thing, is that the producers of the cultural artifacts with which this essay began were influencers all along, which is why they came so readily to mind. The historian of everything is not read but followed; the philosopher of complexity maintains a stage, not a seminar; the consoling essayist trades on a brand, not a book; and the confessional songwriter, most of all, makes a sacrament of parasocial intimacy. Their authority no longer rests on the work and answers to it; it rests on their reach, and reach answers to nothing. Here, an old Platonic distinction earns its keep. A leader knows the harbor and steers for it against the wind, and is answerable for where the ship arrives, even when the arrival costs blood and tears. The influencer, by contrast, reads the wind and the currents and keeps the passengers amused, and is careful, being intelligent, to steer well clear of any rock, any commitment, anything that one could later be held to. Superficiality is not the influencer’s failing; it is the influencer’s strategy. To move people without answering for where they are moved is the entire art, and the art that is now the dominant form that public authority takes. 

    What is true of the single follower is true of the crowd, and here the stakes change. The appetite does not stop at the individual buying their small comfort; with enough insecurity it scales up, and a politics arrives to feed it wholesale. Populism is the aesthetics of counterfeit reassurance raised to the order of the state. It is the grand narrative offered in the register of comfort, a shared story that asks nothing but loyalty, names the enemy who explains every failure, and absolves the believer of the toil of thought. It is kitsch at the scale of a nation. The conspiracy theory is its obscure twin, the empty system of the masses and of the lone soul who fancies they have seen through everything: it cannot be checked, every event confirms it, and the demand for a falsifying case is reclassified not as naivety but as complicity. Umberto Eco, analyzing what he called Ur-Fascism, named the feature nearest to my argument, an impoverished vocabulary meant “to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning,” a Newspeak that may hide inside the blandest entertainment. Here the two counterfeits meet, and the gate stands plain: tyranny wants both, and hands the crowd its over-simple slogans and the initiates its over-complex myths; the same foreclosure of thought worked from opposite ends.

    Two cautions, lest the argument overreach. The line between the genuine and the counterfeit runs within each tradition, not between them. Christianity, socialism, and the rest each have an earned form and a predigested one, a lived discipline and a catechism, and fascism enters here only because in it the reassuring register is not a corruption of the content but the whole of it. The shared logic is structural, though a moral chasm yawns: a cheap picture harms no one, whereas a predigested politics kills. The hunger for reassurance is human, and in the art gallery or the pop charts it is mostly harmless; it turns lethal only when it seizes the one domain, I mean politics, where power and violence are at stake. To say that the consoling hit and the totalitarian myth share a structure is not to equate them, but only to identify the small, daily, excusable version of a thing whose great version is unforgivable.

    So, the honest place to leave this analysis is not with the sentimental canvas or the sausage or the chiasmus, but on the screen, the one figure I have so far spared. If this essay travels, it travels not as thought but as content; if it is praised, it is praised by the reach that it set out to indict; and its author, posting the link, becomes for a moment the very thing it describes, an influencer of anti-influence, courting the recognition he is too refined to admit he wants. There is no clean exit. There is only the choice that the helmsman makes and the influencer refuses to make: to name a harbor, to steer for it, and to answer for the arrival. The rest is baloney, however thin you slice it.

    And one steers anyway, into a fight that will mostly be lost, for the reason Kant gave for why the will matters: one fights not because the fight will be won but because it is right, and the worth of that, as Kant said of the good will, lies wholly in itself, a thing to which usefulness adds nothing and from which failure takes nothing away. But let me be exact about what this offers and what it withholds. It withholds all comfort. There is no light here to bask in and no figure of the lonely truthteller to play, for that figure is only the last of the reassurances, and the most flattering. The case for real music, real painting, real literature, real philosophy is not that they will beat their cheap doubles in the market, where they usually lose, but that they are the thing that the doubles, the counterfeits, imitate, and that to make them is right, no matter whether it “works.”

    The will that does this is rarely the hero’s will, and the courage that I trust most is a smaller one, which the Greeks left unnamed. They called courage andreia, from the word for the man under arms, the hoplite in the line, and its absence they called anandria, the an- doing its usual work of negation. What they did not name is the lack of the nerve to leave a small good thing undone, the inability, once one has seen what the moment asks, to walk indifferently past it. This is more than cowardice but less than courage, and it is therefore a more plausible demand to make of ourselves. I call this ananandria, a double negative and a poor coinage that no one will steal: neither courage nor the failure to act, but the failure to fail to act. It is the mirror of Aristotle’s akrasia, the weakness of will that cannot bring itself to do the right thing which it knows it should do; ananandria is the weakness of will that cannot bring itself not to do something even if it knows very well that it is pointless to do it. And it is enacted in the smallest unwitnessed thing, it is the deed that changes nothing big and that no one will reward or even notice, the bit of soap one cannot bring oneself to throw away. This is courage demoted from the battlefield to the home, and the demotion is the whole point: the magnificent figure that the truthteller’s empty chair was awaiting was never the hero, it was only this. English has a homelier word for it: decency, which asks of us neither heroism nor grand virtue, only that we not leave the small good undone.

    A culture that does not reassure has, by that very fact, already refused the predigested; and so it disturbs, it is dissonant, it sits wrongly with its age, not because it set out to provoke, which is only the avant-garde sold as one more product, but because it cannot help it, because the truth that it follows happens to be uncomfortable. Its revolution, when there is one, is never the revolution it intended. A true revolution is not wanted. It happens despite being unwanted. A true revolution is a reluctant revolution.

    Insanity and Solace at the Venice Biennale

    I tore open my hand when I hit the gravel. A dozen Italian cops were behind me — one drove his boot into my back. Ahead, a pack of journalists crushed into one another to capture the shot. I had locked arms with Nadya Tolokonnikova, the leader of Pussy Riot, to try and block the entrance to the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Seconds before I tumbled to the ground, I’d pulled her through a gap in the advancing police line. Two minutes before that fifty people in pink balaclavas had converged together while the song “Disobey” blared from nearby speakers. We were protesting Russia’s participation in the most important contemporary art event of the year. The closed press preview had started at ten that morning and only a handful of people had made it inside. Within a week after our protest, Russia designated Pussy Riot a terrorist organization. I shrugged my shoulders. Now the Russian government has me tied to three terrorist organizations instead of two. The thrill isn’t what it once was.

    When the excitement was over, I washed the blood off my hand and went back to the festival. The Biennale had a hundred pavilions this year — a record since 1895 — but the whole thing had curdled into a geopolitical scandal. Art was the last thing anyone talked about. The jury had resigned over the admission of Russia and Israel, whose leaders are under ICC investigation; the EU pulled its grant; the right screamed about cultural freedom while the left issued cancellations till they were blue in the face. But art was exactly what I’d come for — I wanted to see every single pavilion.

    The Venice Giardini, or the Giardini della Biennale, is the Biennale’s center of gravity. Napoleon Bonaparte had created the gardens in the early 1800s by draining the marshlands on the banks of the Bacino di San Marco. There are thirty permanent pavilions arranged inside the gardens, built over the decades since the first festival in 1895. My governing principle for evaluating works of art is that the concept and the form must rise to a level of excellence. If the form doesn’t grip the viewer, if it fails to deliver what the text promises, the art fails.

    I visited the Greek pavilion first, one of the thirty inside the Gardini. Behind heavy black curtains, a red neon floor stretched into infinity. Broken marble columns were positioned around the space complimented by chains hung along the walls. The presentation, Escape Room, was Plato’s cave reimagined as an S&M club. It was designed by Andreas Angelidakis, who brought “architecture into vivid dialogue with digital media” as the Biennale website would have us believe. Angelidakis had taken the year 1934 as a macabre inspiration for his installation. That was the year the Nazis began the mass persecution of homosexuals, and the year Mussolini first met Hitler, here, in Venice, and walked him through the Biennale, which had just opened its Greek pavilion. The columns at the entrance replicated pillars from Hagia Sophia — a monument to “Make Greece Great Again” ninety years before Trump; Angelidakis had smashed them and placed the remnants at the door. This year the space was dedicated to Zak Kostopoulos, a Greek drag artist beaten to death in central Athens in 2018. Angelidakis was trying to remind his visitors of the fascistic leaders who had built this and neighboring pavilions while also updating the style of fascism for 2026. As I left, I was thinking about the Biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — a former leader of the neofascist Fronte della Gioventù. At the opening press conference, he declared that the exhibition was “not a tribunal but a garden of peace.” Perhaps Hitler and Mussolini also visited the Giardini for a quiet stroll.

    Back out beneath the blazing sun, the longest line in the park winded towards the Austrian pavilion over the entryway of which a naked woman was hanging upside down inside a bell suspended from a crane. She was slamming her body against the bells’ walls in a slow, terrifying rhythm. The toll carried across the entire park. One had to walk under her to enter the exhibition wherein visitors were greeted by a glass cube of crystal-turquoise liquid in which a second naked performer was swimming. She was breathing through a diving mask. The liquid turned out to be filtered urine, collected from visitors in two bio-toilets installed nearby. Florentina Holzinger explained that she was showing Venice from the inside — a city drowning in the accumulated filth left behind by throngs of tourists but repackaged for those same people as a beautiful aquarium. Piss Christ had to be updated for a fallen and perpetually re-shocked world.

    Holzinger is an heir to the Viennese Actionism of the sixties — art that used shock as a weapon against institutions. Sixty years later, the institutions have metabolized radicalism — now it’s lucrative. Radicalism garners grants and comes with security and content warnings. In 2026, The System pays handsomely for a safe media attraction no matter how revolting. Radicalism is locked inside a piss-filled aquarium and forced to bang itself against the inside of a bell in a grotesque attempt to earn clicks while audience members participate by posting it to their Instagrams and TikToks. Edgy!

    The next day, I crossed over to the other side of the barricades — inside the Russian pavilion, and crossed the very doors I and others had been blocking the day before. Just the night before Russian forces had launched 102 drones at Ukrainian territory; thirteen civilians were killed. (As of this writing, strikes like that one are occurring practically every day.) But here, the press’ overwhelming object of interest was the only bar at the Biennale pouring out prosecco and vodka for free. Attendees were eager to slurp down what the Russians had on offer. On the balcony, I struck up a conversation with a thoroughly drunk journalist from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The Biennale’s president was a friend of hers, she shared, gushing, “He fought city hall and won!” Venetian authorities had refused to grant the Russian pavilion a permit for a public event, but Buttafuoco, a fellow Sicilian, had found a way around the law — closed previews don’t require permits. The building would shut three days after opening. “There must be a dialogue between cultures,” she repeated the official line, prosecco in hand. I asked what exactly the Russians had spoken about, and why the pavilion was open for just three days. She steadied her drifting gaze on me and ignored the question. What she liked most, she said, were the bar and the music downstairs. Then she said she had a flight to catch and tottered away.

    On the ground floor below me, a DJ was lazily playing indistinct electronic music. In the center of the hall, a tree grew with its branches pointing up; mismatched installations hung along the walls. The concept of “a dialogue between cultures” as the journalist had dutifully repeated had been blurred to unintelligibility. The whole production was charged with a manic insistence that everything was fine in Russia. Nothing in the room hinted at the ever-expanding war in the middle of Europe. 

    On the staircase, I ran into a Russian artist living outside the country. He proudly pulled up his shirt to show me a stomach wrapped in bandages: an hour before our meeting, he’d carved “ART” into his belly with a scalpel — at a gallery owned by one of the pavilion’s sponsors, the oligarch Mikhelson. Now he was drinking the sponsor’s champagne with the air of a champion. I’d had enough. 

    On my way out of the Giardini, I passed a poster of the face of a Ukrainian artist with words “CANCELLED” stamped across it — a Russian aerial bomb had killed him. 

    This poster was part of the Invisible Pavilion, a project of 274 such images featuring information about Ukrainian cultural figures killed by Russia. In the days that followed, I’d find them plastered across the city. A little further on, above the heads of gleeful tourists, swung an installation by Daria Koltsova: Ukrainian military uniforms sent from the war, strung between buildings on clotheslines, drying like ordinary laundry — but these clothes were riven with bullet holes. The name tags of fallen soldiers were readable on the empty chests.

    I spent the next two days at the Arsenale, the former military shipyards of the Venetian Republic, walking through twenty-six more pavilions — ecological catastrophe, migration, colonial legacies, an Argentine hangar of dried-ocean salt drawn over in charcoal — until the kaleidoscope of meanings was too cluttered to ingest.

    On one of the vaporettos, I saw a poster which read “Step inside lost freedom,” beneath which was printed the address of the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista. This was the unofficial Belarussian exhibit. Belarus has had no official pavilion since 2019 — Lukashenko won’t let independent artists out and won’t fund the ones who toe his line — so the country was represented by the exiles of the Belarus Free Theatre. In the first room, they had installed a field of wheat, and above it they had hung traditional Belarusian charms forged from prison bars. Unexpectedly, a pleasant smell wafted through the space.

    “In the second room, we have the smell of dictatorship,” the host explained, and opened a door onto an enormous cross made of CCTV cameras flashing red. The fourteenth-century church was being used for its original purpose — except God had been replaced by the state and its surveillance, and censorship had become the holiest sacrament. Within ten minutes, the smell — soothing and inviting at first — had soaked into me from head to toe. It was a cloying floral perfume pumped so many times that its power made it physically uncomfortable to stand in the dim church, where the red lights of the cameras kept blinking, recording the emptiness. I didn’t leave quickly enough to keep the scent from clinging to my clothes.

    I rode back across the canal with the aroma of dictatorship still emanating from me. On the gray facade of Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, a Ukrainian flag waved beneath a banner that read “Still Joy” — after the totalitarian dimness of the Belarusian church, the phrase sounded almost like a welcome invitation. The banner beckoned to an exhibition by the Pinchuk Foundation, part of the Biennale’s alternative program, without censorship, gloss, or official approvals. Heavy Kyiv techno music greeted visitors on the other side of the door. The exhibit was a two-channel chronicle of Kyiv raves: those before the full-scale invasion and those that were being held as the war raged. The joy on the dancefloor wasn’t escapism or blind denial. Raves had become a stubborn act of resistance, a way of going on living while the neighboring country was using its full force to squelch the life out of Ukraine. I stood longest at an installation dedicated to those missing in action. It was made up of hundreds of leaves, each one of which was half green and half dried up — the two halves glued together to present a Frankenstein of life and death. The dead half of each was stamped with the designated digits of a slain soldier. Each leaf represented a family waiting in suspended limbo for news that might never come. 

    In the corner of the next room, a line was moving in silence. A Ukrainian artist was inking tattoos for anyone who wanted one, right there in the palazzo. Simple patterns were inscribed on backs and forearms. Watching the needle leave its permanent mark, I thought of the vodka drowning conscience and memory at the Russian pavilion, and the scalpel carving meaningless drivel into the flesh of the inebriated. Their alcohol promised a numb oblivion designed to forget Russian crimes. Here an artist was inking elegant, pulsing, painful marks of life, the life Russia has been trying to erase for a fifth year now. This pain was sweeter than the scent from which I’d just fled.

    By that point, I had walked through more than eighty spaces of the Biennale. Twenty pavilions still remained, but the last space I chose to visit, the first ever exhibition at the Biennale representing the Republic of Guinea, was the most distant — a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. San Servolo had been a psychiatric asylum operative since the eighteenth century and shut down only in 1978. From the water, the island looked like a fortress. The curator, Carlo Stragapede, had simply hung paintings on the walls — bright, alive, full of local motifs. No wall text justified the work by insisting on political relevance. It was a relief and a joy to be alone with the beauty, and my relief peaked when I entered the asylum’s inner courtyard: an abstract, multicolored sculpture, an old park, and a complete, deafening silence. After a week of nonstop audiovisual violence, performances, and geopolitical scandals, silence was the most beautiful work of art Venice had offered. To stay sane in this maddening era, you have to know when to retreat for solace, even if the only place left for respite is one where for centuries they used to lock up the mad.

    Paul Onditi’s Damaged World

    Paul Onditi lives and works in Nairobi, in a high-ceilinged studio with a corrugated iron roof located just a few feet behind his house. He paints there obsessively, surrounded by the sound of barking dogs, Afro-pop from the neighbor’s radio, and matatus honking in the distance. Onditi often wears a brown newsboy cap and black-rimmed glasses — a bit of an old school presentation in a city where formal wear is the norm.

    Photo by Matteo Lonardi. Courtesy of Montague Contemporary

    Inside the studio his finished paintings lean against the plaster walls tilted in an uneven embrace. The first work I notice is Helter Foggy which features a recurring figure that Onditi has nicknamed “Smokey.” In this incarnation as in all others, Smokey stands with his back to us, contemplating the colorful Armageddon of a distant cityscape toppling in on itself. Smokey blends into the chaos, his silhouette scorched and chaffed by the same materials that depict the falling city before him. He stands in the foreground contemplating the scene in front of him, hands in his pockets, defiled by the destruction he witnesses.

    Paul Onditi, Cast on Scape 2, 2025, Mixed media on digital polyester inkjet plate  112 x 140 cm

    Onditi was born and raised in Kenya and later studied painting at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt. Like many of us, he worries about climate change and especially the pollution that threatens Nairobi. “There are plastic bottles in drainages all over Nairobi,” he lamented to me on my visit. “People just dump plastic and rubbish wherever they are.” Onditi clicked his tongue, paused, then clicked it again, more sharply this time, shaking his head in disappointment and disgust.

    Walking through Nairobi after leaving his studio, I began to notice what he meant. Every unclaimed space seemed to collect people and their refuse. A profusion of tin and cardboard lines the highways that eventually empty into the parking lots of extravagant shopping centers or modern glass towers. Along the walls of nearby gated communities, the poor have erected lean-tos to shelter themselves from the rains. Because clean drinking water is not available in the city both the poor and rich rely on plastic bottled water. And since there is no infrastructure for recycling the plastic, it ends up befouling the margins of the city’s rivers, roads, and buildings; plastic bottles and bags cluster in drainage channels along the side of the roads, clump around the edges of overflowing bins, or float in the river that runs through the city. The necessary refuse of a life dependent on plastic for survival.

    To many around the world the waste has become invisible. In Onditi’s paintings, however, the disorder and its potential devolutions are urgently brought to our attention. In his view it is impossible not to be implicated by the contamination simply by living in Nairobi and getting by. In his view every individual has a hand in the debasement of the environment. The system is such that to live is to contaminate. The boundary between the polluted and unpolluted is hard to distinguish.

    Paul Onditi, Regardless Negative, 2016, Mixed media on digital polyester inkjet plate, 112 x 240 cm

    What is true about the debris-strewn daily life is true on a larger, industrial scale. All across Kenya, for instance, on the flower farms owned and run by international companies, pollution is almost completely unchecked. The farms use strong pesticides and fertilizers which leach into the soil and drinking water. Yet the conglomerates which poison the city are also essential to the community since they offer employment to the locals and provide them with (barely) adequate earnings and a measure of stability. Moreover, peasant farmers all over Kenya rely on the unregulated use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to secure the high yields required to feed their families. The wages of this devil’s bargain affect everyone since these chemicals contaminate the air and water — hence the omnipresent plastic bottles. 

    Of course, unregulated chemical use plagues all major industrial cities, but in rapidly growing cities in developing countries the consequences cannot be easily contained or covered up or trucked away. In these cities pollution presses upon residents and visitors, darkening our worldviews. This is what we see in Onditi’s paintings, even to the point where the outlook becomes apocalyptic, and the individual can only bear witness to the collapse that surrounds him.

    Thus, the recurring figure of Smokey. He appears in almost all of Onditi’s paintings, drifting through the landscape, navigating the unstable ground of the city surrounded by buildings about to collapse. He appears worn, fatigued, but simultaneously somehow defiant. He is not presented as a savior or a victim but a ghostly, anonymous figure existing in a state of suspended failure. He is an everyman who haunts the paintings as a passive observer of the desecration. He reveals little; his back is always turned toward us. We witness only his witnessing and infer demeanor from his posture — sometimes his head is slumped in despair, or his hands are resting on his hips in frustration, or his shoulders are squared in anger and disgust. In a few of the paintings Smokey seems to be strolling casually into the chaos with apparent indifference, and in almost all of them it seems as if he is about to be subsumed by his surroundings. Smokey is a condition rather than a message — the landscape he sees cannot be resolved into a moral position, only lived in or passed through. 

    Paul Onditi, Untitled (IV), 2015, Mixed media on digital polyester inkjet plate, 255 x194 cm

    Nevertheless, the paintings are strangely colorful and alive, despite their subject matter. Grays settle over the surface in thin, almost translucent veils; primary colors occasionally emerge from beneath the darkness. More often he employs dirtied pastels — pink, turquoise, soft yellows, and pale greens that appear contaminated by their environment. Solid subjects dissolve or drip, as if pulled downward. 

    Paul Onditi, Alien Blot, 2015. Oil and mixed media on digital polyester inkjetplate,120 x
    112 cm.

    Onditi incorporates film strips and printed photographs into the pigment; the oil paints are layered, pressed together, worked over and over again until the surface begins to lose any sense of stability. Some areas are slowly built up, then scraped back, and then rebuilt so the surfaces feel less like images than records of time. All the surfaces are carefully tended, even though all depict neglect. Paint drips downward hinting at the fluidity of the constructed world, but the drips are deliberately composed. Smokey inhabits a melting collage of high rises, power lines, trees, and fragments of unsettled landscape.

    Paul Onditi, Bags to Rags, 2020, mixed media on digital polyester inkjet plate, 131 x 112 cm

    Onditi’s exploration of environmental damage does not distinguish between rich and poor, and it does not assign blame. He is considering the conditions in which everyone is forced to live, and the emotional impact of that damage. In this regard, it differs from that of other African artists that deal more directly with waste by incorporating it directly into their work. El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor, gathers discarded bottle caps and transforms them into vast metallic tapestries that shimmer like cloth. Fabrice Monteiro, a Belgian-Beninese visual artist and photographer, places haunting figures in costumes made from trash and natural materials, and then positions them in landscapes already blighted by pollution. Moffat Takadiwa from Zimbabwe builds intricate sculptures from post-consumer waste — toothbrushes, computer keyboards, and other fragments of consumer life. These artists consider the afterlives of discarded objects, and the possibilities of reclamation and redemption, as well as the shock of transformation. Onditi, on the other hand, tries to capture the disorienting impact on the individual of widespread environmental devastation. All of these artists are trying to remind us that environmental damage is not external to daily life but embedded within it, a product of habits of consumption across time and scale.

    Paul Onditi, Untitled, 2015, mixed media on digital polyester inkjet plate, 131 x 112 cm

    When I left Onditi’s studio, I kept considering a subject mentioned early in our conversation: the idea that Africa is “too poor to pollute” — the assumption that only the over-consuming rich can pollute because the poor don’t have the material means to damage the environment. It is a familiar claim, and not without its partial truths. But of course Africans pollute, too. They have no other choice. The river I had walked past in Nairobi made that abundantly clear. It may be tempting to see waste as an inevitable product of global systems of production and consumption, but it also infiltrates small, ordinary realms of life. Individual decisions about consumption and waste — to the degree that they are actually decisions — are limited by systemic constraints and, like it or not, become habits that resist easy moral sorting. There may be no clean division between those who cause damage and those who suffer from it, but the more it is tolerated, the more likely we will end up like Smokey — lost in a damaged world. 

    Words and Bombs

    During the war, water became something special. It didn’t come from a tap anymore. You had to go out and look for it. This ritual did not end when the bombing slowed down. I still do the same thing. Usually twice a day, every day, I take a bucket and start walking, sometimes about a kilometer, sometimes more. Information about where to find the water travels by word of mouth: we ask around and we start the search. Every time I arrive there are already many people waiting holding buckets or plastic containers. The bucket full is much heavier than the bucket empty. On the way back it pulls on my arm and shoulder. By the time I reach the tent — or wherever I am staying — most of my strength has trickled away. I need to sit down, and then I try to write.

    In the midst of a war, a person doesn’t ask why they write. The real question, for me anyway, is: how could one not write? In peacetime writing is a cultural act, a normal form of expression. But in the middle of destruction it becomes something completely different. It is an effort to keep things in balance in a world that has lost its balance. Cities under attack don’t just lose buildings. They lose meanings. The streets that used to have names are now just dusty roads. Homes that once held memories are now just holes in the ground. In such a world of rubble, a person might start to feel as if their existence can be erased. We are losing more than bodies. I have my body. But what does it mean now?

    Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it to write in a place that is coming apart the way Gaza is. Then I realize that the question itself is part of the answer. It’s a survivalist reflex, like someone talking to themselves to keep from going crazy. I do not write to publish, but to express myself if only to myself. I write to defeat something invisible but heavy. Maybe it’s hopelessness. Maybe it’s the feeling that the world really has no purpose. When you write a sentence, something small happens. The chaos in your mind begins to have a shape, to make sense. Fear becomes words, and words, however fragile they may be, give a person a small sense of control. I often feel that writing during wartime actually postpones death, even if only for a moment. That is why I kept writing on days when I felt I had no strength left.

    Writing cannot stop a war. But it can prevent a person from disappearing completely inside it. Here, in this meaning desert, a word is not a literary device. It is a sign of life — a small pulse in a being that might otherwise fall silent. And even the faintest pulse is enough to make us believe that life is still possible. This must be why so many people have written during wars. People have written in trenches, in prisons, and in exile. They did not write for literature. They wrote for something much more fundamental: to tell the world that they are still here. To tell themselves that, too. Or perhaps to tell themselves that the world still had room for them, even if only in imagination.

    In Gaza now writing is not only a profession, it is also a way to stay alive. And it certainly isn’t a luxury for me. I make money from it. I write articles and reports for different websites and newspapers. I have to think about my ideas, feel them out, and then compose them into sentences. Then I send them to an editor in a very different place. And I do all this while I am hungry and exhausted. Is it hard to imagine how someone can write when they’re hungry? I console myself that there is an old and honorable tradition of writing to keep hunger at bay, even in circumstances less extreme and desolate than mine. Still, it is painfully hard to focus in a place full of noise and terror and rumbling bellies.

     After the journey of thirst and hunger, another journey begins: the journey of the word. Something unexpected happens when I set my mind to this work. I sit wearily in front of the page and words slowly start to appear. It’s as if the tired body moves to the side, making space for something else — a calm, decisive force insisting that today needs to have a purpose. Sometimes the word itself becomes a form of nourishment. Writing does not stop hunger, but it stops hunger from transforming into complete silence.

     

     Here writing happens when the stomach is empty and the mind is full. What fills the mind is fear. You write while drones fly above you, while you think of someone you have lost, while you remember a home that no longer stands. For a while I was stuck on a small piece of land. Shells fell above my head. A drone with four propellers buzzed back and forth outside my window. I could hear the sound of death all around me. Why didn’t I leave? The crossing out of Gaza was closed. Travel had become an almost impossible dream. We were trapped in a huge prison and couldn’t leave because missiles were falling. There was a world outside the fences, of course, but it was impossible to reach.

    In such a place, a person feels like their life is shrinking into a very small space. Days start to feel the same. Fear is almost monotonous, a constant companion. During those moments, I started to think about writing in a different way. It felt like a prayer, not a traditional prayer but a prayer for the world, an attempt to send a signal from inside the darkness. I wrote as if to say: look. Look at what is happening here. Writing became like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea. You don’t know who will find it or when, but you still throw it. For yourself, you throw it. Throwing the bottle is what remains of optimism. Hope, even when it is weak, needs language. 

    I never imagined words, mine or anyone else’s, could change government decisions or stop wars. But silence felt worse than anything else.

    After writing my poems, I had an idea that at first felt almost silly. Why not translate this book into the language of the people bombing my city? Into Hebrew.

     The idea was risky. Translating it into that language might lead to misunderstandings. Many people might see it as betrayal or normalization. But I thought about it differently. I wanted something very simple to happen: I wanted someone there to read these words. I wanted them to see the world that I see. Maybe they might imagine what it is like to live under constant attack. I imagined what it might be like for me to sit calmly and listen to my book being read by someone whom I have never met. Translation was an attempt to create a small opening in a thick wall. Can experiences, like words, be translated?

    But why talk to someone who sees you as an enemy? The question makes sense. Yet war itself raises a bigger question: how can hatred end if no one ever tries to speak against it? I knew it was possible that very few people would read my Hebrew book. It certainly might be misunderstood. It might get rejected. But my idea was simpler than all that: all I wanted was dialogue.

    At the very least my poetry would give words the chance to cross the distance, and to show them the Gaza that they do not see. The news often shows the same image of Gaza: destruction and blood. That image is real, but it is not complete. Gaza, even now, is not just a place of death. It is also a place where a writer tries to write. And where a child draws a beautiful house on a piece of paper that is old and has been used a lot. A place where people still dream, however implausibly, of a decent life. For me, translation was an attempt to show this other image — the city that contains human beings, not just morbid statistics.

    War makes people into symbols, into enemies without faces. Writing tries to resuscitate those faces.

    And I did it: my collection Crying by the River Twice was published by the Mitan publishing house in Tel Aviv in January in a dual-language edition, the first printing of which, 500 copies, sold out completely. I was shocked when I heard the news. I was actually reaching people. For a moment, I felt that my effort had paid off and that the book had found its place in the world. Ayat Abou Shmeiss, Mitan’s director, told me they are preparing the second edition.

    I don’t know if translation will change anything for a reader far away. But I do know one thing.

    Writing has been my small boat in a violent sea — fragile, but strong enough to keep its passenger afloat.

    The Oracle in the Opera Garnier

    The painted curtain, with its great swags,

    is not the greatest of illusions on offer here,

    the first being: that this is an opera house.

     

    Once it was. Now it only brags

    of brief ballet seasons. Behind glass, the headgear

    of Aïda, Isolde’s robe, a mask from Die Fledermaus.

     

    Take this plaster horse’s skull from Salomé

    and look through its eye socket as through a lorgnette.

    This is not a past that anyone recognizes.

     

    It is a confection, a fantasy, a derivé.

    Still, the masses pour through this play set,

    climbing the grand staircase to optical surprises,

     

    the arches and curves that seem to be in motion,

    marble that seems to flow. I never once felt vertigo:

    all drops from balconies seemed bottomless

     

    as, regarding the masque of endless fun,

    candelabra juggled flames in a mirror show,

    and posing girls shook their hair over the abyss.

     

    Crowded ceilings draw the eye upward as against

    common sense embodied in floors.

    That’s why you might miss the ballast

     

    that grounds the structure otherwise unfenced —

    the library. Books of myth and doomed amours

    are stacked behind wire mesh, locked fast;

     

    bound scores preserve the music that vanishes in air.

    They’re guarded by two formidable figures:

    the first is strict Apollo brandishing his lyre.

     

    The second is wild-eyed Pythia, bare

    of accoutrements, facing down the rigors

    imposed on those who pierce the ruse of empire.

     

    A Courtly Love for Foreign Lands

     

    As I caught sight of the Loire’s rapids snagged

    or pinned in the shadow of the bridge,

    and the currents that tore away from it ragged

     

    in the dusky light, I thought, ou sont les neiges?

    One may suffer amour de loin for other lands.

    Serenading them from afar, laying siege

     

    to them across time: would the sands

    in the Arles arena fill an hourglass with as

    many grains as life is filled with ampersands?

     

    For I walked under the limestone crags là-bas

    remembering that a foreign language is only

    another set of synonyms. Or an alias:

     

    where even here the affirmative oui

    was said above, and oc below, the massif

    in the days of Alienòr’s diplomacy.

     

    When I saw the silver olives, each tree as if

    seized by a hand at the root, open like cages

    in the morning under the limestone cliff,

     

    mist dispersing to reveal in stages

    bulging clouds, sun’s reservoirs

    in wild grasses, could I forget the images

     

    stunning us from third-hand wars,

    and set my foot in the depressions in each stair,

    which had deepened with the precession of the stars?

     

    And when I saw the bee nose into the atelier

    of blossoms as if merely the visible tip of that force,

    I suffered my amour de loin to clear

     

    a place for nightingales, for the white horse

    in the boscage who would have bragged

    of long ago unseating its troubadours!

    A Fear of Stars

     

    High desert like High Mass

    — it’s an open monastery.

    And the rural poor huddle

    with their chickens in grass

    behind gappy iconostases.

    The landscape can befuddle

     

    anybody. Conquistadors

    came around, truffling for gold

    but didn’t see it on the surface,

    on everything the artist draws,

    the very dust Dios amarillo’d,

    aureate air, lightning, furnace

     

    of the gilded tips of sagebrush

    growing low to the scree.

    The painters used knives.

    Built their gessoed walls flush

    with the walls of eternity

    in whose shadow we hoard our lives.

     

    High desert like High Mass

    — it’s an open monastery

    with a peripheral amphitheatre

    where raptors lift a spyglass

    and we in the arena slink warily

    beneath the occasional helicopter.

     

    At evening I might go for a walk

    where tire ruts forayed

    into the sunset-soaked abattoirs

    rattlesnake and scorpion stalk.

    I scuttle home by dark, more afraid

    of the onslaught of stars.

     

    Afterlife

     

    My latest folly, you say, spilling

    the bag of jigsaw pieces on the table.

    Odor of sweet sawdust, redolent

    of the mandate it’s fulfilling:

    turning a woodland into a fable,

    not one piece left over or absent.

     

    You build out the perimeter first.

    Moving inward — sunny hounds,

    shady figures, scattered foragers.

    Little coheres, and then a burst

    of intuition: making up the ground,

    pieces stick to pieces like burrs.

     

    The chimeras are coming into play,

    each corner with its unicorn

    or griffin: guarding, not holding court

    amid the thicket’s green-gold array;

    wildflowers creep up and adorn

    the Cloisters set there like a fort.

     

    In real life the Cloisters were moved

    across the ocean, and piece by piece

    reassembled in New York — a miracle!

    And that’s how holiness is proved:

    reenacting on a small scale, by degrees,

    the original feat of human will.

     

    Night after night something clicks.

    Comes into focus. A few pieces rescued.

    It makes you sleepy. It keeps you

    from mischief or the bottle, tricks

    you into laying down arms, subdued.

    You’ll say how sharp your eyes grew,

     

    vision you so worried was dimming.

    Look again. You’re not allowed in

    to that paradise of gradient hues,

    rooms within rooms limning

    a sanctuary of rosebush and fountain

    conjectured from a scarcity of clues.

    The New Euthanasia and the New Liberalism

    Let me begin with a declaration of my intention to avoid all euphemism. The standard term for medically facilitated death is “euthanasia,” and that is the term I will be using. We should always be wary of efforts to render more palatable any given proposal for social change by means of innovative new terminology to describe it. The results of such efforts are exactly what we see in the designations “Medical Assistance in Dying” (Canada), “Termination of Life on Request” (the Netherlands), “Voluntary Assisted Dying” (Australia), and so on. “Euthanasia” is not, in its etymology, any more grim or backwards than these other options — it literally means “good death”! And if that is not good enough, if even “good death” sends us back to the euphemism treadmill for alternative formulations, the real source of unease must plainly reside not in our vocabulary but in our intentions. 

    As for my personal convictions, I find I have evolved over the past years towards a fairly flexible position on euthanasia, at least for the terminally ill. This has been motivated in part by an awareness of the vagueness of the boundaries on the continuum extending from sudden violent suicide, through hastened demise, through withholding of treatment, all the way to preservation at all costs. As the second to last of these we have the “do not resuscitate” clause that so many elderly people include in the instructions for their medical caregivers. Just before that, under “hastened demise,” we have the more or less rational adjustments that some dying people make in view of their true plight. My father smoked like a fiend throughout his last days — this was practically the only thing still in his ability to do. When a kindly young nurse at his hospice outfitted him with an oxygen tank, she warned him not to use it while smoking “unless you really want to go out with a bang.” He took that advice, mostly preferred his cigarettes to his oxygen, and quite likely died a few days earlier than he otherwise would have. 

    An old Soviet joke asks us to imagine a man standing in front of an anti-smoking poster that reads: “Smoking: It’s Slow Suicide.” He pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and comments: “That’s ok, I’m in no big hurry.” The joke contains a deep and serious truth. We are all committing suicide, if only half-heartedly, over the course of our entire lives. I am writing this, for example, not at a “standing desk,” but sitting, hunched over, in a posture I am told can be fatal. In this light, it seems too much to ask of someone whose death is imminent that they choose this late moment of their lives to stop committing suicide. Even if they are nonsmokers, as most of us are these days, the dying are still likely to be presented with various choices — in their medication regimen, for example — that may either hasten or retard their death. It would be an unusually disciplined person who would always make the choice that prolongs their life, and in this regard it seems simply too much to ask, of real people in the real world, that they commit themselves to a total rejection of euthanasia. 

    Previously, for many years, I thought of myself as just such a total rejectionist. Two events have jolted me over the past year. One occurred when a friend of mine in Paris told me that his mother, back home in Canada, had opted to end her life by euthanasia. I could not deny what I observed in my friend after this decision was carried out: he was at peace, and utterly certain that his mother had made the right decision. It would have been impossible for me, in my reaction to this news, to continue to stand on principle. Obviously, conversational pragmatics just don’t work that way — the emotional truth reported by a deceased person’s loved ones trumps, always and automatically, any conceivable abstract principles opposed to that truth. And a few months later, my own stepfather, at the age of 90, with rapidly declining health, and a near total loss of autonomy, began to request, rather insistently, to likewise availed himself, in December 2025, of a dose of morphine sufficient to finish nature’s own slow work.

    When I first spoke to my Canadian friend, however, I was still thinking entirely in terms of abstract principles. And so I asked him whether his mother, however diminished, however subject to irremediable suffering, was still in any sort of position to do good for anyone else. Doesn’t she know any young people who might yet benefit from a kind word that she extends to them? Can she still give her input, even if now mostly symbolic, to any collaborative projects that may have meant something to her in her earlier life? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, then it cannot be said that she is, now, living for nothing, or that the continuation of her life is not worth the suffering it must involve. 

    It is a significant tenet of my own religious faith that suffering is intrinsic to life — not just ineliminable, but an essential and to some extent even welcome part of being human. In this, I stand against whatever ideology is responsible for the messaging of pharmaceutical companies and retirement planners and so on, which depicts the end of life as a never-ending sequence of leisure activities, entirely unhaunted by the specter of death, entirely characterized by a relationship to one’s own corporeality that remains unchanged since the prime of youth. 

    Even among those who are not religious, I suspect that in the face of such strange representations of our mortal life as these, the voice of a much older wisdom lingers to whisper that bodily suffering is in no way a deviation from the ordinary course of things. It is, rather, intrinsic to the definition of old age, and in the best case can serve as an occasion for profound reflection on, and a deepening of one’s attachment to, those dimensions of our human lives that are anchored not in our bodies at all, but in our moral personhood, and in our access to truths eternal. 

    We can, in attending to this faint whisper, in rejecting the propaganda of the pharma ads, even come to discover a late-arriving opportunity for our own moral improvement, for refining our attention to the emotional and material needs of others. After all, many expressions of kindness or charity towards others — as in agapé, or the unconditional, un-needy love believed by Christians to extend from God to created souls, not as in mere philanthropy — can be carried out just as effectively from a bedridden position. You do not need strong muscles to uplift others. Such wisdom as this has been articulated and recycled again and again throughout the ages by thinkers religious and secular, from Boëthius (in On the Consolation of Philosophy) to Norberto Bobbio (in De Senectute). If it were not for all those pharma ads, if it were not for the cult of youth that writes the script for these ads as it does for the entirety of our culture, this would not be hard-won wisdom at all, but simply a self-evident feature of the arc of a life, as real as puberty or menopause. 

    Anyhow that’s how I see things, with the result that at the age of 53 I relate to my future with great hope and eager expectation: as holding out to me an opportunity to be good to others, indeed better to others than I have been until now. My future seems to me to hold more promise than ever, precisely because it has less to do with me and more to do with others. Of course much depends on the unique circumstances of our individual encounter with death and dying, but I hope to continue to find opportunities to be good to others from my deathbed, and I see the task of the rest of my life, a task at which I could well fail, as one of setting up the conditions, of internalizing the habits of character, that when the time comes will make such deathbed behavior second-nature to me. 

    I may well fail in this goal, and I note as well that many of the people whom I have loved most have come up decidedly short of it in their own death and dying. I confess I find that Christian ethics, to which I do my best to adhere, is complicated by the dazzling diversity of human character types, not all of whom, plainly, are going to discover and commit themselves to a life of charity. I said “plainly” but I might also have said “thankfully.” What would become of literature, for one thing, if there were no devious self-serving rascals out there? How could we delight in the human comedy, if all the selfishness, all the low schemes and treacheries that alone inject the comic element into human life, were suddenly to be canceled? Would a world without evil be a meaningfully human world? 

    My stepfather, for example, was not a devious self-serving rascal, but a warm and engaging and very funny person. Yet he chose to elevate not charity, but leisure, as the highest principle of the conduct of his life: tennis, bridge, golfing in a custom-painted golf cart, community theater, and motoring in luxury cars. Once he was no longer in any state to enjoy these activities, there was some real force to his conviction that the purpose of his human life could no longer be fulfilled. And it would have seemed rather strained, to say the least, if not condescending, for me to come along at that late hour and to insist that the real purpose of life lies in service to others — especially given that for most of the forty years he knew me I was as preoccupied with serving myself, in my own way, as he had been with golfing and bridge. 

    It would, I see now, have taken a long effort at reorientation, begun years before, when moral character was still malleable, to be able reasonably to expect my conviction — that life is still worth living as long as one is in a position to serve others — to have any real force now. In consequence it seems to me that my most promising line of dissuasion when I encounter people who wish to pursue euthanasia, or whose loved ones wish to do so, cannot even get off the ground. In its place a different Christian virtue, or a virtue that may be called Christian when applied under the right circumstances, seems to suggest itself: the virtue of humility. You say the purpose of your particular life is past now, and plainly unrecoverable in light of your terminal physical illness? You say the only solution is a large dose of morphine? Perhaps, perhaps. What do I know? 

    Most of what I have written so far has served, in the first instance, to give some indication of my own ethical position, but also to help you to understand why, in what follows, I will focus not on what are taken to be the most “obvious” cases of justified euthanasia, namely, those involving the terminally ill, but rather on the problem of what may be called “euthanasia creep,” where, once consensus has solidified around this obviousness, we find a proliferation of arguments for euthanasia in far less obvious cases as well. 

    While the analogy is not perfect, the terminally ill play a rhetorical role in debates over euthanasia somewhat comparable to rape and incest in the abortion debate: both serve to establish beachheads in what for some may otherwise have remained forbidden territory. In the case of euthanasia, the pathways out from those beachheads have been easy of access, and almost entirely undefended. 

    In at least some of the countries where euthanasia is legal, the case has been successfully made that it must not be restricted to those facing certain terminal illness. In May 2024, Zoraya ter Beek was euthanized in the Netherlands. She had long suffered from depression, anxiety, and PTSD stemming from unspecified events, and had also been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. She was 29 years old. I have written about her case previously, and in truth I find I barely have the nerve, now, to reopen that file. I will say only that I myself suffer from severe depression and anxiety. When I was 29 I thought these were nothing but a malediction, while today I find they have played a necessary role in my own pilgrim’s progress. How many truths of my existence, buried deep in my soul, would I have left buried there, had I been sanguine and carefree all along! 

    Zoraya, I believe, in her short few years, was sold a lie, one that she did not have sufficient time to begin to see through: the lie that dread and sorrow have no place in a properly lived human life. As for the autism, I find it is not at all hard to agree with disability-rights activists and theorists who will tell us that whether this diagnosis involves suffering or not has much more to do with the social circumstances in which the autistic person lives than with any prior context-free pathology.

    How, now, did one of the most liberal and progressive states in the world get into the business of putting down its basically healthy young citizens? We can go some way towards answering this question by turning our attention to Canada, a peer of the Netherlands in most indices of development, well-being, and democratic health, and where the public record of the lobbying and legislation that has led to the “Medical Assistance in Dying” program in its current form is particularly clear and comprehensive. Though this may seem hard to believe — I myself have gone over the relevant documents and arguments numerous times, convinced that I must have misunderstood something — it is no exaggeration to say that Canada has extended the MAiD option from centenarians with terminal physical illnesses to Canadians of any age who have been diagnosed with mental illness or with substance-abuse problems. It has done so mostly in order to avoid what might look, from a certain distorted angle, like discrimination. 

    The medicalization of mental and emotional difficulties, as well as of drug and alcohol addiction, has surely been an important and necessary step in gaining for those who are afflicted, at least sometimes, some of the sort of nonjudgmental care that they need. Neither has this medicalization been just pragmatically useful; it is also based on solid scientific evidence. There really is a special neurochemistry of depression and anxiety, and the same is true, even less ambiguously, of drug and alcohol addiction. But no matter how rigorously we are instructed to treat mental illness and addiction as if they were comparable in all respects to, say, Parkinson’s disease or leukemia, we find, like it or not, that there is always something left over, something that belongs squarely to the normative sphere of human life. As the comedian Mitch Hedberg (dead of an overdose at 37) once joked, addiction is a disease, but a strange one: it’s the only disease people yell at you for having. We can of course simply blame the yellers for misunderstanding the true nature of the affliction, but to do so seems to me simply out of sync with the real ways in which such problems are treated, imperfectly but humanely, in human culture.

    As many disability-rights advocates and theorists have been concerned to point out, part of what is really going on in the medicalization of mental illness and substance abuse is an effort to secure for these conditions a transhistorical, context-free, “objective” reality, since such reality is as it were the gold standard for prioritization by the medical system. But one problem with this is that even “purely” physical conditions, at least in the way they are experienced, are not entirely “objective” either. What it means to suffer from Parkinson’s or leukemia has much to do with one’s financial situation, family network, historical era, and many other factors besides. Some philosophers of disability will go so far as to say that no medical condition has any pre-given reality at all prior to a specification of the discursive practices that grow up around that condition in a given cultural context. We do not need to go nearly as far as that in order to appreciate that there might be more to be said in the case, say, of an unemployed alcoholic in a First Nations community in Saskatchewan, who has become a financial burden on his loved ones and who begins to find the MAiD option appealing, than that this person is, straightforwardly and objectively, suffering from a medical condition for which euthanasia may be a fitting solution.

    Law is messy, of course, and sound principles can often eventuate in absurd practices. In the United States, for example, prisoners may no longer enjoy a last cigarette prior to their execution, a rule that, when traced back to its original rationale, is found to have something to do with the fact that smoking is bad for your health. But the inclusion of mental-health and substance-abuse disorders under the umbrella of MAiD eligibility is an even greater jurisprudential absurdity, as it stems not from a concern for the equal application of a negative prohibition, but of a positive right. 

    Much of the language in which the case for euthanasia is made overlaps with the language of abortion rights. In Great Britain, for example, an organization called “My Death, My Decision” announces itself as a sort of corollary or further articulation of the cause that has placed the slogan “My Body, My Choice” on so many car bumpers and t-shirts. One difference, however, is that we find, in the fledgling opposition to euthanasia, a most unusual solidarity between the Catholic defenders of the “culture of life” and the very most radical wing of the disability-rights movement. 

    It was in fact thanks to the consistent efforts of the Canadian disability theorist Shelley Tremain, at the group blog that she runs under the name of Biopolitical Philosophy, that I was first made aware of the excesses of the MAiD program. I had been familiar with Tremain’s work for years, and often delighted in seeing her, as predictable as clockwork, showing up in the comments sections of other philosophy blogs to condemn as “ableist” more or less any thought any other person might wish to share. In Tremain’s view it is ableist, for example, to call Trump stupid, or to argue that while a trans woman is not delusional in believing that she is a woman, a person who claims to be a teapot is delusional. Tremain will show up to tell you that you are ableist if you use the word “unmute,” and she will tell you that you are ableist if you express a preference for in-person academic conferences over Zoom-based or hybrid ones. I had always found her interventions unwittingly but deliciously funny, especially since they typically target virtue-signaling academic progressives who seem to know only how to steel themselves against attacks from the right, and are always predictably nonplussed when they get blindsided on their left flank by the indefatigable Shelley Tremain. 

    But while I began reading her work in a spirit of slightly prurient gawking — I love the human comedy, and there are few sources of it richer than the eat-your-own squabbling of the progressive academic blogosphere — I found over time that I was fully and sincerely convinced by Tremain’s analysis of the nature and significance of the Canadian MAiD program: that it marks, namely, the moment in history when advanced liberalism begins its lurch into genocide. As Tremain has consistently, and I would say courageously, shown, the underlying logic of MAiD, even if it is described by its defenders simply as “common-sense,” as “decent,” as “humane,” is a logic of ruthless cost-effectiveness. There are simply too many people using up resources, and euthanasia helps to solve that problem. 

    It does other things, too. It helped my own Canadian friend’s mother end her life with what at least she and her family experienced as dignity. But she was not poor, or socially marginal, or in the grips of addiction or mental illness, with no social or community support network to lessen the burden of such afflictions as these. She was simply old and sick. Yet surely any program or policy, no matter how unjust or even monstrous, will genuinely satisfy the legitimate human needs of at least some people. A massive social program such as MAiD cannot be justified by anecdotes of happy endings alone. One must also pay special attention to cases of evident misapplication. 

    As recounted in 2023 in an eye-opening piece at Biopolitical Philosophy by the Ph.D. student T. Virgil Murthy, physician-assisted suicide in Canada was restricted until 2019 to people with “a grievous and irremediable medical condition,” who are facing a “reasonably foreseeable death.” In 2019 this restriction was successfully fought in court by Jean Truchon, who had been born with cerebral palsy but was not facing imminent death. By the end of his efforts, Truchon’s explicit reason for seeking death, which he was granted in April 2020, was that he found the isolation of the covid pandemic unbearable. “The coronavirus has literally stolen my time with those I love,” he explained. “Seeing what is coming frightens me the most. Therefore, I made the decision to leave now, and this was well thought-out.”

    In 2021, the Canadian parliament followed up the Truchon case with Bill C-7, which created two categories of applicants: “Track One” for those facing a reasonably foreseeable death, and “Track Two” for “other disabled people,” as Murthy describes them. Nor did this bill limit Track Two to cases such as Truchon’s. Murthy cites a remarkable letter to the editor of the Canadian newspaper the Hill Times, in 2023, from Helen Long, the CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada, explaining that to exclude individuals “whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental disorder” would amount to “a breach of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” It would, she continues, “discriminate on the basis that a person has a mental disorder. Excluding people with mental disorders from MAID legislation also suggests . . . that your suffering can’t be as intolerable as someone with a physical condition. That is stigmatizing.” 

    Long’s subliterate mess of a letter — how “intolerable” exactly is “someone with a physical condition”? — at least may be said to put into language one of the pathways by which liberalism has arrived at this dead-end. The state, it argues, must be prepared to kill you, if you are someone facing mental-health difficulties, in order to avoid stigmatizing you. To refuse to do so would amount to discrimination against you as a mentally ill person. 

    Thus does recent mental-health advocacy in liberal democracies begin with medicalization as a pragmatic move, grounded in some real neurochemical facts, but mostly useful as a rhetorical strategy for getting suffering people some of the help they need to feel better. The pharmaceutical industry plays its role here too, in pushing the medical model of mental illness, and maximizing in every way it can the profits it derives from their medical treatment. Over time, however, the mentally ill become a distinct category of people, an “interest group” that may be said to have or to be blocked from having certain rights. And once the discursive practice of designating the depressed and the anxious as belonging to such a group has succeeded, it comes to seem to make sense to conceptualize the withholding of any social good from any member of that group as an instance of discrimination, even when that social good is death itself — the end of all social belonging. 

    Tremain’s campaign to purify natural language, so that it might someday bear no trace at all of any word or expression betraying what is likely our innate human tendency to differentiate among people — often affectionately, sometimes cruelly — in view of their real physical, mental, and characterological differences, is obviously going to go nowhere. One cannot even really imagine what a world thus purified might even look like. Or at least I cannot, though maybe that is because I spend more time reading Balzac than I do reading disability theory. As a campaign for actual change, I consider the abolition of purportedly ableist language to be a ridiculous nonstarter, and a troubling reminder of the left’s bad old habit of losing itself in trivial distractions and intra-left displays of righteousness. 

    But it is worse than that still. This particular current of the philosophy of disability, while honoring Michel Foucault as a sort of patron saint, seems to me to be doing entirely the opposite of what Foucault would have liked to see. On the one hand it insists, in a genuinely Foucauldian spirit, that we can have no meaningful pre-discursive notion of the normal and the pathological, nor of the boundary between these. On the other hand it habitually classifies people as “disabled” and “non-disabled.” In Tremain’s blog-based series “Dialogues on Disability,” various academics are interviewed about their career trajectories, their research interests, and their disabilities. A good number of these conditions turn out to be things like mild depression, or gluten intolerance. Often I find that I can’t help but think when I read them: Wait a minute! I’m more disabled than that guy! 

    The problem though is that disability is obviously not like race or gender or sexual orientation, in that the question, “Are you disabled?” can meaningfully be answered, “Not for the moment, no,” while none of these other descriptors is quite so easily alterable. Gender and sexual orientation do change sometimes, but every human being’s disability status changes simply in the course of living an ordinary and predictable human life. We are all disabled, I mean, even if some are feeling it more than others at any given moment. 

    Still, in spite of my own numerous diagnosed conditions, in spite of my decades of being poked and prodded and made to swallow meds at the insistence of the psychiatric establishment, I would not count as disabled, certainly not by the standards of the disability theorists I am criticizing, simply in view of the fact that I don’t talk the right talk. I take my condition to be the human condition, basically universal and unexceptional, even if it has sometimes manifested itself, in me, in dramatic ways. These ways have been so dramatic in fact that I now have official recognition, by the French government, as a “disabled worker” (the labels keep changing — “anxiety disorder,” “major depression with obsessive-compulsive symptoms,” etc. — while the official recognition helps to protect me against any liability that the underlying condition, however it is labeled, might bring about in my performance of my job duties). I take this to be a fact mostly about my bureaucratic positioning, not about my identity, but it is the identity part that you really have to play up if you want to play on the team of the disability theorists. 

    In this respect a “disabled person” turns out to be, for them, someone who has any number of conditions and describes themselves as disabled. And this way of carving things up, when you stop to think about it, looks, tragically, an awful lot like the one that is now written into law by Bill C-7. Who is disabled? Anyone who adopts the language of disability to describe their condition, which may well be an inner condition undetectable by poking and prodding. Who is eligible for MAiD? Anyone who makes the case that to deny them their untimely death would amount to discrimination. 

    Don’t you see the problem? A pervasive attitude has taken over significant portions of the neoliberal center and the progressive left alike. Those who adopt this attitude would have you believe that there are two different kinds of people: those who suffer and those who do not. The neoliberals would have you believe that this suffering comes from the pathological condition of the body; the disability theorists of the progressive left would have you believe that this suffering comes not from the body, but from the injustice of the society in which the embodied subject is situated. But either way the claim is false. There are not two different kinds of people. We are all suffering, and we are all endowed with the capacity for joy even in suffering. Connections with other people are a fairly reliable way of activating that joy. Even when the suffering is so great as to occlude from view any possible future joy, there remain some very compelling reasons to stick around and see if life might yet surprise you, or if you might surprise yourself. It really is that simple. 

    As I have said, however sincerely I aspire to live by my faith, it is very likely that I am going to mess it all up. At some point in the next, say, fifty years, it is perfectly possible that you will find me howling for a huge dose of morphine, just to get it all over with as fast as possible, and that at that moment I will have no interest at all in the well-being of others. Also I admit to finding the Stoic position on suicide attractive: as Seneca put it in his Moral Letters to Lucilius, “the road to liberty is always open. . . . The shortest and easiest, if only you are willing, is through your own veins.” This stance directly contradicts the teaching of Augustine, who represents my own narrower tradition, and who firmly insists that life, as God’s gift, is not ours to take. It does seem to me, however, that some synthesis of the Stoic and Christian positions might be possible: before considering whether you have “access to your veins,” or indeed to a heavy dose of morphine, ask first whether you have access to other mortal, fragile human beings who might yet need you. 

    Once that access has indeed been exhausted, whether because you are now completely immobilized or because you are now truly alone, I find that I am not prepared to stand on principle and insist to you that you must continue resisting euthanasia. Yet I also find that even in extremis I am wary of the intrusion of the state, of paperwork and legalism, into the intimate matter of suicide. I am reminded here of what I take to be an analogous consideration that was much debated in the era of the Iraq war, when some Americans of the chattering class began to warm up to the idea of “torture warrants” — that is, of the institution of a legal process for obtaining the right to torture a prisoner. Now it may well be that there will come a moment when the information an interrogator needs to extract from a detainee is so important, say, for the future survival of the world, that an interrogator will find it justified to extract it by any means necessary. Let him break the rules then, let him violate a real and sacred taboo. That would be far preferable to lending even the slightest hint of normalcy, of routineness, to the act of torture through the production of paperwork by which, even if only in some rare cases, it might be green-lighted by the law. And similarly with euthanasia — if it must happen, let it happen on the down-low.

    Just such a scenario is touchingly depicted in Denys Arcand’s beautiful film The Barbarian Invasions, from 2003, from a time in the history of Québec before the passage of Bill C-7. In it, an old soixante-huitard’s family and friends procure for him a significant dose of heroin, with the help of a corrupt police officer, and they give it to him lovingly, and he dies in a state of bliss. If resort to such shady means by a family or a community seems to most of us less suitable than passage through recognized institutional channels, out in the open and with the full approval of the state, this may have more to do with the fact that we are used to the state not only claiming its own interest in regulating matters of life and death, but also in punishing people who fail to respect these regulations. It does not strike me that this is something we are justified in taking for granted. 

    There are at least some deeds that, while illegal in many illiberal societies, are socially discouraged but still not susceptible to criminal punishment in countries such as the Netherlands or Canada. Adultery, for example. I am inclined to say of both adultery and euthanasia: probably a bad idea, but perhaps sometimes humanly necessary. Either way I am certainly not going to waste your time with any abstract principles. These are matters best worked out between loved ones, and if they do come out in the open there should be no question of the intervention of the law, or of the apparatus of criminal punishment. 

    It should not be too hard to get your hands on an ample dose of morphine, and neither should the state be too concerned with what the families of the terminally ill do with that dose. Least of all should the dying person have to spend a single second worrying about the scope of the law. No matter how much it tries to encompass everything, the truth is that human law can only ever reach as far as the boundary of death itself, and no farther. To choose death is to turn away from human law altogether, and it makes a mockery of death to stage it as a scene of legal compliance. “Death is not an event in life,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote. One implication of this, if true, might be that it is also not the sort of thing we should easily be able to add to our calendars. 

    Forgiveness at a Distance

    They would tell me they had forgiven. Then, without lowering their voices or altering their tone, they would add, “If he comes back here, we will kill him.”

    The sentence was not whispered. It came without irony, without threat. I heard it while sharing kola nuts in shaded courtyards, after Friday prayers as sandals lay scattered outside the mosque, and in late afternoons when men lolled on mats beneath trees in front of huts woven from dried grass and millet stalks.

    At first, I heard contradiction. Forgiveness and killing in the same breath. Mercy entangled with vengeance. It seemed to collapse moral categories that theology and political philosophy have spent centuries distinguishing. Forgiveness, we are told, releases resentment. It refuses retaliation. It opens the possibility of reconciliation.

    “If he comes back here, we will kill him.” Over time, I began to hear something else in that sentence. Not confusion. Not hypocrisy. Not even anger, at least not primarily.

    I began to hear the grammar. The sentence did not reconcile injury; it set the conditions under which proximity could be endured.

    Forgiveness, in the Lake Chad Basin, is often spoken from a distance.

    For more than a decade, communities across northeastern Nigeria and northern Cameroon have adapted to the vacillation between insurgency and counterinsurgency as ordinary life, what the anthropologist Michael Taussig calls “terror as usual.” Boko Haram fighters abducted schoolgirls, forced marriages, burned farms, and executed neighbors in public squares. State forces responded with raids, aerial bombardment, detention, and the sorting of displaced civilians into camps. Vigilante groups emerged, sometimes protective, sometimes predatory. Hunger moved in alongside fear.

    The war did not unfold along a single front. It accumulated within households.

    As one woman whose three sons joined Boko Haram explained, devastation was rarely singular. “If you confided in another person,” she said, “you found out that their children too were involved. If your child is not into it, your brother’s child is. If your brother’s child is not into it, your neighbor’s child is.”

    Now many of those who once lived in the bush are coming back.

    Some pass through official programs such as Operation Safe Corridor in northeast Nigeria or through state-run reintegration centers in northern Cameroon. They are screened, trained in trades, instructed in civic values, photographed in rows, declared repentant, and given identification cards as proof of rehabilitation.

    But society is not waiting in neutrality, in forgiveness. It is thick with memory.

    In Kolofata, a brigade commander leaned forward in his chair as he spoke to me. “Of course we have concerns,” he said. “My biggest concern is for our children. We are afraid that the repentant fighters will tell the younger ones about their adventures in the bush and that they will be fascinated.”

    His worry was about influence, about the seduction of narrative. But in other communities the anxiety ran further still. It was not only what returnees might say to children. It was whowhat these returnees’ children would grow to be.

    In Makilingaï, a traditional authority put it bluntly: “The lion’s cub is a lion.” The children, he said, “are still young, so we tolerate them, but their future worries us.” Another man expressed the same sentiment more directly: “A dog never gives birth to a cat. They are like their parents.”

    Suspicion attaches not only to the repentant body but to its offspring. In some neighborhoods, mothers quietly discourage their children from playing with the children of returnees. It unfolds in gestures, in small refusals, in games not joined.

    The commander paused before adding what he regarded as more dangerous still. “If someone recognizes a repentant member who has harmed their family, revenge could engulf the village.”

    Engulf. Revenge is not an isolated act. It spreads. It revives grievances that had been held in check. It draws in cousins and uncles and old rivalries that predate the insurgency.

    Here fear does not manifest as hysteria. It is vigilance.

    An elder once described coexistence with returnees as “dining with the devil.” Another reached for a more intimate image. “It is like having a snake inside your trousers.” He did not smile when he said it.

    He was concerned with the proximity. A snake in the bush can be avoided. A snake against your skin demands stillness, restraint, calculation.

    The state’s reasoning is pragmatic and, in its own way, lucid. Brigadier General Abdullahi Ishaq, one of the architects of the program of amnesty known as the “Borno Model,” explained it without sentiment. If the governor had said, “Come out and surrender, we will investigate you, and those who are guilty will be prosecuted,” he told me, “nobody would come out. Even the innocent will not come out.”

    Evidence is rarely intact. Weapons pass through too many hands. Time erodes memory. Trials would stretch for years. “You need evidence,” he reminded me, “but in the bush, it is your words against his.” 

    In his telling, justice is postponed not because it is unnecessary, but because it would stop people from surrendering.

    The philosopher Paul Ricoeur once described amnesty as a form of “commanded forgetting,” not the erasure of memory but its suspension in the name of social continuity. Something like that suspension is palpable here. Communities are asked to accept returnees as brothers. They are told that the men have been screened and are safe. Yet most have not witnessed the process. They have not heard confessions. They have not seen remorse.

    Part of the difficulty lies in how information travels and where it stops. I was repeatedly told that communication about returnees often ends at the level of the government, or with a narrow circle of intermediaries: traditional rulers, religious leaders, security officials, vigilante heads. Names are verified, forms are signed, files are stamped. But the wider community is rarely carried along in that process. People hear that “so-and-so’s son has returned from DDR,” yet who he is, what he did, what repentance means in his case, remains opaque.

    Communities are told, “Welcome them, they are your brothers.” But they are not given the means to assess risk or mediate tensions with families who lost someone. “We are informed,” a traditional authority in Kolofata explained to me, “but it is often very administrative.” Information circulates among leaders but rarely reaches far enough to calm fear.

    The injury is not only in what happened, but in what cannot be publicly processed. “Nobody has listened to me,” one woman in Maiduguri told me. “I have lost my husband, I lost four children, but nobody has listened to me. I do not even have the right to cry. Am I going to cry to myself?”

    A Lake Chad-based journalist framed it similarly. “People just want to be listened to,” he said. “The government has to come out and say, ‘We are sorry.’ But we are resettling people.”

    Publicizing names would invite retaliation. Speaking too openly would create targets. Limited disclosure can protect returnees. But it also breeds rumor, and rumor breeds mistrust.

    What is being asked of communities, then, is restraint without recognition, coexistence without collective consent.

    In Kolofata, Abba Goni Tchari did not speak to me about reconciliation. He spoke about vigilance. “We live with them,” he said, “but in fear.”

    The fear was specific. “We see them walking around. We know who killed our parents, our brothers, our friends.” Some, he said, “continue to collaborate. They supply them with food and equipment. They give them information about the movements of the security forces.”

    Repentance, in his view, is not an inward state. It is a visible severance. “If they stay in their corner whispering on the phone,” he said, “we think they have not yet fully returned to us.” Another traditional authority put it more bluntly. “For me, a repentant is a man on probation.” Probation without a defined end.

    Even strength could become suspicious. “They are very strong at work,” one man told me. “It is true. But that strength also frightens us.”

    The war was perpetrated by strong bodies moving confidently through familiar terrain. The body is not innocent.

    Across Borno State, I heard a refrain that shifted only slightly from place to place. “We forgive them,” people would say. “But we do not want them here.” Sometimes it was phrased more sharply. “We forgive, but we don’t want to see them.”

    This preference is not reducible to stigma. It is preventive. If the man who killed your father is resettled next door, forgiveness becomes unbearable. If he is relocated to another town, forgiveness becomes speakable.

    Distance is not the failure of forgiveness. It is the form that forgiveness takes when repair is incomplete.

    Ricoeur describes forgiveness as a gesture that unbinds the agent from the act, affirming that a person is not reducible to their worst deed. Yet he is equally clear that such unbinding cannot be commanded, certified, or scheduled. It remains exceptional, fragile, and dependent upon conditions that cannot be bureaucratically manufactured.

    In the Lake Chad Basin, where repair is partial and acknowledgment uneven, distance becomes a way to hold open the possibility of unbinding without collapsing memory into intimacy. The act is not erased. The injury is not dissolved. Proximity is simply modulated so that forgiveness does not become self-betrayal.

    Returnees often understand this with clinical clarity. Abatcha, who spent years in Sambisa, told me he did not return to his original community. “It’s true, I didn’t return to my own community,” he said. “But I’m not complaining about being in this host community.”

    What made the arrangement livable was separation. “We are housed in a particular neighborhood on the outskirts of the city,” he explained. “In this neighborhood, we live only among ourselves, those who were in Boko Haram.”

    It was not intimacy that produced safety. It was the buffering of recognition.

    The state sometimes enforces the same logic. Ishaq told me about a young man who claimed Konduga as his home. When representatives arrived to verify him, they insisted he was originally from elsewhere. “And so we moved him to Dikwa,” Ishaq said.

    Where someone is known, memory is sharp; where memory is sharp, revenge is possible.

    Stories of early returnees who were quietly killed moved through the towns. “They were seen for a time,” someone would say, “then they disappeared.” Their deaths circulated less as scandal than as warning. They became what Michael Taussig calls public secrets: widely known, rarely spoken aloud.

    And yet distance alone does not quiet resentment.

    In Bulum-Kuttu, during a community dialogue, a young man stood and spoke with restrained anger. “If a repentant member prospers while a victim of war starves,” he said, “peace will not last.” His complaint was not only about proximity. It was about distribution. Reintegration is often smoothed with food packages, vocational training, stipends. Victims receive condolences and condolences do not feed the hungry. “What about us that are unemployed, and we are here?” he asked. “The state is not even concerned about us.”

    A chaplain in Maiduguri framed the problem in theological terms. “If you are reintegrating repentants,” he told me, “you should also re-empower and restore the victims.” Otherwise, he warned, it begins to look as if the “Boko Haram business is lucrative.” Forgiveness without repair is fragile.

    Over time, I noticed another pattern. When I asked returnees where they were from and where they now lived, the answers rarely aligned.

    Return was rarely a return home.

    One woman released from the rehabilitation center in Meri told me she had wanted to go back to her original village. Instead, she was settled in Meri town. “The population fears us and treats us with mistrust,” she said. “They see us as terrorists.”

    At first she told me, “I don’t feel a sense of belonging.” Months later she amended it: “Now, I’ve already built my life here. I understand that I belong.” Belonging arrived not as welcome but as endurance.

    Another returnee, Abdoulaye, posed the dilemma directly. “Which community should we return to?” he asked. “Is it our community, or other communities?”

    He preferred distance. “I prefer to go further away,” he said, “to a place where no one knows my story.”

    Distance makes forgiveness possible. Anonymity is its price.

    In Jere, I was told repeatedly that one cannot tell who is who. Returnees farm, fish, ride commercial tricycles, pray. “If you move in the town,” one official said, “you will not differentiate who is who.” But maintaining this indistinguishability is laborious. Returnees learn to speak carefully, to temper confidence, to avoid appearing entitled. “Reintegration is harder work than people think,” one man told me.

    An accident reveals how fragile that labor can be. A returnee riding a motorbike struck a young girl. She died. In another setting, the event might have been framed as tragic misfortune. Here it became evidence. “You see,” someone said, “people who have lived with blood…”

    The sentence trailed off. It did not need completion. Suspicion does not wait for verification.

    Under prolonged insecurity, vigilance can become preemptive. Communities do not forgive uniformly. They sort. A child abducted at the age of five is spoken of differently than a commander who imposed punishments in the square. Even before forgiveness is considered, distinctions are made.

    The sorting is not gender-neutral.

    When men return, the quiet question is whether they once commanded. Did he hold a rifle? Did he enforce discipline? Even when a man insists he never shot anyone, people search for traces of authority in his bearing. If he speaks too boldly in a meeting, someone will murmur that “the bush is still in him.” The fear is not simply that he might kill again. It is that he might reassert power. “The men were the armed wing,” one traditional authority told me. “They were the direct danger.”

    Women, by contrast, are rarely feared as commanders. Yet they are watched diligently.

    In several communities I was told that women who returned from Sambisa were “essential to the logistics of the sect.” Not because they carried rifles, but because they carried goods. “The men fought. The women travel,” a local leader explained. Movement itself became evidence.

    If a woman made frequent trips toward border zones, if she disappeared for two days and reappeared quietly, suspicion accumulated. Stories circulated of women who slipped back to husbands still in the bush “as if going to the farm.” Whether verifiable or not, such stories thickened the air.

    There are hierarchies of vigilance. Men are watched for signs of dominance. Women are watched for patterns of movement. The categories promise clarity where certainty is scarce.

    And yet life continues.

    Returnees farm land allocated by chiefs. They share tricycles in rotating shifts. They guide soldiers away from mined terrain. Acceptance often arrives first as practice.

    A hunters’ leader once told me, “Hakki da ka rena shi kan soni maka ido.” The grass you disregard will injure your eye. He paid rent for returnees not out of sentiment but out of caution. Better to keep them within sight than to push them back toward uncertainty.

    Livelihood becomes containment. Work integrates bodies into society and renders them legible. To be visible within routine is safer than to be absent from it.

    Some returnees described this vigilance as care. “If I disappear for a few hours,” one man told me, “people ask where I am. They care.”

    Whether it is care or monitoring remains unresolved. What is clear is that peace here is not trust secured. It is vigilance shared.

    Yes, as they said, “We forgive but we don’t want to see them.”

    Forgiveness can be real and still require separation. It can be sincere and still be bounded. It does not dissolve fear. It manages it.

    “We have forgiven.”

    “And if he returns here, we will kill him.”

    Forgiveness here survives only at a distance. And sometimes that distance is the only thing keeping the war from returning in another form.

    The Lonely Passion of Rachel Auerbach

    On the sun-kissed afternoon of November 7, 1945, a clear but frigid autumn day, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw — the first such organization founded in the rubble of the destruction — dispatched a convoy of seven men and one woman, all of them Polish-Jewish survivors, to the destroyed extermination camp at Treblinka. Bundled in fur collars and wool coats, their mission was to gather whatever evidence they could of a catastrophe whose memory they devoutly wished to preserve, to piece together the extant fragments of destruction into a narrative whose enormity they hoped, somehow, to define. Their journey to Treblinka that day was a journey to the precipice of oblivion. They would do everything in their power to stop the catastrophe from disappearing into the abyss, where it already seemed destined to disappear. 

    The woman in the group was the writer Rachel Auerbach, a minor literary star of Yiddish Warsaw before the war, and it was she who was charged with assembling the evidence of destruction that the group collected into an official report. What she produced instead is a text that remains the most authoritative description of life in the camp to date. Written in Yiddish and never translated into any other language, only a few copies of it survive. Oyf di felder fun Treblinke, or In the Fields of Treblinka, is a haunting and furious document, 109 pages of impressions, photographs, and early interviews with Treblinka survivors written by someone who had already decided to devote the rest of her life to the project of testimony. The report is also that rare thing, a record of memory in the making. “I feel I should not spare other Jews their mood and so should acquaint them with, at least, a hundredth of a hundredth of that which has been done to Jews,” she wrote in her foreword. “All Jews should know. It is their national duty to know the truth.” 

    This pamphlet, eventually published in 1947, was a clear departure from the early methodological protocols elaborated by the Jewish Historical Institute, especially the group’s commitment to scientific objectivity at all costs. Auerbach had little use for objectivity, because she was certain that there was, and could be, no such thing, not in the face of Treblinka and the countless other sites like it across Jewish Europe. Oyf di felder fun Treblinke is, among other things, an argument for the value of subjectivity in the clarification of the past, and for the vulnerability on which it depends. It is written in the voice of one Jewish woman who demands that her readers recognize her as such, and who reports “the facts” she finds, but who also narrates her own experience of visiting the site and her own reactions to it. We hear her voice, her impressions, and most of all, her blinding, stupendous rage. Rage, too, is a fact. For her, it was arguably the most important fact of all. 

    In late July 1942, when the Germans began liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, the historian and activist Emmanuel Ringelblum had called an emergency summit of the Oyneg Shabbes archive, a task force of Jewish prisoners devoted to preserving every trace they could of the Jewish catastrophe. Auerbach was a key member of that group, and she handed over all the documents she had been collecting and all the testimonies she had conducted for immediate burial underneath the ghetto. But her batch of documents came with the following note, scribbled on a fragment of paper:

    I am handing over this unfinished essay to the archive. The fifth day of the “aktion.” Perhaps such horrors have occurred before in Jewish history. But such shame, never. Jews as tools [of the killers]. I want to stay alive. I am ready to kiss the boots of the worst scoundrel just to see the moment of revenge. REVENGE REVENGE remember.

    Miraculously, she survived, unlike Ringelbum, escaping the ghetto and living under a Polish name on the “Aryan” side of the city — but the emotions that she expressed in that note, a kind of last will and testament, would guide her for the rest of her life.

    In keeping with the promise that Auerbach made to herself, Oyf di felder fun Treblinke is nothing less than a daring intervention, a quiet revolution in genre, which even the Institute’s editorial board clearly recognized. “Although this reportage is more characteristically literary than scientific,” the group added in a disclaimer to the beginning of Auerbach’s pamphlet, “the facts contained within are fully in accord with our current research on the topic of Treblinka.” Auerbach’s fading pages were among the very first postwar attempts to come to terms with what had happened in the language of individual, and specifically survivor, emotions. Most of her contemporaries — her fellow survivors, and even the writers and the historians among them — buried those emotions as best they could. To show them would have been to admit a bias, to jeopardize the facticity of the catastrophe. But testimony, for Rachel Auerbach, was all that mattered. That the victims of a catastrophe, and only the victims, should narrate the story of their own destruction, however imperfectly, however inaccurately, was nothing less than a categorical imperative. 

    The further into the ruins of Treblinka Auerbach’s fact-finding team walked, the more they were assaulted by the putrid stench of death. They followed the path of the vanished Himmelstrasse to where the gas chambers had stood, now a muddy crater that sank deep into the ground. When the Nazis abandoned the camp, they had covered their machinery of mass liquidation with sand. But the bombs later dropped on the site had uncovered some of what they had sought to hide. On that afternoon in November 1945, you could see human remains, strewn over acres and acres. 

    “That isn’t just bones,” said the procurer from Kosów, traveling with the group, standing at the edge of the former gas chamber. At this point, he and the magistrate knew every corner of Treblinka, given the investigation they had launched after the war, under Soviet supervision. He wanted to make sure his Jewish visitors saw something in particular, and he pointed in a certain direction. There, caked in the sand, were masses of semi-decomposed bodies, bundles of entrails still somewhat intact. 

    The survivors gasped at the sight. They began pointing, shaking each other, arguing. Eventually, still wearing their overcoats and hats, the trappings of the bourgeois society to which they had managed to return, they leaped down into the pit and began fishing out the corpses with their bare hands, holding them, caressing them. They were not disgusted by these mangled fragments of people they did not know but whose places they might have taken. 

    “Take a look,” the magistrate added, pointing in the distance. “There are the bones of a child’s foot.” One of the survivors rushed toward it. “Be careful,” another member of the group said to him. “There’s still a bit of flesh hanging on the bone.” The survivor in question ran to the remains of the dead child just the same, and wept. He found a piece of newspaper on the ground, and wrapped the bones with what Auerbach described as “the gestures of a pious Jew packing an etrog.” (An etrog is a citrus fruit used for ritual purposes on the holiday of Sukkot, or Tabernacles.) 

    He cradled them, still weeping, holding them under his coat pocket, close to his heart. “Maybe it’s the foot of my little boy, who I carried here to be burned,” he said. The point, for Auerbach, was the “maybe.” “The uncanny part of it is,” she wrote, “although all of us have the urge to say something profound, and although profundity is either appropriate or entirely misplaced, it could coincidentally be true, a simple, factual truth.” 

    By then, Auerbach was acutely aware of her power as storyteller, as an architect of narrative and of the emerging memory that her narrative would shape and, later, define. For her, what was crucial, and nonnegotiable, was that this chilling expanse now covered with wildflowers not be remembered only as a site of mass murder. The combs and the shoes and the eyeglasses mangled in the mud had belonged to distinct individuals to be mourned, but it was most important that they were together members of one particular people, the Jewish people, to whom the catastrophe belonged and who were to be the sole custodians of its memory. Jewish suffering belonged only to the Jews, and specifically to those who had survived the conflagration — this was her great argument, an argument she would make, and lose, for the rest of her life. 

    It was there, in Treblinka, when she first awoke to the imperative of this stance and of just how difficult it would be to demand. At the time of this fact-finding mission, the catastrophe was not even primarily seen as a Jewish catastrophe, but rather was considered the evidence of Nazi and Fascist brutality, a legal challenge to adjudicate in the emerging field of “international law” and a metaphor for any number of abstract things — mankind’s capacity for evil chief among them. But on that November afternoon, Auerbach, who had lost everything, demanded that the world know that in the end there was nothing at all “abstract” about the catastrophe, and that this, in fact, was the point. Auerbach came to this realization, this conviction, when she looked closer at the objects and things that the looters had unearthed and left to rot. These were not just objects and things, but the specific relics of a specific people who had suffered a specific fate because of their peoplehood. All that mattered was salvaging for the Jews the authority to arbitrate what had befallen them and them alone. The Nazis had failed to banish their victims to oblivion. “They were not able to rid themselves of the relics of the hundreds of thousands of people who passed here. The objective evidence, the corpora delicti,” she wrote. 

    “And in case there were ever any doubt as to who these people were, those who left behind such abundant traces of their lives, to what nation they belonged — there it is, look closer.” She did. “Bent Sabbath candles — enough to gather whole collections of them. A piece of a tallis. Only just now discovered no doubt, lying white and fresh, with the blue star of David on an elegant Warsaw armband (from the corner of Karmelicka and Leszno Streets — the last word in ghetto fashion). A whole pile of women’s wigs.” These objects were the stuff of people who were noteworthy not because they had been murdered but because they had once lived, and because they had once lived as Jews. 

    Rachel Auerbach was not especially interested in exactly how the destruction had happened or by what means it had been perpetrated. She cared most, almost exclusively, about those to whom it had happened, and about restoring, however possible, their voices, dead or alive. “We could distribute the reliquaries of Treblinka to the entire Jewish nation,” she wrote toward the end of Oyf di felder fun Treblinke. That nation was the only place she felt its memory belonged. 

    When the political fate of postwar Poland became clear, Auerbach, along with so many other survivors, made aliyah to the newly established Jewish state. Her arrival in Israel was a moment of overwhelming emotion. “The ships that sail the sea come into harbor without incident. No truth, and no lie, will stop this stream — not even the fear of death,” she wrote in In Land Yisroel, or In the Land of Israel, her memoir of that time. None of her fellow refugees were daunted by the situation on the ground where they were going. “‘War — we have seen such already,’ answer escapees. ‘The hardships of this land, the unrest? Everything will be our own.’”

    When she landed in Haifa, she had almost nothing with her except for a few keepsakes and one box of prized possessions — the manuscripts she had written during the war alongside Ringelblum, the testimonies she had collected, the diaries she had kept, the letters she had sent and received. She had lost them once, deep beneath the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, and “I never parted from them, either on the train or on the boat,” she wrote. Needless to say, life was not easy in Israel in those days. A year after her arrival, she wrote to her friend Filip Friedman in New York — Friedman, a fellow Polish survivor, was the father of Holocaust studies in the United States; he had been the head of the Historical Institute in postwar Łódź. Auerbach was short on cash, she admitted, and it was almost impossible to get a loan from a bank. Israeli industry could hardly keep up with the enormous pressure of furnishing a new state almost overnight, especially one in the throes of an economic crisis that seemingly had no end in sight.

    “I’m going through various difficulties here, but I haven’t regretted for a moment that I settled here and not somewhere else,” she wrote to Friedman. 

    Only a few weeks ago I received an offer to move to Canada. Even though I have my closest friends there and even though it might be more peaceful and safer there in the event of a war, such an option is completely out of the question. Perhaps I have never felt so much in the right place in my life, as I do here right now. Regardless of the fact that the life of a Jewish writer here is not exactly a bed of roses.

    What she missed, she allowed herself to admit to Friedman, were her close friends, the few who remembered what the streets of Lemberg looked like when it was still called Lemberg (it is now called Lviv), who knew when to speak Yiddish and when to speak Polish, the few who understood. She had lost her entire family, just as Friedman had lost his; neither would ever know how, exactly, their loved ones had been murdered or where. And at the age of 51, Auerbach had no husband or romantic partner, nor the energy or desire to find one. “I only dream that, over time, my closest friends will gather here — those from before the war who are still around, and those from later times — the friends who are like my adopted family,” she wrote to Friedman. “Among them, you hold the most important place, but will you come here, and when? To tell the truth, Doctor — I regret immensely that you are not here.”

    Auerbach assured Friedman that she had not forgotten their shared mission. The weight of the documents that she had retrieved from the rubble of the ghetto and carried from Europe all the way to the small apartment she now kept in Hadar Yoseph, on the northeastern outskirts of Tel Aviv, was with her always. The new state had other priorities in 1950, of course, but the memory of the catastrophe had to be among them. She would ensure that. And she would ensure that whenever the memory was finally taken seriously, what people would remember most was yiddishkeit, about what and who had been lost, not about how and not about why. The documents demanded nothing less; they were relics of the Jewish past in the foyer of the Jewish future. 

    “Maybe at last there will be at least the germ of an institute and an archive on a state and national scale,” she wrote to Friedman. There would indeed be such an institution very soon, but it would never follow her lead.

    On July 29, 1954, the first cornerstone was dedicated in Jerusalem for the memorial institution that would become the official answer of the State of Israel to the memory question, as elusive as it was inescapable. A black backdrop hung behind a long stage, with Hebrew letters that spelled YAD VASHEM. (The Hebrew words mean “a monument and a name,” from Isaiah 56:5: “I will give them in My house and within My walls a marker and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off.”) Six Israeli flags flew in the wind that day, high above Jerusalem, one for each million. A crowd of hundreds gathered — survivors of the catastrophe, visiting dignitaries, and government ministers among them. The crowd recited the kaddish and El Malei Rachamim, or “God Full of Mercy,” the Jewish prayers for the dead. 

    The Israeli government had allocated a parcel of land for the project on Mount Herzl, then as now hallowed ground in the Jewish state. Named after the patriarch of Zionism — who himself had been reinterred on these very slopes a few short years before — this was already Israel’s Pantheon, where it buried its war dead and celebrated its heroes. In putting Yad Vashem here, the government was sending a message to the world, but most of all to its own people. This was exactly how the millions slaughtered in Europe were to be seen — as heroes. 

    The establishment of Yad Vashem came after years of argument in Israel about whether the Jewish catastrophe even deserved to be commemorated in the Jewish state. As early as 1942, in the throes of the destruction in Europe, the activist Mordechai Shenhavi proposed a memorial complex that would insist that Jews had resisted. “Our generation will teach and the coming generations will learn that our brothers were not led like ‘lambs to the slaughter,’” he wrote. This was an important phrase, from Isaiah 53:7, the same one that would soon be used repeatedly to make the same argument against commemorations that gave the impression of Jewish passivity in the face of their Nazi oppressors. Shenhavi was one of the first to insist on the fundamental connection between heroic resistance and the Zionist commitment to Jewish self-rescue against all odds: “Here we will establish the historical-national fact of how great our part was in the war against the terrible nemesis.”

    When Shenhavi submitted his proposal to the executive board of the Jewish National Fund, the central organization founded in 1901 to purchase tracts of land in Ottoman Palestine for Jewish settlement, they were horrified. They felt he was disrespecting the memory of the murdered before the killing had even stopped. Abraham Granovsky, its director general, was incredulous. “Can the suffering of Israel be used as a tool?” he asked at the meeting when the memorial complex was first discussed. Jacob Tsur, the head of public relations at the Jewish National Fund and soon to be Israel’s ambassador to France, was likewise provoked. Surely, he insisted, the better use of the organization’s time and resources in a moment of unprecedented crisis was to help those in need — the destitute survivors who would soon arrive in Palestine. 

    Opinions changed, and quickly, once Israeli officials saw commemoration efforts take root elsewhere. In France, for instance, the survivor Isaac Schneersohn — a descendant of the Lubavitcher line — established the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporain, or Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, a documentary initiative that led to a major public memorial to the Holocaust in the center of Paris. Shenhavi refused to accept defeat. “In the eyes of the world, Jerusalem will have been vanquished by Paris,” he told David Ben-Gurion. His agitation paid off. On May 18, 1953, almost entirely in response to Schneersohn’s upcoming dedication ceremony, Israel’s parliament passed the Yad Vashem Law, claiming ownership of the Jewish catastrophe for the Jewish state.

    The task of Yad Vashem is to gather in the homeland material regarding all those members of the Jewish people who laid down their lives, who fought and rebelled against the Nazi enemy and his collaborators, and to perpetuate their memory and that of the communities, organizations and institutions which were destroyed because they were Jewish.

    Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s president at the time, gave the dedication that day in June 1954, paraphrasing a few words from Psalms: “Our legs stand here, in your gates, Jerusalem, to lay a cornerstone for an enterprise whose goals have within them to fill all Jews’ hearts with awe,” he said. “This building will be the foundational building on the road to realizing the great objective of Yad Vashem for the Shoah and heroism in Israel. And may it be God’s will that we may complete this building and establish it from bottom to top and add great buildings that will be worthy of serving as a symbol in memory of our martyrs and heroes.” In a way, that last line said it all. The new memorial center was the first one established and conceived by a government.

    Mordechai Shenhavi, who had fought for an institution of this kind since 1942, was given the honor of lighting the ceremonial remembrance torch that day — his consolation prize. But the real victory behind Yad Vashem belonged to Ben-Gurion’s education minister, Ben-Zion Dinur, who was named president of the institution that day and would define it in its early years. 

    Dinur was a distinguished Jewish historian, but for him history was a vehicle to advance ideology. History was not what you said about the past; it was how you invented the future. When Zionism entered the Jewish arena in the late nineteenth century, it was fringe and frail. Dinur’s kind of history gave it its momentum and built it into the movement it became. The historical narrative that advanced the Zionist cause was actively built in real time, and it had no greater architect than Dinur, who understood better than anyone in Mandate Palestine the staggering political potential of the past. “The ego of the nation exists only to the extent that it has a memory,” he famously insisted, “to the extent that the nation knows how to combine its past experiences into a single entity.” His life’s work was the making of that memory and that nation. 

    The 37-year-old Ben-Zion Dinaburg — he would not Hebraize his name to Dinur until Ben-Gurion asked him to do so decades later — arrived in Palestine from Odessa in 1921 with his wife and son but without a Ph.D. He said he had lost the draft of his dissertation — it was called “Government and Self-Government in Palestine from Septimius Severus to Diocletian” — in a Petrograd library, and it is unclear if he ever completed the thesis. Although the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in 1918, would not officially open its doors until 1925, the Palestine of the British Mandate was already an overcrowded intellectual territory, full of scholars and writers with the most impressive credentials that European institutions could confer. One could not just sashay one’s way onto a faculty, and certainly not a history faculty, without a degree. So Dinaburg began his career at the Jewish Teachers Training College in Jerusalem and was appointed only a lecturer without tenure at the Hebrew University in 1936. For most of his career, he was really an independent scholar, but he used that independence to his advantage. 

    Almost immediately upon his arrival in Palestine, he began the tireless work of crafting a decidedly Zionist history of the Jewish people, a history that was nakedly and even proudly teleological — a history that had a clear destination in sight, Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, which Dinur insisted was the unifying bond of all Jewish history throughout the millennia, its “essence.” This was history that began at the end, his chosen end, and that he selectively constructed backward, to the beginning. 

    Much later in life, in a seminal multi-volume work published in the 1960s called Yisrael Ba-gola, or Israel in Exile, Dinur declared that Zionism “was like a huge river into which flowed all the smaller streams and tributaries of the Jewish struggle down the ages.” The riverine metaphor was a telling one, not merely because rivers have a clear direction of travel but also because there is no stopping them. “So powerful was the impetus of the revolt against the Galut [exile] that it forced the historical course of the nation back into its original channels and recreated the character of the modern Jew in the likeness of his ancient ancestors,” he wrote.

    In 1935, Dinur, alongside Yitzhak Baer, the great German-Jewish medievalist who had likewise immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1930, co-founded the scholarly journal Zion, which quickly became one of the most important venues for the study of Jewish history in the Hebrew language. In their inaugural issue, the two Zionist emigres wrote a short and stirring mission statement: the history they would write would legitimize, with the weight of the past, the political aspirations of the Jewish nation that was already coalescing in the historic land of Israel, a project that by 1935 already had the imprimatur of the British government and the support of the League of Nations. “The fundamental assumption of our historiography, which should serve also as the point of departure for the discussion of the functions of Jewish history and the determination of its research objectives, is the history of the Israelite nation, which was never interrupted and whose significance never waned,” they wrote. The nation needed to be seen as a political constant, because otherwise the Jewish “return to Zion” made no sense as a political aim. “Jewish history is consolidated by a homogenous unity which engulfs all periods and all places.” The river, in other words, was already there; all that was left to be done was channel it in the right direction. To Dinur, Yad Vashem would help him channel that river once and for all. 

    Dinur hired Rachel Auerbach on March 1, 1954, a few months before the dedication on Mount Herzl. She came highly recommended. Given her work for the Jewish Historical Commission in Łódź after the war, she seemed a perfect fit for collecting testimony. She was 51 years old, ailing, alone, carrying in abundance the memories of the past. Although proud as ever to be living in the Jewish state, it had not been easy. She had spent her first few years in Israel sitting in cafés in Tel Aviv writing about Warsaw. (Her Warsaw writings, from the war years and after, have recently been published in English as Warsaw Testament by White Goat Press, edited by the scholar Samuel Kassow.) She continued to believe that testimony was therapy — in gathering it she hoped to heal others, but also to heal herself. “According to the opinions and the experiences of psychologists, the healing is painful — to the recorder no less than the teller,” she wrote. “Nonetheless, it is known to us that denial and the stifling of sorrow cause much greater damage.” 

    For Auerbach, this kind of catharsis had to be the primary purpose of Yad Vashem — not the heavy-handed ideological instruction imagined by Dinur and his deputies from Hebrew University. To justify its existence, such a worthy institution had to belong to the survivors and to them alone. If not for them, what would be the point of collective memory? “For them, I suffered all the time and received with love the suffering and the pain bound up in them,” Auerbach insisted. “For them, I neglected my literary work because I saw in this a mission and an obligation and a justification of the fact that I remained alive.”

    When she started at Yad Vashem, its directorate had her work not in Jerusalem, but in Tel Aviv, because it was there that the vast majority of survivors had congregated once they arrived in Eretz Israel. But Auerbach’s terrible loneliness was not immediately assuaged by her employment, since she was the only staff member of the Department of Testimony. She worked at spare desks in the offices of other companies, and it would be a year before she had a desk of her own, in a small apartment in central Tel Aviv that Yad Vashem rented. She would be alone there, too. The few friends she had in the city were from the old world, which is all they ever discussed when they met at Café Kassit or Café Landwer, sipping iced coffee in the dry heat, reminiscing about Warsaw. A few years after making aliyah, she had still not mastered Hebrew.

    If collecting testimony was a means of protecting the historical record, for Auerbach it was also a means of creating the kind of community that she so desperately craved in her private life. “My personal experience has taught me that between the witness and the interviewer, who is also, in many cases, one of the survivors of the Shoah, an emotional connection will easily be formed, based on the experience of fate in the past,” she wrote. 

    Immediately after she began at Yad Vashem, Auerbach presented her colleagues with detailed and thoughtful guidelines about how they — she — would go about collecting testimony. Even before she took the job, she had reflected long and hard on the guidelines that she and her colleagues had developed in Łódź after the war. Although she still felt that the general approach they had recommended then was valid, particularly their focus on the historical validity of subjectivity, she was also convinced that it was out of date, since technologies had advanced. Cheap and readily available tape recorders would be essential for Yad Vashem to do valuable work. In Łódź after the war, she, Friedman, Kermish, and the others often had to interrupt their witnesses to take down their full stories. But these interruptions, Auerbach said, often stopped the flow of “the tension and emotion, the drama and the excitement, and the literary energy.” Worst of all, when interviewers scribbled their notes during those pauses, they sometimes infused what they wrote with their own memories. In 1954, she proposed to Dinur and his staff that they invest in a number of these new tape recorders, but her request was denied. 

    Auerbach was immensely proud of the legacy of Emmanuel Ringelblum — rightly so for his seminal and heroic contribution — and what it represented: the fight against oblivion in the darkest days of the war. As she would note in Davar, the legendary and now-defunct Israeli newspaper, in the late 1950s: “An entire people clutching pens, in ghettoes, in hiding places, in the faces of gas chambers and machine gun muzzles, found the strength to write — for the sole reason that at some time the world should know.” 

    She clearly saw herself as the sole custodian of that legacy, as its ambassador to the new Jewish state and especially at Yad Vashem in its early days, a self-conferred status that came with a certain self-importance. But testimony, the collective memory of the Jewish catastrophe — and it had to be collective — was first and foremost a matter of emotional urgency for Auerbach, a psychological imperative. She felt she had no choice in the matter: it had chosen her. As she would say when she appeared before Yad Vashem’s directorate in 1958: 

    Woe to the man who is deeply involved in this experience, and in particular if he is a bereaved and solitary man who lost dear ones in this great tragedy, and whose memory recalls over and over again pictures of what his eyes have seen in those days. And with all this he feels that the work must be done specifically by those who understand and feel — and he knows that this work must be done now and cannot be put off because the witnesses are dying and in a little while those taking their testimony and researchers who belong to the generation of destruction will also die.


    Predictably, things grew tense between Dinur and Auerbach almost immediately after she began work. She had never been someone meant to work for other people, and he had always been someone who expected complete and total deference. There was also the fact that Auerbach was a woman. Dinur viewed his employee as impetuous, insubordinate, and lacking in scientific rigor; the survivor saw her boss as arrogant, entitled, and entirely unqualified to shape the memory of a catastrophe that he himself had not experienced. In a sense, they were each correct in their assessment of the other. But in 1958, their fraught relationship gave way to an ugly public brawl. 

    In the early years of his tenure, Dinur, in keeping with his work at Hebrew University, was keen to fold the recent catastrophe into the larger framework of Jewish history, where it could be studied analytically. Historical study of any kind demanded nothing less. Yad Vashem, in the vision of its first director, would be most beneficial as an extension of an existing research center, attached to an institution of higher learning that championed the values he hoped would govern the emerging field of research on the slaughter of the European Jews. He had clear views on what that field should look like. As he saw it, research on the catastrophe had four key components: “persecution of the Jews,” “research on the Jewish question,” “the war against antisemitism,” and “hatred of Israel,” by which he meant the Jewish people, not their state. Then there was his main project, the project to which he had devoted the majority of Yad Vashem’s very limited funds in its first few years — Pinkas HaKehilot, or The Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, a sprawling, ambitious effort to tell the story, with painstaking documentation, of each and every single Jewish community in Europe, from its first recorded traces to its destruction at the hands of the Nazis. 

    Dinur saw Yad Vashem as his own, and to some extent it was. After all, this was an institution whose charter he had personally ushered through the Knesset when next to no one else in Israel was interested in the study of the catastrophe. But the point of Yad Vashem had been to serve as the central custodian of the memory of a particular event that neither Dinur nor any of his other deputies had actually lived. The men — and they were all men — that he appointed as staff members in 1953 were fellow scholars who had either immigrated to Palestine before the war, as he had, or who had been born there. For the most part, these men had been trained in the school of Zionist history at Hebrew University, in its absolute certainty. But the survivors who joined the staff shortly thereafter — Auerbach, Nachman Blumental, Josef Kermish, Nathan Eck, and others — felt that the future of Yad Vashem should belong to them, because they had lived the catastrophe. Why should they take orders from those who could never understand?

    For years, Dinur’s staff faulted the survivor historians for being motivated solely by their emotions rather than the conventions of scientific research, while the survivor historians dismissed those in charge for not understanding those emotions in the first place. Again, each faction was probably correct in its view of the other, but the final decisions were always Dinur’s to make. The tipping point came in 1958, when he decided to demote Auerbach from running the department in Tel Aviv, because of her “low output.” He imagined her focusing only on survivors from Poland, which in his mind was all she knew anyway. Auerbach sensed that she was being forced out and fought back, going public — a move that Yad Vashem’s directorate was not expecting. 

    The historians on staff, all of whom had met in Łódź after the war, loyal to each other always, banded together. Auerbach, Blumental, Kermish, and Eck signed an open letter establishing themselves as a distinct and special group within the institution, decrying that “all participation in the planning and direction of work has been taken from us.” They attacked Yad Vashem under Dinur’s leadership as having pushed away those “with experience and ability in research and literary work”; for them, these were the most important qualifications, the only ones that mattered. Auerbach became their avatar: “Instead of appreciating her achievements and encouraging her, it was decided to remove her from her position. . . . She has been subjected to destructive criticism about everything she has done and conflicting claims and insulting accusations have rained upon her.”

    Auerbach took to the pages of Davar to fan the flames of public outrage. It was an opportune moment to make her case, and she knew it. At long last the Israeli public — filled now with so many survivors — had gradually begun to take an active interest in the catastrophe. This was especially true after the dramatic trial of Rudolf Kastner, the spokesman of Israel’s Ministry of Trade and Industry. One day in 1952, the hotelier Malkiel Gruenwald, himself a survivor, had been walking in Tel Aviv when he saw Kastner, whom he instantly recognized as Rezső Kasztner, who had served on the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee during the war. Kastner saved a number of Jews from deportation, but failed to inform the majority community of the fate that soon awaited them. Gruenwald had never forgotten this. In a series of pamphlets he accused Kastner of having collaborated with Adolf Eichmann in 1944 to save a small number of Jews who were close to him at the expense of more than 1,600 others. The ensuing scandal, the most vicious in the history of the young state, toppled the Israeli government. On Kastner’s behalf, the government sued Gruenwald for libel, but he was acquitted on all counts, with Judge Benjamin Halevi — later a judge in the Eichmann trial — accusing Kastner of “selling his soul to the devil.” Kastner, who compared his case to the Dreyfus Affair, became one of the most hated men in Israel. He was assassinated outside his Tel Aviv apartment building in 1957 by a right-wing fanatic.

    A tidal wave of outrage about the memory of the catastrophe had crashed over the Jewish state, and Auerbach would capitalize on that sentiment. In October 1958, she published “What Is the Conflict in Yad Vashem About?” in Davar. Yad Vashem, she wrote, “this great and holy thing that deeply touches on the hearts of the Shoah survivors, is in danger.” With a few short paragraphs she turned the internal debate into a popular movement; survivors such as herself represented the will of ordinary people, while the institution’s leaders represented the interests of those who could never understand what the catastrophe had meant. “With the people and for the people!” she wrote of Yad Vashem. “Not an institution for simple and apathetic scholarship, and not a factory for documentation — and certainly not a bureaucratic center empty of content — but rather a popular enterprise, alive and creative and exciting!”

    Dinur fired back, doubling down on the question of academic standards. “Miss Auerbach claims that she has, as it were, ‘a system’ of her own for taking testimony, built upon ‘expertise’ and on ‘a special way’ of interviewing the witnesses,” he told a reporter from Davar. “I do not evaluate the subject from a ‘literary’ point of view; from a historical view I have serious doubts.” Whenever questioned about her methods, or the alleged lack thereof, Dinur said, “she responds that she came from Poland.”

    He got it wrong: this was never a debate about research standards but about the emotional power of the catastrophe, and he had just launched an ad hominem attack on one of its most visible survivors. An avalanche of press came out in support of Auerbach, and Dinur resigned in January 1959. Auerbach — and testimony, in its raw, emotional form — had won, at least for the time being. 

    During the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Auerbach was asked to testify. She had requested that she be granted an hour and a half to comply, which anyway would not be enough. How could an entire civilization, the prewar world of the Jews, her world, be described in so short a time? She was told she could have only forty-five minutes. In the end, she would get a half hour.

    At the very trial that would cement the preeminence of testimony — and, specifically, the testimony of Holocaust survivors — in narrating the past, Auerbach’s own time on the stand exposed its limitations. The transcript of her remarks is painful to read. She came to the courtroom expecting a kind of communal catharsis among those who had also been through the inferno, but instead found a tribunal of judges and a chief prosecutor solely interested in prosecuting a crime. 

    Asked by Gideon Hausner, Israel’s chief prosecutor, to give a concise summary of Jewish Warsaw before the war, she embarked on an endless digression that she could not control, an emotional outpouring that lingered for far too long on her initial impressions of the city in the 1920s. She suddenly became self-conscious about how long she was speaking. “I do not intend to make a speech,” she told the court. 

    Hausner was clearly annoyed. “Please be good enough to answer the questions.” 

    “I believe this depends on you, Mr. Hausner,” said the Justice Moshe Landau presiding over the trial, also frustrated. 

    The two men openly discussed Auerbach as if she were a child. “I shall endeavor to get the witness to be concise,” Hausner said. “I shall try to guide her.” 

    Judge Landau, a German Jew, clearly had little patience for the idea of testimony as catharsis. This was a trial, after all, not public therapy. “Mrs. Auerbach, you were asked what activities you undertook in order to avoid cultural degeneration,” he said at one point. 

    “It would seem that, possibly without even being aware of it, we did it. There was a large number of writers, artists, the working intelligentsia, of Warsaw,” she said. “Please excuse me that I cannot express this briefly.” 

    “But please answer the questions, that is all we ask.” Eventually the clock ran out, and the representative from Yad Vashem was humiliated. 

    Seven years after the Eichmann trial, in 1968, Rachel Auerbach turned 65 and was told that it was time for her to retire from Yad Vashem, the only home she had ever known in Israel, despite her frustrations with it. She was furious — not only to be out of a job, but because she could no longer ensure the survival of her testimony department, and its special office in Tel Aviv. Her budgets had been slashed every year, and the writing had been on the wall for some time, especially after her public campaign against Dinur a decade earlier. Now her life’s work was at stake. “This is my personal tragedy because it touches my heart so much,” she wrote to Jacob Robinson in New York, “the enterprise that I built is like a child that I brought into the world.” (Robinson, who deserves to be more widely known, was a Lithuanian-Jewish lawyer and diplomat who was instrumental in establishing institutions of Shoah memory and creating protocols for the war crimes trials in Nuremberg and in Jerusalem.) She felt profoundly small, and she was more sanguine about her vulnerability than usual. “If only there stood behind me a husband, a party, or some influential lobby. . . the directorate would not behave this way.” 

    Soon Auerbach was herself again, masking her pain with belligerence, as she always had done. “I, in any event, do not want to waste any more years on a hopeless struggle for the recovery of such an important but wretched institution.” No matter how much she pretended that she could get by without Yad Vashem, it had been her entire identity after nearly twenty years in Israel, and it had been taken away from her. She had nothing left, not even her health. In 1972, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in December 1975, she was hospitalized for the last time. Her old colleagues from Yad Vashem, at least the ones whom she had not alienated, were aware that she was isolated in the world, and banded together to raise money for her care. In the words of one Yad Vashem union employee: “Rachel is a lonely and forlorn woman. Her family was killed in the Holocaust, and there is no one to take care of her.” She died a few months later, alone, in the Rivka Hospital in Petah Tikvah outside Tel Aviv. She was 72 years old.

    There is a photograph of Auerbach later in life, standing on a quiet residential street in the Kiryat Shalom neighborhood of her adopted city. Named in his honor, this street of squat dilapidated houses on the periphery of Jaffa was Israel’s small memorial to Emmanuel Ringelblum, the great archivist of the catastrophe and the great love of Auerbach’s life, even if that love was never more than platonic. They were comrades in the same cause, a cause that she never abandoned, even decades after the war. One night Auerbach made the trek to Rehov Ringelblum and stared for quite some time at the plaque with her mentor’s name, adorned with an Israeli flag. The memories of Oyneg Shabbes came rushing back — the urgency of their documentary mission, the pain of the loss, but also the feeling of having once been part of something that mattered, if only for a fleeting moment. Nothing had ever mattered to her that way again — if Oyneg Shabbes was the pride of her life, it was also the great joy. The great oyneg.

    “There is one thing I know for sure as I look back through the prism of what happened then,” Auerbach wrote. “If it was indeed fated that of the many people who collaborated in the most important project in Ringelblum’s life only two would survive. . . then we can say that we fulfilled the obligation that Ringelblum laid on each of us: to search for, dig up, and reveal to the world what he collected.” She had kept her promise after all those years.

    The Venus Effect: In Defense of Voyeurism

    Aphrodite

    In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder records the legend of an ancient traveler who, sometime in the fourth century bce, voyaged to Knidos, a city on the western tip of the Datça peninsula in modern-day Turkey. The young man came specifically to see the statue of Aphrodite in the temple that the Knidians had erected to her cult. The great Athenian sculptor Praxiteles had created two monumental images of the goddess: one clothed, the other nude. The former was purchased by the people of Kos — an island whose mountains are visible from the temple ruins on Knidos on a sunny day — in keeping with the Greek moral preference for female modesty. But it was the Knidians who, in acquiring the less desired (if not less desirable) of the statues, lucked out. The naked Aphrodite generated an explosive shock, garnering renown across the Mediterranean world, attracting thousands of pilgrims like Pliny’s young man, and ultimately transforming the course of Western art. 

    It also laid bare our vexed and timeworn relationship with what we have come to call “the gaze,” an affair we have long since mangled. When the man in Pliny’s account reached the temple, which sat on a cliff overlooking the sea, he was confronted with an open shrine to Aphrodite. It was designed this way, as Pliny affirms, “so that the statue of the goddess can be seen from all sides.” And indeed, as the man discovered, “it is admirable from all angles.” Aphrodite, standing contrapposto, held the end of a robe that rested on a hydria in her left hand, while covering her pubic area with her right. The man fell in love with the statue and, so the legend goes, hid himself in the temple at night in order to copulate with it. Four hundred years later, Pliny felt the need to tell this story so as to explain a feature on the statue that, we can guess, puzzled his contemporaries: “a stain bears witness to the young man’s lust.”

    If you were to examine the Aphrodite of Knidos that stands in the Museo nazionale in Rome, you would not be able to identify the traveler’s stain. Nor would you find it on the armless Aphrodite in gallery 162 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Venus de’ Medici in the Uffizi Gallery is similarly sans tache. There is no Aphrodite of “Knidian type” in the world which bears this mark. All of them are ancient copies; the original has, intriguingly, been lost to time. 

    But that there are so many copies — about 130 that we know of, plus ancient currencies stamped with her figure — is a far more intriguing matter. The mania over the bathing Aphrodite, itself the result of what the scholar Nigel Spivey calls Praxiteles’ intended “strategy of épater la bourgeoisie,” created what “has arguably been one of the most influential artworks ever created.” Coming nearly three centuries after the first male nude forms in Archaic Greek sculpture (the kouroi), the Knidian Aphrodite is commonly cited as the first female nude in Western art. It would not be a stretch to say that every female nude thereafter, from the Venus de Milo to Manet’s Olympia, stands in the shadow of the Aphrodite unwanted by the people of Kos.

    But why was she unwanted? The answer drives at the very heart of our timeless ways of seeing. We are not the first civilization to be troubled by the gaze. The male gaze, the colonial gaze, the medical gaze — our many means of transmitting and reenacting structures of power by way of the human eye have been a concern for humankind for longer than we might suppose. And we might learn from this history something unsettling to us: that the power of the voyeur does not lie where we think it does. Our sense of this power and our ability to speak of it plainly are corrupted by the very term “voyeur,” by voyeurism, which we cannot help but use pejoratively. But the arraignment of the term denatures its meaning, converting a taboo (an essential part of human life) into a crime. 

    The naked Aphrodite affronted the people of Kos because she was taboo. By this I don’t mean simply that Praxiteles had depicted her in an uncouth fashion. The thing is more charged than that. Freud notes that the taboo signifies at one and the same time the sacred and the forbidden, the consecrated and the unclean. Unlike moral codes, the taboo does not belong to a system that provides reasons for its restrictions; rather, taboo prohibitions “have no grounds and are of unknown origin,” being in certain cases (like the incest taboo) so mysteriously common across human societies that anthropologists have called them “cultural universals.” Crucial to the Freudian conception of the taboo is the ineffaceable relationship between prohibition and latent desire. Taboo, Freud argues, is not arbitrary. It is “directed against the most powerful longings to which human beings are subject.” He posits that “where there is a prohibition there must be an underlying desire.” 

    Though it is true, as Spivey writes, that “Greeks and Romans alike were relatively shameless in their acknowledgement of the force of erotic desire,” they nevertheless coded one’s proximity to this shamelessness according to signifiers of class and status, in ways that we might find familiar. Women from respectable parts of society were thus expected to be creatures of the oikía, of the hearth, spending their time indoors and remaining, at all times, clothed. (It was rare even for their husbands to see them naked.) On the other hand, hetairai, or courtesans, were of a strata unbound by such proscriptions. Attending a symposium, men could expect the company of certain female companions hired for their gratification. And indeed, one finds many black-figure vases depicting hetairai in a state of undress. The critic Mireille M. Lee explains that, “as non-ideal figures,” the hetairai “do not conform to the same dress code as proper women.” 

    And yet, proving the deep contradiction immanent to the taboo, one also finds on the inside of some red-figure cups what Spivey calls “an almost telescopic view of one or two women ‘at toilette.’” It was not uncommon, as Lee reminds us, to find images of respectable brides “undressed in the context of the preparations for the wedding, especially the bridal bath,” but their being painted on the inside of drinking vessels, to be “revealed” to the reveler as the cup is drained, betrays a different intention. As one imbibes long and deep over the course of an evening, one is treated to a forbidden scene of private nudity. 

    Aphrodite, in all aspects of her identity — from the codes of her worship to the history of her syncretization as a Greek goddess — partakes of this same paradox. In the mythological terms handed to us by Hesiod, she is said to have issued from the white foam of the sea (a reaction formed when Uranus’ genitals, lopped off by his own vengeful son, were cast into the Mediterranean from on high) and to have emerged whole on the shores of Cyprus. But anthropologically she is probably derived from Astarte, a Near Eastern deity associated with sexuality and beloved by the Phoenicians, who had been active on Cyprus in the ninth century bce and erected a temple to the goddess there around 850. In Babylon, the cult of Astarte (or “Ishtar”) was known to Herodotus for its practice of “sacred prostitution,” which appears to have amounted to an offer of sex by temple attendants in exchange for an oblation to the deity. Though Herodotus speaks of these practices disapprovingly, Aphrodite had such attendants of her own in Corinth. And by the Roman era, “priestesses” of this sort were said to reach a thousand in number. The goddess, whom propriety dictated should always appear covered, was so foundationally associated with sex that her name became slang for making love (aphrodisiazein), and in various cities she was worshipped as Aphrodite Pornê (prostitute), Aphrodite Hetaira (courtesan), and Aphrodite Philommeidês (genital-loving). 

    That these associations were, in Praxiteles’ time, sedimented within a social prohibition is evidenced by the shockwaves his creation produced, and by the prurience with which it was charged. By enshrining her in a temple the Knidians gave license to those repressed desires to which the taboo attested — license not to be fulfilled, but to be excited. Fulfillment was the trap lying on the other side of the asymptote, which should never be reached. Another version of Pliny’s legend, related several decades later by the satirist Lucian, allegorizes to this pitfall: after consummating his passion with the statue, the young traveler, in his shame, hurls himself over the cliff and into the sea. Here the man implicitly recognizes in his behavior a constitutive feature of the taboo, as defined by Freud — namely, that taboo is contagious. “Anyone who does what is forbidden, that is, who violates a taboo,” Freud writes, “becomes taboo himself.” He may therefore possess “the quality of arousing forbidden desires in others and of awakening a conflict of ambivalence in them.” The conflict of ambivalence, the Aphrodisian contradiction that works dialectically upon us all, cannot in fact be tolerated. It must be destroyed. 

    But this is mere legend. No one really dies for having come in contact with the Aphrodite of Knidos. The version that Lucian tells is actually a frame tale, told to two contemporary travelers of the second century ce who have come to see the statue. One of them, a heterosexual, sees the goddess akalyptos (“uncovered”) and smothers her in kisses. Then the pair proceed to admire her backside, and it is the other man, a homosexual, who has his delight. Aroused, he commends “those parts of the goddess which would befit a boy.” At this point, the men discover the famous stain on Aphrodite’s thigh, prompting the priestess who has been guiding them to tell the story of the ancient paramour who left it. It is not so much a cautionary tale (though it is not difficult to imagine the men, as Lucian describes them, taking their turns with the statue) as it is a ridiculous suggestion. The point of the statue, for the voyagers, is precisely to inflame their lust but not to consummate it, to sanction their exploration of taboo within a “safe space.”

    As should by now be clear, the taboo in question is not merely the manner of Aphrodite’s undress, but more seriously the act of spying on a woman in the privacy of her toilette — of peeping-tomism, simply put. The interdiction in Greek culture is encoded in the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who stumbles upon a clearing where Artemis is bathing in private. Outraged by his transgression, Artemis transforms him into a stag, and has his own dogs tear him limb from limb. Or we may turn to Herodotus, who tells us of Candaules, king of Lydia, who is so proud of his own queen’s beauty that he implores his friend Gyges to hide in their bedroom and spy on her to see for himself. When the queen catches him peeping, she forces him to choose: either he kills Candaules and marries her, or he submits to his own execution. (His decision is predictable.) In either case, we are left no doubt that for a mortal to spy on a woman in this way is wrong. 

    And yet, at the same time, the very erection of the Knidian Aphrodite in her temple authorized this mode of spying by circumscribing it in a devotional and aesthetic experience. She creates a structure of permission, an environment in which the taboo can be enacted as a sort of game between viewer and artwork. That it is a game, a sort of make-believe as might befit the child in each of us, distinguishes it from an act of violence. The rules which are meant to be broken are sheltered within other rules, which are not.

     

    Bathsheba 

    The game is what we are at risk of losing, or losing sight of. That we need such a game is a product of the fact that all of us are voyeurs. What Freud called the “pleasure in looking,” Schaulust or scopophilia, plays an indelible role in our psychic development. It is not simply a matter of arousal, but the acquisition of knowledge. “The instinct for knowledge or research,” he says, is not purely intellectual but corresponds to “a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery” and “makes use of the energy of scopophilia.” Voyeurism is both a will to power and a will to know. We can define it, simply, as pleasure taken in unauthorized looking. But it is crucial that we do not get tripped up on this authorization, to such a degree that we foreclose the game.

    Who has the authority to authorize? Presumably the object of the gaze, but it is more complicated than that. Taboo is a social structure of authorization, but one, as we have seen, that takes on meaning only by virtue of its transgression. Or consider the Greek eidos, meaning “that which is seen,” at the heart of Plato’s theory of Ideas. One way of grasping the so-called Socratic method is as the development of a progressively disclosed vision. This goes some way in explaining the backlash of Athens against Socrates. It is forbidden to see wrongly, which is to say, it is forbidden to unconceal that which society, for the sake of holding itself together, deems necessary to conceal. And so they executed him. It is no accident that Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth. To corrupt is to “break altogether,” and this is what his mode of seeing, his visions of Love, Justice, Beauty, and the Good, threatened to do to Athenian society. 

    What do we owe the authority who authorizes? Privacy and secrecy are real, and they are sacred — the right to be forgotten, the right not to be known. As Calaf, desiring to withhold his name from the titular princess of Turnadot until dawn, sings: Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, “my mystery is closed up in me.” Yet between spy and espied, there is a relationship, not simply an imbalance of power. We have spent a long time figuring out what it means to cling onto this relationship, even as we negotiate between power and powerlessness. 

    In the centuries spanning Pliny’s legend and late-medieval confrontations with voyeurism, the psychic function of repression, as in the taboo, is gradually complemented by the epistemic function of recognition. The central question drifts from “what is forbidden?” to “what is acknowledged?” The critic Sara Koenig reminds us what we should be wondering in this respect: “How guileless, or manipulative, is each character?”

    The question comes from Koenig’s Bathsheba Survives, and she is speaking a general truth about a specific and momentous scene in world culture. King David, having sent his army commander, Joab, as well as his servants and “all Israel” away from Jerusalem to battle the children of Ammon, is at home alone. “And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.” There is not enough time in a week to view all of the paintings that have been devoted to this scene if they were exhibited together. It is a moment made pregnant with the significance of what follows. David, spellbound, inquires after the identity of the bathing woman and learns that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Despite her marital status, or perhaps because of it, David has her brought to his residence and the two lie together. When David learns, some weeks later, that she is with child, he has Joab send Uriah to the front to be killed by the enemy. This is the only way that David can free Bathsheba to become one of his wives.

    How guileless, or manipulative, is each character? It would be easy to rest on David as the nefarious party: he is the one who invades another’s privacy; he is the one who uses his power to sleep with her; he is the one who has a man killed. But David is also the forefather of the Messiah. He is the first king of a united Israel and the founder of the covenant with God to build the First Temple (though, owing to his misdeeds, it is left to his son Solomon to build it). He is, in the opinion of many, the blood ancestor of Jesus. A considerable amount of ink, tempera, and oil paint has therefore been spilt in order, somehow, to exculpate him. There are rabbinic commentaries on the incident admitting that David sinned, but only before God (that is, not towards another human being). The medieval Provençal commentator David Kimchi, for example, argued that an “evil inclination” overwhelmed the king, and that his sin was in not honoring God by overcoming this desire. A less tortured take, from the Talmud, prefers to see David as the victim of an externally imposed “trial” rather than an internal inclination. “Now Bathsheba was cleansing her hair behind a screen, when Satan came to him, appearing in the shape of a bird. He shot an arrow at him, which broke the screen, thus she stood revealed, and he saw her.” The addition of the screen, which is not present in the Biblical passage, removes even the possibility that David could have spied on her. A less anxious reading of the passage, though, one less concerned with preserving the reputation of the man for the sake of the religion, would recognize the simple and all-too-human nature of the scene immediately. David, like all of us, could not help but look.

    Yet the inheritors of this story also propose an interpretation that offers a more complicated relationship to this sort of voyeurism. How innocent is Bathsheba, the future queen and mother to Solomon, anyway? A strain of medieval artists sought to cast her as the true Satan that the Talmud could only contrive in avian form. In such representations, as in Jean Bourdichon’s Bathsheba Bathing, the wife of Uriah is unquestionably a seductress, baring her naked breasts to an almost reluctant David. But Koenig illuminates another tendency, cataloguing some of the ways in which, beginning in the Patristic Era, interpreters contrived to establish Bathsheba’s purity. For certain Church Fathers, the toilette of Bathsheba was an allegory for baptism. In later medieval and early modern depictions, such as the Book of Hours of Luis de Laval and Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba, the scene is not so much allegorized as euphemized: Bathsheba, though bathing, is nevertheless clothed. The very notion that Bathsheba needs an excuse or an apologia in this family of representations reflects a repressed cultural suspicion that she may have been more of an agent than some would like her to have been. 

    When standing in our private rooms, each of us is aware of the lines of sight into them. Each of us has looked out our windows and understood that whomever we can see can also, if they choose, see us. Are we to believe that Bathsheba did not know that she lived within sight of the king’s house? Had she not seen its rooftop from her bath? Did she not know that in her nudity, under the moonlight, she was not only very beautiful to look upon, but in fact always potentially looked upon? These are questions that more contemporary feminist studies of Bathsheba have brought forward as a means of rescuing her from pure objecthood and recovering her agency — and they were already on the minds of certain artists who, over the centuries, have been drawn to the scene. We do not need to imagine that she knew, at that very moment, that David was on the roof. We need only assume something like the reflexive self-consciousness of one’s visibility inherent to the prisoners in Bentham’s panopticon: one knows that one can be seen, but because one never knows whether one is being seen, one feels perpetually that one could be seen at any moment — a felt possibility that is the condition of play, if not its justification. This is the gamble, and the game, inherent to the decision to bathe in sight of the king’s roof, at night, without a screen. 

    We may wonder why the artists have dwelt so endlessly on this moment of voyeurism, and on the nature and scale of its ethical violations, when it is not among the reasons for which God punishes the king. “Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight?” the prophet Nathan asks David, ventriloquizing God. “Thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the sword of the children of Ammon.” For these reasons (that is, for violating two if not three of the ten commandments), but seemingly not for his act of voyeurism, “the sword shall never depart from thine house.” 

    The most drastic of the punishments meted out unto David is the death of his child with Bathsheba. But there is another sanction that might go some way in explaining our obsession with his gaze. “Behold,” says the Lord, “I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbor, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.” Before thine eyes; in the sight of this sun. That not only David, but all of Israel should witness his cuckolding is a curious psychosexual echo of the inciting act of 2 Samuel 11. Is this the ultimate penalty, or the ultimate titillation? We are to linger in the ambiguity, just as the question of whether Bathsheba is a victim or an exhibitionist should remain ambiguous. Our quickening is sustained by the suspension of judgment.

    From the Renaissance through to the Enlightenment, European artists gravitated toward such a suspension, departing from the need to judge or else to absolve that had so gripped the Talmudic sages, the Church Fathers, and their late-medieval beneficiaries. This is a slow progress of several centuries. Cranach the Elder’s rendition, from 1526, maintains a sympathetic cast for both David and Bathsheba by keeping them both central to the painting, twin foci forming a triangle with a third: the maidservant washing Bathsheba’s feet. It is as if the painter cannot choose a central subject, and as such the large bush framing Bathsheba almost assumes the role. (Some art historians have interpreted the bush cryptologically as the presence of the divine.) Jean Pichore, a French contemporary, does much the same thing in a vastly different idiom in his Bathsheba at the Bath; again, a classic triangular composition seeks to balance the presence of the voyeur and the object of his desire. Daniel Lindtmayer the Younger, the Swiss sketch artist a generation below Cranach and Pichore, compounded this approach in his ink drawing, David and Bathsheba, in 1587, even going so far as to wash David in divine light, idiosyncratically casting him — again in focal balance with his future wife — as the central character.  

    But elsewhere in Europe, Lindtmayer’s age witnessed a focal displacement in the representation of the famous scene. Around the same time, Jan Matsys, a central figure of the Flemish Renaissance, moved David almost out of sight, to the top-left corner of his David and Bathsheba. He is a fraction of the size of the painting’s main subject, a serene and bare-breasted Bathsheba, and of its secondary subjects: on the one hand, the messenger whom David has sent to bring Bathsheba back to his home; and on the other, a maidservant attending her bath. This painting introduces two new elements which will thereafter become canonical in Bathshebean iconography: David’s literal marginality, on the one hand, and the interpellation of the viewer into the scene, on the other. Matsys accomplishes the latter by way of the maidservant, by far the most striking figure in the painting, who stares — fiendishly or pleadingly, it is wonderfully hard to say — directly at the viewer. Inviting us to haunt the episode, to attend to it as a presence only she can see, she is as God, who will later cast us among “all Israel” to witness the cuckolding of David. She invites us, by analogy, to watch a man watching.

    Matsys’ two elements are consolidated into one in subsequent renditions. David, as a rule, grows ever more microscopic, retreating ever further into some spot or corner where the viewer, having learned the trope by canon, seeks him out. By the mid-seventeenth century, as in canvases by Jacob Van Loo and Johann Spilberg, he has become little more than a shadow half-perceptible between the columns of a distant portico, a trend which will carry for another 200 years; by the time of Gustave Moreau’s Bathsheba, in 1885, it is no longer even clear that the vaguely stenciled figure we see above is a king. (One knows that a trope has become a genre when, as in a caricature, a mere outline will do to complete the picture.) In his diminishment, David has absorbed the function of the maidservant’s stare, for by dint of his position such paintings now interpellate the viewer into a game, a sort of Where’s Waldo culminating in the aha moment of spotting the king. Even those artists who sought to pull the pendulum back somewhat — such as Francesco Hayez, whose remarkable Betsabea, in 1827, reasserts the maidservant’s stare, this time in Bathsheba’s own incriminating gaze, while David, squished at the upper edge of the canvas, leans over his balcony to get a better look — persisted in recreating this jeu à deux. In merely viewing the scene of the bathing Bathsheba, as at a glance, we are not yet voyeurs; it is only when we see David, who is our reflection, whose discovery brings to our own realization just how keenly we are seeing, that we are invaded by the role and come to inhabit it ourselves. 

    Susanna

    So we are finally drawn from a position of judgment into the game itself, all the better to feel the tension of David and Bathsheba’s own fraught contest. But something is not quite right. One side effect of David’s gradual diminishment is his growing ridiculousness. Another word for what one feels emanating from the tiny, marginal David is desperation. He is sapped of the power which sustains the frisson of the voyeuristic taboo. In a painting like Hayez’s, there is much more energy between Bathsheba and the spectator than between the future spouses. The flip side of this is that Bathsheba, over the centuries, grows more venerable, indeed more holy, in her nudity. What informs the taboo of voyeurism in the first place — the sense of violation — has more or less vanished from the Biblical narrative. (An outright humorous David appears in another rendition by Hayez, Betsabea al bagno from 1834, craning his neck for a view through the trees; if God’s punishment of the king in 2 Samuel were meted out to this fellow, the genre would be comedy, not tragedy.) The idealized Bathsheba has been dissociated from the non-idealized form of the victim, who suffers a prurience which has expanded beyond playful bounds. 

    That these two visions might be held in tandem has been, for the most part, discarded as a possibility by the canon, a process which holds a mirror to our own sanctimoniousness about voyeurism. The child of today whose gaze is averted by a parental hand is the protégé of this pruned tradition. He is acquainted not with a game, or even a kink, but a crime. 

    In opposition to Bathsheba, then, we have inherited a subject who does indeed carry the burden of victimhood: Susanna. The one basks, the other trembles — though both are vindicated by the authors of the Bible. A virtuous married woman, Susanna is spied on by two lustful elders while bathing in her garden. The elders had in fact been appointed as judges, but we are forewarned by the narrator of this apocryphal tale that they are tainted with “that wickedness” that “came from Babylon from ancient judges, who seemed to govern the people.” The judges, after first catching each other peeping on the young woman, determine to rape her together at a “fit time.” When finally she is alone without her maidservants, they sneak into her garden and shut the doors. “Behold,” they say, “the garden doors are shut, that no man can see us, and we are in love with thee; therefore consent unto us, and lie with us.” They threaten to accuse her of adultery if she refuses them, and when she resists, they give false testimony against her, leading to her condemnation. But a young prophet named Daniel intervenes at her trial. Separating the elders, he exposes their lies by eliciting conflicting details about the alleged encounter. Susanna is vindicated and saved, the elders are punished, and the tale is said to stand as a lesson about justice, the abuse of power, and the integrity of the innocent under the gaze of the community.

    Susanna forces into question the famous antinomy of the “naked” and the “nude.” Kenneth Clark, surveying Greek depictions of the human form, controversially juxtaposed the nude male, who is idealized, composed, and confident, with the naked female, who is de-idealized, exposed, and deprived. That is why the Lapith women in the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are depicted with their garments rent. There is an imbalance of agency between the two forms of exposure. John Berger, in his Ways of Seeing, sought to rectify Clark’s imbalance in his own take on the binary with a well-known formulation: “Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.” The one is a process, the other is a state. That is, nakedness implies a certain authenticity or self-identity that nudity is designed to interrupt: “To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.” 

    We will come back to the matter of recognition. It must be said that Susanna’s authenticity is precisely what is at stake in her tale, for it is this quality which is first stripped from her and then, in an act of divine justice, returned to her. She did not, in fact, lie with the elders; she was not exhibiting herself in her bath. She preferred to die with her honor, rather than defile her purity by consenting to the judges. But at the same time, undercutting Berger’s assessment, it is a simple truth that we are to pity Susanna in this moment — unlike Bathsheba, she is a victim whose salvation is completely justified, coming as it does from the deus ex machina. 

    And yet at the same time the patient reader will notice, in the text of Susanna, a certain irrepressible horniness that taints the narration in trace amounts. One notices above all that the narrator lingers on the men’s perspectives and their experience of lust: “And the two elders saw her going in every day, and walking . . . and they perverted their own mind, and turned away their eyes . . . Yet they watched diligently from day to day to see her.” (The story is recounted in the Book of Daniel.) Rather than cut to their pact to spy on Susanna, the narrator goes out of his way to tell us that, at first, each of the elders kept his lust a secret from the other, and then narrates a scene in which they catch each other loitering in the garden after saying to each other that they would be going home for dinner. The salaciousness of the whole thing is dwelt upon. And then the moment’s texture thickens: “And it fell out, as they watched a fit time . . . and [Susanna] was desirous to wash herself in the garden: for it was hot.” She sends her maids away, and tells them: “shut the garden doors, that I may wash me.” The reader knows that a despicable act is being committed and forms her judgment. But is the narrator not a little worked up?

    The art historical record evinces to the possibility of arousal. Representations of Susanna’s scene, as those of Bathsheba, experience a slow transformation from lingering over these trace elements of titillation to a categorical moral framework, whereby she is “naked” as opposed to “nude,” very much in Clark’s sense: ever frightful, ever indicting us, rather than inviting us in. The scholar Norma Broude, in a careful study of Susannas throughout the centuries, has argued that her representation in Renaissance painting is predominantly lascivious, often emphasizing the lust of the elders rather than Susanna’s fear. Around 1500, an unidentified painter known to art historians as the “Master of Apollo and Daphne” depicts Susanna in Knidian fashion, covering her genitals with a towel and leaving her breast exposed to the elders, as she objects to their advances with all the grace of an angel. Around 1540, Matsys, in a manner reminiscent of his Bathsheba, depicts Susanna with full-frontal exposure, her genitals covered with a cloth and her right hand languidly rejecting her attackers. Yet the “display” of her nudity is counterposed by the wicked, mask-like visages of the elders — a feature which cannot be reduced to Matsys’ style in depicting male faces, for the messenger in his David and Bathsheba has a comparatively kinder and more natural expression. 

    Once again, Matsys presents us with a hinge moment in the representation of Biblical voyeurism. From his sordid men follows a century and a half of Baroque iterations that drain the scene of its residual erotic energy. Canvases by Rubens in 1606–1607) and Chiari around 1715 make the dual character of the new convention for portraying the episode unmistakable: the fear and innocence of Susanna, on the one hand; the utter depravity of the judges, on the other. The Baroque Susanna is best expressed, of course, by a woman: it is Artemisia Gentileschi, in 1610, in her Susanna and the Elders, who most fully manages to express the profound corruption that is endemic to the crime, and that seeps by osmosis into the spectator him or herself. Susanna’s almost Aphrodisian form is neutralized by the all-too-human redness of her feet, which twist along with her whole body away from the men. Gentileschi inaugurates a strain of Susannas that will consummate the moral absolutist interpretation, descending the infernal ladder from the subject’s fear, to her terror, to her total petrification. The divine light that shines, in spite of all, on Rembrandt’s paralyzed Susanna, in 1647, cringing in her robe from the touch of a rapacious judge, is all but extinguished more than two centuries later in Laurits Tuxen’s Susanna, in 1879, whose frozen heroine, defending her body in a way we are almost ashamed to witness, is so encompassed by darkness that her assailants are not even visible.

    Thus did the centuries work to cement the antinomy that Berger and Clark were happy to accept — Bathsheba and Susanna moving as archetypes in opposite directions. Twin images of the civilizing process that, in the wake of the Reformation, internalized the problem of guilt as a matter of purity, they achieved the circumscription of our sexual morality. Because her story ends in marriage and monarchy, Bathsheba may be idolized; whereas Susanna can only ever be the victim of a crime in which we are in some way complicit. But these polarities, the nude and the naked, have been separated artificially in our social conscience, for in the authentic voyeuristic scenario — epitomized, as we have seen, by the Knidian Aphrodite, and woven into the variegated narrations of the Bible — they are dialectically intertwined. Aphrodite the Naked, exposed in the privacy of her bath, hunched ever so slightly into a defensive posture, is simultaneously Aphrodite the Nude, deciding what can and cannot be seen; Aphrodite the Goddess. 

    This latter aspect, the deity in her power, is what for centuries following the Renaissance was passed through and processed by the artistic imagination as Venus, herself a meta-archetype toward which Bathsheba aspires. Aphrodite, having become Venus, is so obsessed with her own erotic power that she is frequently depicted as displaying it primarily for herself. This develops into its own trope, whereby Venus is conventionally depicted staring at herself in a looking glass, a motif drawn from ancient pictures, on amphoras and kraters, of Aphrodite sitting with a handheld mirror. (In a late-Renaissance painting of Susanna, from 1555–1556, when convention still allowed her to be associated with the nude and not only the naked, Tintoretto has her bathe herself in front of a large mirror while the elders look on.) It also gives rise to what is known as the Venus Effect (epitomized by Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus): optically, in order for the spectator to see Venus’ face appear in the mirror, it must be angled in such a way as to prevent her from actually seeing herself. This only makes her all the more alluring — all the more for you. And Berger is wont to point out, rightly, that the spectator imagined by the artist was frequently the male patron of the artist and future owner of the painting. She really was for him. 

    So Bathsheba is set off against Susanna, Venus against the mere mortal — the “naked” woman who is stripped of her voice, and who is not a goddess in her power — artificially, as I say. The exceptions to this rule are instructive, and point the way to an alternative fate for bodily exposure in the modern aesthetic sensibility. It is Rembrandt, among all artists, who in some shining examples manages to seize the dialectic rightly. That is, some of his nudes are also naked. Simon Schama, in his magisterial Rembrandt’s Eyes, half explains this by way of linguistic determinism: “seventeenth-century Dutch had no word for nude” in the sense we have been using. “The nearest it got was naakt, or moedernaakt (or, if not quite naked, schier naakt), all terms which presuppose exactly the embarrassment and awkwardness that Rembrandt, alone among Baroque artists, was irresistibly drawn to explore.” 

    In seeking an affect that most closely brings together the naked and the nude in the context of a toilette, “embarrassment” is a good choice, for it is a middle-state, teetering between the impulse to cover up and the decision to reveal oneself further. What captivated Rembrandt, in Schama’s telling, was “the quasi-nude, the imperfect conversion process by which live models were made over into mythological or biblical figures.” It was the very fact that these “plump and rumpled women” could not quite manage “the required transformation into Dianas or Venuses” that made them perfect subjects for the voyeuristic paradox: “does she belong to the ages, or does she belong to me?” Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath, from 1654, not only perfects this “relationship between exposure, embarrassment, and desire” in Bathsheba’s body, which is Venus-like in its beauty yet mortal in its slight slouch, but also illustrates this very relationship in Bathsheba’s face. Holding the (apocryphal) letter from David inviting her to his house, she is frozen in a perfect ambiguity. Is it reverie or remorse? Delight at being desired, or chagrin at being summoned? She is quietly forlorn; she is quietly happy. Though we know what the Biblical Bathsheba will do next, we have no such certainty when it comes to the woman in Rembrandt’s painting. 

    Within this Bathsheba lives the spirit of the Knidian Aphrodite; by her reaction, and in imagining ourselves as David, we feel alternately spurred and guilt-stricken, without resolving one way or the other. The problem of the voyeuristic gaze has not merely been represented, but also passed back to the spectator, without the trick of interpellation. This Bathsheba is the one we always should have understood her to be — aware of every line of sight into her bath, yet never once imagining that her voyeur would break the rules of the game, transforming the reach of his vision into the grasp of his kingly hand. As we adore her through a frame, just as we admire our neighbor through a window, just as we are framed by views more known to us than we would readily admit, her story allegorizes our perpetual voyeuristic scenario, always spying or being spied on. We are called to recognize the gaze of the other which is always already internalized within, seeing us before we properly see ourselves, creating within us an eternal posture somewhere just north of relaxed — what Heidegger called the Stimmung, or attunement, that primordial, animal-like way of absorbing the world and ourselves within it. 

    How else are we to understand the story of David’s wrongdoing and the terms of his punishment? The tale of Bathsheba is one of the rare moments in which the Bible tells us how it should be read. It is the prophet Nathan who shows the king his own sin, when he tells the story of a rich man with many sheep who, in order to clothe a traveler in a hide, takes the only, beloved sheep of a poor man, rather than one of his own flock. “As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die,” David cries. But the point of the parable is revealed to him in Nathan’s terse reply: “Thou art the man.” David has his revelation, but so do we. And just as the story of the unjust man is an allegory for David’s sin, so too is the king’s punishment an allegory for the way God watches us all, as the compilers of the Torah would have it. God is the voyeur on high; he sees us, or is always possibly seeing. “For thou didst it secretly,” he admonishes David. “But I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.” His is the first alterity we internalized, and which we have kept within us long after his death. At the very bottom of the self is the eye of God, who watches in an eternal and uninterrupted surveillance. 

    The Other

    There is, then, an alternate path for our relationship to the illicit gaze, running from Rembrandt’s Bathsheba. Five years ago, while wandering the galleries of the Met, I found myself hovering near a small tour group that had gathered around a color print by Mary Cassatt. The guide, gesturing towards La Toilette, from 1890–1891, brought their attention to its defining features. A brown-haired woman, a striped towel wrapped around her waist, hunches over a washbowl with her back to us. She is topless, but we do not see her breasts. In the mirror we glimpse the top of her head and a distorted and partial reflection of her face, but not her eyes. With her cupped hands dipped into the water, she is about to wash herself. Finally, the guide asked: “Do you think she knows we are watching her?” 

    It is a fine question. The answer has something to do with the times in which the bather lived. In depictions of the toilette from across the millennia, from the Romantic to the Neoclassical and the Baroque, and from the Renaissance to the Gothic, on down to the Ancient Classical period, bathing had always maintained an association with the public. Bathsheba notwithstanding, painted bathers were most frequently to be found in gardens and rivers, oases and sheltered ponds. In the public life of towns and cities, the ritual act of washing oneself occurred more often than not in the bathhouse. Then, by the 1860s, the water closet with its “S-trap” plumbing became mass produceable. Suddenly people could run water directly into their homes. Thus we find Cassatt’s bather at home, rather than in a bathhouse or a river. Though her washbasin is not a sink connected to a tap or pipes, we can presume that she has filled the jug on the floor beside her with water from the central spigot in her home or apartment building. Suddenly, toilette and the public have little to do with one another; the ritual has become an altogether private affair. We can begin to answer the tour guide: surely she would not have expected the gaze of a stranger in the inner sanctum of her bathroom.

    And yet, there we are, spectating. There is another image from this period, a Toilette by Degas from 1884–1885, which provides us with a similar scene. Again, a towel-bound woman washes herself (this time with the help of a running tap); again, her back is turned to us, and we cannot see her face. Despite their modernity, indeed their utter banality, Cassatt’s and Degas’ washing women, whose wrapped towels slope in that eternal way, are echoes of their antique forebears. Less in the line of the Knidian Aphrodite than the Venus de Milo (which had become a sensation in France after Napoleon pilfered it for the Louvre), they are nevertheless of the Venus type. Both artists have learned Rembrandt’s lesson. Their subjects are simultaneously mortal and divine, naked and nude — only, with the invention of this new sense of the interior, this timeless intertwining of opposites has been subdued and domesticated within the corresponding interior of the modern bourgeois subject. This is corroborated by the fact that, in contradiction of the Aphrodisian trope, they are turned from us, their identities forever unknowable. Cassatt’s bather, like that of Degas, is neither exposed nor exhibiting. The “embarrassment” that Rembrandt so ardently worked to capture is gone, for the new interior has made it irrelevant. And yet, lost in her own affairs, she throbs between slouching figure and inclining Venus. Does she know she does this? It appears automatic. Heedless of our external gaze, embroiled in her ritual, she radiates her dual nature from within. We are in a modern space, where our customary view, the view of the bathhouse, is no longer the primary axis along which our voyeurism works. It is already within her, and she is always already responding to it. 

    Does she know that we are watching her? Yes and no. This is a scene in which we are no longer present, because our presence is no longer needed. She is the culmination of a modernizing process first glimpsed in Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, and that has its analogue in the movement from punishment to discipline famously described by Michel Foucault. Just as spectacular, violent punishment was gradually replaced by the disciplining of the soul, so too did the voyeuristic scenario metamorphose from an external game into a self-reflexive one. In both cases, the internalization of surveillance made this state of affairs newly private. Even in a windowless room between four solemn walls, the whole scene can now play out: we are always both naked and nude, our toilette both intimate and exposed, the mirror showing us both what is most private and what it is possible to offer another. 

    This modern subject, made in the image of us all, condenses the social character of selfhood: to recognize one’s sovereign self, one needs to internalize the omnipresent gaze of the other, like the eye of God, which offers recognition from without. Voyeurism is a process that plays out this recognition. Crucially it cannot be allowed to tip over into victory and loss, or else the process will fail. This is its ethical form. There are, we know, all manner of nefarious gazes, but if the scene succumbs to them, it is no longer an authentic moment of voyeurism; it is the degenerate weaponization of power, typically wielded by a man against a woman. To the extent that we are always already knowing ourselves to be watched, we also choose to what degree we offer ourselves to the watcher. When, as with Susanna, more is taken than is given, the other becomes a monster. Between the voyeur and the vu (or vue, as is often the case), there can be no imbalance of power, only an imbalance of domination, which oscillates according to the steps of the dance.

    The phenomenologists were the first to describe this oscillation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers us the image of his left hand touching his right, which in turn is grasping an object. He is touching and he is also being touched, simultaneously, and yet he cannot experience both at the same time. “Either my right hand really passes over into the rank of the touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted,” he says, “or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it.” The attempt to touch himself touching always “miscarries at the last moment.” In this gap between himself touching and himself being touched, there is no absolute distinction to be drawn. Instead, across it, he experiences the “reversibility” of these states, the encroachment of one upon the other — an encroachment “which is neither sheer identity nor non-identity.” 

    These twin experiences, touching and being touched, constitute the intertwining fabric of our subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty calls this the chiasm. And as within, so without: he accounts for the experience of otherness within the same framework. The self and the other are like the right hand and the left. They are engaged in the same act of reversibility, without the one resolving into the other; touching and being touched, seeing and being seen — all the while, mysteriously, retaining their autonomy. 

    This is the image in which the Aphrodite of Knidos was made, the experience for which she was erected in her temple. When we travel to gaze upon her, we discover that we have preceded ourselves by two millennia and more. Our gaze is already folded into her being, and hers into ours. She is not an enigma closed off to us, but an intimate foreignness involved in the oscillations of our mutual recognition. 

    Voyeurism is properly the scene of recognition, and of subjectivity itself. We must unburden it of its pejorative connotations and emphatically assert its universal quality. In a world with eyes, it is a condition and a norm and an ideal. Like the vanishing point, like perspective itself, the gaze belongs to no one and everyone, and is therefore genderless and classless. It is older and more primal than the structures — patriarchy, racism, colonialism — that have seen fit to misuse it. 

    The gaze is the stage for serendipity. To look, that is, to stare or gaze, is a choice. One is chosen, sometimes on a dime and by total coincidence, and depending on the chooser one might have mixed feelings about this. Our history attests to a relationship to voyeurism not only as a violation but also, simultaneously, as an act of selection. At court, you espied your lady, or else your charming prince, before you loved them. Perhaps they were already married. Your gaze was no less unauthorized than that of the men in the garden, circumscribed by the laws of marriage, the customs of court, the strictures of class, and much else besides. The one who peeps may harbor a danger. But they may also harbor a utopian vision. The King on the parapets of thy heart leans over; he would break the marriage, but he would also build a new one for the ages.