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Writing in Ha’aretz on January 19, 2004, in an article entitled “This Isn’t Sweden,” the Israeli poet and critic Yitzhak Laor wrote one of the more interesting, if confused, essays of the day. As he wrote:
The incident in which Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, wrecked the installation in the museum in Stockholm, succeeded in explaining to the Swedes how far we—not “the region,” not “the conflict,” but we—are from notions of the freedom of artistic expression…. Israel is indeed a democratic country, and in some respects it is even very democratic; and freedom of expression is also protected there, perhaps, with the help of rulings by the Supreme Court. But the law is a marginal factor in the existing public atmosphere, and notions of freedom of artistic expression in Israel are very far from what is known in the West.
Moreover,
The violence of the Israeli ambassador in Sweden is not an opportunity for the Swedes to take a close look at us, but rather for us—precisely because it occurred in the European arena, the arena of which we are so keen to be a part—to take a close look for a moment at our ideas of tolerance.…15
Now, we understand from this that Laor has heard of democracy, freedom of artistic expression, and tolerance, and that he is in favor of them. But what exactly is he saying? Is he saying that de jure there is freedom of expression in Israel, but de factothere is not because of the intimidation he and his friends suffer? This would be news to many, I think. By most accounts, after all, the problem in the Israeli art scene is not so much that you cannot express certain things, but that while you can express whatever you want, nobody seems to care.16 And who, exactly, is this “we”? We bourgeois readers of Ha’aretz? We bourgeois writers for Ha’aretz? Finally, it seems that one can be far from the freedom of expression, or ignorant or confused about a notion. But what could it possibly mean to be “far from notions of the freedom of expression”?
Perhaps, we may suggest, Laor is just intoning a kind of catechism, the typical late-bourgeois confession of faith: Artistic freedom as the last residue of the sacred in ritual life, the sole remaining holy of holies after the death of God. One keeps repeating it, in other words, no matter how much artistic freedom one has.
And with all his culture, tolerance, and taste, what kind of a reader is Laor? How did he understand what transpired that day in Sweden? In his estimation, Snow White and the Madness of Truth is nothing short of beautiful. We Israelis, however, cannot see it, because we are blinded by our taboos. As Laor puts it, Snow White “is a beautiful text. It has one serious flaw: It violates an Israeli taboo whereby it is prohibited to look hard at the faces of the suicide terrorists. Breaking this taboo made the Israeli ambassador blow a fuse.”17
According to Laor, the stormy reception that Snow White received in Israel is due to the fact that this work shattered our tribal taboos by humanizing the suicide bomber, by “looking hard” into her face. But this is exactly wrong. Nothing that comes within hailing distance of humanization, the hard look at another human face, is to be found in the work. The glamorized, digitized, aestheticized image of Hanadi Jaradat that finds its way into Snow White is, on the contrary, completely inhuman. The idea that there is some referent here, as if it is to some actual person, is itself perverse. She is merely the figure of a beautiful death. And this notion of the beautiful death is the heart of terrorism.18
In this, Laor is a good European. For just like the work itself, Europe refuses to engage the theological significance of the Other and its true political ramifications. For such European intelligentsia the basic conviction is that the “humanitarian” denial of difference—“she has a face like ours”—means she has the same motives, and is driven by the same passions, as are we Europeans. All humanity wants the same thing; they all want to live like us. Since living like Europeans is a basic human right, politics is nothing but the securing of a European lifestyle. In this kind of thinking there is no place for a radically different politics, for acknowledgment of the possibly incommensurable passion of the Other. There is no acknowledgment of the right not to be European.
Works such as Snow White betray an amazing inability to see the Other. They exhibit a completely reductionist understanding of human motivation. Snow White, like Laor’s criticism, is a symptom: Neither compels one to experience the strangeness of the Other; they are complete domestications, rendering the Other all too familiar. This is another side of the aestheticization of theology, the as-if theological character of the symbol. The work is a supreme example of what the sociologist Guy Dubord has called the spectacle: Modern people lack theology or political life, and as a result cannot engage the Other on his own terms.19 To protect themselves from the dangers of theology and politics, they seal themselves off and become completely passive, contenting themselves with an endless stream of visual imagery in lieu of genuine life. With the “spectacle” the audience is led to identify with full life without having to engage it. This allows it to remain passive, avoiding any real engagement with the Other, with the strangeness of life.
Moreover, there is the strange way in which this European nihilism feeds off of the old nihilism—as if there is still a sense of the theological origin of the symbol. This is a very subtle dialectic. Islamic nihilism is a species of the old nihilism, the idea that life is for the sake of death, that the only point to living is the final deed and the afterlife. But in the European form, this nihilism is devoid of the belief in an afterlife, and seeks only security and comfort, and to “express itself.” In the words of that connoisseur of nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche:
This perishing takes the form of self-destruction—the instinctive selection of that which must destroy. Symptoms of this self-destruction of the underprivileged: Self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, romanticism, above all the instinctive need for actions that turn the powerful into mortal enemies (as it were, one breeds one’s own hangmen); the will to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct, the instinct of self-destruction, the will to nothingness.20
In other words, the negation of life evident in the nihilism of the shahid is translated in Snow White and the Madness of Truth into the iconography of European nihilism.
The issue comes up in the question of how to read the photograph. Laor, like many good Europeans, has a faiblesse for the aestheticized image; they look for beautiful women. And we know at least since Poe’s impish symbolisms that, “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”21
The fundamental issue, however, is how this photograph, this theological symbol, continues to function even after the death of God. What we have in Snow White and the Madness of Truth is precisely Romanticism, the idea that what is most important for the work of art is that it be aesthetic experience. That is to say, the work of art, and not wisdom or science or religious knowledge, is the proper locus for the experience of the Absolute.22 In the Romantic theory of the symbol, what was once meant as an actual incarnation of the divine in the sensuous realm—the wafer and wine were the body and blood—is rendered merely aesthetic. The symbol is taken as a substitute for, rather than an instance of, the transcendent of theology. Symbols become the last residue of the sacred in a world depleted of God.23
