2008年10月27日 星期一

《佛洛伊德與非歐裔》

這本書的議題都沒被討論
翻譯者易鵬的"後記"(文中"導論" ) 檔的"寓言不止"之思考方式也是相當跳躍的.....

身份無解正是世界一家的本質:《佛洛伊德與裔》

文/黃孫權


書名:作者:愛德華薩伊德
出版:行人 2004/09

這本小書對台灣書市是個小小的震撼,我不曉得出版者是順著薩伊德去世消息而有出版銷售的理由,還是對於當下台灣「他者」思考缺乏的一種提示。這是兩人神奇的歷史巧遇,被談者佛洛伊德是以色列建國主義裡被抑制的人物,而談論者則是被以色列驅逐的人,此書是薩伊德去世前最後一本出版品,而薩伊德引以談論的佛洛伊德的作品《摩西與一神教》則是佛洛伊德生前最後一本著作。

此書原本可能在薩伊德去世的一年前出版,原邀請單位維也納之佛洛伊德協會與博物館(Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna)在2000年薩伊德對以色列棄守、四野無人之邊界象徵意涵投擲石塊後,撤回年度佛洛伊德年度演講的邀約。隔年,由倫敦的佛洛伊德博物館提供適當場合發表。這又是一個巧合,類似當年英國接納險遭納粹迫害之佛洛伊德。種種巧合,讓兩位驅離者互相照映,於是在談論者、被談論者、評論者與中文譯者的導讀中(此書有相當難得,精準而顧及歷史背景交代的譯註與導讀),呈現出「他者」沉默考古學的濃稠歷史對話。

薩伊德採取了一種類似班雅明的方式重讀佛洛伊德的經典,重點不在於找出已故作者缺失或者意識形態的盲點,(評論者蘿絲教授說的好,這在文學院太容易),而是為了找到一種歷史,一種經由他們的見解(及其限制)局部而試探性的預見及激發,尚未經驗而且正在形成的歷史。這類閱讀的任務在於「演活前人或先前形式中的那些能瞬間點亮現在的潛能。」,簡單來說,這是歷史任務的重讀。

透過佛洛伊德在該書沒有明言的「」觀點,薩伊德點出佛洛伊德論說的重點,摩西是埃及人,而一神論來自埃及,摩西並猶太人,一神論也猶太教的「起源」,佛洛伊德所作的正如他自己期許的,不折不扣「從一個民族那裡,奪走他們所讚頌的為偉大後裔」,而且「真理比所謂的「民族利益」來得重要」,來對照出以色列╱猶太歷史之混濁、殘缺、不穩定的世俗傷痕以及建國主義中的淨化獨斷主張。 佛洛伊德作為一個維也納的猶太人,對於猶太復國主義與反閃主義的矛盾心態正是現下以色列亟欲排擠的,後者要求一個全然的猶太國度,而前者則懷疑,一個身份(地區)之內有如此多人駐足,而且蒙受其害,「如此絕然不確定又全然未決的歷史可能真正的被寫成嗎?」。薩伊德另舉年輕學者阿布愛爾-哈吉(Nadia Abn ElHaj)的以色列地景考古學之作,說明以色列國族之建構過程中,如何將地景象徵與國族象徵透過統一與排除而建築起來,並企圖將此衝突過程「當代化」與「和解化」。誠如此篇演講結尾所提及的問題(也是薩伊德本人的希望):「在其國度內,以色列與巴勒斯坦在雙方的歷史與內在現實中均站一部份,各自對手?」

以色列的巴勒斯坦人、阿拉伯人、猶太人;巴勒斯坦的猶太人、阿拉伯人、巴勒斯坦人,薩迦走廊與聖城的人們,無論東西左右都是身份不明,「身份本身無法僅就其本身來進行透徹思考或通透工作;如果沒有抑制不了的根本起源斷裂或瑕疵(radical originary break or flaw),它就不可能建構或甚至想像自身」。身份無解正是世界一家的本質,這不僅是薩伊德終身志願,也再度呼應了薩伊德「 知識份子無家論」的回歸。此書,是對於歷史重讀,如果世俗之人真有此能力的話,最好的示範。

*****

Freud, Zionism, and Vienna

Edward Said explains why intellectuals must fight on, against all the odds, for peace with justice

Edward SaidThis is a parable worth a few lines here, although it derives from a rather peculiar personal experience of mine which has attracted unusual, if undeserved, media and public attention. Ordinarily, I don't use myself as an example, but because this one has been so misrepresented and also because it might illuminate the context of the Palestinian-Zionist struggle it took place in, I have permitted myself to use it. In late June and early July 2000, I made a personal family visit to Lebanon, where I also gave two public lectures. Like most Arabs, my family and I were very interested to visit South Lebanon to see the recently evacuated "security zone" militarily occupied by Israel for 22 years, from which troops of the Jewish state were unceremoniously expelled by the Lebanese resistance. Our visit took place on 3 July, during which day-long excursion we spent time in the notorious Khiam prison, built by the Israelis in 1987, in which 8,000 people were tortured and detained in dreadful, bestial conditions. Right after that we drove to the border post, also abandoned by Israeli troops, now a deserted area except for Lebanese visitors who come there in large numbers to throw stones of celebration across the still heavily fortified border. No Israelis, neither military nor civilians, were in sight.

During our 10-minute stop I was photographed there without my knowledge pitching a tiny pebble in competition with some of the younger men present, none of whom of course had any particular target in sight. The area was empty for miles and miles. Two days later my picture appeared in newspapers in Israel and all over the West. I was described as a rock-throwing terrorist, a man of violence, and so on and on, in the familiar chorus of defamation and falsehood known to anyone who has incurred the hostility of Zionist propaganda.

Two ironies stand out. One was that although I have written at least eight books on Palestine and have always advocated resistance to Zionist occupation, I have never argued for anything but peaceful coexistence between us and the Jews of Israel once Israel's military repression and dispossession of Palestinians has stopped. My writings have circulated all over the world in at least 35 languages, so my positions are scarcely unknown, and my message is very clear. But, having found it useless to refute the facts and arguments I have presented and, more important, having been unable to prevent my work from reaching larger and larger audiences, the Zionist movement has resorted to shabbier and shabbier techniques to try to stop me. Two years ago they hired an obscure Israeli-American lawyer to "research" the first ten years of my life and "prove" that even though I was born in Jerusalem I was never really there; this was supposed to show that I was a liar who had misrepresented my right to return, even though -- and this is the stupidity and triviality of the argument -- the invidious Israeli Law of Return allows any Jew anywhere the "right" to come to Israel and live, whether or not they had even set foot in Israel before.

Besides, so crude and inaccurate were this lawyer's methods of investigation that many people whom he interviewed wrote in and contradicted what he said; none of the journals, except one, that he approached for publication accepted his article because of its misrepresentations and distortions. Not only was this campaign an effort to discredit me personally (the editor of the journal that published it said openly that he had printed the silly rubbish produced by this hired gun simply because he wanted to discredit me personally precisely because I have a lot of readers) but quite amazingly it was meant to show that all Palestinians are liars and cannot be believed in their assertions about a right to return.

Fast upon the heels of this orchestrated effort there came the business of the stone-throwing. And here is the second irony. Despite Israel's 22-year devastation of south Lebanon, its destruction of entire villages, the killing of hundreds of civilians, its use of mercenary soldiers to plunder and punish, its deplorable use of the most inhuman methods of torture and imprisonment in Khiam and elsewhere -- despite all that, Israeli propaganda, aided and abetted by a corrupt Western media, chose to focus on a harmless act of mine, blowing it up to monstrously absurd proportions that suggested that I was a violent fanatic interested in killing Jews. The context was left out, as were the circumstances, i.e. that I simply threw a pebble, that no Israeli was anywhere present, that no physical injury or harm was threatened to anyone. More bizarrely still, a whole, again orchestrated campaign was mounted to try to get me dismissed from the university where I have taught for 38 years. Articles in the press, commentary, letters of abuse and death threats were all used to intimidate or silence me, including those by colleagues of mine who suddenly discovered their allegiance to the state of Israel. The comedy of it all, the total lack of logic that tried to connect a trivial incident in South Lebanon to my life and works, was to no avail, however. Colleagues rallied to my side, as did many members of the public. Most important, the university administration magnificently defended my right to my opinions and actions, and noted that the campaign against me wasn't at all about my having thrown a stone (an act rightly characterised as protected speech), but about my political positions and activity that resisted Israel's policy of occupation and repression.

The latest episode in all this Zionist pressure is in some ways the saddest and most shameful. In late July 2000, I was contacted by the director of the Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna to ask if I would accept an invitation to deliver the annual Freud lecture there in May 2001. I said yes, and on 21 August received an official letter from the Institute's director inviting me to do so in the name of the board. I promptly accepted, having written about Freud and for many years been a great admirer of his work and life. (Incidentally, it should be noted that Freud was an early anti-Zionist but later modified his view when Nazi persecutions of European Jews made a Jewish state seem like a possible solution to widespread and lethal anti-Semitism. But I believe that his position vis-à-vis Zionism was always an ambivalent one.)

The topic I proposed for my lecture was "Freud and the Non-European" in which I intended to argue that although Freud's work was for and about Europe, his interest in ancient civilisations like those of Egypt, Palestine, Greek and Africa was an indication of the universalism of his vision and the humane scope of his work. Moreover, I believed that his thought deserved to be appreciated for its anti-provincialism, quite unlike that of his contemporaries who denigrated other non-European cultures as lesser or inferior.

Then without warning on 8 February of this year, I was informed by the Institute's chairman, a Viennese sociologist by the name of Schülein, that the board had decided to cancel my lecture, because (he said) of the political situation in the Middle East "and the consequences of it." No other explanation was given. It was a most unprofessional and lamentable gesture very much in contradiction with the spirit and the letter of Freud's work. In over 30 years of lecturing all over the world this had never happened to me, and I immediately responded by asking Schalein in a one-sentence letter to explain to me how a lecture on Freud in Vienna had anything to do with "the political condition in the Middle East." I have of course received no answer.

To make matters worse, the New York Times published a story on 10 March about the episode, along with a grotesquely enlarged version of the famous photograph in South Lebanon last July, an event that had taken place well before the Freud people had invited me in late August. When Schalein was interviewed by the Times, he had the gall to bring up the photo and say what he never had the courage to say to me, that it (as well as my criticism of Israel's occupation) was the reason for the cancellation, given, he added, that it might offend Viennese Jewish sensitivities in the context of Jörg Haider's presence, the Holocaust, and the history of Austrian anti-Semitism. That a respectable academic should say such rubbish beggars the imagination, but that he should do so even as Israel is besieging and killing Palestinians mercilessly on a daily basis -- that is indecent.

What in their appalling pusillanimity the Freudian gang did not say publicly was that the real reason for the unseemly cancellation of my lecture was that it was the price they paid to their donors in Israel and the US. An exhibition of Freud's papers mounted by the Institute has already been in Vienna and New York; now the hope is that it will be put on in Israel. The potential funders seem to have demanded that they would pay for the exhibition in Tel Aviv if my lecture were cancelled. The spineless Vienna board caved in, and my lecture was cancelled accordingly, not because I advocate violence and hatred, but because I do not!

I said at the time that Freud was hounded out of Vienna by the Nazis and the majority of the Austrian people. Today those same paragons of courage and intellectual principle ban a Palestinian from lecturing. So low has this particularly unpleasant brand of Zionism sunk that it cannot justify itself by open debate and genuine dialogue. It uses the shadowy mafia tactics of threat and extortion to exact silence and compliance. So desperately does it seek acceptance that it reveals itself in Israel and through its supporters elsewhere, alas, to be in favour of effacing the Palestinian voice entirely, whether by choking Palestinian villages like Bir Zeit, or by shutting down discussion and criticism wherever it can find collaborators and cowards to carry out its reprehensible demands. No wonder that in such a climate Ariel Sharon is Israel's leader.

But in the end these thuggish tactics backfire, since not everyone is afraid, and not every voice can be silenced. After 50 years of Zionist censorship and misrepresentation, the Palestinians continue their struggle. And everywhere, despite poor media coverage, despite the venality of institutions like the Freud Society, despite the cowardice of intellectuals who put their consciences to sleep, people speak up for justice and peace. Immediately after Vienna cancelled my invitation, the London Freud Museum invited me to deliver the lecture I was to have given in Vienna. (After being driven from Vienna in 1938, Freud spent the last year of his life in London.) Two Austrian institutions, the Institute for the Human Sciences and the Austrian Society for Literature invited me to lecture in Vienna at a date of my choosing. A group of distinguished psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic critics (including Mustafa Safouan) wrote a letter to the Freud Institute protesting the cancellation. Many others have been shocked at such naked bullying and have said so in public. Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance continues everywhere.

I still believe it is our role as a people seeking peace with justice to provide an alternative vision to Zionism's, a vision based on equality and inclusion, rather than on apartheid and exclusion. Each episode such as the one I have described here augments my conviction that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have any alternative to sharing a land that both claim. I also believe that the Al-Aqsa Intifada must be directed towards that end, even though political and cultural resistance to Israel's reprehensible occupation policies of siege, humiliation, starvation and collective punishment must be vigourously resisted. The Israeli military causes immense damage to Palestinians day after day: more innocent people are killed, their land destroyed or confiscated, their houses bombed and demolished, their movements circumscribed or stopped entirely. Thousands of civilians cannot find work, go to school, or receive medical treatment as a result of these Israeli actions. Such arrogance and suicidal rage against the Palestinians will bring no results except more suffering and more hatred, which is why in the end Sharon has always failed and resorted to useless murder and pillage. For our own sakes, we must rise above Zionism's bankruptcy and continue to articulate our own message of peace with justice. If the way seems difficult, it cannot be abandoned. When any of us is stopped, ten others can take his or her place. That is the genuine hallmark of our struggle, and neither censorship nor base complicity with it can prevent its success.

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