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A review by garberdog
Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler
5.0
An unorthodox approach to the Israel-Palestine "conflict" (better described as a colonial occupation), Butler draws from Jewish resources (conceived broadly) to establish grounds for a non-antisemitic critique of Zionism, and an anti-Zionist Judaism. Readers looking for an introduction to and/or history of the occupation might prefer to start elsewhere; this text is excellent, but it's not a primer to the situation.
Butler begins the text working with Levinas, moves on to Benjamin, and continues on through Arendt and Levi. She ends with Darwish and Said, two Palestinian thinkers who complement Butler's overall theme of drawing from the diasporic experience of both Jews and Palestinians to craft a future beyond Zionism.
This book is in many ways the capstone of Butler's oeuvre. One can find everything from her theories of gender (performativity, citationality, abjection) through her work on the (in)ability of the subject to fully account for itself and on the precarity of human life at play here. Moreover, many of the criticisms for which Butler has become infamous (that she is too hard to read, that she fails to give concrete examples, that one needs to have read an extensive list of texts before one can even begin to comprehend what she is saying) are largely absent from this book. Written in clear, if at times poetic, language, and grounded in concrete political struggles, this book de facto serves as a good introduction to some of the major works of Levinas, Benjamin, and Arendt. Butler works with the reader in a way that I have not noticed in her other work that I have read. To be sure, she is brilliant, and it really comes across here.
Centering the ethical, Parting Ways is an excellent resource in challenging Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism, and in imagining a binationalist, one-state for the region.
Butler begins the text working with Levinas, moves on to Benjamin, and continues on through Arendt and Levi. She ends with Darwish and Said, two Palestinian thinkers who complement Butler's overall theme of drawing from the diasporic experience of both Jews and Palestinians to craft a future beyond Zionism.
This book is in many ways the capstone of Butler's oeuvre. One can find everything from her theories of gender (performativity, citationality, abjection) through her work on the (in)ability of the subject to fully account for itself and on the precarity of human life at play here. Moreover, many of the criticisms for which Butler has become infamous (that she is too hard to read, that she fails to give concrete examples, that one needs to have read an extensive list of texts before one can even begin to comprehend what she is saying) are largely absent from this book. Written in clear, if at times poetic, language, and grounded in concrete political struggles, this book de facto serves as a good introduction to some of the major works of Levinas, Benjamin, and Arendt. Butler works with the reader in a way that I have not noticed in her other work that I have read. To be sure, she is brilliant, and it really comes across here.
Centering the ethical, Parting Ways is an excellent resource in challenging Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism, and in imagining a binationalist, one-state for the region.