Atelier TenouaTalk18 October 2022
Do you speak fanatic?
1h 34min
The 2022 season-opening session, on an 18th of October: two years after the assassination of Samuel Paty, two months after the attack on Salman Rushdie. From Amos Oz to the Tower of Babel studied verse by verse, a biblical genealogy of fanaticism as a passion for oneness, and its antidote: a Jewish thought that never speaks in a single language. In French.
“This Torah is written in square letters which, hold on tight, are not Hebrew letters. […] Hebrew is not written in Hebrew. Hebrew is written in Assyrian.”
“The fanatic is a devotee of the One who will refuse, in all circumstances, whatever might crack his certainties, cut them in two. […] The fanatic, in fact, dreads doubt.”
“Safa means language, but before meaning language, safa is the lip. […] it is also the edge of a river, the shore of a body of water. So this verse, the earth was one language, literally says that the earth had a single lip, a single shore.”
“Kedem in Hebrew is the origin, what there was before. […] At the origin of totalitarianism there is often a problem with one's relation to origins.”
“It is impossible, impossible to make yourself a name. No one can truly create their own name since, by definition, a name is what was given to us. Given by another, by a before-us, by a parent, by a society, by a world that gave us birth.”
“There is nothing purely Jewish, and the authenticity of Judaism is precisely its capacity always to metabolise its encounter with the other, to know that there is always some of the other within it, which is to say room for the two, which is to say room for doubt.”
The session
The session opens with the calendar: Simchat Torah, dancing with the scrolls, the last letter of the Torah and the first forming lev, the heart, and this text that begins with the second letter, bet: no one sees the aleph, there is always a before. The theme imposes itself through the news: Paty, Rushdie, always the honour of a text to avenge. The reading of Amos Oz ("How to Cure a Fanatic") draws the portrait: the altruist who wants your good, the One-obsessive deprived of humour, and his literary antidote. Then the study: the Tower of Babel, read in Hebrew for its sound, with three midrashim in support, including the man no one weeps for when he falls from the tower while everyone weeps for the brick. Voices from the room bring up Babel and Abel's vapour, Nimrod as Abraham's intimate enemy, Kafka and the Great Wall of China, Solomon's Temple as counter-model. The final unfolding takes the words apart: safa, the language that is first a lip and a shore; kedem, the origin the fanatic invents for himself; the bik'a, the geological fault Babel wants to fill; the roundness of the idol, from the golden calf to the football; the impossibility of making oneself a name, when Abraham keeps the father in his; the three roots that stutter through eleven verses; Derrida at last, "more than one language." The conclusion runs through the cascade of borrowings: Babylonian months, Assyrian script of the scrolls, Aramaic Talmud, Roman seder, Persian Purim, Yiddish and Ladino. As a parting gift, the Monty Python scene where the crowd repeats in chorus that they are all individuals: the recipe against fanaticism, and Jewish humour after all.
Texts studied
- Genesis 10:31 to 11:10 (the Tower of Babel, read in Hebrew and French)
- Amos Oz, "How to Cure a Fanatic" (excerpts read in session)
- Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer (the falling man, the mourned brick)
- Midrash Tanchuma (the three categories of builders)
- Genesis Rabbah (the war on the heights)
- Along the way: Amos Oz, "How to Cure a Fanatic" · Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel · Samuel Paty · Salman Rushdie · Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer · Midrash Tanchuma · Genesis Rabbah · safa · kedem · ktav ashuri · Jacques Derrida · Monty Python's "Life of Brian".