It's Saturday 17 February morning here in Sydney. For those wondering, I did not leave Europe to Australia because of what happened in Germany. The trip was planned long ago. I’ve come back to Australia to welcome into the world my grandson Luca (my first grandchild).
But it’s good to be with family, old friends and colleagues. I am over my jet lag. And I am over the 'stunned this is happening to me' phase of the Max Planck debacle.
When I insisted on noisily being sacked rather than silently ‘parting ways’ with the institution, I knew that their cheap classification of me as antisemite would only reflect badly on them and on their reputation as a place of serious and unhindered academic research. The classification was a slap in the face of every institution that has ever employed me: Melbourne, Sydney, Western Sydney, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Harvard, Paris, Toulouse, Beirut, and I won’t mention all the many places that have invited me, paid for me and housed me to give talks about my research, all these universities and all the students and academics who wanted to hear me, and believed I had something valuable to say, all were naïve little sods who never noticed what an evil antisemitic creature I am, until the president of the Max Planck Society and his lawyers came to finally reveal me for what I really am.
For those same reasons laid out above, I was confident that most academics will see the classification ‘antisemite’ for the travesty that it is, and will rally behind me. Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for the scale of support I have received and am still receiving from around the world. It is all a bit overwhelming. I cannot begin to thank the many organisations, friends, colleagues, ex-students, people I know and have not met, and people I don’t know at all, who have sent me private messages, or made public statements to the Max Planck Society’s President and/or on social media. They have all made a difference. It is practically impossible for me to reply individually to all of them. But let me assure you: I've read all of them. I've read them all, not out of politeness, but, with an immense sense of gratitude, because they all lift my spirits and give me much needed strength.
And I do not forget for one second that this is ultimately not about me at all. It is about a concerted effort by reactionary colonial forces around the world to normalise and legitimise the mass murder of thousands of people in Gaza in the name of defeating Hamas. ‘Defeating Hamas’ is elevated into some kind of higher transnational, and even transcendent, geopolitical reason. What makes this doubly important for us academics is that these forces have accompanied their assault on Gaza with an obscurantist assault against critical academic culture everywhere in the world. Using the state apparatuses when they are under their control, colonising and weaponizing third rate journalistic spaces that thrive on a culture of manufactured lies and innuendos, scaring mediocre managers of academic spaces that don’t know how to strike a balance between the interests of their sources of funding and the interests of the academics they are managing, they aim to eradicate the very conditions of possibility of what makes intellectual places specifically intellectual: the provision of the space, the time and the peace of mind to be able to ‘think hard’ about things. Thus, at this very moment, the struggle to stop the Gaza massacre from continuing to unfold and the struggle to be able to think hard about this massacre have become articulated - even if there is no imaginable symmetry between the suffering that results from the destruction of Gaza and the suffering that comes with the repression of the capacity to think critically about it.
Reading the flow of nice things being said in my defence in the public domain I couldn’t help but joke to my partner and say: ‘it’s like one of those impossible fantasies examined in psychoanalysis, the fantasy of being alive and hovering over your funeral. The assassins are sitting there in satisfied silence, while the mourners dole out the tributes. But at least you get to hear all the nice things that people have to say about you at a time when they are disposed to say nice things about you.’ By the time I cracked the joke, a sense of dread and a more serious fear overcame me: and what if this was, really and truly, my funeral, I found myself thinking. Or at least the funeral of my Max Planck self. That part of myself that has just been subjected to an attempted symbolic murder by the president of the Max Planck Society? After all, not that long ago, if you read this piece carefully, I predicted the possibility of my assassination https://allegralaboratory.net/gaza-and-the-coming-age-of-the-warrior/. But I never thought the assassin will be the chief manager of the institution that employed me.
When I took my time to reflect on this fear, it became clear that this was not about the fear of death. I loved my Max Planck self and the people that sustained it, and I am sorry to see it wasted like this. But, luckily for me, and as with all beings, I have many other selves. There was another fear lurking in the background. A fear that I have always harboured: it was the fear that all those statements in my support were really forms of funeral orations.
It was a fear that I have always harboured, one that I indeed touch upon in the linked text above: how can we academics, who, by definition, are part of a non-warring culture, respond to a warring culture that wants to harm us, without undermining our very mode of existence? Does not our discourse reflect, as a matter of fact, our pathetic lack of political power? And even if we had political power, how can our statement and our very analytical concepts be deployed in an aggressive way without them losing at least some of their analytical value? Aren’t we academics destined to only cop it, complain and make a statement without really being able to do much in the face of those who act against us?
While, as I said, I was raising questions that I have always raised and reflected upon, there was another part of me that felt unethical to react in such a way to the statements I have received. After all, most of those texts, and the statements that were made public, had in them the necessary fighting spirit demanded by the occasion (except maybe one email which, despite being well meaning and supportive, had ‘Condolences’ in the headline ). They were full of demands for re-instatement, apologies and the like. As I said, they energised me and pumped life into me. Thus, despite my rationalist defeatist inclinations those text demanded from me ethically and politically that I believe in them.
This is when the Holy Spirit intervened. It is true that we have witnessed the assassination of my Max Planck self. And it is true that we are in the midst of its funeral. But aren’t all these statements resisting and refusing to believe in this death rather than being resigned to it. Perhaps because Easter is approaching, I found myself digging into my neglected Catholic upbringing and saying to myself: maybe I should believe. Maybe my non-religious self should believe again in the possibility of resurrection! Is this not what these statements point to? Rather than a politics of defeat, a politics of resurrection?
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