Sep

20

2024

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): I’m not much of a rereader, but I’ve read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love four or five times over the past decade. Far more personal than the revered critic’s better-known works, the 1999 book details her experiences with a single therapist, beginning at age 42. Though their work together was prompted by Sedgwick’s diagnosis with breast cancer 18 months earlier (a disease from which she would die at age 58, ten years after the book’s publication), their conversations roam far beyond her lifelong “wish of not living” or her desire, following the initial cancer treatment, “to be realer.”

On first read, I was enthralled by the intimate details, at once ordinary and extraordinary, of a tremendous thinker’s inner life: her childhood memories, her relationship with her parents, her email correspondences and embarrassing dreams and fantasies about sex. I was captivated, too, by the invitation into the dynamics of therapy: Sedgwick’s initial fear that her new therapist might be “too dumb,” and the arguments, the affection, and the finely tuned shames that reliably burble up as their sessions continue.

My specific interest in therapy has waned over the years, but the book has continued to offer surprising gifts. For one, there’s its peculiar aesthetic: Drawing inspiration from the poet James Merrill, Sedgwick renders her narrative in the ancient Japanese form of haibun—blocks of prose punctuated by haiku—accompanied by a kind of “speaking spirit,” in the form of her therapist’s notes. Then, there are Sedgwick’s vulnerable and earnest attempts at parsing her own relationship to queerness. (“I know I want to talk about sex; it’s what I do for a living . . . But my own sexuality—do I even have one? It leaves me stony with puzzlement.”) In more recent rereadings, I have delighted, too, in the whispers of Jewishness that appear, a matter-of-fact part of Sedgwick’s otherwise wholly secular life. In her “handsome, provincial Jewish family” of origin, for instance, her mother refused to be called “Mom” because, Sedgwick speculates, it sounded either too uncultured or too American.

Sedgwick’s body of work resists “the idea / that you’re born sewn up / in a burlap bag with a / few other creatures, / and you have to claw / and fight inside that burlap / bag for your whole life.” Her sense of non-belonging in her family of origin, and the queer family she makes of her friends, are major themes throughout this book and her life more broadly. In those friendships, we get a taste of how, as she writes, “I recognize love.” In a recording of her reading an early excerpt of the book in 1998, the large audience’s love for her is evident in both their hush and their waves of delighted laughter. Generative, expansive pleasure, Sedgwick tells her therapist early on—the kind this book uncovers and enacts—is the only thing that might “bring me through to real change.”

Aparna Gopalan (news editor): Each of the few times we’ve seen a sustained explosion of left protest in the past year—most notably during the student encampments of the spring—I’ve been reminded that I need to revisit the work of Rosa Luxemburg, which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis. But between work, organizing, and the constant witnessing of horror, my capacity for serious reading has been so reduced that instead of picking up The Essential Rosa Luxemburg as I ought to have done, I decided to start with Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. It proved to be the perfect on-ramp.

Using text from primary sources, including Luxemburg’s published writings, speeches, and letters, together with intricate black-and-white sketches of her too-short life, Red Rosa offers a portrait of Luxemburg’s remarkable personal story and political thought. We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation (“I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears”). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches.

Throughout this story, Evans rejects the biographer’s distance from the subject’s ideas, instead layering Luxemburg’s ideological and political insights into the telling of her life story. Panels featuring a tea kettle boiling over in Rosa’s kitchen are overlaid with her analysis of capitalism’s use of imperialism as a release valve; blackboard illustrations Rosa draws when teaching at the Party school lay out the doctrine of historical materialism; and in a memorable sex scene, Rosa’s bed covers are decorated with scenes depicting the history of labor action across the Russian Empire in 1905, culminating in quotes from her classic 1906 booklet “The Mass Strike.” The result of this masterful melding is that, unlike with most biographies, I finished this one oriented towards Luxemburg not just as a historical icon on a pedestal but as a strategist whose work offers weapons for the present struggle—if only we would pick them up. I’m ready to return to The Essential Rosa Luxemburg now.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): One should never pass up an opportunity to see a screening of a film by Robert Bresson. The great French director—whose rigor and uncompromising fidelity to his vision are nearly unrivaled—reinvented the medium, creating a cinematic language based on non-professional actors who are forbidden to “act” in the traditional sense. In a Bresson film, the characters’ speech is stripped of any histrionics; only the essential remains. (Anyone interested in the aesthetics of cinema must seek out not only his oeuvre itself, but also his treatise Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson, a collection of interviews, which give us access to the creative process of a genius who was sui generis.) I discovered Bresson in the early ’70s, when I first saw Four Nights of a Dreamer (showing in a restored version at this year’s New York Film Festival). I was so taken with this film that I sought out all the others—and later moved to Paris in the hope of meeting and working with him. I sadly failed in the latter, but I succeeded in the former; I recently found an account of my rendezvous with the legend, which I wrote and misplaced 45 years ago, and published it in Film Comment.

Over the next two weeks, Film Forum is screening two of Bresson’s late works. The Devil, Probably (1977), showing for a week starting today, is his most resolutely contemporary film, a meditation on disaffected youth and the collapse of civilization. It’s a dark film, one that holds out little hope for humanity—or the planet—and demonstrates much contempt for every aspect of modern life. It is also Bresson’s least successful film, its despair almost caricatural. His best films were adaptations of or modeled on works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or Bernanos. The Devil, Probably likewise probably has a certain value as a chronicle of the death of the spirit; more than that I can’t honestly say.

The following week, from September 27th through October 3rd, you can see Lancelot of the Lake (1974). This project, which Bresson pursued for decades, is both radically different from and radically continuous with the rest of his oeuvre. While the milieu is unlike any other in his filmography—the film is set in the Middle Ages and recounts the end of the court of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table—the pared-down sets, the lack of outward emotion, the play of gazes, the strictly dictated rhythm of speech that gives the scenes an almost musical quality, and the austere framing we expect from Bresson are all here. The jousting tournaments, the failure of the hunt for the Holy Grail, the disintegration of King Arthur’s court, and the love between Lancelot and Queen Guinevere are all infused with the Bressonian spirit (the style that Paul Schrader, in a book he wrote before becoming a famous director and screenwriter, called “transcendental”). There can be little doubt that this enormously grave work exerted an influence on another film that is its polar opposite: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Indeed, when the knights hack away at each other in this comedy, it’s a direct homage to the opening scene of Bresson’s film. No stranger borrowing has ever occurred in the history of world cinema.

This week’s parshah, Ki Tavo, opens with instructions to Israelite yeoman farmers, enjoining them to bring the first portion of their harvest to the Temple as a sacred donation. Upon arrival, the farmers recite a formula that summarizes the Israelite narrative: We were oppressed as slaves in Egypt, but when we cried out, God rescued us with miraculous power and delivered us to this rich land, whose fruits are now brought as tribute.

While this rite has not been performed for two millennia, since the destruction of the Temple, today many extremist religious Zionists see the rebuilding of the Temple—and the revival of rituals like this one—as a tangible political possibility, even though this project callously disregards the site’s holy status in Islam. With a growing segment of the Israeli polity adhering to far-right religious Zionism, what once seemed like a fanciful dream now has the backing of government ministers. Initiatives like the Temple Institute, which used to exude the twee enthusiasm of a re-enactment club, have assumed a malevolent plausibility.

However, even if they were to accomplish their aims, could these ultranationalist Temple restorationists perform the ritual of this week’s parshah with integrity? The farmer’s liturgy, after all, is rooted in respect for the land as the source of wealth and prosperity, thanking God for “bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” While religious Zionists focus obsessively on the land, advancing a goal of territorial acquisition, this enterprise prioritizes military might and dispossession over the health of the land itself. Indeed, Israel’s production of military technology, a core pillar of the state’s permanent war economy, depletes non-renewable resources, and its use is devastating to the environment. For instance, the toxic metals in Israeli-produced armed drones contaminate water sources and contribute to soil acidification. Of course, religious Zionists’ violent project of territorial expansion is also inimical to Palestinian life and flourishing. This puts it in direct opposition to the second liturgy featured in our parshah—a formula the farmer must recite when tithing produce, which speaks of generosity and care for the marginalized: “I have cleared out the consecrated portion from the house; I have given it to the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, just as you commanded me.”

Our parshah has harsh words for those who neglect this care: “Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger.” This ominous line appears in the darker second half of this week’s reading; after the description of agricultural liturgy, we get a torrential litany of punishments that will be the fate of anyone who violates God’s commandments. The curses paint a picture of a debased and defeated people, abandoned by their God and rejected by the land. The land of milk and honey will turn to dust and leave the Israelites impoverished, desperate, and vulnerable to exploitation by the very stranger they were meant to care for. These curses, described in vivid detail and at magisterial length, are meant to awaken the listeners, prosperous and comfortable Israelites who do not expect their fortunes to change. Having lived in exile for countless generations, today’s Jewish people should remember the contingency of territorial control in the Holy Land and heed the warning given to us by our parshah: “Because you would not serve the Lord your God in joy and gladness over the abundance of everything, you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness and in lack of all things.”

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.