1. Samuel Beckett on "the Irish people" (in a J.M. Coetzee review of Beckett's letters)
It is only when the subject of Ireland comes up that Beckett now and
again allows himself to vent a political opinion. Though [critic Thomas] McGreevy was
an Irish nationalist and a devout Catholic, and Beckett an agnostic
cosmopolite, the two rarely allowed politics or religion to come
between them. But an essay by McGreevy on [painter] Jack Butler Yeats provokes Beckett to a fit
of ire. "For an essay of such brevity the political and social analyses
are rather on the long side," he writes [in the 1930s].
I received almost the impression…that your interest was
passing from the man himself to the forces that formed him…. But
perhaps that…is the fault of…my chronic inability to understand as
member of any proposition a phrase like "the Irish people," or to
imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art
whatsoever,…or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other
than the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests
and by the demagogues in service of the priests, or that it will ever
care…that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler
Yeats.
2. Hannah Arendt (from a review by Judith Butler of The Jewish Writings):
[Jewish nationalist Gershom] Scholem went on to impugn Arendt’s personal motives [in a letter in 1963]: ‘In the Jewish
tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough,
which we know as Ahabath Israel: “Love of the Jewish
people”. In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from
the German left, I find little trace of this.’ Arendt… replies:
You are quite right – I am not moved by any
‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life
‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the
French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that
sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know
of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the
Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather
suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and
parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a
conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who
was defending the – in my opinion disastrous – non-separation of
religion and state in Israel. What [she] said – I am not sure of the
exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand
that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in
the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too
shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the
greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed
in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater
than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good
can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor
do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course,
beyond dispute or argument.
