Abstract
This short chapter serves as the book’s introduction. Beginning with the trope of Anne Frank’s secret annex and with that of the reader, it discovers that the space of self-enclosure can be read like a book with pages missing and new pages inserted that treat past time as pastime. This begins the narrative of finding replacement parts for a past that ghosts influence where causal links have long-since disappeared. A homeland is fictionally cited/sited/sighted from which nothing and no one can firmly derive any real sense of origin. Thus, begins a major theme in the book regarding the inauthenticity and possible irrelevance of origins. This puts history on notice, as it does logical thought and its various delivery systems.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Sholem Shachnah, the protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s “On Account of a Hat” (1913), experiences this when he accidentally switches hats with a Ukrainian official. Unable to accept himself in the identity he sees in the mirror, he illogically reasons that he’s asleep. This gives new meaning to the sense that Sholem’s resemblance to the man in the mirror is uncanny. Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 247–48.
- 2.
“‘And what of the Jews?’ asked Mendel. ‘What trick is performed with the Jews?’… ‘Sleight of hand,’ she said… ‘For a moment the magician stands, a field of Jews at his feet, then nothing.’” The discussion inverts the Nazi trope of extermination with Jewish magic on the way to the death camps. Nathan Englander, “The Tumblers,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (New York: Vintage, 2000), 41.
- 3.
Nathan Englander, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (New York: Vintage, 2013), 24.
- 4.
Englander, “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side,” in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, 132.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Golub, S. (2019). Field-State. In: A Philosophical Autofiction. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05611-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05612-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)