The Violence of Fragment (A Response to John Forrester’s ‘I Could have Worshiped the Abased and Mutilated Remnant of the Temple’: A Masked Jew in Rome)

This essay interrogates John Forrester's analysis of Jewish tenacity, and the relation of the latter to Freud's logic of ruin, memory and destruction. Forrester elucidates especially the connection that Freud draws between Jewish diaspora or exile following the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the rise of Jewish high intellectuality as a ‘civilized value’, ultimately exhibiting Freud's conflicting relationship to Jewish nationalism and Zionism. This essay unravels what remains unexamined in both Freud and Forrester's discussions about statue and fragment, monument and remnant, dispersal and survival – that is, the legacies of violence and destruction for the natives of Palestine, who are absented from the textual and archaeological layers, and from Freud and Forrester's aims to reconstruct and replace a narrative of violence with a narrative of tenacity and survival.