A Doctorate on Hope: Yehuda Amichai’s Affective Pedagogy

In a draft of a speech for an event called “Israel 85: For Peace and Social Justice,” the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote that he was working hard on completing a doctorate in hope, asserting, “I may not finish it by the end of my life.” This statement, ironic though it may be, attests to Amichai’s ongoing search for hope as a profound poetic project, traceable in the vocabulary of hope replete in his poetry and private writings, as well as in his active commitment to hope in extraliterary realms. Throughout his writing, Amichai questions, challenges, and recasts common conceptions of hope, positioning himself as a seeker of a new hope. In his pursuit of hope, Amichai searches for alternative modes of hoping while stressing hope’s complex, multifaceted nature and paradoxes. His poetics presents hope as both an affective force, channeling the creative process, and as a mode of knowledge. This article explores how Amichai’s project embraces hope as an active commitment to openness to the world and to others, as well as to mundane modes of knowing without mastery. This imbrication of hope and knowledge, I demonstrate, is evident in Amichai’s poetics through his affective pedagogy. This article proposes to see hope in Amichai’s poetics as a method of knowledge that remains open to uncertainty rather than as a fixed object. Rather than coming with a definitive meaning of hope, Amichai’s project instead presents hope as a form of relationality that defies notions of self-sufficiency and self-mastery. This view offers an alternative to readings that apply a hermeneutics of suspicion in understanding Amichai’s poetics.