National Times and Other Times: Re-Thinking Citizenship

Citizenship is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon. While it conceptually located in a legal, territorial entity, within which it is associated with the privileges of sovereignty and the rights of individuals, it is also understood is terms of the historical process by which peoples develop shared characteristics. However, the attempt to code citizenship interms of shared cultural backgrounds belies the ways in which citizen-subjects are temporally disjunctive. Beginning with attention to the way some writing practices challenge the state system's monopoly over the meaning of citizen presence in time and space, this essay turns to a reading of an Israeli woman's novelistic treatment of a geographically and culturally diverse Jewish family, whose characteristics challenge the State of Israel's myth of national homogeneity. Ronit Matalon's, The One Facing Us, which juxtaposes a version of what Julia Kristeva calls 'women's time' with the historical time of the state, restores the diverse forms of co-presence that are denied in the discourses of nation-state legitimation. Her novel, along with the other genres treated in this analysis, encourages an understanding of politics that resists the identity-fixing effect of a state-oriented model of political space and the homogenizing of the temporal presence of citizen-subjects. More generally, the writing performances treated in this essay cast political interaction as a continuous negotiation of co-presence among those with diverse ways of being-in-time.