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186 L ANGUAGE

across its concrete sensibility there is a path toward the possibility to


construct a new place. The movie is saying to us that when the situation
is horrible, full of death and violence, when it has become impossible for
it to become something good for all people, there is always the possibility of seizing the situation in another manner, from the point of view of
humanity itself and not from some particular part of humanity. From this
point of view it can be seen that all people who live here are all the same,
and that a new place can be constructed. As I understand it, Local Angel is
the angel for a new place.
In the film there is a very important subjective declaration about the
reconciliation between the weak god, who is not the god of glory and
potency but a weak and suffering god, and the figure of the mother who
protests and does not accept. The question for me is the gap between
these two determinations. Is it possible to have simultaneously a strong
protest and revolt and, on the other hand, a god of weakness, pity, and
compassion, something like a Christian god? Udis vision is precisely on
this gap between the two. On one side, the question of the construction
of a new place is always a question of weakness, because a new Palestine
is something that is the result neither of victory nor defeat. If you want to
have a new place, you have to renounce the logic of power. So, on one side,
you have a god who is not the god of one people but the god of everybody;
on the other side you have to do and to say something, because a searching for a new way in a situation cant be purely passive and compassionate.
In the movie we can see Udi facing Arafat. In politics speaking to somebody is an act, it is not pure passivity. The question is, what is the action
adequate to my vision of the construction of a new place? It is not the
classical form of action, which in this situation would be fighting and
aggression. While Udi is not a pure pacifist, he knows as well as I do that
a new political conception about this sort of situation is not on the side of
the old conception of fighting, fighting, fighting, and then finally victory
or death. Another way must be found. In the movie we can see that the
art, the singers and love, are determinations immanent to a real conception of a political transformation of place. The gap between protestation,
revolt, and the weak god is also a place for a new means for a new place.
This gap is certainly a problem: Udi has no mechanical solutiononly the
gap itself. So my question, which is not an objection, is about the means
of Udis vision.
Udis means lies in the gap between four figures of messianism: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Shabtai Tzvi, and Saint Paul. I think he

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