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Inheritance

Although this study is not quite about a word, it circles around something like a word: shibboleth—a bit of language that turns spectral as we linger over it, as Walter Benjamin’s much-cited citation might lead us to expect: “Words too can have their aura. Karl Kraus has described it thus: ‘The closer you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back.’ ”¹ Any word, on the authority of that epigram, has the potential to make palpable its participation in the withdrawal of language. But shibboleth poses singular complications. As a closer look will show, it is less, more, and other than a word; and to the extent that it is one, no language can properly claim it. It owes these complications to a narrative that made it unusually mobile, capable of traveling from one end to the other of recorded history, and across any number of languages. For shibboleth is of course a loanword from Judeo-Christian deep time. As a feminine noun it appears five times in the Hebrew Bible:² three times to mean something like flowing stream or flood (Psalm 69:2; Psalm 69:15; Isaiah 27:12); once to mean ears of grain (Job 24:24); once, in the passage in Judges 12 that made it famous and that we shall be examining, possibly to mean stream, possibly ears of grain, but most immediately, in the context of the text, nothing at all, since there it is used solely as a pronunciation test by the Gileadites in order to identify their defeated enemy, the Ephraimites:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.³

In times, cultures, and languages far removed from those of ancient Israel, the word shibboleth came to signify the sort of test it was supposedly once used to set: a test in which a hard-to-falsify sign winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. Ancillary meanings developed to a greater or lesser extent in different languages. French usage hews relatively closely to the biblical story: Hachette defines schibboleth as “test, épreuve décisive”; the Grand Robert has “épreuve décisive qui fait juger de la capacité d’une personne” (a decisive test that tries a person’s abilities). German usage is broader, as the succinct Duden entry for Schibboleth indicates: “Erkennungszeichen; Losungswort; Merkmal” (identifying mark; password, watchword, slogan; distinguishing mark).⁴ English is unique in having developed meanings for shibboleth that have overtaken and displaced the biblically oriented sense of test-word or identifying trait. Extending further the German extension of the word toward “slogan,” modern English grants to shibboleth a range of meanings distributed between the poles of test-word and formulaic speech. The entry for shibboleth in the online resource Dictionary.com runs thus: “1. a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons; 2. a slogan; catchword; 3. a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” By the mid–twentieth century that third definition had become dominant—a fact that inspired the opinionated 1965 edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage to proclaim that “shibboleth is a WORSENED WORD. Ability to pronounce it properly was the means by which Jephthah distinguished his own Gileadites from the refugee Ephraimites among them.… It is now rarely used except in the sense of a catchword adopted by a party or sect, especially one that is old-fashioned and repeated as a parrot-cry, appealing to emotion rather than reason.… Sometimes it seems to be thought of merely as an ornamental synonym of maxim or cliché.”⁵ Current English-language dictionaries tend to bear this out, as the online Oxford English Dictionary’s one-sentence entry underscores as it unfolds: “A custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.”⁶ The English-language Wikipedia entry opens with a similar statement: “A shibboleth is either a saying that people repeatedly cite that some think to be wrong, or a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style distinguish members of ingroups from those of outgroups, with an implicit value judgment based on knowledge of the shibboleth.”⁷

Without pretending to be able to account historico-philologically for the vicissitudes of this word in post–seventeenth century English, we can sketch a rationale for a semantic cluster roughly mappable as: test-word; password; identifying mark; slogan; cliché.⁸ For the multiple meanings of shibboleth in English seem intriguingly keyed to certain large aspects of modern life, insofar as these meanings tend to refer back to their own technical reproducibility, while taking up different positions on an axis of publicity and privacy on the one hand and of semantic and nonsemantic functioning on the other. Passwords presuppose secrecy whereas clichés, slogans, and test-words presuppose various degrees of knownness (the cliché circulates as the already known; the slogan imposes itself; the test-word presents itself as a challenge that involves what one might call a certain open secrecy). Passwords and test-words bracket their own semantic functioning, though along different vectors: passwords, particularly in the machine age, rapidly leave the domain of the logos and cease to be pronounceable words; test-words at least in principle remain pronounceable, but, unlike passwords, they insist on a performance irreducible to knowledge or will (this forms the nucleus of the problematic that will detain us when we examine shibboleth as test-word in the biblical sense). Clichés and slogans retain a semantic dimension—slogans more fully, if they are to remain effective perlocutionary performances, whereas clichés, to the extent that they have lost “current meaning or truth,” approach the state of contentless, mass-mechanical iteration suggested by the origins of the word cliché itself in nineteenth-century print technology.⁹ All of these avatars of the English word shibboleth, however, the password as well as the cliché, directly or indirectly remark their dependence on their own iterability and indeed on a potentially uncontrollable iterability. All of them also put pressure on the semantic functioning of language—even the slogan, however heartfelt its repetition might be in a particular context, cannot avoid hinting at its own potential collapse into emptily mechanical reiteration. The semantic field that English calls shibboleth references the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility. This word also seems to cue more punctually historical phenomena: the proliferation of tests, passwords, and checkpoints in digitalized, stratified, fragmented, and heavily (if, in wealthy zones, discreetly) policed societies that direct substantial resources to the filtering of populations; the hyperproduction and instantaneous outdatedness of signs, texts, and images under technically advanced consumer capitalism, with a concomitant emptying out of political institutions and an ever-increasing subordination of social life to the logic of the cash nexus and its language of equivalence; a refugee crisis of global scale that grows more acute with each passing year, as resources and civic viability continue to be stripped from the “outer zone,” to use a term offered by Alphonso Lingis some two decades ago, with wealth concentrated ever more densely in an international “archipelago of technopoles.”¹⁰

One could heap up other such shibboleths to describe the era of the shibboleth. The mood of such reflections tends toward the dystopic, with all the darkly sublime excitations of that genre; though of course many of the phenomena under consideration form part of the banality of the everyday. “In the era of cyber-surveillance,” as Emily Apter comments, “checkpoints can be as anodyne as a Facebook wall, a paywall, or a document fingerprint, or as menacing as a citizen’s authorization to apply a stand-your-ground law.”¹¹ At present millions of digital passwords (including one dedicated to verifying, in certain contexts, the identity of the present writer) are managed by “Shibboleth,” an “open-source software project” that claims to be “among the world’s most widely deployed federated identity solutions, connecting users to applications both within and between organizations.”¹² The name was well chosen, and it can serve as a metonym for innumerable contemporary technologies and practices that go far beyond mere password management: shibboleth technologies, as we may call them, of encryption and decryption, exclusion and inclusion, identification, privatization, exposure. Neoliberal ideologies, along with the economic, political, military, technological, and cultural phenomena we sum up as globalization, are unimaginable in the absence of such technologies, which flourish particularly when zones of indeterminacy are being created and leveraged. The binary logic of testing has a natural affinity with contexts in which it has become necessary or expedient to generate, parse, and police identities.¹³ But here again we seem to be touching on a particular determination of a much broader phenomenon: a testing imperative, ancient as metaphysics but particularly coercive in the modern era, infiltrating seemingly every aspect of life in a context in which the drawing and blurring of borders saturates cultural, political, semiotic, and economic space.¹⁴ Testing mechanisms can be subtle or crude, technically sophisticated or phantasmatic and wild. The ethnic nationalism and transnational racism that, throughout the modern era, accompany the deracinating movement of global capital, are reaction formations laced with the same drives and anxieties as the techno-capitalist regime against which they react; which is why all modern racisms, no matter how fiercely invested in fantasies of intuitive certainty, hunger for supplemental fixes and highs, from the high-tech allure of genetic testing to the atavistic-sadistic jolt of stereotype and myth.

These large-format considerations suggest that there is something to be gained from focusing on the traditional, and, in non-English-language contexts, still current, meaning of shibboleth as test-word. It will be useful, furthermore, to center attention on the “word” shibboleth “itself” (we shall see very soon how loose-fingered a grip the word “word” has on this word). The analysis thereby acquires far more manageable contours, since, despite its transhistorical and translinguistic survival skills and its vast reserves of exemplarity, the word shibboleth appears rarely in the Western literary and philosophical archive. In English, shibboleth rhymes fortuitously with death, and one might have expected that rhyme to show up occasionally in standard poetry anthologies, but a couplet in Milton’s Samson Agonistes offers almost the only occasion on which readers of canonical British poetry encounter it. Early on in that text, the Chorus, seeking to console the enslaved, blind, and bitter Samson, reminds him of Israel’s frequent ingratitude toward great leaders, offering examples from stories in Judges that precede his:

Thy words to my remembrance bring

How Succoth and the Fort of Penuel

Thir great Deliverer contemn’d,

The matchless Gideon in pursuit

Of Madian and her vanquish’d Kings:

And how ingrateful Ephraim

Had dealt with Jephtha, who by argument,

Not worse than by his shield and spear

Defended Israel from the Ammonite,

Had not his prowess quell’d thir pride

In that sore battel when so many dy’d

Without Reprieve adjudg’d to death,

For want of well pronouncing Shibboleth.¹⁵

Alert readers may well hear more in these lines than the Chorus at least seems to intend, since the episodes being recalled showcase not just the fickleness of relatives but also the alacrity with which leaders direct lethal violence against fickle relatives (Gideon slaughters the men of Succoth and Penuel on his way back from killing the Midian princes in Judges 8; Jephthah, leader of the Gileadites, slaughters the Ephraimites after defeating Ammon in Judges 12). It is possible to glimpse a killing field being adumbrated in these lines—a space ready to host Samson’s mass-murderous suicide. But however one interprets this speech, it hardly ranks among the most important in Milton’s tragedy, and the word shibboleth, despite its emphatic positioning, carries little more than metrical stress. It seems generally to be the case that this word, on its rare appearances in the literary record, garners less emphasis than a scholar setting out to write a study of it might have expected.¹⁶ An exception will be found in a scene in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in which Rosa Coldfield tells of running toward her niece Judith Sutpen (whose fiancé Charles Bon has just been shot by Judith’s brother Henry) and being halted—ambiguously and momentarily, yet also devastatingly—by a touch of the hand of Clytemnestra Sutpen, Judith’s black half-sister. In this section of the novel, Rosa’s narrative is given to us in italics, one of the many ways in which the novel marks the writtenness of its fictions of oral transmission:

Then she touched me and then did I stop dead. Possibly even then my body did not stop.… I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh.… But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. ¹⁷

Even pulled from context, this passage has enough figurative density to arrest and touch a reader. As a passage about passage, it projects the biblical story of a perilous border-crossing onto the broad modern meaning of shibboleth as identifying mark, while troubling the identity of that identifying mark through an adjective, “eggshell,” that always already, even before its “fall,” connotes fragility and fragmentation (it being an eggshell’s purpose to shatter) and hints at the destruction of the legibility of the text’s binary racial code (eggshells being, in the absence of further specification, possibly white, possibly not). In context, this textual knot grows yet more complex, for the novel’s plot has as its vanishing point the (elaborately unreliable) story of Thomas Sutpen performing an ur-act of crossing over, fashioning himself into a white planter-class patriarch after being refused entry, as a ragged messenger boy, by a black slave to the front door of a grand house. Rosa repeats that motif here as a fragmented act of (non)passage (she “stops dead” but her body “possibly” does not, a paradox that this hallucinogenic scene elaborates and complicates over several pages);¹⁸ and that aporetic movement replays in miniature the double bind of the Sutpen story, which compulsively reproduces the possible illegibility of the racial identities that it exists to produce and secure. We shall return to Absalom, Absalom! and clarify these points a little later. For now it suffices to note the complexity with which the word shibboleth punctuates the novel’s central motif of passing and passing over (and failing to pass over). Not until Paul Celan will shibboleth achieve richer literary elaboration.

Appearances of this word in the philosophical record are infrequent. Thanks to the magic of searchable databases it is possible to state without bravado that the word Schibboleth does not appear anywhere in Kant or Fichte or Nietzsche or (perhaps surprisingly) Benjamin.¹⁹ Hegel uses it three times, Marx five or six, and Adorno twice, mostly in polemical contexts that nudge the German Schibboleth in the direction of the well-established English meaning of cliché.²⁰ (This is particularly true of Marx, the great satirist of bourgeois commonplaces: e.g., “By all means, production, production on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth”).²¹ The word appears three times in Freud’s later writing, at points where Freud is affirming the boundaries constituting the institutional and doctrinal integrity of psychoanalysis. Thus in a footnote added in 1920 to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud asserts that the recognition of “the importance of the Oedipus complex … has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents”; in The Ego and the Id (1923), he affirms that “the division of the psychical into what is conscious and unconscious” constitutes “the first shibboleth of psycho-analysis”; and in the New Introductory Lectures (1932), he tells us that the “strangeness of the assertions” of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams “has made [that theory] play the part of a shibboleth, the use of which decided who could become a follower of psycho-analysis and to whom it remained forever incomprehensible.”²² In these passages, Schibboleth has its classic meaning of test-word or recognition-sign, Erkennungszeichen, a sign that polices a border. It gathers up and incorporates Freud’s fierce desire to claim psychoanalysis as his progeny and legacy, and to control the development of psychoanalysis both as a theory and as an institution. That the first two of these Schibboleths evoke dramas of recognition (Oedipus) and division (between conscious and unconscious systems) lends extra resonance to the third; for the “strangeness,” the Fremdartigkeit, of the dream-theory, and by extension psychoanalysis generally, consists in its being a theory of misrecognition and division-violation—a theory of ambivalence, spectrality, illicit border-crossing. From that angle we could say that, in erecting psychoanalysis into a password to and for itself, Freud at once represses and calls forth a ghostly double for that shibboleth—one that cannot but misspeak itself, out of turn, with an uncertain accent, from an other place. (As Freud comments, “the unconscious speaks many dialects”: it exists to crack and generate codes and to send emissaries over the line.) Any study of shibboleth will need to draw inspiration from psychoanalysis, a discourse propelled like no other by shibboleth-effects—not, or not just, in an abstract or thematic sense, but quite concretely or materially as an insistent foregrounding of words that grant, forbid, delay or simulate access to other scenes, voices, and signifiers: words misspoken, forgotten and returning, errant, promiscuous, at work in the arrière-scene, punning across languages, having letters purloined, coming unglued.²³

Schibboleth is a rare word in Paul Celan’s oeuvre, as it is elsewhere in the archive; but the two poems of Celan’s that showcase it do so with such power that Jacques Derrida was led to grant exemplary status to this word in his influential Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan (1986). These texts by Celan and Derrida thus form something of a salient. They offer us the chance to reflect on poetic and philosophical readings of a figure that seems at once marginal and central in the Western tradition—visible only as a hairline crack, though perhaps one as consequent, in its own way, as the “barely perceptible fissure” marking Poe’s House of Usher (“which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn”).²⁴ When we bracket the large issues evoked earlier in order to focus on shibboleth as word and concept as bequeathed by the biblical narrative, we simplify matters in one way only to complicate them in another, for we find ourselves parsing fundamental questions of identity and difference that play themselves out in a context of extreme violence. The force of a test-word resides in its resistance to knowledge or willpower, as noted earlier, and this force is nothing if not lethal.²⁵ In the story in Judges, “forty-two thousand” Ephraimites fail the shibboleth-test and are killed at the border; the number, though almost certainly symbolic, suggests mass murder on a nearly genocidal scale. As has already been hinted, however, the possibility of this deadly sorting-system derives from a more general condition of iterability that renders all borders and all codes permeable, and all technologies of targeting vulnerable to error, as Derrida’s classic analyses have demonstrated in numerous contexts.²⁶ Rather than being a contingent byproduct of the targeting process, finitude inhabits the shibboleth-test from the inside, as it were, opening it to an alterity that is also—and this is one of the major levers, and challenges, of Derrida’s thought—constitutive of the singularity of a judgment or event, including the event of a poem. Somewhat paradoxically, given its blood-soaked origins, the figure of the shibboleth thus becomes, in Celan and Derrida, the watchword of an affirmative, antifascist politics.²⁷ Or better, it also becomes this; Derrida will stress “the terrifying ambiguity of the shibboleth, sign of belonging and threat of discrimination, indiscernible discernment between alliance and war” (48).²⁸ The following pages develop that claim by examining the concept and performance of the shibboleth in texts that Derrida’s wide-ranging reading of Celan privileges but does not examine in detail: the biblical story and the poems that Celan titled “In eins” and “Schibboleth.” In closing we shall look briefly at Doris Salcedo’s famous installation at the Tate Modern, Shibboleth (2007), the title of which—probably with intentional reference to Derrida and Celan—offers another affirmation of the critical and aesthetic resources discoverable in this thin, raveled strand of linguistic inheritance.