Performing Jerusalem: Religious, Historical, Ideological and Political Scenarios — and Some Personal Ones

Abstract

When travelling and asked where I live, my answer is always ‘Jerusalem’. Yet naming this city consciously performs an ambiguous openness which makes it necessary, while at the same time frequently creating a certain ‘difficulty’ for my interlocutor, to find the appropriate follow-up question. That is, asking me — though usually not directly — to clarify what I mean by saying that ‘I live in Jerusalem’. To live in Jerusalem — and this is to some degree also time for someone visiting this city — inevitably means having or taking on a specific identity-position, choosing or being assigned a certain role within the complex textures of cultural, ethnic, religious, national or ideological identities relentlessly played out in this city. To me this seems like the heterotopic experience described by Foucault, which I would choose as the ‘motto’ for my reflections on performing Jerusalem:

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.

(Foucault 1986: 24)