Description
Book SynopsisWorking from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. It has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliche. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility-to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. The various phenomena we sum up as neoliberalism and globalization are unimaginable in the absence of shibboleth-technologies. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement,
Table of Contents1 Shibboleth: Inheritance | 1
שיבולת 2 : Judges | 13
3 S(h)ibboleth: Sovereign Violence and the Remainder | 19
4 Schibboleth: Derrida | 36
5 Schibboleth: Celan | 50
6 “S(ch)ibboleth”: Apostrophe | 69
7 S(c)hibboleth: Babel | 86
8 Shibboleth: Salcedo | 100
Acknowledgments | 107
Notes | 109
Index | 155
