Jerusalem: Dismantling Phantasmagorias, Constructing Imaginaries

“Only by stopping the movement of the earth — vertically through space, horizontally across time — can you enter the ‘once-and-for-all’ and take possession. Of land, of others, of yourself. Blind credence. The fantasy on which state and nationhood rely.” In States of Fantasy (Clarendon, 1998), Jacqueline Rose examines the psychic preconditions for modern statehood, particularly as it is revealed in Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state, where the fantasy and its realization collapse into one another, and where the maintenance of authority relies on the possibility of its own demise.