On Zionism and the Concept of Deferral

Abstract

This paper offers a set of conceptual reflections on the politics of deferral. Beginning with an examination of this idea in analyses of colonialism, human rights, and liberalism, the paper turns to Gershom Scholem’s well-known opposition between Jewish messianism (“life lived in deferral”) and Zionism (concrete political action). The paper troubles this distinction by tracing the concept of deferral back into Scholem’s earliest writings on messianism and by showing the term’s genealogical reliance on the theological-political vocabulary of sovereignty. Against this critical background, the paper returns to the present, in order to reframe Scholem’s distinction and suggest that, far from negating messianic deferral, Zionism and Israeli colonial rule capture and redeploy its logic as a secular modality of power. The paper concludes by inscribing this secular, political theology of Zionism within a Christian history of deferral, messianism, and empire.