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Ruth Preser's essay 'Things I Learned from the "Book of Ruth": Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions' performs a queer appropriation of history. The "Book of Ruth" is a biblical narrative that opens with two women, Naomi the Israelite, a bereaved woman who wishes to return from Moab to Judea, and her no-longer-daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, who pledges to follow Naomi, turning away from her gods and people. This laconic tale of nomadic intimacies and speech-acts of pledges and conversions has become an iconic narrative and a seminal text in Judaism, and it has also been appropriated by contemporary feminist and lesbian readings. Indeed, since it is not fully narrated but rather full of gaps, voids, and 'ghostly matters', the "Book of Ruth" provides apt ground and a malleable vessel for contemporary appropriation by stories seeking incarnation beyond linear or teleological constraints. In Preser's 'palimpsest reading', the biblical tale continues to communicate a story of successful assimilation of the poor and the foreign, and of a 'home-coming', but it is troubled by displacement, unresolved diasporic longing, and an acute and continuous sense of vulnerability. Thinking with Avery Gordon's modality of haunting, Preser's reading aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when their oppressive nature is denied. It reflects on what kind of theory might emerge by remobilizing the category of 'home' through its de-constitution, through movement rather than destination, through disintegration rather than determination. Troubled by questions of race, nomadism, gender, and sexuality, in an era when (some) bodies may traverse national, sexual, and class borders, Preser's investigation asks what happens to bodies that continuously signify precarity and loss.
According to Arthur Rimbaud’s famous saying “Je est un autre” Max Frisch develops in his early diaries an idea of love which has to orient itself by the ban on images in the Old Testament and which, as a modern concept, has to renounce every image of oneself and the other at all. In Max Frisch’s novel Stiller the roots of this seemingly biblical belief can be found both in an aesthetic attitude towards life (as pointed out in Sören Kierkegaardʼs scriptures, especially in Entweder-Oder) and in an existentialist understanding of life (as set forth in the philosophical work of Jean-Paul Sartre). Max Frisch’s novel Stiller can be read as a literary experiment of achieving the ultimate goal of love and self-acceptance by radical self-negation and negation of the other.