Emile Habiby vs Voltaire: Humor and the Law of Rights
Humor and the Law of Rights: Voltaire’s Cosmopolitan Optimism and Emile Habiby’s Dissensual Pessoptimism
By Liron Mor • University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature
This article explores the operation of humor in Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s novel The Pessoptimist (1974) and compares it to Voltaire’s humor in Candide, which it explicitly cites. The differences between the two authors’ modes of humor are read as an index of their different relations to the law, and specifically, to international law as the guarantor of human rights. Voltaire’s humorous critique is limited to the current content of the law, reflecting his confidence in universalist ideals and rights attainable by legal reform. Habiby’s humor, however, protests the law as such, exposing universalist ideals as not merely unhelpful for the Palestinians’ struggle but also as complicit in the oppression and fragmentation of Palestinian society. Habiby therefore redirects the emphasis toward interpersonal manners and intimacies that are external to the realm of the law yet underwrite it. Against Voltaire’s cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment-era ideals, Habiby’s humor thus offers a differential and conflictual community that prioritizes a practice of decolonization over ideal solutions and their dichotomous logic.
Unlike Voltaire’s Candide, which hardly requires any introduction, The Pessoptimist is not as widely known. Yet, it is quite difficult to introduce. This is partly because, unlike Candide, The Pessoptimist does not present the reader with a clear linear narrative. It instead consists of a host of episodes and anecdotes weaved together in the style of maqāmāt. What unites these episodes (as is usually the case in maqāmāt collections) is a recurring fool-protagonist: Saeed the Pessoptimist — a satirical antihero and a Palestinian citizen of Israel. The novel begins with Saeed’s miraculous disappearance, as he takes off with extraterrestrial creatures, and then unfolds in Saeed’s depictions of the events that led him to disappear. One might therefore say that what truly ties together the different episodes of the novel is the absurdity of life as a Palestinian under Israeli rule.
