Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon fieldwork with Hasidic diamond brokers in Antwerp, my paper offers a foil to Weber's construction of the "vocation." In this "provisional life," God desires religious subjects to be in a constant state of economic precarity, so they constantly entreat him for temporary provisions.

Paper long abstract:

What is security good for? This would strike many as an odd question. An assumed logic would have it that security—existential, economic, bodily, and otherwise—is understood to be an unequivocal good, the desire for it universally sought, the risk it bears actively guarded against. Often insecurity can be made productive—it can spark radical creativity and invention, offering new horizons of possibility for solidarity, care, and mutual aid. Yet this is always after-the-fact, epiphenomenal byproducts of insecurity; never something to be actively sought after. One presumably does not seek precarity to secure stronger bonds or forms of mutuality and care.

Drawing upon extended fieldwork with precarious Hasidic diamond brokers (being cut out as middlemen in the diamond supply-chain), my paper offers a foil to Weber's construction of the "vocation." In this "provisional life," God desires religious subjects to be in a constant state of economic precarity, so they constantly entreat God for temporary provisions. In this model, insecurity may very well be desired, not in and of itself, but rather as a precondition for being in-relationship with a divine power. That is, relationships built upon forms of dependence, by their very nature, structurally require some expression of insecurity.

This paper is a meditation on life marked by provisionality, in all of its multivalence, that which provides, but never permanently sustains, that which only lasts or is only intended to last for a demarcated amount of time.