Doppelgänger stories—like a parasite you can’t shake. Mirror Image/Double Identity—what’s staring back at you in the cracked bathroom mirror? Not you. Vertigo, Fight Club—it’s all a funhouse reflection, and maybe you want to smash it. Evil Twin—think The Man in the Iron Mask, where one brother takes the throne while the other festers behind bars. The face is yours, but the mind? A perversion.

Subconscious Manifestation, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when the doctor’s good intentions dissolve into nocturnal brutality. The beast inside isn’t coming out to play—it’s already running the show. Shadow Self? That’s Black Swan, as Nina pirouettes into madness, her double waiting in the wings, sharpened claws out.

Identity Crisis—The Double Life of Véronique—two women, one face, two lives, no clue. You want the answer? There isn’t one. Imposter Syndrome—Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where everyone around you is smiling with your teeth, talking in your voice. Don’t Look Now’s red-coated figure, mocking the grief-ridden Donald Sutherland, dragging him to the edge of madness and off the cliff.

Supernatural Influence—ever wonder why The Sixth Sense creeps under your skin? Because the dead and the living sometimes share more than real estate. Psychological Breakdown—try Mulholland Drive. Identity fracture? Or just too many lies piling up until the protagonist, Betty, slips between her delusions like someone trying to undress in a dream.

Moral Opposition—ever look at your choices and see someone else’s blood on your hands? The Dark Half takes this to the extreme as Stephen King unzips the skin of its protagonist to reveal a sadistic writer trying to break free. Foil Character? Gatsby staring at his reflection in the eyes of Nick Carraway, the American dream in one, the cold truth in the other.

Split Lives? Take Sliding Doors. What if you missed the train? What if you caught it? The doppelgänger lives in every path not taken, taunting you with what could have been. Parasitic Twin, Basket Case, a literal lump of flesh that could have been you—better pray it doesn’t crawl out of the box.

Tragic Destiny—Don’t Look Now again. The doppelgänger isn’t your reflection; it’s your death. You’ll see it coming, but there’s no escape. Social or Political Commentary—Enemy, where Jake Gyllenhaal splits himself in two, caught between identity and the surveillance state, society dissecting the self until there’s nothing left but spiderwebs in your brain.

Moral Corruption—start out good? The Picture of Dorian Gray reminds you that it won’t last. Your double hangs in the attic, rotting while you walk free, but the decay’s coming for you in the end. The reflection always catches up.

Operation Shylock—Philip Roth at his most deranged, his most self-lacerating, flinging his doppelgänger into the geopolitical grinder of Israel and Palestine like some kind of literary suicide mission. Roth himself? A fragmented man, ripped between the flesh-and-blood author and a lunatic double spouting off about diasporism, an absurd anti-Zionist fever dream designed to make you question if Roth is mocking the whole ordeal or taking it dead seriously. Probably both.

This isn’t just a book—it’s a psychotic trip through identity, history, and the endless hall of mirrors that is the Jewish condition in the late 20th century. Roth the character—or is it Roth the man—wanders through the Middle East, a tourist of his own unraveling mind, trying to pin down who the hell he is as his double gleefully detonates their shared identity like a kamikaze pilot with an identity crisis.

Zionism, Jewish exile, and the whole festering circus of Israel-Palestine politics get skewered, twisted, dissected, and stitched back together in some grotesque display of intellectual taxidermy. Diasporism? Roth’s double turns it into a punchline that never lands, but it doesn’t need to. Roth knows the joke’s on us—the reader, the state, the diaspora, and anyone looking for something resembling coherence in a world that offers none.

Operation Shylock is Roth on amphetamines, manic, obsessive, the boundaries between fact and fiction snapping like brittle old bones. It’s not a novel—it’s an exorcism of the self, where the devil looks a lot like you, and maybe you kind of like it that way. Roth asks questions nobody wants to answer, and he answers them anyway, with enough bile and brilliance to make your head spin. A satire, a breakdown, a literary implosion. Roth doesn’t just operate—he cuts deep.

Why Roth would consider diasporism pompous

Roth would consider diasporism pompous because it embodies a lofty, almost utopian ideal that seems detached from the messy, grounded realities of Jewish history and identity. For Roth, the idea of diasporism—embracing perpetual exile and rejecting Zionism’s call for a homeland—comes across as an intellectual vanity project, a way for his doppelgänger (and others) to parade around grand ideological concepts without facing the brutal, lived experiences of displacement, anti-Semitism, and survival.

It’s pompous because it takes something as raw and painful as exile and turns it into a kind of philosophical abstraction, as if living without a homeland is some enlightened choice, rather than a historical trauma. Roth, always suspicious of grand theories, would find diasporism out of touch with the messy, contradictory nature of human life. It ignores the blood and struggle, the longing for security, and instead elevates exile to a noble ideal, disconnected from the real fears and anxieties of actual displaced people.

In Operation Shylock, Roth’s double spouts diasporism with the air of someone who thinks they’ve cracked the code, all while Roth—the real Roth—sees it for what it is: intellectual posturing, a fantasy of rootlessness masquerading as wisdom. The pompousness is in the sheer audacity to romanticize exile, to intellectualize what is, at its core, a deeply human need for belonging.

Isn’t diasporism a line of flight in deluzian terms and for that reason good?

In Deleuzian terms, diasporism could indeed be seen as a “line of flight,” which is a positive force. For Deleuze and Guattari, a line of flight is a means of escape, a way of breaking away from rigid structures, oppressive systems, or fixed identities. It represents movement, deterritorialization, and the creation of new possibilities outside dominant frameworks. From this perspective, diasporism—the idea of embracing exile and living beyond the borders of a homeland—could be seen as a liberating force, a rejection of nationalism or state control in favor of multiplicity and fluid identity.

In this view, diasporism offers freedom from the constraints of a singular cultural or national identity, allowing for a proliferation of connections, experiences, and ways of being. It aligns with Deleuzian ideas of becoming, rather than being fixed in one place or defined by one label. By existing in diaspora, the individual or community is constantly in a state of flux, creating and recreating themselves across different spaces, cultures, and times—an example of deterritorialization in action.

But Roth’s critique of diasporism as pompous comes precisely from its romanticization of this “line of flight” as inherently good without recognizing the real-world consequences. For Roth, it’s not enough to valorize deterritorialization when the experience of displacement also involves suffering, fear, and loss. In the context of Jewish history, exile wasn’t a choice; it was imposed by violent forces. Roth sees the intellectual embrace of diasporism as ignoring the complexity and trauma of living without a homeland, making it an abstract, elitist fantasy.

So while Deleuze might celebrate diasporism as a productive escape from rigid identity, Roth is more ambivalent, questioning whether it truly offers liberation or if it’s just another form of intellectual posturing detached from lived experience.

Yes but an ethnostate is a zero sum game destined to cruelty and self destruction

That’s likely where Roth’s ambivalence, or even cynicism, toward both diasporism and Zionism comes into play. An ethnostate, by its very nature, can become a zero-sum game—structured around exclusion, boundaries, and purity, it often leads to cruelty in its defense of those boundaries. The ideal of an ethnostate is rooted in a kind of rigid territorialism, where survival and identity become tied to land, creating conflict not just with external enemies but internally, where dissent is crushed to maintain unity. Roth, through Operation Shylock, seems to interrogate this very problem: Zionism’s noble quest for safety and identity becomes a machine of oppression, locking itself in a cycle of violence.

But where diasporism might provide an escape from this trap, Roth’s critique is that it can also become a form of intellectual privilege—a way to avoid confronting the real political stakes. Diasporism’s line of flight, its refusal to root identity in land or nation, offers a freedom from the zero-sum game, yes, but it also risks floating away from the struggles of those who remain locked in that game. In the face of existential threats, as Jews have faced throughout history, Roth might argue that diasporism can feel like turning away from the practical realities of survival in favor of abstract freedom.

The question, then, is whether diasporism can be a viable alternative to an ethnostate without becoming a lofty ideal disconnected from the pain and fear that drove people to seek a homeland in the first place. An ethnostate is destined for cruelty because it’s built on exclusion and defensiveness, but diasporism—without the weight of history and survival—risks becoming a moral high ground, looking down on the dirty, bloody business of political reality without truly engaging with it.

Roth, in his typical acerbic way, seems to be saying: neither Zionism nor diasporism holds the answer, because both can fall into the trap of dogma. And when you build any system—an ethnostate or a philosophy—around the absolute certainty of its righteousness, cruelty and self-destruction are inevitable.

Network States as Solution

A network state could be seen as a potential solution, or at least a provocative alternative, to the binary trap of ethnostates or diasporism. In theory, a network state—a decentralized, digitally connected, transnational community—could offer the flexibility and freedom that diasporism promises, without being tied to the rigid, exclusionary borders of a traditional ethnostate. The idea, championed by thinkers like Balaji Srinivasan, imagines a community bound by shared values, ideas, or identities, not geography. These communities could span the globe, using technology to connect people in ways that transcend physical borders, while still maintaining a coherent identity.

For Roth, who wrestled with the weight of Jewish history, such an idea might offer a way to transcend the tension between Zionism and diasporism. A network state avoids the zero-sum, territorial game of ethnostates because it isn’t tied to land in the same way. There’s no need to defend borders, no need to exclude others to preserve a physical territory, and no need to define identity through who can and cannot belong within a specific place. Instead, identity becomes more fluid, shared through digital connections and cultural bonds rather than physical proximity. It’s a deterritorialized way of existing—something that might satisfy the diasporic desire for freedom while avoiding the pitfalls of abstraction that Roth critiques.

In a network state, the cruelty and self-destruction inherent in ethnostates could be mitigated because the structure wouldn’t rely on exclusion or violence to maintain itself. Members of a network state could maintain cultural, religious, or ideological identities while coexisting with other networked communities across the globe. There could be multiple “Jewish network states,” for example, without the need for a singular Zionist project tied to one piece of land, one government, or one set of political borders.

However, Roth might still be skeptical. A network state could fall into the same trap of becoming another intellectual ideal, detached from the messy, brutal realities of power, land, and human survival. Who controls the infrastructure? Who ensures the rights of those who aren’t digitally connected? And would a network state truly escape the self-destructive tendencies of human nature, or simply recreate them in a new form?

In theory, a network state offers an alternative that sidesteps the zero-sum cruelty of an ethnostate. But Roth’s work, always grounded in the complexities of human nature, might remind us that even the most utopian solutions can be undone by the same forces they seek to overcome. The question isn’t just whether a network state can avoid cruelty and destruction, but whether it can survive the weight of history, fear, and the darker impulses that drive people to seek control over land and identity in the first place.