Angela Davis recently described “Palestine as a moral litmus test for the world”. (Al Jazeera English-Up Front, 27/10/2023) And however much we may sympathise with the statement, it also begs reflection, for what is the test evaluating precisely? What morality is under scrutiny and what is the “proper” moral position to assume?
Such questions may seem academic at the moment – even obscene for some -, but without them, and others, our moral reactions risk being just that: reactive.
In an equally recent interview, the poet-essayist-philosopher Fred Moten, takes us some way beyond unthinking accusation and condemnation, as we endeavour to think and re-think, and to act, with justice.
For those unfamiliar with Moten’s work, and, in a way, to help clarify and situate the video interview, we also share below selections from an interview given by him for the Kunstkritikk/Nordic Art Review of Norway.
And for an older intervention by Moten, in defence of a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, we also share a video recording of a lecture given at the American Studies Association Meeting, November 7, 2009, along with a parallel, revised text on the same theme.
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. To a psychoanalyst it is not so important whether you tell the truth or a lie because lies are as interesting, eloquent, and revealing as any claimed truth.
I feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about themselves, about life, or about the world. I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars.
Italo Calvino, “The Art of Fiction No. 130” (Interview), The Paris Review, Issue 124, Fall 1992
What defines political consciousness today? A subtle conjugation of renunciation and hope. When God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, he gave up his son without hesitation and yet – at least this is what Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling – in a corner of his heart he continued to believe (faith, we know, is only a form of hope) that God would not take Isaac from him, although he had renounced him once and for all. So in the extreme situation in which we find ourselves, a lucid mind can only leave aside projects, plans and even the idea of a possible happy political community between men, and yet, at the very moment when we renounces, there we are infallibly hoping in what we had to abandon.
Renunciation and hope, idea and disenchantment, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza converge in a single person, they mutually provide each other with denial and confirmation. Only a hope, which deserting the field of false certainties of dogmas and ideologies, of churches and parties, turns with all its strength towards what it has just declared impossible, will be able to escape from the confinement of facts and strike power at its weak points, to possibly bring back the unexpected. Both in the city and the public sphere and in the darkness of private existence, it is only possible to believe and hope in this joy which we have been able to renounce.
It could be a question of characterising the collapses that we are experiencing; the collapse of living environments, of the social world and its prisons: its institutions; the collapse of the idea of a social subject at the foundation of the political; finally, the collapse of canonised revolutionary legacies.
But what’s the point if we refuse to live them so that other worlds resurface? Because the proposition is another: it is the experience from which we must start.
Josep Rafanell i Orra, whom we regularly welcome in our pages, has just published a luminous Short Treatise on Cosmo-anarchism, published by Divergences. We publish here a short presentation of the work, followed by the book’s epilogue.
Western critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and far-right government are frequently accused of antisemitism, but leftist and left-liberal Israelis have been decrying the country’s descent into fascism for years. In this article, Alberto Toscano argues that fascism is embedded in the logic of Israel’s colonial project.
Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack has also elicited talk of fascism in multiple quarters. In a collective statement, the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees has spoken of ‘colonial fascism’ and of the ‘pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines’; in their own declaration, the Communist Party of Israel (Maki) and the left-wing coalition Hadash ‘put the full responsibility on the fascist right-wing government for the sharp and dangerous escalation’; meanwhile, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro described the onslaught on Gaza as the ‘first experiment to deem all of us disposable’ in a ‘global 1933’ marked by climate catastrophe and capitalist entrenchment. Even quoting these lines probably falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has served as an important instrument in efforts to curtail peaceful international solidarity activism against Israeli apartheid, especially in the guise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Stretching our imaginaries, our desires, for a different Palestine-Israel.
We share an essay originally published with Ill Will (18/10/2023).
Across Gaza’s fragmented collage of architectures and ruins, the abstraction of life rivals life itself. Subsumed by social technologies that densely blanket and code the territory without pause, lives are so exhaustively represented and recognized as this or that kind of life that it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that anything actually remains living beneath the thick waves of identification and classification. Refugee, militant, civilian, hostage, prisoner, soldier, and victim — these are the abstract coordinates that position lives within various military stratagems, political maneuvers, and economic programs, the particular forms of identity that are each coupled with their own particular shades and intensities of violence, the circulating codes that establish what a life is in ever higher detail, only to further establish what can be done to it. To live and die as an abstraction: this is the fate imposed on all who inhabit the space between the sea and the security fence.
Right now, the Israeli military is raining bombs onto people trapped in Gaza. They have already killed almost 3000 people and displaced over a million more. This is just the latest chapter in over a century of colonial violence targeting Palestinians.
We grieve for everyone throughout the region killed, injured, or displaced on October 7 and in the days before and since. But as in any struggle, those who have the most power have the most leverage when it comes to determining what form the conflict will take. We are concerned about the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere around the world, not despite the deaths of Israelis, but because the only way to make anyone safe in the region will be to bring an end to the oppression of Palestinians.
Corporate media outlets in Europe and North America have spent the past ten days focusing attention on Israeli suffering rather than exploring the series of events that led to this situation. The vast majority of all perspectives on the situation are coming from outside Palestine. It is important to hear directly from Palestinians, who understand better than anyone else how the situation reached this point.
It has been very difficult to communicate with people in Gaza, owing to challenges including Israeli airstrikes targeting communications infrastructure. For now, we present the perspective of a Palestinian living in the north of Palestine, who speaks about different aspects of life under colonization and about the struggle for liberation through grassroots organizing and solidarity.
For more background on the situation, you can read this interview with an anarchist from Jaffa.
T.N. “maîtresse”: the french word for teacher, or for that which teaches; “l’idée maîtresse” or “la lutte maîtresse”: the key idea or struggle, but not in the sense of essential (and exclusively so), but that idea or struggle which “teaches”. The expression “master struggle” below should be understood against the background of this.
To stand, in the shadow of the scar up in the air.
To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone.
With all there is room for in that, even without language.
Paul Celan
A 71-year-old man in Plainfield, Illinois, has been charged with murder and a hate crime after stabbing a child and his mother because they were Muslims.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the Will county sheriff’s office said.
Six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was killed and his mother seriously wounded in the attack. Police said they responded to an emergency call made by a 32-year-old woman who alleged her landlord had attacked her with a knife.
October 7, 2023. Hamas commits war crimes. The Israeli state is an occupier; the Israeli government and Israeli army have been committing war crimes for years. One does not justify the other.
From settler-colonialism to ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide …
“It is no exaggeration to say that the Intifada questions the future of Judaism with force and obstinacy. The tragedy of the Holocaust is well documented and indelibly etched into our consciousness: we know who we were, but do we know who we have become? Contemporary Jewish theology helps us confront our suffering; it has little to say about a today where we are in a position of strength. This theology, stretched between Holocaust and emancipation, puts into eloquent words the victims of Treblinka and Auschwitz, but ignores Sabra and Chatila. It pays tribute to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but gives no place to the Intifada of those ghettoised by Israeli power. Jewish theologians are committed to ensuring that the torture and murder of Jewish children be remembered and mourned in Jewish ritual and spirituality. It remains to take into account the possibility that Jews, in turn, tortured and killed Palestinian children. Holocaust theology recounts the greatness and suffering of the history of the Jewish people, but it fails to recognise the contemporary history of the Palestinian people as an integral part of ours. This theology accounts for who we were, but it does not help us to understand who we have become. […]
Yousef Munayyer:Moving to today’s program. We are very happy to host, on an annual basis, a memorial lecture commemorating the contributions and life of Professor Edward Said – who we lost far too early as a guiding light and an intellectual – not just in the Palestinian cause, but also, in studies on post-colonialism, and critical theory, and comparative literature, and the like. This lecture is one of our key events annually and we are very happy to have Dr. Judith Butler as our Edward Said Memorial lecturer this year.
Dr. Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program on Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books and her most recent is, “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critic of Zionism”. She also is active in gender and sexual politics, in human rights, in anti-war politics, and in Jewish Voice for Peace.
Today, she will discuss the differential value accorded to Palestinian and Israeli lives in the light of the most recent Israeli military campaign on the Gaza Strip, in which massacres and violations of International law have occurred. So please join me in welcoming our Edward Said Memorial lecturer today, Dr. Judith Butler.
Fred Moten: Thinking with Palestine
Angela Davis recently described “Palestine as a moral litmus test for the world”. (Al Jazeera English-Up Front, 27/10/2023) And however much we may sympathise with the statement, it also begs reflection, for what is the test evaluating precisely? What morality is under scrutiny and what is the “proper” moral position to assume?
Such questions may seem academic at the moment – even obscene for some -, but without them, and others, our moral reactions risk being just that: reactive.
In an equally recent interview, the poet-essayist-philosopher Fred Moten, takes us some way beyond unthinking accusation and condemnation, as we endeavour to think and re-think, and to act, with justice.
For those unfamiliar with Moten’s work, and, in a way, to help clarify and situate the video interview, we also share below selections from an interview given by him for the Kunstkritikk/Nordic Art Review of Norway.
And for an older intervention by Moten, in defence of a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, we also share a video recording of a lecture given at the American Studies Association Meeting, November 7, 2009, along with a parallel, revised text on the same theme.
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