In the Moment: Recent Episodes
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Ryan Banfi
In “Chris Ware’s New Yorker Covers: Reading the School Shootings Triptych,” I wrote about Ware’s visual exploration of school gun violence through the medium of the comic. I sent him my essay and asked if I could interview him about his new book, Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three (2024), and about his trajectory as an artist. And because I was teaching his work at MassArt, I wanted to know his thoughts about his comics in the classroom. He was kind enough to oblige. I hope this interview will be insightful, not just for learning about Ware’s art, but also about his understanding of comics.
PAFF! International Museum of Comic Art – Pordenone – CHRIS WARE – Inaugurazione – 09/03/2024 – Foto Elia Falaschi/Phocus Agency © 2024 – https://www.eliafalaschi.it – https://www.phocusagency.com – https://paff.itRyan Banfi: In the introduction to Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, you draw yourself thinking about comparing your work to Robert Crumb. Do you feel that you have reached this level of comic artistry? Are you the R. Crumb of the twenty-first century? The awards you have received certainly reflect your importance.
Chris Ware: My many thanks for your kind words, but aside from making fun of myself in the introduction, I definitely do not in any way feel that I’ve somehow reached any level of artistry compared to any artist, especially compared to Robert Crumb. I’m regularly paralyzed by self-doubt and am especially aware of all my deficits, which I nonetheless am always trying to improve upon. I harbor very mixed feelings about awards and prizes, though given that I work in a medium which in America at least is more likely to be associated with superhero franchises and illiteracy, occasionally being compared with thoughtful writers and artists can cheer one for an hour or two—but real life always asserts itself.
It’s, of course, buoying to be the recipient of plaudits, but it’s also quite frustrating that awards (and worse, lists) seem to act as a sort of legitimizing cultural shorthand, because they’re not always accurate (Tolstoy being denied a Nobel prize and the delightful Academy Awards “season” soon to be upon us.) Really, in many ways, the negative effects public decoration has on overlooked artists and writers is worse, sometimes calamitously so. Developing a “thick skin” is not always an asset to an artist unless that artist is also an asshole. Most importantly, awards tell you more about the people or committee who award them than the artist who receives them. Besides, no award or list will win out in the harsh light of posterity, a judgment based on whether the artist or writer was somehow incisive enough about human experience to earn the heart of a soul not yet born looking for solace. (I know this sounds dippy, but I believe it.)
Chris Ware, “Self-Portrait”Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three (2024)“Ware’s Self-Doubt,” in Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, p. 43RB: Are your Acme Novelties and other books paratexts for your explicit (streamlined) graphic novels such as Jimmy Corrigan (2000), Building Stories (2013), and Rusty Brown (2019)? Of course, the Novelties contain these characters (that is, drawings of Jason Lint), but do you view their sketchbook references as complementary to your graphic novels, or do they act as the genesis for longer stories? Will readers find out more about the graphic novels by reading the Novelties?
CW: Not exactly—this all simply had more to do with them as periodicals versus final books and how I figure things out along the way; I learned to not always trust my initial ideas and found that those which occur unexpectedly and in the process of writing were the “real” ones. There’s a long tradition of this in comics but also in literature (Dostoevsky, Chekhov—and anyone who’s written a short story that has then grown into a novel).
“Jason Lint in College,” Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, p. 13RB: Just a follow-up question about the “Ware Universe.” Many characters intersect with your novels (for example, characters in Jimmy Corrigan are referenced in Rusty Brown). Why are all your books in dialog with each other?
CW: Well, because life is, and everything is interrelated in ways we can’t either articulate or, most of the time, even perceive. The invisible influences we have on each other—whether social, emotional or biological, from something as simple as noticing a previously dormant word suddenly appearing again in everyone’s conversations to not recognizing a person at an art gallery next to whom you sat on a plane — are incalculable. Again, however, I don’t plan any of this; it just sort of happens because the mind is already a very organized thing. (I do greatly appreciate your having noticed, though.)
RB: How are your New Yorker covers in dialog with your graphic novels? How might they expand people’s readings of your graphic novels?
CW: The majority of them are part of a larger story on which I’ve been working on and off for years, the way I do everything, which is: completely uncertainly and instinctually, since that’s the way I’ve noticed life also more or less works. (Again, thanks for noticing.) Beyond this, I’m afraid I’d rather not write too much about it since such notions sound silly when articulated, and these things change as the stories change.
RB: In my essay, I write about your daughter, Clara, being a concern and inspiration for your New Yorker covers, or what I call the “School Shooting Triptych.” As the Trump administration comes into power (2024–2028) and due to the increase in school shootings since “Lockdown” was published, do you foresee yourself doing more work on the topic of school shootings? What might that look like, and how might the topic find its way into your graphic novels?
CW: I would really, really love not to write or draw about school shootings anymore. The fact that it was both in the news and a source of regular anxiety during Clara’s childhood—and around my wife’s profession, as she’s a public high school teacher and has experienced threats and lockdowns herself—is stunningly damning of our country, as if we need anything more to be stunned and damned about. The ubiquity of guns was a factor in my daughter’s deciding to attend college in Canada, and it’s a factor in my daily anxiety of wishing my wife a good day every morning. Worse, that it’s now considered clichéd or even naïve to say this is a “regular part of daily life in America” is especially shameful. I don’t see how it will ever change at this point. I know of teachers who have considered, or whose family has actually bought, guns. Is this really the world we want to live in?
“Clara,” in Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, p. 1RB: In my graphic-novels class at MassArt, we read Rusty Brown. The students and I had a long conversation about its ending, the “Intermission.” Will Rusty Brown be continued, or is the “Intermission” supposed to be an open-ended ending, like The Sopranos finale?
CW: Well, thanks for caring, but no, it is actually, genuinely only halfway done; I’m not trying to be evasive or clever. There are three and a half chapters left to go, one of which I’ve been working on since the first half was published, and all of which I expect to be working on for many years to come, along with all the other books I’m not done with. I feel bad this all takes me so long, but fortunately I’m not the only person out there making books.
RB: We also extensively discussed why you insert yourself into Rusty Brown. Why did you make this decision, and might you have drawn inspiration from other graphic novelists like Daniel Clowes, who inserts himself in Ghost World (1997), for example?
CW: I only did this because the story needed a jerk and my schedule was free. This said, drawing comics is nearly always an act of inhabiting and feeling through a drawing, but oddly, I’ve noticed that this is easier the stranger the person is compared to me; that is, whenever I draw “myself,” I remain very much on the outside—which was sort of necessary for this particular character, if that makes any sense at all.
Original art from Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, p. 141RB: What advice might you give to professors who teach graphic novels?
CW: (1) Only read works that are by a single artist, (2) if the book seems to have an obvious clear point to make, avoid it, and, most importantly, (3) don’t bother with any “how to read comics” textbooks. All focus should ideally be on the stories and the characters and especially on the emotions captured in the books themselves.
RB: If teachers had to select one of your books to teach, which one would you suggest and why?
CW: I wouldn’t ever recommend any of my books be taught; it’d sort of be like picking one sibling over another. Though of course it’s always nice to hear that one was deemed worthy enough. It seems to me that if an instructor is compelled or annoyed by something to want to look at it more carefully, that’s nice, though I wouldn’t want my opinion being a part of that.
RB: What lasting impact has Building Stories had on graphic novels? I ask because it differs, especially in its use of storytelling conventions (that is, it’s nonlinearity) and book construction.
CW: I have absolutely no idea. Though I greatly admire works that have seemed to expand some possibility for expression, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991), Richard McGuire’s Here (2014), Gary Panter’s Jimbo (1982), Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday (2024), or Rodolphe Topffer’s Albert (1845), and I hope my stuff someday might be considered to have done something similar. With Building Stories I was trying to make a book that didn’t have a beginning or an end and was more attuned to how we remember things rather than how we experience them — for better or for worse.
RB: If you were to make a syllabus for an English class on graphic novels, which seven books would you place on the syllabus?
CW: Well, those mentioned above could be a start. Seven seems like way too few, though. Many graphic novels usually only take a couple of hours to read; if I were teaching such a course there would be at least two or more to read a week, and they don’t all have to be discussed. On the other hand, I could easily spend an hour talking about one of George Herriman’s or Jerry Moriarty’s pages. Also: there is a tremendous difference between graphic memoir and graphic fiction; though often conflated, the two use almost two different visual languages and approaches.
And, in case you haven’t already noticed, I really, really don’t believe in playing favorites—especially with living people whose feelings might be hurt. My apologies.
This interview was conducted by email on 16 December 2024. Julia Pohl-Miranda (marketing director of Drawn and Quarterly) provided all images to the author, and they have been approved for reprinting in this interview.
Chris Ware is known for his New Yorker magazine covers; he’s hailed as a master of the comic art form. Ware’s complex graphic novels tell stories about people in suburban Midwestern neighborhoods, poignantly reflecting on the role memory plays in constructing identity. Stories featuring many of Ware’s protagonists—Quimby the Mouse, Rusty Brown, and Jimmy Corrigan—often first appear in serialized form in publications such as the New York Times,the Guardian, or Ware’s own ongoing comic-book series Acme Novelty Library, before being organized into their own stand-alone books.
Ryan Banfi recently received his PhD in Cinema Studies from The Martin Scorsese Cinema Studies Department at New York University Tisch School of the Art. He is on the editorial board of Games and Culture.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology. (Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies)
“I am the last Cassandra of the human story. . . . I prophesied and nobody believed, and this time it’s not only Troy that will burn, but Sparta and Ithaca and all the Achaeans too.” (Salman Rushdie, Quichotte)
The Trump Revolution in Two Moves
Do you remember what Joe Biden said a few months ago about the possibility Trump’s election victory?
He said, more or less, that Trump’s victory would destroy American democracy. He wasn’t wrong; assuming that American democracy ever existed (which I don’t believe), the advent of the Trump-Bannon-Musk gang represents its full-blown liquidation.
Technically speaking, the advent of Trump aims to be a revolution, albeit a reactionary one.
The Trumpist revolution will happen in two moves: the first move is announced by Stephen Bannon, the diabolical strategist, the most lucid of that band.
In a talk at New York University at the time of Tthe Donald’s first triumph, he declared: “I am a Leninist.”
To the astonished academic who hosted his talk and asked for explanations, he replied that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too.” Actually the appointment of freaks to the highest positions in the administration goes in the direction of making state institutions a carnival joke so as to destroy the public sphere.
However, if for Lenin destroying the state was the premise for building the proletarian dictatorship in the name of a future justice that never arrived, for Bannon destroying the state means allowing the profound dynamics of American society to be unleashed.
Here comes the second move, whose proponent would be Elon Musk: unleashing the animal spirits of American society, starting from a reactivation of the wild dynamics of this society, born from a genocide and enriched by deportation and slavery.
The Musk’s project is the creation of a high-tech slave system, the abolition of residual social protections, the systematic use of terror against minorities and immigrants. The implementation of this programmatic framework can be glimpsed in declarations and in the first steps of the DOGE project.
Pretending that the US is a democracy (if the word means something) implies a state of systematic denial, a stubborn removal (in the Freudian sense of Verdrängung) of the psychogenesis of the American unconscious.
Before dying, just a few months ago, Paul Auster wrote Bloodbath Nation (2023),which tries to come to terms with the reality (and the unconscious) of the American entity.
Auster remarks that in Berlin there is a monument dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. In Washington there is nothing dedicated to centuries of slavery.
Racism is the core of the American unconscious. This is why Trump is the soul of America.
Better said: Trump is the psychotic eruption of the senescent white unconscious, unable to deal with the amount of violence that haunts the collective self-perception, and unable to deal with decline (demographic decline, mental decline, political decline).
Trump is he aggressive extroversion of the unbearable self-despise of white culture.
The Empire from Augustus to Caligula
Twenty-five years ago, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote in Empire (2000) that:
“Empire is the . . . sovereign power that governs the world. . . . Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order. . . . We should understand the society of control . . . as the society . . . in which mechanisms of command become ever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens.” (pp. xi-23)
Dazzled by the light of the Clinton era, Hardt and Negri were missing the nihilistic substance of the global power of the United States and the destructive nature of the new technologies dependent on the neoliberal model. That book proposed to view the postmodern Empire as the equivalent of the progressive trend implicit in the utopia of networked revolution.
“The imperial project, a global project of network power, defines the fourth phase or regime of U.S. constitutional history.” (p. 179)
Hardt and Negri were expecting peace and prosperity based on the peer-to-peer principle as they failed to see the duplicity of that principle and also because they did not grasp the irredeemable abyss of the American unconscious.
A year later, Salman Rushdie published his highly prophetic Fury. Let’s read some lines:
“This Metropolis built in Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women too?” (pp. 86-87)
The tension that ran beneath the surface of globalism at the beginning of the century is not perceived by the authors of Empire, who wrote instead:
“Empire can only be conceived as a universal republic, a network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture. This imperial expansion has nothing to do with imperialism, nor with those state organisms designed for conquest, pillage, genocide, colonization, and slavery. Against such imperialisms, Empire extends and consolidates the model of network power.”(pp. 166-67)
A few months after the publication of Empire, the new economy based on the digital technology collapsed worldwide. Eventually, in the year 2001, Al-Qa’ida put in motion the war that unfolded in the terrorist wave of Daesh and in the counter-terrorist wars of Iran Afghanistan and so on.
This evolution totally escapes to the theoretical schema outlined in Empire:
“An idea of peace is at the basis of the development and expansion of Empire. This is an immanent idea of peace that is dramatically opposed to the transcendent idea of peace, that is, the peace that only the transcendent sovereign can impose on a society whose nature is defined by war. Here, on the contrary, nature is peace.” (p. 167)
In the same page of the book, Hardt and Negri quote Virgil: “’The final age that the oracle foretold has arrived; / The great order of the centuries is born again ‘” (p. 167).
Shortly after the publication of this book, the history of the world took a totally different direction. The 9/11 coup de scene provoked a reversal of the prevailing sentiment of invincibility of the Western hegemony.
The never ending peaceful expansion of democracy gave way to the breakdown of the global hegemony of the United States.
After a decade of inconclusive wars, of social decline, and of growing resentment, the emergence of Donald Trump marked the beginning of a sort of chaotic civil war in the very center of the Empire.
Now, twenty-five years later the civil war in the US is provisionally over, and it’s easy to understand who is the (provisional) winner. The winner is not Augustus, the glorious and peace loving emperor glorified by Virgil but an interesting mix of Caligula and Nero.
The problem with Hard and Negri, the reason why their book failed to grasp the impending process, lies in their indifference to the anthropological dimension in which American politics is deployed.
Only by gauging the abyss of the American unconscious, can we decipher the roots of the social ferocity that now is in full display.
Unthinkable
Much more interesting than Hardt and Negri’s Empire is Congressman Jamie Raskin’s Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.
Published in 2022, on the first anniversary of the farcical insurrection that brought thousands of Trump’s followers into the political heart of the US, the book takes on new meaning today, after the comeback of the leader of that subversive demonstration.
Jamie Raskin is also a professor of constitutional law, a self-proclaimed liberal, and a father of three. One of his children, Tommy – a political activist, a supporter of progressive causes, a compassionate, empathic young man – died on the last day of 2020.
To be more precise, Tommy committed suicide because of a long lasting depression and also (it goes without saying) because of the long moral humiliation of his humanitarian values during the years of the first Trump incumbency.
This book has been important for me because it contains a radical reflection on the entrenched racism of the American democracy (a detail that totally escaped to the authors of the book of the self appointed Marxists who authored Empire).
For Raskin, Tommy’s final decision is not only an affective catastrophe but the trigger of a radical meditation on the depth of the crisis that is tearing apart liberal democracy.
I read the book just after its publication, and I’m reading the book again now that the comeback buries forever the credibility of the country’s democracy and questions the very credibility of the concept of democracy itself.
Raskin writes that he has always considered himself as “an optimist, and I am radically optimistic about how the Constitution of the nation itself can uplift our social, political, and intellectual condition.”
After the death of his son, however, his self-perception has changed. He writes that his constitutional optimism is shattered by the prevailing of brutal force upon the force of reason,and by the spread of depression.
“Suddenly, this constitutional optimism shames and embarrasses me. . . . I fear that my sunny political optimism, what many of my friends have treasured in me most, has become a trap for massive self-delusion, a weakness to be exploited by our enemies. Yet I am also terrified to think about what it would mean to live without this buoyancy—and also without my beloved, irreplaceable son. The two always went hand-in-hand, and now I may be alive on earth without either of them” (p. 11)
The political optimism of this generous law professor is shaken by the sudden realization that liberal democracy rests on a fragile foundation. In fact, he writes: “Seven of our first ten presidents were slaveholders. These facts are not contingent or random but arose from the deep architecture of our political institutions” (p. 117).
Slavery is part of the cultural heritage of the American nation, just as genocide was of the early inhabitants of the territory.
How can this nation claim to be seen as an example to something else?
How can we avoid thinking that this nation is a danger to the survival of humanity?
Now it’s getting impossible to persist in the state of denial: the American memory is so loaded with horror that no political evolution can erase this elementary truth from the collective unconscious of a country whose manifest destiny is the destruction of the whole human kind.
In the speech that Biden gave on 6 January 2022, one year after the insurrection, speaking of the need to reject violence, he said: “We must decide what kind of nation we are going to be.”
Can America decide to rule out violence, if American history is based on violence, slavery, and genocide?
The irredeemability of that past is a source of systemic depression for the West and therefore a systemic source of violence. But now, if we look at the geopolitical landscape, if we look at the inner landscape of the Western culture, disintegration seems irreversible.
Will the decline and disintegration of the Western world trigger the final destruction of what we used to call civilization?
Disintegration
Disintegration is the trend emerging throughout the Western world.
In every European country, as in the United States, not to mention Israel, the population is irreconcilably divided by the alternative between liberal democracy and authoritarian tyranny. As liberal democracy has always been fake also the alternative is false, but disintegration is real.
In my humble opinion, Trump’s election will accelerate the Western disintegration. I don’t think there will be a civil war as was the case during the Spanish Civil War, with armed multitudes clashing along a more or less defined front. No, this is not how the civil war of a demented population unfolds. We’ll have a multiplication of racist shootings, of massacres, we will simply have what is already there, but increasingly widespread, harsh, violent.
The mass deportation that has been has promised by the winners will rather result into a restaging of the Ku Klux Klan in many areas of the country than in an actual operation of impossible repatriation of undocumented immigrants. Violence, fear, aggressiveness will eventually persuade migrants to go away, but the process will hardly be peaceful.
Despair will be the driving force of the American disintegration.
In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020), Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe despair in statistical terms: increased mortality, particularly among whites aged 45 to 54 years old – alcoholism, suicide, use of firearms, obesity and addiction to opioids (such as fentanyl). Overall decline in life expectancy (unique among advanced countries): from 78.8 years in 2014 to 76.3 years in 2021. All this in the presence of the highest healthcare spending in the world (equal to 18.8 percent of GDP).
Nonetheless, we cannot expect a peaceful disintegration of American power. Just as Polyphemus, blinded by Ulysses, slashes those who approach him, so the colossus is destined to react with reckless fury.
In “After Trump’s Victory: From MAGA to MEGA,” Slavoj Žižek relativizes the Trumpian triumph and tries to see it in perspective. The MAGA formula could be described in an inverted way: after decades of military defeats, the superpower recognizes that it cannot continue the policy of global hegemony and must withdraw by accepting, without admitting it, a position of local power that must compete on an equal footing with other local powers, Russia, China, India.
Žižek’s opinion is well founded, but my question is: Will the stronghold of white supremacy accept its decline without a reaction that might be no less than apocalyptic?
Furthermore Žižek thinks that Europe could emerge strengthened from the downsizing of the American geopolitical role, hidden behind the promise of “making America great again.” Europe, according to Žižek, will no longer be the “little sister” of the giant.
Here too I have some doubts. Žižek’s hypothesis would only be true if the EU really existed. But the Ukrainian war has pushed the European Union into a position of irrelevance, weakness, and rapid disintegration.
The French government is breaking down, the German government I breaking down, while economic recession is looming.
The strategic defeat in the war against Putin’s Russia (the legacy of Biden) pushes the union towards disintegration, while the allies of Putin, election after election, are winning the majority of the continent’s parliaments.
To conclude my short essay I will quote Rushdie’s Quichotte again: “I can’t look up. Up there, what is that. Like a colossus with a huge blaster blew a hole in the air. You look at it, you want to die. This can’t be fixed. I don’t believe there’s anyone in DC or Canaveral who knows what the fuck to do about this.”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a social theorist, activist and was a key figure in the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He is cofounder of the magazine A/traverso (1975–1981) and of Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Italy (1976/1978). He is the author of, most recently, Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024).
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
The wars of the twenty-first century are fought less and less by human beings. Human beings are the victims, but the perpetrators of the extermination are machines. These machines are driven less and less by humans because the implicit tendency in artificial-intelligence systems (equipped with deep learning capabilities) is to free humans (random organisms often endowed with consciousness and sensitivity) from the task of torturing, maiming, killing and exterminating, and to leave these tasks to intelligent systems.
The word intelligence denotes the ability to carry out a task, without the need to feel emotions of any kind or decide on ethical legitimacy.
Intelligence without sensitivity, intelligence without conscience: this is the general product of the capitalist system in the era of intelligent automation.
Twentieth-century Nazism had to take into account the limits of emotional intelligence, as Jonathan Littell shows in his novel Les Bienveillantes (2006).
The techno-Nazism of the twenty-first century of which the Zionists are the symbol and vanguard must no longer fear these limits.
The work of killing is exhausting, as we learned by reading Littell’s novel about the psychic fatigue of an SS man: the human organism has physical and psychological limits from which the intelligent machine is emancipated.
The drone is the dominant figure of this new phase of Nazism: the Ukrainian war and the Gaza genocide are the theater of experimentation of this new phase of termination – a process that will fully take place in the twenty-first century.
A drone is an aircraft characterized by the absence of a human pilot on board. Its flight is controlled by computers that can see, hear, and perform extermination (among other secondary tasks).
From the first large models, exclusive to a few armies, the technology has evolved through the construction of very small models that work in groups (swarm drones), affordable for nearly everyone.
The Israeli genocide constitutes the first large-scale application of this automation of extermination.
We should not think that this is an isolated episode; we must not think that after this exceptional event war will return to take on its ancient humanly inhuman features.
Inhumanity has finally emancipated itself from the human and can finally proceed on its way.
In the techno-military competition, extermination machines are destined to become pervasive. From now on every armed conflict – be it national war, religious war, or civil war – will increasingly make use of intelligent extermination techniques.
In April 2024, the Israeli magazine +972 published a chilling report: it describes the epistemic and pragmatic structure of an artificial intelligence system designed to identify and hit hypothetically hostile targets. These targets can be innocent passersby, children returning from school, women going to fetch water from the fountain. It does not matter. Automatic extermination works stochastically, and military stochastics cannot be too subtle.
According to Yuval Abraham in +972, the Israeli extermination system, which bears the charming name Lavender, is
a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
Humans, therefore, are the bottleneck; they are the element of uncertainty and slowdown. However ruthless and fanatical they may sometimes be, humans are still indeterminist machines: emotionality, uncertainty, tiredness can limit their homicidal competence.
The intelligent machine must gradually subsume the entire sequence of actions that make extermination possible: visual and audible identification, cataloging, selection, elimination. And finally self-correction and self-perfection in pursuit of the higher purpose: establishing order where humans are chaos. Therefore remove every human element.
During the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes. . . . The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war because of the AI program’s decisions. . . . In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians. . . . “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.” The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. [Lavender] offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently. “The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.”
Targeted elimination and multiplication of collateral assassinations are the result of a technical improvement of which Israel is the vanguard, but we should not think that this is an isolated and specific phenomenon. Every armed group on the planet is going to equip itself with technological governance guided by exterminating artificial intelligence.
Gaza is exposing the final truth of history: there is no way out from the infinite replication of the cycle violence-revenge-violence. So why should we need to sterilize intelligence? We need to dissociate intelligence from the intrinsically fuzzy nature of the unconscious.
War is the logical continuation of the liberal economy, and war demands full unbridled application of intelligence. In the book Homo Deus (2015), Yuval Noah Harari remarks that the uncoupling of consciousness from intelligence, the emancipation of intelligence from consciousness, is the condition for full empowerment of intelligence.
Consciousness, as long that this word means something, is a limitation of intelligence. I’m speaking of ethical consciousness, which implies sensibility, sensuous consciousness, embodied consciousness: a limit to intelligent performance.
You will understand this point when you think of the job of killing, which is the most important economic activity of our time and will be more and more the main economic investment: the more intelligence is emancipated from sensibility and (ethical) consciousness, the more efficient will be the intelligent agent.
Aviv Kohavi, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said that Israel’s war methodology is inspired by the rhizomatic theory of Deleuze and Guattari. The asymmetric proliferation of micro war machines is the best definition of the idea of transforming everyday objects such as pagers and walkie-talkies into weapons of mass destruction.
Only naïve readers could believe that Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic methodology is only a theory for liberation. Actually it is something much more complicated and complex: that methodology first of all conceptualizes the economic model based on the molecular distribution of capitalist control – then the molecular inscription of war and terror in every single fragment of daily life and things in common use.
The paranoid life of Israel – a country that is permanently haunted by the hatred of its surrounding populations – is marked by this molecularization of terror.
The war of extermination is – if you may pardon the macabre pun – the killer application of artificial intelligence.
All talk about the ethical regulation of AI is nonsense because it is based on removing and forgetting the military use of AI, which dominates the research, funding, and use of this technology: intelligence driven by dementia, psychosis, from horror. Intelligence for extermination.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a social theorist, activist and was a key figure in the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He is cofounder of the magazine A/traverso (1975–1981) and of Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Italy (1976/1978). He is the author of, most recently, Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024).
We are pleased to present a book forum on Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, featuring posts by Bill Brown, Jonathan Culler, Emily Apter, John Brenkman, and Bruno Perreau.
Read . . .
Bill Brown’s “Jameson’s Years of Theory”
Jonathan Culler’s “Jameson Stands Alone”
Emily Apter’s “Jameson and Us”
John Brenkman’s “Reflections on Fredric Jameson”
Bruno Perreau “In Theory: On Fredric Jameson’s Years with French Thought”
Bruno Perreau
Translated by Susannah Dale
Fredric Jameson, literary critic, Marxist philosopher and Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, has published the transcripts of the graduate seminars he led in the spring of 2021 exploring the place of theory in France since the Second World War. The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in intellectual history. Written in a straightforward style, it offers a heterodox interpretation of the decades that established France’s intellectual reputation on American campuses, starting with the publication of Being and Nothingness (1943). Jameson organizes his work around a number of key figures: Sartre, of course, but also Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Saussure, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Clastres, Althusser, Wittig, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudry, Comolli, Rancière, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Balibar, Nancy, Debord and, more briefly, in an afterword, Meillassoux, Latour, Stiegler and Laruelle. Jameson draws on his personal experience (from his student days in Aix-en-Provence to his role as an ambassador of French culture in several American universities) to provide a fuller analysis of the power of ideas. He recounts how France “joined (the world of) theory” but also how it has, to his mind, partly emerged from it.
Jameson ascribes the centrality of theory in France to a number of factors: first, intellectual life was concentrated in Paris—a concentration unmatched in other Western countries; second, France lost its geopolitical and military clout after the Napoleonic defeats, which led the country to refocus its will to power on artistic and intellectual production; and finally, France’s position at the crossroads of Europe meant that it experienced simultaneous occupation, collaboration and resistance during the Second World War, thus heightening the need for critical thinking—or as Sartre famously put it: “Never were we freer than under the German occupation.”[1]
For Jameson, theory began to flourish in France when three perspectives came together: existential ontology, Lacanian psychoanalysis and semiotics. When these perspectives ceased to interact, the theoretical intensity of the postwar period waned considerably: critical thought withdrew into various academic circles, where it was aestheticized to the point that it no longer had any essential relation to action.
Jameson’s thesis has much to recommend it, offering a historical breakdown that distances itself from the history of institutions, preferring to navigate between the development of concepts (binarism, the look, existence, utopia, and others), intellectual trajectories, and cultural movements (particularly cinema). Jameson’s approach is not linear: in each chapter, he brings together numerous references (often several centuries apart) and establishes some particularly enlightening connections: for example, within just a few pages, he navigates between Thomas Mann, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Norman Mailer, The Truman Show, The Invisible Man, Monique Wittig, and Guy Hocquenghem! This gripping exploration of intellectual life sometimes leads him to generalize (for example, when he contrasts French and American feminisms). But this is the inevitable trade-off for an analysis that is as brilliant as it is heterodox. As a critical rereading of intellectual life in France, The Years of Theory hits its mark.
By organizing his analysis around the best-known French authors in the United States (where they were referred to as French theorists), Jameson suggests, however, that the intensity of their theoretical work was merely a passing moment in contemporary history, linked to a particular intellectual configuration that has now come to an end. Yet other intellectual figures have forged networks just as dense and vigorous as those of “French Theory” and have consistently nourished social and institutional life in France since the Second World War: Daniel Guérin, Didier Éribon, René Schérer, Simone Debout, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Aurélien Barrau, Serge Moscovici, Yves Citton, Colette Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Nicole Lapierre, and Georges Didi-Huberman, among many others. However, they have never embodied theory in quite the same way: their approach has always been more collaborative, more decentralized and more situated.
As a follow-up to Jameson’s volume, I would like to make a plea for the acknowledgement of what may be referred to, for the sake of convenience, as New French Theory. Its starting point was 1983, forty years after Being and Nothingness was published. Why 1983? At the time, the Left was in power in France but had taken a neoliberal turn with its austerity policies. The first decentralization laws were passed. In the wake of decolonization, France was refocusing its universalist project on other areas and issues, such as technology and the body (the National Consultative Ethics Committee was founded in 1983). 1983 was also the year in which the Member States of the European Communities pledged their commitment to an “ever closer union” (Stuttgart Declaration of 19 June 1983), and in which Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party forged its first alliance with the Gaullist right in the Dreux municipal elections. The years to follow were marked by the creation of major private audiovisual channels—a phenomenon that would have a profound effect on theoretical practices. As shown by Pierre Bourdieu—the notable absentee from Jameson’s book—thought became caught up in an imperative of spectacle that favored a doxic rhetoric[2]. This had an impact on the entire editorial and journalistic chain. The mid-1980s also saw major sociological upheavals: deindustrialization led to the creation of committees of the unemployed; the AIDS epidemic raised questions about the authority of medical knowledge; new associations fighting racism and defending the rights of undocumented immigrants were pushing for a redefinition of land rights; environmentalists were calling for new forms of political responsibility (in the wake of the asbestos scandal, for example), and so on. Numerous intellectuals contributed to these initiatives where theory was coproduced, in the tradition of what Jean-Marie Domenach, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet inaugurated with the Prison Information Group back in 1971. Didier Éribon summed it up perfectly: “Foucault’s intellectual problem consisted in trying to detach historical and political analysis from Marxism”.[3]
These new links between theory and activism have been reinforced more recently by the globalization of exchanges and the rise of social media. Take feminist theory, for example: in the wake of #MeToo, and thanks to new printing technologies and online discussion forums, publishing houses are flourishing and contributing to the dynamic production of theory in France. There is also a wealth of critical journals that question the boundary between academic spaces and political commitment. Vacarme was one of the first, while the most renowned journals today are Multitudes; Cités; Raisons politiques; Analyse Opinion Critique; La Revue du Crieur; Frustration.
Resistance to academicism may also be seen in the combination of fiction and self-narrative as a form of political action, as in the work of Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis: aestheticization no longer means the defeat of theory but its reinvention. Ultimately, transatlantic relations have also been reconfigured: translations are less numerous than at the time of the authors analyzed by Jameson, but hybrid exchanges between art, politics and research are enabled by new institutions such as the Villa Albertine.
Some French-language authors, such as Thomas Piketty, Vinciane Despret, Norman Ajari, and Achille Mbembe, are of course well known in the United States. Others deserve greater recognition. Examples include Jérôme Gaillardais on terrestrial habitats, David Berliner on the avatars of the self, Benjamin Boudou on migration and hospitality, Philippe Huneman on profiling societies, Leonora Miano on cultural hybridity, Razmig Keucheyan on ecological planning and the artificiality of needs, Mathieu Quet on capitalist flows, Lila Braunschweig on the neutral, Camille Froideveaux-Metterie on the body and intimacy from a feminist perspective, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille on the relationship to objects, Magali Bessone on reparations, Astrid von Busekist on secularism and identity, and others.
Not only are these theoretical perspectives thriving in France and other French-speaking countries, but some of the authors to whom Jameson refers have also found a new relevance through them: Wittig on the question of inclusive language, Sartre on anti-Semitism, Fanon on police violence, Barthes on the question of emancipation, and so on. In my most recent book Spheres of Injustice, I argue for the need to create resonances between these works, based on a critical reflection on what links different minority experiences—what I call intrasectionality. One reason why minority theories are so important is that they reveal the deep conservatism of some highly acclaimed authors. A number of French theorists at the heart of Jameson’s book, for example, have vilified and sometimes even viciously attacked the LGBTQ+ and feminist movements. They have blamed reality when their theories have been challenged, as in the case of Jean Baudrillard and Alain Badiou.[4]
This, then, is one of the unintended merits of The Years of Theory: it serves as a reminder that all theoretical activity is historically and geographically situated and that it is our duty as academics, publishers, journalists, diplomats, and activists to help sustain, on North American soil, the critical vitality born in post-war France. In a world where the intertwining of time and space is complex and often contradictory, this task will only be achievable if we challenge the very epithet French: under what conditions can a language truly be a vector of theoretical invention?[5]. It is up to us to engage in this reflection by encouraging new transatlantic exchanges.
I wrote this short contribution at the end of August 2024, just three weeks before Fredric Jameson’s passing. The generosity that emanates from The Years of Theory is a reflection of his entire career: oriented towards others and marked by insatiable curiosity. May we follow in his footsteps and, to paraphrase French writer Pierre Michon, make his winter falter in our fictional summers.
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Republic of Silence,” in The Aftermath of War, trans. Chris Turner (New York, 2008), p. 3.
[2] See Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New York, 1999).
[3] Didier Éribon, D’une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris, 2007), p. 144.
[4] See Bruno Perreau, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford, Calif., 2016), pp. 237-38. See also Thomas Florian, Bonjour… Jean Baudrillard (Paris, 2004).
[5] See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, De langue à langue. L’hospitalité de la traduction, Paris, Albin Michel, 2022.
Bruno Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
John Brenkman
In April I was thrilled that he was celebrating his ninetieth birthday. When contacted by Critical Inquiry in June I was amazed to learn that he had a new book on French theory coming out. And then on the day I sat down to sketch out these reflections on The Years of Theory came the news that Fredric Jameson had died. Delight, marvel, and sorrow arrived in such rapid succession that they remain tangled and fused in my heart.
I got to know Fred my second year of teaching. When I arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974 the chair asked me whom I thought he should invite for the comparative literature department’s “polyseminar” the following year. I said I thought the two most interesting literary critics at that moment were Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. David Hayman invited them for 1975–76, and each came for two separate weeks and taught five evening seminars on each visit. For me, my colleagues, and our students those twenty evenings were electric. I’d been hired to “teach theory,” and Jameson and de Man jolted the field into existence for my department and students. I soon joined Jameson and Stanley Aronowitz in envisioning, planning, and launching Social Text. Even though I left the journal after coediting just the first six or seven issues, the value of that experience and my admiration and affection for Fred have lasted a lifetime.
The lectures transcribed in The Years of Theory are cast as a retrospective on an eighty-year span of French thought, beginning with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). Retrospection creates a vibrant tension and ambiguity in the lectures. The periodizing framing of existentialism followed by structuralism followed by post-structuralism followed by an “aestheticizing” trend—each of which has complex interactions with psychoanalysis and Marxism—gives the impression that each phase supersedes the previous. And Jameson does evoke Thoms Kuhn’s notion that paradigms are abandoned when they exhaust themselves, providing no new fresh solutions to the problems they inaugurally posed. And yet he qualifies the model when he counters any impression that “the past is just worthless” by alluding to a precept of more recent science studies, where explaining “why a discovery comes to count as true” must be accompanied by explaining “why what is now false once counted as true” (p. 79). Even as he seeks to apply this approach in the seminar, he keeps exceeding the dictum itself. For over and over he pinpoints, and often celebrates, moments in the theorists he is discussing which remain vital and productive well after another paradigm has intruded. In a kind of countermovement to his own narrative, he validates ideas, procedures, and problematics that return in new contexts or revive neglected problems.
Nowhere is the nonsynchronous, syncopated countermovement more palpable than in the references to Sartre throughout the lectures. Jameson begins with Sartre and offers an extraordinarily lucid and engaging account of the pour soi of consciousness and en soi of concrete, empirical entities. Unlike entities, consciousness is empty; the self is a nothingness ever seeking to become an entity in itself (en soi). Jameson shows the silent persistence of Sartrean existentialism in Lacan’s mirror stage and the psychoanalytic notion that identity is but a bundle of identifications. He shows the traces of Sartrean phenomenology in Kristeva’s innovative exploration of the abject. He points out that Deleuze sees Sartre as the benchmark of the vocation of philosophy. And the vital emptiness of the self even returns in Jameson’s clarification of problems in Althusser, the anti-Sartrean Marxist whose notions of ideology and mode of production often anchor Jameson’s own version of Marxism.
The autobiographical aspect of the lectures goes deeper than the fact that the years of French theory overlap Jameson’s education and career, even as that provides illuminating context and great anecdotes and gossip. More fundamentally, the existentialist sense of situation and freedom, of the individual’s predicament and responsibility, with all its overtones of tragedy and liberation, pervades Jameson’s own sensibility. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his plays and novels stubbornly resist being superseded by his Critique of Dialectical Reason. The polarity of seriality and the fused group, which Jameson often evokes and refined in his own polarity of reificiation and utopia, does not ultimately absorb or efface that situated, empty self from whose projects, desires, actions, and words emerge a singular individual. As he himself might say, Fredric Jameson is but the signifier of those projects, desires, actions, and words. Such is the singular individual honored and remembered today.
In the many tributes to Jameson, it is striking how his readers and students often center his impact on some specific instance in the vast scope of his literary and artistic analyses. Is it nineteenth-century realism? Or postmodern architecture? Or global cinema? Or science fiction? Or avant-gardism? Or Raymond Chandler? Or Wyndham Lewis?! The scope and heterogeneity dazzles all who have followed his work. At the same time he is always identified as a Marxist. And yet there is no tightly held Marxist doctrine that governs his myriad interpretations. As with the great Marxist critics preceding him—Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno—there is more than a bit of the aesthete in Jameson. Marxism provides frame and concepts to rein in unwieldy receptivity and give it social and political pertinence. In fact, Jameson’s aesthetic sensibility and sensitivity are even more capacious than his predecessors’. And his Marxism is less rigid. His trust in the broad strokes of Marx’s thought—and it is more belief than doctrine—and his evocation of his own recurrent but loosely defined keywords—History, revolution, utopia, the dialectic, the collective—allow him to relish others’ intellectual commitments and theoretical projects. Throughout these 2021 lectures, that capacious receptivity to ideas as well as literature and art is fully manifest. One hopes that those who took the seminar and those who now read The Years of Theory will be as inspired as those of us at the polyseminar half a century ago.
John Brenkman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English, City University of New York Graduate Center, and Baruch College. He is the author of, most recently, Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect (2020). He lives in Livingston, Montana. More information at johnbrenkman.com
Emily Apter
Fredric Jameson died in Killingworth, Connecticut, a town near one I was staying in when I learned the news. The physical proximity makes the feeling of loss especially poignant – I regret I hadn’t managed to visit him, the intention had been in my mind for months. I flash back to personal memories: meeting Jameson at my parents’ house in North Haven when Fred and my father were part of a seminar on structuralism (and likely the sole participants in that group, which included Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, who spoke and thought “in Marx”); sitting in on Fred’s Yale seminars (which set off explosions in my head); selecting Marxism and Form for my first oral presentation in graduate school; bringing Fred as a distinguished visiting faculty member to UCLA in the 1990s; writing an essay called “The Prison-House of Translation? Carceral Models and Translational Turns” in Diacritics (2019). In 2006 Sharon Marcus, myself, and Elaine Freedberg co-organized a joint NYU-Columbia conference called “The Way We Read Now”—a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Political Unconscious and an occasion to debate Jameson’s use of the Althusserian notion of symptomatic reading. Jameson gave the keynote, and a number of the conference papers were published in an issue of Representations that became a minor cause célèbre in literary history, with everyone arguing, for better or worse, about surface reading and the postcritical.
Fred was always direct and unpretentious, consistent in modeling equality of address.[1] He would talk theory with anyone who was willing to jump in. He didn’t apologize for his thunderous typing speed (on an old electric typewriter) or his prodigious canon mastery (Terry Eagleton alleged he’d read “every significant work of literature” . In addition to his powers of recall and preternatural capacity for critical analytics, he had a knack like no other for translating continental theory into a discourse that Anglophone readers could (more or less) follow. Jameson was “our” Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Saussure, Troubetskoy, Auerbach, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Goldmann, and Debord rolled into one. He was a paradigm thinker who loved disassembling and demystifying structures, especially ideological ones— “Always historicize!” might well have been matched with the slogan “Always demystify!” He could be relied on to identify what was precisely political about an aesthetic form. He underscored a form’s potential radicality at moments of conservative backlash, starting with the ’70s turn of the “nouveaux philosophes,” moving on to the post-Wall, post-Maestricht era of the “end of history” and “the retreat of the political,” and from thence to the contemporary queasy climate of self-centric affect theory, which he perhaps helped precipitate by insisting on the “waning of affect” as a symptom of postmodernism. Jameson’s struggle to resist capitalism as a force-field inside your head comes through clearly in The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, a text that now reads like something of a last will and testament.
What is this book’s genre? It is first and foremost a seminar, in the groove of those bequeathed by outsized postwar thinkers in France like Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. The last twenty years has seen a geyser of seminars coming to publication, many of them containing outtakes, records of intellectual paths not taken. Less filtered than books on similar topics, preserving traces of their settings, occasions and audiences, they are nonetheless well-edited documents. They remind us of how much teaching matters to thinking; they prompt us to remember that figures like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Kristeva, Rancière, Badiou, Stengers, Nancy, Latour and others were credentialized members of an academic labor force charged with exam preparation.
We don’t quite have the equivalent of the agrégation in the US, but we can read Jameson’s The Years of Theory in the same way, as a preparation for a qualifying exam that we may or may not ever take. Its genre is theory mode d’emploi. The text will be useful to teach with even though (or perhaps because) the explications are indisciplined; occasionally veering off into digressions that make the narrative resemble a shaggy dog story. What is striking about this book is its immediacy; it is a like a live recording of a mind at work. The stream of consciousness style flows into trenchant analyses of consciousness as such, in all its strangeness as a temporally décalé activity that ultimately remains impossible to grasp. Jameson’s writing about thought bites its own tail—it’s very meta, and it’s no accident he embraced the term “metacommentary” “to indicate a certain mode of cultural-intellectual production and intervention” (JJ, p. 183).[2] Topics like desire, the carceral imaginary, structuralism, cultural logic, subjectification, come off as auto-affective performatives of theory, and this perhaps is Jameson’s gimmick, his version of the self-reflexive MacGuffin that we also find in Freud, Marx, Lacan, and Žižek.
The gimmick aligns with what Jameson, in his chapter on Derrida and the “Linguistic Politics of the Third Way” in The Years of Theory refers to as failed synthesis, an aborted Aufhebung, a condition of dichotomizationthat yields oppositions ad infinitum with no hope of dialectical, systemic transformation. In questing for a “third way” Jameson will fix on Derrida’s “framework of the ‘supplement,’” cast as an accounting system (Derrida’s speculative origin of writing) for items of surplus accumulation (p. 269). The supplement is the vehicle by which Derrida’s much derogated “meaningless theoretical jargon” makes its stealth entry into mainstream analytic philosophy, overturning its norms. But more consequentially, politically speaking, the supplement works as a politics from within, producing a disjunct between conceptualization and experience. Jameson glosses this process of “deconstructing” as “a life in time,” whereby “we can’t have meaning in the vulgar sense of meaning: because we are always in this process” (p. 276). While he doesn’t exactly anoint “deconstructing” as the political answer to the question of a dialectics worthy of the name, he does recognize it as “an enormous insight” that might well define “what philosophy ought to be doing,” – so no mean feat (p. 277)!
5:00 a. m. on 9/25/24. Awake, reading obituary comments about Jameson. Mostly by male critics, including one by my friend Stathis Gourgouris, who notes, after posting a photograph of Fred encircled by rapt young men (dating from the 1980s?), the “only guys” gender-skew of the group. While it is no doubt true that Jameson’s fan base was heavily male (most often white, usually hyperliterate in the Marxist idiolect), there were notable exceptions: Kristin Ross early on, more recently Anna Kornbluh and Sianne Ngai, to mention just a few.
Ngai finds in Jameson’s essay “The Aesthetics of Singularity” (2015) inspiration for her own Theory of the Gimmick (2020). Referencing postmodern works “soaked in theory” like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005)and Xu Bing’s installation Book from the Sky (2016-2017), Jameson had analyzed the postmodern transformation of the idea in art from “universal concept to a historically isolated contrivance.” [3] This contrivance becomes the basis of gimmick theory: “The dictionary [Jameson wrote] tells us that the word ‘gimmick’ means ‘any small device used secretly by a magician in performing a trick.’ . . . It is a one-time device which must be thrown away once the trick—a singularity—has been performed” (TG, p. 65). This idea of the gimmick as disposable device is contradicted by the fact that gimmicks are “used over and over again” (TG, p. 66). But that is precisely the point. Ngai theorizes them as forms of compulsory repetition, like “an over-repeated joke that’s no longer funny,” or “a novelty with no consequences beyond its immediately vanishing moment. . . . The outdated device that refuses to die” (TG, p. 68) The gimmick, then, is revealed to be a strange one-time-but-forever hat trick that morphs into a political allegory of hellish presentism; the kind of endless, pointless expenditure and consumption that underwrites capitalism and epitomizes (as Ngai would have it), the late-capitalist aesthetic. A key characteristic of the gimmick is its self-defeat. As Ngai observes of the word’s effect on Jameson’s exposition: it “produces a hesitation in this essay, highlighting similar uncertainties inherent to the form. A likeness between the singularity and gimmick is suggested . . . then retracted. . . . The retraction is then itself retracted” (TG, p. 66). Perhaps this coy retractivity is Jameson’s indirect answer to the nihilating force of the dialectical language that he applies often to the analysis of literature, linguistic structuralism and the rhetoric of temporality, namely, sublation, subsumption and supersession.
Why France? Is Paris over as a city where polemics are “not only possible but inevitable?” As “a space in which all kinds of things can happen?” (p. 436). These questions are raised at the end of The Years of Theory in an “Envoi” subtitled “Theory after De-Marxification.” Like T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999) or Edward W. Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2009),there is an elegiac plaint suffusing this bookend. Even the title, The Years of Theory, implies a past tense, a requiem for the years when people actually convened in person to theorize Verstehen, dialectical thinking, periodization, deconstruction, the gender of the Symbolic, the nature of unrepresentable totality, world systems, alternate narratives of modernity, third world allegory, cultural logics of late capitalism, the society of spectacle, feminism, and others.[4] Theory “then” kept the Left from bleeding out; it staved off the defeat of the Utopian idea.
So where are we now? With this retrospect on a life in theory, Jameson leaves us with the task of theorizing as a prescriptive calling grounded in an emancipatory political project. Cast as an open-ended teaching, the book guides us through a barren landscape in which thought has been de-Marxified (an expression that unfortunately connotes deprogramming, as if from a cult, or some kind of drug detox), towards a clearing that highlights theory’s ongoing vitality. We glimpse theory years that lie ahead.
In Paris, that historic site where postwar theory reigned, French Culture Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer organized a conference at the Sorbonne in January 2022 that took aim at “le cancel culture,” deconstruction, and “le wokisme.” But the attack was a reactionary sputter, soon forgotten. French theory soldiered on, with new work by thinkers of varying generations – Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, Eric Alliez, Catherine Malabou, Eric Fassin, Peter Szendy, François Hartog, Pierre Charbonnier, Vinciane Despret, Grégoire Chamayou, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Hélène Cixous, Françoise Vergès, Achille Mbembe, and Paul Preciado– all widely read and translated.
A new English translation of Capital, Volume I by Paul Reitter (edited by Paul North) is renewing engagements, just as Jameson did, with Marx’s concept-lexicon, contributing to a thriving discussion of Marx in translation (Michael Heinrich, Ian Balfour, Robert Young, Keston Sutherland, Benjamin Conisbee Baer, Nergis Ertürk, Jason Smith are just a few who have weighed in in interesting ways). Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal (2024) conscripts Freud, Lacan, and Jameson in the service of a critique of conspiracy theory (“the Subject Supposed to Deceive (Us),” noting that, “As Fredric Jameson argued in his seminal study of conspiracy films of the 1970s and 1980s, conspiratorial thinking often functions as an important means of cognitive mapping in late capitalism—it could be seen as almost the only way left to think about the social as totality and about the collective (as opposed to the individual.” (emphasis in the text).[5] McKenzie Wark credits Jameson with readings of Situationism that spark her own efforts to identify a form of “collective, decentered cultural production, which, if it cannot fill the empty chair, can at least name it.”
The survey course that we can follow in The Years of Theory accords scandalously scant attention to Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s name appears in a line-up after those of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir under the chapter heading “After the Liberation.” Jameson was a Left internationalist but for the most part he left decolonizing Western epistemes to others and perhaps rightly so. Yes, there was Eurocentrism, but his preoccupation with Euro-theory did not stop him from being one of the most popular American thinkers the world over, especially in China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. We can well imagine Jameson writing a sequel to The Years of Theory that would track the story of theory’s global circulation and critical transformation. Here, it seems fitting to conclude with Jameson’s response to Xudong Zhang’s observation that many people in non-Western societies “are looking for an ideal form of representation or narrative, a mode of thinking as a way to organize your private and collective experiences, which might otherwise be utterly fragile and fragmented.”
Absolutely. I think that is the whole point of the narrative of postmodernity, and its relationship to late capitalism. Whatever is going on in the other parts of the world, in the Pacific Rim, for example, it seems to me that everyone in one way or another is caught in this force field of late capitalism (automation, structural unemployment, finance capital, globalization, and so on). That then, it seems to me, is the organizing dynamic. One does not necessarily solve this fragmented reality in existential terms. One does not map that our or represent it by turning it from fragments into something unified. One theorizes the fragmentary and symptomal interrelationship. [JJ, p. 187]
[1]Unpretentious, yes, but Fred did have an unselfconscious sense of his own importance. I remember when Anthony Vidler and I met him in Paris once, we picked him up where he was staying—at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes! – situated just steps from the Pantheon. Nor would he shy away from publishing a book of interviews in a series coedited by himself and Stanley Fish titled Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, ed. Ian Buchanan(Durham, N.C., 2007); hereafter abbreviated JJ.
[2] I cite Xudong Zhang’s gloss on “metacommentary” in his interview with Jameson.
[3] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, Mass, 2020), p. 65; hereafter abbreviated TG.
[4] A querulous cavil: In The Years of Theory Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and Luce Irigaray are lumped together under the rubric “Feminism as Transgression.” By contrast, Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze receive far more airtime, with dedicated, free-standing chapters.
[5] Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (Hoboken, N.J., 2024), pp. 97–98.
Emily Apter is the Julius Silver Professor of French Literature Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of, most recently, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (2018).
Jonathan Culler
Given the thousands of pages that have been written about French theory, it seems surprising that Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory stands alone. There are many books about modern critical theory in general, about structuralism and/or post-structuralism, and about individual theorists, but to my knowledge nothing else that tries to capture the movement of theoretical work in France from the mid 1940s until the early twenty-first century. The closest competitor is doubtless François Dosse’s two volume Histoire du structuralisme (1991), but that is much more strictly chronological, more focused on publishing events and French institutions rather than the analysis of ideas, and heavily based on interviews with observers available to speak with him (most of the major figures had already died).
Jameson’s work is unique in its combination of colloquial tone, vast theoretical reach (potent excursions into the earlier history of philosophy to explain the stakes of French writings of these years), continuous situating of theoretical movements within the history of capitalism and the Cold War, and above all its pedagogical commitment “to demonstrate for those who never experienced it the intensity and originality” of these years of theory (p. 5). This makes it tremendously engaging. Frequent injunctions—“you should all read the famous essays”—accompanied by allowances that listeners will find some texts more interesting than others, make it a very welcoming book (p. 427).
While explicit in its identification of its historical and conceptual frameworks, and ready to note personal preferences, it is less a critique of various movements and theoretical claims than an engaged exploration of these competing discourses. “Anyone who has not lived through this period,” he writes,
will not be able to understand how one can provisionally adhere with a certain passion to all of them in turn, without abjuring the Marxism with which they were all “in dialogue” and without becoming a fanatical adherent of any one of these theoretical stances, now considered a doctrine or an -ism. But this is my personal claim, which animates these lectures and which, from another perspective, has tended to be denounced as eclecticism. [p. 4]
The Years of Theory offers analysis and high praise of Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze but makes continual reference also to other thinkers interacting with them; gathered in close proximity in Paris and reading and responding to one another, they are “productively caught between capitalism and communism, and in search of a third way which does not exist” (p. 7).
Sartre, the subject of Jameson’s dissertation and first book, looms large, the central figure of four chapters. Sartre suddenly opens up “the possibility of writing philosophy in a wholly new way” (19), giving us theory rather than philosophy; and problems posed by Sartre’s work orient much of the subsequent analysis (p. 19). Lacan, whom Jameson now calls the central figure of theory in the 1960s, is surprisingly “read as a successor of Sartre”: Lacan “develops Sartreanism further with a very different sort of turn” (p. 23). Even structuralism’s break with phenomenology, its treatment of lived experience, such as meanings, as effects to be explained by reconstructing underlying systems responsible for them, is presented as a dialectical response to the limitations of Sartre’s conceptual framework: Sartre
is confined within this commitment to lived experience, to the individual, to existential experience. And so, while this is profound, it is also a fundamental limit on his problematic, on his thought. What is going to change that? Well, first of all, maybe we could name this problem. Maybe we could turn the problem into a solution by describing it. That is what will happen in structuralism. [p. 89]
But Lévi-Strauss declares in Tristes Tropiques (1955) that the movement of thought blossoming in existentialism seemed “the contrary of any valid reflection” because of its complacency about subjective experience. His three sources of inspiration, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and geology, had taught him, rather, that “to reach reality one has first to reject experience.”[2] This seems rather more than a “description” of Sartre’s problem.
Jameson distinguishes four periods of French theory. The first, dominated by Sartre and phenomenology, encompasses the Liberation, anti-colonialism, and the beginnings of the Cold War. The fourth, the period of “the end of theory,” is characterized by globalization, corporatization, postmodernism, aestheticization, and a return to the disciplines. Sandwiched between are two periods of the height of French theory, defined in unusual ways: the initial period of structuralism and the widespread influence of linguistics is related to Lévi-Strauss’s interest in societies without power, whereas the second, which brings the Algerian War and May ’68, is seen as a period of revolt and reflection on power. But Jameson admits that these are actually “two overlapping periods” (p. 17). Speaking of “so-called post-structuralisms,” he avoids the American tendency to distinguish a structuralist period from a post-structuralist one (p. 3). After all, the critique of the subject and an interest in resistance to systems is central to structuralism; and the culminating moment of French theory, 1966-67, sees the publication of Lacan’s Ecrits, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, Derrida’s La Voix et le phénomène, De la Grammatologie, and L’Ecriture et la différence, and the second volume of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, Du miel aux cendres—all of which are diverse and inventive explorations of structures. The American assimilation of all save Lévi-Strauss to post-structuralism would produce a caricature of structuralism, which Jameson avoids.
But his periodization is less important than the pedagogical effectiveness of his recommendations, informal comments, and extended explanations of key concepts and theoretical commitments. The pedagogical character of The Years of Theory entails a greater openness to the work of thinkers previously subject to Jameson’s critiques, such as Deleuze, who is here called “a thinking machine, one of the great thinking machines. Deleuze is one of the most marvelous thinkers of the twentieth century” (p. 368); but strikingly, this benevolence does not extend to Derrida. While Jameson offers useful, rather abstract accounts of Derrida’s general strategies, he allows himself comments easily twisted into barbs: “Does Derrida think? I tried to make the point the other day that there aren’t thoughts in Derrida” (p. 266). (I wonder whether Derrida’s claim that he had no interest in Sartre might have rankled.) Derrida’s writings “are performances, performances of reading and writing. They are to be experienced, but one must avoid—and I always come back to this notion of reification—reifying them into ideas” (p. 266). Defensible judgments are given an acrimonious twist. But more important than acerbic comments is Jameson’s failure to discuss essays, such as “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida’s influential critique of Lévi-Strauss, highly relevant to questions about structuralism and post-structuralism, and where Jameson, with his nose for complexity, could have shown that this is much more subtle than often assumed. In fact, Jameson is very sympathetic to the resistance to the reification of ideas that he finds in Derrida and to his conviction that you can’t escape it. In his concluding envoi he returns to Derridean formulations.
Jameson makes excessively modest claims for what he can accomplish in these lectures—this Cook’s tour, he suggests, can do little more than give the names of the principal players and explain the distinctive terms they use and slogans associated with them; in his envoi he winningly keeps mentioning people of interest whom he has left out. I do wish that the editor had listed the readings assigned for each session: those that are identified are often surprising or little-known, and readers would benefit from being able to follow up. But this minor failing scarcely mars the dazzling achievement of this book. The range of references Jameson brings together has always been amazing, but here it is accompanied both by an unusual pedagogical effort and a greater enthusiasm for ideas and positions that he would once have preferred to situate historically. Jameson’s critical oeuvre, the most impressive of any American critic of the postwar years, finds a fitting culmination in The Years of Theory.
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1976), p. 70.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books on literary theory and criticism, including Structuralist Poetics, On Deconstruction, and, most recently, Theory of the Lyric (2015).
Bill Brown
Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) held a seminar—remotely—in the Spring of 2021, the record of which now appears as The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present. Last spring we proposed that we feature the book of lectures as the focus of a “forum” on the Critical Inquiry blog, inviting a few scholars to respond to the book, followed by his own response to those responses, along with his further thoughts about the book, indeed about that thing called theory. He loved the idea. As it happened, of course, he didn’t live to read the responses, which we will begin posting on Monday, within an intellectual atmosphere that has suddenly changed without him.
The Years of Theory reads as a uniquely personal and idiosyncratic book by Jameson: there’s not one Jamesonian sentence in more than four hundred pages. The voice is casual and patiently pedagogical. Explaining Althusser’s notion of overdetermination, he uses the example of “a movie with George Clooney called The Perfect Storm,” where everything that could go wrong (multiple determinants) comes together (p. 233). It is a voice determined to render the opaque more transparent, to streamline basic concepts, and to chart their relation to each other (above all their relation to Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Lacan). But for all its effort to organize French thought in the postwar era, it is delightfully digressive, waxing anecdotal, looping back to a point that he had meant to emphasize weeks before, recommending books to read (René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel [1961], Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics [1972]) and films to watch, mostly the films of Goddard. Because the book preserves the lectures as they were, you gain a sense of their author’s concern for his (virtual) audience: “Okay, we’ll go on next time to Lacan. . . . I hope you survive the ice storm and all the things that are happening in the weather today.” But not at the expense of that overarching concern, “the project, futurity” (pp. 171, 82).
None of which means to slight the book’s formidable account of existentialism, structuralism, semiotics, and a cluster of post-structuralisms, perceived against the background of multiple ideological, social, and political milieux: the Communist Party, Algerian independence, May ’68, Maoism, Mitterrand, neoliberalism—above all the shifting fate of Marxism in and beyond France. It is a history that can’t be (and doesn’t mean to be) distinguished from an intellectual autobiography. There are predictable elements of that history: the persistence of Sartre (in Badiou, for instance). And there are unpredictable elements: his fascination with Baudrillard, the attachment to Lacan, his celebration of Kristeva’s invention of a new signifier, the abject, and his eagerness to bring out a “profound unity” in her work despite charges of eclecticism (p. 295). It will become impossible not to read the book for insights into Jameson’s other books (his own massive theoretical achievement) just as it’s impossible not to recognize, in his passing thoughts about schematization (in Kant, in Lacan, in Deleuze) what will crystalize into an essay published three years later. Given how seriously Jameson shaped more than one generation’s thinking (about literature, film, Marxism, postmodernism, utopia, allegory, the dialectic, and others) it is, and will continue to be, an invaluable resource for understanding how Paris shaped his own thinking.
Bill Brown is coeditor-in-chief of Critical Inquiry.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself. . . . We constantly lose our ideas. . . . We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “From Chaos to the Brain,” in What Is Philosophy?)
Speaking with a German journalist in 1919, Sandor Ferenczi said that psychoanalysis did not possess the tools to understand and cure mass psychosis. Not even politics had those tools, and we can repeat those words today, one hundred years later.
What does mass psychosis mean? The above quote from Deleuze and Guattari brings us closer to understanding the meaning of the word psychosis: when thought escapes from itself, when action can no longer be traced back to coherent mental processing. When everything starts going too fast for us to understand and guide action coherently.
Deleuze and Guattari connect this condition to old age, a condition in which we lose the ability to process neuro-informative stimuli over time because those stimuli go too fast for our slowed down senescent brain.
In a certain sense, the contemporary electronic acceleration of info-neural stimuli produces a generalized senescence effect on the social mind.
The generation that grew up in an environment in which info-neural stimulation is hyperfast, certainly develops the ability to process faster the stimulus that comes from the connective electronic environment. But a rapid processing method is precisely based on the elimination of those mental activities that slow down our ability to respond and to act: emotion and rationalization.
Consequently the act tends to become devoid of emotional profundity and devoid of rational motivation.
In our time these two phenomena converge: the aging of the population (with the effect of mental confusion of which Alzheimer’s is merely the extreme manifestation) is accompanied by the emergence of a young population that has been deprived of the possibility of developing over time the emotion and consequences of the action.
We know that more and more often the political behavior of the majority is inexplicable with the categories of political rationality: think of a phenomenon like Trumpism, the enthusiastic support of a population for an aggressive individual who is incapable of connecting sensible reasoning but perfectly capable to excite feelings of frustration by directing them towards imaginary goals.
Psychology too seems unsuited to explaining what happens to the contemporary mind and behavior. Episodes are happening more and more often that psychological science is unable to explain with the diagnostic tools at its disposal. Episodes that signal a profound mutation in behavior, a mutation that does not only affect psychic dynamics but also, perhaps, the modes of cognitive processing. Think of the (increasingly frequent) acts of destructive violence carried out by very young people.
Paderno Dugnano is a town in the Milanese hinterland, with villas inhabited by the middle class. At the beginning of September in one of these villas a seventeen-year-old boy killed his younger brother with a kitchen knife, then his father, and finally his mother. The triple murder, which was carried out in a few minutes by a boy whom everyone described as normal and on an evening like many others, appears enigmatic. The boy did not give an explanation for the act; he said he could not understand why he had done it; he said he had no motivation.
There were no apparent motivations; this is important. It seems that the very notion of motivation has lost its meaning. In this case, there is no reason that precedes the act, a reason that is elaborated by the mind under particular conditions, before performing an action so complex, so extreme, so full of consequences.
Motivation, consequences.
Are there still motivations in the acts carried out by the contemporary subject? Does the perception of the relationship between the act and its consequences still exist in the action of the contemporary subject? And above all: Who is the contemporary subject? What differentiates the contemporary subject from the subject studied by psychology or by psychoanalysis with the tools of anamnesis, of interpretation? Can we still distinguish between the behavioral level and the deep dimension of psychic processing?
We can say that the boy from Paderno Dugnano did it because he found himself in the middle of an action that did not correspond to an idea.
A type of homicidal behavior comes to mind, which in South-East Asia, particularly in Malaysia, is called amok. The ethno-psychiatrist Georges Devereux describes it as a subject is in the grip of a temporary condition of violent and homicidal fury, which follows a more or less significant reason or even just the accumulation of an inexplicable nervous tension. The subject withdraws into themselves, isolates themselves, then suddenly attacks anyone who comes to him or her, first family members and then strangers, in an uncontrollable crescendo of murderous fury. What seems characteristic of the amok is the fact that during the explosion of violence the subject runs very fast through the streets and between the fields and then, finally, collapses.
Finally, after the homicidal action, the subject does not remember or confusedly remembers the event and is unable to report the motivations and the psychic experience that led him or her to the act.
It would seem that it is not the subject who conducts the action, but it is the action that leads the subject.
Can I say so? Can I dare a sort of reversal of the usual chronological sequence: first the mental elaboration then the execution of the act?
Let’s be clear: the case of Paderno Dugnano is not isolated, unique. In the US, killing sprees or mass murders are the order of the day.
Think of the fact that in 2023 “there were 38 school shootings that resulted in injuries or death.” In September this year, a fourteen-year-old in Winder, Georgia, killed two teachers and two students and injured eight other people. Why did he do it? Of course, it can be said that he suffered from loneliness, that he had been the victim of bullying and so on and so forth. But loneliness is a generalized phenomenon in the generation that has lived most of its conscious time in front of a screen. And bullying is everywhere in a society that makes aggression a positive value. We continue to look for a psychological explanation, but in this case it seems to me that the problem is rather cognitive than psychological.
More and more often we are witnessing acts that cannot be explained with the categories we have. We continue to look for reasons, but the reasons are obvious and inconsistent at the same time: isolation, loneliness, competitiveness, widespread violence in the environment, in the media, everywhere.
The point I am interested in emphasizing is that the psychological categories with which we explain the functioning of the human mind no longer correspond to the reality of the mind formed in a technically changed environment. The cognitive modalities (perception, verbalization, ideation, implementation, distinct steps that take place in sequence) have undergone a mutation, and the chronological sequence tends to be disturbed, confused. It is this mutation that must be analyzed.
Psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular refer to the cognitive framework in which ideation precedes the act and in some way motivates it. Therefore, to explain a behavior we are used to interpreting conscious and unconscious motivations, reasoning, and emotions. But this explanation no longer works: the act is no longer necessarily preceded by the ideation, and probably the concept of ideation and motivation no longer correspond to anything.
The cognitive model that was formed in the interaction with a sequential techno-semiotic environment has been replaced in recent generations by an instantaneous, simultaneous techno-semiotic environment.
Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964) writes that when the mind is formed in an electronic environment rather than in an alphabetic environment, the sequential is followed by the simultaneous, and the rational modes of cognitive action are replaced by mythological modalities. From here, in my opinion, we need to start, to radically rethink the behavior of the contemporary subject. It is not just a question of examining psychological motivations, psychological traumas, and so on. It is a matter of going deeper, of getting closer to neurological hardware, and of recognizing that mutation involves cognitive modalities: imagination, language, memorization, ideation, passage to the act.
In the alphabetic communicative environment, in the context of the traditional family, village life, or socialized life in the city, the child learns language from the voice of the mother or at least of a human speaker. Consequently, the cognitive disposition manifests itself through a succession of stimulus and response, of ideation and implementation. But when the alphabetical is succeeded by the electronic, then the speed of the info-neural stimulus cuts the time for the ideational elaboration of the act. In a video game there is no time to think, but only to react instantly to the stimulus. Furthermore, when the maternal learning of language is followed by learning approved by a de-realizing techno-linguistic device, language no longer has the character of affective singularity, and the author of the act tends to lose consciousness of its physical consequences: in a video game the little green men that you eliminate by pushing the button are an incorporeal entity; they never die, or if they die they get up immediately.
Instantaneity and virtuality: these two reconfigurations of the relationship between conception and execution have changed cognitive functioning so radically that the behaviors of our fellow human beings (similar up to a certain point) tend to appear more and more inexplicable to us. What we need is an understanding of the cognitive mutation that has ended up structuring a psycho-cognitive model that is incompatible with the models available to psychological science.
Of course, I start here from a theoretical-methodological premise very different from the Chomskyan one that for a long time dominated in the field of cognitive psychology as well as linguistics. I don’t believe that there is an innate structure of the mind; I don’t believe that there is a natural mode of cognition. This is not the place to elaborate on this reasoning. I limit myself to observing that structuralist cognitivism ignores the relationship between the techno-communicative environment and the formation of cognitive structures, but this relationship emerges today with unprecedented force.
Technological transformation has changed the communicative environment to the point of upsetting the fundamental modalities of psychogenesis. A generation has emerged that has acquired more words from a machine than from the voice of a human being and which has acquired its cognitive skills in an environment where action is devoid of physical consequences. We must hypothesize that this generation has lost the ability to deeply perceive the physical effect of an action that does not take place on the screen but in the kitchen and bedroom or in a school or in any other physical place.
There is a whole phenomenology of this kind of inexplicable act. I would say that we are witnessing the effects of the contraction of mental processing time (instantaneousness, stimulus, response) and the effects of desensitization to physical consequences (virtuality of perceived experience). These two reconfigurations of the perception-projection of reality reconfigure the mental projection of the act itself.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a social theorist, activist and was a key figure in the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He is cofounder of the magazine A/traverso (1975–1981) and of Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Italy (1976/1978). He is the author of, most recently, Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024).
Bill Brown
For those inhabiting the world of literary theory and cultural criticism, the loss of Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) comes as a disorienting blow like no other. In part this is because his vitality proved unwaning, because he kept publishing unpredictable contributions to literary criticism (an essay on Alexander Sokurov, a book on Raymond Chandler, a book on science fiction, a book on realism). But it’s also because of what became the predictable, yet always mesmerizing, momentum with which he perceived the dialectic of reification and utopia wherever he looked. No less, because he continued to demonstrate what he describes in The Political Unconscious (1981) as the power of the Marxian analytic to absorb and repurpose other paradigms (semiotics, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, deconstruction, and others). Rediscovering that power and that perception seemed to require exploration without end. His career as “the most influential Marxist critic writing in English” depended on his uniquely astute formalist inquiry (from sentence to genre), so too on the unending (and at times unnerving) oscillation between the micro and the macro, the corporeally experienced particular (on the page, on the screen, on the street) and the conceptualized dynamic of cultural mode. The ongoing impact of the postmodernism book derives not just from its concepts (“cultural logic,” “cognitive mapping”) but from the writerly vividness of its iconic scenes (the Bonaventure Hotel) and iconic juxtapositions (van Gogh’s shoes and Warhol’s shoes). All this animated by that will to historicize, which, for Jameson, is the will to totalize, absorbing a vast cultural landscape into the relentless narrative of capital (the requisite effort to mirror capital’s own power of totalization).
A frequent visitor to Chicago (and once Wayne Booth’s student at Haverford), Jameson gave the Carpenter Lectures for the Department of English and returned to serve as the first Critical Inquiry Professor. For the former he explained that he would need to give four (not three) lectures, which began with a (very) long lecture on Aristotle. For the latter he taught a seminar on Twoness and Threeness, which began with Peirce and pressed on to the structuralist binary and the Hegelian and then Marxist dialectic. He rewarded his audience by demonstrating the effect of patience. At the 2003 Critical Inquiry symposium on the future of criticism he described theory as, “of course . . . yet another characteristic superstructural development of late capitalism,” which “thus displays many of the same dynamics (although in a wholly different political valence).” Which is to say that he was never not historicizing his own thought.
A member of our editorial board for decades, Jameson published many words in our pages. This began (in 1978) with an essay on Kenneth Burke in which he defines “what has today for better or for worse come to be known as literary theory” and where he admonishes that theorist for his unwillingness “to historicize.” Most recently (2023) in a dazzling account of “schematizations” from Kant to Deleuze (efforts to visualize thought, to produce the “X-ray of a concept”) he does not exclude his own “visual hobby horses” (the Greimasian squares) while recognizing how all of this might intimate “a creeping triumph of formalism over content, a gradual colonization of thinking by visuality.” Two weeks ago, I asked whether he might be able to review the new translation of Capital. He wrote back apologetically: “Sorry, Bill, in hospital right now, hard to work.” For those of us who have always worked (consciously or unconsciously) in some relation to Jameson, who cannot help but think in relation to his thinking, his work will continue to do its work. In the forthcoming The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present (2024), he argues that those years are effectively over (that the conditions of theory’s vitality have passed). But by continuing to reread Jameson we should sense how the point might really be that, at first, the ongoingness of theory will be unrecognizable.
Bill Brown is coeditor-in-chief of Critical Inquiry.
Fredric Jameson in Critical Inquiry:
“The Symbolic Inference; Or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis” (1978)
“Ideology and Symbolic Action” (1978)
“On Magic Realism in Film” (1986)
“Culture and Finance Capital” (1997)
“The Theoretical Hesitation: Benjamin’s Sociological Predecessor” (1999)
“The End of Temporality” (2003)
“Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” (2004)
“History and Elegy in Sokurov” (2006)
“The Square Peg in the Round Hole or the History of Spaceflight” (2008)
“How Not to Historicize Theory” (2008)
“Schematizations, or How to Draw a Thought” (2023)
Liron Mor
1.
This is the time of inqisām. A time of severance, of breaking apart, of the utter destruction of Gaza, the dissolution of its inhabitants, its communities, and its infrastructures, of lives and everything that sustains them, of the very habitability of the land.
But this word, inqisām, names much more. Meaning “severance” or “being partitioned” in Arabic, it helps designate and illuminate several political, conceptual, social, and psychological aspects of Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, both before and after October 2023. It is, first and foremost, the proper name for an Israeli mode of segregation, which separates not only colonizers from colonized but also, and more importantly, the colonized from one another. It indexes technologies of distancing that produce Israeli blindness and apathy to Palestinian subjectivity. It accurately manifests the current stage of what is known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a stage defined by the temporally cyclical and spatially binary logic of blood feuds and revenge, with its tendency to decontextualize and its recurrent moral rebooting of history. Finally, it helps demonstrate that what is going on at present does not constitute a break with the previous Israeli paradigm of “conflict management,” which many declared to have been shattered. Instead, this severance is simply its continuation by other means. Since “conflict management” has long involved periodic large-scale operations of mass killing and infrastructural devastation—a violence whose seasonal nature is captured by the term Israeli politicians have given it, mowing the lawn—what sets apart the current violence in Gaza is primarily its unprecedented scale.
2.
Inqisām both encompasses and exceeds such practices as apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich, then a member of the Israeli parliament and now Israel’s finance minister, devised a political plan, which he termed Tokhnit ha-Hakhraʿa. This phrase translates as “the plan of decision,” of verdict and decisiveness,but also as “the plan of subjugation.”[1] Declaring his rejection of both the “conflict management” paradigm and the two-sides framework of conflict, Smotrich suggested that Israel should simply seize the power to “win” and take the liberty to unilaterally decree this conflict over and decided. It would then leave Palestinians between the river and the sea with three options: subjugation, or relinquishing all national rights for the sake of a right of residence (read: apartheid); voluntary emigration (read: ethnic cleansing or transfer); and struggle, which would be met with unbridled military aggression by the Israeli army, now unburdened of any legal or humanitarian considerations (read: genocide or, at least, a genocidal mode of engagement). These three options are presented by Smotrich as future prospects. In reality, however, they represent current conditions all over historic Palestine. Even prior to October 2023, these three modes of subjugation were operative—to varying degrees and in various permutations—in different sites in Palestine.
Apartheid, transfer, and genocide—like their conceptual relatives: occupation, conflict and siege—are incredibly valuable prisms for better investigating and spotlighting the oppression and dispossession of Palestinians, yet they are insufficient. None of these largely imported prisms fits perfectly with what is happening in Palestine-Israel or is specific enough to this context. Additionally, they pertain more to Israeli modes of oppression and dispossession than to Palestinian actions or epistemologies. Perhaps most importantly, they offer only partial frames. Each of these frameworks often attends to the structure of oppression of only one segment of the Palestinian population according to the modes of Israeli control to which it is subjected. These conceptual frameworks thus tend to replicate and reinforce the colonial division lines drawn in 1948, 1967, 1993, 2007, and so on. This partiality is not coincidental. Not at all a bug, it is rather a key feature of Israeli domination, which functions to a large degree by attempting to fragment Palestinian society along those colonial lines and by rendering unpredictable the specific manifestations of its own power in different times and places. One might argue that this combinatory and fracturing mode of control is in fact intentional, guaranteeing its own endurance and open-endedness—for, if articulating the problem is impossible, then confronting, redefining, or challenging it is out of the question.
3.
This partiality—the severance of Palestinians into population segments by various Israeli technologies of oppression—is thus part and parcel of Israel’s mode of control and should be named as such. Considering Palestine on its own terms, I propose the term inqisām, drawn from the history of this place, as a way of conceptualizing the contemporary conditions there.
While scholars of Palestine tend to periodize our time as post-Oslo, as defined by the so-called Oslo Accords and their aftermath, perhaps the contemporary moment is better characterized as the time of inqisām, or post-inqisām. It is defined by the 2007 forced split between Gaza and the West Bank—a split known in Arabic as al–inqisām. Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections put a strain on its political relations with Fatah (the largest faction of the PLO), which still controlled most administrative and security apparatuses in the West Bank. This clash, as well as Hamas’ subsequent seizure of power in Gaza, served as a pretext for Israel to impose a blockade on the Gaza Strip, thus effectively transforming a political split into a physical one. Following the Split, as the political theorist Nasser Abourahme puts it, “Hamas eventually settled for a besieged and ostracized fiefdom in Gaza, and a self-disciplining Fatah in the West Bank re-integrated into the global-imperial political order. Priorities shifted, and the national lost further traction in the face of renewed factionalism and the engineering of an internal enemy.” These two effects of al-inqisām—increased severance and fabricated internal animosity—are, I argue, the main political technologies constitutive of inqisām as a mode of separation and control.
The Split is indeed paradigmatic of the specific uses Israel makes of inqisām. Israeli politicians have long explicitly pitted Hamas against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and vice versa. Israel takes advantage of the collaborative attitude of the PA to “coordinate security” in the West Bank and to attempt to subdue Hamas there, while financially supporting Hamas in Gaza, propping it up for decades as an alternative to the PLO, then using its rocket fire as a perennial excuse to avoid political negotiations altogether. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly declared on several occasions that he views Hamas as an asset precisely because its status as a “terrorist organization” allows Israel to refuse any political settlement or change.
4.
Crucially, then, severance differs from other modes of segregation, such as apartheid and “divide and rule.” Unlike apartheid, Israeli inqisām separates not only colonizers from colonized but also the colonized from one another. In the exemplary case of the Split, for instance, it is Hamas and the PA/PLO that are divided and made into antagonists. Unlike colonial “divide and rule,” moreover, this practice of inqisām does not elevate one segment of the spliced population to rule over the rest but instead plays off both Hamas and the PLO against one another to inspire internal hostility and division and to forestall political change.
5.
The fragmentation wrought by inqisām is also far more granular than those generated by other modes of segregation. Fences, checkpoints, walls, the siege on Gaza, various surveillance and biometric border technologies, as well as the convoluted bureaucracy of the work permit regime, have all intensified in recent years, colluding to physically divide Palestinians on a nearly molecular scale. Such border technologies not only sever Palestinians “of the inside” (fī al-dākhil) from Palestinians “of the outside” (fī al-khārij), or the West Bank from the Gaza Strip; they also isolate communities and individuals from one another, operating on the smallest possible level of societal atomization.
In our post-inqisām time, the border has become the main site in and through which Israeli security apparatuses exercise control. As fences and walls continuously proliferate, the border, as well as its crossing, has become definitive of Palestinian experience. The exiled Palestinian intellectual and politician Azmi Bishara, for instance, named the occupied Palestinian territories “the land of checkpoints”[2] and the historian Rashid Khalidi claimed that the shared anxiety of Palestinians at the checkpoint “proves that they are a people, if nothing else does.”
We saw the intensification of this severance recently in Gaza, during the disastrous war Israel has waged on the enclave. This severance started with a single split, between the northern and southern parts of the Strip, when early in October Israel commanded 1.1 million Palestinians to vacate all areas north of Wadi Gaza, transforming the wadi’s east-west axis into a de facto border, complete with buffer death zones and checkpoints. Soon after, infrastructure for more permeant-looking military bases appeared on site, suggesting that this severing border is gradually being solidified. In December, the process intensified when the Israeli military distributed a map of Gaza broken down into hundreds of land cells, some of which were designated as alleged “safe zones” to which Palestinians were to evacuate—a designation that kept changing in accordance with Israel’s strategic needs or its political talking points. Use of this map has shattered Gaza into innumerable geographic smithereens, whose perimeters were often illegible, tearing asunder the coevalness between these tiny enclaves, thus performing a major severance on a miniscule scale (fig. 1).
Figure 1: A map of coded zones, distributed by the IDF in Gaza, December 2023, https://www.idf.il/ar/جيش-الدفاع-الإسرائيلي/جيش-الدفاع-الإسرائيلي/swordsofiron-011223-150/6.
Inqisām designates not only the means Israel employs in its effort to subjugate Palestinians but also their effects on Palestinians, the ways Palestinians experience them. Scholars have long noted the disjointed timespaces created by the Bantustanization of the West Bank and the enclosure of Gaza. They demonstrated how the proliferation of borders and checkpoints in Palestine contributed to the loss of social cohesion not only by creating physical barriers but also by inspiring suspicion, economic competition and miscommunication.[4]
Literary and cinematic works, too, help expose the various ways in which this severance spoils the very foundations of communal existence—its destructive effects on a shared sense of time, of space, of distance, of self and self-interests, of knowledge itself. In the short story “Dust,” for example, the Palestinian author Adania Shibli reveals the profound onto-epistemic uncertainty that the checkpoint breeds and its social effects. Complaining that her friends are chronically late because of the checkpoints, Shibli’s unnamed narrator ponders: “Why should I always arrive on time, wait, and suffer doubts about time, place, day, and the notion of clarity itself?” In Shibli’s writing, the border and its checkpoints undermine three key coordinates of being, which together form the very conditions of possibility for both knowledge and intersubjective relations—space, time, and self. Shibli’s narrator often describes moments of self-hatred and self-doubt: wondering whether she herself is a collaborator and whether the checkpoints are already inside her, she reports feeling like self-destruction is the only option left.
This internal severance is the profound meaning of inqisām. The renowned Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has proposed the related concept of ashlāʾ, Arabic for dismembered flesh or butchered body parts, as a means for theorizing Israel’s genocide and its necropolitical regime. This concept—which Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduced in April in a podcast that later served the Israeli police and her employer, the Hebrew University, as pretext for unconscientiously persecuting and abusing her—points to an even more granular level at which Israel divides up Palestinians. It refers not only to the geographical, political, and social scattering of Palestinians,but also to the severance of the body itself, to the dismemberment of Gazans to such a degree that one is driven to hold up a bag of body parts and torn flesh to the camera, proclaiming: “these are my children.”
7.
The distance introduced by inqisām has created a particularly distorted Zionist view of Palestinians, a view best described as its opposite—a blindness. In the media, many couched Hamas’s 7 October attack as demonstrating an Israeli failure of intelligence. Seeing things through the prism of inqisām, however, one might argue that the failure was never that of intelligence. All the information was readily available. Instead, it was a failure to truly take account of Palestinians, not merely as objective data points or “incited” mobs, but as real humans, with interiority and intentions that might change and develop over time.
This blindness is partly the result of a growing Israeli reliance on automated technologies—those surveillance, biometric, and algorithmic tools for “managing” conflict and, with it, the Palestinian population itself—which significantly increase the distance between Israeli security personnel and the Palestinians they subjugate. For example, since the Split, Israel has made the larger checkpoints, known as terminals, appear more and more like airport crossings, where biometric data is scanned and collected and where Palestinians are herded through a series of automated gates (whose opening, however, is still a decision that ultimately lies with a person). Similarly, in the past decade, Israeli security apparatuses have been employing algorithmic detection systems—some of them, like Levander and Where’s Daddy, use AI to rapidly produce “target banks” for bombardment in Gaza, while others allegedly detect “terrorists” and “inciters” based on data points, often operating preemptively, without any criminal action having taken place. Explaining the operation of one such system, an Israeli intelligence officer claimed in a press briefing in July 2016 that the system can detect a terrorist before “the kid even knows that he’s a terrorist yet.” In this way, Israeli institutions regard Palestinians merely as a threat to manage—as biopolitical carriers of terrorism and thus as data sets to tabulate and objects to surveil. Convinced that it truly knows these objects, the Israeli military, like Israelis more broadly, ignores Palestinians’ stated intentions, their interiority and—dare I say—their humanity.
This blindness is not the result of ignorance or of self-deception; lying to oneself still requires some knowledge of the truth. Instead, it is a matter of ignoring one’s ignorance, of repressing the very fact of repression, claiming that one already knows, that there is no more information to seek out. This repression of the repression, the conviction that one already knows, becomes immensely easier in light of automated and algorithmic procedures, which both prevent direct engagement and generate knowledge that appears objective.
Severance, then, produces a mode of knowledge that is familiar with Palestinians only with regards to their physical and algorithmic shell. It further renders distance a marker of political status as well as of moral and technological progress. While automated technologies bolster the impression of impartiality, they gradually foreclose opportunities for interpersonal contact. They sever relations, rendering all interactions mechanized and bureaucratic. Inqisām thus not only diminishes Jewish Israelis’ familiarity with Palestinians but also augments epistemic insecurity amongst Palestinians, as the representatives of Israeli power became inaccessible, opportunities for appeal are rescinded, and the process and its rules become grotesquely opaque. The distance introduced by severance blinds Israeli security personnel to the violence they inflict and short-circuits opportunities for raising questions, thus allowing them to regard themselves as neutral service providers, as mere “conflict managers,” and to maintain their self-image as the “most moral army in the world.”
8.
But the border does not, in fact, function automatically. Who are those Israeli security personnel who operate its distancing technologies? Today, this task, like other close-contact roles, has been increasingly delegated to Mizrahim—Israeli Jews originating from the Arab and Muslim world—who have become the immoral face of Israel’s systemic violence. Overly represented in the police, the border police, and the security apparatuses, Mizrahi Jews are the ones managing the checkpoints that tear at the social and physical flesh of Palestinians. By front-lining Mizrahim, the state distances itself from the spectacle of violence and abdicates responsibility for it, while severing Mizrahi Jews from both their Arab past and Palestinians.
Elsewhere, I therefore employ the term inqisām for investigating the severance between Jewish Arabs (Mizrahi Jews) and Palestinian Arabs. Specifically, I examine why solidarities that seem likely, based on cultural similarities and class interests, do not in fact emerge between these two groups today (though they have at various moments in history). Severance was essential to the integration of Mizrahim into the Jewish collective, an integration achieved only by separating them from their home countries and cultures, from their families and communities. Mizrahi Jews were thus “de-Arabized,” socialized to associate their Arab cultures and pasts with the enemy and hence aim for assimilation. Simultaneously, however, they were also “Arabized”: though their backgrounds were highly diverse—in terms of geography, class, and culture—Mizrahim were perceived in Israel through a homogenizing prism, which rendered them akin to Palestinians and painted them as easily exploitable bodies. Owing to this perception, Zionism used Mizrahim for the purpose of competing with and replacing Palestinians. Regarded as fungible bodies, Mizrahi Jews were deployed as cheap labor to oust Palestinian workers and as a human security belt for the settlement of the frontiers—for fortifying the borders of newly colonized areas to prevent Palestinians from returning.
This logic of competitive replacement was operative in Zionism from the very beginning. It is evident, for instance, in arguments made already in 1909 in favor of importing Jewish Yemini workers to Palestine. Viewed as “natural workers,” Yemini Jews were nonetheless in need of rehabilitation and acculturation so that they would eventually “become the better contenders for every aspect of farming work. The Yemenis will then come to take, and they are indeed able to take, the place of the Arabs.”[3] Because the labor, settlement, and security work of Mizrahim was largely coerced it was left unacknowledged, while similar “pioneering” efforts by a minority of Ashkenazim were lauded and heavily subsidized. Even today, after some Mizrahi Jews have ascended into the ranks of the middle class, this historic lack of recognition and the fear of falling once again to the bottom of the racialized barrel remain key factors driving many Mizrahim to insist on their intentional national belonging by vocally expressing animosity toward Palestinians.
This process has created a systemic adversarial relationship between Mizrahim and Palestinians, a zero-sum competition, whereby one is commanded to displace the other or risk becoming abject. The racialization of both groups was thus coconstitutive. It is because Mizrahim had to shed “Arabness” that it became definitive of disposability; it is because Mizrahi Jews could eventually be de-Arabized that Palestinians could not; and it is because Ashkenazi society in Israel delegated violence, settlement, and menial labor to others that it racialized them as primitive, illiberal, and immoral, while building itself up as white and socialist-liberal. What severance severs, and thus conceals, is this coconstitutive nature of the racializing structures that expendabilize both Palestinians and Mizrahim.
“Guard labor” on the border and high-friction combat in Gaza, increasingly delegated to Mizrahim, are the current incarnation of these longer severing processes, which succeeded at both de-Arabization—turning Mizrahim against Palestinians and their Arab past—and Arabization, rendering Mizrahi bodies more disposable, easily deployable in the service of executing the state’s violence on Palestinians, whose bodies are perceived as ultimately disposable. The racialized division of labor within the Israeli economy of violence also highlights a key severance within Jewish society in Israel—between the illiberal nationalist camp, whose exclusionary drive is explicit, and the liberal Zionist camp, attempting to disavow this same drive. This internal division is in fact productive in facilitating outward violence, for illiberal violence and illegal land grab—which serve the state’s interests and eventually earn its legalizing seal—can be presented as operating despite and outside the democratic rule of law, and liberal discourse is used as a screen behind which violent dispossession and colonization continue unperturbed.
9.
Processes of inqisām are related not only to technological changes but also to a recent shift in the perception of conflict itself. A textbook example is the TV action series Fauda, whose cycle-of-revenge narrative bounces back and forth between an Israeli undercover army unit operated by Arabic-speaking Mizrahi men and Palestinian militants. The show betrays, perhaps despite itself, just how flimsy the racialized dividing line between the two groups is. It also reveals that Mizrahi Jews today perceive Palestinians as an enemy of equal stature, couching violence in familial terms, through the trope of the blood feud. This is quite different from the Orientalist supremacist attitude of historical Zionism, which regarded Palestinians as inferior (and thus as either deserving of dispossession or requiring “salvation”) and aimed for a political-juridical resolution, however deferred, violent, or insincere. This new imagined parity, too, is mired in violence, which becomes more annihilative the more differences are devoid of political values, dictated instead by the tautology of us versus them or by religious Zionism’s idiosyncratic mashup of Jewish and Evangelical messianic ideologies. This feud perception, which is becoming prevalent across Israeli society more broadly, is different than that traditional perception of violence as conflict because the faceoff is intended to establish not the truth or a new set of laws, but rather who is right by proving who is stronger. It is a binary logic of self or other, of winning or losing, of survival and domination or death and subjugation. In this schema, there is no longer any pretense of legality—of negotiations in front of an external judge who might bring about some sort of resolution, compromise, or “states.” As it is merely might that makes right, winning becomes all the more important.
10.
Inqisām names, moreover, a prevalent contemporary rhetorical weapon—decontextualization, or severance from history. The core narrative force of the cycle of revenge, which produces the false symmetry in Fuada, also generates a distorted, cyclical, dehistoricizing, and preemptive temporality. Retribution always presents itself as a reaction to the opponent’s last act of violence, thus erasing from view everything else—the historical context, its nuances, and systemic, ongoing violence. By resetting the clock to point zero every time the enemy strikes, the revenge narrative paints the enemy’s violence as always necessarily unjust, even inexplicable. Israel has long practiced this radical form of de-historicization, rebooting history with every Palestinian attack, thus framing Palestinian violence as a pure evil materializing out of thin air rather than as actions in context, responding to both structural oppression and particular historical processes. By severing Palestinian violence from its context, Israel aims to position itself as the only victim, whose outsized response is thereby exonerated, while depicting Palestinians as irrational terrorists motivated by nothing other than perpetual, blind, baseless hatred (and, at best, by “incitement” or by a fundamentalist version of Islam).
Since 7 October, context has become a forbidden word. At times, it has even been regarded as nothing less than antisemitic. Any invocation of the context of Hamas’s deeds, we are told, is necessarily an attempt to justify “pure evil” or erase Israelis’ traumatic experiences. And yet—and I cannot believe this needs to be stated—nothing exists without context. Israeli representatives, too, often invoke context to justify Israel’s own crimes in Gaza (as in the case of the ICJ hearings). The Israeli tendency to disarticulate Palestinian actions from their context leads to an inflated and exceptionalized sense of victimhood, which no amount of violent defense could ever assuage. This process goes hand in glove with that dehumanizing blindness toward Palestinians, whose actions now appear as unfathomable, inhumane, and fanatical (even when explanations are issued). This severance of time and context is yet another meaning of inqisām. One might say that this is the qessem of inqisām, its special magical alchemy that turns aggression into victimhood and rationalizes wholesale violence. Indeed, the semantic field of the root of inqisām encompasses acts of conjuring and divination (in Arabic), as well as straight up magic (in Hebrew), thus helping to account for this mysterious reversal.
11.
The concept of inqisām also allows us, finally, to zoom out and regard the present devastation in Palestine through a boarder temporal and geographical lens, one that links current colonial conditions with the longer histories of imperialism in the region. Inqisām shares its root with the Arabic word taqsīm, which means “partition” and connotes, more specifically, the Partition Resolution devised in 1947 by the UN and spearheaded by US. Partition was also the brainchild of Great Britain, following decades of its imperial involvement in Palestine. This inequitable severance plan, while ultimately conceding that Palestinians might deserve some sort of sovereignty and some part of the land, was the culmination of two imperialist ideas long held by Britain. The first is the notion and practice of “divide and rule,” which Britain attempted to enact in Palestine since 1917 by favoring the Jewish minority. The second was Christian Zionism, which has regarded Jews as those capable of serving as a bastion of the West in the East before Jews adopted Zionism.
Indeed, the notion of a Jewish state serving as a rampart of the West in the East is one that Theodor Herzl, the visionary of Zionism, borrowed from British writers, including, as Edward Said notes, from George Eliot, whose Daniel Deronda (1876) advocates for a Jewish state in Palestine that would serve as a bridge between East and West, a “medium of transmission and understanding.” (And it might be worth noting, as Ella Shohat does, that Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is an exoticized Sephardi Jew—a Mizrahi figure avant la lettre.)[5] Note that this rampart is thus dialectical. It means a bulwark, a border that would separate the East from the West and distance the Oriental elements within Europe eastward; but it also means a traversable border, a conduit that will extract and translate—will make useful and comprehensible—the East for the West. It is in this sense that Israel is a rampart of Europe and the US in the Middle East, serving as an extension of their economic and political interests in the region as well as a distancing mechanism, a protective periphery.
Inqisām as a severing border is thus forever porous, a frontier whose inability to ever fully set renders it remarkably productive and profitable. A possible final point about “conflict management” through inqisām is thus precisely its potential endlessness (already implied earlier by the cyclical logic of revenge and by the boundless, unknowable nature of the infinite permutations of various Israeli modes of control). It was clear from the start that the war on Gaza will never achieve its stated goal, that it could never lead to a clear triumph, defined by Israeli politicians as the complete elimination of Hamas. It was thus clear that this war could never truly end or force a final separation. This endlessness, the dialectical underside of decisive severance, facilitates, as mentioned, the continuation of Israeli domination and allows certain Israeli politicians and parties to cling to power undemocratically. It also allows Israel and its allies to extract value from war (as long as warfare does not spill over and becomes a regional war). Israel profits from this forever war. And Israeli weapon and warfare technologies manufacturers, now more than ever, are eager to reestablish their prestige and the status of their products as “battle tested.” Despite predictions to the contrary, the Israeli industry of war technologies has only become more lucrative in recent months.[6]
Given the scale of destruction already visited on Gaza, I surely hope that I am entirely wrong and that there will soon be an end to this endlessness. I have little hope that the old paradigm, that of “conflict management,” has indeed been shattered, as some proclaim. Left to their own devices, the US and Israel will continue in their current track. The “day after” the genocide in Gaza—Is there ever a day after genocide?—would then at best look like an “Oslo 2.0,” enclosing a maximal number of Palestinians on a minimal area of land and outsourcing most security and humanitarian work. Instead, to the extent that I have hope, it derives from seeing the cumulative effects of decades of Palestinian resistance and allies’ protests on global public opinion, which seems to be, finally and still too slowly, shifting.
Liron Mor is associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel (2024).
[1] The Hebrew term hakhraʿa carries both meanings—subjugation and a decision, a ruling—perhaps because in both war and legal dispute opponents are brought down to kneel, li-khro’a.
[2] See Azmi Bishara, al-Hajiz: shazaya riwaya, al-Kitab al-awwal: Wajd fi bilad al-hawajiz (Haifa, 2004).
[3] Sh. R., “ʿAl ha-Temanim” (On the Yeminis), ha-Zvi, 27 Jan. 1909.
[4] See the work of, among others, Nasser Abourahme; Ariel Handel; Amal Jamal; and Helga Tawil-Souri.
[5] Mizrahi is a term made in Israel and is thus anachronistic when discussing Deronda, yet the processes his figure undergoes chime with the later racialization of Mizrahim.
[6] In an interview in December 2023, the CEO of the Israeli tech warfare company, Smartshooter, “framed Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed almost 30,000 Palestinians [at the time], as a sales boost. ‘This is the finest hour of the defense industries.”
Karl Baldacchino: Your book Disertate (2023), forthcoming in English as Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024), treats the subject of desertion or quitting, which according to you is congruous with the depression that is prevalent to our contemporary life. From the disaffection among the absent electorate, the wave of postpandemic resignations in Western capitalist societies, the milder viral tactic of quiet quitting at work, and the growing number of hikikomori in Japan and other Asian countries, detached attitudes are growing globally. At the same time, as the recent university-student encampments and youth climate movements indicate, many are eager to politically engage in some form of direct action. How do you perceive this concoction of attitudes?
Franco Berardi: I fully endorse the student’s mobilization against the Israeli genocide. Nevertheless, I try to understand the inmost meaning of the wave of protests against Zionism and pro-Palestine. I try to do it beyond the rhetoric of Free Palestine. Students and young people in general are horrified by the slaughtering, by the cynicism of the Zionist leadership, and this is perfectly understandable. But we must be frank about the strategic weakness of this movement. I will try to explain: when my generation demonstrated against the American war in Vietnam, we were expecting something from the Vietcong resistance: We were expecting that the Vietcong was going to open the way to a communist government and to strengthen the internationalist front of revolt against Western colonialism. Were we right? Were we wrong? This is another question. What is important is that we could identify with the Vietnamese people in terms of internationalist hope and of a socialist future. Can we say the same today? Can we identify with Hamas, or Hezbollah? Can we expect something good from Arab nationalism? Absolutely not. We know that Palestinians are oppressed; we share their suffering and their resistance. But we don’t see any future beyond the catastrophic present. Internationalism is dead, and Arab nationalism is fascist. So why are so many young people are identifying themselves with the Palestinians?
Jean Baudrillard, Punto Final (1997)KB: In the last issue of the Utopie journal in 1978, Jean Baudrillard published an important essay on the subject of silent masses and the end of the social. In it he underscored how the silent indifference of the masses is a “weapon” that needs to be further analyzed as a mode of contemporary resistance. The essay was written in the context of the postpolitical societies formed in France after the events of May, which was somewhat radically different from what was occurring in Italy, where notably a long political struggle was reaching its peak. Yet, in Italy a distinguishing type of detachment from political power was taking place, which in my opinion can be regarded as more creative and organized. I wonder then if this silent desertion has been happening for a while now and also if it has indeed been fully recuperated by capitalism on the way. Ultimately the silent masses withdrew from political life, but in doing so they conformed, or in Baudrillard’s words, “hypeconformed,” even more to the spectacle.
FB: We cannot compare what is happening now with the scenario of ’60s or the ’70s because the context is totally different. The backbone in those years was the social force of the working class and an internationalist perspective. Baudrillard was prophetic in his ability to perceive the dissolution of the social subjectivity. I read the early Baudrillard, and I felt that he was seeing something prophetic, but at the same time in the social scenario of Italy (and of France to a certain extent) social autonomy was persisting. Then came the neoliberal destruction of social solidarity and the globalization of the labor market and the prevarication of labor, and, in the end, workers were defeated and internationalism dissolved. If I speak of desertion today, it is because I think that social solidarity is out of the picture. As long as the labor market will be overwhelmed by precariousness, and competition among workers and migrants, no autonomy will be possible. I do not see any perspective of transformation of the fascist tendency that is prevailing everywhere. Therefore, we must think how to preserve our life, our existence, our social network of friendship. War is expanding, and I think that it will be an overall trend in the coming years. What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert.
KB: In an interview with Giuseppe Cocco and Maurizio Lazzarato, titled “Ruptures within Empire, the Power of Exodus,” Antonio Negri described desertion as such:
It is quite clear that desertion, exodus must be understood as a political laboratory. But it’s also clear that we are faced with a fundamental transmutation of values. The problem is to understand that the private and the public no longer signify anything at all, that they no longer are of value, that the important point is to manage to construct a ‘commons’ and that all production, all expression must be made in terms of ‘commons.’ The big problem then is that the transmutation of values must exist and must lead to a decision. However, neither the decision nor the objective can be decided presumptively. They arise from within the processes of the multitude’s transformation of the world. Or else, none of that takes place and we go backwards. A cycle of struggles had begun and it allowed us to start building our very own little war machines . . . very Deleuzian machines. It’s apparent that we have been delayed in relation to the expectations we had of this process, which has now come to a ‘stop.’ And yet, this stop, if it is thoroughly understood and mastered, paradoxically could be very powerful.
Does this align with your idea of desertion? If not, can you point any differences?
FB: Yes, I agree with the description that Negri makes of the idea of desertion. But I think that Negri has not seen the extent of the destruction produced by the neoliberal war against workers autonomy. On these lines, Negri speaks of a cycle of struggles and of a delay in the process of revolutionary movement. He did not understand that neoliberalism has destroyed the possibility of an organized subjectivity of labor. It is not a problem of the cycle of struggles; it is not a problem of delay. We have entered a totally new era in which internationalism has disappeared and solidarity has turned unthinkable because the workers movement has been broken by the force of precariousness and competition. In this conjuncture fascism has become the way of identification of the majority of the forces of labor. Identity (national, ethic, racial, religious, and others) has replaced autonomy, and I don’t see where and when this trend can be broken because this trend is not a cycle, a phase, a short or long period of regression. This trend is the total devastation of society. What Negri never understood is the anthropological mutation produced by globalization, which goes beyond a momentary political defeat and changes forever the cognitive and psychological composition of society.
KB: In Now (2017), the Invisible Committee speaks of a “destituent” type of desertion, as opposed to Negri’s “constituent” exodus. Following Giorgio Agamben, they call for an exploration of new forms of life, which are only possible by way exercising an indifference towards elections, government, and power in general. What are your thoughts and in which camp would you situate yourself?
FB: I situate myself in the field of Agamben and of the Invisible Committee. Negri has been unable (or unwilling) to understand the radical mutation produced by the globalism, the disintegration of social subjectivity. Only from a biopolitical point of view it is possible to gauge the extent and depth of the present defeat of modern democracy. It is not a political defeat, like it was in the ’20 s and ’30s of the past century. It is a mutation of the biopolitical fabric of society and a mutation of the human cognition. The basic concepts that made it possible to understand the social processes of the past centuries have lost their meaning.
Democracy has turned into the antechamber of fascism, and there will never be a democratic reversal of the biopolitical dimension of contemporary fascism. The concept of revolution has lost its meaning because it is impossible to subvert the biopolitical composition of subjectivity.
KB: A final question. If we had to take your life as an example, how would a younger version of yourself in today’s world look like? Would you quit everything and still go on to cocreate Radio Alice and A/traverso? In other words, would it be an active quitting? Or does contemporary life require a Bartleby type of withdrawal?
FB: I can affirm that A/traverso and Radio Alice have been an anticipation of my present idea of desertion. A/traverso did not conceive autonomy in terms of struggle for power, but in terms of withdrawal from the condition of exploitation. I don’t know if you happened to read some of the issues of A/traverso. For instance, in September 1977, the title of A/traverso was “Per favore NON prendere il potere” (please do not seize power). In the last issues of the magazine, we spoke of “sottrazione”, that means “subtraction”, or withdrawal. The Bolognese Autonomy was remarkably different (also opposed at times) to the groups of Autonomia organizzata (organised autonomy), just because we did not share the Leninist strategy, and we were much more interested in the creation of spaces of autonomy outside the sphere of social life, in a condition of separation. Moreover, the title of the magazine in June 1977 was: “La rivoluzione è finita abbiamo vinto” (the revolution is over, we won). This was to say: there no longer exists (and there will be no more of) the political possibility of overthrowing capitalist domination. The only strategy can be one of separation (today I would say of desertion).
This interview was conducted by email between 12/06/24 and 02/07/24
Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a social theorist, activist and was a key figure in the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He is cofounder of the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and of Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Italy (1976/1978). His most recent publications are The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (2021), The Second Coming (2019), Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (2018) and Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (2017).
Karl Baldacchino is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also a graduate affiliate at the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. His research focuses primarily on political resistance, indifference, power, subjectivity, and ethics through the lens of twentieth and twenty-first century French and Italian thought.
Ryan Banfi
Last spring marked the tenth anniversary of Patrick Jagoda and Hillary Chute’s special issue for Critical Inquiry, “Comics & Media,” which followed the May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy and Practice” conference at the University of Chicago. Chris Ware designed an original poster to advertise that conference, and the discussion he participated in during the conference is included in the special issue. In the right panel of that poster, a figure slumps frustrated over a drawing table surrounded by, what we might assume, are failed comics. The anxiety is palatable, like much of his other work, including, as I’d like to discuss in the following, the commissioned covers he created over the years for the New Yorker. According to Ware, those covers remain one of the few vital ways for artists to speak truth to power within mainstream media.
In his school shooting triptych “Back to School” (17 September 2012), “Threshold” (7 January 2013), and “Lockdown” (17 October 2022), Ware uses characters from his life for the first time in his work. They stand in for his wife, Marnie, a high school teacher; Clara, his teenage daughter and a high school student; and himself, a powerless observer. Although the worries in Ware’s triptych still pertain to the institution of schools where he was bullied (see Jimmy Corrigan or Rusty Brown), his angst now revolves around his daughter and wife’s safety and well-being.[1]
“Back to School” “Back to School” was meant to be a lighthearted remembrance of the start of the school year. On the cover, a little girl looks back at the adults with worry. Ware later stated that this cover depicted “a real moment: Clara, then in elementary school, looking back at me as I left her at school.” Originally, Ware drew this image with happy intentions, depicting children returning to school to learn while their parents are ecstatic to receive their respite. But after Sandy Hook, that little girl’s body language and the gulf represented between parents and their children can now read as a premonition of the terrible school shootings to come.
“Threshold”In comparison, “Threshold” conveys an intentionally different tone. Ware shows the vantage point from within the hallway of the school rather than from outside looking in. The parents no longer migrate in various pathways but stand side by side, inert, worrying about whether their children will return home. Unlike the parents, the children are happy to return to school: a little boy, the last in line, waves at his teacher, which calls back to and inverts the little girl’s anxiety in “Back to School.” Between the release of these two covers, Adam Lanza killed twenty children between the ages of six and seven years old.
The word threshold implies two things. For one, a threshold can mean an “entry point” or “the point at which a . . . psychological effect begins to be produced” (for example, he or she “has a high threshold for pain”). Ware’s cover and title suggest that parents must now have an extreme tolerance for anxiety if their children are to attend school in the US. The entry way to the school also has a double meaning. The school’s front door is an entryway, but it might lead to a death trap, not a place of knowledge. “Back to School” connotes fond memories of reuniting with friends, whereas “Threshold” conveys what returning to school means for many American children and parents after Sandy Hook. Going to school is no longer just about learning but surviving. This image of powerlessness becomes even more obvious with Ware’s final cover, “Lockdown.”
“Lockdown”Unlike the previous covers, “Lockdown” explicitly engages with the depiction of a school shooting. In this way, Ware zooms in on the tragedy which suggests the urgency of the violence. It also conveys explicit images of school shootings that are now regularly posted to social media websites.
Ware drew “Lockdown” based on his daughter’s description of what a lockdown drill entails. To draw attention to the foreground, Ware uses vivid crayon colors to emphasize a child’s drawing of a flower that rests on a desk next to a picture of a house. These are, unlike the cover itself, cheerful graphics. The primary colors also draw attention to the empty seats. Chairs are designed for sitting, but in this instance the children are found on the floor, away from any windows, hidden from any view from the room’s door. Like Ware’s diagrams that lead readers to various points in his images, the vacant seats draw the readers’ eyes to the people who should be sitting in them. In the first two covers the teachers are shown as the gatekeepers of the school’s thresholds, but in “Lockdown” the teacher hides from the threshold, fearing what might cross it.
Sequential Art?Ware often depicts slowness in his graphic novels. Slowness is also evident in my manipulation of Ware’s covers to form sequential art. In this sequence there is no change in terms of optimism, the characters remain insecure. Scott Bukatman writes that Ware uses “moment-to-moment transitions . . . to an almost parodic degree. Stasis becomes an existential condition.” Ware’s covers showcase this stasis or slowness, which is not used for parody but rather political commentary. Unlike the seemingly rushed imagery we see on social media and in the news about these massacres, Ware’s images ask us to slow down, to remain in the fear and anxiety that his images produce. Ware’s covers provoke conversation because they contrast with the violent photos of school shootings in the news and on social media.
The US deals with school shootings, not by banning assault weapons (or lethal gun accessories), but rather by placing the onus on the teachers and the children to survive, which Ware’s last cover clearly addresses. Upon the release of the Uvalde massacre footage, it became obvious that the same people who signed up to protect the innocent were unable to. While state level gun advocacy groups have won some victories like state legislatures passing 130-gun safety bills in 2023 and also heavily blocking the gun lobby’s (NRA) agenda, in other locations (and at the federal level) ordinances on gun safety has had little effect on school shootings. Since Columbine there have been 377 school shootings in the US. More than 300,000 American students have experienced gun violence since that 1999 massacre.
Journalistic reviews of gun control and academic studies on the matter indicate that Ware is right to show concern about gun safety in the US. After the Newtown Massacre, politicians and the media described the event as a “tipping point.” Post-Sandy Hook, many US gun laws faced a gridlock between gun safety advocates and firearm lobbyists during the ensuing decade. In the months preceding the Uvalde massacre, for example, Texas lawmakers made it easier for citizens to buy firearms, which certainly enabled Salvador Ramos’ shooting spree.
One way in which the media is fighting back against the relaxed gun laws is to show images of gun violence. As photographs of school shootings contrast with one another to create a narrative about gun safety, Ware, too, uses his platform at the New Yorker to draw attention to the power of opposing images. Ware is answering, albeit not directly, W. J. T. Mitchell’s question about comics’ intersection with media: “Where do comics fit among the media, and what can the study of media tell us about comics?” For Ware, illustrations can speak to the public. According to Jean Braithwaite, Ware’s New Yorker covers are “accessible,” and the school shooting triptych contrasts with national narratives. The covers are not graphic depictions of school shootings but artistic critiques of gun safety.[2] Ware’s art means to explore human emotions. Part of that emotional intensity arises from not only Ware’s personal insecurities but safety concerns for his wife and teenage daughter. That is the power of his New Yorker covers.
Ryan Banfi is a PhD Candidate in The Martin Scorsese Cinema Studies at New York University Tisch School of the Art. He is on the editorial board of Games and Culture.
[1] See Chris Ware, “Komiks.dk Interview,” interview by Matthias Wivel, in Chris Ware: Conversations, ed. Jean Braithwaite. (Jackson, Miss., 2017), p. 173.
[2] Jean Braithwaite, Zoom interview by Banfi, 4 Apr. 2024.
Adam Almqvist
This quarter, I taught my class, The Comparative Politics of the Middle East, which includes extensive discussions on Israel and Palestine. I came away with a bitter taste of the current reality surrounding freedom of speech.
As a UChicago PhD student and an instructor, I am a product of the university’s Core Curriculum and Center for Teaching. There, I was trained to deal with contentious issues by facilitating discussion, engaged intellectual inquiry, and respectful disagreement.
Therefore, as tensions were running high on campus following the encampment in Solidarity for Gaza and its subsequent dismantlement by UCPD police, rather than pretending that nothing was going on around us, I increased our class time devoted to Israel and Palestine, and I sought to engage students in discussions on the encampment, the national protest movements, and the response by administrations and police forces across the country.
However, I discovered at my peril that the teaching methods the university had equipped me with were futile in the context of the comprehensive deprivation of many students’ freedom of speech.
This issue culminated in class in a discussion of the police raid on the encampment, in which only students with seemingly no personal stakes in the encampment or national protest movement, let alone the wider Arab world, made comments. Those who spoke up engaged in class productively and commendably; yet, they were met by a loud silence, and the discussion died down despite my efforts to resuscitate it.
Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club ChicagoLater, during office hours, multiple students expressed that they had felt a strong desire to vent their feelings and frustrations in class and push back against what they perceived as unfair allegations against the encampment by other students. Yet, they felt either insufficiently safe or that the risks of speaking up in class were not worth it.
As an instructor, I was left with a feeling that by facilitating discussion, I had caused harm to students who had to sit through class while actively suppressing their opinions. My class, I felt, had inadvertently become an arena of speech suppression. Nothing about my training had prepared me to teach a class in which students experienced an unlevel playing field in terms of their liberty to speak.
As Anton Ford, associate professor of philosophy, argued in a recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Chicago principles of free speech protects only freedom of discussion (truth-seeking speech), and eschews freedom of deliberation (decision-making speech) and protest (disruptive speech). What I experienced in my class was that without the freedom of deliberation and protest, the freedom of discussion is also meaningless.
Free speech does not depend on so-called safe spaces in which we protect ourselves from divergent opinions. However, it does depend on safe spaces in which students can feel sufficiently protected from online threats, deportations, doxxing, disciplinary actions, arrest, and loss of future job opportunities. Right now, there is a sense among many students connected to the Palestinian cause that not only will their speech be twisted to mean things their speech did not intend (like that Intifada means calling for genocide). What is more, there is a sense that no one will have their backs once they face such allegations.
This sense of unsafety is amplified by a broader asymmetry: a warranted outpouring of concern for some students’ feelings of unsafety (by university administrations, media, and politicians) following events in the Middle East and on US campuses, coupled with a complete disregard for the feelings of unsafety of other groups of students.
This deprivation of some students’ free speech is not only an injustice that afflicts some; as I told my students, this should concern us all because free speech functions a bit like freedom in general; no one has it until we all have it.
Adam Almqvist is a Postdoctoral Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.
Kim Kolor
As people assembled the Dr. Hammam Alloh Medic Tent, the Refaat Alareer Library, and the beginnings of what would become a legendary twenty-four-hour food tent, administrators arrived and encircled the UChicago Popular University for Gaza. One began directing: “These walls are blocking the egress of this pathway and have to move. Move this tent two feet off from the path to keep an egress. Those tent stakes might puncture a water line, and then you would be responsible for the damage.”With each expression of noncompliance, the frustration of this administrator became increasingly palpable and shifted to brute intimidation: “What is your name? Spell it out slowly. Are you, personally, prepared to take responsibility for this?”
During the camp, I was a liaison between the administration and police, on the one hand, and the Popular University for Gaza, on the other. The experience of this intermediary position helped illuminate, for me, the widespread and ordinary mechanisms of administrative repression that–far from being incidental to the university’s famed Chicago Principles of free expression and political neutrality–are close to their core. UChicago generally does not react with the violent spectacles that Columbia or UCLA did; instead, they most often shroud themselves in the banalities of policy and offer apparently reasoned arguments. Yet, like universities elsewhere, there are, in fact, no reasoned arguments at stake in its repression. There are only tactics: banal tactics, posing as reasoned arguments, that protect, as they disavow, the invested interests and wide-sweeping politics that enable our murderous present in which thousands of people in Gaza have been displaced and killed. Therefore, the following reflections are not counterarguments; rather, I seek to elucidate some of the contours of the concrete mechanisms of disavowal that can, at times, seem to present arguments but, in fact, are not engaged in argumentation at all. The university represses any space for real argument about its functioning as it offers retrofitting and disorienting pseudoarguments to explain away its violent repression.
One night I rushed back to my department building, where students had been using the bathroom. When I arrived, these students were being detained and intimidated by eight UCPD policemen. “You can’t be in here,”the police said. “But I’m a student here, I’m in this building all the time,” one replied. The police then asked us if we’d seen the sign on the door.There was never a sign indicating building hours or prohibitions. Nonetheless, the students were issued trespass warnings, and I was reported for using my access card to let students into the building. Later, administrators used the police report to initiate disciplinary proceedings. I attended one of these proceedings, and I offered what I considered reasoned arguments about my concern for the application of the policy to students solely for using university bathrooms. None of my arguments made the slightest difference. Administrators assured me, however, that this disciplinary matter had nothing to do with anything beyond the specific incident at hand. It was strictly a matter of policy.
It is not only a matter of compliance, we were told, but a matter of student safety. Yet that same evening, for example, a visibly intoxicated student harassed several individuals of the Popular University for Gaza, shouting hateful things and walking over tents while people were sleeping. The UCPD did confront that student, but they neither detained them nor wrote a report about it. Then there was the violent UCPD raid of the Popular University for Gaza encampment with no regard at all for student safety. Days after this raid, I witnessed UCPD detaining a student wearing kuffiyeh for chalking the sidewalk. Was this a thinly veiled attempt by UCPD to collaborate with administration for possible future disciplinary complaints?
This Borgesian maze of administrative policies is not unreasonable or absurd, we are expected to assume as we encounter the multifarious practices of the institution. Yet through experiencing these tactics over time, we glean the ways in which the university disavows its fundamentally anti-Palestinian stance. This is perhaps especially evident at UChicago, an institution where the line between administration and police is constantly blurred. We see it in the ways that UCPD and administrators collaborate to intimidate, gather information, and build disciplinary cases. The ambiguity created through this relationship facilitates the repression of voices in support of Palestinian liberation because the university administration can threaten disciplinary policies by pointing to reports filed by UCPD in ways that involve no arguments at all. The case of the 9 November sit-in also demonstrates this link; police arrested students at the authorization of the dean of students, and then used the list of arrestees they obtained as the basis for disciplinary proceedings.
The “Deans-on-Call” are another example of this blurred relationship. They describe themselves as a “collaborative effort” with UCPD and share the same phone number. Though Deans-on-Call are tasked to facilitate protest at a university famed for free speech, in practice, they arbitrate what constitutes legitimate protest by threatening students with noncompliance. They act simultaneously as policy interpreters and enforcers, and failure to comply with their “authority to direct” is itself grounds for disciplinary action. When protestors disagree, the subsequent engagement by the university to repress or intimidate students need only refer to violation of the policy and never to the substance of what the students are arguing. The UCPD and the Deans-on-Call, in this specific sense, become indistinguishable in practice. And this ambiguity facilitates a profound, prolonged, and ensnaring space of nonargument, of a deferral of any space to make arguments about protest for Palestine.
Through ordinary encounters with administration and police, then, a different kind of contradiction becomes clear: not one between purported political neutrality and its violation, but in the purported temporality of the university administration’s responses. The administration is not actually listening to and engaging with student protests about its complicity in the genocide in Gaza and therein is not responding to the powerful arguments and critiques community members raise through protest. Any official email or statement of policy announced by President Paul Alivisatos or Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen is, in practice, predetermined; when administrative arguments or explanations are offered, they serve as retroactive and supplemental justifications for gears already in motion on the ground.
In one of the Alivisatos’s announcements, for example, he says that the university will intervene when there is a “substantial disruption of the functioning or safety of the University. These are our principles.” He cites a Palestinian flag installation approved by the university as an example of how the administration doesn’t discriminate against “this viewpoint” but only enforces policy violations. He fails to mention, of course, that an administration-approved kite installation honoring Refaat Alareer was immediately removed by the university before they realized that they had violated their own policy—student artwork honoring Palestinian poets thrown into a dumpster in the anxious momentum of repressive practices that regularly function on the ground.
Epitomizing the retrofitting temporality of the nonargument of university tactics were leaflets that suddenly appeared hours after UCPD terrorized sleeping students with no warning—long after all people were cleared from the encampment and their tents demolished. “This is your final warning to leave the encampment,” they read. Later that morning, the president’s email reiterated the retroactive fabrication: “The protesters were given an opportunity to disassemble their structures and depart.” Such statements explaining away the enforcement of the policy seem reasonable but are purely tactical. The temporal unfolding of these encounters reveals pseudoarguments and tactical reason that only ever explain away the violence of such tactics.
It therefore cannot be overemphasized that when the university works to ensure the essential functioning of the university, what that essential function might be, and what might constitute a substantial disruption to it, are simply not up for debate through reasoned argument. There is a profound tactical tautology: the university functions to protect its own functioning, and this in turn is largely at the hands of powerful donors and trustees. What we experience as students engaged in principled protest are only accumulations of variously scrappy or smooth tactics that act in a violent anxiety when the grounds of the university’s functioning actually come into question.
These tactics are not just retrofitting, deferring, and looping; they are profoundly anti-historical. They disavow the foundational violences that UChicago continually enacts in the world, from its ongoing violent displacement of Black residents in the South Side to its material investments in the weapons manufacturing industry that supports, and profits from, the genocide of Palestinians. It is no coincidence that the same university with one of the largest private police forces at hand, and that Amnesty International has scored the absolute lowest for ethics and transparency in its investments, also espouses famous free-speech principles adopted by many other universities. These violent histories, and their perpetuation in the form of investments and property grabs protected by police force and administrative obscurity, are the essential functioning of the university.
So, it becomes abundantly clear that the university offers not arguments but tactics. And this might raise questions as to how we ought to respond to, or refuse to respond to, the administrative-and-police mechanisms of the hedge-fund university. How, then, should we deal with this violently nonargumentative and obfuscatory murk so that we do not facilitate the facade that it makes arguments and therein the atrocities that this procedurally enables? This is no doubt a question that we must continue to confront as we, members of the university who seek to end the genocide in Gaza, are all deeply implicated in these administrative tactics in our lives. It seems urgent that, whichever paths we may follow, we continue to move against the ensnaring pull of these mechanisms that expect us to participate in the antiargumentative disavowals of the university by responding to tactics as if they are arguments. The UChicago Popular University for Gaza was one such space of deep recognition and a place to open imaginative possibilities of what a university that is actually able to respond to urgent arguments about its genocidal foundations could be.
Kim Kolor is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Hoda El Shakry
On 23 May, members of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza organized a graduation ceremony for students, faculty, staff, family, and community members. After the event, we all gathered over a shared meal to celebrate everything that these students had built and all that they would be. It was a profoundly moving evening that honored the abundance, joy, and resilience of this unstoppable movement for Palestinian liberation.
The following day, a handful of graduating students who had been vocal members of the UChicago Popular University received an ominous email from the Associate Dean of Students indicating that the university was investigating numerous reports of “disruptive conduct” during the encampment in which these students had been “identified” for their involvement. Sidestepping faculty governance protocols and standard procedures, administrators weaponized the Disciplinary System for Disruptive Conduct and informed students that their degrees would not be conferred until the charges were resolved.
In less than twenty-four hours, we were faced with the stark contrast between a punitive university culture of policing dissent and a popular university built on communities of care and a commitment to the freedom of all.
1
The UChicago Popular University for Gaza was established on the morning of 29 April by UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) as part of a wave of Palestine Solidarity Encampments forming on university campuses to protest the devastation in Gaza that is part of the ongoing Nakba. The students’ demand to “divest, disclose, repair” calls out the financial, military, and ideological support of Israel’s targeted destruction of Palestinian lives, lands, and infrastructure by both the US government and our own universities. The encampment was raided and dismantled by the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) at 4:25 a.m. on Monday 7 May using terrorizing tactics that expose the colonial origins of the UChicago police.
Palestine Solidarity Encampments are indexing historic student-led anti-war and anti-colonial organizing—from protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s to calls to divest from South Africa’s Apartheid regime in the 1980s. They are also exposing the limitations of liberal models of free speech and international governance in relation to the Palestine Exception. Scholars and activists have long noted the Palestine Exception to free speech, which has essentially imposed a de facto gag order on speech advocating for Palestine through silencing measures—ranging from False and Inflammatory Accusations of Antisemitism and Support for Terrorism, Official Denunciations, Bureaucratic Barriers, Cancellations and Alterations of Academic and Cultural Events, Threats to Academic Freedom, Lawsuits and Legal Threats, to Legislation—according to a recent report from Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Steven Salaita, who had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of his vocal views on Palestine, has advocated for reframing the moniker Progressive except for Palestine (or PEP) as Regressive because of Israel (or RBI) to indicate the incompatibility of progressive politics with Zionism as a “settler-colonial movement” premised on “Palestinian dispossession and occupation.”
While we might find resonances between the 1960s, 1980s, and today—from revolutionary student-led calls to collective action to the brutal police crackdowns ordered by university presidents—the Palestine Exception adds a unique dimension to our current moment. Even if institutions of higher learning continue to be on the wrong side of history, Palestine Solidarity Encampments have called out the administrative double-speak and chilling climate of New McCarthyism suppressing speech about Palestine across university campuses in the US and Europe. Worse still, this is happening as taxes, tuitions, and endowments are funding, and often profiting from, investment in Israeli tech, telecom, and weapons industries that support the current assault on Gaza and ongoing occupation of Palestine. For context, UChicago’s university investment board was recently rated 0/40 by Amnesty International for failure to ensure that its investments are in accordance with the UN’s Guiding Principles of Human Rights.
Prior to the encampment, the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) coalition staged a peaceful action on 9 November consisting of a sit-in of Rosenwald Hall during which they called for: a public meeting with university administration and President Paul Alivisatos, transparency in university investments, and full divestment from weapons manufacturers supplying the Israeli military. The university responded by locking down Rosenwald and adjacent buildings, barring NLG legal observers and press, in addition to authorizing the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) to arrest all participating students and faculty observers who remained in the building. UCPD ultimately arrested twenty-six students and two faculty members on grounds of “criminal trespass to real property,” which is typically a Class B misdemeanor in the state of Illinois, that can carry a punishment of up to six months in jail and a 1,500 dollar fine. Despite significant pressure from the university community, the administration refused to humor any of the students’ demands or drop the charges, which the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office independently declined to pursue. Nearly seven months later, arrested students are only just learning the results of specious disciplinary hearings that they underwent in response to an internal complaint by university administrators for alleged violation of Statute 21 on “disruptive conduct.”
Despite thispolicing of dissent, student organizers have led the effort to amplify the Palestinian plight for survival and sovereignty, while simultaneously pushing for the university administration to cease material support for the current war and acknowledge its most vulnerable victims. An essential part of this process is the institutional recognition of what Palestinian scholars refer to as scholasticide—a term first coined in 2009 by Karma Nabulsi to name “the systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure”. Within six months, the current war on Gaza has accelerated the project of scholasticide with the destruction of over 80 percent of Gaza’s schools, including the reduction of every single one of Gaza’s twelve universities to rubble, and the killing of countless students, teachers, and professors. Leaving hundreds of thousands of students with no access to education, there has been the further destruction of revered spaces of knowledge production and learning—such as libraries, archives, heritage sites, mosques, and churches.
The University of Chicago’s continued silence on the destruction of Palestinian higher education was a major sticking point during the failed negotiations with UCUP representatives. This epistemic violence only grew as university administrators abruptly ended negotiations after a session on 5 May, that I attended, during which student organizers pressed them for greater clarity and accountability measures. By virtue of rhetorical gymnastics, the document outlining proposed university commitments offered in exchange for ending the student encampment managed to avoid mentioning the words Palestine or Palestinian even once. The student demands demonstrated not only principled moral clarity but also a highly knowledgeable understanding of the political intricacies of the current war in Gaza, as well as the internal contradictions of UChicago’s policies on free speech and political neutrality. In so doing, they tapped into the one of the fundamental questions at the heart of the current divestment movement—whether in the context of weapons manufacturing, genocide, or fossil fuels—namely, how can investment be politically neutral but divestment be politically charged? Put otherwise, Is the premise of “profit at all costs” itself not deeply political?
2
Students have actively challenged this growing cognitive dissonance between, on the one hand, the unfiltered images of death and detritus emerging from the brave Gazan journalists fearlessly bearing witness to their own existential and material displacement and, on the other, US institutional whitewashing of this unfolding genocide. From daily rallies, vigils, art builds, fundraising, and sit-ins to the recent encampment, they have built a space for collective mourning and mobilization at a moment when Palestinians are being represented as nonhuman in life and ungrievable in death.
UChicago’s Popular University forGaza was comprised of hundreds of tents on the quad that included sleeping quarters, a welcome tent, food tent, medical tent, media tent, and public library named after the Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer—killed by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza on 6 December—among numerous other resources and events that centered intersectional solidarity, collective organizing, and mutual aid. Daily programming included a diverse range of student, community, and faculty-led teach-ins—on Palestine, Israeli settlers, and Jewish anti-Zionism; on the history of protest movements from the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square to the 1968 student protests, and Occupy movement—as well as workshops, interfaith services, and cultural events.
The encampment invoked powerful sites of revolutionary action staged across the Middle East and North Africa in recent memory—from the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square to the Hirak or 17 October Revolution in Beirut in 2019. Student encampment tents also honored the resilient itineracy of the Palestinian people—with nearly 1.5 million Palestinians living in refugee camps prior to 7 October and roughly half of Palestinians, over seven million people, comprising one of the largest diasporic communities in the world.
The recent fixation on the “disruptive” nature of student protests and encampments fails to account for the fact that war and genocide are profoundly disruptive. By critically engaging with the disturbing realities of our present moment, students and their allies have been moved to change business as usual—as threating as that might seem to the political old guard or the ivory towers of the academy. Our student-led movements and encampments have ignited a revolutionary imaginary that rejects the normalization of the unfolding horrors in Gaza as well as the weaponization of free speech and institutional neutrality policies. This politics of refusal, embodied by the popular protest chant “shut it down” speaks to a growing public awareness about the multiple ways in which Palestinian oppression intersects with broader struggles for social justice—both on and off campus.
As an anti-colonial project, the scholarly, existential, and social movement for Palestinian sovereignty exceeds false binaries of philosophy and praxis as well as the personal and the political. In the words of Sherene Seikaly, “Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present.” It implicates the necropolitics of settler colonialism and genocide, the cryptopolitics of war, extractive economies of capital, the carceral state, workers movements and labor rights, as well as the biopolitical forces that seek to discipline unruly bodies. There is no unseeing these difficult truths nor how profoundly they reverberate on our campuses. As some of my colleagues have recently pointed out, the students are merely reflecting back to us precisely how undemocratic the university really is.
Inspired by our student organizers, a UChicago Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter was formalized on 4 December, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, advocating for Palestinian liberation, and supporting students and others protesting for Palestinian rights. Our chapter of nearly two hundred faculty and staff serves as “a political base from which to fight for the liberation of the Palestinian people as well as for broader, intersecting matters of justice,” which we understand as “aligned with anti-colonial movements and struggles in many parts of the world. These include movements for indigenous land rights, Black liberation, gender and sexual freedom, disability justice, and a liveable and sustainable planet”. Our principles of unity follow urgent calls from Palestinian civil society to join the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli institutions for their material and ideological support of the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestine.
By restructuring what education can be, the UChicago Popular University for Gaza bravely charted a path towards another horizon of possibility. Experiencing this student-led movement has renewed my sense of the radical power of imagining the world otherwise. It has also shown that the seemingly impossible—whether an abolitionist university or a liberated Palestine—is a highly moveable target. As Palestinian scholar Samera Esmeir so eloquently urges us:
To stay with this life beyond territorialization and civilian normalcy is to create an opening in language, politics, and ethics, an opening in excess of colonial cartography and the international order that enables it.
Hoda El Shakry is a member of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza and Faculty for Justice in Palestine. An assistant professor of comparative literature, she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Her first book, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (2020) was awarded the 2020 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Her current research explores Arab print cultures, anti-colonial theory, speculative fiction, and Palestinian world-building.
Christopher Iacovetti
I want to begin these reflections with an episode I experienced as part of the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) negotiating team. Sitting across the table from President Paul Alivisatos, our team was asked what the university administration could do to build trust with student protestors and move toward a negotiated ending of the quad encampment. As a step in this direction, we proposed that Alivisatos issue a university statement opposing Israel’s campaign of scholasticide in Gaza – that is, its systematic destruction of Gazan universities and targeted assassination of Gazan academics. Given the university’s professed commitment to defending free expression “throughout the world” and to “supporting the global academic community in times of great need,” we thought this a fairly uncontroversial proposal. There could scarcely be a greater threat to free expression and academic freedom, after all, than the wholesale destruction of a people’s higher education system.
Alivisatos disagreed. Not only, in fact, did he dismiss the idea of making a public statement about Israel’s scholasticide; he refused to concede as a factual matter that Gazan universities had been bombed at all. The problem was not that Alivisatos disbelieved or did not know that such bombings had occurred. (When offered videographic proof, he dismissed it as irrelevant.) Rather, the problem was Alivisatos’s insistence that for him to acknowledge the mere existence of these bombings – even privately, even with evidence, even off the record – would be to take a “political position” and thereby compromise the university’s policy of “institutional neutrality.” After all, Alivisatos explained, there are “people who would disagree” with the facts in question.
At one level, Alivisatos’s position is self-evidently absurd. While the University’s Kalven Report does urge administrators to refrain from “expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day,” it nowhere prevents them from acknowledging basic factsabout the world. (There are “people who would disagree” with the reality of anthropogenic climate change, for example, but that does not prevent the university from recognizing it.) In certain “extraordinary instances,” moreover, the Kalven Report not only permits but explicitly urges the university to oppose sociopolitical measures that threaten its “values of free inquiry.” This has been the operative logic behind statements the university has readily issued about the invasion of Ukraine, affirmative action, Trump’s immigration policies, and a range of other politically charged issues. Consistency would demand that the same logic be applied to Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza.
Compelling as it may be to highlight the university’s double standards, however, there is something potentially short-sighted about this approach.[1] For while it is true in the abstract thatfacts about Palestine are no more “political” than, say, facts about Ukraine, it is crucial to stress that the University does not exist in the abstract. The “supposedly hermetic world of higher education,” as Steven Salaita reminds us, is “in fact symbiotic with the real world.” Situated among existing concentrations of corporate and political power and predominantly governed by ruling-class trustees, corporate universities process and reproduce the same “prejudices,” “market conditions,” and “geopolitical common sense” at play in other US industries. This context is crucial for understanding what forms of speech these universities do and do not treat as political. For the University of Chicago, as for those in power generally, speech is most political when it threatens to disrupt existing power structures and ideological truisms, least political when it reinforces them. Expressions of sympathy for Ukrainians suffering a “devastating humanitarian crisis” as a result of Russia’s “ongoing invasion,” for example, threaten neither the material interests nor the geopolitical ambitions of the US ruling class. The university therefore classifies such statements not as political speech but as displays of student care and basic human decency. Nor does the university consider hosting the Obama Presidential Center to be a political act – a position that many Libyans, Yemenis, and others would no doubt find bizarre and infuriating. Glorifying the Obama presidency is, at this point in time, a politically safe act, one wholly unthreatening to the status quo. It is therefore – from the university’s perspective – not a political act at all.
Speech about Palestine, however, is a different story. If there is one thing Palestine is not, it is “politically safe.” Indeed, merely mentioning Palestine by name is enough to ruffle certain ruling class feathers – which is presumably why Alivisatos has refused to do so publicly. This situation has little to do with the Palestinians themselves and everything to do with the central place Israel occupies in the ecosystem of US power. There is nothing mysterious or particularly surprising about the fact that it occupies this position. Since the 1970s, Israel has functioned as a strategic outpost for both domestic and imperial US interests, ranging from weapons manufacturing to energy production to the maintenance of regional US hegemony. This being the case, Israel’s centrality to US interests owes neither to lobbyists nor primarily to a deep ideological commitment to Zionism on the part of US elites but to the fact that Israel has been effectively annexed into the corporate and political power structure upon which the ruling class (and the university) depends. To voice support for Palestinian liberation – or even to acknowledge basic facts about Palestinians’ oppression at Israel’s hands – is therefore to threaten not only Israeli colonialism but also the US status quo in which both Israel and the University participate.
It is against this backdrop, I would like to suggest, that we can best understand the hostility with which the University of Chicago and other US universities have responded to the ongoing student intifada in support of Gaza. The fundamental problem is not that these universities operate with double standards, refusing to support Palestinians while being happy to support Ukrainians. More fundamentally, the problem is that US universities operate all too consistently by a single standard: fidelity to the status quo dictated by US power, no matter what form it takes.
For the past 230 days, this status quo has taken the form of genocide in Gaza. Contrary to public perceptions, the US has not merely been complicit in this genocide but has actively presided over it. Since the start of Israel’s onslaught, the US government has sent it more than a hundred distinct arms shipments, gifted it more than eighteen billion dollars in unconditional military aid, bombed multiple countries in its support, slashed funding for UNRWA, and vetoed no less than four UN Security Council resolutions demanding humanitarian pauses and ceasefires. Israeli officials, for their part, have candidly admitted that their Gaza onslaught could not continue without US support. What we are witnessing, then, is not simply an Israeli genocide, but a US-Israeli genocide. Whether most of us realize it or not, the blood of Gaza’s children is on the hands of US citizens and institutions no less than it is on the hands of Israeli society.
In such a situation – what Hannah Arendt called the “intrusion of criminality into the public realm” – there can be no neutral option: “whoever participates in public life at all, regardless of party membership or membership in the elite formations of the regime, is implicated in one way or another in the deeds of the regime as a whole.” It is this basic truth that student protestors have been insisting upon for months, despite their administrators’ cynical attempts to evade it. In calling for divestment from Israel’s genocide, they have in effect been calling on their administrators to cease operating as cogs in the machinery of US power and instead to act, finally and for once, as moral and institutional stops to it. Hiding behind the rhetoric of “institutional neutrality” will not deliver administrators from the burden of this decision. On the contrary, as Jasbir Puar points out, it will only deepen their culpability: “It is precisely by denying culpability or assuming that one is not implicated in violent relations toward others, that one is outside them, that violence can be perpetuated.”[2]
Even now, 230 days into this genocide, a clear call is emanating from the Gaza ghetto: never again. There can be no neutral option in the face of this call – least of all on the part of academic institutions already invested in Israel’s arms suppliers and implicated in Gaza’s suffering. For administrators like Alivisatos to justify their ongoing silence and inaction in the name of “institutional neutrality” is merely to confess their abiding allegiance to the status quo, that is, to US-Israeli genocide. This in itself is a political decision, albeit an ugly and cowardly one. Ultimately, the question facing Alivisatos and administrators around the country is not whether they will act politically in response to Gaza’s call, but how they will do so: as functionaries of ruling-class power or as principled human beings. Granted, the latter choice may involve a degree of personal sacrifice and career risk – but has that stopped students from making it?
[1] Within this timeframe, Israel has killed or wounded more than 116,300 Palestinians, destroyed over 70 percent of Gaza’s homes, targeted hundreds of humanitarian sites and aid convoys, displaced more than 85 percent of Gaza’s population, and driven 1.1 million civilians to the brink of famine.
[2] I first encountered the quotations by Puar and Arendt in Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, Calif., 2019).
Christopher Iacovetti is a PhD student in religion and literature at the University of Chicago, where he organizes with Students for Justice in Palestine. The views expressed here are his own.
Jessica H. Darrow
In the wake of the razing of the encampment on our quad, many of us are asking ourselves about our relationship to the University of Chicago and the university’s relationship to the wider world. The encampment and what it stood for was not a phenomenon unique to our campus, and thus these questions might mirror those asked by other university communities.
Given that the university is a place where truth and knowledge are pursued and scientific inquiry is central to these pursuits, there is a need for risk-taking within the institution. After all, can one create and test hypotheses or address complex questions about meaning if one is unable to risk failure in the pursuit of a breakthrough? The university must prioritize conditions that foster risk-taking. Here is where I enter the discussion. As a professor of social work, it is my job to teach students about the power and purpose of protest and to demonstrate what it means to enact the values of social work, which include a commitment to equity and countering oppression in all its forms. My pedagogy is centrally focused on creating conditions that permit students to take intellectual risks and face serious discomfort as they are unsettled in their pursuit of truth and knowledge. I want students to feel respected, valued, and assured that when they take a risk in their academic exploration they will be supported. To describe these conditions, I use a word that the university abhors; safety. I understand my role within the university to be that of a professor who creates safety and encourages risk-taking. I support our students’ right to protest, and I believe it is our job to ensure they are safe to engage in this form of free expression.
From this grounding, I am trying to understand the university’s role in creating conditions of safety, for whom does it do so, and at whose expense?
The University falsely denies its status as a political actor and claims that silence is neutral. The administration, citing the Kelvin Report and the Chicago Principles, did not issue a public statement after the attacks by Hamas in Israel on 7 October. Nor did the university make any public statement in November, condemning Israel for threats of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, despite the UN’s call to the international community to do so. And the university has remained silent in the face of evidence that the grounds for determining genocide have been met. Finally, the administration refuses to acknowledge the fact of “scholasticide” in Gaza. I disagree with the university’s assertion that silence in the face of genocide is a neutral stance.
It is in this context that the UChicago Popular University for Gaza was created as part of our students’ ongoing campaign to hold UChicago accountable as a political entity. The student protest amplifies the reality of genocide in Gaza and demands that UChicago “Disclose, Divest, and Repair.” Meanwhile, students created a community of care, creativity, and commitment within their protest movement. Here I offer a brief ethnographic description of select events at the encampment that have led me to insights about the university’s role in creating conditions of safety, for whom does it do so, and at what expense.
1
They came marching toward the encampment flying American and Israeli flags, chanting “USA!” White Nationalists and Zionists, an unlikely brotherhood. My Faculty for Justice in Palestine colleagues and I have been meeting since November to plan and enact support for our students who stand in solidarity with Gaza. Our goal has been to send the message that students do not face this university alone. On that day our plan was face the White Nationalists directly so that students could maintain their calls for justice without drawing in police action. Our role was to help avoid physical conflict. As the protesters and counterprotesters met face to face with only the faculty between them the student protest line pushed ahead. When a student was knocked to the ground, we faculty stepped forward to de-escalate the now heated confrontation. Whereas the members of the Popular University for Gaza had spent a week developing community, teaching and learning, eating together and making art, the counterprotesters were made up of a rapidly deployed coalition with little cohesion. They were disorganized, chaotic, and unpredictable. It was clear that the situation was likely to combust, and so, with arms locked, the protest retreated as one removing ourselves from the center of the quad. “Disclose, Divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” the protesters chanted. The line receded to the camp. The Chicago Police and University of Chicago Police (UCPD) stepped into the now empty central quad.
The University did not have a role in creating safety in this altercation. In fact, the violence that could have erupted had dissipated by the time UCPD arrived. It was student protesters and FJP allies who de-escalated this interaction. Students in the encampment had been clear all along with their “No Cop Zone” signs; the encampment did not want a police presence. “We keep us safe,” they kept repeating.
2
On Sunday the administration said they were done talking: negotiations were suspended. What the students are asking for is outside the bounds, they argued. What they want is not possible, they said. Who decides what is possible? we are left to wonder.
The university said they would come, and we were ready. Members of our faculty coalition went to the camp to wait. We were there to get arrested with our students if that is what we needed to do to defend their right to protest. But no raid came. Exhausted and exhilarated, they all tried to sleep.
3
Monday: at midnight the camp will be cleared, we heard. FJP came out in numbers for a second night in a row. Midnight came and went—no raid. 3 a.m. came and went. The students sang and it was festive. The encampment had survived another night. I talked to a UCPD officer on shift. “We are tired,” he said. “Sixteen-hour shift,” he said. “When are they going to sleep so we can have some quiet?” he said. “I know,” I said. “You must be tired,” I said. “I hope we can all go home and sleep in the morning,” I said. My faculty colleagues went home to sleep. The students crawled into the tents. It was quiet. It was peaceful. I walked around the quad. There was a breeze, but it was not cold. It was dark. It was calm. I talked with the student marshal. We stood in the quad, and we wondered aloud about the day.
It was then that the lights swept onto the pavement at the end of the quad. “What is that?” I asked.
“Maintenance crew,” the marshal said as he glanced over his shoulder. And then UCPD were everywhere, yelling. The lights flooded over us. The shouting, the floodlights in my eyes, students running and trying to get out of the way of the boots stomping on their tents and get out from the nylon material as the tents they had been asleep in were ripped out from under them, the stakes coming out of the ground. Students tried to avoid the metal folding chairs that UCPD picked up and threw. As officers ripped the wooden pallets off the barricade that had been meant to protect the camp, and threw them violently across the pavement, the students stepped back. Why was no one hurt? Because students kept enough distance. UCPD did not keep us safe.
It was a violent, brutal, surprise attack that was meant to scare us and destroy the space students had created. The administration quickly took credit for the “safe” destruction of the camp. They deserve none. I phoned and texted my colleagues, asking them to join my efforts to de-escalate, but they could not get to us, they were not allowed onto the quad and we were barricaded in. No one was arrested, Paul Alivisatos has said. UCPD shouted over the megaphone, “you will be arrested.”
It was orderly, there was plenty of time, he has said. It was chaotic and loud, and terrifying. There was no time.
We were bullied. We were terrorized by UCPD in riot gear. That is, black helmets with face shields, black batons and body shields, men screaming at us and threatening us with arrest. They used the fear of harm to make us move. They had guns on their belts, zip ties in hand. This is what the University of Chicago did to our students, to the free expression of ideas they do not like, in a format they find unacceptable. The university values free expression. But only in the forum. Only on their terms.
Even as I take seriously my role in creating a context of safety for the purpose of intellectual risk-taking (and sometimes protest), it is clear to me that the university does not share my commitment. When faced with student protest and demands that UChicago end political engagements related to the genocide of Palestinians, the administration deploys UCPD, upending safety.
Some of us were surprised that the university would call its private police force on students, staff, and faculty—after all, aren’t we the ones UCPD is there to protect? Then we must ask, protect from whom? The presumption that our campus needs police protection is racist and elitist and comes at the expense of the safety of our community neighbors. What we need is for our university to create a context of intellectual safety for the purpose of risk-taking in pursuit of knowledge, acknowledge its role as a political actor and divest from genocidal institutions, be good neighbors in the wider Southside community, and disband UCPD.
Jessica H. Darrow is an associate instructional professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago
Itamar Francez
In the days leading to the shutting down of the encampment, in discussions and debates among faculty, some colleagues expressed the view that the encampment should be shut down, offering the familiar narrative of disruption. They argued that the encampment made it difficult to work, teach, and learn on campus. Among the many things said in that debate, one stood out to me. The view was expressed (I’m paraphrasing, somewhat, as the comments were not made in a public forum) that the encampment made it insufferable for those of us with family in Israel and those who love Israel with its complexities and flaws.
In a discourse that, for various problematic reasons, has been largely framed around Jews, this angle was different. It did not mobilize Jewishness, an abstract category of personal and collective identity, but rather a concrete category of real, living human relationality, of care. People who have people they care about in Israel, this view implied, find the encampment particularly insufferable. As I am a person who has people I care about in Israel, this implication overwhelmed my aversion to public discourse, and I felt compelled to respond to it. This is an expanded version of the response I shared with my colleagues.
I am Israeli. I grew up there and lived there until my mid-twenties. I “served”—that is, was forcefully conscripted—into the Israeli military when I was eighteen. My entire family lives there as do some of my life-long friends, academic mentors, and intellectual interlocutors. There are many things about that place—not the state but the place and the people living in it—that I love very dearly and miss very intensely (Who can love a state? What does that even mean?).
It is as an Israeli who cares deeply about that place, and not so much as a Jew, that I had found the encampment, and the activism that preceded it, a much-needed source of solace in the aftermath of the awful October 7th attacks. With all the unbearable noise that surrounds this unbearable war, from Hamas-supporting hipsters on Instagram to Israel-supporting antisemites, it was on campus and at the encampment that I could come together with other people in the UChicago community whose lives are deeply and painfully intertwined with this violence, who have people they care about and things that they love and miss intensely that are destroyed by it, and who urgently, achingly want and need it to stop.
When the public discourse in the US and in Israel is framed around “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israeli”, it is important to remember the fallacy of the presupposition of this framing. Palestinian Israelis, Jewish Israelis, and Palestinians living, for generations, under brutal Israeli military occupation and apartheid, are all in this together. It is us and our families who have been meeting and inflicting violent death, in indiscriminate massive bombing, terrorist raids by Messianic settlers and Islamist militants, suicide bombings, rocket fire, gruesome lynching, kidnapping, and now also starvation and disease, all consequences of the ethnonationalism, religious zealotry, racism, greed, and corrupt governance that both fuel and grow out of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. And it is us who desperately need and want to talk to each other, mourn together, worry together, and insist that we can, must, and want to live together differently. That is what the UChicago encampment has been about for some of us Israelis.
There is nothing about being Israeli, being a person who has people they care about living there, that entails finding an encampment protesting the occupation and the barbaric war on Gaza “insufferable.” It is the burning of families in their homes and the burying of thousands of children under rubble, not anti-Israeli demonstrations, that are insufferable for many of us. Israelis, Jews and Palestinians, have been insisting for decades on protesting together the myriad forms of collective punishment, the criminal reign of terror by contemptuous, Jewish-supremacist settlers, the land theft, the constant attacks on all forms of civil society, the dehumanization and total disregard for human dignity and life that are the reality of occupation and which breed these outbursts of atrocious, illegitimate violence.
“Loving Israel” is not and has never been the monopoly of Zionists and nationalists. In the sense of having a real, and hence nuanced, complicated, ambivalent relation to the space between the river and the sea with its variety of inhabitants, in the sense of caring about them, about their rich, painful personal histories and the cultures they have created, loving Israel is simply our lot, the natural state of being of those of us who happen to live there or to be in exile from there, some by privileged choice, like me, others because of the total devastation of Palestinian society in the 1948 Nakba.
There are Israeli Palestinians, Israeli Jews, and Palestinians living under military occupation who have been fighting for decades together to create spaces where the kinds of association that were possible at the encampment would be possible in Palestine/Israel and to try to create an alternative to the racist, violent, and increasingly fascist state that Israel has become. One of the suffocating ironies of indiscriminate violence is that a disproportionate number of those brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7th were activists of the already vulnerable Israeli peace camp.
I was not an organizer or even a particularly active participant of the encampment. I tried to have my lunches there during the week, I went to some of the teach-ins and rallies, sent photos of the Yiddish signs to my family in Israel who, like everyone, are fed radically distorted narratives about what is going on at American campuses. Mostly I talked to colleagues and students who, like me, wanted a space where Arabs and Jews can find solidarity—not just human empathy but a political solidarity for which human empathy is the basis. Was I always comfortable in that space? Of course not. The encampment was big, it had all sorts of people and voices, all sorts of slogans. Some I found silly, some I found callous, shaped by abstract, broad frameworks that too easily romanticize or gloss over illegitimate forms of violence, rather than by the nuances that make up the lived realities of people who have been, unequally, living together and killing each other for more than a century, carrying different collective and personal traumas of racial violence, displacement, the destruction of families and entire communities. II didn’t like or agree with every single slogan I saw and heard, but that’s fine, such are slogans and such is the public sphere.
These kinds of spaces are hard won in Israel, a state which never liked them and has for a long time been doing whatever it can to deter and prevent their creation. These are not spaces where we say, “people are people, can’t we all just get along”. That is not what a state like Israel, or a school like the University of Chicago, cares to shut down. These are spaces for protest, for rejection of the status quo, for imagining institutions and pushing ideologies that prioritize people over institutions and ideologies. They are spaces for asking, to quote my Palestinian Israeli colleague Khaled Furani: “Is it our lives – the lives of its citizens – that matter to the state, or its own?” I came to the encampment for the people who, like me and like him, know that the answer must be, but isn’t, “our lives.” Shutting down (or rather, trampling and trashing) the encampment was also shutting down one more space for us.
Rima Jawabra Khatib and Guy Elhanan hosting the 2024 joint memorial day ceremony, organized by Combatants for Peace
Itamar Francez is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.
Eman Abdelhadi
In the Muslim tradition, iinn (think genie) are beings made of fire who live in a parallel universe to our own. The jinn are shape shifters, who can appear to humans or retreat into their own dimension. Like us, they fall along a moral spectrum and are neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Being shape shifters, they have us at a disadvantage. They can see us, but we cannot see them. The evil among them can use this advantage to wreak havoc on human lives, and so the Jinn are the objects of both intense curiosity and fear.
Having grown up Muslim and Arab in the American Midwest, I think I know how the jinn must feel. I was nine when I put on the hijab in my hometown in mid-Missouri, and I was about twelve when 9/11 happened. I spent my entire life explaining Islam to people. Falafel is a food, not a religious belief. No, I do not speak Islamic; the language is Arabic. I was born here, not in “Arabia.” Thank you for asking; I do not expect I will have to marry Osama when I grow up. At school, I did every school project on Palestinian history, filling PowerPoint after PowerPoint with UN Statistics and elaborate maps. Please see me, I asked of my bewildered suburban classmates.
Life had gotten better though. I live in a large city that is home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. I work at an academic institution where staff, faculty and students boast a certain degree of cosmopolitanism. Still, I have kept—out of necessity—my immigrant skill of compartmentalizing my life, of only doling out bits of information about my background in manageable bites. I learned quickly which colleagues never to say the word Palestine around. I kept my life as an activist after hours and tucked away from my place of employment. I emphasized my Muslimness just enough to convey my unique access to the community I study while carefully presenting a neutral front. My workplace has long been a symbol, in my mind, of my success at managing visible invisibility.
In October that all changed. My phone screen started to fill with devastation: parents screaming over the bodies of their dead children, entire neighborhoods razed to the ground, human flesh ground into pulp. But my window screen was telling a different story—my home was warm and safe. No bombs threatened to fall from the sky. I walked around my neighborhood and my grocery store surrounded by the blissfully unaware and the strangely unperturbed. Can they see me? Between the phone and the window, which of the screens should I believe? I could not function as the polished version of myself that has been honed for polite, secular, white, upper middle-class society. I wept when asked a casual “How are you?” by the water cooler. It was becoming impossible to be a jinn in the land of the humans.
Between 29 April and 7 May, 2024, a few feet from my office, at the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, I did not have to compartmentalize. I did not have to pretend to be okay, to pretend I was not always thinking of Gaza and counting the dead. I did not have to pretend these extraordinary times were ordinary or attempt to separate Gaza from the rest of my life.
While the rest of the world has been hell bent on Palestinian erasure, the Popular University insisted on Palestinian recognition. Since October, those of us with public profiles have been fighting the war of narrative about Palestine. After every atrocity committed against Palestinians—troops of Israeli propogandists cast doubt on every dimension of the events we were witnessing with our own eyes. Recall, for example, that after Israel first bombed Al-Shifa hospital in November, killing hundreds of patients and people seeking refuge, it successfully convinced Western media to parrot the plain lie that Palestinians might have bombed themselves. Months later, Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system is indisputable fact. It has been maddening to scream into the void about atrocities, to provide links and videos and images, only to be told that they were all figments of our imaginations.
Gaslighting is not a new tactic. Read the replies to any pro-Palestinian X/Twitter account on any given day, and you will find people questioning the very existence of Palestine and Palestinians. “What is Palestine?” a troll recently asked in a reply to a X/Twitter thread I posted. “There has never been any such thing.” Unfortunately, erasing Palestine has not been limited to trolls on the internet. President Biden and his administration have regularly repeated Israeli propaganda, including outright lies.
Here at UChicago, the administration has doggedly refused to acknowledge the existence of Palestinian life, much less the enormous pain and suffering Palestinians are facing. President Paul Alivisatos attended a vigil for victims of the 7 October attack held by Zionist organizations on campus, but he did not attend a single vigil or commemoration of Palestinian death, even the many events that were registered and approved by the university.
After months of claiming political neutrality, he met with the Israeli Consul general and Hillel to discuss the safety of Jewish students on campus. We reside thirty miles away from where a six-year-old Palestinian child, Wadea Al Fayoume, was stabbed to death. Three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont, another was run over in California. Visibly Muslim or Arab students have felt unsafe across the country including at UChicago. Nary a word about their safety. Anti-Zionist Jewish students have faced anti-Semitic harassment and profiling as well as repression for their activism. Nary a word about their safety.
Negotiations between UChicago administration and the Popular University fell apart, in large part, over the question of recognition. I was in the room during the final session of negotiations on Sunday, 5 May. Students continued to demand that the scholarships and programs the university was offering go to Palestinians; administrators suspended negotiations instead. In the final deal on offer, the word Palestine does not appear once.
“Existence is resistance,” is a popular refrain in the Palestine liberation movement. At the Popular University, I learned that recognition is solidarity. In sharp contrast to the administration’s stance, students had built a minisociety on the premise of recognizing Palestinian life, and the impact of that work was enormous. I teared up every time I approached the encampment. Palestinian flags were everywhere and handmade art across the quad told the stories of my people. Songs from my childhood filled the speakers. It was not just that I was surrounded by my people, it was that I was surrounded by my people openly and unapologetically being ourselves among everyone else.
Forget compartmentalization, friends, colleagues and comrades from every nook and cranny of my life found their way to the quad. One evening it took me an hour to cross from one end of the camp to another, because I kept colliding with folks I knew: colleagues from UIC and Northwestern, acquaintances from my mosque, Hyde Park neighbors unaffiliated with the university, Chicagoans from all ends of the city. Everyone was part of the camp. “We’re on your turf,” one longtime friend joked when I ran into her. “My worlds are colliding,” I retorted!
Miraculously, there was nothing for me to explain to any of them. I did not have to be the Palestinian voice in the room. There were so many of us. I did not have to have the long debates about history, terms, or definitions with the many Zionists who approached the camp. Anti-Zionist Jewish organizers took that work on. I did not have to scurry to my office to pray. A few times a day, a student would call the adhaan on the quad and Muslims would gather to pray unproblematically. Islam was neither normative nor abnormal, it just was.
I have argued elsewhere that the encampments were glimpses into a different kind of life, one organized around care rather than profit. But for me—and I suspect for many Arabs and/or Muslims there—the encampment was also a glimpse into a different kind of self. My research on Muslim life in the United States shows the complexity and toll of living the compartmentalized lives that a hostile world necessitates. In bringing our worlds together, the UChicago Popular University for Gaza gifted many of us a new experience of wholeness. It helped heal some of the wounds of the past seven months and reenergized us for the fight ahead.
Eman Abdelhadi is an assistant professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.
Over the past month, students on college campuses around the country have launched encampments to protest Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza. On 29 April, a student-led encampment organized by UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) went up on the quad outside Levi Hall, the University of Chicago’s central-administration building. Following failed negotiations over demands for divestment, disclosure, and repair, the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) raided and cleared the encampment shortly after 4:30 a.m. on 7 May.
During the eight days the encampment was present on campus, it was a site of education, protest, debate, and community, what organizers called the Popular University for Gaza. University and community residents mingled, talked, and ate together; faculty and students held both teach-ins and regular classes amidst the tents; singers performed; kids played and made art; speeches, rallies, and religious services (both Jewish and Muslim) were held.
The encampment resonated far beyond the UChicago campus. Student reporters at the Chicago Maroon provided live updates and in-depth coverage. And in the national media—in the NYTimes, the WSJ, and elsewhere—the encampment became for many an especially contested site for different takes on the state of the academy, not least because of UChicago’s self-promoted “Chicago Principles.”[1] Indeed, over those eight days, the administration issued several statements (to the campus community and then, on 7 May 7 in the WSJ) that framed its response to the encampment, and eventually its decision to clear it, in terms of UChicago’s “core animating value” of free expression and its “foundational value” of institutional neutrality.[2]
Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon. Image from The Chicago Maroon. The editors of Critical Inquiry deplore the use of police to clear nonviolent student protesters. We reject the administration’s stated reasons for doing so, whether in the name of campus safety or on the principle of institutional neutrality. With many of our colleagues (quoting from a 13 May open letter to President Alivisatos), we believe that “in choosing this course of action, the administration has elected to abandon its own principles of neutrality and the protection of free speech.” We also believe that the demands the students raised are vital, both to the current situation in Gaza and to broader principles and practices of a democratic university.
We have invited faculty and students from different backgrounds and levels of involvement to reflect on the encampment and its aftermath. By publishing a small cluster of posts, we hope to convey something of the particular tenor of the encampment at Chicago, as well as the particular controversies it provoked (and continues to provoke). Even as the Popular University for Gaza has been dispersed, it is important to record the complexities (affective, social, political) of this experiment in collective action and to insist on its ongoing relevance within and beyond the university.
[1] What’s become known as the “Chicago Principles” are articulated in a 2014 report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago.
[2] President Paul Alivisatos refers to free expression as “the core animating value of the University of Chicago” in “Concerning the Encampment,” his message to the campus community on Monday, 29 April. He calls institutional neutrality the “foundational value” of UChicago in his WSJ op-ed, “Why I Ended the University of Chicago Protest Encampment,” on 7 May 2024.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
The twenty-eighth Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change – or COP28 for short – recently took place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The negotiations that go on at these COP meetings tell us something about the bind that humanity increasingly finds itself in. On the one hand, there is the fact of an energy-intensive civilization that growing numbers of humans are getting used and attached to. We only have to remember the ever-increasing number of gadgets – from the electric toothbrush to the electric car – we plug in every day to see how the consumption of energy dominates all aspects of our lives, from self-care to the delivery of goods and services that sustain us. Even the two contemporary wars are reminiscent of this: the firepower of a nation lies in its capacity to unleash huge bursts of energy in the shape of bombs and missiles that can destroy lives and built structures in a matter of minutes; and human lives become tragic if hospitals have to run without electricity and water, that is to say, without access to energy. The consumption of energy is at the core of what we have come to regard as civilization. Humans want to migrate from societies in which per capita energy consumption is low to those where these figures are much higher. This demand for more and more energy fuels all dreams of equity of human material affluence.
On the other hand, there is the question of where we source this energy from. Over the last four or so decades, governments and their publics have increasingly become aware – thanks to the work of many dedicated scientists – that deriving all or most of the energy we need from fossil fuel sources can, by the process of emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, drive up the surface temperature of the planet to a point where the earth may become inhospitable or extremely unpleasant for life, particularly human life. Pushed to an extreme, the process can threaten human existence.
So, in the absence of a global-governance regime, the COP processes are the best we have for managing this conundrum where, if we want to have our “energy cake” and “eat” it too, humans will have to transition to a sustainable state of atmospheric warming, given that the options of returning by choice to preindustrial lifestyles or pursuing degrowth seem out of the question. Based on both scientific and political advice, COP16 at Cancun in 2010 resolved that nations should aim to keep the average warming below 1.50C over the preindustrial average and substitute that target for the previously preferred figure of 20C. Close to two hundred nations signed on to this formula at COP21 held in Paris in 2015 whereby they undertook to decarbonize their economies according to nationally determined levels to reach this goal.
French researchers Béatrice Cointe and Hélène Guillemot have recently described this target as “at once recent and, as it appears increasingly unreachable, almost obsolete.” Their somewhat ironic take is repeated by Faith Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, who states that while the “rapid deployment of clean energy technology” has “shaved off” about 10C of projected global warming by the end of this century by bringing it down from “the truly catastrophic 30C” to “an only slightly less severe 2.40C,” it is not yet “good news.” NASA website describes some of the main differences between the respective scenarios for 1.5-degree warming and 2-degree warming thus: “At 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, about 14 percent of Earth’s population will be exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years, while at 2 degrees warming that number jumps to 37 percent. Extreme heatwaves will become widespread at 1.5 degrees Celsius warming.” The average rise in global temperature in 2019 was already 1.1 degree Celsius above the preindustrial average. Things must get a lot worse if the warming goes up to 2.40 Celsius.
COP28 therefore took place in a perceived atmosphere of “climate emergency.” The planet is hurtling towards a warming level of well beyond 1.50C, and the COP processes have clearly failed to arrest this trend. As Birol says, currently “we are not on track to meet the Paris agreement of keeping global warming well below 20C.” Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel are on a record high, reports the Global Carbon Project at Exeter. The bulk of the emissions come from a small number of countries. Between them, China, the US, India, EU27, Russia, Brazil represented more than 63 percent of fossil fuel consumption and 62 percent of greenhouse gas emissions last year. It is also true that the use of coal, the most offending fossil fuel, is not going to be given up anytime soon. China and India have more coalmines in the pipeline. For coal still remains the fossil fuel par excellence in terms of the “cheap” and plentiful amount of energy one can harvest per unit compared to other sources.
A positive and welcome development at COP28 was the establishment of the global “loss and damages” funds to compensate for the unavoidable losses that climate change will cause to people least responsible for it. However, a “climate emergency” also means that no options are off the table, including the technological ones of carbon capture and sequestration from the air and in the process of mining fossil fuel. As the emergency becomes even more dire, we will probably hear soon about more experimental technologies like those being developed to engineer the climate of the whole planet.
Slow, entangled, and uncertain, COP processes reflect a fundamental reality. Humans share this one planet, but human politics remain divided and scaled, from local to global levels inside and between nations. National politicians are primarily driven by their diverse domestic constituencies. Even the technologies on offer for addressing planetary problems index the inequities and power imbalances of the world. But an implicit agreement binds the world’s democratic and authoritarian-minded leaders together. Their domestic constituencies aspire for more, and not less, energy so that the amenities and conveniences of modernization could be accessed by increasingly larger sections of a human population that is still growing. How politics will reconcile these understandable and just (in human terms) aspirations with the knowledge of the environmental degradations that an unbridled pursuit of modernization has already caused and will continue to cause in the foreseeable future is anybody’s guess.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and a Critical Inquiry consulting editor. He is a frequent contributor to the journal and the author of, most recently, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023).
Maha Nassar
27 December 2023
On 31 October 2023, as Israel’s horrific bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip entered its fourth week and as its ground incursion into northern Gaza entered its fourth day, a music video was released. The video’s thumbnail picture depicted a red map of historic Palestine with dark skies and smoke billowing behind it. The map was overlain with the word Raj`in (we are returning) in white Arabic script; below it stood silhouetted figures. I started to see the picture every time I opened YouTube. Eventually, I clicked, not sure what to expect.
Rajieen | راجعينWhat I saw and heard was a rousing, eight-minute Arabic anthem that reflected discourses of the present moment while also containing refrains from the past. These discourses do not view Palestine primarily as a humanitarian cause but rather as an anti-colonial one.
Produced by Jordanian producer Nasir al-Bashir, “Rajieen,” as it is commonly transliterated, is a collaboration of twenty-five Arab performing artists, each a star in their own right. Palestinian-Jordanian singers Issam al-Najjar and Zayne are joined by artists from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Kuwait, all of whom bring a range of musical styles.
Marketed as an updated version of the 1988 pan-Arab hit, “The Arab Dream,” this latest song has struck a chord. Seven weeks after its launch, “Rajieen” has been viewed, in whole or in part, millions of times across various social media platforms and through private messaging apps.
Much of the track is dedicated to memorializing the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza being slaughtered by Israel’s genocidal war machine. By 20 December, the recorded number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza stood at over 20,000, with nearly 8,000 of them children.
The children of Gaza—comprising about half of the area’s 2.3 million residents—feature prominently in the song; images of Gaza’s children flash regularly across the screen. Egyptian rapper Afroto asks: “What crime did the murdered child commit, who dreamt of only a modest future? And what of the child who survived, only to lose their family?”
But “Rajieen” is not a lamentation. The more I listened to the track, the more I heard echoes of the defiant, anti-colonial Arab discourses that animated much of the twentieth century. Those discourses have consistently upheld the principle of Arab national independence, rejecting Zionism’s exclusionary claims over Palestine as well as the 1917 Balfour declaration that committed the British government to supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine while denying Palestinian Arabs’ national claims.
Early in the track, Tunisian rapper Balti asks, “How can we declare peace when Balfour’s declaration stands?” By naming the Balfour declaration as the opening salvo in this “hundred years’ war on Palestine,” the track affirms the anti-colonial paradigm that has long animated Arab liberatory discourse on Palestine. It also rejects the dominant Western paradigm that seeks to absolve itself of its imperialist sins by positing Israelis and Palestinians as engaged in an interminable ethno-national “conflict.” The song returns the problem of Palestine firmly to its settler-colonial roots.
The “we” in that line is also a declaration that Palestinian political agency lies with the people themselves, not with the Arab governments or the Western-dominated international order. Seventy-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba, fifty-six years after Israel’s military occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and thirty years after the Oslo Accords revealed the two-state solution to be a chimera, the track affirms that Palestinian refugees and their descendants do not seek permission from hostile imperial powers to return home. Al-Najjar leads the chorus:
The key to my home remains in my heart
And I’m returning with my children in my arms
Even if the whole world stands against me
I am returning, O my country
I am returning.
The refrain is significant. As Asmahan Qarjouli explains in her comparative analysis of “Rajieen” and “The Arab Dream,” unlike the earlier song’s longing hope that Arab governments unify to end the Israeli occupation, “Rajieen” insists that it is the Arab youth themselves who are “united as custodians of the Palestinian cause despite their sense of powerlessness. And that there is no defeat or division, firm in their belief of return.”
By formulating their return through both the singular present progressive tense (“I am returning”) and the plural present progressive tense (“we are returning”), the lyrics also return us to the Arab liberatory discourses of the mid-twentieth century. As I show in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (2017), Palestinian cultural producers in the 1950s and ‘60s utilized the principles of politically committed literature (adab al-iltizam) to articulate and popularize anti-colonial discourses that located political agency within individuals, not governments.
Free verse poetry – with its short, rhythmic lines – played a key role in this struggle. Poets would declaim their poems at festivals in front of large crowds; their direct, intimate verses connected them viscerally to the audience, who quickly memorized the poems and shared them with others. The interplay between the “I” and the “we” helped foster a sense of collective spirit, while the poems’ explicit anti-colonial message engendered political mobilization. By eschewing the apolitical aesthetic commonly found in European and North American literary productions at this time, such resistance poetry played a key role in helping spread leftist, anti-colonial consciousness, not only among Palestinians, but among Arabs more broadly.
And what were the contours of this Arab anti-colonial consciousness? As Laure Guiguis explains, the major ideological movements of the period – Marxism, communism, socialism, Baathism, Nasserism, pan-Arab (qawmi) nationalism, nation-state (watani) patriotism, and Third Worldism – all coalesced around a “transregional and even transnational, though diversified, universe of meaning and values,” that was “structured by debates on the best ways to lead the Arab/Palestinian revolution and achieve economic, social, and political emancipation” from Western hegemony.
The transnational aspect of this consciousness also linked Palestine to activists across the Global South at a time when they, too, were fighting to rid themselves of Western colonial and imperial domination. As Palestinian poet Hanna Abu Hanna declared in 1962, “My struggle embraces every struggle / and encompasses the world from pole to pole.”
Some cynics say that such anti-colonial discourse carries little weight in the face of Western military and economic hegemony. But this view ignores the power of discursive frameworks to grant legitimacy to (or withhold legitimacy from) those in power. Imperial regimes have expended much energy on waging discursive battles aimed at legitimizing their rule, from France’s “mission civilisatrice” and Britain’s “White man’s burden” to the US’ “rules-based international order.”
Those discourses have often been animated by racist tropes that depicted non-White populations as incapable of ruling over themselves and untethered to the land targeted for conquest. Proponents of Zionism have likewise deployed anti-Arab racist tropes to try to legitimize the Zionist conquest of land inhabited overwhelmingly by Palestinian Arabs. Following the 1948 Nakba, they mobilized these racist tropes to deny Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland.
Palestinians have long waged a discursive battle against this “Nakba denialism.” Even after the Israeli state destroyed Palestinian villages and replaced their names with Hebrew ones, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees continue to refer to them by their Arabic names. And they continue to insist upon return.
Today, with some Jewish extremists seeking to destroy the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a Jewish temple, many Muslims see protecting the Aqsa Mosque as part of this anti-colonial struggle. In “Rajieen,” Libyan singer Fuad Gritli insists, “Al-Aqsa is ours / Even if my enemy erases its name.” Egyptian Trap artist Marwan Moussa vows, “I’m returning again to my land / Al-Aqsa is where I will hold my next prayer.” At a time when Muslims and Christians are frequently barred from accessing their holy sites in Jerusalem and subjected to attacks by Israeli police and Jewish settlers, the “return” here is also a promise of religious emancipation.
Yet “Rajieen” knows that the present moment is about much more than a contested holy site, important though it may be. In the last minute of the track, we see images of the massive, worldwide protests that have been held over the last two months, include that of young American Jews who took over New York’s Grand Central Station on 28 October, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. As we watch images of these protests flashing across the screen, we hear the refrain, “If I lose my voice, your voices won’t leave,” repeated eight times. It’s a trust that one group of youth is bestowing upon another.
Ultimately, the artists of “Rajieen” insist on returning the Palestine cause to its pan-Arab, anticolonial roots. At the end of the song, as the camera pans across the twenty-five young artists, a phrase appears: “We do not just stand in solidarity with the cause; we are its custodians.” It is a generational call, as young people around the world – and in the US – mobilize in the streets and battle censorship online to champion the Palestinian cause.
If this is truly the anthem of this generation, then despite the war’s horrifying, gut-wrenching toll on Palestinians lives, their liberation and return may indeed be closer than ever before.
Maha Nassar is an associate professor of modern Middle Eastern history in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (2017).
Oren Yiftachel
15 December 2023
Below are early critical reflections from within on the recent upheaval in Israel/Palestine highlighting the disastrous consequences of Hamas’s “boomerang” insurgency, which triggered mass destruction and the deepening of Israel’s apartheid. Articulation of a joint nonviolent struggle is urgently needed for decolonization and justice in our torn land.
The Black Sabbath
The black sabbath of 7 October in southern Israel will be remembered as one of the gravest national shocks ever. Even seven weeks later, the Negev region, from where I write, is engulfed in a state of collective mourning. Hamas’s surprising invasion unleashed mass terrorist killing and horrific, inhumane crimes of extreme cruelty on an unprecedented scale. 7 October was by far the largest day massacre in the history of the century-long conflict, with Hamas murdering and killing over twelve hundred Israelis. This was accompanied by injuring, burning, looting, abusing, and torturing thousands of defenseless civilians. Moreover, over two hundred Israelis, including elderly, women, and young children were kidnapped as hostages against all norms of warfare or human rights. The indiscriminate bombing of Israeli cities by Hamas and Hizballah has continued unabated since 7 October. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are still displaced.
It didn’t take long for the violence to return as a vicious boomerang to the small, besieged territory of the Gaza Strip, where 2.1 million Palestinians live, mostly refugees from 1948. Israel’s retaliation, predictably, was extremely heavy-handed, overstretching far and wide the “right to defend itself.” The first month of the war was the bloodiest in the history of this land, with Gaza—the largest Palestinian city—literally flattened, more than eleven thousand Palestinians killed, mostly children and women, and over a million forcefully displaced. Israel has inflicted massive collective punishment on most Gazans, a move buttressed by Israeli public discourse demanding revenge, destruction, and annihilation, with government ministers proudly declaring “Gaza’s Nakba 2023” and openly calling for “erasing” the strip and evicting its population. A mutual disaster.
Comparative Optics
How can our conceptual optics account for this unprecedented series of brutally violent events? I offer here the optic of a boomerang insurgency, being a doomed attempt to violently rise against an oppressive regime using terrorist methods with little regard to the immense power and intentions of that regime. Boomerang insurgencies are often driven by a messianic belief in complete (religious or national) redemption with scant attention to the huge cost imposed on their own civilian populations.
Such boomerang (some may say suicidal) insurgencies have a long history among rebelling colonized or oppressed nations. We can recall the violent campaigns by groups such as the Chechens in southern Russia, the Kurds in eastern Turkey, and the Tamils in northeastern Sri Lanka—all using terrorist and suicide bombing as key tools in their arsenal.
These insurgencies have typically spawned severe reactions from ruling states using their own version of terrorism, inflicting massive casualties on civilian populations and destroying the just struggle for equality, resources, and/or sovereignty. In all three cases, following a period of armed insurgency, Chechen, Kurdish, and Tamil national movements suffered fatal blows and have not recovered for decades after their suicidal revolts.
Notably, this has often not been the case. Nonviolent campaigns for liberation also have a long history, with legendary leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela. Organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC), Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Zapatistas, or the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) became more effective once they laid down their arms or stopped using terroristic methods.
Failed boomerang insurgencies are also well-known by both Jews and Palestinians. Jews recall two rebellions against the mighty Roman empire that led to the ransacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of Jewish nationalism for millennia. The Palestinians, too, recall the Great Revolt of the 1930s that was crushed by the mighty British army, sending Palestinian leadership into exile. The effect of this seriously weakened the Palestinians and contributed to the disaster of the 1948 Nakba.
Deepening Apartheid
The background to Hamas’s insurgency is essential: the story does not start on 7 October. Israel was created in 1948 as an ethnocratic state committed to Jewish supremacy. Palestinians still live under the ongoing consequences of the Nakba—the 1948 ethnic cleansing of large parts of Palestine—and over fifty-six years of military rule, settler colonialism, and blockade in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. They suffer ongoing settler colonization and massive land grabs that saw most Palestinian lands nationalized and settled by Jews. More specifically in Gaza, following the disengagement—Israel’s partial retreat—and the violent 2007 takeover by Hamas, Israel imposed a sixteen-year suffocating siege, lasting until 7 October.
Over the last two decades, mainly under the hawkish leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the colonial Israeli regime has de facto annexed the West Bank. In addition, Israel has forced a sharp separation between the West Bank and Gaza and given Hamas’s leadership implicit backing. This prevented the emergence of a united Palestinian leadership. Coupled with discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinian citizens, Israel has established, step-by-step, a de facto apartheid regime bolstering Jewish supremacy and Palestinian fragmentation between River and Sea. This was exemplified in the opening sentence of the “basic principles” of the current Israeli government:
The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the [Jewish] settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel—in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, and Judea and Samaria.
Given this clear framing, Israel has used the fog of war since 7 October to deepen the control and dispossession of Palestinians outside Gaza. In the West Bank, the Israeli army and settlers have trebled their attacks, killing over 200 Palestinians in almost daily infringements into putatively Palestinian autonomous areas. Settler attacks have caused the cleansing of tens of fringe Palestinian communities forced to flee settler violence. Within Israel too, almost 2 million Palestinian citizens have been placed under severe surveillance, prohibition of political activity, and mass arrests for any shred of public sympathy with Hamas.
Disastrous Violence
Hamas is not monolithic and enjoys substantial support among Palestinians. It has used a range of social, political, and terrorist tactics over the years. Nonetheless, it has consistently denied Israel’s right to exist and violently opposed any peace or reconciliation. Accordingly, Hamas’s 1988 Charter declared:
Israel will exist . . . until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. . . . It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. . . . peaceful solutions . . . are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.
[Preamble, Article 6, Article 13]
During the 1990s Oslo period, and again during the second intifada in the early 2000s, Hamas orchestrated a deadly series of suicide bombings, killing hundreds of Israelis in buses, restaurants, hotels, and public spaces. They have also murdered hundreds of Palestinians suspected of collaboration. Many of these acts hit the center of Israel well beyond the settlements in the occupied territories, triggering harsh “boomerang” responses by the Israeli colonial state and inflicting widespread damage to Palestinian society, killing thousands and again seriously impeding Palestinian national aspirations.
Since Hamas violently took control of Gaza in 2007, over 20,000 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli civilian spaces. At the same time, it imposed an authoritarian regime over residents. The long-planned 7 October attack appears to have again caused a major setback to the just Palestinian struggle for freedom, self-determination, and decolonization. The 7 October attack is hence likely to be remembered as a major moral and political nadir of the Palestinian struggle.
Needless to say, destructive violence is consistently employed by Israel. As an occupying and colonizing force, Israel’s main policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians have been framed by a pervasive use of force. It has persistently denied Palestinians basic individual and collective human rights, most notably the right of self-determination and return. Such violence is also highly destructive to the nature, stability and morality of Israeli society as well. Hence, the current asymmetric dialectics of violence rests on long dark histories, and can be likened to a deadly dance, born from the clash of active settler colonialism with Jihadist Islam.
Decolonization
The disaster of 7 October and its horrific boomerang consequences are plain to see. It is hence high time to reflect on the strategy of a violent insurgency with its deadly boomerang effect. The task for Palestinian, Jewish, and international circles supporting peace and Palestinian rights is to rebuild a renewed (preferably joint) Palestinian-Israeli nonviolent decolonization agenda. Such a campaign will resist Israeli apartheid and apply a range of civil, economic, political, and international forces to dismantle the apparatus of supremacy and occupation.
Renewed mobilization will combine political, popular, and moral strategies, and attempt to organize wide circles of support in a way armed resistance and terror are bound to fail. Several movements have already begun this task, including A Land for All, Combatants for Peace, and Standing Together—all joint Palestinian-Jewish movements with small yet growing followings. The task of rebuilding nonviolent campaigns is urgent, so that the dark clouds of 7 October do not cast a paralyzing shadow over the moral and political task of attaining the legitimate rights of all people residing in our dear, torn, and sorry land.
The spirit of that struggle was well articulated by late poet Mahmood Darwish:
(from the prisoner to the prison guard)
I will teach you how to wait.
At the gate of my ever-delayed death
Slowly
You may get tired
And cast your shadow elsewhere
So you can enter your night, liberated
From the shadow of my ghost.
[Translated from “State of Siege”]
Oren Yiftachel is a professor of political geography, urban planning, and public policy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “‘Ethnocracy’ and Its Discontents: Minorities, Protests, and the Israeli Polity,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000).
Anton Shammás
27 November 2023
Dear Critical Inquiry,
Thank you again for the renewed invitation, and I find myself, again, asking you to please accept my apologies – if anything, my rage has been increasingly overwhelming, disorienting, smothering, and I really can’t find the words. And a good voice inside my head keeps warning me: whatever I write about Gaza right now will probably be used against me* and prevent me from entering Israel again in the foreseeable future, to see my relatives and loved ones. That, on top of the paralyzing realization that whatever I write will not save a single Gazan child. I know, we need to always speak out and never let go, even though we know deep down that it’s a “lost cause,” as Edward Said has taught us, but at times the cause seems so lost that words can’t help us find it, and get hold of it again.
I’ll let you know if this state of mind gives me some respite soon.
My best,
a.
- Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history . . .
– Adrienne Rich, “North American Time”
5 December 2023
The following is probably the last poem I’ve ever written in Hebrew, some forty years ago, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre at the outskirts of Beirut, in September 1982. Standing inside the same history, it came back to haunt me in recent weeks, this time in my English translation, as I watch the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
Requiem
Please hold on, until I’m ready. It’ll take some time, some precious
time, and you must be cold out there, no doubt, where you stand.
But both of us, how should I say, must wear the shroud
of patience, I mean especially I. What’d you say?
What’d you say, I say. Never mind. Our hearing
will become acute, as we turn keen ears to
each other’s mutters and moans, as mute time goes by. Sleep I will not give,
nor a single slumber, to mine eyes. As simple as that; no grudge.
For I’ll always stand guard. Cross my heart, I will. Always
on my guard, and never budge. It’ll take some time, as I said, precious time.
But everything, as you know, must come to an end;
and you, how should I say, will stay put, down the road –
a creditor who’s found a spot to collect his debt.
Who’s found a plot, waiting for the dead to rise.
The dead – that would be me. Me, I said. Never mind – you too are hard
to hear sometimes, through all the shrouds. Comes as no surprise. But please,
hush and hold tight. Don’t give up, repeat: don’t give up, if you can.
What’d you say? Don’t you rush. I’ll be right there with you. Here you are.
Late a bit, I have to say, but you must admit – quite a feat for a dead man.
Shatila, Rosh Hashanah, 1982…
… and now Gaza, Hanukkah, 2023.
A Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English, Antón Shammás is Professor Emeritus of Middle East Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Torture into Affidavit, Dispossession into Poetry: On Translating Palestinian Pain” (2017).
Neta Stahl
13 December 2023
I was born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where my father, two siblings, and their families still live (or rather lived until 7 October). When I think about the attack, I think about it as occurring at night, not only because of the darkness of what happened, but because for the last twenty-five years, I have lived in the US. So for me, it started at 11:30 pm with the initial report by my family members that they entered their home-shelter, hearing shootings all around. (my beloved sister-in-law was murdered, the rest of my family survived).
I never went to bed that night, and at the end of the following day, trying to make sense of that which the mind still cannot grasp, one thought kept running in my head, and that was that I finally gained access to the depth of the words of the poets whose poetics have been at the center of my research for many years. Working on Hebrew literature while living in the US, I had always thought that I had an intimate understanding of the poet Avot Yeshurun’s (1904–1992) phrase, “the secret of the Torah of longing,” which he used to describe the pain of longing for his loved ones. But it turned out that I didn’t. Mine was the longing for a place and a community that I could still visit, something that these poets could not do. Having emigrated to Palestine before WWII, they learned of the destruction of their home communities in Europe and the murder of their entire families when they were already in a safe heaven.
I didn’t yet understand the longing for one’s own memories and the pain that such memories could bring. How can one recall the landscape of her childhood when it is tainted by the blood of family members, dear friends, and their own children or grandchildren? I used to tell my friends there that they live where my memories are, and now they, too, do not live (there) any longer. To be sure, I do not mean that what had been done to my childhood community is a Shoah—a word that some of the writers I work on, including Yeshurun, avoided (they used the traditional word Hurban—destruction—instead). But for me, 7 October is the closest I could get to what this generation of writers experienced when they learned of the loss of the world of their childhood and of the atrocities that had been done to their family members and loved ones.
The poet whom I was thinking about when I first realized that Kfar Aza, as I knew it, is gone was Uri Zvi Grinberg (1896–1986), a Yiddish and later Hebrew modernist whose 1951 monumental poetic response to the Holocaust gained a canonic place in the Jewish literary canon. But now that Gazan civilians are killed by the hundreds each day, it is Yeshurun to whom I return. Ever since that horrible night, I have not been able to get back to my new manuscript on Grinberg. Both poets wrote about their loved ones, the agony of losing them, and the world they lived in. Both poets expressed their longing for that world and bore a sense of guilt for leaving their family behind. The two poets lamented the destruction of their home community, but Grinberg’s lamentation is imbued with anger and an urge to take revenge, while Yeshurun never calls for revenge and focuses on the life that was lost rather than the circumstances of their death and those who were responsible for it. Yeshurun blames himself for leaving because he focuses on the pain of longing and his own actions (or lack thereof, such as not answering his mother’s letters) when his family and childhood community were still among the living. In the few poems in which he refers to a collective guilt, it is a collective guilt of an entire generation of young people who, like Yeshurun, left their families and communities in Europe and immigrated to a new land, leaving behind their Jewish tradition, language (that is, Yiddish), and culture:
I left a country, I left a language, I left a people,
I left a city. I left Perlmutters-Jews. I left their language.
I left my father, I left my mother and I left my brothers and my sister.
And I went to the Tel Avivian soil of the Land of Israel, and I took a Tel-Avivian Hebrew.
(December 12, 1988).
Moreover, while for Grinberg, Jewish suffering led to his Zionist and later radical right-wing, semi-fascist ideology that called for shedding blood for the sake of a Hebrew national redemption in the land of Israel, Yeshurun also identified with the pain of the Palestinian victims of the Nakba. He refused to ignore the agony of losing one’s land, home, and community. He viewed instead the loss of his family and the destruction of his hometown as a moral legacy to forever remember this pain and, therefore, never inflict it on others:
וְאַבָּא-אִמָּא, מִן מִלְקוֹחַ
– אֵש-אֵל-רַבְרַבָּא מִלְקָח –
.צִוּוּנוּ יַהְנְדֶס לֹא לִשְכֹּח
.וְעַל פּוֹילִין לֹא לִשְכַּח
[And father-mother
Ordered us from the fire
Not to forget [our] Jewishness
Not to forget [what happened] in Poland. ]
(“Pesach al Kukhim,” 1952).
In his idiosyncratic language (to which a translation cannot do justice), Yeshurun uses the word Yandes, in the Yiddish dialect of his parents, which means Judaism or Jewishness, and embodies a deep moral commitment to do no harm onto others.[1] The notion that his Jewishness obliged him to remember the Holocaust is not exceptional, of course. But for Yeshurun, this memory of the atrocities is important not for the sake of revenge or for preventing them from reoccurring to Jews, but for precluding them from reoccurring to any people, to anyone. Perhaps most important is the moral injunction that he finds in his Jewishness to never become the perpetrators ourselves. In other words, as Jews, we are obliged to never do to others that which had been done to us. It is the legacy of Jewish suffering that calls for empathy for the suffering of others and for moral responsibility to never be on the side that inflicts this pain. Yeshurun, like Grinberg, speaks in the name of the murdered Jews, but while Grinberg cites them as calling for revenge, Yeshurun invokes his poetics to remind his fellow Jews that for traditional Jews, what it means to be a Jew is very different than what is done in their names. Many of the people who were murdered on 7 October were not observant Jews, and their world was very far from the world of traditional Jewish communities. Living right next to Gaza, many of them were peace activists who were not blind to the pain of the Gazans, and in that sense, they had more Yandes—Jewishness—in them than religious nationalists who call for the murder of Palestinian children, women, and the elderly, because they were born on the wrong side of the border. The dead that I lament call us to maintain our Yandes and not kill young children in their names.
There is another reason this call is relevant to me today here in America. In the academic circles of which I am a part, some leftist scholars and intellectuals refuse to see the perpetrators of the 7 October attack for what they are. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the humanity and, therefore, the pain and suffering of the innocent victims of the atrocities committed by Hamas. My hope is that both they, as well as those who call to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth, will find in themselves their Yandes-Jewishness, in Yeshurun’s sense of the word, namely, guided by the moral injunction to see the pain of innocent others as they see their own.
Neta Stahl is associate professor of Modern Hebrew Literature and director of the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
[1] For a meticulous discussion of the meaning of Yandes in Yeshurun’s work, see Amos Noy, “Those Who Pass Over,” Te’oriah ve-Bikoret 41 (Summer 2013): 199–221.
Orit Bashkin
11 December 2023
Shmuel Ben David, a Jewish Karaite from Crimea who went on a pilgrimage in 1641–1642, provides us with a vivid depiction of Gaza, praising the city for its beauty, its numerous mosques, its Jewish prayer house, and the city’s bustling “baths, coffeeshops, and hundreds of stores, where they sell all kinds of merchandise and food.” Shmuel was just one of the early modern Jewish travelers who mention Gaza as a beautiful and vibrant space. His comments contradict sharply with the horrors we witness today in the midst of one of the deadliest wars in our history. The War started on 7 October when Hamas launched rockets on Israel and sent 3,000 of his men to the border. Around 1,200 people were killed during the attacks, and 240 more, including foreign nationals, were taken hostages. The attacks targeted women and children, taking down entire families. Participants in a music festival were hunted and gunned down. Recently, the left leaning NGO Physicians for Human Rights–Israel published a devastating report on sexual violence in the conflict. The Israeli response was a deadly campaign to destroy Hamas; it dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza and enforced a stricter blockade of the Gaza Strip than ever before. Then the Israel army began to occupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip, from north to south. Around 17,000 Palestinians, including over 7,000 children, died in this campaign. Over 300 families have lost 10 or more family members in the bombings. The Gazan population is forced to flee every place the army enters, leaving its dead under the rubble of bombed-out buildings, and yet the question remains: What will become of them when there is no more place to escape? To what city will they return?
In the hours and days following the hideous massacres of 7 October, I did not want to think about history; I simply wanted to find out who was amongst the dead and how they died and then to mourn and to cry. But we do need to at least try to understand how we got to this place, although I don’t believe that historians can provide an exact point zero when and where these crises began nor convey an iota of the pains of a parent who has lost a child.
The Historical Before
Writing history depends on your starting point, and each of these starting points can lead to a different narrative. I start with World War I, when Gaza, which was under Muslim rule since 643, was occupied by the British. Although the entirety of Palestine, and indeed the Middle East, suffered tremendously during the years of the war, Gaza faced massive British attacks beginning on 26 March 1917, with relentless bombardment from air and sea, which devastated the city. The destroyed city and its hinterlands were rebuilt during the years of the British occupation of Palestine in the form of a mandate from the League of Nations, which ended in 1948.[1]
The 1948 War, known in Palestinian history as the Nakba, changed Gaza. As Israel was fighting regular armies from Egypt in the South, Egypt assumed control of a territory known as the Gaza Strip, a small territory 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide, which included the city of Gaza and neighboring communities such as Beit Hanun, Beit Lahiya, Jebaliya, Dir al-Balakh, Khan Yunis. More importantly, many of the refugees ethnically cleansed from Southern Israel arrived in Gaza, doubling its original population, when 130,000 homeless refugees settled in tents in haphazardly built camps. The Gazans were now isolated from their Palestinian brethren under Israeli and Jordanian control and lived under Egyptian military rule, which severely limited movement outside of the strip. At the same time, the Palestinians in the strip resisted attempts to transfer them to the Sinai; in March 1955 both communists and Muslim Brothers protested such a plan in a series of mass demonstrations.
The third occupation of Gaza occurred in October 1956 by Israel as part of a joint campaign of Israel, the UK, and France to defeat Egypt, whose regime at the time led an anticolonial, Pan-Arab, and Pan African regional movement. Israel had to evacuate the region a few months later due to international pressure, but the war cost Palestinian lives; 275 Palestinians were killed in the protests of Khan Yunis and Rafah, for example.
The fourth, and longest, occupation of Gaza occurred in June 1967, again by Israel, as part of its June 1967 War, during which Israel also occupied the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. From this period onwards, the Gaza Strip’s supply of electricity, water, and basic services were dependent on Israel. The economics of Israel and Gaza Strip became intertwined, with Gazans working as low wage laborers in Israel. Moreover, Israeli illegal settlements were built in the southern region of the strip, which later became known as Gush Katif. The idea, developed by Itzhak Rabin and Yigal Alon, was to split the southern part of the strip from the city of Gaza by populating it with Jews.
Already in the 1950s, Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and those in Jordan and Lebanon, crossed the borders with Israel, attempting to return to fields and homes. Individuals also attacked Israeli civilian and military targets; these individuals were known as fedayeen, namely, individuals engaged in a battle to liberate Palestine who were willing to sacrifice their life for this cause. After Israel’s massive victory in 1967, Palestinians strongly believed that they, rather than Arab states, should take hold of their own fate, which led to the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, founded in 1964), and several similarly radical organizations; these organizations embraced the ideology of armed struggle, the theory according to which Palestine will be liberated by force. Consequently, they targeted both Israeli soldiers and civilians, who were deemed legitimate targets as part of the Zionist settlement project. Categorized as terrorist organizations in most of the Western world, they forged connections with other groups in the New Left and the Global South. In this period, the slogan “from the river to the sea” came into being, which initially meant the liberation of all of Palestine, allowing only the Jews who lived there before the Zionist settlement project to remain, though the question of whom should remain after decolonization changed over the years. The endgame was envisioned as a secular Palestinian state and, according to some organizations, a liberation of the entire region from its corrupt pro-Western regimes.
The Gaza Strip is surrounded by the Gaza Envelop—that is, Israeli communities—like the Kibbutzim, Nirim, Kfar Azza, Beri, and the city of Sderot. These communities were meant to create facts on the ground before 1948, allowing the future Jewish state to grab more territory; after 1948, the new villages and kibbutzim were meant to protect the border with Egypt. Some of the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) members of the Envelope’s settlements were themselves, or were the descendants of, Jews who escaped Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s. At this point, when states closed their borders to Jews fleeing Nazism, these Jews could either stay in Europe and die, or, if lucky, settle in Palestine. They chose the latter. Other Ashkenazim are, or are descendants of, Holocaust survivors. The people of the city of Sderot, in contrast, are mostly North African. After the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish communities in Arab states found themselves as pawns between the Israeli state who wanted them for its own ideological and demographic concerns, and for Arab states whose ultranationalist elites considered every Jew a Zionist. They could not withhold under these pressures, and many chose to immigrate to Israel. Arab states confiscated their property, and they suffered discrimination in Israel because they were not European Jews. The city of Sderot included first Iranian and Kurdish Jews and then many Moroccan Jews. In the 1990s, Soviet and Ethiopian Jews joined Sderot. The communities by the border suffered tremendously from the attacks of the Fidayeen, and the speech that Moshe Dayan gave in the funeral of a young man killed, mutilated, and dragged to the border became one of the cornerstones of Israeli martyrology.
The Gaza Strip was historically a hub of anti-Israeli activities. In 1971, following the murder of two Israeli children near Gaza, Ariel Sharon was called to crush resistance to Israeli rule in the strip, opening a series of arrests and assassinations. Within the tiny radical Israeli left, a group of intellectuals and activists centered around a group called Matzpen warned in the Haaretz newspaper (22 September 1967), following the 1967 war, that “Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation entails Foreign Rule. Foreign Rule entails Resistance. Resistance entails Repression. Repression entails Terror and Counter-Terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. Let us get out of the Occupied Territories immediately.” Radical Israeli journalist Uri Avineri wrote in 1969 that “The Gaza Strip has become a focus for the Palestinian Arabs’ resistance movement against the state of Israel,” with “mine laying, bomb throwing and other daily terrorist activities.” He concluded by saying that “it is not by chance that people in Gaza are hungry; it is not by chance that they have no employment; it is not by chance that wages in Gaza are below the necessary minimum. All this is so because someone wanted it to be so. Someone in Jerusalem. A collective ‘someone.’” However, what separated these Israeli revolutionaries from their Palestinian counterparts was the question of the armed struggle, because the former objected to the killing of Israeli civilians, especially women and children settled in border towns; these confrontations were usually followed by Israeli raids and aerial bombardment of refugee camps in the north and south.
British soldiers in Gaza, World War IIn 1987, the first Intifada, mostly a series of grassroot protests against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza, broke out. It started in the Gaza strip, in a refugee camp, after four Palestinian workers were killed by an Israeli truck driver. During the Intifada, HAMAS, a new organization that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded. Its ideology was different than that of the secular Palestinian organizations. Hamas, whose acronym stands for “the Islamic resistance movement,” appropriated a term essential to the secular organizations, resistance, but redefined it in religious terms. Its goal was to establish a Palestinian Muslim state; its resistance to Zionism and to relinquishing any Palestinian territory to Israel was based on religious principles that a holy territory—Palestine—cannot be given up to non-Muslims. Its charter modeled its approach to Jews not only as settlers but also based that approach on Quranic verses and prophetic traditions about Jewish resistance to the Prophet Muhammad, and it also referred to Zionists as Nazis. While PLO intellectuals theorized about settler colonialism and armed struggle, then, Hamas turned to a religious language.
Gaza strip’s leadership changed once more in Israel’s peace deal with the PLO in 1993, known as the Oslo Agreement, when the PLO was given partial control of some of the strip’s territory. The PLO was now morphed into the Palestinian Authority (PA), an entity that was to run the West Bank and Gaza in coordination with, and under strict supervision of, Israel. I visited Gaza as part of peace groups twice in the 1990s, meeting with educators and community leaders, when some dared to be hopeful that they would be able to build a new city and a new life. What I remember most were the women who worked with children, suffering from ongoing trauma, having witnessed soldiers raiding their homes. Leaving Gaza, I saw elderly men, old enough to be my father, rushing through the Israeli crossing point, trying to catch a bus after a long day of work in Israel. Their hopes were short lived. The disingenuous attempt to create a two state solution led to the Second Intifada, a much more violent outburst against Israeli rule, which ended up in the collapse of the Oslo process and the deadly Israeli invasion of the West Bank. Hamas presented itself in this period as an alternative to an ineffective, subservient, and corrupt PA, and it orchestrated a series of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in coffeeshops, malls, and especially buses.
The Gaza strip seemingly moved in a positive direction when Israel evacuated all the Gush Katif settlements, leaving full control to the PA in September 2005. In the Legislative elections held in the next year in West Bank and Gaza (January 2006), Hamas won. This victory led to internal conflict within Palestine, at the end of which the PA remained mostly active in the West Bank, while the Gaza Strip was governed by Hamas. This phase started what is known as the Siege of Gaza. Israel argued that it could not have a ruthless terrorist organization at its borders, and, with Egypt, it prevented exit and entry of peoples and goods to Gaza from land, sea, and air, allowing movement through three crossings.
The Immediate Before
The years of siege created incredible devastation in the strip. After the end of the second intifada, Hamas stopped using suicide bombing as its main weapon and turned to using Qassam rockets turned to Israel, most prominently the Gaza Envelope, rendering the lives of its denizens very difficult. The truces between Israel and Hamas were broken again and again, leading to Israeli military operations (mostly from air), especially following the kidnapping of soldiers and settlers, which devastated the strip. One of the deadliest, in 2014, resulted in 2,310 dead Palestinians. Although isolated since 1948, Gaza was always part of a broader Palestinian community, and Hamas itself linked its attacks on soldiers and civilians to developments in the West Bank and especially to the fate of the al-Aqsa Mosque. In 2018–2019, Gaza orchestrated a series of demonstrations known as the Great March of Return, where they marched towards the border wall, demanding the end of the blockade.
On 29 December 2022, the thirty-seventh Israeli government was sworn in, the sixth government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. After a decade of unstable governments and ongoing elections, Netanyahu, who faced several corruption charges in the Israeli courts, was finally able to form a rightwing government that included, and essentially whitewashed, the most radical Jewish supremacists. Palestinians and Israelis do not agree on much these days, but there is a veritable consensus that this government played a role in the present disaster. The rightwing government strove to curb the powers of the supreme court. Many of the rightwing coalition members cited the supreme court’s support of the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlements as main rationales for distrusting the legal system. Key ministers, themselves West Bank settlers, such as the ministers of finance, were involved in attempts to stop the disengagement from Gaza. The mass demonstrations against the government’s legal “reforms” engulfed most of Israel. During the protests, however, hundreds of Jewish intellectuals, including many liberal Zionists, signed the “The Elephant in the Room” petition, calling attention to the direct link between Israel’s attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians, which many of the protesters ignored. The protests, however, reached the Israeli military, with soldiers, pilots, and officers on reserve declaring that they would not serve.
Netanyahu, moreover, was in support of the siege and the “weak Hamas” policy. He believed that allowing humanitarian aid and the entry of workers from Gaza to Israel, while maintaining the blockade, would be the best strategy to avoid negotiating the future of settlements or ever reaching a two-state solution. Hamas, he believed, was a terrorist organization which would receive no global recognition and would be fearful of Israeli attacks, and the weak PA in the West Bank would be unable to enforce any unity between itself and Gaza, let alone a unity with Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. What Israelis and Palestinians, for very different reasons, are asking themselves today, however, is how on earth Netanyahu, the self-proclaimed expert on security and terrorism, did not perceive that an organization that calls itself the Islamic resistance movement, which orchestrated some of the deadliest attacks on Israeli citizens in recent years, would yield to these conditions? Worse yet, Netanyahu was cautioned by several bodies, including Israeli intelligence officers, that Hamas realized the weakness of the state and would attack; days before 7 October, female soldiers watching the border warned their commanders of suspicious activities, but they received no response. Most died in the attacks.
Another front that Netanyahu lost was the Jewish American Diaspora, although the US is a stanch supporter of Israel in this war and many Jewish communities stand by its side. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu was able to win significant achievements, such as US recognition of Israel’s status in the Golan Heights and Jerusalem. Israel’s successful normalization efforts under the American umbrella, Netanyahu believed, would make the Palestinian Question irrelevant. Once Netanyahu acknowledged the results of the 2020 elections, however, Trump was quick to denounce him. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s support of Trump, while American Jews suffered from anti-Semitism and white nationalism under his administration and Netanyahu’s allegiance with Republican and evangelical groups, distanced Democratic and especially progressive Jews from Israel, while Palestinian activists created coalitions with progressives at the very same time.
The After?
Two weeks ago, I was happy, for a first time after weeks, to see a pause, a moment when the bombing temporarily stopped, when Hamas released hostages, and Israel freed Palestinian prisoners. I think this process should continue immediately. I don’t think that saving human lives is a form of defeatism; it is an ethical obligation. A significant part of my research deals with Jews in Arab states, and, as such, I’m in contact with both Israeli and Arab scholars. When I ask them how they are, the answer they mostly provide is khara, the Arabic and Hebrew word for “shit.” We are all depressed and anxious about the future. In October, my Israeli friends and colleagues spent their time between Shivas, memorials, and attending to the needs of internal Israeli refugees as government services collapsed. My West Bank friends and colleagues are petrified from settler violence, which increased dramatically in recent months. The Palestinian Israeli citizens are afraid to speak. The Gazans don’t know if their family members will survive. For many Arabs, this war triggers other painful memories of siege and aerial bombardment, from the American occupation of Iraq to the Syrian Civil War.
I am a descendent of Zionist settlers in mandatory Palestine. My paternal grandfather tried desperately to enter the US but was denied entry. He immigrated from Belorussia to Cuba, trying to make his way illegally to the US, and was arrested and deported. When offered the choice between death in Belorussia (the fate faced by most of his family members after Nazi occupation) or settlement, he chose to settle. I strongly believe that our tragic lot should not have come at the expense of the Palestinian indigenous population, and these horrible sixty six days will not shatter this belief. In the long run, the solution for this century-old conflict lies in the principles for democracy, equality, and justice. For all.
Orit Bashkin is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.
[1] You can read about Gaza’s history from the late Ottoman period to creation of the Gaza Strip, in Dotan Halevy’s dissertation Stripped: Ruination, Liminality, and the Making of the Gaza Strip (2021). The history of the city from the British mandate to Egyptian rule is covered in Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (2008).
Lila Abu-Lughod
12 December 2023
I would like to focus on some concerns I have as a feminist scholar with close personal connections to Palestinian feminist colleagues.[1] Their situations and their insights have helped me see aspects of the dynamics now at work in the devastating human nightmare unfolding in Gaza.
What is perhaps most distinctive about our current moment is that the seventy-five years of Palestinian dispossession and subjection to genocidal violence is happening in real time and on camera. There’s nothing new in Israeli aims to force Palestinians to accept their subjugation or to expel them. But the intensity and visibility are unprecedented. In the past, those supporting Israeli rule tried to organize their debates around disputes about facts—who started what, who did what, who refused what. But they cannot now dispute the scale of the deaths, injuries, deprivations, and displacements. So, they have to try to frame the issues in ways that distract us from what we are seeing. I’ll give just two examples that have shown this tactic starkly.
First, I want to discuss the reaction of the heads of the Hebrew University in Jeruslaem (HUJI) to a public letter signed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian colleague with whom I worked for years and collaborated recently on The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (2023). Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a chaired professor of law and social work at HUJI and a brilliant and accomplished scholar, one of only a handful of tenured Palestinian women in the top ranks of the Israeli academy.
On 26 October, she signed the public letter “Childhood Researchers and Students Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza.” She speaks as an expert and the author of, most recently, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (2019). She is also a therapist, social worker, feminist antiviolence activist, consummate ethnographer, and a sophisticated theorist of the effects of militarization and securitization on women and on children. The open letter that has by now garnered over two thousand signatures from experts on childhood is about the devastating effects on children of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, with arms provided by Western powers; the forced evacuation of over a million people by the Israeli Defense Forces; and the denial of food, water, and fuel by the Israeli state. The letter placed this in the framework of seventy-five years of settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and seventeen years in which Gaza has been little more than an open-air prison. The letter points out that children are losing their lives, their futures, and their ability to breathe.
At the time the letter was published, there were three thousand children killed. The number has more than doubled since late October—over seven thousand now, not to mention the wounded and missing. The letter describes research that has exposed the long-term effects of wartime experiences and research in Gaza that reveals the ongoing cumulative trauma and its effect on children’s well-being and emotional, mental, and physical health. It concludes that there is no moral justification whatsoever for continuing this brutality that will result in “the debilitation, wounding, and death of thousands more children.” As it has now. It insists, poignantly, that “Palestinian children have names, families, stories, and dreams, yet they are facing global and local brutalities that reduce them to anonymous numbers.” It concludes: “As academics and students of childhood, we say that no child should be subjected to violent death, injury, or starvation, no matter where they are from. We affirm: Palestinian children’s lives are precious.”
Three days after this call for a ceasefire and protection of the people in Gaza went public, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian received a joint letter from the president and the rector of her university. The letter’s final line states: “We are sorry and ashamed that the Hebrew University includes a faculty member like you. In light of your feelings, we believe that it is appropriate for you to consider leaving your position.”
I want to point out that they refused to accept the open letter’s framing of the bombardment and ground incursion as a genocidal war, calling it an “appalling claim regarding the extermination of a nation that Israel is allegedly committing”; and they denied as “absurd” the by now well-documented history of the colonization of Palestine and the effects of the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 and the ongoing settler colonial expansion and rule through law, prisons, and violent appropriation in the years that followed, including the present; and they were silent on the substance or content of the letter, which was, after all, about children and the traumatic and inhumane debilitation of children’s lives by war. They objected not because of the facts she had described about what was happening to the people of Gaza but because of the way the letter framed the ongoing events. They objected to the framing because they could not dispute the facts. It was intolerable for them to see the victimization of children and their mothers and uncles and aunts; so, they called instead for the resignation of a courageous, brilliant, and internationally recognized feminist member of their faculty.
They threatened not just Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s dignity and livelihood but her personal safety. She feared arrest. She hid in her apartment. She still does not know whether she will be teaching when HUJI reopens. This story matters to me not just because she is a colleague and friend but because one of the most important things she taught me while we worked together on our book on gender violence is that we must attend to how violence is framed. The final paragraph of our introduction offered some guidelines: “Untangling the multiple entwined and layered forms of violence that devastate the lives—physical, social, and psychic—of so many around the world is a first step to resisting the selectivity of the violences that are made visible, the willed blindness to ‘collateral’ harms, and the suspension of judgment about the complex political interests at stake in the worlds we inhabit” (p. 38). We urged the reframing of an important feminist agenda to widen the definitions of what constitutes violence and what violence matters. What happened to Shalhoub-Kevorkian is significant for the way it reveals the power of framing.
The second case that shows how framing matters in these dark times is about the weaponization of anti-Semitism by an American feminist social justice organization in response to current events. The organization is called Zioness, and it describes itself as a coalition of Jewish activists and allies who are unabashedly progressive and unapologetically Zionist. They claim to be fighting for the inclusion of Zionists in social justice spaces. Zioness, their website says, “commits to actively opposing all forms of oppression, including racism, classism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, white saviorism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and xenophobia.” Zionism is described not as a colonizing movement but as “the original progressive movement––a movement of liberation for a long-persecuted minority, and a veritable miracle in the global fight for justice.”
Again, however, as it has become impossible in these times to deny the deadly violence being unleashed, Zioness tries to reframe the issues. Zionesses entered the war of words recently, in this case with the word genocide. On their web page “Violating the Victims: Standing Up to the Degradation of the Word ‘Genocide,’” they start off in ways that are uncontroversial: “In an age of rampant misinformation and the mass proliferation of unverified content, many well-intentioned people are struggling to determine the appropriate use of certain language.” But then the document goes on to warn that “too many are reacting to the war between Israel and Hamas in a way that indicates they have internalized age-old antisemitic tropes.” The accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity, the document insists, are simply morphs of age-old tropes of antisemitism.
What is the trope? Zioness reads the language of genocide as blood libel. “Jews,” it explains, “have been libelously accused for thousands of years of being murderous, bloodthirsty people who enjoy violence and seek it both for pleasure and for ritualistic purposes. This is why imagery of blood in the context of Jews is ubiquitously understood as antisemitic and intended to instill fear of ‘the Jew,’ individually or collectively.” The political use of military violence and mass destruction by the Israeli state and army is reframed here: there is a rush from the present actions of a highly armed nation-state to persecution from medieval times. There is a confusion of political critique with horrible past forms of antisemitism, in that sense instrumentalizing or weaponizing blood libel to avoid criticism. This is precisely what the document deplores in charges of genocide—that it is being instrumentalized. The invocation of the gory trope of blood libel, however, accomplishes the task of making Jews the victims, even while Israel, to which the Zionesses are committed, is perpetrating shocking harm.
In this Alice in Wonderland world, anti-Zionism is called a conspiracy theory and a caricature. It too is simply a morph of anti-Semitism. Here we see the same category mistake that Nadia Abu El Haj pointed out so sharply in her open letter to the President of Barnard College: “Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism are directed against persons for who they are—or, perhaps more accurately, for who they are assumed to be. As speech acts, they constitute racist and hate speech. Anti-Zionism, by way of contrast, is directed at a state-building project and a political regime. To render anti-Zionism equivalent to the first three is to commit a fundamental category mistake.”
Anti-Semitism is about who one is; anti-Zionism is about a political project. The two should not be confused. But Zioness confuses them deliberately. It is sad to see a feminist organization that worked on progressive issues like reproductive rights and social justice capitulating to this kind of framing of reality. When they called on their members to go out and march, their cause was the return of the hostages. It was not for a ceasefire that would be good for everyone, including those being held. They did not advocate an end to violence, an end to militarism, an end to war. But militarism and war, and the ways they destroy lives and families everywhere, have long been core feminist issues, issues that Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian risked so much to highlight in the letter on children that she signed.
I have been truly moved over these last two months by the visible leadership of feminists, women, and the LGBTQ+ community in their calls for ceasefire and their charges of genocidal violence. At marches and rallies, in actions around the country, I see how they have learned to shout through bullhorns, determined to keep attention focused on what we are all seeing with our own eyes. They are naming the existential conditions under which Palestinians have been forced to live and die, whether under bombardment or scattered, expelled, and dispossessed. They insist that history did not begin on 7 October. My grandmother, my father, my uncles and aunts, and some of my oldest cousins were forced into exile. My friends and colleagues who stayed, whether in ’48 Palestine or internally displaced in the West Bank or Gaza, have been subjected to the harsh rule of the Zionist project of the Israeli security state. The students and activists have refused to be silenced, and I consider this the kind of feminism I want to stand with and the kind of feminism that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian models for us—a feminism that embraces humanity.
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She studies cultural forms from poetry to media and writes on the politics of representation, gender, nationalism, and women’s rights discourses. She is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics” (2020).
[1] The following short essay was originally written for the faculty panel “On Feminism and Palestine” organized at Columbia University on 4 December 2023.
This series includes entries by members of our scholarly community on the War in Gaza. CI has a long history of theorizing questions related to settlement, racism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and antisemitism in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere in the world. Over the years we have published articles by Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Lila Abu Lughod, Ann Laura Stoler and other scholars on these themes. Our commentators might not agree with one another, but we offer this platform as a call against the culture of academic silencing, bullying, and doxxing and as a way of informing ourselves, and others, about the conflict, its contexts, and its meanings.
Orit Baskin’s “The Before: History in Times of Khara”
Lila Abu-Lughod’s “A Feminism That Embraces Humanity“
Neta Stahl’s “The Torah of Longings to Our Jewishness“
Anton Shammas’s “A Letter and Poem to Critical Inquiry“
Oren Yiftachel’s “Boomerang: Hamas Insurgency and Deepening Apartheid“
Maha Nassar’s “‘We Are Returning’: An Anthem for Palestinian Liberation”
In anticipation of our forthcoming blog forum, we’d like to share our archive of essays, reflections, and responses to the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict.
FREE ACCESS: In order to access any of the below articles for free, please open the following link in a seperate browser tab: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/stoken/default+domain/CI_ISRAEL+%26+PALESTINE/full?redirectUri=/toc/ci/current
With the above link open, click through any of the links below for free access:
Archiving Praxis: For Palestine and Beyond by Ann Laura Stoler (2022)
Dispossession and Discontinuity: The Impact of the 1967 War on Palestinian Thought by Manar H. Makhoul (2022)
Temporalities of Israel/Palestine: Culture and Politics by Lital Levy (2021)
The Colonized Semites and the Infectious Disease: Theorizing and Narrativizing Anti-Semitism in the Levant, 1870–1914 by Orit Bashkin (2021)
Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics by Lila Abu-Lughod (2020)
About the Term Exile by Paul Mendes-Flohr (2020)
Editor’s note to Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier (2018)
Apartheid / Apartheid / [ ] by Saree Makdisi (2018) (Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier)
Israelis Studying the Occupation: An Introduction by Ariel Handel and and Ruthie Ginsburg (2018)
Fragments by Hagar Kotef (2018) (Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier)
For Occupation Studies, To Cultivate Hope by Hilla Dayan (2018) (Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier)
Writing about the Occupation by Amira Hass (2018) (Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier)
The Transformation around the Corner by Maya Rosenfeld (2018) (Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier)
1967 Bypassing 1948: A Critique of Critical Israeli Studies of Occupation by Amal Jamal (2018) (Israel/Palestine: A Forum on the Occupied and the Occupier)
In the Moment: Boycott Dossier curated by David Simpson (2017)
In the Moment: The End of Identity Liberalism at MLA: Saying “No” to Discrimination on the Basis of Nationalityby Gabriel Noah Brahm (2017)
In the Moment: Reports of Its Death Were Pre-mature: A Response to Gabriel Noah Brahm by David Palumbo-Liu (2017)
Torture into Affidavit, Dispossession into Poetry: On Translating Palestinian Pain by Anton Shammas (2017)
Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today by Talal Asad (2015)
Biometrics, or The Power of the Radical Center by Nitzan Lebovic (2015)
Settler Colonialism: Then and Now by Mahmood Mamdani (2015)
1948 and after in Palestine: Universal Themes? by Rashid Khalidi (2014)
Palestine as Symptom, Palestine as Hope: Revising Human Rights Discourse by Ariella Azoulay (2014)
Potential History: Thinking through Violence by Ariella Azoulay (2013)
Kafka and Arabs by Jens Hanssen (2012)
The Post-Zionist Condition by Hannan Hever (2012)
Rethinking the Nakba by Elias Khoury (2012)
Declaring the State of Israel: Declaring a State of War by Ariella Azoulay (2011)
Introduction to “Letter to Maurice Blanchot on the Creation of the State of Israel” by Sarah Hammerschlag (2010)
Letter to Maurice Blanchot on the Creation of the State of Israel by Emmanuel Lévinas (2010)
The Right to Refuse: Abject Theory and the Return of Palestinian Refugees by Dan Rabinowitz (2010)
The Architecture of Erasure by Saree Makdisi (2010)
Critical Response I. Response to Saree Makdisi’s “The Architecture of Erasure” by Frank Gehry (2010)
Critical Response II “The Architecture of Erasure”—Fantasy or Reality? by Raphael Israeli, Shmuel Berkovits, Jacques Neriah, and Marvin Hier (2010)
Critical Response III Response to Saree Makdisi’s “The Architecture of Erasure” by Jeremy Gilbert‐Rolfe (2010)
Critical Response IV The Intractability Lobby: Material Culture and the Interpretation of the Israel/Palestine Conflict by Daniel Bertrand Monk (2010)
Critical Response V Letter to the Editors by Saree Makdisi (2010)
Undefeated Despair by John Berger (2006)
Is There Anything We Might Call Dissent in Israel? (And, If There Is, Why Isn’t There?) by Daniel Dor (2006)
Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation by Saree Makdisi (2005)
“Ethnocracy” and Its Discontents: Minorities, Protests, and the Israeli Polity by Oren Yiftachel (2000)
Postnational Palestine/Israel? Globalization, Diaspora, Transnationalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Dan Rabinowitz (2000)
Invention, Memory, and Place by Edward W. Said (2000)
Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness by W. J. T. Mitchell (2000)
“Hidden Transcripts” Made Public: Israeli Arab Fiction and Its Reception by Rachel Feldhay Brenner (1999)
An Ideology of Difference by Edward W. Said (1985)
An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference I Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said by Robert J. Griffin (1989)
An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference II Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (1989)
An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference III [Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said]: Response by Edward W. Said (1989)
Peter Galison
Five decades ago, Critical Inquiry was in its formative moment. Its editors identified a kind of exemplary triad—author, topic, writing—that should characterize the journal:
We sought critics who value examination of the assumptions underlying particular discriminations about works of art. . . . [and] criticism that aspires to be a special kind of “learning”—not in any sense dispassionate or impersonal but something akin to that fusion of human commitment with objectivity that Michael Polanyi characterizes as “personal knowledge.” . . . The critics we wished to publish were those who formulate fruitful and exciting questions about works of art . . . no matter where their explorations lead them.
Though a brief note like this one is hardly adequate, it is intriguing to look back at what strikes me as a double break, the first marked by the establishment of the journal, productively crossing disciplines and opening the way for a broader conversation in the humanities—and the second by an expansion around 1980 that effectively redefined the journal.
The original incarnation of Critical Inquiry embraced a triad of related commitments. First, in those early days, the journal aimed at authors whom the editors saw, and presumably the authors themselves saw, as critics. Second, the targets of their criticism would be works of art. From the broader context of that first editorial note, the arts in question were principally literature and the visual arts. Certainly, there were disagreements (for example, about the status of the author in literature), but in their method we see a third commitment: a journal that deliberately did not ground itself in the historical. Connecting the three vertices, the critic—the literary, music, or arts critic—looks in from the outside to evaluate, frame, and arrive at a characterization of the works of art that would be as universal as possible.
Casting one’s eyes over the twenty most-cited articles from Critical Inquiry, a few features stand out. All were issued after 1978: six from 1980–89, seven from 1990–99; four from 2000–09; and three from 2010–19. Michel Foucault’s “The Subject and Power” (1982), the most cited piece in the history of the journal, pointed the way (alongside so much else in his work) for many Critical Inquiry articles that followed. Foucault began with a suite of negatives: his was not a theory, not a method, not a phenomenology of power, and not a philosophical foundation of power. Unsaid but evident, Foucault never considered himself a critic of literature or of the arts. Indeed, he wrote scathingly of the hermeneutics of suspicion that threw a dubious light on schemes to cast the real below the visible. Not for him a Marxist, Weberian, or Freudian reduction to a putatively more substantial basis. Foucault’s aim, as he saw it, was to track the ways that persons become subjects, zeroing in on the history of sexuality as an approach to the making of the self in its changing historical manifestations.
Bruno Latour asked “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” in 2004. Second in citation frequency only to Foucault’s article, Latour’s criticism of criticism echoes some of Foucault’s doubts about the hermeneutics of suspicion. Principally, though, Latour’s was not a plea for reaction—being un-critical—but rather an effort to bolster what he called a stubbornly realist attitude (after William James); less an attack, and more a commitment to the planetary climate that became for him, increasingly in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, “matters of concern.”
Numerous of these most-frequently cited articles in the post-1982 period took questions of power, imperialism, and postcolonialism as central topics. Text and representation are through-themes, but the setting of their analysis favors relations of power and history over eternal formal structures. Gayatri Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985); Arif Dirlik’s “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism from the Age of Capitalism” (1985); Edward Said’s “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” (1989); and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism?” (1991) embody this shift in the journal’s treatment of its subjects. Not only does the discipline of history need to confront anthropocentric changes, Dipesh Chakrabarty contends in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), but the accepted categories of that discipline, alongside modernity and the division between the natural and the human, must also come under a critical gaze.
A second cluster of articles focused on subjectification: the production (under conditions of power) of the subject and subjectivity, expressly focused on the self and sexuality. A central theme of Foucault’s later work, it is taken up in some of the journal’s most-often cited articles. Here one thinks of Joan Scott’s often-invoked essay transforming “The Evidence of Experience” from a bottom-line, self-evident, and transhistorical category into something that is produced and contingent, bringing gender to immediate attention as part of this history. Here too would be Lauren Berlant’s exploration of the produced subjectivity of everyday comportment, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)” (2007); this builds on her and Michael Warner’s article, “Sex in Public,” from the 1998 special issue on intimacy (Berlant’s introduction to that issue is itself also among the top twenty cited articles from Critical Inquiry), which aimed to bring the domestic, the therapeutic, the desires of the nonpublic into historical and specific analysis. Sander L. Gilman crossed race and female sexuality in his (1985) analysis of the late nineteenth century across art, science, and medicine, while Nicholas Mirzoef’s “The Right to Look” (2011) pits a subjective, willing self-disclosure to another (or others) against an authoritarian nonconsensual “visuality.” Perhaps the most dramatic form of subjectivity-interrogation comes with Jacques Derrida’s (2002) exploration, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” as it pressed on the not-quite or not-yet reciprocal gaze of human and animal.
A third theme structuring many of these oft-read articles is narrative. Paul Ricoeur eschewed both achronological models and physics-based concepts of chronology in “Narrative Time” (1980); instead, he aimed to use plot as the structuring frame that organizes events phenomenologically. Hayden White examined, in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), non-narrarative forms of historical accounting—the annals and the chronicle are his examples—not as failed narratives but rather as alternative productions of reality, throwing into (questionable) relief the notion that narrative has a unique hold on reality. A decade later, in “The Narrative Construction of Reality” (1991), Jerome Bruner built on his career-long argument around the conviction that we are not all, at root, in life, logicians or physicists of the spacetime manifold, nor Piagetians following a fixed script of cognitive competence. Instead, we compose reality out of an assortment of narratives in the form of “stories, excuses, myths, and reasons.” All three of these authors contended that the concept of narrative—variable and located, not universal—was constitutive of our grasp of reality, time, and history. Narrative was not an optional feature, but instead a contingent, historically- and culturally based frame of the world.
Such concerns about the structure of postcoloniality, subjectivity, and narrativity opens a branch of critical history. It means putting the neoliberal university under analysis, as Chris Lorenz does in 2012; it means challenging a too-easy slide toward a quasi-algorithmic neuro-explanation of affect, as Ruth Leys memorably put forward in 2011. Whatever the label, this complex of questions has clearly taken expansive steps outward from the narrow, if engaging, realm of literary or art criticism as construed in the 1970s. The Polanyi (and later, Thomas Kuhn) critique of a purely intellectual or algorithmic picture of knowledge did put more-than-rational factors into the description of scientific advance. But the view Polayni, for example, had of body and mind was always a kind of universal incorporation—not the place-, culture-, race-, historical- context-, or gender-specified accounts that began to characterize Critical Inquiry post-1980.
This opening up—across the three vertices of author, method, and topic—certainly made it possible, more personally, for me to consider contributing to Critical Inquiry. I wanted my article, “The Ontology of the Enemy” (1994; dead last, I should say, in the list of twenty articles I’ve been discussing), to be historical—on the World War II material history of Norbert Wiener and cybernetics. I also had in mind for it to be about a new kind of selfhood, the restricted, constrained, self associated with knowing a Manichean enemy by way of fragmentary measures—and then applying that stripped-down feedback concept to our own self-as-black box. That sense of materiality and more-than-materiality saturated many of the other pieces I wrote, including one on nuclear weapons- propelled national security secrecy, “Removing Knowledge” (2004) and one on the radical transformation of simultaneity by way of trains, maps, and special relativity, “Einstein’s Clocks: The Place of Time” (2000).
Taken together, I see Critical Inquiry, as it has developed over the last forty years as driving hard toward a critical assessment of what can be taken as self-evident or foundational concepts. The stance of the analysts who contribute to this exploration of what we take for granted has come a quite a long way from that of an art critic, the objects of inquiry expanded to include not just the arts but politics and the economic, corporeal, climatological, and scientific domains. It is an exciting, productive, and provocative journal, so here’s to continuing inquiry, expanding, in the decades to come.
Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and is a frequent contributor to the journal.
James Chandler
1. Specific Intellectuals
Twenty years ago, for its thirtieth anniversary issue, I compared the early history of Critical Inquiry to that of the humanities-centers movement. I noted that both had their take-off in the 1970s and that each involved a distinctive way addressing certain contemporary issues with disciplines in the humanities and human sciences. I invoked Michel Foucault’s mid-1977 discussion of how, over the course of his own lifetime, a major shift had taken place in the role of intellectuals in modern society, how the figure of the universal intellectual had been superseded by that of the specific intellectual. The universal intellectual emerged in the course of eighteenth-century political struggles in Europe. This figure was “the man of justice, the man of law”—Foucault’s language is relentlessly masculinist—who “counterposes to power, despotism, and the arrogance of wealth the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.” Such efforts were made in behalf of a concept of right that, Foucault says, “can and must be applied universally.” The specific intellectual is a figure is of much more recent emergence, roughly “since the Second World War.”[1]
Where the universal intellectual “derived from the jurist or notable,” the specific intellectual derives “from the savant or expert” (“TP,” p. 128). For specific intellectuals, what Foucault calls the mode of connection between theory and practice is worked out not by way of “the just-and-true-for-all” but rather within “specific sectors, at the pressure points where their own condition of life and work situate them” (“TP,” p. 126). Further, the universal intellectual “finds his fullest manifestation in the writer” (“TP,” p. 128). The specific individual may write, of course, but writing is a different sort of affair in this case. The specific intellectual is not “the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognise themselves” but the holder of specialized knowledge acquired in “specific sectors” of disciplinary practice (“TP,” p. 128). Foucault goes so far as to claim that “the whole relentless theorization of writing in the 1960s was doubtless only a swansong” (“TP,” p. 127). For him, the fact that this theorization took its bearing in specific disciplines, and “needed scientific credentials founded in linguistics, semiology, and psychoanalysis,” was only so much further proof “that the activity of the writer was no longer at the focus of things” (“TP,” p. 127).
Yet even as writing, taken to be “the sacralizing mark of the intellectual,” has disappeared,” Foucault explains, “it has become possible on this account to develop lateral connections across different forms of knowledge” (“TP,” p. 127). This recent shift carries decided implications for the university: It explains two developments in particular: not only why, “even as the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead, the university and the academic emerge, if not as principal elements, at least as ‘exchangers,’ privileged points of intersection,” but also why “universities and education” had already by the mid-1970s become “politically ultrasensitive.” In respect to what he calls the “crisis of the universities” in that moment, Foucault nonetheless advises that it “should not be interpreted as a loss of power, but on the contrary as a multiplication and reinforcement of their power-effects as centres of a polymorphous ensemble of intellectuals who…relate themselves to the academic system” (“TP,” p. 127).
My thought in 2004 was that Foucault’s account of the academic order of things in the mid-seventies captured something important about how, in these circumstances, newly forming humanities centers became sites of exchange and points of intersection. By way of parallel, I suggested that the founding of Critical Inquiry at Chicago in that period might also be understood to answer to the situation Foucault sketches. CI was conceived neither as a public journal in which writers engage readerships in the fashion of universal intellectuals—not, say, as a “review of books”—nor, pointedly, as a journal that took its cue from the “relentless theorization of writing” on the Continent in the previous decades. Indeed, CI did not at the outset appear to be terribly invested in Continental theory at all, though this changed over the years. It was founded as a scholarly journal, but it did not restrict itself to any of the relevant scholarly disciplines that it relied on. In introducing the first issue, founding editor Sheldon Sacks explicitly eschewed terms like “interdisciplinary” and “comparative” but still made it abundantly clear how the mission of CI embraced multiple disciplinary perspectives even as it maintained its status as an academic rather than a public enterprise: “The literary critic who has no interest in E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, the music critic who found Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure irrelevant, the art critic who would simply be bored by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism were not our potential readers, nor were meant to be.” The journal has from the start been pitched to a readership of “savants,” in Foucault’s terms, expert in at least one discipline but open to reading in others.
It is even truer now than it was in 2004 that CI has made good on its mission to be a venue of exchange and intersection among the disciplines, even as it has extended the number and scope of the disciplines it has engaged. Founded largely in an English department, led largely by editors with that affiliation, it has nonetheless steadily broadened its editorial staff into a host of other fields, and its published offerings have broadened accordingly. In this broadening, moreover, it has continued to reestablish the ever-altering balance between a respect for what disciplines have to offer and an effort to develop modes of presentation that can move across them. In its pursuit of this mission, the journal has clearly aspired to make itself a desirable place—the desirable place—for individual scholars to publish work across disciplines in a variety of formats: articles, essays, occasional pieces, and, more recently, book reviews and blog posts. But a second dimension of CI’s developing practice over the decades brings it perhaps closer to the humanities-center movement, a succession of more ambitious initiatives that tend to be project-based, collaborative, and reflective about our ongoing disciplinary arrangements.
Tom Mitchell organized an early cluster of these cross-disciplinary conferences and special issues: On Narrative and The Politics of Interpretation are two that come to mind. But later years saw many others, among them Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s timely special issue on “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda’s volume on Comics & Media, and a series of major projects by the late Lauren Berlant, including Intimacy, On the Case, and, with Sianne Ngai, Comedy Has Issues. An especially wide range of disciplinary perspectives were mobilized for Around 1948 (a special issue address to the post-War situation targeted by Foucault), which began its life as a conference at the Franke Institute for the Humanities organized by Deborah Nelson, Lisa Wedeen, and James Sparrow. For the reasons I have sketched, The Franke Institute and Critical Inquiry have made for excellent mutual collaboration. I myself have been involved in a trilogy of such projects at CI, all connected to major conferences at Chicago—Questions of Evidence (with Arnold Davidson and Harry Harootunian), Arts of Transmission (with Davidson and Adrian Johns), and The Fate of Disciplines (with Davidson). The second and third of these emerged from conferences organized through the Franke Institute. The third, which doubled as annual international conference of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes), was in fact designed to engage the agenda laid out at the end of my thirtieth-anniversary reflections on “critical disciplinarity,” addressing head-on the kinds of issues Foucault raised in his commentary on universal and specific intellectuals. I’m sure I speak for many colleagues involved in these many projects and special publications over fifty years, that CI was been the best of possible venues for them and its editors the best of partners.
2. Oppenheimer
Back in 1977, when Foucault explained the eclipse of the universal intellectual by the specific intellectual, he had names in view. The prototype of the universal intellectual turns out to be Voltaire. (Sartre, according to Foucault, was the last of them.) As for the specific intellectual, Foucault pointed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a name now very much back in circulation after the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic this summer. To be more precise, however, Oppenheimer figures in Foucault’s account as a pivotal figure, one who could become “the point of transition” between universal and specific intellectuals because of two important circumstances (“TP,” p. 127). On the one hand, Oppenheimer was positioned make his public intervention on the issue of nuclear-weapons proliferation after the war “because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions” (“TP,” p. 128). On the other, “since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal” (“TP,” p. 128). The upshot, for Foucault, is a development he takes to be historically unprecedented for “Western intellectuals”: “For the first time the intellectual was hounded by political powers, no longer on account of a general discourse which he conducted, but because of the knowledge at his disposal” (“TP,” p. 128). In Nolan’s Oppenheimer, this hounding, with Lewis Strauss (played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.) as its driver, becomes the retrospective frame of reference for the narration of remarkable career.
Nolan’s film is not, of course, the first popular account of that career. It was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), and that book itself frequently cites testimony from an earlier film treatment, Jon Else’s 1982 competent documentary, The Day after Trinity. Interestingly, all three of these works emphasize two important aspects of Oppenheimer’s career not discussed by Foucault. One is that Oppenheimer was himself very much a creature of the modern university system before being recruited to the Manhattan Project. By the early 1930s, not yet thirty himself, he had already had academic affiliations with Harvard, Cambridge, Gottingen, Leiden, Caltech, Berkeley, and The Swiss Federal Institution of Technology in Zurich. His teaching, especially at Berkeley, shaped a small generation of academic physicists in a relatively short time.
The second emphasis present in all these works, but overlooked by Foucault, is that Oppenheimer was a polymath of such prodigious capacity that all sorts of disciplinary paths lay open to him in his precocious early years. He commanded five languages beyond English and read deeply in French, German, and Sanskrit. He had serious investments in poetry. Oppenheimer’s scholarly commitments beyond physics are certainly suggested in Nolan’s film, but they are even more fully elaborated in the Bird-Sherwin biography, which goes so far as to speculate that Oppenheimer recovered from a serious psychological crisis in 1926 by reading Proust’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdus in the original French while on vacation in Corsica. Else’s documentary, for its part, registers Oppenheimer’s prodigious intellectual versatility not least in extensive commentary by his intimate friend Francis Fergusson, himself a distinguished literary critic (though no relation, of course, to the distinguished literary critic who just stepped down as CI’s editor). Another literary colleague and friend of Oppenheimer, Berkeley French scholar Haakon Chevalier, who figures prominently in Nolan’s film, attests in Else’s documentary that Oppenheimer read all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital in German on a train trip from California to New York City.
The best short piece I’ve read about Oppenheimer is Freeman Dyson’s chapter in The Scientist as Rebel (2006), “Oppenheimer as Scientist, Administrator, and Poet.” In science, Dyson thinks Oppenheimer’s most important work was a 1938 article detailing the formation of black holes, a topic in which Oppenheimer lost interest, Dyson speculates, because the Blitzkrieg and the invitation to lead the Manhattan Project came so quickly on its heels. In poetry, Dyson shows Oppenheimer to be a talented parodist of T. S. Eliot, and in “Crossing,” his 1928 publication in the Harvard Review, a creditable craftsman of neoromantic verses in his own right. In administration, perhaps most surprisingly, Dyson emphasizes Oppenheimer’s competencies less by pointing to the Manhattan Project than by noting his command of academic matters far afield of physics–this by way an anecdote Dyson had been told by a colleague at Princeton’s Institute for Advance Study to whom Oppenheimer offered advice about a raft of British applications submitted in 1948:
Ummm . . . indigenous American music—Roy Harris is the person for him. . . . Roy was at Stanford last year but he’s just moved to the Peabody Teachers College of Nashville. . . . Symbolic logic, that’s Harvard, Princeton, Chicago or Berkeley. Ha! your field, 18th-century English Lit. Yale is an obvious choice [Oppenheimer had already commented on “Tinker and Pottle” as authorities in that field at Yale], but don’t rule out Bate at Harvard. He’s a youngster but a person to be reckoned with.[2]
Dyson’s informant reports that he spent an hour like this listening to Oppenheimer commenting on some sixty applications across disciplines. Dyson also tells of a dinner party where Oppenheimer began reading metaphysical poetry to a prominent strategist of the Cold War, announcing that “we’ve got to see that George Kennan reads George Herbert.”[3]
In light of Foucault’s account of the twentieth-century university as a site of exchange and intersection among disciplines, it is strange that he does nothing to link Oppenheimer’s remarkable breadth of knowledge to the pivotal role he plays in the story of modern intellectuals—he does not even comment on Oppenheimer’s wide range of disciplinary pursuits. Nor does he speculate, as do the authors of American Prometheus, how such pursuits might have positioned Oppenheimer to think differently about physics and its place in the world—differently from, say, a notoriously specialized mind like that of a distinguished contemporary like British physicist Paul Dirac. To this point, Bird and Merwin relate an exchange between the two scientists in Gottingen in which Dirac, after being read Dante aloud in Italian by Oppenheimer, is supposed to have responded: “Why do you waste time on such trash?”[4]
Might we be in a better position to consider such questions now than Foucault was a half-century ago? Needless to say, the Science-Humanities debate has been with us at least since modern science began to assume its still recognizable disciplinary identity around 1800—a development about which Foucault himself wrote extensively. The famous novel Mary Shelley subtitled The Modern Prometheus was very much an early contribution to this debate. Yet these past fifty have witnessed major new developments in how this debate is framed. Consider the emergence of “science studies,” a field whose relation to the history of science was the subject of a brilliant Shakespearean allegory by Lorraine Daston in The Fate of Disciplines. Such developments have been accompanied by increasingly ambitious crossings from the humanities to the more distant natural science disciplines. These crossings have been undertaken not least, more and more, in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” is just one of its recent influential publications in this register. Some of the debates about Oppenheimer provoked by Nolan’s film are likely to turn on questions about if and how the scientist’s serious engagement with the humanities mattered to the shape of his major work and fateful decisions he took, early and late in his life. I hope that Critical Inquiry will be at the forefront of venues that host them.
A final point I wish to make about Foucault’s commentary on Oppenheimer in relation to Nolan’s film concerns the question of the medium. Foucault might initially seem to have a laser-like focus on this question, insisting, as he does, that “writing” will no longer serve the modern intellectual as it had done since the eighteenth-century. Yet having made this declaration, he does not consider alternatives to writing as a medium but points instead to specific intellectuals’ new mode of connecting theory and practice. Indeed, Foucault shows no interest in the concept of the medium as such, though by the 1970s it was already enjoying serious conceptual elaboration. Different questions might occur to us today, after the emergence of media studies and new genres of screen practice such as the video essay. Should Else’s documentary about Oppenheimer, released just five years after Foucault’s comments, be taken as an “intellectual” intervention in debates about nuclear weaponry? Should Nolan’s film? What would be the criteria for such judgments?
These questions could be posed about Nolan’s Oppenheimer in a little symposium that might include physicists, film scholars, political scientists, and historians. Other questions would surely follow. What should we make of the film’s representation of both the research benefits and the security risks implicit in open scientific exchange (as opposed to what in the film is called “compartmentalization”? How accurate is the film’s representation of quantum physics? How much does that question matter? Should we take Nolan’s particularly frantic scrambling of narrative sequences, or his mismatching of soundtrack and image track (the repeated thunder in the soundtrack long before the post-Trinity celebration at Los Alamos in which we actually see stomping feet that produce it) as an effort to mimic the dislocations of quantum mechanics? Should such an effect be understood to extend the film’s implicit homology between quantum physics and modernist works by Picasso, Stravinsky, and T. S. Eliot it shows Oppenheimer engaging? Does the melodramatic villainy of Downey’s Strauss, shown ruthlessly sacrificing Oppenheimer’s reputation to serve his own personal ambition, function as Nolan’s tactical compensation for the ethical quandaries attendant on the Manhattan Project and its aftermath? Why does Nolan not emphasize, as Else’s documentary does, the instrumentalist momentum that led Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos to carry on to its horrendous conclusion, months after V-E Day, a project launched to defeat Nazi Germany? How does the film represent the dissenting “Chicago Petition” in this debate about the use of the bomb? Is that representation accurate? Why does the film dwell on various scientists’ differing approaches to the spectacle of the Trinity test? How does that matter to the film’s own many spectacular effects? And what about the representation of “writing” in the film, including the Sanskrit text that plays a role in a curious early sex scene between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh)?
In my little fantasy of this collaborative project, then, it would begin as a conference organized at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, with its proceedings published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. For all I know, however, Bill Brown, Heather Keenleyside, and Richard Neer already have such a project in the works. No, on second thought, I’m sure they are dreaming up a far more interesting collaboration between Critical Inquiry and The Franke Institute, and I wish them all the best with it.
James Chandler is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and interim chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (2022). He serves on the advisory board of CI, has published many essays and reviews in its pages, and has edited several of the journal’s special issues.
[1] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 126, 127; hereafter abbreviated “TP.”
[2] Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York, 2006), p. 233.
[3] Ibid., p. 233.
[4] Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 62.
Harry Harootunian
I served on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for about ten of the fifty years now being commemorated. For me the time spent represented an ongoing education, a virtual work in progress, in disciplines, idea, and cultural and literary theories that have since become part of my own work. The experience at CI distilled for me what I believe was the distinctive critical essence of the University Chicago, which I will always cherish. As the lone historian and Asianist among specialists in literature, the experience of reading articles in fields beyond my specialty, which often seemed exotic, and discussing them brought me be back to the regions that formed my earlier education. Above all else, I learned more than I can say or repay, but principally how the appeal to specialization began to look like an enclosed space with no exit to the wider world.
In my time at CI I had the opportunity to begin writing some pieces that were unrelated to the world of my research, occasioned by the growing interest in colonial discourse and its consequences initiated by Edward Said. I would like to say here that in these articles it eventually occurred to me that I hadn’t gone far enough, that I was blindsided, perhaps, by theory itself. Even though the promise of theory is to shed new light on familiar things, sometimes the light is dimmed and we’re thrown into making our way in the dark. A recent article in the Washington Post reminded me of this defect, as well as the way some things never change. The article reported the plight of the Armenian minority in Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic enclave of indigenous Armenians surrounded by a sizeable Azerbaijani military, employed to cut off the community from road contact with Armenia. The dire situation is the result of a conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the most recent in several wars after the fall of the Soviet Union. An oil rich Azerbaijan won in this round of the struggle, armed with the most advanced weapons bought from Turkiye and Israel, which should have known better. Israelis could not have been ignorant of where the weapons would be used; Turkiye was already practiced in the genocidal vocation from their near attempt to exterminate the entire population of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915-16, which makes both states complicit in Azerbaijani ‘s attempt to starve the citizens of the enclave by blockading access to food and other necessities. Extermination by starvation qualifies as genocidal intent.
Here we have an illustration of how colonialism works to eliminate indigenous populations. What has not been recognized in this familiar story is how colonizing domination invariably leads to unspeakable oppression, usually of a minority, whether Armenians, Irish, Native Americans, Ainu, or other, now identified as indigenous, through diminishing their means of subsistence, expropriation of land, theft, dispossession, and degradation ending in mass murder. It does not matter if the colonizer is a precapitalist conquest dynasty or settlers, it comes down to the same terrible conclusion, which Marx described as the “slaughter of the innocents” augmented by the agency of “so-called primitive accumulation.” This knotting of colonialism combined with expropriation and dispossession disclosed the kinship among the dominated indigenous peoples who have been forced to undergo their systematic elimination. The great French poet Aimé Césaire had Africa in mind when he accused Europeans of accumulating the “highest heap of Corpses in history.” But it needs to be said that the misrecognition of theory has inadvertently played a damaging role in reshaping this narrative. While the momentary theorization of post-coloniality contributed to sensitizing us to the ill-effects of colonial domination, it also worked to displace the denialism associated with colonization as the scene of genocidal excess by avoiding it. Instead of confronting the destructive outcome of political oppression and massive material expropriation of the everyday lives of indigenous minorities, it diverted attention to the cultural and psychological encounter, which, in some cases, inspired historians to extol empires for their ethnic multi-diversity. This approach turned to a preoccupation with subjectivity, worrying whether the subaltern could speak (when did they cease to speak?) rather than live, through the promotion of categories like negotiation and the coming together of shared subjectivities, fantasies conjured in the afterlife disappointments of new nations accompanied by failure to see colonization’s aptitude for exploitation, dispossession, and genocide, which resulted in concealing its shared resemblance to the horrors of primitive accumulation. Here, in the twenty-first century, we continue to face the figure of genocidal extermination and its enabling desire, living the present as if it was still the unfinished past. The writer Jenny Erpenbeck rightly asked “is memory an instrument of power” and answered “perhaps,” then added: “How far do you have to step back in order to see the entire historic tapestry extending far beyond your own lifetime? How much do you have to know in order to understand what it really is that’s flourishing in your own blind spot?”
Harry Harootunian is the Max Palevsky Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He was a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and is now on the editorial board.
Lorraine Daston
Why is there no epistemology of the humanities that is even remotely comparable to the epistemology of the sciences? Why is it that humanists can gesture to only a handful of seminal works by philosophers (Wilhelm Dilthey on understanding in the humanities versus explanation in the sciences; Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics; R. G. Collingwood on history), whereas great swathes of philosophy are devoted to the epistemology of the sciences? Even leaving the philosophers aside, the sciences have an impressive tradition of practitioners philosophizing about their own practices – practices such as controlling experiments, making measurements, distinguishing correlation from causation, estimating personal equations, sampling populations, and constructing mathematical models. It is not as if the humanities lack for their own refined ways of knowing, from source criticism in philology to close reading in literary studies, not to mention critical commentary in philosophy and anachronism-spotting in history. Yet despite the remarkable sophistication of these tools, each with its own history and all honed by decades if not centuries of disciplinary scrutiny, there is very little systematic reflection among humanists (much less among my own tribe of historians and philosophers of science) about how we know what we know. Why not?
This question has been nagging at the fringes of consciousness for some time now, but it shoved its way to the center of my attention twice in the past year. The first time was an international commission (yet another) on the state of the humanities. There was a great deal of furrowed-brow discussion over waning public support, declining student enrollments, philistine university administrators, downright hostile politicians, the imperialism of STEM disciplines, and a wretched job market, all genuinely concerning topics. But there was little appetite for discussion about why the humanities found themselves in this predicament, about why they were evidently losing their status as a form of learned inquiry that made contributions to knowledge. Why, after centuries of defining what knowledge was worth having and modelling how to go about getting it, were the humanities perceived even within the university as being no longer about knowledge at all? Why were the disciplines that invented the research ethos (and the research seminar) now viewed as ever more peripheral to the pursuit of knowledge?
The second time was the fiftieth anniversary of this journal and a request from the editors to write a short piece for the occasion. This gave me the very welcome excuse to spend an agreeable day perusing the online archive of Critical Inquiry, reading articles from this or that year (and also essays and translations and even testimonies, manifestos, and reminiscences). This cosmopolitanism of genre mirrored CI’s cosmopolitanism with respect to authors and topics, well beyond the anglophone province of the Republic of Letters. My reading was entirely unsystematic; I followed only fancy. Although some pieces had staled with time, a surprising number of them still richly repaid the reading: Frank Kermode on “Novels, Recognition and Deception” (1974), Nancy Fraser on “Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas” (1992), Peter Galison’s “Ontology of the Enemy” (1994), Carlo Ginzburg’s “Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors” (2004), Jean-Pierre Vernant’s “Semblances of Pandora: Imitation and Identity” (2011), Marjorie Garber’s “Over the Influence,” (2016), and many more.
Although the departure point for most articles was a detailed examination of something – a work of art or literature, a historical episode, a myth, a public event, a philosophical idea – none of them were only that. By no means all of them were high-theory (indeed, those that were had aged worst), but all were high-concept: intensely alert to the treacherous depths beneath the surface of apparently innocuous assumptions; seismometer-sensitive to the faint vibrations of words and images; indefatigable in making the implicit explicit and the taken-for-granted suddenly surprising, even shocking. On display were not only the raw materials for an epistemology of the humanities but also the analytical acuity needed to create one worthy of the name. Yet once again, there seemed to be no impetus to do so.
Will this change, should it change? In the past decade a new field called the history of the humanities has been assembled out of pieces previously belonging to the history of learning, disciplinary histories, the history of science, and intellectual history. The new specialty tends to be more widely cultivated in languages that had never narrowed their vernacular cognates of the Latin scientia to refer only to the natural sciences, such as those of Dutch and German. So far, its practitioners have not been particularly interested in questions of epistemology. But just as the history of science has long served as a stimulus and sparring partner to the philosophy of science, perhaps the history of the humanities will eventually engender a philosophical counterpart. Even if it did, though, the question would remain: What would be the point? Just as many scientists query the need for an epistemology of science, many humanists may find an epistemology of the humanities superfluous: we know how to do what we do, and we’ll just get on with it, thank you very much.
I’m not so sure we really know how we know what we know. And even if we did, a great number of intelligent, well-educated people, our ideal readers and potential students, even our colleagues in other departments, wonder why what we teach and write counts as knowledge. The first step in justifying our ways of knowing to these doubters would be to justify them to ourselves.
Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is also in the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Thomas Pavel
The Critical Inquiry essay that helped me most was Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology (2011), coauthored by our former colleague David Nirenberg, intellectual historian, and his father, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, mathematician and writer.
David Nirenberg and Ricardo L. NirenbergThe topic of this essay was French philosopher Alain Badiou’s use of interdisciplinary arguments to reach unexpected, stunning conclusions. Badiou followed the example of thinkers who, inspired by structural linguistics, asserted in the late sixties that since the human condition had ceased to be the main object of philosophy, thinkers should henceforth examine language and its networks of relevant differences. In a stronger, more radical move, in the late eighties Badiou aimed at revolutionizing ontology, the philosophical reflection on being, by identifying it with mathematics.
A simple, elementary, insight tells us that such an identification is probably mistaken. Yes, mathematics does assist natural and social sciences find simple, elegant expressions of their discoveries, provided that empirical observations confirm the predictions reached with its help. Perhaps it could also assist some branches of philosophy formulate their findings in a more rigorous way. But in the case of Badiou’s speculations, prudent insights are not decisive, given that his main theses are remarkably audacious. He states, for instance, that “Situations are nothing more, in their being, than pure multiplicity.” Using the expression “pure multiplicity,” Badiou suggests that ontological reflection should pay no attention to the differences between the beings that populate the world and to the specificity of their mutual interactions. For him, there are no modes of being. Since, moreover, Badiou asserts that this pure multiplicity is the object of set theory, he concludes, after a few intermediary steps, that “insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself.”
A wonderful feature of the Nirenberg paper is the generosity of their approach. Far from just exclaiming “nonsense!,” they patiently, politely, go through Badiou’s claims, explain to readers less familiar with set theory the notions and the operations he uses, and in a kind, respectful tone, indicate their inadequacy. We all are, the paper suggests, inhabitants of the Republic of Letters, a community in which intellectual errors do happen. Such errors should be calmly discussed with the help of clear, detailed arguments, rather than subjected to condemnation, exclusion, interdiction.
Thank you, Nirenberg father and son, for this important lesson.
Thomas Pavel is the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and Fundamentals at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Robert Pippin
The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry happens to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of my life as an academic philosopher in the United States. We both began in 1974, and I recall beginning to read Critical Inquiry in the UCSD library a couple of years later. It was not then, and it still is not, a journal that anglophone philosophers regularly consult, but I had been an English major in college, had made the decision to switch to philosophy relatively late, and had gone to a graduate program where I could study Greek, German, and French philosophy both historically and in their present manifestations.
I had become as familiar with Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Elder Olsen as I had started to understand Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger and their contemporary interpreters. Of course, the articles in CI largely concerned literary criticism, quickly expanded to critical thinking itself and then a “theory” of such critical thinking. But I fit uneasily into the anglophone world of analytic philosophy (which I have come to think of as more a sociological category than a philosophical one), and had come to think of philosophy as an activity not confined to academic departments of specialists, but as a mode of reflective thought that was an unavoidable aspect of any reflection about meaning and value, or any inquiry that aimed at a kind of truth not available empirically. There were of course early articles in CI by distinguished American philosophers – Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Max Black – but as literary theory became more self-consciously philosophical and began to occupy itself with major Continental thinkers, the “official” representatives of philosophy tended to be Europeans, Foucault, Derrida, Bruno Latour and so forth. This was certainly a reflection of the increasingly specialized and unfortunately provincial nature of the organization of knowledge in modern universities. This “silo” like organization has been especially harmful for professional philosophy as, in its isolation, it seems to me ever more uncertain about what it is and why it is important. This has sometimes produced an unhelpful arrogance. (Some philosophers believe that all other work in the humanities is a bad version of it, rather than a good version of what it is.) But CI seemed to me – remarkably – to avoid settling into any ideological niche within all these hardening divisions. That feature of the journal proved invaluable to me when I began to argue that philosophy was impoverished if philosophers believed, as they increasingly did, that philosophy was only properly available in engagements with other philosophers. Inspired by philosophers like Cavell and George Wilson, art historians like Michael Fried, and film theorists like Victor Perkins, I wanted to make the case that art, novels and films were themselves modes of philosophical thought, not merely illustrative or provocative for philosophy. Beginning in 2002, I began having extremely helpful conversations with the editors of CI about such a possibility and published an article about abstract art (from the point of view of Hegel), in 2005 “Authenticity in Painting” about Michael Fried’s art history project, and starting in 2009 several articles on film and philosophy. I can’t imagine now being able to embark on such projects without CI. So, my somewhat personal “Happy Birthday” to the journal is a simple expression of deep gratitude.
Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is on the editorial broad of Critical Inquiry.
Stanley Fish
In this profession, you are ahead of the game if you have an idea. if you have an idea and a half, you are in rarefied territory; and if you have two ideas, you are Wittgenstein. I am not Wittgenstein; I have had only one idea. It has taken various forms, but basically, the idea is that the binary distinctions within which we ordinarily reason (objective/subjective, true/false, literal/figurative, core/periphery, and the like) do not as we often think mark an opposition between something given and available directly—the bare facts, the minimal linguistic meaning of a text, the bottom line—and something mediated, secondary, derivative, added, suspect. Rather, in each opposition both poles emerge within the medium (mediation) of assumptions, presuppositions, settled practices, long-established institutions, authoritative professions, unchallenged (but not unchallengeable) definitions, culturally privileged histories, deeply in-place goals and values—what Adorno terms the “realm of prevailing purposes.” “Prevailing” means prevailing now, not for all time. The overarching and totalizing narrative within which we are scripted characters can and does change and the routes of possible change are included in its landscape, but for so long as the narrative and its sub-plots are relatively stable, locally or generally, judgments of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, better and worse, to the point and beside the point, real and illusory can confidently be made and supported by reasons. It is just that those reasons are reasons—have the force of reasons—by virtue of the prevailing realm within which they are intelligible and even obvious. That is, they are not just reasons, reasons that would be honored as such no matter what purposes or goals or norms are in place. They therefore have a relative status and force—relative to the status and force reasons would have if they were independent of any culturally delimited normative regime—but in the absence to us (not, presumably to God) of any such free-standing reasons, they are what we have and they are sufficient; not wholly sufficient as they would be if they could resolve matters once and for all, but sufficient to the extent that they enable us to make sense of things, if only for a while. You can always say of something that it is true or false, correct or incorrect, on target or off the map, certainly the case or certainly not the case and you can always support your judgement. What you can’t say when your judgment is challenged that it holds true in all conceivable (and presently inconceivable) alternative worlds. But we don’t live in alternative worlds. We live in this one; or, rather, in the world given to us by whatever realm of purposes currently presides over our thoughts and actions; and in that world we can at once and without contradiction affirm the antifoundationalist insight that nothing we see, say or do is tethered to a bottom-line reality and still perform in normative ways that foundationalists claim are available only if we believe as they do.
So that, in a brief, waiting-to-be-filled-in form is the idea. I am not today going to defend it or elaborate it or respond to the objections that have been brought against it or acknowledge the predecessors and contemporaries from whom I have borrowed. I want, rather, to note as a matter of personal and professional history, the centrality of Critical Inquiry to its emergence and development. Critical Inquiry was and is the perfect venue for my ambitions by virtue of its own ambition—to present arguments that extend beyond analyses of particular texts and address themselves to the largest and most general questions one might ask: What is literature? What is a text? What, if anything, constrains interpretation? In the ordinary course of things, these and related questions have already been answered or, to be more precise, answers to them have been presupposed, and the business of literary description, analysis, and evaluation proceeds without undue theoretical anxiety. But theoretical anxiety and theoretical controversy are what the editors of Critical Inquiry wanted to provoke from the beginning. Every essay published was an invitation to respond and the invitations were almost always accepted with the result that the traditional stand- alone essay was replaced by dialogue and by dialogue that often expanded to include more and more participants. In effect a Critical Inquiry author always entered the fray in medias res, as I did in my initial appearance in the journal’s inaugural year. The piece was titled “Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader,” and, as footnote 1 explains, I was writing in response to Rader’s response, made in Critical Inquiry and in a volume of the English Institute papers, to my first theoretical effort, “Literature in the Reader,” published in New Literary History, the other new “big idea” journal. At the time, Rader was my colleague at Berkeley, someone I played softball with, someone with whom I had a good, if not close, relationship. And yet we went at it as if we had never met and inhabited completely different worlds. We had been transported from a shared local geography to the abstract, realm of scholarship and criticism where we jousted on invisible fields with words.
Two years later I turned on the position for which I fought so strenuously in my debate with Rader and announced my about face in, where else, Critical Inquiry. In “Interpreting the Variorum,” I abandoned the categories of the text and the reader and introduced the concept of “interpretive community” (corresponding more or less to Adorno’s prevailing realm of purposes, Kuhn’s paradigm, Bourdieu’s habitus, Polanyi’s tacit knowledge, MacIntyre’s well developed practice, Wittgenstein’s life world), a solvent in which texts and readers were no longer independent entities with independent shapes but community entities whose shapes were extensions of the communities procedures, protocols, and values. About this time I was moving away from literary studies and towards the law, and, as if on cue, Critical Inquiry invited me to participate in a multi-day conference featuring everyone I had ever heard of where I responded to a paper written by Ronald Dworkin, legal theory’s leading light. That first entry in the Dworkin/Fish exchange soon appeared in Critical Inquiry where readers could enjoy the spectacle (or was it a farce?) of a legal theorist doing literary criticism and a literary critic replying by doing legal theory. Four more exchanges spanning ten years followed and when it was all over I had a new career, courtesy of Critical Inquiry. (A retrospective on the Fish/ Dworkin debate is currently in press.)
With sixteen or so appearances, I took to referring to Critical Inquiry as “my publisher,” although in the past two decades my submissions have slowed. (The most recent substantive essay is “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter.”) Nevertheless I will always feel that the journal and I have flourished together and given the vigor and excitement its pages still breathe, I have hopes.
Stanley Fish is the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Catherine Malabou Tom Mitchell once gave me a pink woolen cap as a present. It is a knitted cap, with large stitches. Maybe it’s crocheted. Its pink is comparable to the chewing gum in France called Malabar (note the phonic … Continue reading →
Haun Saussy I owe a lot of my education to the 1980s Critical Inquiry. Then as now, I was in hot pursuit of theoretical models that might collide in unexpected ways with literary texts and common sense, and thus force … Continue reading →
The fiftieth anniversary of Critical Inquiry marks more than the ongoing liveliness and longevity of one journal. It marks the ongoing importance of humanities journals tout court and the vitality of a field that persistently asks new questions and expands the borders of knowledge. As we begin our next fifty years, we remain committed to that vitality—to new authors, new research, and new conceptual paradigms that open new fields of inquiry.
Looking back at what the journal has accomplished and looking forward with undiminished aspiration, we want to express our gratitude to the University of Chicago Press and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago for their unflagging support and to our authors (of articles, reviews, responses, and blog posts) and our readers, who so clearly justify the endeavor. In particular we’d like to celebrate the members of our coeditorial board (past and present), who sustain a dynamic, at times passionate conversation from across fields and theoretical dispositions.To mark the occasion, we’re posting short reflections on the history and importance of the journal from members of our editorial board and from frequent contributors to the journal. Join us as we celebrate Critical Inquiry at fifty.
What we’ve posted so far:
Catharine R. Stimpson’s “The Origins of Critical Inquiry“
Michael Fried’s “HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND THANKS“
Jerome McGann’s “The Roots of Critical Inquiry”
Elizabeth Abel’s “CI Special Issues“
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “CI Moments“
More to come . . .
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Critical Inquiry is fifty! I am sure there have been journals that have lasted longer. But what is remarkable is that CI – not the mouthpiece of a professional association but an in-house journal run by colleagues at the University of Chicago – has managed to retain its position as a leading journal of the humanities continuously for decades. CI came into my life late. Throughout the 1970s, I trained to be a social-scientific historian of South Asia and even tried my hand at using some tools of econometrics only to realize that my passions lay elsewhere. The historian Ranajit Guha and the historiographical project named Subaltern Studies that he led through the 1980s introduced me and my cohorts to structuralism and the proverbial “linguistic turn” it inspired. But CI was not a part of my endeavors until I got my first academic position as a lecturer in Indian and Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, towards the end of 1984 and befriended Simon During and David Bennett, colleagues in Melbourne’s English department. It was Simon who first spoke to me of the work of being published in CI, of the postcolonial criticism that Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak (whom I came to know through Subaltern Studies) spearheaded and drew my attention to the eye-opening issue of 1985 on “Race, Writing, and Difference” that Henry Louis Gates guest edited. Excited by the ideas I encountered on the pages of CI, I soon joined Simon and David in waiting with eagerness for the arrival of the latest issue of the journal in the University library.
One of the secrets of the success of CI must be that while it has always been associated with “theory,” it never espoused any particular variety of it as an orthodoxy. Its commitment was to remain a forum for discussing all issues of interest to the academic left generally. The credit for this must go to my colleagues who ran the journal and to Tom Mitchell, its longest-serving editor. These colleagues, incredible intellectuals themselves, steered the journal through the changing seas of academic fashions, especially through the stormy 1980s and ‘90s when “Theory” came to be charged with so much intellectual enthusiasm and ferment, all deployed in service of necessarily unruly and utopian desires for human futures beyond the limits of Western liberalism, colonial and racist domination, gender inequalities, and neoliberal globalization of economies and cultures.
I had the privilege of serving on the editorial committee of CI sometime in the early decades of this century, and what a privilege it was! To be in the presence of my colleagues Tom Mitchell, Bill Brown, the late Lauren Berlant, Arnold Davidson, Joel Snyder, Françoise Meltzer, Richard Neer, and Beth Helsinger discussing, debating, and evaluating a submission with no other interest in mind than a good argument, a new insight, a novel twist in thinking, was both thrilling and uplifting. It made you see in action what Hannah Arendt once famously called “the life of the mind.” These formidable intellectuals had managed, over the years, to develop a collective culture of nurturing and curating new points of view or new movements of critical thought in the humanities. There were arguments aplenty in these editorial meetings – often passionate, sometimes partisan, but seldom angry. What they looked for in every article was something new and persuasive – a new thought, a new question, a new analytical twist, something to keep the intellectual world, the world of ideas, from turning stale.
I was myself a beneficiary of this culture when I began my work on climate change that resulted in the publication in 2021 of my book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. My personal experience of some horrible Australian wildfires in 2003 stoked my early interests in the phenomenon of global warming. But unlike in the case of my other book projects, there was no model to follow for a humanist historian wanting to work on climate change. As I began to read into the scientific literature explaining the anthropogenic nature of this planetary warming and came across the idea of “the Anthropocene,” I developed a sense that scientists’ claim about human institutions and technologies having become a geological force challenged one of the most profound and dearly held assumptions of my own discipline: that human history and natural history belonged to separate realms of knowledge. Natural history, to put it in nineteenth-century terms, was the realm of necessity while human history was a realm of both necessity and freedom. Indeed, the very idea of “freedom,” I thought, was being challenged by the scientific understanding of this crisis. And as I thought through the significance of this collapsing distinction between nature and history, certain other propositions followed. The subject was huge, and I did not know how I, as someone interested in South Asian history and postcolonial theory, might handle it. I published my first speculations in the form of four theses in an essay in 2008 in a Bengali journal published from Calcutta. Unfortunately, none of my Bengali readers were interested. The experience reminded me of what my friend, the historian Greg Dening, would often say of academic writings: it was like dropping a feather into a deep well and waiting for the echoes to come back!
Completely by chance, Tom Mitchell asked me soon after this Bengali essay was published if I had something I might want to submit to the journal. I expanded my Bengali essay and wrote it up in English in the form of the same four theses I had advanced in the original. Both Tom and Bill Brown gave it a close reading. I still remember discussing a draft with Bill over cups of coffee in the University’s bookshop on Ellis. I don’t remember what I called that essay originally though it did have the expression “Four Theses” in it. I was trying to explain to Bill my argument that the science of climate change was going to change the academic climate of my own discipline when Bill made the brilliant suggestion that I call the article “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Thus was born one of the most significant essays I have written in my life. But without the title that Bill thought up for that piece, I don’t think it would have delivered any of its punches.
“The Climate of History” was a controversial essay. But CI nurtured the debate and made room for my ongoing work allowing me to develop conversations with colleagues elsewhere. One such interlocutor was Bruno Latour, a regular and esteemed contributor to the journal who, sadly, is no longer with us. When The Climate of History in a Planetary Age came out, I retained Bill’s original phrase in the title of the book, both for its pithiness and for the irrevocable connection it made between CI and my academic work at the University of Chicago.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a consulting editor for Critical Inquiry. “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009) is one of the most popular essays ever published in the journal.
Elizabeth Abel
My life changed in 1979, when Tom Mitchell suddenly – inexplicably – invited me to become a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Overwhelming as it was – I would be the only assistant professor and the only female coeditor in an august assemblage of renowned male scholars – I eventually realized that I could make a contribution by spotlighting the emergence of feminist literary criticism as an area of special interest for the journal.
Proposing a special issue of CI on feminist criticism felt audacious at the time. Committed to casting a broad net across diverse fields of inquiry, the journal had been wary of special issues. It prefaced its first exception, On Metaphor (1978), with an editorial statement attributing this anomaly to the impact of a recent symposium on metaphor at the University of Chicago. A similar logic undergirded the special issue On Narrative (1980). Venturing beyond that logic that same year, Tom Mitchell placed his editorial signature firmly on the journal with the first free-standing and explicitly transdisciplinary special issue: The Language of Images.
Granting feminism the gravitas of a special issue marked a step beyond both traditionally literary subjects (metaphor, narrative) and newly interdisciplinary ones (iconology) into a discourse that emerged from a political movement rather than an academic discipline. The exploration of sexual/textual politics was not new to Critical Inquiry, however. From its origins, the journal had included pathbreaking essays by Annette Kolodny on defining a “Feminist Literary Criticism” (1975); Catharine R. Stimpson on the mind/body problem in Gertrude Stein (1977); Carolyn G. Heilbrun on marriage in contemporary fiction (1978); Lee Edwards on the female hero (1979); and Sandra M. Gilbert on transvestism as literary metaphor (1980). Writing and Sexual Difference (1981) simply knotted these threads together into a broader critical fabric whose difference was announced by the bright pink cover of its publication as a book.
Writing and Sexual Difference marked a turning point in the focus of the special issues, which from that point on increasingly engaged the intersections between interpretation and politics. The very next special issue, in fact, was titled The Politics of Interpretation (1982). Dedicated to “the proposition that criticism and interpretation, the arts of explanation and understanding, have a deep and complex relation with politics, the structures of power and social value that organize human life,” that issue signaled a strong departure from the journal’s self-description in the epigraph that topped all four issues of volume 1 (1974): “A voice for reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit.” Followed by several special issues whose political investments were explicit – Canons (1983), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1985), Politics & Poetic Value (1987), The Sociology of Literature (1987) – the turn to politics reached its own climactic turning point in the special issue on Identities (1992), guest edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As the editors explain in their introduction:
A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry‘s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, “Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity.
The special issues that followed – on topics ranging from “God” to “Things” to “Cases” to “Disciplines” to “Comedy” to “Intimacy” to “Pandemic” – enact the disruptions that Gates and Appiah sought.
I hope this little history offers one example of the “unpredictable spontaneity” that Sheldon Sacks celebrated in the journal’s inaugural editorial: the openness to changing intellectual and political scenarios that has kept Critical Inquiry at the forefront of critical reflection for the first half century of its existence and will hopefully keep it there for the half century to come.
Elizabeth Abel is professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California Berkeley. She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Jerome McGann
All the instruments agree that the day of its birth was a bright warm day. And all of us who learned to use Critical Inquiry during the next fifty years – to read it, to write for it – agree that it was a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps I’ve been asked to testify now to that truth universally acknowledged because I am one of the few persons still around who was also there when CI was founded.
Elizabeth Helsinger was there too, and she will have a store of memories to draw on. But Elizabeth came to Chicago in 1972, six years after I arrived and just as Shelly Sacks was beginning to lay final plans for founding the journal. So her memories might be slightly and, I’m sure, quite different from mine.
For instance, when the first issue of Critical Inquiry was published in late 1974 I was thinking about leaving the university (in 1975 I did). It was a move I seriously did not want to make but, for personal reasons, felt I might have to. My years at Chicago had radically altered how I thought about myself as an educator and a scholar, and I was – still am – deeply committed to what happened to me there. So the first issue of CI brought my love of the university into an unusually clear – an unusually critical – focus.
The issue featured Wayne Booth’s inquiry, commissioned by CI’s editor (Shelly Sacks), into “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing.” When the essay was sent to Burke for a “response”, he delivered what Shelly called a “counterblast.” I still remember Shelly’s exact word because it so wittily echoed Burke’s first collection of essays, Counter-Statement (1931). And I recall as well how happy he was in the event. For Shelly, Burke’s “counterblast” to Wayne’s critical inquiry completed an “exciting intellectual exchange” that he had hoped would be the hallmark of the new journal. More to his immediate point, it was, as he wrote in the journal’s first editorial note, a “significant commentary on how one great critic sees himself and on how he is seen by one of his most sensitive admirers.” The exchange for Shelly was a dramatic ( = very Burkean) demonstration of intellectual perplexities abounding. Here were two serious men committed to learning about ways of knowing and who wanted to let us know – happily for us, not so happily for them – that they had a lot yet to learn. For a reader even today, their exchange remains provocative and enlightening in the rich sense that Burke gave to the word “negative”.[1]
Although I’m inflecting that inaugural CI event in Burkean terms, in 1974 it seemed to me, as it still seems to me, echt University of Chicago. I see it that way because of two salient matters of fact that are also personal matters of fact. First of all – Wayne mentions it in his essay – Burke and the “Chicago School of Criticism” had long been in spirited intellectual disputes about what the Chicago School called “Critics and Criticism Ancient, and Modern”.[2] As a second generation Chicago School critic, Wayne’s essay was a move to reconcile some of the differences between Chicago and Burke. Second, the history of the relations between Burke and the Chicago School was much on my mind when I joined the UofC English faculty in 1966.
In 1961 I had written a long MA thesis at Syracuse University on the disputes between The Chicago School and the New Critics where I came down strongly on the side of New Criticism.[3] More to the point, my view was shaped almost entirely by Kenneth Burke, whose books were sacred texts for me, especially The Philosophy of Symbolic Form. Studies in Symbolic Action (1941). Four years as a PhD student at Yale (1962-66) when The Yale School was in serious liftoff, I had made Romanticism my chief scholastic interest. But it had not changed Burke’s importance for me or my views about the special formalism of the Chicago School. So when I arrived at UofC in 1966 the book most on my mind was Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action (1966), just being published by University of California Press.
During the next ten years at Chicago everything changed for me because I was plunged into the day-to-day context – the practical educational scene – that had shaped the approach of the Chicago School. This was the set of first year Common Core humanities courses I was required to teach and that many of the established faculty, not least Wayne and Shelly, had been running every year for many years. It was one thing to know about Chicago’s Common Core as a set of formal approaches to the study of Great Works of Culture. It was something else again to experience it as an ongoing project of undergraduate education.
When you were assigned to those courses, the first and most enduring thing you discovered was that you would be learning them, not teaching them. That discovery was, I’m sure, what made so many on the Chicago faculty choose to/want to run them again themselves every year. Knowledge was not what an instructor came to these courses to deliver or what a student would be taking away. Trials of learning, the courses were designed to give and take habits of attention and ways of knowing as always also ways of unknowing.
Truly, what else was even possible in a ten-week seminar that took up a sequence of works like the following: Genesis; The Peloponnesian War; Orestia; War and Peace; Trotsky’s The Russian Revolution. The next year the texts might swap out Genesis for the Gospel of Matthew; and/or Thucydides for Herodotus, Aeschylus for Plato, The Russian Revolution for The Education of Henry Adams (War and Peace was de rigeur). And in later years (after 1968) the last unit in the course often took up more current works like Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. That was Hum II. Hum I was different though no less designed to make positive knowledge and academic expertise secondary concerns. In 1966 I was assigned a Hum I section where we were to wrangle major works of art, music and literature that appeared between 1848 and 1918. But the object in Hum II would be the same in Hum I: to try to think about what you were doing accurately and to try to discuss what you were doing clearly.
Was the “content” of those courses important? Yes, but rather in the way that Rilke let us know an archaic torso of Apollo might be important for an educational project like the Common Core. An archaic torso like War and Peace or The Peloponnesian War were there to watch and watch over your helpless seeing and to take the measure of your cultural longings: “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht”. That’s why, each year and each term, these courses would turn out, as Gertrude Stein might say, “beginning again and again”. Because each year, each term, we would be called to reprise the event of the previous years in, so to say, a new key or new arrangements. We reprised: that’s to say, everyone in those classes, where the distinction between instructor and instructed was constantly being turned around. When you graduated or, like myself, left Chicago, what many of us came away with was the ethos of the Common Core.
CI was born from that splendid educational ethos.
Jerome McGann is professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and has published many articles in the journal.
[1] Burke’s “dramatic” schema for parsing symbolic action and his reflections on Language’s negative spaces (“motivated” and “spontaneous”) are pervasive. Part III of Language as Symbolic Action is probably the single best place to watch him “in action” – that is, to follow what he is doing in saying what he says. And while as a negative dialectician (like Nagarjuna) he never explicitly wrote that A = A iff A ≠ A, that seems to me the premiss underlying all of his work.
[2] That was the title of the polemical set of essays collected and edited by Ronald S. Crane.
[3] Neo-Aristotelian Versus New Critical : A Study in the Nature of Critical Disputes (1961).
Michael Fried
I’ve counted them up and it turns out I’ve published nine articles in CI along with several responses to critics. The earliest of the articles, on Courbet’s After Dinner at Ornans and Stonebreakers, appeared in 1982; those that followed discuss Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846, Almayer’s Folly and other fictions by Joseph Conrad, Manet in his generation, Caravaggio, Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and Jeff Wall’s photograph Adrian Walker, Artist . . . in the light of a fascinating passage from Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value. Before discovering CI (indeed before CI) I was at a loss. From the start of my career as an art historian, such as it was in those early days, I realized that nothing I was likely to write would ever be acceptable to an “official” journal of art history like The Art Bulletin or The Burlington Magazine. For one thing, I couldn’t operate rhetorically without the first person, an absolute no-go in those distinguished organs. And for another, my whole style of argument, the claims I was making about Manet and his citations from previous art or the primacy of considerations of beholding and theatricality in Diderot’s criticism and the art of David and his successors, or (especially) my conviction that Courbet’s realism is to be understood as the product of an attempt by the artist to paint himself “all but corporeally” into his paintings were too foreign to the norms of the field to be taken seriously, much less find their way into such publications. I did take advantage of my friendship with Phil Leider, then editor of Artforum, to publish in that unlikely venue both “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1959-1865” and “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century Painting” in 1969 and 1970 respectively, but for obvious reasons that was hardly an ideal solution. But in 1969 and 1970 CI didn’t yet exist, so what was one to do?
I’m not certain about this, but my intuition is that what made my CI possible, and in time comparable journals like Representations, was the widespread use of photo offset lithography, which meant that illustrations became feasible without having to engrave a plate, with all the expense that the latter course of action entailed. And starting in 1979 CI was edited by Tom Mitchell, whose dissertation and first book was on William Blake’s “composite art” and who would go on to write on a host of visual subjects in the years to come. I had met Tom, who made it clear that he would welcome submissions from me, and starting with my writing on Courbet I took maximum advantage of this. And of course publishing in CI meant not only getting one’s work into print but also reaching an audience not confined to the narrow and repressive field that art history then was, a liberation I found intoxicating. Simply put, my career, such as it has been, owes a huge debt of gratitude to CI and its editors, Tom and Joel Snyder above all, a debt I am glad to have this opportunity to acknowledge.
Michael Fried is is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
Catharine R. Stimpson
To steady my memories of the origins of Critical Inquiry in Chicago in the 1970s I consulted a magisterial book, John W. Boyer’s The University of Chicago: A History (2015). It reminded me of the acute, even dangerous, financial pressures on the university then and in preceding years. Yet, the university neither trashed nor forsook its devotion to intellectual excellence and the formidable activity of reason.
Indeed, had the faculty not recruited Sheldon Sacks from Berkeley in 1966? Shelly had earned his doctorate from Chicago but had left Illinois to build a superbly vibrant reputation as a scholar, critic, and teacher in Texas and California. Had the university not hired Morris Philipson, a well-regarded publisher, as the director of its historic university press in 1967? Serving until 2000, Morris would become the legendary model of a modern press director.
Sheldon SacksMoreover, had Morris not encouraged the career of Jean Sacks at the Press? A University of Chicago graduate, she immediately entered into what she would sardonically call her “suburban housewife period.” In 1962, as a “re-entry woman,” she returned to the university. An astute businesswoman who was alert to new intellectual developments, she became manager of the journals division and assistant director of the press. Jean had been divorced in 1965. Shelly’s first wife had died shortly after they returned to Chicago. In 1967, Jean and Shelly married.
In 1974, the press and Shelly and his colleagues, Arthur Heiserman and Wayne Booth, launched Critical Inquiry. Jean said that after she had overseen the birth of CI, she thought “we ought to be doing something for women.” She set out to find an editor and found me at a lunch table at Barnard College where I was helping to organize an early rendition of the “Scholar and the Feminist” conferences. Newly tenured in English at Barnard, I was living in a loft at 352 Bowery in New York. Jean asked around about me, decided to take a chance, and pluckily invited me to be the founding editor of an academic journal explicitly and unapologetically about women. The initial group of editors eventually called it Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. It appeared in 1975.
Because of Jean’s leap of faith, because of Morris Philipson’s support, and because my blueprint for a new journal with that perplexing name passed the stringent press vetting and approval process, I could enter the exhilarating world of Critical Inquiry. I could be in the company of such citizens of that world as Tom Mitchell and, later, Alan Thomas. I had never studied at the University of Chicago but had respected its aura of excellence.
Moreover, I immediately loved Shelly and Jean. When they came to New York, they would summon me up from the Bowery. I would put on one of my limited number of better outfits. We would dine in a fine restaurant. We talked. We gossiped. I would make my way back to the Bowery, a fortunate woman who learned quickly how limited her capacity for Martinis was. Shelly and Jean enjoyed their marriage; they were bon vivants with a conscience and a strong consciousness of the indispensability of ideas. We all cared passionately about our journals, every detail about them.
A few days ago, I reread Shelly’s editorial for the first issue of Critical Inquiry, “A Chimera for a Breakfast,” a reference to Oliver Goldsmith and the nature of good criticism. I saw, more deeply than ever, how much his hopes, and those of his coeditors, overlapped with mine for Signs—that it be a “reasoned inquiry into the human spirit,” that it be interdisciplinary, that it “formulate fruitful and exciting questions,” and then attempt to find the best possible answers to them.” CI and Signs had very different reasons for being but not that much of method.
Shelly also edited the first of the four essays I have published in CI, “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein” (1977). I had stumbled into Stein scholarship during a year at Yale in 1975-76. He saw merit in my discoveries and interpretations. He also understood the promise of the emerging feminist criticism and women’s studies. Since then, CI has taken three more of my essays: “Zero Degree Deviancy,” an early theory about lesbian literature (1981); “Nancy Reagan Wears A Hat: Feminism and Its Culture Consensus,” deliberately sassy before the colon, more soberly explanatory after it (1988); and finally, “Texts in the Wind,” a proposal for six questions that CI should address in its next decades (2004). Glancing through these pages, I realize how much I wanted to push both myself and intellectual boundaries as I wrote for CI, but simultaneously, how bound I was to “reasoned inquiry.” That commitment cautioned me against talking through my hat.
Shelly was to die prematurely in 1979, a hard loss. Jean was to die in 1996 in Memphis, Morris in 2011 in Chicago. The invaluable criticism that CI has fostered helps to provide necessary equipment for mourning. Part of that equipment is to question, fruitfully, why some chimeras, the cruel bogey men and vicious phantasms, must wrench our most bitter griefs from us.
Catharine R. Stimpson is a university professor and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science New York University. She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
N. Katherine Hayles 30 June 2023 Left uninterrogated in “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” and “Against Theory” is what “authorial intent” means for LLMs, as well as the assertion that meaning must … Continue reading →
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels 30 June 2023 In “Against Theory,” after the second wave has washed up and left behind what looks like the second stanza of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” we ask whether you still … Continue reading →
Ted Underwood 29 June 2023 A graduate student who fell asleep in 1982 and woke up in 2022 might see large language models as a triumph for cultural theory. It is hard to imagine a clearer vindication of a thesis … Continue reading →
Kari Kraus 29 June 2023 Due to its second person point of view, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s thought experiment is unavoidably elliptical: after witnessing a half dozen submariners emerge jubilantly from the ocean to claim responsibility for the … Continue reading →
Caroline Bassett 29 June 2023 “No motion has she now, no force,” men in submarines have written on the sand. Some words about the sea. It seems to be a poem. I trained an LLM to do something along the … Continue reading →
Alex Gil 28 June 2023 “Is it useful?” Bethany Nowviskie, the American pragmatist, asked me about a decade ago almost in passing. The question came as a revelation. She wasn’t talking about an app, or some civic action. She was … Continue reading →
Annette Vee 28 June 2023 No theorist in the humanities simply writes up their discoveries. The writing process is constitutive to any meaning in humanities scholarship. So, as radically focused on authorship as “Against Theory” is—undercutting all literary criticism by … Continue reading →
Tyler Shoemaker 28 June 2023 There is reading the wave poem and your reading of the wave poem. “Against Theory” never quite dispels this difference; it structures too much in Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s argument. If, for “the … Continue reading →
Matthew Kirschenbaum’s introduction to the forum Lisa Siraganian’s “On Accidental and Parasitic Language“ Hannes Bajohr’s “When in Doubt, Go to the Beach“ Seth Perlow’s “Intention and Text Machines“ Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky’s “Against AI?“ More to come . . … Continue reading →
Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky 27 June 2023 The initial reader response to our title would most likely be to assume that it refers to the increasingly polarized debates for and against an advanced AI that promises to dangerously exceed … Continue reading →
Seth Perlow 27 June 2023 If you have played with ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM), you’ve experienced a new demonstration of an old truth: language is a technology that can work in unintended ways. “Against Theory” and its … Continue reading →
Hannes Bajohr 27 June 2023 Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s thought experiment of the wave poem aims at dissolving the inferential connection between meaning and intention, which they dub “theory.” If you discover lines in the beach that form … Continue reading →
Lisa Siraganian 26 June 2023 “Can Computers Create Meanings?” The point of the wave poem in Knapp and Michaels’s “Against Theory” was neither to ask that question, nor to ask if oceans can intend to write messages in the sand. … Continue reading →
Matthew Kirschenbaum 26 June 2023 Published in the March 2021 issue of FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, few scientific papers have captured as eager a public audience as “On the Dangers of … Continue reading →
(after a drawing by General Idea)
Wayne Koestenbaum
no dog has ever been friendly to me
or I don’t know how to decode dog kindness
dog invasiveness might be amicable
the dog notices me by seeming to do violence to me
I misinterpret the signal of the dog’s regard
curlicues of animal hair reiterate human hair
the man dreams of the poodle
I keep calling him a man but he is a god
or a devil
a troublemaker in elementary school
an artist in labor
will you make inroads on the poodle’s sanctity
or will you leave the poodle to its inviolate serenity
like an ice-cream concoction served at Serendipity
an advertisement for poetic license
the saint’s infernal horns almost touch the poodle’s buttock-curlicues
does my nervous system’s unrest duplicate the drawing
the famous man said I was full of shit
I shook his hand in response to the insult
his face, tiny as an ultimatum, had become even more miniature
facial miniaturization underwrote his vocation as filmmaker
the air froze around his miniaturization
return to the drawing
be tempted by the drawn man’s
reposeful elbow like Déjeneur sur l’herbe but with a dog companion
is bestiality illegal in the U.S.
the star mentioned that my review of her performance had not been favorable
her silver turban a Cinecittá emblem
her son a Bertolucci Luna apparition
aureole of boy curls an affront and a miniaturization
seek a shame effect because it will sell or redeem
perdition avoided if you claim shame
love to have my pole drawn he said
wish I’d gotten a tantric massage I said at the art fair
Manet made a fortune from public urinal art
I took the poodle literally as a symbol of conflagration
or a thought bubble manifested by the reclining savior
the poodle a materialization of the recumbent figure’s cogitations
the satyr, like Henry James’s Fleda Vetch, had designs
or is Fleda notable for her absence of cunning
must eroticism contain cunning
fuck my face he said with the impromptu air of a court musician
more mild-mannered than I’d expected
not a dom daddy
just a Pez container sans alibi
that’s a polite way of saying I’m smitten I replied with no reference to my toupee intended
the poodle’s curlicues are discourse
they authorize any fantasy
stylized repetition frees them from the responsibility of being original
you can repeat your smittenness like a pole dance in the trauma unit
can I get extra-credit in the trauma class by stylizing my smittenness
tinting it pink and green to match the Formica countertop of the diner
where you drew the poodle and the saint on a napkin
and then turned the napkin over and wrote an elegy for grandfathered eroticism
you retroactively give license to earlier lubricities
and you don’t penalize them for being born after the date when liberation was announced
I like the drawing because it tells me how to think about my life
it tells me to subtract dog and satyr from the picture
and thereby create negative-space pudding
eat negative-space pudding on the subway
he said I saw you on Fire Island
I replied I haven’t been to Fire Island in twenty years
he insisted he’d seen me on Fire Island
thus insistence is the miniaturization of the curlicue according to
either Kant or Arendt or Misha Dichter
or Telemachus or Alpo
or Tanaquil Le Clercq or Mickey Hargitay or Lassie or Fatty Arbuckle
or Jean Harlow or Frances Farmer or Barbara Loden
or Jean Dubuffet or Eartha Kitt or Tommy Tune or Transylvania Airlines
the gargantuan power of an engine determines the flow of capital
who is the engine
is the poodle the engine is the satyr the engine
is pink the agenda or is green
I once decreed that agential was not a word but now I am being agential
is the satyr agential is the poodle agential is the curlicue agential
is the general idea of the poodle agential
is the general idea of the satyr agential minus one like music minus one
or minus capitalism or minus Silvia Federici’s book Patriarchy of the Wage
are the poodle’s curlicues patriarchy of the wage
or are curlicues the undoing of wage patriarchy
anti-work curlicues
A4 paper is the usual size of the daydream
the satyr’s elbow hits the page’s right-hand wall
the time I couldn’t remember the Contes d’Hoffmann melody in the night
mentioned already and why is repetition a crime against decorum
I keep violating logic
I keep drawing from the deep well of malfacture
mal facture
like fleurs du mal facture
a climacteric rictus
when you have an orgasm your face freezes
an unemployable grimace
is orgasmic rictus an exit from patriarchy of the wage
can we stop emphasizing tops and bottoms
I forgot to ask what the temptation is
poodle tempts satyr
or satyr tempts poodle
poodle wants cross-species sex
flaccid satyr is indifferent to poodle
so horny poodle dreams up satyr for entertainment while walking
poodle defecates on satyr’s head perchance
a possibility within the satyr’s pleasure toolkit
Spank Me Red was his handle
do kink aliases erupt from evading plot
doodles represent distraction
if your pelt is a distraction
a strategy of embroidery that stains the living and prevents forward motion
poodle strolls on no seen surface
satyr rests on no seen ledge or field
no visible means of support for satyr or poodle
floating-world poodle and floating-world satyr
our status as floaters (hovering above wage patriarchy)
creates vertigo and acrophobia
am I entitled to write a porno based on this drawing
is the drawing already a porno
is a porno a philosophical direction to pursue
is drawing a philosophical practice
what prompts me to call an art activity a philosophical practice
maybe it was an accident, this drawing
but it became your friend
and accompanied you on your travels
to Astoria and Fishkill and Cairo
they pronounce Cairo “Kay Roe”
because they want to distinguish themselves from Egypt
a desire of which I don’t approve
I could find you by accident at the baths
would that be embarrassing or would that be a philosophical practice
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, performer—has published twenty-two books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. “The Temptation of the Continental Poodle” was originally written for at an event at The Drawing Center, at the invitation of Claire Gilman and Alex Kitnick.
Interview by Nitzan Lebovic Prologue During the Fall of 2022 I served as the Joyce C. Greenberg Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. When I learned that Dipesh Chakrabarty and François Hartog plan to coteach a … Continue reading →
Daniel Morgan There was a time in my early twenties when I had gone a while, probably a year or more, without seeing a film by Jean-Luc Godard. At that age a year felt like a long time. Like many … Continue reading →
Colleen Lye Recently, a Korean American friend of mine was walking in the San Francisco Mission District when she was called the c word (the racial not gender slur). She clocked that the man who said it wasn’t one of … Continue reading →
Homi K. Bhabha Globalization, driven by the priorities of financial markets and political majoritarianism, deploys new technologies to encompass those parts of the world that gravitate toward power and privilege—be it in the North or the South. Outside these enclaves … Continue reading →
Nessa Cronin “It’s a curse to live in interesting times,” so goes the ancient Chinese proverb that Hannah Arendt was known to cite in the last years of her life.[1] In her essay “No Longer and Not Yet,” Arendt observes … Continue reading →
Mikko Tuhkanen One of the first things I recall Leo telling me, as I was querying him about his intellectual influences, was the lesson he said he had learned from a Harvard professor as an undergrad: how remarkable it was … Continue reading →
Tim Dean “Nothing is more ominous than the unanimous reverence with which Volumes 2 and 3 have been received in France, or the hagiographical industry already at work on—really against—Foucault’s life and writing.” This sentence, written by Bersani following Foucault’s … Continue reading →
Joan Copjec In May 2010 my visit to the University of Chicago overlapped by chance with that of Leo Bersani. Told I was on campus, he emailed to ask if I’d like to have dinner with him. Profoundly flattered, I … Continue reading →
Lee Edelman Leo Bersani’s thought was ill-served by its association with mine and its specious categorization as antisocial or antirelational.[1] Excepting our late friend, Lauren Berlant, no contemporary critic more brilliantly engaged relational possibilities or more thoroughly invested in the … Continue reading →
Jacqueline Rose I have been reading, rereading, and teaching the writings of Leo Bersani for a very long time but never with the intensity with which I have returned to his work over this last while. It has been my … Continue reading →
On hearing of the death of Leo Bersani (1931-2022) we asked the University of Chicago Press to provide free access to the essays that he published in Critical Inquiry, which began with “‘The Culture of Redemption’: Marcel Proust and Melanie … Continue reading →
Jacques Rancière Part 1 “Time Redivided”: the title sounds enigmatic. And the enigma can hardly be cleared up by the image that I choose as a point of departure: it is a detail from Jean-Baptiste-SiméonChardin’s La Ratisseuse de navets (“the … Continue reading →
Ann Cvetkovich Feminists are still made violently minor in institutional, public sphere, and everyday life contexts. We are considered less rigorous, more sentimental, more “tribal,” more merely subcultural and subnational, more merely lesbian, sexually pathological, or just sexual than others … Continue reading →
Charles Bernstein Charles Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Katie Stewart Lauren hated academic politics. Collaboration took its ferocious place. A bossy push for associational thinking together. She wanted reaction; she wanted to be edited; she wanted reciprocity. It was hard to keep up with her. She’d wait. Our phone … Continue reading →
Jenny Holzer She was an ally. “COHERENCE IS ALWAYS PROVISIONAL” is a warning and a belly laugh.
Lisa Duggan Lauren Berlant was luminous, intimidating, uncannily perceptive, generous, incisive, devastating. Their years long investigations of everyday affect, their extensive collaborations, their fierce and capacious pedagogy, their creative vocabulary, had a decisive impact on overlapping worlds of scholarships, politics, … Continue reading →
Joseph J. Fischel “Art humbles theory in its propositional mode, allows an encounter instead of inciting a pronouncement.”[1] I did not write this sentence even though I did. Time varnishes memory like fantasy fabricates it, as Lauren describes.[2] But my … Continue reading →
Dana Luciano The first thing Lauren ever said to me? “I see you’re the kind of person who uses exclamation points!” We’d just been introduced; they were sitting in front of me at a lecture (some queer-theoretical something or other, … Continue reading →
Kris Cohen I’ve found myself, in the wake of Lauren’s death, in the weird position of being stuck in exactly the kind of treading water temporality (continually just not drowning) that Lauren always described so well, while also trying to … Continue reading →
The Affective Publics Reading Group (Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Kris Cohen, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Rachel Furnari, Luis-Manuel Garcia Mispireta, Laura-Zoë Humphreys, Adam T. Jernigan, Andrew R. Johnston, Leigh Claire La Berge, Michelle Menzies, Anahid Nersessian, Scott C. Richmond, Jennifer Tyburczy) In 2006, at … Continue reading →
Caleb Smith An opening might be a welcoming ceremony or it might be an attack. At an artist’s opening, guests are invited to see new work for the first time; in a game like chess, one player’s opening calls for … Continue reading →
Elizabeth Freeman Elegy Who would I show it to —W. S. Merwin Lauren Berlant provoked fantasy. That wasn’t (usually) Lauren’s fault, and it must have been a burden to bear. Someone I’m close to said, the day of her death, … Continue reading →
Michael Hardt I have never met anyone more relentlessly intelligent than Lauren, more intensely present. I remember once saying to them – admittedly, a rather banal comment – that love is a muscle. The more you use it, the more … Continue reading →
Virginia Jackson I. The Function of Criticism In 2015, before she got sick and after they turned down an offer from my university, I wrote an essay about Lauren’s work and what it meant to me. That essay was a … Continue reading →
John Brooks Defacement’s engine is the excessive, the disorderly, the disquieting, and any other sort of radical exclamation that troubles the state of things. It is not simply an act of destruction but rather a process of rupturing the surface … Continue reading →
Achille Mbembe Translated by Carolyn Shread When considering the recent history of critical thought, two major events invite reflection today. First, Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. As I wrote in the introduction to Critique … Continue reading →
W. J. T. Mitchell “‘I didn’t think it would turn out this way.’” That, according to Lauren Berlant, “is the secret epitaph of intimacy.” It is also the most fitting epitaph for Lauren Berlant’s own career, not just as a … Continue reading →
Joining the faculty in 1984, Lauren Berlant had a transformative impact on students, colleagues, and the intellectual culture at the University of Chicago—most robustly, perhaps, in the ongoing conversation named Critical Inquiry. Lauren joined the editorial collective in 1991. The insight and creativity … Continue reading →
This June, Executive Editor Patrick Jagoda met with Soraya Murray, associate professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at UCSC, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, professor in the Computational Media Department of UCSC, to discuss video games and critical theory. Their … Continue reading →
Veena Das I take the pleasure of companionship that these five comments offer me as an invitation to overreach myself. My response then to these careful, critical, and challenging comments is taken from my experience of threading a delicate piece … Continue reading →
Michael Puett Textures of the Ordinary is an intensely personal work in which Veena Das invites the reader to join her as she rethinks the key stories, problems, and tensions with which she has wrestled over the course of her … Continue reading →
Penelope Deutscher 1. An endeavor to take flight from the everyday in which we are immersed will likely fail. But sometimes the everyday flees from us. And one can err, simply by having confidence in the everyday. Textures of the … Continue reading →
Piergiorgio Donatelli 1. Professor Veena Das has given us a book filled with knowledge, insight, and imagination in the many fields she covers. It is a book that belongs both to anthropology and philosophy. Veena Das is a renowned anthropologist … Continue reading →
Clara Han In Textures of the Ordinary, Veena Das invites us think closely on method as that which allows for philosophical texts, anthropological texts, and ethnography to be on the same plane. The philosophical method that Das hones from her … Continue reading →
Sandra Laugier Veena Das is an anthropologist of exceptional reputation, but for more than a decade she has also been a crucial commentator on Wittgenstein, especially as he is read in Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) and by philosophers such as … Continue reading →
Starting on Monday, Critical Inquiry brings together, over the course of a week, five scholars – three philosophers and two anthropologists – to discuss Veena Das’s Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein (2020)[1], a book in which Das re-turns, differently, to persistent questions … Continue reading →
Homi Bhabha During the presidential election, Joe Biden made frequent references to the fragility of democracy. In his inaugural address, Biden returned to the subject. In the days between these repeated warnings of the perilous state of democracy, all Americans, … Continue reading →
W. J. T. Mitchell You will not be able to stay home, brotherYou will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop outYou will not be able to lose yourself on skagAnd skip out for beer during commercials, … Continue reading →
W. J. T. Mitchell J. Hillis Miller, a massively influential literary critic and theorist, passed away at his home in Maine on 9 February 2021. Miller was the author of dozens of important scholarly books on American and English literature, … Continue reading →
Ranjan Ghosh In June 1833, Charles Darwin asked the captain of the HMS Beagle to delay the departure from Tierra del Fuego because a “strange group of granite boulders” had stirred his investigative and imaginative energy – “One of these, … Continue reading →
Pato Hebert and Alexandra Juhasz From: Patrick Hebert Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2020 2:29 PMTo: Alexandra JuhaszSubject: Re: some prompts Hi Alex, Sorry for slow reply. School has been extremely difficult and I’m having 1-2 medical appointments daily, including rescheduled endoscopy and colonoscopy on … Continue reading →
Dipesh Chakrabarty Let me state at the outset the point that I wish to get across in this short essay. The current moment of the COVID-19 pandemic belongs not only to the global history of capitalism and its destructive impact … Continue reading →
Zachary Cahill Robert Bird, a scholar of vast erudition of film and Russian literature, passed away on 7 September 2020, after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His book Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema is considered a landmark contribution to the … Continue reading →
To celebrate his forty-two years as the editor of Critical Inquiry, we asked past and present contributors and editors Homi Bhabha (0:55), Frances Ferguson (7:35), Elizabeth Abel (10:07), Lauren Berlant (16:08), Slavoj Žižek (19:20), and Hillary Chute (27:30) to share … Continue reading →
Lennard Davis In regard to disability, the ableism that puts on a compassionate mask in milder times now reveals its brutal face. While laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act acknowledge human rights and subjectivities involved in disabled identity, a … Continue reading →
Robert Gooding-Williams Now is a suitable moment to revisit the US Justice Department’s Ferguson Report.[1] What the report suggests, I propose, is that explicitly disparaging and stigmatizing antiblack racial stereotypes shaped the ordinary, business-as-usual, communications of the FPD, and … Continue reading →
Hannah B Higgins First the images of absence became common place. Pictures were taken of a newly ubiquitous nothing: of no people on city streets, no people in major plazas of the world, no people at rallies, no people in … Continue reading →
Ewan Jones If, in years to come, an intrepid researcher writes a dissertation upon the history of technology-assisted synchronous learning, her first chapter may well find room for 7 January 1977. It was on this day that the Collège de … Continue reading →
Jenny Holzer 8 June 2020 For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York … Continue reading →
W.J.T. Mitchell This is the third Part of an essay on time located in the present moment in human history, an attempt to align “my time” with “our times.”[1] It is impossible of course, to write about the present, because … Continue reading →
Romi Crawford “I can’t breathe”—these are now America’s defining words. Back once again in the national imagination, the words refer to Eric Garner, the young black man who died from a chokehold by a New York City policeman in 2014. … Continue reading →
Leela Gandhi But He’s Much Bluer than When I Went Away Many of us will recognize two cognitive phenomena from the intense experience of the coronavirus lockdown. The first is fairly ubiquitous. It is a perception that something is … Continue reading →
Lydia H. Liu It makes a world of difference where the novel coronavirus travels. For the first time, I feel as vulnerable as my eighty-eight-year old mother who is locked down in another part of the world. Neither she … Continue reading →
*Wendy* Hui Kyong Chun****
I write this during a time when we feel acutely the stakes and consequences of connection, polarization, infrastructures, models, and habits. To many, it seems a world turned upside-down, in which the unimaginable has become possible: “socialism” and extensive surveillance within the US; the retraction of the Chinese economy and the negative price of oil; the invocation of Cold War shelter-in-place ordinances; and KKK masks worn as protective masks in California. This crisis has highlighted and augmented already existing divides: from white collar employees who seek the “perfect” gadget for working from home; to the mainly non-white and poor essential personnel who have had to balance daily financial and medical risks; from French dentists without proper protective equipment who posted naked pictures to protest back-to-work orders to Donald Trump supporters—compared to a “modern-day Rosa Parks”–who publicly demonstrate against orders by Democratic governors to stay at home.
It is a time of uncertainty and therefore responsibility—and something like community. Scientific, economic, and political knowledge and models are constantly evolving. Many of the first guidelines presumed similarities between SARS Cov-2 and SARS Cov-1, which were later proven to be untrue, such as the period during which a person is most infectious: in SARS Cov-1 it is when one is most symptomatic; for SARS Cov-2 it is just beforehand. Our current knowledge of Covid-19 is mainly correlational, with mechanistic-genetic explanations, as always, lagging behind observation and comparison. For example, SARS Cov-2 is widely assumed not to be airborne because it is far less contagious than airborne diseases such as measles. In desperation turned pharmaceutical opportunity, drugs are being approved, such as remdesivir, which were discontinued in early clinical trials due to debilitating side effects. Most significantly, because of the lack and poor quality of existing tests and testing materials, the scope of the pandemic—necessary for modelling the basic reproduction number (R0)—is poorly known. It is even unclear if “recovereds” are immune or for how long.
This uncertainty, however, does not undermine science or politics; it drives research and makes political decisions difficult and necessary. Intersecting this cloud of uncertainty are correlations and probabilities, which can guide our decisions, even if they cannot guarantee them, for the pandemic and its “cures” confront us with responsibility in the strongest sense of the word. As Thomas Keenan has argued, we face responsibility not when we make decisions by following guidelines and rules but when we desperately want to but cannot: “when we do not know exactly what we should do, when the effects and conditions of our actions can no longer be calculated, and when we have nowhere else to turn, not even back onto our ‘self.’”[1] Not even back onto our self—because at these moments we realize that the individual is, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s evocative phrase, “the residue of the dissolution of community.”[2]
Tellingly, although ostensibly about the human death toll, calls for communal responsibility are mainly framed in terms of infrastructure: things that ground and touch us, even as we strive not to touch too many others. The April UK motto of “staying at home to protect the NHS and save lives” encapsulates this perfectly (fig. 1). By caring for infrastructure, we care for ourselves and others. In countries with national health services, the fear is becoming another Italy. In other countries, such as the US, the motto would seem to be “work, save businesses, and save your grandchildren’s livelihoods (and your pension, if you have one) (fig. 2). Or, more positively, “stay home/distant, flatten the curve, and save lives and the city.”
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 2
The “cures” proposed, emergency powers granted, and sacrifices demanded reflect and reveal profoundly different national, regional, and local perceptions of which curve matters—the number of “infecteds,” the stock market, national employment figures, GDP, the mortality rate—and which ties bind most strongly—capital, public health, taxes, national deficits, public transportation, and others. These cures acknowledge that exit is impossible, even for the most nonessential wealthy, whose New Zealand bunkers and seasteading dreams still rely on the value of capital and the lives of “essential workers.”
The proposed cures and sacrifices reveal different diagrams of the social. If the nation is mainly viewed as a network , the goal is to produce “safe” exceptional neighborhoods: to create/augment clusters so that the “infected” are separated from the “recovereds” and “susceptibles” (fig. 3).
FIGURE 3
Surveillance to track and manage contagion and contacts becomes the key to amplifying social distance. In this worldview, community cases become mysteries to be solved via stalking and recording undocumented cases and silent spreaders. Tracking “patient zero” becomes a national pastime, as does blaming other countries for viral spread. Safety—resting as it does on inequality and dreams of emptying space—is precarious. Think of everything that must be erased for an edge to represent a friendship: institutions, such as schools and bars; interactions with “nodding strangers” (which during pandemics turn out to be essential); social media prompts to say “happy birthday”; regular meetings and events. In order for there to be networks, there must be gaps. Networks hollow clouds of uncertainty—that is, infrastructure and in/difference—in order to foreground clean connections across empty space.[3]
Perversely, the logic of networks spreads the word neighbor everywhere, in order to impoverish it conceptually. Machine learning is filled with “neighborhood” methods used for pattern recognition and collaborative filtering, which create segregated clusters of agitated sameness. Networks presume and prescribe homophily—that birds of a feather flock together, that similarity breeds connection. A banal and therefore dangerous notion of friend becomes a synonym for neighbor: segregation becomes naturalized and hatred becomes love.[4] How do you show you love the same? By fleeing when others show up. Hatred attracts and repels at the same time, creating angry clusters that need to hate:
if homophily == true
neighbor := self
self.love := other.hate
neighbor.love := self.love
ethics := narcissism
society := nul
endif
If the nation is mainly viewed as a community—what I’m calling “net-munity”—the onset of nontrackable cases demands treating everyone as “infected,” in order to suppress the disease (we have to remember that viruses, such as SARS Cov-1, have been eradicated without vaccines). The Vancouver Parks motto “the space between us will hold us together” encapsulates vision, for rather than treating the population as a series of nodes and edges, it attends to the spaces that enable community to emerge. Community presumes community transmission—community is communication and space. Once a virus is endemic to a community, neatly drawn graphs become impossible and the goal becomes widespread habitual changes to save others and public infrastructures: physical distancing, wearing facemasks, washing hands, avoiding mass gatherings, cleaning public spaces. Even as the disease and these changes affect “vulnerable” populations differently, there are no exceptions to the call for—if not the act of—sacrifice. Friends and mobility become dangerous, and addressing the needs of those “at risk” populations becomes key.
At its best, net-munity follows the call made by the Combahee River Collective to treat everyone as “levelly human,” by engaging—rather than ignoring—identity politics and individual experience.[5] In British Columbia and elsewhere, houseless populations finally are being moved into safer shelters, such as hotel rooms and empty apartment buildings, after individual consultations. Appallingly, Vancouver’s long-standing housing and drug crises are finally being addressed, not because of the dangerous living conditions of the houseless or the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women or the Overdose Crisis public health emergency declared in 2016, but because of the need to contain Covid-19 (tellingly, 113 people in BC died due to illicit drug toxicity in March 2020 ; in comparison, a total of 141 people have died of Covid-19 as of 15 May). This sheltering, however, can also destroy. The construction of spiked fencing to prevent tents from re-merging in Oppenheimer Park evokes other clearances: Japanese Canadians were removed from this area into Interior internment camps during World War II; Vancouver lies on the still unceded lands of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
We must engage neighbors and relations in all their rich ambivalence. Neighbors are not innocuous—the term neighbor literally recalls “boors.” They are nosy and noisy. They can provoke hostility, resentment and ambivalence. They intrude, even—and especially—when they are inert. They offer, however, a way to reside in/difference and to engage interactions that go beyond homophily: not just heterophily (heterosexuality, electromagnetism and other opposites that attract), but also ambivalence, compassion, and neutrality.
Neighbors space.[6] At their best they un-settle, for their spacing resonates with what Ariella Azoulay has called “potential history.”[7] Diverse worlds and lands persist despite being crossed out in official maps and graphs.[8] The task before us, as Kara Keeling has put it, is to “listen, with others, for the poetry, the refrains, and the noise a world is making.”[9]
So, let us shelter in space; let us care for the infrastructures that touch us, so that “we” might surface and endure, in/difference.
20 May 2020
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Group. Dr. Chun is the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections. She has received fellowships from< various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. Currently, Dr. Chun works with the Digital Democracies Group to undertake the proliferation of misinformation, abusive language and discriminatory algorithms. Through the investigation of natural language processing (NLP), political theory and critical data studies, the group aims to develop methods for creating effective online counterspeech and alternative models for connection. Her work has appeared in Critical Inquiry.
I would like to thank Lynn Festa and Paul Moorcroft for their comments, suggestions, and conversations, and Hannah Holtzclaw for her editorial help. They have been invaluable.
[1] Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, Calif., 1997).
[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al., ed. Connor (Minneapolis, 1991).
[3] Wendy Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).
[4] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, 2014)
[5] Combahee River Collective, How We Get Free (Chicago, 2017).
[6] Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago, 2005).
[7] Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Brooklyn, N.Y., 2019).
[8] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1-25.
[9] Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York, 2019).
Chiara Cappelletto
Translated by Samuel Fleck
The dominant narrative of the COVID-19 illness plays into the most conservative iconic order. On the one hand, there is a widely circulated, glossy image of SARS-CoV-2 that makes use of the realist rhetoric of photography: the virus is this. It hardly matters that such an image is not a depiction of the pathogen but an illustration designed “to grab the public’s attention.”[1] On the other hand, the virus is “invisible” above all else, and its symptoms largely “mimic” those of the seasonal flu, which they resemble. It is therefore said to be unknowable. The lay observer is once again caught in a double bind between optical efficacy and the phantasmal quality of the image.
Apart from its well-known paradoxes, the logic of the sign—still applicable to AIDS, which has in fact been termed an “epidemic of signification”[2]—is completely inadequate for understanding the current pandemic. The “pestiferous bodies,” the carriers of contagion, cannot be detected because they are largely asymptomatic. The virus strikes without marking the sick person, as confirmed by the frantic search for a tracking system that will compensate for the dearth of symptoms, using geolocation data to make up for the lack of stigmata.
Indeed, since anyone could be sick without knowing it, we are all asked to maintain distance from one another. This policy might have been called “physical distancing,” so as to grant relevance to all the forms of attachment, care, and aid that we have mobilized during this time. The fact that it has been called “social distancing” clearly underscores the aesthetic-political implications of this extraordinary type of negative performance. Social distance is the suppression of gestures of contact. It entails not shaking hands with, hugging, or leaning in toward—much less slapping, hitting, or attacking—one another. It abolishes the affordances of the world, thus working like an anesthetic. If, as Adam Phillips writes, “attention seeking . . . is a form of sociability, an appeal to others to help us with our wanting,”[3] then social distancing inhibits our desire to give and receive attention.
We talk about the pandemic using surface codes, but we live it as bodies embedded in our homes, as though in a cultural version of locked-in syndrome. Are we a new kind of freak in a new kind of circus? It will be interesting to see to what extent future reflections about the transformation of public space into media space, the virtualization of private space through the systematic use of online platforms, and new codes of social representation where only the upper half of the body is displayed remain reliant on our culture’s privileging of the iconic, and to what extent they acknowledge that vision itself is situated. We are currently living a critical stalemate and paying for it in the flesh.
Suffering due to suspended sociality alone does not account for the profound sense of disorientation that we are experiencing. Are we not asked to stay in what is, by definition, the most welcoming space for us: our homes? Why then does this space appear so inhospitable to us? Coming from decades where being mobile was everything, home confinement suddenly becomes the cutoff point where our experience of near and far, neighbor and stranger, collapses. After living so freely, after having the very notion of open space shape our understanding of what living space is in itself, we all find ourselves confinable.
A different understanding is needed to account for the current state of human affairs. The latter calls for a new aesthetic of presence.
We know that our bodies are coextensive with the physical, social, and cultural environments in which goods, medicine, laws, and artifacts play a part; that emotions, thoughts, practices, and tools modify the neurobiological processes of individuals and of our species as a whole. Cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy use the term embodiment for the interconnectedness of man, nature, and technology: our bodies cut the world into a continuous reciprocal dynamic of action and reaction. We are all cyborgs. We have supposedly known this for decades, though we resist the idea and continue to observe this embodiment from the outside, as a notion to be put in perspective; we thus have a paradoxically disembodied understanding of it.
This critical inertia occurs at a time when COVID-19 has raised the question of embodiment to a higher level: an institutional level. The problem has been clear from the outset: by all getting sick at the same time we would have made it impossible for doctors and hospitals to care for us. Sick people make the system sick. We have thus acknowledged a link between the vulnerability of the individual and the vulnerability of the government infrastructure responsible for medical care. The moral imperative has been to “flatten the curve.”
The ongoing pandemic shows us governments as institutional actors whose power to lead lies unexpectedly in their capacity for care and protection. I am in favor of rethinking political action as an exercise in care because it would entail an ecological, feminist, and intergenerational agenda and would acknowledge that citizens are an aggregate of women and men, children and older people, with different potentialities, who make up networks of knowledge, affections, desires, and abilities. Nevertheless, while care as an active and mutual practice is a positive and productive engagement, being taken into care suggests an attitude of submissiveness that weakens personal initiative, the freedom to try and fail. If responsibility is the ability to respond, as Karen Barad has put it, then the political perspective of being cared for can weaken us to the point of making us nonresponsible.
We are at a crossroads. We have the opportunity to implement an ecological agenda and finally recognize that a butterfly flapping its wings can indeed cause a hurricane; to increase individual responsibility and inventiveness as a result; to overcome the ill-conceived alternative between social justice and freedom; and to build a fair and inclusive system of power. At the same time, we run the risk of turning our vulnerability into passivity; of assimilating individuals into two broad categories—reliable healthy people and socially dangerous sick people, each tagged with its own health code; of substituting the medical specialist for the political leader and the military, driven by a magical faith in science, which we are asked to believe in as we might a patron saint and whose praxis and verification system are unfortunately largely unknown to citizens.[4]
This choice, which calls into question the ultimate meaning of democratic citizenship, arises at a time of increased implementation of the prosthetic nature of the human body. Since sealing ourselves in our homes, we have never been so unbounded: with all of us connected 24/7, using privately owned platforms, whether for birthday parties, dissertation defenses, homeschooling, or work meetings, we are redefining the experience of our self and of the outside with a blind faith in the openness of the web and its democratic accessibility, both of whose shortfalls we prefer to ignore.
To pursue the best way forward we need to queer the dominant narrative and finally abandon the regime of “natural iconicity,” with its divide between presence and absence, which has unfortunately withstood decades of academic studies; we need to think about how embodied and gendered minds perform freely in spaces where the affective values of near and far have taken on enormous political relevance. We need to be able to be in touch and respond.
13 May 2020
Chiara Cappelletto is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the Philosophy Department, University of Milan, where she teaches Poetics & Rhetoric and Contemporary Aesthetics, and heads the Performing Identities Seminar (PIS).Her work focusses on the fabrication of personal identity through public discourse and theatrical performance. Her books include Neuroaesthetics: Art, Braincentrism, and the Embodied Mind, forthcoming Columbia University Press.
Samuel Fleck earned his PhD from Columbia University with a dissertation on Antonio Fogazzaro and late nineteenth-century Italian literature. His experience as a translator of French and Italian texts into English spans more than twelve years. Among his recent works are translations of the poetry collection Valsolda by Fogazzaro, with selected poems set to appear in the Italian Poetry Review, and the book Neuroaesthetics: Art, Braincentrism, and the Embodied Mind by Chiara Cappelletto, forthcoming Columbia University Press
[1] Cara Giaimo, “The Spiky Blob Seen Around the World: How C.D.C. Medical Illustrators Created the Coronavirus Pandemic’s Most Iconic Image,” New York Times, April 1, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-illustration-cdc.html.
[2] Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” Cultural Studies 1, no. 3 (1987): 263–305.
[3] Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking (London: Penguin, 2019), p. 7.
[4] To complexify the question at hand, consider the notion of “therapeutic citizenship” coined by Vinh-Kim Nguyen. See Vinh-Kim Nguyen, “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 124–44.
W. J. T. Mitchell
I thought that, by seventy-eight, I had seen everything. Every epidemic from polio to AIDS to SARS. Every war from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan and the endless, stupid “War on Terror.” Every terrible president from Nixon to Reagan to Bush. Around the fall of 2016, with the election of Donald Trump, I was reminded of the old proverb, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Now, in the spring of 2020, we see how deep nothingness can be, a black hole in time that has sucked the entire world into its gravitational field. And so I began thinking about time, the present moment, and asking why and how it might provide a unique moment of insight.
Of course, since we are in a state of emergency, crisis, and exception, who has time to think about time? Nurses, orderlies, doctors are overwhelmed with sixteen-hour days of nonstop work; grocery clerks, immigrant fruit pickers, and meat processors are essential workers, while the poor and people of color line up with millions of unemployed at food banks. Politicians scurry about covering their asses, or making up for the incompetence at the helm of the national government, and we watch as the richest, most technologically advanced country on the planet, with 2 percent of the world’s population, catches one-third of the cases of coronavirus at the latest count and boasts the worst record in the first world for mismanagement of the crisis.
Antony Gormley’s Clearing No. 1
So who has time to think about time? The answer is stunningly clear. We do. I mean those of us who are paid to think, and write, and teach and who may be lucky enough to still be on the payroll of some academic institution. Or those of us who are retired, drawing a pension, lucky to be sequestered at home rather than condemned to the petri dish of a nursing home. As someone who is on the verge of retirement, in the process of stepping down from the helm of Critical Inquiry, a journal I have edited for the last forty-two years—the time of “theory”—I had already been thinking about time, numbering my days, and reflecting on the question of time itself. Inspired by the maddest American political epoch in my lifetime, launched by the election of 2016, I had already plunged into the vast philosophical, historical, and scientific literature on time, trying to make sense of what makes this moment both unprecedented and utterly predictable, unique and yet exemplary, terrifying and yet filled with potential.[1] Above all I wanted to ask what makes this a teachable moment, one from which we could learn something together. And so I have found myself writing in the present tense about an extraordinarily tense present.
I have not been doing this alone. On every side, pundits, essayists, poets, artists, intellectuals, novelists, historians, political theorists, and philosophers have been weighing in. The present “Posts from the Pandemic” on the Critical Inquiry blog, “In the Moment,” have been pouring in from all over the world, crossing the screens of our editorial collective for debate and evaluation, and then reaching out to a readership much more numerous and far-reaching than the usual audience of a scholarly journal devoted to criticism and theory.
The result has been an enormous outpouring of thoughtful reflection gathered up in these posts. They range from the personal and confessional (Slavoj Žižek noting that he finds himself hoping he will catch the virus) to the apocalyptic and prophetic (Bruno Latour and Achille Mbembe linking the pandemic to climate change, and Joshua Clover bringing it all back to capitalism). Science (Norman Macleod urging us to “show some respect” for viruses and viral metaphors) and the history of science (Catherine Malabou and Lorraine Daston reflecting on how intellectuals have responded to plague). Practical wisdom (Carol J. Adams on “anticipatory care-giving” and why we shouldn’t shake out clothes before washing them; Bill Ayers on the trials and dangers of Zoom teaching). Virus-inspired reflections on biopower and biopolitics are everywhere as Michel Foucault’s prophetic writings continue to resonate (according to Daniele Lorenzini), and Jacques Derrida’s metaphorics of autoimmunity looms on the horizon. Katherine Hayles’s posthumanism relocates our bodies as the battleground between simplicity and complexity, viruses and the counter-virus of human intelligence. Affect theory and collective emotion go global in new forms of wonder and anxiety; the poetry of domestic immersion (Andrea Brady’s “Hanging in the Air”), ferocious tirade (Charles Bernstein’s “Covidity”), and John Wilkinson’s meditation on a time that has lost its legs to love. Mick Taussig’s shamanism finds a vocation, amid the “comic dimension” of self-isolating critical theorists, scholars, and poets laboring at their laptops, promoting their pet theories, predicting both u- and dys-topia, a new world of Green Socialism or a suicidal species hell-bent on authoritarian populism, nationalism, and racism.
Antony Gormley’s Clearing No. 2
Are these “end times”? Trump’s favorite Evangelical minister, Robert Jeffress, pastor of the Dallas First Baptist Church, recently conjured with the possibility that the coronavirus is an apocalyptic judgment from God. Although he asserted with total confidence that “all natural disasters can ultimately be traced to sin,” he reassured his flock that this is not the Biblical plague that signals the apocalyptic end times. The reason: the Antichrist has not appeared yet. Please excuse the uncontrollable laughter that follows this remark as I watch the Dear Leader pontificate on the medicinal virtues of Lysol. Just kidding, wasn’t he?
So, are we experiencing the onset of a New World Order? Peter Szendy’s “Viral Times” explores the temporal paradoxes of “hypervelocity and standstill,” the onset of a surprise that was unthinkable a few short months ago and utterly predictable after “decades of neoliberal dismantling of health and research infrastructures.” Emmanuel Alloa, on the other hand, finds himself “envying the confidence” of those who are “eager to explain to us that everything they have been saying for years has thus proved to be right.” Meanwhile, Irina Dumitrescu and Caleb Smith comfort us with reminders of monastic life as a precedent for temporal stress and chances for the “care of self” produced by “social isolation.” If Hans Blumenberg were still among us, he would no doubt remind us that the trope of “Shipwreck with Spectator” is a “metaphor for existence,” especially that of the philosopher who withdraws from the world to observe it from the solid ground of reason. But he would then go on to note that Nietzsche launched an epoch in the history of philosophy by declaring (with Pascal) that “we have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us.”[2]
Let us agree, then, that we are “all at sea,” and even “all in the same boat,” Spaceship Earth drifting like a modern Titanic whose fate is still unknown, with first-class cabins protecting some of us from the chaos in the engine room and steerage, while the band plays on in the cyber salons. We live in what historians call an “epoch,” a crazy, possibly revolutionary turning point in history in which old certainties collapse and science reveals its true nature as a discourse of contingency, uncertainty, and the incalculable. At the same time, it feels like we socially isolated hermit scholars are trapped in the film Groundhog Day (1993), caught in a time loop in which every day feels like the last, but we are given one more chance for an imaginary do-over. One prediction seems secure: the dates of B.C. and A.D. will now designate the “before” and “after” of COVID-19 as a caesura in the time of our species on this planet. A global pandemic coupled with a financial crisis on the scale of the Great Depression looms before us. In the scale of cosmic time, this is a mere moment that will pass in the “blink of an eye,” what Germans call an Augenblick. In human history it promises to be a game changer.
The concept of epoch, the revolutionary turning point or “momentous moment,” is not the sole property of history. Philosophy, especially skepticism and phenomenology are also grounded in the concept of the epoché, Edmund Husserl’s method of “bracketing” or “suspending” judgment in order to ponder our percepts and concepts for just a moment before getting back to work. We lucky scholars thrive in “down times,” “time-outs,” moments of suspension or bracketing of judgment, when we are compelled to meditate on both our objective perceptions and the “objectless representations” of collective hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, and ideologies. The distinct scales of immediate, urgent, and microscopic “viral times” and the macroscopic planetary scale of climate change converge, as Achille Mbembe argues, and so with every breath you take, every move you make, CI will be watching you.
11 May 2020
W. J. T. Mitchell is the editor of Critical Inquiry.
[1] See also “American Psychosis: Trump and the Nightmare of History,” Lecture at the University of Geneva, January 17, 2017.
[2] Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 19.
Bernard E. Harcourt
Over thirty million Americans just filed first-time unemployment claims as a result of the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, pushing unemployment to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Despite that, the US stock markets recorded in April their best month since 1987; after an initial shock, the markets rallied steadily, rising over 30 percent since their lows in late March. Most economists sounded puzzled and offered fanciful daily explanations. Even Paul Krugman had little to say, suggesting that “Investors are buying stocks in part because they have nowhere else to go.”
But it’s no wonder the markets defied the economic crash. For the markets, there is nothing like a good crisis when the right people are in power. Philip Mirowski wrote tellingly about this during the last debacle—the financial meltdown of 2008—under the moniker “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Now too, the Faustian logic as to why institutional investors just put their bets on the market should not escape us.
First, Donald Trump and the Republican Senators have made it crystal clear that they have the backs of the large-cap corporations no matter how bad things get. By strengthening the largest corporations now, the bailouts will help them weed out their smaller competitors and facilitate monopolistic practices later. After the pandemic, the large-cap corporations will be poised to reap extractive profits, while most small businesses and mom-and-pop stores will be out of business.
Second, the sunset provisions on the bailout restrictions will allow shareholders and managers to enrich themselves when an economic recovery eventually happens, again without ever needing to build reserves because they know they’ll be bailed out next time as well. As Tim Wu details, these recurring bailouts have allowed wealthy managers to pillage in good times—through stock buy-backs and exorbitant executive pay—and get rescued in bad. This too enhances market value while extracting capital for the wealthy.
Third, Trump has sapped any momentum toward universal health care by promising financial exceptions for coronavirus-related health care costs. These COVID-19 carve outs will protect the Republicans from backlash in the November 2020 elections. After it’s all over, the less fortunate will continue to be ravaged by ordinary cancers and poverty-related diseases without any coverage, to the financial benefit of private insurance and corporate and wealthier taxpayers.
Fourth, the pandemic is disproportionately decimating the most vulnerable populations: the elderly, the poor, the uninsured, the incarcerated, and persons of color. The racial imbalance is unconscionable: the coronavirus mortality rate for African Americans is almost three times higher than the mortality rate for whites. The rates of infection in prison and jails are also horrifying. The populations at risk are disproportionately older and poorer, so on Medicare and Medicaid. Some refer to this as “culling the herd.” Market investors can expect that social security will be less of a drag on the economy in the future.
Fifth, the Republicans have been able to secret into the bailouts tax bonanzas for millionaires. One such provision temporarily suspends a limitation on the amount of deductions to nonbusiness income that owners of businesses established as pass-through entities can claim as a way to reduce their taxes owed. The nonpartisan congressional body, the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates this will disproportionately benefit about 43,000 taxpayers in the highest tax bracket (over one million dollars in income) who will receive an average windfall of 1.63 million dollars per filer.
The markets have become the mirror of an ugly truth. Michel Foucault presciently observed, back in 1979, that markets are the touchstone of truth in neoliberal times. And the ugly truth that they reveal today is that the pandemic is a goldmine for large-cap corporations, institutional investors, and the wealthiest. I once overheard a New York real estate tycoon talking about the land grab in the Adirondacks in the 1930s and commenting “Wasn’t the Great Depression grand!” Institutional investors must feel the same way about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sadly, one can hardly expect that much difference in a Democratic administration, especially one that is equally beholden to Wall Street and wealthy donors. The last two—those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—avidly embraced neoliberal policies such as workfare for the unemployed and welfare for the corporate elite. The Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner bailouts of 2008 were the model for today’s.
Mia Ruyter, Hank Paulson (oil on fake leather, 2008)
The only way forward—beyond a next Democratic administration—is a genuine legal transformation that replaces our existing corporate regime with cooperative, mutualist, and nonprofit enterprises. The many of us who create, invent, produce, work, and serve others need to displace the few who extract and hoard capital and put in place a new cooperationism that favors the equitable and sustainable distribution of economic growth and wealth creation.
The legal structure that enables the corporate form—what Katharina Pistor accurately calls the code of capital—has to be repealed and replaced with a new economic framework that circulates the wealth generated from production and consumption. These alternative legal forms, which have existed for centuries and surround us today, include cooperatives for producing and manufacturing, credit unions for banking, housing coops for living, mutualities for insuring, and nonprofit organizations for good works and learning.
This is also the only way to address head-on the global climate crisis. The logic, principles, and values of cooperative arrangements can serve to slow down our consumption-at-all-cost society. The goal of the cooperative enterprise is not to maximize the extraction of capital but to support and maintain all of the participants in the enterprise and to distribute well-being, which includes and depends on a healthy environment. By replacing the logic of capital extraction—the extractive logic as Saskia Sassen calls it—with an ethos of equitable distribution, we can prepare to address the climate crisis after the pandemic is over.
In hindsight, the term capitalism was always a misnomer, coined paradoxically by its critics in the nineteenth century. The term misleadingly suggests that capital inherently functions in certain ways, has a certain DNA, and is governed by economic laws. That’s an illusion though. Capital is just an artifact shaped by law and politics. Its code is entirely man-made. And as Thomas Piketty and others demonstrate, the current concentration of capital and increasing wealth inequalities today are nothing more than a political choice, not the product of any laws of capital.
In truth, we do not live today in a system in which capital dictates our economic circumstances. Instead, we live under the tyranny of what I would call “tournament dirigisme”: a type of state-directed gladiator sport where our political leaders bestow spoils on the wealthy in order to get reelected (and increasingly, to self-fund their own political campaigns).
We need to displace this tournament dirigisme with a legal and political framework that favors cooperation and collaboration between those who create, invent, produce, work, labor, and serve others. Rather than corporations that extract capital for the few shareholders and managers, we need cooperatives, mutuals, and nonprofits that distribute the wealth they create widely to everyone in the shared enterprise; and continually guard against the gross disparities in pay that now characterize our gladiator dirigisme. It will be the only way to tame our obscene and destructive consumerism.
It is not enough to increase progressive wealth taxes on the billionaires and invest more in public hospitals and public schools, as Piketty recently suggested. That won’t fundamentally change the Faustian logic and temptations. Instead, and urgently, it’s time to replace our system of tournament dirigisme with a new cooperationism.
Too many of us in this country are still entranced by the myth of American individualism—the idea that we can go it alone and invent and create and build things by ourselves and reap all the benefits. It is so ingrained in the public imagination, tied to the image of the pioneer gold digger and the shiny rewards of solitary hard work. The ideology undergirds the corporate form and the logic of capital extraction. But for the most part, we succeed in inventing, creating, and producing through mutual support, working together, and collaboration. It is these forms of cooperation that must ground a postpandemic economy.
This pandemic and economic crash must not prevent us from working together to place ourselves in a better position to deal with the other crisis—climate change—still looming on the horizon. On the contrary, these times call for a legal, political, and economic revolution to ring in a new epoch of cooperationism. This will demand political will. It will not come from our political leaders, so beholden now to corporate contributions. It will have to come from us all united.
5 May 2020
[A version of this post appears in French at AOC]
Bernard E. Harcourt is a professor of law and political science at Columbia University in New York City and directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is the author of The Illusion of Free Markets (2011) and The Counterrevolution (2018), and of the forthcoming book Critique & Praxis (2020).
John Wilkinson
The lights have fallen dumb and refuse to travel,
preserving their angles is all that concerns them;
clothes hang in their creases, while in seed-banks
weevils curl up at the futility of spoiling green further.
This time had been expected to have legs, to move
formations across the plain. This time believes love
a moving force, but takes delight and bandages it,
runs closed captioning behind closed doors. What if
an elevator loses purpose, flashlights fail to search,
if empty buses void the timetable – did you survive
Rome’s marauding gangs, did you survive plague?
Lovers take turns round apartments, seek to bring
stars to earth, starring the recesses of bodies plainly
felt, might that stop the fever? – Courses deviate,
the very bricks lift off to touch skin, skin will float
song that pulmonary rises, falls and rises in the street.
29 April 2020
John Wilkinson is professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago and director of the program in Creative Writing and the program in Poetry and Poetics. His first collection of poetry, Useful Reforms, was published in 1976. More recent publications include Reckitt’s Blue (2013), Ghost Nets (2016), and My Reef My Manifest Array (2019). A selected poems, Schedule of Unrest, was published in 2014.
This video is an excerpt from a longer reading featured in “Writers in Residence,” the University of Chicago Program in Creative Writing’s virtual reading series. For the full reading and more videos in the series, visit the Creative Writing YouTube channel.
Since early March, Critical Inquiry has been publishing a series of short pieces about the global outbreak of the coronavirus. “Posts from the Pandemic” features critical writing by Lorraine Daston, Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Achille Mbembe, N. Katherine Hayles and others, many of whom are frequent contributors to the journal. Sometimes speaking alone, but often in conversation with each other, these blog posts have touched on the environmental, political, and economic consequences of the spread of Covid-19. The online response to the series has been overwhelming. With over 200,000 views so far, the blog is being read and commented on by readers all across the world. We’ve never seen anything like this. And we hope to keep posting as contributions to the series continue. Thank you for reading and writing!
W. J. T. Mitchell’s “Groundhog Day and the Epoché”
Slavoj Žižek’s “Is Barbarism with a Human Face Our Fate?” (3/18/20)
Nikolaj Schultz’s “The Climatic Virus in an Age of Paralysis” (3/21/20)
Catherine Malabou’s “To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and ‘I’” (3/23/20)
Kyle Stevens’s “When Movies Get Sick” (3/25/20)
Bruno Latour’s “Is This a Dress Rehearsal” (3/26/20)
Joshua Clover’s “The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour” (3/29/20)
Michael Taussig’s “Would a Shaman Help” (3/30/20)
Andrea Brady’s “Hanging in the Air” (4/1/20)
Daniele Lorenzini’s “Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus” (4/2/20)
Carol J. Adams’s “Anticipatory Care” (4/5/20)
Norman MacLeod’s “COVID-19 Metaphors” (4/6/20)
Alexander Garcia Düttmann’s “A Letter to Oliver Vogel,” translated by James Fontini (4/8/20)
Lorraine Daston’s “Ground-Zero Empiricism” (4/10/20)
Achille Mbembe’s “The Universal Right to Breathe,” translated by Carolyn Shread (4/13/20)
Peter Szendy’s “Viral Times” (4/15/20)
N. Katherine Hayles‘s “Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus” (4/17/20)
Emmanuel Alloa’s “Coronavirus: A Contingency that Eliminates Contingency” (4/20/20)
Irina Dumitrescu and Caleb Smith’s “The Demon of Distraction” (4/22/20)
Charles Bernstein’s “Covidity” (4/24/20)
Bill Ayers’s “OK, Zoomer” (4/27/20)
John Wilkinson’s “After Lucretius” (4/29/20)
Bernard E. Harcourt’s “On Cooperationism: An End to the Economic Plague” (5/5/20)
Chiara Cappelletto’s “Arguments for a New Aesthetic of Presence,” translated by Samuel Fleck (5/13/20)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “Net-munity, or The Space between Us . . . Will Open the Future”(5/20/20)
Lydia H. Liu’s “The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime” (5/26/20)
Leela Gandhi’s “Skeptical Conditions” (6/1/20)
Romi Crawford’s “Connecting Breaths” (6/3/20)
Jenny Holzer’s “COVID-19 / EXPOSE” (6/8/20)
Ewan Jones’s “How to Learn Together, Apart” (6/12/20)
Hannah B Higgins’s “Sonic Images of the Coronavirus” (6/17/20)
Robert Gooding-Williams’s “Revisiting the Ferguson Report: Antiblack Concepts and the Practice of Policing” (6/19/20)
Lennard Davis’s “In the Time of Pandemic, the Deep Structure of Biopower Is Laid Bare”(6/26/20)
Bill Ayers
Yes, yes, I’m teaching my classes on Zoom ().
It’s weird for me, but I’ve got it (I think) and, against my will and better judgment, I feel a little thrill and a burst of relief each time class ends without the internet exploding. I push all the right buttons, issue all the appropriate commands. Oh, joy! ().
Image by Beyza Ozer
So here we are, suddenly, all of us: distance learning, e-learning, online teaching, virtual classrooms—the whole bewildering turmoil. I soldier on, necessarily but not happily, all the while with an irritating chorus of cheerleaders in the background pushing me forward: “online learning is an excellent way to increase student engagement and differentiate instruction;” “digital tools save time and do the heavy lifting by providing ready-to-use lesson plans, instructional materials, and assessments;” “distance learning can continue delivering instruction without disruption even in events like snow days or the COVID-19 pandemic.” Every line offends what I know to be true about teaching, and my sense of what it can achieve, but, wow! snow days or COVID-19—that pretty much covers the waterfront; wait! better add floods and fires and extreme weather.
I was particularly annoyed when I saw my neighbor Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education, on TV finding, as always, a silver lining in the catastrophe (after Katrina, you may remember, he famously declared that New Orleans was now liberated to create a whole new school system from scratch!), this time ushering in the pandemic as dress rehearsal for the “classrooms of the future.”
Come on, Arne— Zoom is not the future of classroom life or teaching. In fact, that response betrays a staggering ignorance about the nature of each. When I saw Arne jogging while on my walk the other day, I suppressed the desire to strangle him, and, fortunately, remembered that I couldn’t get closer than six feet.
Of course distance learning is nothing new—I took a correspondence course on figure drawing in the 1950s (a bust in my case, although I liked the colored pencils) and was tempted to take another on body building offered by Charles Atlas (the advertisement in the back of my comic books promised I could transform myself from a “97-pound weakling” into a tough guy who would never again allow a bully to kick sand in my face at the beach—of course I didn’t have a beach, but whatever). Correspondence courses and distance learning stretch in all directions—back to 1873 and the founding of the US Society to Encourage Studies at Home, onward to 2008 when salvation was offered in the form of MOOCs, or massive open online courses. A colleague of mine at the University of Illinois at Chicago told me in 1995 that e-learning represented the end of educational inequity: “In the remotest village in the Third World, or the most segregated poor neighborhood in this city, a student will be able to access the best professors and hear the best lecture ever given on Romeo and Juliet!” OMG!
The “Great Books Program” has been around for decades, and the “Great Courses,” a series of video classes produced and distributed by the for-profit Teaching Company based in Chantilly, Virginia, claims to have developed over seven hundred courses and sold over fourteen million copies—once again “the greatest scholars and their classic lectures.” So with these and other entrepreneurs already up and running, along with the millions and millions of books out there, why are we even bothering with Zoom? Or classes. Or bricks and mortar. Or professors.
A colleague with experience in distance learning told me that online classes are to actual classrooms what frozen pizza is to home-made pizza: similar ingredients but a vastly different experience. Staying with the metaphor, pizza delivered is straightforward and concrete, as well as often delicious; real classrooms can be delicious as well, but not because the teacher/pizza person “delivered instruction.” Teachers might write books and record lectures—I’ve done both—and those can be more-or-less delivered into the waiting hands (pizza-style) and upturned heads of hungry consumers.
Classroom teaching is quite different—it’s a relationship, a transformative journey for everyone involved. That’s why good teachers come to class ready to teach, but also primed to see, to hear, and to know their students as three-dimensional creatures, much like themselves, each the one-of-one, each a member of the group—an intimate encounter that cannot adequately take place at a distance. The teacher comes as a student-of-the-students, prepared to change lives, and simultaneously prepared to be changed by the propulsive, life-altering energy that’s released whenever a human being’s mind expands or rearranges itself.
Caution: Class Underway—May Be Explosive!
Social distancing is such an awkward, ugly term as well as an unfamiliar but necessary practice we’re all learning to implement together. As we move through these dire and unpredictable times, we might change that language and call it what it is: social solidarity—among the zillion things we can do to help one another out as part of a shared community is to break the chain of contagion and allow some sensible space between us—it’s an act of cooperation, really, not distance or isolation, and an expression of human harmony and not dissonance. Let’s call it by its truer name: social solidarity!
I have two seminars this term, one on Writing Creative Nonfiction, and one on Ethics and Education. I have students zooming in to class from western Canada, Eastern Europe, the Bronx, South Asia, Texas, and places in between. Their circumstances are dramatically different, of course, and yet they are uniformly flexible and forgiving, kind and generous with me and with one another, comrades facing the world arm-in-arm. Each seminar is scheduled for three hours a week, but I’ve kept to about an hour and a half, supplementing with extensive office hours, and regularly correspondence with my students.
Both courses invite us to peer into the pandemic and shine a bright light on the many, many contradictions that the virus illuminates. The ruling class—the powerful, the wealthy, the 1 percent and their enablers in the political class—has an agenda that’s aggressively promoted in good times and in bad, an agenda pulled quickly from the bottom drawer in any crisis and rushed relentlessly toward center stage. So here we are: the privatization of public goods and services, massive transfers of wealth from the public to the private, the destruction of participatory democracy and the erasure of the public, the suppression of voting, the reduction of education and health care and public safety to products, the intensification of white supremacy, and more. And so we wrestle in class with the outlines of an alternative agenda—what are we willing to fight for?
The perennial contradiction between “we” and “me”—a basic human tension with vast social, cultural, and political differences and dimensions—lurched violently toward an exclusive “ME” in our country in 1980 with the “Reagan Revolution” and its racist dog whistles, its opposition to any concept of collectivity or the public, its weaponized individualism, and its anemic, libertarian definition of freedom. Public safety became “own a gun;” “public education” became a product to be bought at the market place; public health was reduced to “take care of yourself.” The word itself—public—in some contexts was racially coded: public welfare, public housing, public aid, public transportation. Saint Ronald Reagan, godhead of the Right and the icon to whom every Republican leader bends a knee and genuflects piously to this day, famously said this at his inauguration: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” That’s the dogma we’re now suffering together now, and that’s the orthodoxy under examination in seminar.
In the opening scene of the Cohen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, Johnny struggles to explain to the big crime boss, Leo, how he’s been wronged by an associate mobster, Bernie. “I’m talkin’ about friendship,” Johnny says, and the camera lingers on the saliva forming in the creases of his thin, menacing smile. “I’m talkin’ about character,” he continues structuring his case. “I’m talkin’ about—Hell, Leo, I ain’t embarrassed to use the word—I’m talkin’ about ethics” (pronounced e-tics).
“When I fix a fight,” Johnny proceeds indignantly, “Say I play a three to one favorite to throw a goddam fight. I got a right to expect the fight to go off at three to one.” Then Bernie, the lying cheat, hears of the deal, manipulates the situation, and the “odds go straight to hell.”
“Now, if you can’t trust a fix,” Johnny whines, “what can you trust?” Without ethics, he concludes, “we’re back into anarchy, right back in the jungle. . . . That’s why ethics are important. It’s what separates us from the animals, from beasts of burden, beasts of prey. Ethics!”
“Do you want to kill him?” asks Leo, cooly.
“For starters,” Johnny replies earnestly.
Johnny, Leo, Bernie—and the Trump mafia—are all talkin’ about ethics.
And the crisis rages on.
27 April 2020
William Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has written extensively about social justice, democracy, and education, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; Race Course: Against White Supremacy; and Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto.