https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4404-6720
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ABSTRACT
This essay invites thought on the structure, texture, and limits of theory in the North Atlantic university humanities as brought into relief by Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. I suggest here that the deep idiomatic and affective reflexes of theory are emergent and contoured by the imperial colonial imagination as it undergoes decomposition from ecological collapse, pandemics, global capitalist deterioration, and unyielding insurgent resistance. Creative and critical theory in the university, I ultimately argue, is a tertiary prose of counterinsurgency whose chiasmic codes absorb insurgent energies, scrambling and recoding them in terms set by the political unconscious of racial capitalist catastrophism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Al Jazeera, “More Children’s deaths in Gaza in 3 weeks than annual total since 2019: NGO” October 29, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/29/more-childrens-deaths-in-gaza-in-3-weeks-than-annual-total-since-2019-ngo (accessed April 4, 2024).
2 Middle East Monitor, “Israel Minister Calls for ‘Ways More Painful than Death’ for Palestinians,” January 6, 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240106-israel-minister-calls-for-ways-more-painful-than-death-for-palestinians/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
3 Irfan Galaria, “Opinion: I’m an American Doctor who went to Gaza. What I Saw wasn’t War—It was Annihilation,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children (accessed April 4, 2024).
4 Alex de Waal, “Starvation as a Method of Warfare,” The London Review of Books, January 11 2024, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/january/starvation-as-a-method-of-warfare (accessed April 4, 2024).
5 Nicky Andrews, “‘Doxxing Truck’ Displays Names and Images of CU Boulder Ethnic Studies Faculty on Campus,” January 30, 2024, https://www.denverpost.com/2024/01/30/doxxing-truck-displays-names-and-images-of-cu-boulder-ethnic-studies-department-on-campus/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
6 Ahlam Muhtaseb, “An Accounting from Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb,” Communication and Race, https://doi.org/10.1080/28346955.2024.2308452
7 Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counterinsurgency,” ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In Selected Subaltern Studies (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45-86
8 Kai Heron, “Capitalist Catastrophism,” Roar, June 17, 2020, https://roarmag.org/magazine/capitalist-catastrophism/
9 Robert Lee et al., “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News, March 30, 2020 https://www.landgrabu.org/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
10 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).
11 Guillory, Cultural Capital, 257.
12 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919-1045.
13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 149.
14 Timothy Brennan, "Running and Dodging: The rhetoric of Doubleness in Contemporary Theory." New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 277-299.
15 For paradigmatic texts that inscribe this tendency, See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) and William Connolly, World of Becoming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
16 For a landmark text of the reparative turn, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). For an excellent critique of the reparative turn, see Patricia Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
17 For an example, see Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016).
18 This is more or less the career arc of Achille Mbembe. For a critique of Mbembe, see Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African philosophy (New York Routledge, 2016).
19 Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1977), 142-49.
20 Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2009).
21 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
22 I’m alluding, with a twist, to Timothy Bewes’s “pathos of ineffability.” See Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 174.
23 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin UK, 2004). Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-248.
24 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52.
25 Anthony Reed, "The Black Situation: Notes on Black Critical Theory Now." American Literary History 34, no. 1 (2022): 283.
26 Reed, “The Black Situation,” 284.
27 Reed, "The Black Situation,” 296.
28 For a brilliant piece fired by a Global South imagination, see Bryan Mukandi. "Pan-African Pandemonium: Identities, Histories, and Constellations," Philosophy & Rhetoric 56, no. 1 (2023): 33-50. Another magnificent essay in this vein is Kundai Chirindo, "Rhetorical Places: From Classical Topologies to Prospects for Post-Westphalian Spatialities,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (2016): 127-131.
29 Reed, “The Black Situation,” 296.
30 Reed, “The Black Situation,” 296-97.
31 Omedi Ochieng, “Infraontology: Rhetoric, Insurgency, Abolition,” in Handbook on Rhetoric and Power, ed. Nathan Crick (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
32 Eyal Weizman, “Lethal Theory,” Log, no. 7 (Winter/Spring 2006), 54.
33 Weizman, “Lethal Theory,” 54-55. Gilles Deleuze, to his credit, is on record for his unequivocal support for Palestine and unyielding opposition to Zionism. The critique advanced in this essay is particularly concerned to pick out why, for example, Deleuze's imagistic and affective idioms thrum uncannily in the Zionism imagination. See Gilles Deleuze, “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Discourse 20, no. 3 (1998): 30-33.
34 Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
35 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 6.
36 See Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 208.
37 A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012).
38 Noah Lanard, “The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric,” Mother Jones, November 3, 2023, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament/ (accessed April 4, 2024). Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that it was a Palestinian, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who convinced Hitler to exterminate Jews. See Zack Beauchamp, “Benjamin Netanyahu Blames the Holocaust on a Palestinian Mufti. That’s Ludicrous,” October 21, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/10/21/9584122/netanyahu-mufti-hitler (accessed April 4, 2024).
39 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self- Fashioning in Israel Society (Chicago, 2001).
40 On the word casual as an echo of casualty, see Stanley Cavell. The casual as “expressions of thoughtlessness and conformity,” and, moreover, “permanent, … can rarely be neutralized by a simple ‘pardon me.’” See Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 29.
41 Jurgen Habermas’s statement declaring solidarity with Israel even as the Zionist entity perpetrates a genocidal campaign offers a devastating comment on critical theory. See Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Gunther and Jurgen Habermas, “Grundsatze de Solidaritat. Eine Stellungnahme,” in Normative Orders, https://www.normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatze-der-solidaritat/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
42 Noah Feldman, “The New Antisemitism,” Time, Feb. 27, 2024, https://time.com/6763293/antisemitism/
43 Jeremy Scahill, “Joe Biden Keeps Repeating His False Claim That He Saw Pictures of Beheaded Children,” The Intercept, Dec. 14, 2023, https://theintercept.com/2023/12/14/israel-biden-beheaded-babies-false/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
44 For a comprehensive debunking, see Feminist Solidarity Network for Palestine, “How The New York Times Helps Israel Weaponize Rape Allegations Against Palestinians,” in The New York Times War Crimes, 2023, https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-helps-israel-weaponize-rape-allegations-against-palestinians
45 Michael Arria, “The Shift: White House Press Secretary Calls Progressives Calling for Ceasefire ‘Disgraceful’ and ‘Repugnant’,” Mondoweiss, October 13, 2027, https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/the-shift-white-house-press-secretary-calls-progressives-calling-for-ceasefire-disgraceful-and-repugnant/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
46 James Baldwin. "Everybody's Protest Novel,” ed. RS Hosmon and C. Montague, Man: Paradox and Promise, (Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1973), 123-128.
47 Yara Hawari, “Why are Israeli Soldiers Sharing Snuff Videos from their Genocide in Gaza?” Al Jazeera, January 24, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/24/why-are-israeli-soldiers-sharing-snuff-videos-from-their-genocide-in-gaza (accessed April 4, 2024).
48 Darryl Li, “The Rise and Fall of Baby Boomer Zionism,” Hammer and Hope, Spring 2024, https://hammerandhope.org/article/boomer-zionism (accessed April 4, 2024).
49 Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5.
50 Hilary Clinton, quoted in Saree Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 48.
51 Makdisi, Tolerance is a Wasteland.
52 Edward Ongweso, “Mowing the Lawn: The Genocide Industry” Logic(s), December 13, 2023, https://logicmag.io/policy/the-genocide-industry-mowing-the-lawn/ (accessed April 4, 2024).
53 Fredric Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber," New German Critique 1 (1973): 52-89.
54 Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (London: Repeater Books), 2024.
55 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400.
56 Omedi Ochieng, The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).
57 Ghassan Kanafani. “The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine,” (New York: Committee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972), 67.