Saturday, June 4th, 9.30 – 11.15, at Università di Verona, Room 2.2
Abstract:
Instead of representing collective political empowerment, the second Palestinian uprising, the al Aqsa Intifada, generally foregrounds the fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement and the de-democratisation and militarisation of Palestinian resistance. This paper, which draws on the conclusions of my PhD thesis, argues that rather than being seen as a crisis of Palestinian political subjectivity and nationalism per se, the al Aqsa Intifada needs to be understood as a crisis of representation, one calling for new ways of understanding, conceptualising and representing politics and political subjectivity in Palestine. The paper shows that since the first Intifada, political life in Palestine has moved increasingly towards modes and spaces that can not find adequate representation within the dominant discourses of Nationalism and Islamic militancy. In order to understand the problematic and, even more importantly, the political potential of these ‘subaltern’ aspects of Palestinian resistance, the thesis suggests an alternative analytical approach that explores the crisis of the al Aqsa Intifada in relation to the wider political problematic of postcolonial late modernity and centres on a notion of the late modern subject of colonial occupation. In so doing, the paper concludes that the potential and promise of the Palestinians' struggle might currently be understood best in terms of non-violent and non-militant forms of action whose aesthetics are closer to struggles for radical democracy than to the aesthetics of a nationalist liberation movement.
