End Date :
The Heyman Center for the Humanities,
Komoda Room
Mr. Cohen’s writes:
In this paper, entitled “A Racism of Disengagement: Israel’s Militarized Neoliberal Apartheid,” I argue that we witness today in Israel/Palestine a novel regime-type informed by an elective affinity between Israeli ethnocracy and a neoliberal economic order, suturing new racial operative logics. This regime has replaced exploitation of Palestinians with their expulsion from, first, the circuits of production and, eventually, conscious or humane life of most Jewish Israelis. In this regime, subjugation of Palestinians is based on control beyond discipline, and de-capacitization of economic production beyond exploitation. Israel’s society of control is predicated both on the obviation of native labor as means for its economic flourishing, and on the perpetuation and harnessing of a sado-masochist libidinal economy of excessive militarism. No longer hindered or mediated by any sort of engagement, be it in the in sense of labor relations or co-habitation of space or time, racial violence unimaginable under exploitative racism is threatening to explode in this regime.
If Israel preserves old relics of “modern” racism, I claime, in enforcing a neoliberal regime concurrently with a continued military occupation it also points to a postmodern racism, where under the consonant operation of biopolitics and sovereign power, social administration and economic management become the proper means of waging war. Under a matrix of inclusion/exclusion, Palestinians become superfluous in a double sense: as the unproductive of the capitalist system, and as the undesired racialized population beyond the pale of law. Yet, their lives are not simply abandoned.
Although value-less according to the calculations of both neoliberal economics and Israeli ethnocracy, Palestinians are nevertheless not simply left to die. Rather, Israel seems to rely on their continual survival as a perpetual threat, or the spectacular phantom enemy haunting its unconscious, constituting what I name a libidinal attachment to domination. I ask, through a turn to psychoanalysis, what are the psycho-logics at play in this new governmental violence-economy, in which violence seems to no longer be a means to an end, but an end in itself; under the guise of deterrence, deadly violence functions as an outlet for excess primary aggressiveness, where the production of death extends or redefines the parameters of what we normally call the economy.
Note: The paper is available to read in advance. Please contact the ICLS office.
Matan Cohen is an Israeli political activist, primarily concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He is a founding member of direct action group Anarchists Against the Wall, a military service refusnik, and a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns coordinator. His opinions, interviews and pictures have appeared, among other places, in The Nation, The Guardian, BBC, Al-Jazeera, The New York Times, Haaretz, the book Occupied Minds, and the films Enraged and Intifada Cult. He is currently a PhD student in the Middle East, African and South Asian studies department at Columbia University, where he is also a Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
