Ariella Azoulay

Potential History: Thinking through Violence

1. Archival Conditions The knowledge that fatal consequences of the past continue to shape what we can see, know, and think—and can also be shaped or affected by our civil imagination—ceased to be a general and abstract working assumption from the moment I began to create an archive of the formative years of Palestine’s transformation into Israel (fig. 1).1 I began to understand several concrete conditions that determine the research of the past. Identifying these archival conditions—and reconstructing the violence involved in their creation and preservation—guided me in shaping a new surface of appearance for the items I collected in this archive.2 I interfered with the usual smooth functioning of invisible conditions for what one can see in and through existing archives and made them items in the archive that I created. The first of these conditions was the basic division of history, as though the history of the Jews and the State of Israel could be told apart from the history of the Palestinians; the second related to the adoption of the new alternative historical paradigm—the nakba— which enables the recognition of the plight of the Palestinians but, in fact, preserves the fundamental rift between Jewish and Palestinian history as if

An alien woman / a permitted woman : on JM Coetzee's Disgrace : Symposium on Disgrace

The heart of the novel concerns two women, both in their twenties, both of whom have undergone a traumatic sexual experience ; the connection between their two stories, the creation of a connection, is the readers task, a task at which Lurie himself fails.

Getting Rid of the Distinction between the Aesthetic and the Political

The point of departure of Berger and Mohr’s Another Way of Telling (1982) is what they call the discovery that ‘photographs did not work as we had been taught’. Since their book was written, the same feeling of ‘discovery’ has been expressed in other writings on photography. Often, these ‘discoveries’ have been linked with the way ‘ordinary’ people have been using photography. This paper addresses this recurrence and asks what are the discursive conditions under which this understanding of photography has been perceived as a ‘discovery’ whenever it has surfaced in the last 30 years. The paper analyzes the conceptual grid within the hegemonic discourse on photography that has contributed enormously to the marginalization of this new understanding of photography — the common opposition between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political’, and accordingly between two seemingly contradictory judgments: ‘this is too political’; ‘this is too aesthetic’. These judgments, applied frequently to photographs taken in zones of ‘regime-made disaster’, usually differ and sometimes completely prevent the possible encounter with the photographed people who, through the photograph, are co-present with the spectators in the event of viewing the photograph.

Palestine as Symptom, Palestine as Hope: Revising Human Rights Discourse

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in 1948 by the then-member states of the United Nations. In the absence of an established international apparatus of enforcement, various means were implemented in order to make the language and principles of the declaration well understood and widely known, if not enforceable. The declaration, though proclaimed as universal, could not be disseminated, internalized, and regarded as universal without extensive educational efforts promoting these particular kinds of rights.1 The document itself was carefully designed to echo the official, minimalist design of other binding agreements such as charters and other declarations (fig. 1).2 To promote the declaration, photographs of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt, a wellknown and respected figure, and pictures of anonymous people attentively reading the publicity poster for the declaration were produced together with photos of heads of state signing the document.3 The UDHR was in-

Declaring the State of Israel: Declaring a State of War

1. This Is (Not) a War When Jean Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), many claimed he had dishonored the memory of those who had fought and died in the Gulf conflict. Others simply dismissed the work as eccentric. After the initial shock wore off, however, many began to recognize the breakthrough that the text marked and the possibilities it opened for rethinking war and its contribution to political economy. Baudrillard argued that the deployment of new technologies, their spatial arrangement in relation to fighting forces, and the military and political power relations between what was presented as two warring sides position us at the dawn of a new age that compels us to abandon previously held concepts of war and to create new ones. To describe the activities in the Persian Gulf Baudrillard replaced the typical understanding of war with a brilliant analysis of what the concept assumes and exposed the gap between previously held assumptions and the actual events. The use of the concept of war presupposes the existence of two sides—two armies fighting each other—and assumes that a clear conclusion is sought, which prevents one from realizing that what occurred in the gulf was actually a unilateral military operation. But Baudrillard’s essay did more than that; it refused to accept the control over the discourse of war that is typically held by those parties with a direct interest in the “conflict,” that is, those with the capacity to initiate and declare war. Baudrillard’s provocative statement—“the Gulf War did not take place”— challenged the discursive control of those who are able to establish that “this is a war” or, alternately, that “this is not a war.” Nearly two decades later, it is as if Baudrillard’s essay had never been written. The second American attack on Iraq was quickly named the Second Gulf War.1 Within the Israeli context, whether directly affected by Baudrillard or as a result of a growing criticism of the Israelis’ violent control of the Palestinians, a critical discourse of war has taken shape since the first Lebanon War that is not exclusive to state officials and the military. For the past fifteen years, as Israel’s large-scale military operations have be-

What Are Human Rights

Azoulay argues that human rights discourse is based on a separation between a closed past, in which what was robbed is no longer contested because the violent dispossession has been legalized and naturalized, and an indefinite future in which the rights of “everyman,” as it were—the typical protagonist of a common declarations of rights—would not be violated. This separation is at the basis of the common discourse of human rights and justifies us calling such a discourse a sovereign discourse of rights. For this sovereign discourse, the state of historical inequality as well as people’s coming together in public to perform their rights are neither points of departure nor concrete bids for reparation and compensation. When people perform their rights in concrete situations of harm and deprivation their performance is usually interpreted as a protest, and they are often blamed with the disturbance of public order and are responded to in kind. Based on Azoulay’s work on revolutionary moments, the essay works to reconstruct a civil discourse of human rights from these sites where people perform together.

Civil alliances – Palestine, 1947–1948

Between November 1947 (The UN Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (The creation of the state of Israel), many Jewish and Arab communities who cared for their country intensified the negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned meticulously to the last detail, during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to prevent the rising violence in the area from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and to salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. In over 100 documented encounters – and probably many more whose records have yet to be found – they promised themselves and each other the continuation of their shared lives. In 2012 I directed a film based on archival documents depicting these events. This essay, followed by the transcript of those events, reflects upon the importance of this chapter for a potential history of Palestine, as well as on her cinematic decisions to film the movie around a map of Mandatory Palestine (from 1947) with the participation of 25 Arabs and Jews of varying ages speaking in Hebrew and in Arabic.

A Tour of the Museum of Regime-Made Disasters

The civil awakening in the Middle East and all over the world reveals more and more facets of regime-made disasters, and the extent to which democracy itself, rather than being their foil, is one of the regime forms wherein such disasters actually take place. This museum, inspired by the Arendtian effort to analyze totalitarian regimes, adopts the widely accepted claim that totalitarian regimes of the kind analyzed by Arendt are a thing of the past, but insists on understanding the disasters afflicting various populations in the world as regime-made ones. The museum follows the way in which such disasters take place and are interlaced in a democratic fiber of life, while being perceived as external to the regime that generates them. This museum is a layout, an outline for visual studies of regime-made disasters and the condition for the emergence of the civil language of revolution.

The Natural History of Rape

This article utilizes photographs taken in Berlin just after the end of World War II to reconstruct the history of mass rape that took place in the city during this period and to argue for this event as foundational to post-war democratic political regimes that inscribed imperialism’s ruling logic within a ‘new world order’. In arguing this point, the author refuses the positivist and evidentiary frameworks through which scholars typically work with photographic images, abjuring an over-emphasis on what is or is not seen within the photographic image, instead focusing on the photograph’s affective and sonic registers, as well as other types of inscriptions in the body of the camera and emissions that require another modality of re/coding. By rereading images historically interpreted as documenting Berlin’s destruction alongside and through textual evidence of the mass rape, this analysis challenges the imperial scopic regime that has classified these images as not being photographs of rape, and connects this act of photographic erasure to the Allies’ post-war efforts to present themselves as saviors, thus legitimizing their continued imperial dominance over the world’s populations.

The Lethal Art of Portraiture

Abstract Since the late 1980s, Miki Kratsman’s photographic work has been produced mainly in what are commonly called the “Occupied Territories.” As a Jewish Israeli citizen and through his work in these regions, Kratsman exposes the nonexternality of the occupation, and the implication of Israeli Jews in it through their actions and interactions with others. Readers of the newspapers where most of Kratsman’s photos have first been published can always indifferently turn the page or whiz by any photograph they encounter. Yet if they choose to pause and observe, Kratsman’s photos share the complexity of the entangled relations between Israelis and Palestinians. In this paper, Azoulay re-visits with Kratsman one single contact sheet of photos from Qabatiya that in the winter of 1988 seemed to be a miss on the part of an alert photojournalist present near a “crucial event”—a lynching that Palestinians had carried out a day earlier of a fellow Palestinian they suspected of collaborating with Israelis. Approached as an archival document, the contact is reconstructed not as a miss, but as a treasure to explore the modus operandi of the Israeli regime of occupation.