Event date:
Wednesday 12 October
Time:
13:00
An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Shakeel Anjum (RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow 2022-2023; Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Frames of Sovereignty and Love: Palestinians, Jean Genet, and the Blacks
At the intersection of Black and Palestinian lives as an emergent thought of the international, the figure of Jean Genet appears as someone who has lived through the intensity of these two inventories of radical traditions, which he came to express in his writings in a single communicative gesture of his own sexuality and life. In their resistance to the carceral practices of settler colonial states (the United States and Israel), Palestinians and the Blacks, for Genet, carry a 'very intense erotic charm’, possessing weight in their ‘gestures’ of protest. Genet's love for them not because they were 'right' in their demand for justice, but they remained beautiful, finds expression in his passionate, posthumously collected essays in The Declared Enemy (2003) and memoir, Prisoner of Love (1986) which he calls a ‘mirror memoir’, as he saw these maligned communities reflecting his own solitude. Black and Palestinian bodies are drawn together in a secret, intimate celebration of life creating reflection of the one in the other, by way of radical procedures of love. Genet desires a sovereign, transparent communication with communities living under the sign of 'scab' inflicted by colonialism as a 'brutal gesture' halting free expression and reflection. Genetian aesthetic provokes us to think of love beyond the predicates of oedipality, kinship, sex, race, and nation, asserting that love is an extended sign of freedom beyond sovereignty.
This work-in-progress seminar seeks to open up the critical inventory of love within structures of feeling as a phenomenology of resistance and the hermeneutics of practical philosophy arising out of a shared idea of living on by hopscotching and crossing over the concept of modern settler-colonial sovereignty and biopolitical systems of constraint; secondly, the seminar will discuss Genet’s idea of love as politically constituted by the decolonial praxis of Palestinian and Black radical imaginations, as Genet saw their lives as living communities of sovereign gestures embodying radical structures of passion. The practice of love as a wayward experiment in politics leading to the flight from the logic of laws and the state is a basic philosophy of ungoverned politics that is grounded in the Palestinian and Black pathways of living on through thinking and desiring by extending their beings. In this project,decoloniality is imagined through the moving decomposition and recompositions of meaning of a shared life and politics through the intimate pathways of the knowledge of heart by going beyond the frames of sovereignty, decision and racial construction of sexualities that associate and bind bodies violently through the structures of oedipalized economy of desire.