MESA Banner
Spectres of Estrangement: the ‘ungovernable’ camp and the figure of the ‘irreconcilable’ refugee
Abstract
With the effective collapse of the national project over the past decade, Palestinian society, having lost its principal collective referents and shared assumptions --- i.e., the collective red lines and fundamentals, often subsumed under the code word thawabet, that mediate and interact with the occupying power and maintain collective national identity--appears to have come largely unmoored. The contemporary moment, then, is one of dissonance and flux that allows for a diffusion of lines of individuation and modalities of subjectivity. There is a spatial dimension to all this, not only in terms of the territorial division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also insofar as the people who inhabit this/these “shared space(s)” increasingly belong to different life-worlds, rely on different and non-commensurate registers, travel in divergent temporal trajectories. Here, ‘humanitarian’ and statist (and proto-statist) apparatuses collide and re-align, as Palestinian subjects begin to live out not only daily fragmentation but, more critically, what can be described as spatio-temporal mutual estrangement. Against this background, the paper focuses on the “ungovernable” spatiality of the Palestinian refugee camp and the “irreconcilable” refugee as the twin specters at the hidden heart of the mutual estrangement that pervades Palestinian society. The camp is often “read” as a sovereign device of control (the paradigmatic space of modern exception), but in Palestine at least it is also a site of “possibility” precisely in its legal suspension and spatial “otherness.” Not only is the camp physically more difficult to discipline and to surveil, but it is also-- by virtue of its liminality and spatial/legal indeterminacy-- the site and resource of an emergent subjectivity from which refugees intervene in the process of (sovereign and humanitarian) subjectification. It is precisely this “capacity” for intervention that Agamben defines as the "point of ungovernability," which for him is the beginning and line of flight of all politics. This is not to say that the camp is post-control or post-discipline, but to recognize its dialectical nature as a spatialized apparatus of control/containment and innovation. And because the “refugee,” who is legally recognized as a person out-of-place, has aspirations and identifications that defy – or cannot be realized—in the temporal space of the political present, the camp’s ungovernability is compounded. The permanence of Palestinian refugee-hood subverts the (idealized) conception that humanitarian crises that “produce” and maintain refugees are temporary and finite.
Discipline
Architecture & Urban Planning
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None