CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Andreea Nicutar |
|---|---|
| Title | Witnessing Body and States of Terror |
| Summary | The dissertation addresses one question, fundamental for political life: how do we practice the ethical work of witnessing violence in states of terror, that is in social worlds that circulate terror in everyday life? To become witnesses to violence is a practice, I argue, a kind of work which requires an embodied attention to terror precisely when terror targets the body not only as fragile object easily destroyed, but also as the matter through which terror circulates. Thus, if terror needs its usable bodies, how do we take the feeling, sensing body back? This is where the labor an embodied attention unfolds, what I call witnessing as a practice to bring us slightly beside the body terrorized and terrorizing. I offer a genealogical approach to the research of political violence in Israel/Palestine. This instance of militarized violence is dominantly analyzed as an entrenched local conflict and a case of violent dispossession and oppression of one people by another. The dissertation destabilizes these approaches in one sense, by asking how this locale might illuminate two general questions of politics: first, what is a people and how it comes into being as a political body that organizes affective attachments (love for those like us, hatred for the “enemy”). The second question concerns the conceptual approaches that largely organize the literature on “Israel/ Palestineȁ d; as a local conflict. Instead, I offer a methodological proposition for an embodied attention to violence as it constitutes itself as a political discourse (“state” or “society” or “citizen”) through bodily gestures, affective circuits that weave the feelings that attach us to a “place.” The first question returns to the problem regarding the production of a “people” as a reified, total body invoked in the literature on the conflict. Conceptually, this is organized as a question about power in two complex technologies that produce the people: sovereignty and biopolitics. These two technologies are generally regarded as lethal and caring powers, respectively. I complicate this view in order to reflect on obvious paradoxes of living as a Jewish citizen in a militarized society and state. The main paradox I follow in empirical analysis concerns moments in which those nominated and self-nominated as citizens and thus as valuable lives confront the actual lethal conditions on which their protection is premised. How does the citizen relate to one’s “home” and “society” when it becomes glaringly clear that they are made possible through violent means that directly and intensely contribute to making social worlds poorer and precarious? Equally relevant for this question concerning the making of the “people” is to historicize the sovereign and biopolitical strategies that make intelligible the valuable life and return that history of the state to its colonial condition of becoming the main relevant political entity. The second question aims to destabilize some of the choices that the “researcher” might make when studying a conflict as a local instance of violence happening somewhere “there,” at a distance for where we happen to be and read about it, considering it as composed observers, analytically - safely. The danger, I argue, is analytical and ethical. In the more familiar manners of referring to a locale of violence, we risk reproducing an attitude that takes the researcher “out of the picture,” as the main subject researching his or her object of interest. Twice removed from the locale is the reader, who must accept the authoritative narrative of the writer. What becomes increasingly objectified is the “thing” to be known, the place, “Israel” and “Palestine.” Instead, I offer a narrative that describes how I orient myself through claims of suffering, of feeling terror, and through actual responses to terror. I pay attention both to narrative acts and to affective states that are conducive to choices for the names of the feelings that the actors invoke. This offers, or at least this is the wager, a possibility for the reader to also begin a process of orientation through the scenes narrated. That orientation is not only analytical, but also embodied. In this more expansive manner of understanding attention to a locale of violence, the stake of my approach is to broaden the possibilities for our questions about the forces that make us as subjects responsible, or not, for violence. The main argument that brings these two questions together appears more clearly as I invoke in my research an approach to an embodied attention to atmospheres of terror, meaning social worlds that circulate terror through mundane gestures and emotions in an environment that self-terrorizes its subjects. An embodied attention asks of this writer and of readers to consider how we find names -and circulate names- for what we feel. This consideration is, I argue, the main technique to emancipate ourselves from oppressive states. |
| Supervisor | Astrov Alexander V. |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/nicutar_andreea.pdf |
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