Kafka at the West Bank checkpoint: de-normalizing the Palestinian encounter before the law

Abstract

Abstract:The checkpoint has emerged as a quintessential trope within the contemporary Palestinian imagination, to such an extent that "checkpoint narratives" have arguably come to assume a dangerously "normalized" status as everyday, even iconic features of Palestinian existence. Turning to the films Route 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, and like twenty impossibles by Annemarie Jacir, this article explores how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to "de-normalize" the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of the "law" that it represents. Mobilizing the critical paradigms of the "state of exception" and "homo sacer" drawn from the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben and the literary work of Franz Kafka, the article argues that apprehension of the enduring oddity and abnormality of the checkpoint serves as a vital mode of critical resistance to the policies of

Thanato-geographies of Palestine and the possibility of politics

“…on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen’. Academic work along this theme of life reduced to (or towards) zoē – ‘the simple fact of living’ in contrast to bios , ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ (Agamben, 1995, 1) – in Palestine ranges from the site-specific – for instance, at checkpoints (Alijla, 2019; Ball, 2014; Bowman, 2007), the separation wall (Boano and Martén, 2013), refugee camps (Hanafi, 2009) and detention facilities (Khalili, 2008) – to the more quotidian thanato-juridical logics that mark Israel’s governing of the Palestinian population (Ghanim, 2008; Gordon, 2008; Mbembe, 2003, 2019). For example, Glenn Bowman’s (2007: 129–133) writing on ‘encystation’ – or ‘the process of enclosing within a cyst’ – deploys a spatial metaphor of ‘a closed sac in which morbid matter is quarantined’ to elaborate on the inclusive-exclusion of a ‘dehumanised’ Palestinian population trapped within severely restricted mobilities (emphasis added).…”