Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book... more Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book In Spite of Partition
I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, y... more I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, yes, cultural differences aside) that is obsessed with, privileges, worships, and fears (losing) the penis. This isn't simply a "man's world," this is a world designed by and for the penis. Many brilliant feminists have made brave and poetic attempts to write their way out of phallocentrism. I love Hélène Cixous' plea to women to write their desire through their vaginas, her cry for the vulva to be heard ("je veux vulve!"). I shivered with joy when I first read Luce Irigaray's love ode for the multiplicity of the inner lips. Woman needs no other because she is already plural, her vaginal lips make love as she walks. I still teach these texts and they continue to make college students giggle with embarrassment, a clear sign of their success. (Hélène Cixous. "The Laugh of the Medusa" 1975. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One [1977], 1986.) Speaking about vaginas continues to be something they find very difficult. They are much more at ease saying "penis" "dick" "cock." Anything just not vagina, let alone, lips, or clit. Cixous and Irigaray labored to create a discursive space from which one could speak of/from the plurality of the vagina. They called for us to speak of women's sexuality and pleasure. To voice our Jouissance. The painful truth is that like the subaltern, the vagina cannot speak, for when it does, it already speaks the phallus. Or it is accused of meddling into serious business, brining yeast infection and other abject interventions that interrupt the phallic order (Lacan said as much explicitly). Judith Butler made this very clear in their melancholic celebration of the lesbian phallus. (Judith Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary," Bodies that Matter 1993.) A thing that isn't a thing at all, but is a play on a play on words, always already within the (phallic) symbolic order. There is no way out. But even this powerful argument can only offer solace to the already convinced. Those for whom the fictionality of the phallus is painfully clear. Still, there is a big gap between knowing something is fiction, and being able to actually find freedom and playfulness in the limited libidinal space opened between the signifier and the signified, even in the hands (or on the hips) of a very capable lesbian. I tried.
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers,... more In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.
... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les... more ... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les silences du palais * Gil Hochberg Nations are nothing eternal. They had a beginning, they will have an end. ...Moufida Tlatli, Les silences du palais, Tunisia, 1994 (French and Arabic). ...
Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book... more Bringing Hebrew Back to Its (Semitic) Place On the Deterritorialization of Language From the book In Spite of Partition
I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, y... more I have unfinished business with the penis. Don't we all? We live in a phallocentric world (yes, yes, cultural differences aside) that is obsessed with, privileges, worships, and fears (losing) the penis. This isn't simply a "man's world," this is a world designed by and for the penis. Many brilliant feminists have made brave and poetic attempts to write their way out of phallocentrism. I love Hélène Cixous' plea to women to write their desire through their vaginas, her cry for the vulva to be heard ("je veux vulve!"). I shivered with joy when I first read Luce Irigaray's love ode for the multiplicity of the inner lips. Woman needs no other because she is already plural, her vaginal lips make love as she walks. I still teach these texts and they continue to make college students giggle with embarrassment, a clear sign of their success. (Hélène Cixous. "The Laugh of the Medusa" 1975. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One [1977], 1986.) Speaking about vaginas continues to be something they find very difficult. They are much more at ease saying "penis" "dick" "cock." Anything just not vagina, let alone, lips, or clit. Cixous and Irigaray labored to create a discursive space from which one could speak of/from the plurality of the vagina. They called for us to speak of women's sexuality and pleasure. To voice our Jouissance. The painful truth is that like the subaltern, the vagina cannot speak, for when it does, it already speaks the phallus. Or it is accused of meddling into serious business, brining yeast infection and other abject interventions that interrupt the phallic order (Lacan said as much explicitly). Judith Butler made this very clear in their melancholic celebration of the lesbian phallus. (Judith Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary," Bodies that Matter 1993.) A thing that isn't a thing at all, but is a play on a play on words, always already within the (phallic) symbolic order. There is no way out. But even this powerful argument can only offer solace to the already convinced. Those for whom the fictionality of the phallus is painfully clear. Still, there is a big gap between knowing something is fiction, and being able to actually find freedom and playfulness in the limited libidinal space opened between the signifier and the signified, even in the hands (or on the hips) of a very capable lesbian. I tried.
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers,... more In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.
... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les... more ... 33 National Allegories and the Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli's Les silences du palais * Gil Hochberg Nations are nothing eternal. They had a beginning, they will have an end. ...Moufida Tlatli, Les silences du palais, Tunisia, 1994 (French and Arabic). ...
In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by ... more In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.
Published at the height of the process of physical and political separation between Israel and Pa... more Published at the height of the process of physical and political separation between Israel and Palestine, Gil Hochberg's In Spite of Partition joins a large and growing group of publications that address the 1947 partition of Palestine by UN Res. 181 and the resulting permanent conflict that ensued. After six decades of armed conflict and four decades of the illegal occupation of diverse Arab territories (including the whole of Palestine), many are beginning to recognize the improbability of the two-state solution and are turning to other older and more enlightened spaces of desire to search for the potential for a lasting, just solution in Palestine. The number and variety of titles dealing with the one-state solution is dazzling, evidence of the bankruptcy of not just Israel's political elite, but also of the West's. Hochberg's book is an especially welcome addition: it does not so much discuss the solution as it addresses the contours of the imaginative space in which a solution may grow. Further, it traces the history of a different discourse from the one that has dominated the politics of the Middle East for the last few decades. Taking his lead (and his title for the book) from Edward Said, Hochberg is trying to replace " the economy of identity (I versus You, Arab versus Jew) with an economy of relation (I as You, Arab as Jew) " (p. 16). Rather than going back to historical points, such as the Brit Shalom period in the 1920s, Hochberg maps the terrain of the relationships between the disputed identities of Jew and Arab through the close analysis of a number of key literary works written by Jews and Arabs since the Nakba. This is done through chapters discussing each a different stage and aspect of the separation, as well as the relationship between Arab and Jew through the examination of a number of iconic novels by such writers as Albert Memmi and Edmond El Maleh (both North African Jews writing in French), Jacqueline Kahanoff and Ronit Matalon (Egyptian and Israeli Jews respectively), Anton Shammas (a Palestinian writing in Hebrew), and Albert Swissa (an Israeli Jew writing in Hebrew). The range of positions is broad but conceptually well-organized, referencing the important work of Daniel Boyarin, Elie Kedourie, Ella Shohat, Amnon Raz-Krakozkin, Gil Anidjar, Sami Chetrit, Judith Butler, and many others while adding significantly to the debate each of them has addressed. The main issues addressed in the book emerge from each writer's positioning of the central tension between the Arab and Jew as fluid containers of identity. Memmi and El Maleh both express a historical potentiality that they present as " missed " —the ability to exist as an Arab Jew in the Mahgrib. Hochberg notes the difference between Memmi's Haim Bresheeth, professor of media and cultural studies at the University of East London, is co-editor (with Hammami) of
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