Join us for this free 90-minute online public lecture by Dr. Soumyabrata Choudhury on War of Worlds, Worlds of War: Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza. You can book your seat at the foot of this page; once you register, you will receive the Zoom link to join the event on November 20th.
Jean-Luc Godard made a documentary on Vietnam called Far from Vietnam (1967). Today, though sitting at a great distance from Gaza, one is surrounded by images of war, death and destitution from Gaza and its neighbourhoods bordering the state of Israel — images that appear to immediately “affect” us with the situation in Gaza. However, are we really situated in the reality we identify by the name “Gaza” such that we can not only be affected by its humanitarian catastrophe but also by its thought? Or are we still so far from Gaza that we can only see or feel its reality through the insuperable distance of an image?
In this talk, the word “thought” can be read in both directions of the “of” in thoughts of Gaza: the thoughts that we claim to think at an irreducible distance from Gaza about Gaza and the thoughts that emerge from Gaza itself, which, strangely images of the place partly block and yet without which any thinking about Gaza would be nominal if not impossible. One of the possible approaches to this attempt to think in a situation as well as at a distance from it, will be to analyse the question of war that governs much of the current discussion around Israel and Palestine: does the State of Israel merely fight a war of self defence or in claiming to do so it inflicts another war, a war on the world that is Palestine, exactly when it reduces Palestine to the murder and destitution of life in Gaza? In this talk, Dr. Soumyabrata Choudhury will distinguish between the level of “life” which is an object of humanitarian care — and hence also of inhuman brutalisation— and that of “world”, which is an active appearing of a political subject — and hence the target of a mode of war which seeks to make all world and all politics disappear.
Soumyabrata Choudhury is a professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and the author of Theatre Number Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth(2013), Ambedkar and Other Immortals : An Untouchable Research Programme (2018) and Now It’s Come to Distances : Notes on Shaheen Bagh and Coronavirus, Association and Isolation (2020)