Archive of Jordan Skinner
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Why is Gaza alone?: Luciana Castellina remarks on the need for active demonstrations
By Luciana Castellina, 30 July 2014 for Il Manifesto.
I do not want to talk about what is happening in Gaza. I do not want to write about it, because it is too painful for me to have to let out a cry of indignation for the umpteenth time. Because I do not want to reduce myself to hoping in good faith for dialogue between the two sides – an exercise to which so many lofty words are being devoted here in Italy. As if it were a matter of two little kids in a fight, who us civilised types had to school in good manners. Not to mention those people writing justifications for poor old Israel, so cruelly under attack by the terrorists (the Palestinians are never soldiers, but always and everywhere terrorists, while the Israelis are only ever soldiers, and never terrorists).
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The limits to the support for the Israeli government by Eric Hazan
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Alain Badiou's "anti-Semitism": Badiou, Segré, and Winter respond to the current accusations in France
A debate has long been raging between France’s public intellectuals regarding Israel/Palestine and the question of anti-Semitism. From Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 Anti-Semite and Jew to Jacques Derrida’s “Interpretations at War” to Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, France—the country with the largest population of Jews and Arabs in Europe—has been fertile ground for these public debates. Even amongst philosophical allies positions have been fragmented; Deleuze expressed his support for the Palestinian cause, while Foucault held a strong pro-Israel stance.
Today, however, the debate has turned personal as well as ideological as attacks have been levelled against Alain Badiou, whose outspoken pro-Palestinian position and advocacy of a single state, along with his thoughts on anti-Semitism, have aroused much debate. Leading the charge is Éric Marty, a professor of contemporary literature at the University of Paris-7 and the author of Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (2007). Marty had begun his querelle with Badiou as early as 2000 when he criticized Badiou for his enthusiasm for the ideas of the Cultural Revolution in China. By 2006 Marty published a full on attack with an article titled ‘Alain Badiou: the Future of a Negation’ in Les temps modernes. The ‘querelle’ continued with Badiou’s response to Marty titled ‘The Word “Jew” and the Sycophant’, in his book POLEMICS. Reflections on Anti-Semitism, a book co-authored with Eric Hazan and Ivan Segré, set out to definitively dispel all accusations of anti-Semitism against Badiou.
Still, in July, the debate heated up once more with the publication of Gérard Bensussan’s article in Libération titled, ‘The far Left has done what the far Right only dreamed of.’ There Bensussan, a professor of philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, charges Badiou and the far left critics of Israel with helping to restore anti-Semitic sentiments in France.
Below are several responses to Bensussan’s article. The first is Badiou’s retort followed by a response by Cécile Winter, the author of the essay 'The Master-Signifier of the New Aryans', which is published in Polemics. The final response comes from Ivan Segré, a Talmudic scholar and co-author with Badiou of Reflections on Anti-Semitism. -
The Indians of Palestine: An interview between Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar
In 1982, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze interviewed the Palestinian author Elias Sanbar, founder of the Journal of Palestine Studies (La Revue d'Études Palestiniennes). They examine the importance of the journal and the existence of the people and land of Palestine. Disgracefully, over 30 years later, these discussions are still despairingly relevant to today's climate.
We have waited a long time for an Arab journal in French, but instead of coming from North Africa, it's being done by the Palestinians. La Revue d'Études Palestiniennes has two characteristics obviously centered on Palestinian problems which also concern the entire Arab world. On the one hand it presents very profound socio political analyses in a masterful yet calm tone. On the other hand, it mobilizes a specifically Arab literary, historical and sociological "corpus" which is very rich and little known.
-Gilles Deleuze, 1982
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Ten theses on the far right in Europe by Michael Löwy
Xenophobia Blog Series. This is the fourth instalment of a series of pieces published on our blog by leading voices on the current and alarming force of Xenophobia—the fear of "strange and foreign" identities.
Ten theses on the far right in Europe
By Michael Löwy
