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• Title: Derrida and the Palestinian Question.
• Author : Arena Journal
• Release Date : January 01, 2002
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 198 KB

Description

In the aftermath of the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the world has once again turned its attention to the Palestinian- Israeli conflict. (1) The recent Aqaba Summit, underwritten by George W. Bush's so-called 'Road Map to Peace', has re-awakened regional hopes that a fair settlement of this debilitating conflict might be found. It might therefore be timely to review the work of some key theorists who have addressed this problem. Although largely ignored, Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx offered a thought-provoking response to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the early 1990s. (2) Derrida's analysis also introduced the concept of 'messianicity', an alleged universal structure of consciousness (3)--or a 'groundless ground' of interlocutory exchange. (4) During the 2001-2 and 2002-3 academic years, I taught courses in US foreign policy and cultural studies at the University of Jordan, Amman. The majority of my students were of Palestinian origin--as is true of most residents of Amman today--and so our inquiry into Derrida's Specters of Marx was framed by concerns that are specific to this region and its citizens--the children of the three major Palestinian 'transfers'. (5) This article was written during the terrible months of the Spring of 2002 as Israelis conducted military operations in Ramallah, Jenin, Gaza and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories. In this context, Derrida's often nebulous, when not downright evasive, remarks on the 'war for the appropriation of Jerusalem' were seldom greeted with enthusiasm. While my students at the University of Jordan attempted to be fair to Derrida, as well as to Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky and other theorists whom we studied, our often spirited and contentious discussions of Specters of Marx did not take place in a political vacuum. Although the conclusions in this article are mine, they were deeply affected by the concerns and personal histories of my students. My initial enthusiasm for Specters of Marx began to erode in this highly charged environment. In fact, it was possible to hear raucous protests, marches, flag-burnings (of US and Israeli flags) from the seminar room where we met. Though I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself, it is safe to say that some consensus was achieved in our analysis of Specters of Marx, especially in the following ways. First, Derrida's critique of Fukuyama seemed disingenuous to all of us, or at least highly problematic, especially insofar as the latter was used by Derrida to emblematize liberal humanism in all its multifarious and complex forms. Whatever the shortcomings of liberalism and humanism in history, from the standpoint of dispossessed Palestinians, the deconstructive posture towards them was highly suspect. Second, from the Christian and Muslim perspectives of those Arabs who share this history, Derrida's 'universal' concept of messianicity appeared to be obviously and indefensibly ethnocentric, a crass positioning of Judaism as master-code. Finally, Derrida's analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seemed to most of us to offer a religious solution to an emphatically secular problem, an actual struggle for land rather than the playing out of a figurative eschatology (the Zionist 'war for Jerusalem'). (6) In this article I develop my own views about Derrida's approach to the Palestinian question in these key areas. However, I hope too that an echo of my students' voices may be heard by all those who read it, especially those seeking a just resolution to more than fifty years of armed conflict in this region.

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