Last year, our seminar Nonrelation, Comparison and Dissensus challenged one of the foundational assumptions of comparative literary study: that the task of comparison is to connect, translate, or produce mutual recognition. Drawing on Adhira Mangalagiri’s theorization of disconnect, Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus, we approached nonrelation not as a failure of comparison but as one of its constitutive conditions. Our discussions were shaped by the recognition that Palestinians and Israelis do not encounter one another from equivalent positions but from radically different lived realities produced by genocide, displacement, unequal citizenship, and settler colonialism. These structural differences fundamentally shape the conditions under which literature is written, studied, translated, read and compared. Across conversations on translation, collaboration, mutual recognition, opacity, and refusal, a recurring question emerged: what forms of reading  becomes possible when comparison no longer seeks to reconcile these unequal realities but instead, attends to the tensions, breakdowns, and irreducible differences that constitute them?

We propose to remain with the tensions that surfaced in our previous discussions. If nonrelation names refusal of liberal narratives of dialogue, empathy, recognition, and coexistence, what forms of relation remain? How might we inhabit spaces of friction, inequality, contingency and discomfort without converting them into narratives of healing or moral progress? Our point of departure remains Palestine-Israel not because it offers a generalizable model but precisely because it does not -- it exposes the limits of comparison itself. Discussions from last year’s seminar repeatedly returned to ways translation and literary exchange are often imaged as technologies of repair. Whether in calls for collaboration, dialogue, ethical translation, mutual recognition or cross-cultural understanding, comparison frequently operates through what one of the papers identified as a “liberal promise” – that exposure will produce empathy, and that empathy will produce recognition, and that recognition will produce justice. Yet the ongoing genocide in Gaza has intensified questions about whether such assumptions remain intellectually or politically tenable or even ethical. We are particularly interested in the costs of legibility and the potential productivity of frustration. What does it mean to write, translate or compare under conditions in which the demand for understanding becomes implicated in structures of violence and domination?  Can English tolerate texts that do not seek inclusion within an anglophone “we”?  At the same time, the seminar seeks to explore forms of collaboration that do not culminate in harmony. Can friction, frustration and tension become modes of support? What forms of comparison emerge when dissensus is understood not as a temporary obstacle but as an ethical necessity?