This seminar aims to discuss the different ways colonialism and capitalism are related in Palestine/Israel; and, conversely, how Palestinian/Israeli anti-colonial politics is related to class struggle. While contemporary critics agree that Palestine/Israel names a situation determined by both colonialism and capitalism, the relationship between them often goes untheorized. One can ask, for example, whether one of these—class contradiction, colonial oppression—serves as the “principal contradiction,” to borrow from Mao, relegating the other to a secondary status. Or, is the Symbolic prominence of colonial antagonism as an organizing concept the best way to approach the unrepresentable capitalist Real in Palestine/Israel? Or, to reframe the problem once again, how does imagining class struggle inflect how we think of anti-colonial struggle in Palestine/Israel?  

This seminar seeks to answer these questions and others by focusing on three registers. First, considering cultural production, we ask, how does art from Palestine/Israel help us perceive the relationship between capitalism and colonialism, against dominant political discourses? How does the Marxist tradition’s formal-historical hermeneutic allow us to see how colonial content is sedimented in artistic form, to use Adorno’s term? How does artistic production help us distinguish ideologically-dominant visions of the good life, from truly emancipatory projects, ones that cannot be realized in the existing social order? How is critical recovery of repressed colonial antagonism in cultural production related to capitalism in Palestine/Israel?

Secondly, psychoanalytic terminology can help mediate the relationship between the Real of the capitalist system (unrepresentable, all-encompassing) and Symbolic ways in which constitute reality in Palestine/Israel. What kind of symbolic orders are available, and how do we make visible the different forms of alienation and gaps that are their true kernels of universal emancipation? How do psychoanalytic notions such as subjective destitution and sublimation help us perceive emancipatory potentialities? And what forms of repression and acting out substitute for struggle for a better world?

And lastly, political economy could produce useful concepts with which to theorize the relationship between capitalism and colonialism in Palestine/Israel. How is Israel’s so-called tech miracle necessarily related to continued and intensified colonial oppression in Palestine? How is global secular stagnation related to Israeli fascism, and how can we theorize most Palestinians’ externality to capital’s exploitation of labor? And, do we need to reimagine anti-colonial struggle, given recent theorizations of the end of capitalism?

These three registers—cultural, psychoanalytic, political-economic—are by no means exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. We invite all submissions that consider the relationship between colonialism and capitalism in Palestine/Israel, broadly conceived.