Liron Mor, "Resistance into Incitement: Translation, Legislation, ‘Early Detection' and the Palestinian Poet's Intention"


 Comparative Literature     Feb 20 2019 | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM HG 1010

Alongside military oppression and greater border policing, Israel’s recent suppression of Palestinian dissent is achieved by reframing resistance as “incitement to terror.” If prior to Oslo Palestinian resistance was couched in terms of terrorism, thus targeting tangible actions conducted by political organizations, today it is framed as incitement, thus increasing the scope of what is considered illicit dissent by criminalizing individualized intentions. This paper explores the working of “incitement,” as both a legal and a discursive category, through the court case of Dareen Tatour—a Palestinian poet recently convicted of “incitement to terror” in an Israeli court based on a poem she posted to social media. Both Tatour’s poem and her statements were translated from Arabic for the court and recorded exclusively in Hebrew. I argue that the court’s practices of translation construct the poet’s intention as fully knowable and fixed, while, paradoxically, treating her words as completely inaccessible on their own terms. This form of non-translation, which fixes the poet’s intention in a single, pre-conceived meaning, thus produces a new, disturbing, and hollowed out political subjectivity. Moreover, in its tendency to essentialize intention, this non-translation is structurally similar and institutionally tied to new preemptive security technologies developed in Israel, as well as to recent changes in Israeli legislation, whereby the charge of inciting terror can now be filed based solely on internal intention and assumed desires. By way of translation, technology, and the law itself, intention is reified and thus serves as a central means for depoliticizing and bio-politically controlling Palestinian resistance.

Liron Mor is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at UCI.  Her talk is one of the Department of Comparative Literature Lecture Series and open to all.

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