The ”Lexicon for Political Thought” project offers a comprehensive and thorough discussion of current continental political thought. Although it focuses on European (mainly German and French) thinkers, the project is deliberately committed to Hebrew and to an explicit connection to the Israeli condition and its contexts.
The project wishes to sustain a ”life span” whose different stages and components feed off each other and enable its ongoing development. The project’s uniqueness is derived from a lexical format which aims at bringing the basic philosophical question ”what is X?” back to the front by using it to develop a critical political language. This language can then be used to enable collaborations with various research fields (law, geography, architecture, international relations, culture studies) as well as non-academic civil and cultural institutions.
3/08 - 6/08, the Lexicon for Political Thought has the following programming open to the public:
3/8 16:00
Guided viewing of video art
4/8 16:00
Itamar Mann - Refugees
The juridical category of the refugee has been constructed during the second half of the 20th century at the face of international states of emergency. The definition was formulated for the first time in the refugee convention (1951), in the shadow of European catastrophes during the World Wars. At the heart of this definition a particular idea of fear was fixed. I will therefore name the regime it created the fear regime. Recently, the global order of things that the fear regime established for a certain period of time has begun collapsing - having faced the percieved threat of terror. Insted of the fear regime what I will call a terror regime is developing. My presentation will be an abridged review of this genealogy, and an attmept to oppose its powers through civilian emergency itterations, which deny the strict differentiaion the legal category has fixed between the refugee and the citizen.
5/8 16:00
State Governmentality, Governance and Non-institutional Protestation - Sari Hanafi
Since their independence, Arab States have been governed by different forms of politics and policies. There is a diversity of political spaces, some of which are dominated by states of emergency and exception, and a multiplicity of actors intervening in the political and public spheres. State formation in this region has witnessed a production of different forms of citizenship, statelessness and refugeeness. In spite of state repression, we witness also the passage from a unified regime to what Camau and Massardier (2009) called “partial regimes.”
I will propose two frameworks for understanding the reconfiguration of political realms in the Arab world in the last 15 years. The first framework concerns the interplay between states’, civil societies’ and contestation movements’ actors through state governmentality, governance and non-institutional protestation. The second framework is more conceptual, concerning nation-state sovereignty and the individual, i.e. the way sovereignty is reshaped and impacted by the emergence of different forms of citizens (flexible citizenship) and non-citizens in the Arab world.
6/8 16:00
Conversation between Adi Ophir and Ann Laura Stoler on genealogy and working concepts.
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26/7 - 29/07, the Lexicon for Political Thought has the following programming open to the public:
26/7 16:00
Tsila Hassine - Algorithms of Power in Information Architecture: from the Information Society to Information Corporation
The much hyped shift from "web 1.0" to web 2.0 is actually a shift from the experimental playground that was the Internet to corporate land. The celebrated platforms of the web 2.0 are mostly privately owned by software and media corporations. The familiar power laws of inclusion/exclusion, anonymity/visibility are embedded into the algorithms defining and shaping the structures and dynamics of these platforms in particular, and internet power structure in general. How can we deal with this situation? is it possible to bypass the existing structures? how to devise viable alternatives? or more generally: how can we spark a public debate on these question, in both theory and practice?
27/7 16:00
Noam Yuran - History of concepts and the concept of history Insights from economics
Marx offers us a unique way to account for the historicity of concepts such as labour and capital. As concepts they appear a-historical, abstractly applicable to any era. So in what does their historicity consist? Precisely in the way they efface their own history. Their occurrence is historical insofar as it conceals their former absence from both thought and practice. Similarly, their absence in both thought and practice of the past is an index of the historicity of the past. This idea of the way concepts are intertwined with history provides at the same time a certain concept of history. According to it the historical object par excellence is the object constituted by an effacement of its own past. Such an object is money.
28/7 16:00
Guided viewing of video art
29/7 16:00
Panel on the Concept of Apartheid
What is an apartheid regime? What do people mean when they say that Israel is a state of apartheid? And is this concept an effective rhetorical instrument for resistance against Israeli policy? The panel will discuss the concept of apartheid in philosophical, legal and political contexts. The panelists are Prof. Adi Ophir, who will discuss the concept following his own recent writing on the occupation; MK Hanin Zuabi from Balad; Advocate Michael Sfard, who filed the petition against "the apartheid road" and Advocate Abir Bakr from "Adala", who will discuss the separation regime within the borders of Israel.
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20/7 - 23/07, the Lexicon for Political Thought has the following programming open to the public:
20/7 16:00
Lin Chalozin Dovrat -- Using and Abusing Etymology
21/7 16:00
Guided viewing of video art
22/7 16:00
Roy Wagner -- The Definition as Liberal Practice: A Critique of the Lexical Method
23/7 16:00
Itay Snir -- The Concept of Common Sense
Details: politicalexicon@gmail.com
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