PGC2020
Jamil Khader: Biopolitics, reinvented communism, and conspiracy theories: The Covid-19 Pandemic in Palestine
Philosophers have interpreted the Covid-19 pandemic, but in the haste of
responding to this “pandemic of signification,” they have tested the limits
of intelligibility and relevance. In this talk, I will briefly address some
of the problems of approaching the pandemic through Agamben’s biopolitical
approach to the “state of exception” and Žižek’s “reinvented communism” and
new forms of solidarity, in order to reflect on the situation in Palestine.
I will also examine the ways in which the Ongoing Nakba (the Catastrophe of
1948) in Palestine has been framed in different conspiracy theories about
the pandemic in Arabic social media and popular culture. These theories
have repackaged common memes in extreme alt-right and populist conspiracy
theories, in order emplot not only an end (apocalyptic, utopian or just
normative), but a closure to this Nakba. However, much like some
philosophical reflections on the pandemic, these conspiracy theories
depoliticize the Palestinian struggle for freedom, by obfuscating the class
struggle, to which some inadvertently point, under the authority of
theological / apocalyptic discourses and timeless Manichean moral
cosmologies.
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