art and posthumanism essays encounters conversations

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• Art After Nature

Art and Posthumanism

Essays, Encounters, Conversations

• $28.00 Paperback

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248 Pages , 6 x 9 in

• 9781517912833
• Published: February 15, 2022

Series: Art After Nature

• 9781452966564
• 9781517912826

ISBN: 9781517912833

Publication date: February 15th, 2022

28 black & whilte illustrations, 12 color plates

"Conversational in style yet highly ambitious in its ideas, this inspiring collection explores different ways of being in the world for humans and nonhumans alike. Cary Wolfe provides a unique approach to thinking both about art and with art—but also a new possibility for seeing and sensing the world through art."—Joanna Zylinska, King’s College London "Cary Wolfe is one of the few animal studies scholars thoroughly fluent in the complex language of contemporary visual arts culture, and he brings his talents for exquisite prose to Art and Posthumanism . I can think of no more valuable volume for makers engaged in the culture of interspecific ecological entanglements."—Mark Dion, visual artist "This important book provides readers with fascinating, crisscrossing paths into Wolfe’s entanglement of contemporary art world and posthumanist theory."— Ecozon@

A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of “life” that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism , Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down.

Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks—from Sue Coe’s illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others—examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe.

One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments. 

Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal , all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.

Contents Preface 1. In Lieu of an Introduction: A Conversation with Giovanni Aloi Part I. Systems: Social, Biological, Ecological 2. Lose the Building: Meaning and Form in Diller and Scofidio’s Blur 3. Time as Architectural Medium: Koolhaas and Mau’s Tree City 4. The Installation That Almost Ate Me Part II. “The Animal” 5. From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies: Seeing “The Animal Question” in Contemporary Art 6. Apes Like Us 7. Condors at the End of the World: Rethinking Environmental Art 8. Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction Part III. The Biopolitical 9. What Is the Bio- of Biopolitics and Bioart? 10. No Immunity: The Biopolitical Worlds of Eija-Liisa Ahtila 11. The Miracle of the Familiar: A Conversation with Eija-Liisa Ahtila 12. The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys  Notes Index

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Art and posthumanism : essays, encounters, conversations

"A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world"--

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Publication Details

• Minneapolis, Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, [2021]
• Art after nature
• 1 online resource
• Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Philosophy.
• Art, Modern -- Philosophy.

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Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations

Do you recommend this book?

How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the "bio" of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of "life" that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism , Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down.

Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks--from Sue Coe's illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac's bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others--examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists' engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of "life" and the "living" amid ecological catastrophe.

One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments.

Book Details

• Publisher : University of Minnesota Press
• Publish Date : Feb 15th, 2022
• Pages : 248
• Language : English
• Edition : undefined - undefined
• Dimensions : 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.80in - 0.75lb
• EAN : 9781517912833
• Categories : • Criticism & Theory • General • History - Contemporary (1945- )

About the Author

Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the "Outside" and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal , all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.

Praise for this book

"Conversational in style yet highly ambitious in its ideas, this inspiring collection explores different ways of being in the world for humans and nonhumans alike. Cary Wolfe provides a unique approach to thinking both about art and with art--but also a new possibility for seeing and sensing the world through art."--Joanna Zylinska, King's College London

"Cary Wolfe is one of the few animal studies scholars thoroughly fluent in the complex language of contemporary visual arts culture, and he brings his talents for exquisite prose to Art and Posthumanism . I can think of no more valuable volume for makers engaged in the culture of interspecific ecological entanglements."--Mark Dion, visual artist

"This important book provides readers with fascinating, crisscrossing paths into Wolfe's entanglement of contemporary art world and posthumanist theory."-- Ecozon@

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Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations (Art After Nature)

Description.

A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of “life” that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down.

Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks—from Sue Coe’s illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others—examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe.

One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments. 

About the Author

Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.

Praise for Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations (Art After Nature)

"Conversational in style yet highly ambitious in its ideas, this inspiring collection explores different ways of being in the world for humans and nonhumans alike. Cary Wolfe provides a unique approach to thinking both about art and with art—but also a new possibility for seeing and sensing the world through art."—Joanna Zylinska, King’s College London

"Cary Wolfe is one of the few animal studies scholars thoroughly fluent in the complex language of contemporary visual arts culture, and he brings his talents for exquisite prose to Art and Posthumanism. I can think of no more valuable volume for makers engaged in the culture of interspecific ecological entanglements."—Mark Dion, visual artist

"This important book provides readers with fascinating, crisscrossing paths into Wolfe’s entanglement of contemporary art world and posthumanist theory."—Ecozon@

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Book Review of "Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Book review of Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations.

Related Papers

Kevin LaGrandeur

[NOTE: This is an essay commissioned and published by the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art for its Spring, 2016 Art Exhibition, and can also be found at their website, here: http://www.mocacleveland.org/sites/default/files/files/lagrandeurpaperfinal.pdf] The idea of the posthuman--the transformation of humanity by its convergence with emerging technology--is a big new philosophical and scientific concept, and big new philosophical or scientific concepts often cause paradigm shifts in the way we think about our world, about ourselves, and about our relation to the universe. And that, in turn, changes art. Which changes us, because art reflects and anticipates our struggles to absorb and assimilate new ideas and how they relate to us.

Masters Degree Thesis

Shane K de Lange

This paper is an investigation into the posthuman influence on postmodern art and the potential for art production in a posthuman context. It emphasises one particular period in art history. The period spanning from the late twentieth century to the early twenty first century is an era bent on the domination of the media and the promiscuity of technologies. It is an era that provokes the onset of posthumanism, where the distinctions that once held humanity in place have become dated; because it is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relationship between human beings and machines. In this way, it is no longer necessary to write science-fiction since we are currently living it. Our time is a posthuman era where the body has become vestigial and obsolete; expendable under the confines of the global village, which has imploded under the weight of its own progress. Posthuman art comments on this paradigm shift, where man submits to the vestiges of hyperreality and a dependence on the media.

John C Woodcock

With the enormous chaotic changes taking place today, contemporary artists are showing us a vast and mystifying range of artworks that show glimpses of nascent worlds coming into being and just as quickly disappearing into oblivion. In Part One the author explores a world that seems to be gaining some traction-the world of the post-human. Contemporary art is showing glimpses of this still-forming world in artworks produced from a collision between, or interpenetration of virtual reality and empirical reality, giving rise to weird, horrific, and sometimes strangely beautiful forms. In Part Two the author seeks to penetrate "behind" this post-human art to the activity of the artist, in order to find the original "bringing forth" (Heidegger) of post-human artworks. This move reveals the fundamental place of revelation and prophecy as the origin of any artwork and thus indicates the essential nature of the post-human world.

If the development of mass media utterly revolutionized the situation of art in the 20th century, current research into the technological reconfiguration and replacement of the human organism promises an even more radical disruption of art's cultural status. As engineers contemplate the creation of artificial life, artistic creation again finds its traditional values and procedures called into question. How will artists respond to the challenges posed by cyborg culture?

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn , Jonas Tinius

Building on such established anthropological approaches to art as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on artistic practices are offered by such new theoretical perspectives as ethnographic conceptualism (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013) or relational aesthetics (Sansi 2014), we hope to propose new pathways of anthropological inquiry. A key proposition behind this workshop is the idea that contemporary art theory and practice are increasingly in dialogue with theories of sociality – how we relate to other people to create meaning – and therefore connected to core anthropological interests. The objective of this workshop is therefore not just to apply existing anthropological theory to potentially new ethnographic situations characterized by the production of art, but to develop anthropological theory through an engagement with the conceptual approaches that underpin the contemporary production of art today. The premise we wish to interrogate with this workshop is thus that there is something distinct about contemporary artistic practices. If this is so, what would a contemporary anthropology of art – or rather – contemporary anthropologies of art look like? As the inaugural research event of the Anthropologies of Art [A/A] network, we wish to propose this digital platform as a space to map, link, and interrogate answers to these two questions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be: • How can we productively theorize the porous boundaries between artistic practice and every life activities? • Has the body been overlooked as a site of artistic production? For example, can we consider the performance of gender as an aesthetics of becoming? • What contribution can anthropology make to understandings of models of postfordist creative labour? • What are the (dis)connections between artivism, protest, and public art? • Can we consider the relationship between aesthetics and politics without a consideration of the state? • How can we provide a better analysis of the porous boundaries of the art world and the market? • What are the potentials of contemporary art for anthropological research? For example, how does the mode of artistic installation challenge and provoke alternative strategies of research?

In this interview, I pursue with Chin the idea of his work as a “posthumanist” form of art, not only in terms of its thematic occupation with the natural environmental, ecological welfare, and technological development, but also in terms of its process-oriented methodology.

Jacob Wamberg , Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero's oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction's indeterminacy to Surrealism's fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.

The Dehumanization of Art

Karlo Opancar

Modernism radically breaks its ties with the linear mimetic-representational way of presenting the image of the divine found in the myth and religion as the idea of beauty and sublimity. Modern art removes the substance of humanity from its works with a new aesthetic that distorts reality and creates unreality. From a sociological point of view, works of art that create a new style are misunderstood by the masses who traditionally see art as an extract of life. Modern art no longer places the content of sensory experience in the center of their works and rejects the burden imposed on it by tradition. In order to be able to understand modern art and its objects, who create a new autonomous language and the new spirit of time, we must change the way we look at it. The process of dehumanization of art serves as a prelude to a posthuman state that will radically establish new types of art through new technologies, such as bio-art and crypto art, through which they will affirm a new aesthetic. There is no doubt that with the new paradigm shift we are facing the most radical philosophical, ethical and cultural changes.

Francesca Ferrando

This article aims to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, with a specific focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism. Starting with the main avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century—specifically, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism—this genealogy analyses the second-wave Feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, with its integral exploration of the body highlighted by performance art. Following this, it takes into account the third-wave Feminism of the 1990s and its radical re-elaboration of the self: from Cyberfeminism and its revisitation of technology, to the artistic insights offered, on the one side, by critical techno-orientalist readings of the futures, and on the other, by the political and social articulations of Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism. Lastly, this genealogy accesses the ways contemporary female artists are dealing with gender, social media and the notion of embodiment, touching upon elements that will become of key importance in fourth-wave Feminism.

Susannah Thompson

This research examines how the manifestation of the nonhuman animal in contemporary visual art is often entrenched in prevailing human systems and practices of violence against nonhuman species. Furthermore, the divide based on species is symptomatic of socially constructed binary divisions such as the 'natural' and 'cultural', the 'rational' and 'emotional', in addition to privilege based on gender, race and species. This thesis proceeds from a foundational hypothesis that the killing or abuse of nonhuman animals as a methodology in art practice (even where this is intended as a means to critique killing or abuse) is ethically problematic. It suggests that posthumanist philosophy challenges anthropocentrism and that a radical reassessment of the use of nonhuman animals as an artistic resource, is necessary. Bringing together posthumanist thinking that challenges anthropocentrism (Cary Wolfe, John Gray) and the historical dialectic between feminism an...

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Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations

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Description - Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations by Cary Wolfe

A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the "bio" of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of "life" that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism , Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down.

Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks-from Sue Coe's illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac's bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others-examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists' engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of "life" and the "living" amid ecological catastrophe.

One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments.

Buy Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations by Cary Wolfe from Australia's Online Independent Bookstore, Boomerang Books.

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Book Review of "Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations"

• Caroline Granger University of Caen Normandy

Book review of Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations.

Author Biography

Caroline granger, university of caen normandy.

Caroline Grangerholds a Ph.D. in American Studies entitled “Crossing Cultural History and Ecopoetics, a study of torsions in Merce Cunningham’s choreographic works”. Her research focuses on American dance in the twentieth century and its relations to “naturecultural” environments. In 2019, she received a travel grant from the Institut des Amériques for on-site research in New York. This hands-on process, beyond words and pictures, leads her to attend many workshops and participate in artistic projects. She is an associate researcher at ERIBIA, University of Caen Normandy and at CRESEM, University of Perpignan Via Domitia.

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• Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations

In this Book

• Published by: University of Minnesota Press
• Series: Art After Nature
• View Citation

Table of Contents

• pp. vii-viii
• 1. In Lieu of an Introduction: A Conversation with Giovanni Aloi
• Part I. Systems: Social, Biological, Ecological
• 2. Lose the Building: Meaning and Form in Diller+Scofidio’s Blur
• 3. Time as Architectural Medium: Koolhaas and Mau’s Tree City
• 4. The Installation That Almost Ate Me
• Part II. “The Animal”
• 5. From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies: Seeing "The Animal Question" in Contemporary Art
• 6. Apes Like Us
• 7. Condors at the End of the World: Rethinking Environmental Art
• pp. 101-112
• 8. Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction
• pp. 113-128
• Part III. The Biopolitical
• 9. What Is the Bio- of Biopolitics and Bioart?
• pp. 129-150
• 10. No Immunity: The Biopolitical Worlds of Eija-Liisa Ahtila
• pp. 151-162
• 11. The Miracle of the Familiar: A Conversation with Eija-Liisa Ahtila
• pp. 163-176
• 12. The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys
• pp. 177-200
• pp. 201-220
• Publication History
• pp. 221-222
• pp. 223-226
• About the Author
• pp. 227-228
• Color Plates

Additional Information

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Art and posthumanism: essays, encounters, conversations (art after nature) paperback – 15 feb. 2022.

A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of “life” that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism , Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down.

Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks—from Sue Coe’s illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others—examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe.

One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments. 

• Print length 248 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date 15 Feb. 2022
• Dimensions 13.97 x 2.03 x 21.59 cm
• ISBN-10 1517912830
• ISBN-13 978-1517912833
• See all details

Product description

"Conversational in style yet highly ambitious in its ideas, this inspiring collection explores different ways of being in the world for humans and nonhumans alike. Cary Wolfe provides a unique approach to thinking both about art and with art—but also a new possibility for seeing and sensing the world through art."—Joanna Zylinska, King’s College London

"Cary Wolfe is one of the few animal studies scholars thoroughly fluent in the complex language of contemporary visual arts culture, and he brings his talents for exquisite prose to Art and Posthumanism . I can think of no more valuable volume for makers engaged in the culture of interspecific ecological entanglements."—Mark Dion, visual artist

"This important book provides readers with fascinating, crisscrossing paths into Wolfe’s entanglement of contemporary art world and posthumanist theory."— Ecozon@

About the Author

Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal , all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Univ Of Minnesota Press (15 Feb. 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 248 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1517912830
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1517912833
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 2.03 x 21.59 cm
• 2,114 in Art Criticism
• 2,121 in Contemporary Art
• 16,760 in Art History by Theme & Concept

About the author

I went to college at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I was a dedicated poet and a Morehead Scholar. After finishing an M.A. at Chapel Hill in English, I completed a doctorate at Duke University, ten miles away, where I landed at just the right time to take advantage of a remarkable collection of faculty talent: Frank Lentricchia, Fredric Jameson, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Stanley Fish, just to name a few (visiting faculty in those days at Duke included folks like Terry Eagleton, Toril Moi, and Franco Moretti). In 1990, I moved to Indiana University in Bloomington, where I stayed for eight years as an Assistant and later Associate Professor in English, American Studies, and Cultural Studies, publishing my first book, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson with Cambridge in 1993, and co-editing with Bill Rasch a special double issue of Cultural Critique on "The Politics of Systems and Environments," which later appeared in modified form as Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity (Minnesota, 2000). In 1998 I left Indiana to become Associate Chair of the English Department at SUNY-Albany, where I stayed until 2003. While there, three books appeared: Critical Environments from Minnesota (1998), Animal Rites from Chicago (2003), and the edited collection Zoontologies, also from Minnesota (2003). In August 2003 I moved to Houston, where I now live and teach at Rice University, holding the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Chair in English and chairing the Department. I've recently published my fourth book, What Is Posthumanism?, which weaves together the concerns of my previous two volumes: animal studies, systems theory, pragmatism, poststructuralism. Over the past couple of years, I've also been involved in a couple of multi-author volumes: Philosophy and Animal Life, with Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, and Ian Hacking (Columbia, 2008), and The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue, with Paola Cavalieri, Matthew Calarco, Harlan Miller, and J.M. Coetzee (also Columbia, 2009). I have recently completed a co-edited collection with Branka Arsic at SUNY-Albany entitled The Other Emerson, which includes contributions by Eduardo Cadava, Stanley Cavell, Sharon Cameron, Don Pease, and several others, which appeared from Minnesota in 2010. Currently, I'm absorbed with completing a short book on biopolitics, biophilosophy, and species difference, and with editing the series Posthumanities that I founded at Minnesota, which will be publishing about six books a year--stayed tuned to my site (or theirs) for forthcoming titles. I continue to teach courses in US literature and culture, mainly in modernism (and especially modern poetry) but also selectively in the 19th century, and I spend a good deal of time working with graduate students in areas of theoretical training such as systems theory, pragmatism, animal studies, poststructuralism and non-literary culture. Over the past two decades, I've published widely on critical theory, American culture and literature, and the arts in venues such as Boundary 2, Diacritics, New Literary History, Cultural Critique, American Literature, PMLA, and New German Critique, among others. I've also enjoyed invitations to deliver numerous lectures, keynote addresses, plenary talks, roundtables, and seminars in both North America and Europe in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, the UCLA Humanities Consortium, The Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and the annual Summer Academy in Frankfurt, Germany, among many others.

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2 Issue 2 : Local-Eyes!

Partizaning's first year - an exhibition in December at Vostochnaya Gallery showing a year's worth of projects. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

Partizaning: participatory art, research and creative urban activism

Partizaning leverages artistic interventions in Moscow’s public spaces as tools for social research and transformation, blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.

P artizaning (v): public art practices which strategically challenge, shape, and reinvent urban and social realities.

The last several years have witnessed increased visibility and importance given to DIY cultures and tactical urbanism in cities across the USA, Canada and Europe. This is partially as a response to the financial crisis and limited resources for city maintenance and development, and resistance to the forms of neoliberal urban development. Active, creative citizens have begun to address the inadequacies of government functions, using temporary, creative interventions to suggest alternative realities.

DIY cultures are not new: most recently, they have long existed in Latin America, parts of Asia and in the former USSR (as well as other parts of the world, at different points in time), where capital-led urbanism was not the norm and people lived in circumstances of scarcity. These DIY traditions have demonstrated people’s ingenuity as the best solution in times of necessity; people can invent and deftly make do, especially in the city.

The tactical urbanism movement – led mostly by planners and architects – has built on DIY action in a strategic struggle for bottom up or grassroots urban planning. The same phenomenon is referred to as ‘urban hacking’ in parts of Europe. But what all of these actions share are active resistance and citizen participation in the processes and developments in our cities.

Partizaning’s first documentation exhibition in Amsterdam. (Image (c) Partizaning)

In Russia, we are witnessing a form of strategic, bottom-up urbanism being led by artists who work in the streets and writers, rather than by architects and planners. Creative people are working in public spaces to express themselves and to create dialogues with authorities and with other citizens. In this article I discuss the work I am doing as a member of the project Partizaning, leveraging artistic interventions in public space as a tool for social research and transformation; blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.

Our idea is not to propose a new form of DIY urbanism, but to transform the idea of a top-down, expert planned city into one where residents are active stakeholders in the place they live; a space where they have a right to lead the lives they choose. I explain how we connect the ideas of DIY-ism and participation, as well as how Partizaning is a strategy which is aligned, but different from, tactical urbanism and conventional social art practices by its connection of research and process of creation.

In Context: Urban Planning in Russia

Partizaning’s map of the Moscow Metro which promotes our ideas of affordability, pedestrianism and walkability. (Image (c) Partizaning)

Russian cities are unique, complex entities. Following the revolution in 1917, all Russian land was nationalized and socialized, transferred to State or local authorities. The houses once belonging to the bourgeoisie were divided into accommodation for the proletariat. The collapse of a traditional spatial order required new planning approaches. At the time, ideas of a ‘socialist city’ were debated in terms of the concepts of two groups: the urbanists and dis-urbanists. Dis-urbanists wanted to dissolve the difference between town and country, while Urbanists proposed a contained expansion and planning of existing cities. The Garden City, an idea that flourished in the West, also became a starting point for the Soviet suburb. All this was resolved by the top-down functional and central planning in the form of high-rise apartments with wide-ranging amenities like schools and clinics located nearby. These ‘microrayon’ structures continue to exist today and present just one aspect or challenge of contemporary urban living in Russian cities.

A game about urban tactics which we created and disseminated online and in print. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

After the collapse of the USSR, the country saw the growth of economy and a construction boom as a result of privatization. The Western model of a city and urban development began to take root; but after 20 years of post-Soviet development, most people still live in a reality which created by and for a centrally planned economy. How is this shift to a capital system possible without removing all ideals of social equity?

Reversing urban gentrification with a DIY platform and discussion in Dusseldorf. (Photo (c) Christian Ahlborn)

Russian cities as they now exist are struggling with remnants of Soviet-era urban planning and the development of a neoliberal form of the city. Although highly organized, these plans were not created for people to experience life in the city. Architects and bureaucratic planners promoted ideals like creating social equality through infrastructure and access. But ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent privatization of space in the city, there have been many recurring urban issues worldwide, such as traffic, over-consumption and trash generation and resource overuse, each with an environmental impact.

So the idea of a ‘partizan’ re-emerges in this contemporary context of resistance and urban revolution. In Russian, the word means ‘guerrilla’ and the idea we promote is resistance to this form of urban development and engage people in the processes shaping their cities – advocating a sense of creative responsibility. With it, we are seeking to promote a new ideal and a new vision for cities – constructed by and for people, based on their explicit involvement and dialogues. Our work straddles the worlds of art and urbanism: we work in the city and with the public but use artistic venues as just one forum for sharing our ideas.

Partizaning: Participatory Urban Re-planning

The DIY mobile discussion platform to activate abandoned railway tracks in the city. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

The website Partizaning emerged at the end of 2011 as an online project documenting examples of urban interaction and participation, whether social, political, environmental or anything else. Meant to inspire people, we show examples of projects in the public realm as creative achievements of social transformation through DIY and participatory actions. The site is managed by an interdisciplinary group of artists and researchers in two languages, because we realized that the project resonates, not only in Russia but as an idea taking root in cities around the world. So we document projects and people who work with the language of art to transform urban contexts worldwide.

A Public mailbox which we installed in Troparevo Nikulino. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

Part of our goal is to reorient the city around people and their goals and ways of life, rather than around expertise and bureaucracy. We recognize the important role of creativity as commentary and suggestion, while advocating people’s involvement, because residents know the city best and sometimes just need the tools to participate, or to express or converse ideas about it. The problem with how cities have developed is that they are perceived as places of work instead of sites of play and living. If you think of the city as an extension of your home, it is different. You are more willing to plant trees, to clean up trash, to decorate it, to repair it. But this is not an idea that is widely held – people are generally confined to their homes, their cars, and are restricted in public space. Partizaning proposes the idea that unsanctioned repairs and improvements can collectively help to re-create a better city. We have done things like made DIY benches, painted crosswalks and created maps and signs that promote an alternate trajectory for the city.

Scans of the mail received during the Cooperative Urbanism project. (Image (c) Partizaning)

We are motivated by a conflation of art and urbanism and are inspired by the role of the Situationists and of street art and urban interventions which fall into the realm of revolutionary urban and social activism. In Russia and internationally, we engage in participatory processes based on research and culminating in interventions in public space. We think of these interventions more as a process and dialogue. Apart from projects, we try to promote creative grassroots urbanism and participation by giving lectures, presentations and conducting workshops in various cities. We also try to produce a bulletin which is occasionally printed as another format for people to interact with some of our ideas.

Cooperative Urbanism

Public surveys in Amsterdam during the Kunstvlaai Festival. (Photo (c) Partizaning)

In 2012, we did a project based on installing Public Mailboxes in outlying districts of Moscow. An experiment in the idea of collaboration and in the concept of cooperation in the city, we tried to get people to communicate their urban challenges and desires by leaving us anonymous mail. Our goal was to work with the idea of how people could reorganize their city from the bottom up and engage in processes that are generally impenetrable. What we found was that creating unsanctioned and unwatched forums in public space involved children and the elderly, who had varied and different suggestions and ways of using the mailboxes. As part of this project, the mail was scanned and shared with participating municipal authorities who could respond to people’s concerns – but the other part of the project was to encourage people to be the agents of urban change in their own neighbourhoods, particularly if they already knew the problem.

What Should Happen to Sint Nicolaas Lyceum?

In Amsterdam, as part of the Kunstvlaai Festival, we put up large format posters surveying residents in the district under transformation for insights about a building that was going to be demolished. We found people to be apathetic about future changes in their city and wanted to facilitate a public dialogue. This is another way in which we have sought to promote the idea of urban participation in varied contexts.

We are interested in how to facilitate and moderate user-oriented cities, promoting the belief that residents know best what they need and how they should behave in a moderated dialogue with other activists and experts. But one of the concerns and challenges we faces is truly involving overlooked and minorities in the city – voices that remain unheard and invisible, but are part of the urban fabric. In cities like St. Petersburg, Moscow, Amsterdam and Dusseldorf we find that our projects are invariably used by voices that don’t have forums for expression – or become taken over by those who seek to control the socially unaccepted.

Ultimately, as researchers, artists and urbanists, we find ourselves trying to use the language of art as a tool for inquiry to understand urban processes and facilitate a form of participation based on art and ideas of inclusion. To what extent we are successful can be debated, but as an experiment we believe that art in the city has a right to public space and interaction in the same way all urban residents do.

Shriya Malhotra is an urban researcher and intervention artist based in Moscow with Partizaning . She has an MA in Cities and Urbanization from the New School and collaborates on participatory art and process based projects that highlight the unseen or unusual aspects about cities and urban life.

Friday essay: Rai Gaita and the moral power of conversation

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne

Associate Professor Criminology, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Both Juliet and Maria have an ongoing connection to Rai via their literary and academic lives.

Juliet Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Ever since the University of Melbourne took from us Rai Gaita’s public lecture series we have been going to Rai’s house in St Kilda to talk. Not regularly, life is too much for that, whenever we can though.

Few people in this world believe more in face-to-face conversations – in speaking with others not when you’ve done your thinking, but in order to think – than Rai. This is how The Wednesday Lectures, first at Australian Catholic University and then at Melbourne University, where we teach in criminology and creative writing respectively, came to be. This belief is a guiding presence in Rai Gaita’s latest book, a collection of his works, Justice and Hope .

Juliet : What I would call “the St Kilda conversations” between Maria, Rai and me weren’t trite. We started with some idea of documenting the thoughts or perhaps even methodology of Rai Gaita. We would take a few moments to adjust to arriving and to decide on tea or coffee but before these important decisions had been made the conversation had begun, about war, about justice, about pain, about grief – and one of us would reach for the phone and press record. No such thing as small talk. Everything and everyone is important.

Rai’s idea of the preciousness of every person appears in all his thinking, and in ours almost from the moment we arrive. Why talk of war at all if there is not something inherently wrong, morally if not legally, in the loss of the uniqueness of a person in war, even if that loss is of something in them when they kill?

Rai’s thinking in these conversations moves from Hannah Arendt to Simone Weil to Albert Camus and back to the ideas in the room. He is promiscuous like this. He values the preciousness of their arguments as he does ours. But there is no place for lazy thought. Having slid into some abstraction, I’d be pulled up – but what do you mean by that, he’d say? It was a painful relief. And sometimes I had no answer and I was grateful even to know that.

Maria : One day last November, nine months into Russia’s war against Ukraine, I came to Rai’s house wanting to talk about shame and denial. How is it families in Russia were telling relatives in Ukraine: we are not bombing you! you’ve been brainwashed! These photos? Staged. These ruins, air-raid alerts? They’re – if they’re real – your Ukro-Nazi forces bombing their own people, congratulations!

I had never known denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence to be so phantasmagorically total. Mothers to their daughters! I no longer understood how to think alone about this war.

Round that time I’d been delivering a final-week lecture in a capstone subject I coordinate, left my notes in the office, had to go off the cuff. “I’ve come to think of my mission as a teacher as helping students develop a capacity to bear shame” – these words fell out of me.

Could people be so afraid of bearing shame they’d do almost anything not to feel it? So we speak about shame. Rai says, “Shame is not just an emotion or an affect, it can be a form of understanding the moral reality you are caught up in.” We talk about how different forms of reality avoidance – insisting on absolutes (moral, political, historical) is one example – become forces in the lives of individuals, families, communities, nations.

Rai’s tough-minded conception of conversations sidesteps chat and debate alike. You speak not to say something and to hear something back, not to dazzle, be right or stake a claim, but to be held accountable to each other. A conversation is a pact. You are accountable not only for what you say but for the way what you say, and how you live your life, does or doesn’t square up. A conversation is also a precious opening. The light of another person’s presence turned towards you will almost always illuminate something you couldn’t see or find thinkable before.

Juliet : When I first met Rai I was sitting on the top floor at Melbourne Law School feeling the approach of a ferocious exhaustion, having flown from Connecticut, arriving that morning, late, delayed, rerouted, refuelled (barely) to deliver a paper at the Passions of International Law colloquium hosted by Gerry Simpson, Rai’s close friend. I can hardly read the words in front of me, I am trying to convey my feelings about months of watching hours of Holocaust testimony videos. My relationship – a feeling of confusion and a kind of irritation – to one testimonial in particular. I explain it psychoanalytically, trying not to fill the room with jargon, trying to remember that I felt something about this testimony, that I cared deeply about this woman’s experience … before the room starts spinning.

I look up as I read, and though everything’s a bit blurry there is the warmest gaze upon me. It’s Rai, sort of smiling, part care for me, part care for this woman I am using to explain my theories of trauma and imagination.

I think I’ve made a mess of it but all I care about is getting to bed. And then as I’m grasping in the break for the comfort of a piece of watermelon he approaches me and expresses his appreciation. He has heard what I said, how I both cared for this woman and felt unnerved by her melodramatic phrasing, and my own irritation. I say “yes of course, it’s hard not to care” but he doesn’t give me a way out. Nor does he pin me to my own rationales. He is curious. It is an academic manner, of sorts – I recognise it from a time before we thought we knew everything or felt we had to prove it to an audience. I’m fond of saying “I’m an academic, I know stuff about stuff”, Rai is fond of saying “let’s talk”.

Maria : In 2005 my then publisher asked Rai to launch Traumascapes . My first book, first launch – I bought my nine-year-old a matching green vest and skirt, a friend played a real-life harp. Rai didn’t know me or my work. I never thought I could be a writer once my family left Ukraine in 1989 so this whole “debut author” period felt, still feels, unreal.

Rai came in. Holding my book. To have a thinker of this calibre take your work seriously is destabilising. Rai had a bunch of my lines underlined and some crossed out – he really read me. Also, he was using an actual pen in a book, wow, bad Rai.

The launch was my first encounter with Rai’s moral seriousness, which animates his idea of a conversation. It is like a lamp you expect to be shined in your face but instead it lights up the room and everyone in it. Illuminates you, the shaky little thing in the room’s centre.

Maria : Rai Gaita has been seeking to create conditions in the public domain for people from different, sometimes antagonistic ecosystems of thought and belief to get into each other’s heads. Or – if the head image feels too ickily invasive (it’s mine, not Rai’s) – to pull their thoughts out like sock drawers (mine again) and look at what’s there and what’s stuffed at the very back.

Twice Rai invited me to give The Wednesday Lecture – on the royal commission into the institutionalised abuse of children, then some years later on feminism, and both nights I bitterly regretted saying yes and was finishing writing my talk with minutes (ten, five) to go. I never felt ready even though I had months to prepare. I felt rushed, pushed, whacked and then – adrenaline and self-loathing having peaked – I felt grateful. I was pinned down, called into accountability, made to face the world and myself. At the end, it was a relief.

Often these public conversations don’t work (sometimes they are disasters) and people walk away saying what the hell. But the goal of disarming each other through conversation strikes Juliet and me as necessary as water. That this was something our university pulled the plug on felt to us indecent. Decency is a Rai word. In Justice and Hope (2005), the title essay of the new collection, he writes about his father Romulus and Romulus’s friend Hora, the two most important influences on his life: “For them nothing mattered more than to live decently – and when I say nothing, I really mean nothing.” If you have read Romulus, My Father and After Romulus you feel this “I really mean nothing” go through your heart and into the shoulder blades. Perhaps you feel it anyway. “Decent” drops its dull, egalitarian overcoat and becomes all silk with sun and wind breathing through it.

Juliet : The lecture series was an event, historic – the world of academia does not always allow for such conversations, conversations without outcomes or grant pathways and where difficult ideas and sometimes difficult people are able to speak. Rai offered and held this hospitality, and to do so, occasionally had to be a difficult person. Hospitality on Indigenous land is a problematic premise to start with and then it’s hard to know what conversations bear airing.

Rai encouraged presentations and conversations on international law, feminism, colonialism, racism. Hard topics. He never shied. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial was his last series, in 2019, “Sleepwalking Through Privilege and Oppression”. Starting with his own commentary on this, he then asked Professor Chelsea Watego , a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman, to speak to the theme, and she spoke powerfully and essentially on the importance of black nihilism, to counter his commentary.

When he responded, some in the audience called for him as a white man to leave the speaking to Professor Watego. An important call, a necessary call on Indigenous land when white people have what we can now describe as too much voice. But hospitality is everything to Rai and he remained at the podium, not to reassert his position but to hold the conversation with the audience. It is what I describe as standing accused: the most crucial task of white people on this land. And to walk away would have been disingenuous as the host of a series.

We’ve been disagreeing – tangled in a conversation about Palestine and Israel; well to say disagreeing suggests it wasn’t a conversation, but it was, with differences, we shared our thoughts, listened, asked, and still disagreed. This is no skill we were born with. It comes from a belief that neither of us knew best or knew it all. It comes from time listening to and reading Rai.

Maria : Open letters have been flying like Shahed drones, detonating on impact. Shahed drones, manufactured in Iran and sold to Russia to pummel Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure, are called flying mopeds because of the sound they make . In Ukraine these drones invoke a particular fear. They travel slowly enough to be seen (one was allegedly taken out by a pickled tomatoes jar) and can hit only static not moving targets, such as people, with any precision. This imprecision (“moped” is also evocative of the Shahed’s lowly standing in weaponworld), their visibility, and their use in swarm attacks – multiple drones against a single target – have put nails under the skin of nervous systems across Ukraine. Because they’re cheap, these drones don’t run out. You see where I’m going here, words are cheap.

I know the sickening sound of drones is what Palestinians are hearing in Gaza when they don’t hear explosions.

Open letters are often, if not invariably, single-use, self-detonating pieces of public discourse. I’m not too cool for them and some are astounding documents of collective labour and thought. But I haven’t signed any. It’s not the denotations (I’ve argued repeatedly that for Ukraine being anti-war equals being pro-genocide) but broken glass and craters everywhere make public spaces incapable of not causing injuries and won’t make a toenail of difference to people whose lives can still be saved. I’ve seen so many open letters that don’t mention the October 7th dead, don’t mention Hamas’s hostages. I don’t want to sign up for enshrining the choice between dehumanising the other (which starts with not seeing their dead) and betraying who and what you stand for. Even at the worst of times and our times might be the worst yet, this choice is not a thing until we make it so.

In his 2017 essay The Intelligentsia in the Age of Trump , Rai Gaita writes Trump has destroyed the “space in which Americans can seriously disagree” not merely by arsoning the idea of the political office and public institutions and letting loose demons of predominantly racialised bigotry and hatred but also he “eroded the conditions under which people can call their fellow citizens to seriousness: Come now! How can you say that?”

Juliet, I look around and oh shit. Saying come on! how can you talk about Israel without mention of Iran (and – just slightly off camera – Russia, China, Qatar)? how can you use settler colonialism as your only frame to speak about the Middle East? how can you righteously retweet genocide apologists from other contexts (Syria, Ukraine) will be pounced on as morally bankrupt bothsideism of the worst kind.

To speak of them alongside each other, the anguish experienced by people in Gaza and in Israel, and by Palestinian and Jewish diasporas, has become in the part of Australia that considers itself progressive an abject objectionable act, like “sending thoughts & prayers”, worse, like genocide apologism lite. To me, to speak of each without collapsing them both into a sentimental ahistorical mush, letting them be in a howling tension, letting them be in a shared space of thought and sight, is the only way we (settlers in Australia) can speak of this moment at all.

If shared public places – where a disinclination to dehumanise is not seen as cowardice or respectability politics, and where harm minimisation is a guiding principle – feel impossible right now, the question is what would it take for them not to be? If that feels unanswerable it still needs to be asked.

When the dead or captured on any side get in the way of the argument, the problem is with the argument. I am not talking about “condemning” this or that atrocity, that word’s gone for me, I am referring to an ethical compulsion not to erase.

Dead civilians killed by IDF and by Hamas are the mountains in front of us – can’t walk around them, can’t jump over them. To be clear: I don’t for a minute believe this injunction applies to people in Gaza or the West Bank and to Palestinian families across the world. It doesn’t apply to the Israelis and nationals of other countries whose lives Hamas has destroyed. Climbing those mountains (sliding down their sides) is the job for the rest.

Most Australians do not have families in Gaza, Israel or neighbouring countries of the Middle East. Whatever pain and despair many are feeling (it’s about impossible not to) the responsibility bestowed by Australia’s safety and distance is to keep holding spaces in which non-catastrophic futures are imaginable. This means practising bothness that is not bothsideism and alongsideness that is not equivocation. This means protecting the idea that public spaces should be free of hate. This means not leaving speaking about the co-existence of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism to our politicians and vice-chancellors with their “In Australia there is no place for …” In Australia, we’re seeing, there’s plenty of place for all of it and more. We can’t let the speaking be done in calcified idioms and grubby grabs – “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”, “Israel has the right to defend itself”.

I’m Jewish, first gen, from the former USSR. My history encompasses not only the Holocaust and the iron-clad denial well into the 1980s that it ever happened but also the Pale of Settlement, pogroms, gulags and Stalin’s own version of the Final Solution in which Jewish doctors were to be accused of a fabricated plot to poison government members on instructions from “Western imperialists and Zionists” (who else) as a prelude to mass deportations. When Stalin’s death in 1953 pulled the rug out from what many historians believe was a three-stage genocide plan, my mum and dad were 11 and 12. Jewish people in Australia speaking about their history right now are said to be weaponising (the weaponisation of weaponising makes my teeth hurt but OK) their trauma. But speaking about my history is the only way I can be properly – which is to say, to the ends of the earth – accountable for my words and their relationship to my life. To the dead of Gaza and Israel I have to add my family’s dead.

Where my family comes from, the word Zionism was only used with utmost cynicism. Soviet cartoons I grew up with depicted Jews as dogs, deadly snakes, as “Zionist cobweb spiders”; swastikas got fused with Stars of David. There is a pretty straight line from that cynicism to a recent Putin psy-ops in Dagestan where crowds tried to storm a plane arriving from Tel-Aviv . It works like this: first, let people know anti-Semitism is very much on the table then crack down on it while blaming Ukraine and the West for stoking “flames of ethnic divisions”, send a message to Moscow and St Petersburg elites to sit tight and count their blessings, arrest and send (as cannon fodder) to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine some of the Dagestanis caught in “disturbances”, and, in the meantime, invite a Hamas delegation to Moscow, speak rousingly of the need for Middle East peace, breathe as one with Iran.

It should matter that the same term with the same inflection is used by the mass murderer Bashar al-Assad, the mass murderer Ali Khamenei, the mass murderer Hassan Nasrallah, the mass murderer Vladimir Putin, the Hamas leadership as they promise a repeat of October 7th in perpetuity to refer to all Jews everywhere who get in their way. For me there is not enough soap in the world.

Thirty-plus years in Australia as a migrant-settler have taught me that the question where I am from must be bound with the question where I am now, on whose lands , if it is to keep its integrity. And since the answer is I’m on stolen, unceded lands, righteousness of any kind is inappropriate for me and it’s not my place to speak to the powerful ties between Palestinian and First Nation peoples in this country – a relationship with a long history of deeply held solidarity. I will register my pain at the way Jewish people in Australia, with the exception of a handful of vetted allies, or “good Jews”, have been shoved into the role of double colonisers, the worst people of all, and so Juliet I address myself to me and you and to other settlers like us.

Juliet: I have signed so many of those open letters you speak of. I cannot sit still with my hands on a keyboard writing words that help me think, and feel and wonder, but rarely help me be of use to others. I am no activist because I can rarely come to a decision, not a clean one, with edges that allow me to move … somewhere. I never say “moving forward” as we now say in the corporate academy, as if there is always a next step and that step means progress. As I’ve seen it, that progress usually means stepping on someone as you step away from responsibility for the past. But these thoughts keep me quiet. I cannot not sign letters which transport sentiments, ideas and demands I believe in when someone else finds it possible to write, to act.

I believe in them, these words. Cheap. Small. And occasionally violent as they are. I believe in letters that push a university and a government to act on one of the violences of this time. One of the most horrifying violences of this time. Not the only one. But it is one they will not act on. The Australian government did not sign the United Nations resolution that called for a truce, that called for a ceasefire, that called for the slaughter of Palestinians at this time to stop. Yes, the genocide. The Australian government did not sign but it did offer support to the Israeli government and support and care for the victims of Hamas. I do not need to write a letter asking the government to back the Israeli government and assist with trying to save the hostages. It does that of its own volition.

You will notice I say Australian government, not Australia and not Australians, as I do not say Israel or Israelis. That is the true anti-Semitism, the conflation of all-as-one. We are not. They are not. You are not. Just as I shy from the “innocent victims” narrative I do not say there are even combatants in this war, as distinct from children. I have watched reels of ten-year-olds speaking with rage. At what point does innocence begin and end? Is the child who sees their family killed an innocent? Is innocence shed when they join the military a few years later? I would put this question to Israelis and to Palestinians, and to myself. What work does innocence do in this violent conflict? It is the cheapest of words. And yes, I would extend this to settler Australians. It is not the same. Nothing is the same. Analogies do not help us in a war of justifications.

What I know is inter-generational trauma can produce innocence and culpability alike. I know something of why the Israeli government is fuelled by fear, vengeance and aggression. I know some of the stories that mean the violence towards Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond is more of a plea saying “how can you do this to us after what we’ve been through?”

I imagine it is fuelled by generations who watched those before them stare out the window with clouded eyes and memories that can never be spoken. I know when I sat for six months watching Holocaust testimonies I was irrevocably changed in my understanding of the significance of Israel. After hours of stories of lost families, pain, humiliation, systematic destruction of whole communities, and tortured children, the need to claim a space that was their own sounded like commonsense.

I understood something of Zionism. And so I say now, with the small understandings I have, that this did not begin with October 7th and did not even begin with 1948 but perhaps with Kristallnacht or perhaps with the arrogance of the Allies who thought they could declare a nation-state over the top of another. That violence is one we know well in this land and on these nations.

To speak of Israel is not the same as speaking of the nation-state of Israel and this too is why I sign those letters that insist we need to be able to criticise law and policy and state practices that deny, that crush and now attempt to decimate peoples. I can understand some of the histories that have taken people there. I can explain but I cannot not fight against these practices with my small, cheap, literary pickle jars. Explanation is not justification. You cannot stretch a name across the lives of others and call it justice. That is colonialism. That is Australia. Explanation has no place on a land where others live. “Oh sorry did I step on your home, your life, the graves of your family, your future?” – this is colonialism and there is no explanation that justifies it.

If we’re to take moral seriousness seriously, in Rai Gaita’s terms, then I can only say that genocide is wrong. And that is what it is.

To say it is genocide diminishes nothing of the Holocaust. It is to use a name to make the world hear the extent of the violence, the devastation and the trans-generational impact: grief and trauma for generations. It is to demand action. Does the Israeli government intend to destroy a people? Well, there have been a lot of words to that effect, but I do not hold all people, or even all of the Israeli government, to the violence of some. There is resistance in all camps.

But if the question is about whether the name fits the act then I think that is a legal question and I am speaking of an experience more than a legal intent. Would it be better if the protests or the many open letters said “alleged genocide”, like we must say “alleged rape” when a woman is asking for her experience to be heard? The urgency is too great for such debates and abstractions. Or perhaps I would ask the Israeli government to stop the bombing while we have a such a legal debate, and allow time for food, water and medicine to be delivered.

I think some of the open letters try to open a dialogue where structures and law and policy are holding us back. These letters and the protests do not mention October 7th, which is to not mention the many dates. This was one. One horrible day that has extended into the lives of both communities. The hostages must be allowed to be free. But I use the word hostage advisedly, not legally, and not in the way the posters use it. I have learned through some of my own experiences with law and police that there are many forms of prison.

I wish October 7th could be mentioned and all those lives could be grieved without that grief taking the air from the history. It cannot. I think of Holocaust testimonies and the repetition and repetition of names. So important. Names going into the world as a pact so that the speaker and listener may share that reality. But we do not own names, we borrow them from history. And genocide is the worst of names, and the worst of worlds. This is my reason for signing letters, trying to make a space to breathe, a space for imagining the non-catastrophic futures you speak of, Maria.

Isn’t this what Rai means by justice – the opening of a space to think, to converse, to breathe? He quotes Camus:

We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.

You speak of the breaking of silence with the robotic buzz of drones and I find myself wishing for silence. Open letters add to the cacophony, it’s true. But they are also a wish to drown out the drones, bombs, screaming. I have little faith in a competition for sound but I have faith in that pickle jar you speak of.

I do not know if white people in this country should take these positions. But I am doing what I always believe is the thing to do. Stand accused. I learned it from Rai. And have watched him take positions I don’t always agree with, as he has commented of mine. White fragility has never been his weakness. He stands and keeps standing. And I know, when I saw you speak at his series once, that he held that stage for you, so you could speak, and I was grateful for it. As I am always grateful for your conversation and for Rai’s demand: let’s talk.

• Moral philosophy
• Friday essay
• Invasion of Ukraine 2022

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