URGENCIES
to redound with a cold and piercing force, like a wave I briefly turned my back on, catching me by surprise. I am stuck, I thought. I am haunted by Gaza. I lay in bed at 2 a.m. looking at pictures of the Haditha Massacre, the cold-blooded slaughter of twenty-four Iraqis by U.S. Marines almost twenty years ago— a couple of years after the liberation of the South and Said’s photo. The pictures had been hidden for nearly two decades and had just been made public because of several lawsuits against the U.S. military. I see the lifeless bodies of a mother and her child together in bed—their last sleep. There are numbers on their backs—the work of a red Sharpie. I do not understand. I feel it again. I am haunted
by Gaza. Palestine. “Melancholy people are [only] witness/accomplices of the signifier’s flimsiness” (Kristeva, 1989, p. 20). In its flimsiness, the signifier expands beyond its lost referent to take on endless representations, endless new translations and meanings, and “new social and political consequences” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2001, p. 5), like the subject beyond their limit. Palestine is the wound of the melancholic political subject seeking emancipation, retranslating, and reconfiguring the materials of their subjectivation. Everywhere we are, we are fixed in place by materials of late liberalism and late fascism. This liberatory moment is our unbinding. Palestine is everywhere. Palestine is the flimsy signifier.
8
DIVISION | R E V I E W
WINTER
2024
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