A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoums Biopolitics of Abstraction*

JALEH MANSOOR

A delicate swath of fabric is laid in a protective vitrine, underscoring its fragility. At first the material appears to impart nothing of itself save fine-craftedness, its fibers woven into a network of threads interlocked in strong knots at regular intervals, meandering at the edges. But the objects placement in a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art imposes a set of interpretive parameters. The repeating modules made by the fabrics material, enclosed in a double border that mimics a frame, evoke the object so commonly encountered in that museum: the painted grid hanging vertically on the gallery wall. The object is a grid, and it isnt. Certain of its characteristics, such as its horizontality, belie any status as a transcendental object of aesthetic autonomy, and in this sense the display evokes an anthropological exhibition context, or that of a craft museum. And it is blatantly material and tactile, exceeding a grids opticality. Its units are not rectilinear, but are irregular ovals, reliant on the warp and weft of the thread constituting them. The cells are not stamped out ready-made over the material that constitutes them; rather, each is the stuff of that very material.1 In this way the objects materiality belongs to the tactile process of weaving. But this evocation of the craft of weaving is frustrated in turn. The excess strands at the fabrics edge are in fact human hair, as is the grid embroidered over the cotton support. This object is not a piece of fabric, but an abject and precarious web of human tissue. How can the object suggest an
* I am deeply indebted to Mona Hatoum for illuminating many points not only about her subtle and complex practice, but about the history of, and geopolitical situation on the ground of, occupied Palestine. Many thanks as well to Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Yates McKee, Judith Grant, and Katherine Hammond. 1. Keffieh is made of cotton and human hair. As the artist has explained in conversation, the hair is embroidered using the appliqu technique onto cotton voile, the material constituting a traditional keffiyeh. The black frame is also characteristic of a traditional keffiyeh. Hatoum had one procured for her at a site in the Palestinian territories where they are woven and machine-embroidered. The artists hair appliqu evokes the embroidered traditional keffiyeh; however, she continued the embroidery past the edge, allowing the hair to spill over the supports limit.

OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 4974. 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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ideated image of the possibility of disembodied puritythe gridand at the same time present itself as a web of human waste? Given the thin stretch of fabrics failure to add up and to supply a meaning, and given the absence of notable material or procedural affinity with the objects around it, curatorial themes and cultural and political discourses impute meaning to this mute object. In 2006, the context was an exhibition of artists from the Middle East entitled Without Boundary.2 Perhaps, then, the fabric is a veil, that symbol of Middle Eastern culture as imagined by the West. In that imaginary order, the veil emblematizes a social practice in which the putative absence of democratic equality relegates much of the population to non-citizenship. The cloth symbolizes the others lack and excess, its failure to have entered secular modernity, and its surfeit of cultural practices predicated on irrationality if not barbarism.3 The materially transparent yet conceptually resistant object at the Museum of Modern Art is embroidered by hair, the seductive material the veil is meant to hide. In its glossy plentitude, the body erupts in its ornamental excess, even as it slides into abjection as so much dead matter. But references to fabric, head covering, and the Middle East only begin with the veil. Hatoum, who began the piece in 1993coincidentally also the year of the signing of the Oslo Accordstitled the object Keffieh (19931999) after the headscarf, woven in a distinctive fishnet pattern, traditionally worn by Palestinian men. With activism on behalf of Palestinians gradually increasing in the 1980s during the first Intifada as a response to Israel's violent suppressions, the keffiyeh begin to signify Palestinian solidarity in Europe and the West. That support grew in the 1990s in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, which many believed to be unjust. Hatoum talks about her Keffieh as a quiet protest, wherein the works medium and technique of weaving and hair, universally associated with the feminine, are held in tense balance with a potent symbol of Arab resistance . . . a symbol of struggle with a definite macho aura.4 As this referential criss-crossing
2. Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26May 22, 2006. Strictly speaking, it was presented as an exhibition of artists from the Islamic world, with Bill Viola and Mike Kelley included to emphasize diversity by questioning the use of artists origins as the sole determining factor in the consideration of their art. See: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/83 (accessed June 8, 2010). 3. For a discussion of the way in which the veil has come to unify a broad and heterogeneous range of practices variously connected by disparate iterations of Islam in the eyes of the West, and has come to symbolize those practices as regressive and oppressive, see Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). The author states: The veil was the ultimate symbol of Islams resistance to modernity (p. 2). Scott focuses on the debates in France around lacit, roughly translated as meaning the separation of church and state under the protection of the state, and the problem of publicly wearing the veil, locating the irrationality of the discussion among bureaucratic entities. Scott notes the foundational hypocrisy at the core of lacit and its claim to protect French Republicanism; the notion of equality as universality, which demands an erasure of difference, is itself predicated on a concrete identity, a traditional and mythical French identity (p. 13). 4. Mona Hatoum: Images from Elsewhere, week 36, exhibition brochure (London: fig. 1, 2000), n. p., quoted in Fereshteh Daftari, Islamic or Not, in Without Boundary, ed. Fereshteh Daftari (New York: MoMA, 2006), pp. 2122.

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Mona Hatoum. Keffieh. 19931999. All images courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, NYC.

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of ethnic and gender politics suggests, the title and the correspondence between Keffiehs conceptualization and an event of world-historical importance do not anchor the objects meaning.5 Rather, they speak to a peculiarly anxiety-producing referentiality, splintered by dissonance. And this suggests in turn that the association with the modernist grid is no mere imposition on this object by its location at the Museum of Modern Art. As a historical form structuring the most rigorous abstract art, the grid once offered the hope of a utopian universality. It has also been argued that the a/temporality characterizing the grid throughout the twentieth century suggested a dystopian condition. Rosalind Krauss famously wrote in 1979 that the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface.6 At the same time, mapping nothing but the surface of the painting itself, the grid is a transfer in which nothing changes place.7 As a structure, the grid is caught in an internal stasis. That which is repeated ad infinitum is the inability to resolve the contradictions, the dissonance in the real on which it is founded, which it disavows, and which, in turn, generates. The grid is a dissonance machine. This suspension, in turn, is foundational to universality and abstraction; it is universality and abstraction. Hatoums project mediates universality-as-abstraction by rethinking its v isual medium: t he gr id, as a chain of dissonant part icular s. Allowing Palestinians to be insinuated into representation, Hatoums practice articulates the perforations of Palestinian identity negatively founded in that antagonism with the other: Palestinian versus Israeli. Identity, in her project, becomes abstraction. The aporetic binaries characteristic of the grid make it functional as a structure for articulating, and deferring, many other binaries.8 Keffieh is a grid understood in its capacity to contain and suspend resolution among myriad contradictions. It is as if the two, grid and Keffieh, functioned as allegories of one another; each articulates and suspends numerous contradictions that are seemingly impossible to resolve in the social political real. To attempt to clear contradiction away would be as impossible as peeling the layers of an onion in hopes of locating a kernel.9
5. Hatoum has stated, in conversation with the author, that she did not begin working on Kefeh in direct response to the Oslo Accords. That urgent political event and Hatoums commencement on her piece serendipitously date to the same year. 6. Rosalind Krauss, Grids (1979), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 12. Art-historical discourse on the grid did not end with Krausss path-breaking essay, of course. Most recently there is Hannah Higgins The Grid Book (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). Higgins work addresses architecture, design, and urban planning and misprizes the legacy of Mondrian and the modernist grid. Hatoums project demonstrates that Krausss model of the paradoxically dystopian grid remains singularly compelling. 7. Ibid., p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 10. 9. In the first part of The Optical Unconscious, Krauss discusses the grid as enabling the suspension of contradiction located within a sociopolitical arena. She describes an exemplary grid,

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Hatoum draws on modernism in order to reenact it as both a technology by which to defer resolution and as machinery to perform the differential, yet ideologically constitutive, chain of signifiers. But she also challenges the grid by taking the abstract trope and yoking it to a chain of referents it was to supersede, thereby dismantling its historically determined associations with transcendental universality. In contrast to Eva Hesses psychoanalytically inflected absurdist grids or Piero Manzonis radically materialist ones, Hatoums grids are ghostly, haunted by a spectral other. In Hatoums work, prewar utopian universalism gives way to spectral universality. That which was putatively risen above (specificity, history, corporeality, ideology, politics) returns to haunt that exemplary emblem of universality. Hatoums negative dialectical use of the grid is more critical than ever at this particular historical juncture, not because Palestine is one of the most difficult knots in world politics and not because her art addresses genocide and diaspora as a condition of the present, but because of the way her work asks us to reconsider universality as a necessity in thinking particularity. Hatoums project performs the relevance of abstract ion in thinking a postcolonial geopolit ical hor izon. Abstraction, conventionally understood to be apolitical, is shown to be anything but. This revivification of universality turns it inside out and exposes its ghosts. In her essay Rest aging the Univer sal: Hegemony and the Limit s of Formalism, Judith Butler revisits Hegels analysis in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the French Revolutions Terror and its relationship to the concept of universality. The assimilation of the particular to the universal leaves its trace, she writes, as an inassimilable remainder that renders universality ghostly to itself.10 Historically, universality was predicated on a transcendence of particularities, among them materiality, through which identity and difference were established. Mondrian, working to move beyond binaries, demonstrated how the surface of inscription became temporarily aporetic, denied and affirmed until a suspended vibrato immobilized ambivalence.11 This aporetic suspension was to remain dynamic, always constituting itself according to the vicissitudes of each new surface encountered. And yet specificities remained unaddressed. Mondrian, in 1919, declared: The truly modern is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is
Mondrians Pier and Ocean (Sea and Starry Sky) (1915), as follows: The sea and sky are a way of packaging the world as a totalized image, as a picture of completeness, as a field constituted by the logic of its own frame. But the frame is a frame of exclusions and its field is a work of ideological construction. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 12. Looking at modernism as a discursive field allows the author to locate the repressed, for her the unconscious. Although our projects converge, I am interested in the condition of modernisms im/possibility from a post-colonial perspective. Ultimately, the two are inextricably linked. 10. Judith Butler, Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and The Limits of Formalism, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), p. 14. 11. Y ve-Alain Bois, Piet Mondrian, New York City, in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 167.

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Hatoum. Present Tense. 1996.

cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.12 The particular, he said, will disappear from art. By 1943, however, around the time he executed the only paintings he deemed successful, New York City and Broadway Boogie Woogie (both 194142), Mondrian had arrived at a notion of continuous dynamism as the negotiation of the particular and the universal. The great struggle for artists is the annihilation of static equilibrium in their paintings through continuous oppositions . . . art is the concrete expression of such vitality.13 Mondrian wanted to achieve the quality of musical Boogie-Woogie, which he understood as a kind of continuous opposition capable of generating dynamic rhythm. An internal struggle of incompatibilities and incommensurability would ideally demand of abstraction that it restructure itself continually.14 Despite this insistence on dynamism by the inaugurator of abstraction, the concept soon ossified into a formula. Postwar painters influential for Mona Hatoum, among them Manzoni, referred to abstraction as an empty semanticity.15 In Azimuth, a journal edited by Manzoni, Enrico Castellani described prewar modernisms presence to the postwar period as a conventionalization of abstraction and its concomitant hopes for a utopian universality.16 Castellani calls abstraction
12. Piet Mondrian, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality (1919), in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 32123. 13. Piet Mondrian, Statement (1943), in Theories of Modern Art, pp. 36264. 14. Ibid. 15. See Artists Choice: Piero Manzonis For a Discovery of a Zone of Images, in Mona Hatoum, p. 108. 16. Enrico Castellani, Continuity and Newness (1960), in Azimuth & Azimut: 1959 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1984).

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Hatoum. Present Tense (detail). 1996.

a formula and a vacuous end in itself.17 After World War II, abstraction was held to be the product of a mechanical ritual, irrelevant to everyday life against the horizon of geopolitical crisis, a universalism gone wrong. Present Tense (1996), another grid made by Hatoum, addresses the way in which putative adversaries share in the politically determined events of recent history. The work resulted from a month-long residency the artist did in Jerusalem in 1996, creating a number of works for Anadiel Gallery in East Jerusalem. Having traveled from London to Jerusalem for the residency, Hatoum encountered a map of the Oslo Accords partitioning of territory. She made a version of this map, creating a grid of 2,200 square-shaped blocks of olive-oil soap (one of the last traditional products still being made by hand in Palestinian factories at the time), over which she pressed tiny red beads to form the territorial divisions of land to be returned to the Palestinian authorities.18 Hatoum says of these surfaces: Its really a map about dividing and controlling the area. At the first sign of trouble, Israel practices the policy of closure; they close all the passages between the areas so that the Arabs are completely isolated
17. Ibid. 18. While some industrial production in Palestinian areas continues, the olive-oil soap factory in Nablus, rare in its adherence to centuries-old methods of hand-crafting its product, was destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2002. I thank Hatoum for this information.

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and paralyzed . . . . The Palestinians who came into the gallery recognized the smell and the material instantly. I saw the soap as a symbol of Palestinian resistance. The map looks like hundreds of little islands with no continuity or territorial integrity amongst them.19 The soap map not only denoted, through the configuration of the beads on the grid, the coordinates of enclosure and isolation, it also materialized them through the mnemonic sensorial connotations of the olive scent. Yet these signifiers slide; they are so much foliage without a kernel. Hatoum describes the way in which Israelis from Tel Aviv at the exhibition opening started reading a reference in the soap to concentration camps. This couldnt have been further from my thoughts.20 Demonstrating the peripatetic movement of the signifier, the anecdote testifies to the overlap between the shared and the restricted among two groups bound by enmity. Both associated the soap grid with the terms of biopolitical limits; both are exiles in a perforated space.21 The political task for each viewer would be to acknowledge this shared exile status and relinquish the violence brought to bear precisely by a set of abstractions: identity, citizenship, and mapped territory. Abstraction as an artistic category allows Hatoum to supplement her use of metaphorical materials (Nablus olive soap, the keffiyeh) with a trope historically overdetermined by Enlightenment values.22 As Butler puts it, Left discourses have noted the use of the doctrine of universality in the service of colonialism and imperialism. The fear is that what is named as universal is the parochial property of dominant culture, and that universalizability is indissociable from imperial expansion.23 That fear is entirely valid; expressions of racism and nationalism stake legitimacy on the notion of universality. Witness the situation in France: Joan Scott has investigated the way in which the irrational response to a very small
19. Mona Hatoum, interview by Michael Archer, in Mona Hatoum (London: Phaidon, 1997), pp. 2627. 20. Ibid. 21. Michel Foucault coined the term biopolitics in the rst volume of the History of Sexuality to describe the way in which power uses the body as its primary site of inscription to organize populations through the formation of institutions. He proceeded to dene and elaborate on the term in 17 March, 1976 in Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 19751976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 23963. 22. Hatoums work could be placed in relation to artists dismantling modernisms totalizing ban on narrative, reference, and metaphor through ambivalent referentiality and indeed spectrality: Robert Gober and Felix Gonzales-Torres. But there are two points on which Hatoum radically differs. First, she explicitly engages modernist tropes like the grid as a means of dismantling its universalist economy. Second, Hatoums work takes on world-historical conflict in the context of globalization. Hatoums project has also been categorized among post-Minimalist artists working in London in the early 1990s, such as Rachel Whiteread, who were rethinking Minimalism. See Hal Fosters discussion of Hatoums work in Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), pp. 63538. 23. Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 15. Gayatri Spivaks authoritative A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) draws a link between Enlightenment concepts of universality and colonialist expansion.

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number of women in the public-school system in France wearing the hijab set off a hysterical resuscitation of the notion of universality as the foundation of the French Republic, which could not accommodate any manifestation of difference.24 Banning the headscarf or veil [in the name of universality] is a symbolic gesture; for some European nations it is a way of . . . declaring entire Muslim populations to be a threat to national integrity and harmony.25 Universalism does continue to be cited in support of the colonialist legacy upon which universality as a concept was paradoxically founded. Those who understand themselves to be

Hatoum. Current Disturbance. 1996.

outside the fictional parameters of hegemony are justified in decrying the term universality. But what might it mean to stage it? Hatoum courageously engages abstraction-as-universalism. Precisely because of its over-determination in the history of the Western Enlightenment, she restages this complex otherwise, allowing the prohibited terms to pull universalism apart from within; she precisely reverses what Krauss described as the grids mythlike capacity to cover contradiction.26 Current Disturbance (1996), for instance, is a three-dimensional grid. Wood and wire mesh comprise 240 cage-like structures in
24. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, p. 3. 25. Scott, in discussion with the author, April, 2010. 26. Hatoum is not alone in this. In the work entitled Gift (2003), which was executed in response to American-military aerial delivery of food in boxes resembling bombs, U.S.-based Pakistani artist Alia Hasan-Khan drew on both a Minimalist idiom of serial cubes as well as the legacy of the Surrealist objet trouv in order to rethink the legacy of Modernism and the neo-avant-garde against a post-9/11 horizon of post-colonial violence. See Yates Mckee, Suspicious Packages, October 117 (Summer 2006), pp. 99121.

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each of which rests a lightbulb. The wires feeding each bulb hang down to the floor, where they appear to tangle in chaotic pools but in fact converge toward a central control panel in which a computerized dimmer device fades and lights the bulbs at different intensities. Shadows shift the shape of the boxes, casting diagonals that cross one another at irregular intervals. The same light that assures the grids visibility also challenges its logic. In addition to the play of shadows, the bulbs crackle, filling the room with, by turns, a comforting purr and an unnerving buzz. The sound of the electric current is amplified so that all the fluctuations of the current are seen and heard simultaneously, creating a tension between the strict regimentation of the structure and the erratic activity that takes place within it. Hatoum says, It feels like a tenement block or a prison block where the inmates are freaking out or rioting. The crackling sound of the electric current adds a sense of threat to this work. It also feels like an electric inst allat ion where somet hing is going dreadfully wrong and is about to self-destruct . . . . 27 In recent work, Hatoum continues to permute order, contingency, and spectrality. In one such piece, entitled Interior Landscape (2008), strands of human hair rest on a pillow, suggesting the precariousness of the bodyits capacity to be pulled to pieces, to fall apart. The hair draws the outline of the historical map of Palest ine. While t he shape of a country is usually that of a nationstate, here, the spectral state of a non-state is metonymically articulated by the remnants of the frailty Hatoum. Interior of the body, in particular the body Landscape. 2008. without rights or citizenship. For the pillow rest s on a mattressless box springa gridmade of the preeminent symbol of the policing of bodies and borders: barbed wire. The body, personal and political, is missing, leaving a ghostly vestige. In other cases, however, the grid opens onto a sense of potentiality. In Hanging Garden (2008), a stack of burlap sacks of the kind found in war zones becomes the matrix of fresh bright-green grass. But that metaphor of futurity and
27. Hatoum, in discussion with the author, April 2010.

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growth is threatened: the stacked bags could be moved at any time, ripping the entwined growth apart. The grid both divides and connects a chain of particulars. Hatoum discusses the stacked bags as war architecture and says that she considers the piece to be an oblique address of the continued state of war in Iraq. The title evokes the mythical hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But beyond that, sand bags, although ostensibly temporary, are a ubiquitous sight throughout the Middle East, not only in Iraq but also in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, among other areas. As Hatoum states, This work implies that [the sacks] have been around so long that plants started growing on them. There is something hopeful in even the most inhospitable of environments.28 Hope and precarious life are entwined. While universality aspires to recognition and the rights of the universal, the claims of the particular dissolve that possibility in advance. Butler argues: The main terms of modernity are subject to an innovative reusewhat some might call a misuseprecisely because they are spoken by those who are not authorized in advance to make use of them. And what emerges is a kind of political claim which, I would argue, is neither exclusively universal nor exclusively particular; where, indeed, the particular interests that inhere in certain cultural formulations of universality are exposed, and no universal is freed from its contamination by the particular contents from which it emerges.29 Thus, any such claims to universality exhibit the very absence of that universality in advance. Universality/abstraction is inscribed in the material and contextual conditions it seeks to organize. It is already precarious and contingent. This statement (published seven years after the Oslo Accords and one year after Hatoum completed Keffieh) demands a redefinition of what the term universality has come to mean, especially for those who experience themselves as disenfranchised. It would be facile to attribute Hatoums exploration of abstraction to an internalization of a colonialist logic. But it would be equally nave to argue that she dismisses the category of universality, a concept she reveals as critically necessary in a diasporic postcolonial global contemporaneity. Hatoum performs the precariousness of any universal while dialectically enacting universality as a chain of particulars. Through artistic abstraction as a vehicle for the concept of universality, Hatoum demonstrates the degree to which [t]here is no cultural consensus on an international level about what ought to be a claim to Universality. Thus, for the claim to work, for it to compel consensus, and for the claim, performatively, to enact the very
28. Ibid. 29. Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 40. Butler addresses the Oslo Accords in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2006), and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009).

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Universality it enunciates, it must undergo a set of translations into various rhetorical and cultural contexts.30 * The 1948 Arab-Israeli war pushed Hatoums family out of their home in Haifa. Hatoum describes herself as born, in 1952, into exile. Because her Palestinian family was displaced by the formation of the Israeli state, Hatoum was born in Lebanon. She has pointed out that identifying as Lebanese was never an option. Hatoum was born and spent twenty-three years there, but Lebanons government very rarely issued Lebanese identity cards to Palestinian exiles. In 1975, she was doubly exiled when, while visiting London, she found herself stranded due to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. She had wanted to stay in England a mere week, but found herself forced into exile.31 So she decided to go to art school and in 1981 she received her Higher Diploma in Fine Art (HDFA) from the Slade School of Art. Having lived and worked in London ever since, she nonetheless distinguishes herself as Palestinian, which is notable given that she has only been to Palestine once, in 1996, for a month-long artist residency, at which point she created, among other works, Present Tense. Hatoum occupies the diasporic condition of simultaneous identification and dis-identification with the site of her cultural heritage. The artists work speaks to this condition, complicating any claim to identity by noting that its terms are contingent upon a set of abstractions. The concreteness of location, of place, no longer obtains in enforced diaspora. When Hatoum emerged as an artist in the early 1980s, the terms Middle East and woman artist were constructed in the popular imaginary as antimonies.32 Woman artist presupposed a unified category predicated on concepts determined by modernity, such as democratic representation, while Middle East not only linked a number of geopolitical sites, languages, and cultures, but is/was seen as a space outside the parameters of a modernity understood as embodying the secular values and precepts of the European Enlightenment. For Hatoum, the referential transparency of figurative representation was inadequate, and so were narrowly representational identity politics, bound to a single referent. Identity politics enact stable categories that no longer existed after 1948: Palestine and the Palestinian. How to think in terms of identity when identity, as a function of context, histories, and practices, is exactly what is missing? Hatoums earliest pieces address exile, the shattered relationship between geopolitical site and identity, and the concomitant failure of the signifier
30. Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 35. 31. Mona Hatoum, interview by Michael Archer, in Mona Hatoum, p. 8. 32. For a discussion of the way in which the qualifiers Middle East and woman artist (or any female subjectivity understood to have agency) cross cancel one another, see Susan Buck-Morsss introduction to Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003).

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(Palestinian, Lebanese, etc.) to circumscribe the self. Hatoum describes the events in Beiruts Chatila camp as the most shattering experience of my life. In 1982, between the 16th and the 18th of September, the Israeli Defense Forces, having invaded Lebanon and sealed off Beiruts Palestinian refugee camps, sat idle as their vengeance-seeking Christian allies massacred the camps inhabitants. The death toll was estimated to have been between 350 and 3,500. Disempowered from her vantage in England, Hatoum responded with a performance entitled The Negotiating Table (1983), in which her body acted as a mediating surface. The artist lay on a table with three chairs around it, wrapped in bandages inside a cellophane body bag that also contained offal. As Guy Brett wrote: The empty chairs reduce the worlds powerful to abstractions, so their presence is felt all the more coldly and impersonally.33 This abstraction was underscored by the voices of world leaders speaking on a cassette-tape recording, so many layers of mediation and delay separating them from the livesthe bodiesat stake. Negotiating Table expresses rage combined with powerlessness, voicelessness, as though one were a ghost, already dead in the abstract organizations of power negotiating global politics. Hatoums practice thus intersects abstraction on the one hand and culturally assigned referents on the other to indicate the dissonant status of identity and universality. Keffieh is, once again, exemplary in Hatoums oeuvre in this regard. A signifier of Arab identity and, more specifically and urgently since 1948, of Palestinian nationalist solidarity in the face of the formation of Israel and the loss of territory, the keffiyeh is almost exclusively worn by men. Many may associate the headdress with Yasser Arafat, whose decision to wear a keffiyeh folded in the shape of Palestine while addressing the United Nations in 1974 garnered much media attention. At the level of over-determination, the keffiyeh eventually came to mean liberation in general, even for those unaffected by the Oslo Accords. For example, the Yiddish slang term keffiyeh kinderlach refers to left-wing Jewish youth who wear a keffiyeh as a political statement; on the other hand, the scarf has been taken up by neo-Nazis in Europe. Contradictory categories divide into other antagonisms. In the absence of any stable referent, abstraction becomes a means by which to disarticulate traditional identity, and to do so in order to articulate a new politics, that of the condition of the exile or refugee, who, by his or her very existence, dismantles categories. Interestingly, one of the keffiyehs first appearances in the American and European media was on the head of a woman, Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The image of her wearing the keffiyeh in the summer and fall of 1969 appeared in newspapers and on TV after her participation in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840, en route to Athens. Paradoxically, Khaled wore the keffiyeh as a form of hijab, the headscarf observant Muslim women wear. She wore the scarf as a feminist gesture, as a way to connote her equality with her male colleagues in the PFLP and to symbolize freedom from
33. Guy Brett, Survey, in Mona Hatoum, p. 43.

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Western constructions of gender and sexuality, which were perceived as yet another form of imperialism. In other words, the keffiyeh/scarf hybrid in this context combined with grassroots feminist movements across the culturally heterogeneous Middle East, from Iran to Egypt. These saw the hijab as an autochthonous tactic to oppose male scopophilia, which they associated with Western forms of sexuality and the general cultural hegemony of European and American modernity.34 The social and political contradictions inscribed in Hatoums Keffieh thus splinter into more antagonisms. Many Middle Eastern and Muslim women living in the United States and Europe have decried the veil as an instantiation of masculinist sovereignty.35 As Susan Buck-Morss has succinctly articulated, Nothing, we are told by Western hegemonic discourse, so differentiates us from them as the lack of freedom for women in Islamist societies.36 Hatoum says she is critical of the rigid limitations imposed on women in the name of any religion. Yet she is boldly outspoken in her solidarity with Palestinian claims for sovereignty. Hatoums Keffieh stages tense ambivalences at the intersection of Middle Eastern and female subjectivity, an inflected subject position often regarded as impossible. But it is the impossibility of this position that becomes the condition of possibility for Hatoums oeuvre. What kind of categorical identity would feminist or Palestinian have to have such that each term would logically negate or obviate the other? What forms of universality and particularity are set in place by each term that render the other impossible, or fail to do so? Conversely, what might each term share with its other? Hatoum does not, as is so often the case in Western doxa, collapse Islams dictates with the Palestinian struggle, and she insists on the disarticulation of the two.37
34. For feminist interpretations of the veil, see Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Womens Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Saba Mahmoods extraordinary Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Mahmood, a Pakistani woman trained as a cultural anthropologist who had identified with secular feminism and was critical of the revival of religious customs in Pakistan in the early 1990s, confronted this question: how to account for the resurgence of Islam among womens groups claiming feminist goals? Her analysis of the Islamic revival also strives to make this material speak back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable (p. 5). 35. Not able among them is Ar vin Darabi. See Darabi, Rage Against the Veil (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999). 36. See Susan Buck-Morsss introduction to Thinking Past Terror, p. 12. Buck-Morss underscores the argument (which is also made in Ahmeds Women and Gender in Islam and in Mahmoods Politics of Piety) that it needs to be noted, however, that far from silencing the power of women, Islamist societies highlight it, acknowledging through severe and violent restrictions that what women do is crucial to political and social order. The argument justifying the strict codes of conduct, based on respect for women (in contrast to Western commodification of women and their disparagement as sex objects) has a dialectical dynamic that can lead to its own undoing (p. 12). 37. The artist also makes the obvious point, so often overlooked in current media-driven depictions of the generalized Middle East, that not all Arabs or Palestinians are Muslim, and that the Palestinian struggle for liberation should not be framed as a religious war.

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Ariella Azoulay, in her analysis of the ethical responsibility of journalistic photography, describes woman and Palestinian as two subject positions historically sharing an oblique angle to hegemony. Azoulay argues that both Palestinians and women are scotomized in civil rights discourses. Because Palestinians are considered stateless, they are absented from the discourse on citizenship; because women are considered full citizens, their susceptibility to a particular type of disaster does not necessitate a discussion of their civic status, which Azoulay describes as fragile and subject to violence, given dominant cultures obsession with women as objects.38 Subjectivity is not awarded to either; both are abandoned by hegemony. And each makes claims to recognition and the acquisition of rights within the discourse of universal human rights that cannot properly circumscribe the specificity of their difference. For Butler, the occlusions of which Azoulay speaks generate dynamism and a continual redefinition of universality. The emptiness of abstraction, its foundation on prohibition, renders it ghostly to itself. [Universality] is inevitably haunted by the trace of the particular thing to which it is opposed and this takes the form of the spectral doubling of universality, which means that particularityin this case cultural, ethnic, socio-historical specificityresurfaces and that any transcultural notion of the universal will be spectralized and stained by the cultural norms it purports to transcend.39 This returns us to the cultural signifiers, each making opposing claims that threaten to tear Hatoums Keffieh asunder. And yet, this is the universal, which will be found only in the chain of particulars themselves.40 Ultimately then, and paradoxically, Butler says, it is the absence of any such shared content that constitutes the promise of universality. 41 Universality exists only as specter. Keffieh is exemplary in its articulation of this ghostly claim to universality. The surface demands that the mimicked grid acknowledge its foundation on, and erasure of, the somatic. This draws on another piece the artist worked out during the same years as Keffieh, entitled Recollection (1995), in which Hatoum collected the hair from her hairbrush over many years and rolled the results into small sculptures. She brought the resultant balls of hair into the space, allowing them to disperse as they would, moving around on air currents often caused by human motion through the empty hall, and collecting like dust bunnies.42 Hatoum also had the hair respond to its architectural frame by hanging it vertically in almost imperceptible single strands from beams in the ceiling and clumps along the horizontal axis of the floor.43 This barely tangible grid of corporeal waste both rhymed
38. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract Of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 15. 39. Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 24. 40. Ibid., p. 33. 41. Ibid., p. 31. 42. This exploration recalls Man Rays photograph of Duchamps Large Glass, over which dust had collected for some time, retexturing the surface. 43. For a beautiful essay on this piece, see Catherine de Zegher, Hatoums Recollections: About Losing and Being Lost, in Mona Hatoum, pp. 88105.

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Hatoum. Recollection. 1995.

with and undermined the strict parameters of the space. The hairs barely there fragility formed a second architectural wrapper, literally made of part of the artists bodyto envelope the viewer.44 That it should be the artists hair suggests an unlikely conjugation of authorthe site par excellence of the proper name, a privileged subjectand a bodily product rendered abject object. That tension is no lesser or greater than that between the chaos of hairs and the rigid parameters of the modernist grid, a structure set in place both by the architectural space and another component of the installation: a tiny loom on which human hairs are strung as warp and weft. Hair is bodily waste that marks an important site in the determination of the rights of life and death. Traditionally a signifier of feminine beauty, in the twentieth
44. Hatoums work evokes yet another modernist strategy entwined with the institution: the Duchampian readymade, which participates not only in the problem of nominalism but also in the uneasy and abject corporeality of Duchamps late objects like Female Fig Leaf (1950) and Wedge of Chastity (1954). This contradicts the objects evocation of the elegant and cerebral grid. Via the readymade and the objet trouv, Hatoums practice dismantles the by now obsolete binary of abstraction and figuration, entwining them. For a discussion of the legacy of the corporeal and abject dimension of Duchamps late readymades, see Helen Molesworths Part Object Part Sculpture, Duchamp, and Louise Bourgeois in Part Object Part Sculpture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Hatoum has mentioned her discomfort and surprise with British mores and what she saw as a split between body and mind foreign to her upbringing in Lebanon when she first arrived in London. See Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate, 2000), p. 29.

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century, once cut away from its human support , it connotes dehumanizat ion, and circulates in contexts of abjection and violence, evoking, in particular, the unthinkable atrocities enacted on the bodies of detainees in the camps of World War II. The Nazis sent hair to textile factories to be used in the production of cheap fabric, and two tons of human hair is currently on display at the Auschwitz museum in Poland. Hatoums loom and the spool of hair that feeds it figure the transposition of bio-organic material to one of the most basic forms of human technics: fabric to shelter the bare body. Hatoums loom evokes moment s character ist ic of modernity: the link between rational forms of organization emblematized by the grid and the monstrous irrationality that is genocide. At the same time, the hairs at the side of the loom, not yet stretched over its strucHatoum. Recollection (detail). 1995. ture, collect chaotically as a bramble of stuff that recalls overgrown pubic hair. This slide from the orderly grid of the loom to the tangle of fuzz recalls the long-standing clich that characterizes weaving as the barely culturally mediated nature of female [re]production. Freud suggested that weaving, which he called one of the only things that women may have invented, was devised on a somatic register beneath the authorial terms of invention as such: Women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization. There is, however, one technique that they may have invented, that is plaiting and weaving. Nature itself would appear to have given the model, which this achievement imitates by providing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals.45 Freuds misogynist optic tautologically generates the conclusions to which he arrives; yet he does brilliantly express the somatic register foundational to, although obfuscated by, the sublimating operations of art and industry. In a text written in 1976 (one year after Hatoum found herself stranded in London), Foucault elaborates on how biopolitics as the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being . . . leads to what may be termed State control
45. Sigmund Freud, Femininity, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, New Introductory Works on Psychoanalysis and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 132.

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of the biological.46 What Foucault notes is that life and death have never been unmediated. Under the classical paradigm, the sovereignty over life and the sovereignty over death were asymmetrical insofar as the sovereign could not make life happen, but he could require death. The formula would be as follows: take life or let live. The modern paradigm enacts a more absolute penetration of life: the power to make live and let die.47 This shift occurred over the emergence of techniques centering on the body; Foucault lists among others the states sudden interest in reproduction, birth-to-death ratios, fertility, and birth controlall of them techniques to increase biopower or (and the issue of race eventually becomes paramount) to decrease the biopower of the other. Here, Foucault raises the Nazis Final Solution as an exemplary case of biopolitics. The hierarchical division of gender along an axis of embodied labor implicates gender in the problem of biopoliticsthe systematic use of rape as a form of ethnic cleansing being just one example. In The Civil Contract and Photography, Azoulay argues that modernity did little to mitigate the status of women as mere biological bodiesas objects. Before modernity, womens lives were organized through an association with masculine identity via marriage, distributed along a set of binaries structured in relationship to a notion of the sacred. Women were mapped along a single axis, a quasi-religious purification and sanctification of the unmarried virgin on the one hand and a quasi-political abandonment of the defamed, permissive unmarried women on the other hand.48 These were two opposite exceptions to the rule of marriage. Azoulay argues that modernity did little to change womens distribution in relation to this foundational paradigm. Just as for Foucault the modern biopolitical regime compounds the old to achieve a more thorough penetration of everyday life, modernity permutes a set of terms shaped and institutionalized over thousands of years.49 In twentieth-century battles for the right to sovereignty over ones body, the body itself underwent a process of secularization . . . [yet] this body came into the world without any of the normative defenses of citizenship to regulate it . . . . 50 Under universal rights, the contingencies of the body, deemed particular, were not introduced to the discourse of citizenship, thus abandoning it to a renaturalized vulnerability. Modernity, based on a set of Enlightenment universalist claims disavowing the specificities of the body, did little to address the particularities of womens lives. Instead, the body, or bare life, continues to be the primary term defining women, now commodified and sexually fetishized.51 Giorgio Agamben has expanded on Foucaults notion of biopolitics by argu46. Foucault, 17 March, 1976, pp. 23940. 47. Ibid., p. 241. 48. Azoulay, The Civil Contract Of Photography, p. 226. 49. Ibid., p. 227. 50. Ibid., p. 228. 51. For a discussion of the blind spot of sexuality and embodiment in Enlightenment thinking, see Jacques Lacans seminal essay Kant with Sade, October 51 (Winter 1989), pp. 5575.

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ing that modernity ushered in a new regime of marking the body, never a neutral category to begin with, with increasing force and violence in the interest of engineering populations, as evidenced by the ways in which historical crises were inscribed on the body, such as the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Both are extreme instantiations of biopolitics. It is charted along an axis between life as mediated by forms of disciplinary control and the condemnation to death articulated in equally systematized forms. In other words, life is only ever a form of life, understood through abstract mediation. This opens onto a discussion of the particular forms of the body motivated by historical and geopolitical context. Artistic practices after World War II consciously and unconsciously address issues of biopolitical violence. That artists in the 1950s in both the European and American contexts raised the problem of the body as a foundation and hidden support for modernist abstraction is already part of the standard narrative. Jasper Johns canonized Target with Plaster Casts (1955) cites the body through sculptural indices, presented alongside a privileged form of modernist opticality, the nesting circles of the target.52 Hatoum cites Piero Manzoni as formative of her idiom, an artist who made the intersection between corporeality and abstraction his primary project.53 Manzonis Achromes of 1959 through 1963 programmatically demonstrate the authoritarian qualities of transcendental universal abstraction. Tropes like the monochrome and the grid are permuted in an investigation of the limits of painting. Unlike his American counterpartswho asked how far a painting could be pushed and still remain painting, thereby posing a purely formal inquiry Manzoni inaugurated materialist abstraction, demonstrating that abstraction was always embodied, implicated in a specific context, and that the universal is an aggregate of particularity. In Manzonis work, the body is present as singular materiality, formless in the absence of a support structure, such as the anthropomorphism provided in re-presenting the body in figurative art. In Manzonis oeuvre, the body is present (as opposed to absent through representation); Manzoni respects modernisms acknowledgement that the sign fails to touch its referent. An exemplary work in this regard is Achrome with Fur (196162). One among a series in which Manzoni affixed various materials, organic and synthetic, to a monochromatic surface, the work addresses the dialectic of plenitude and spectrality as a response to modernism and universality. Fur exposes excess and lack as a priori entwined. The explosion of anarchic matter shatters the artificial divide between virtual and real space protected by the frame. Beyond the clichd dismant ling of modernist paint ing and flatness, Manzoni radicalizes that act of
52. Johns Target references Marcel Duchamps Rotoreliefs, which form a counter narrative to modernism. See Rosalind Krausss discussion of the embodied rhythms of the Rotoreliefs, as well as their part-object aspects as they spin centripetally and centrifugally. See Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, pp. 95142. 53. See Artists Choice: Piero Manzonis For a Discovery of a Zone of Images, pp. 10810.

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disassembling. Fur exposes this act as being not simply analyticalas Frank Stella, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd demonstratedbut an inevitable return of the repressed: the organicized, as Manzoni called it.54 Furs humor and its unmistakably erotic import (E. E. Cummings electric fuzz and shocking fur) cannot be contained. The fur casts shadows over the red monochrome. Those shadows insinuate the return of the embodied, the erotic, and the humorous, but also the spectral. Shadows mitigate the plenitudinous corporeality of the piece, suggesting vulnerability instead. Hatoum makes this precariousness of the body in relation to universalist abstraction her very medium. Hatoums work frames the way in which thinking the bodyinscribed by specificity, and thus gender, ethnicity, and historynecessitates the very forms of abstraction that disavowed corporeality in the early twentieth century. She performs the paradox that the disavowed body and that which disavowed it , abstraction, are a structural couple. Abstraction, formal and political, becomes a means to demonstrate that life is only ever politically mediated. At the same time, she investigates the limits of universality, which she exposes as an empty placeholder always redefining itself, a chain of mutually irreconcilable particulars. This relationship between body and system, materiality and order, opens onto the question of borders. The artist connects her exploration of the corporeal limits dividing inside and out to territory informing the bodys specificity. Edward Said argues that Hatoums project articulates the condition of the exile, split between loss (of home, of self, of continuity), and emancipatory cosmopolitanism.55 He writes elsewhere: The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us in the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons . . . exiles cross borders, break[ing] barriers of thought and experience.56 But as Ranjana Khanna has noted in her study of Hatoum, the exile celebrated in literary modernism must be differentiated from the refugee on the basis of a failure of agency and the right to return.57 The enforced expulsion of the refugee enacts an imprisonment as absolute as entrapment within the enclosed boundaries of home. Enforced limitation away from home doubly robs the subject of both extremes enjoyed by the exile: homecoming
54. See Manzonis claim that We Want to Organicize Disintegration in Manzoni, For an Organic Painting (1957), in The Italian Metamorphosis: 19431968, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), p. 718. 55. Edward Said, The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoums Logic of Irreconcilables, in Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land, pp. 717. 56. Said, Reflections on Exile (1984), in Mona Hatoum, pp. 11011. 57. Ranjana Khanna, Technologies of Belonging: Sensus Communis, Disidentification, Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 11132. Hannah Arendts evocation of the refugee in her essay We Refugees (1943) published in Menorah Journal, would, for Khanna, be suspended between exile and refugee. See Giorgio Agambens discussion of this text in Beyond Human Rights, in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (1996; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1517.

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and circulating in a cosmopolitan world. The condition of serving both as a negative projection site for the production of legitimate life and meaning (i.e., citizenship) and as a cipher marking the failure of signification, the refugees is a subject position at the intersection of universality and particularity. Like the woman and the Palestinian, the refugee stands simultaneously and indeterminately outside and inside the auto-generated system of meaning set by power, guaranteeing it. Said also does not address the degree to which the exile appears as a threat to the very category against which s/he is negatively defined: the native. The native finds the presence of the other both fascinating and threatening. Agamben has noted that if the refugee represents a disquieting element in the order of the nation state, this is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen, and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis.58 The appearance of the other is both exotically seductive and threatening because it exposes the false distinction between birth and citizenship, between what he calls nascita and nato. Citizenship is shown to be another form of abstraction born of modernity, founded on violence, and enacted on bodies. Nation state means a state that gives nativity, or birth [nascita] (that is, naked human life), the foundation of its own sovereignty . . . . The fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there may be no difference between the two moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as such) of the citizen.59 Agamben cites the title of the 1789 text so often referenced on the question of what constitutes a citizen (i.e., a privileged abstraction), The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Agamben notes that the slide from man to citizen betrays some ambivalence about the limit between the terms. Where does the man end and the citizen begin? Where does life end and identity begin? As such, the mere appearance of the refugee produces a range of responses, from uncertainty to fear, by challenging the foundation of national identity. It questions the legitimacy of an identity predicated on territorial and discursive boundaries. These limits emerge as utterly abstract, obfuscating the very life that they are meant to enable. Birth and citizenship, or life and its forms of mediation, are not merely categorical concepts. They mark shifting relationships contingent upon historical and geopolitical contexts. The today that enables Agambens epigrammatic state58. 59. Agamben, Beyond Human Rights, p. 21. Ibid.

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ment, performatively inserting historical context into the interior of the text, coincides with the 1993 Oslo Accords: As I write this essay, 425 Palestinians expelled by the state of Israel find themselves in a sort of no-mans land. These men certainly constitute, according to Hannah Arendts suggestion, the vanguard of their people. But that is so not . . . in the sense that they may solve the Palestinian question in a way as insufficient as the way in which Israel has solved the Jewish question. Rather, the no-mans land in which they are refugees has already started . . . to act back onto the territory of the state of Israel by perforating it . . . . Only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she isonly in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable.60 But the responses that the artist cites to her work, specifically her frustration with the visitors from Tel Aviv for whom the soap scent of Present Tense evoked the camps, raises another problem: the cultural monopoly on a history of suffering, the erasure of the other through the appropriation of its experience to ones own. The monstrous persecution of European Jews must be kept alive in an increasingly amnesiac culture, but it cannot be called upon to obfuscate the suffering of others throughout the history of modernity and the present. Identity politics, which reify the attributes of one subject position, fail to account for a broader structure of relat ions. On this point , But lers engagement with Emmanuel Levinas on the problem of ethics and the other is germane. In her analysis of the limited meaning of the Shoah to the present, Butler traces the theme of persecution to Levinass 1971 reflection in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, where he argues for the imbrication of the terms persecution and the burden of responsibility. But, as Butler states, Levinas situates the particular nexus of persecution and responsibility at the core of Judaism, even as the essence of Israel.61 She quotes Levinas: the ultimate essence of Israel derives from its innate predisposition to involuntary sacrifice, its exposure to persecution.62 For Butler, Levinas uses the Holocaust as an ahistorical phenomenon in a recursive model of suffering and responsibility that is allegedly essential to Jewish people rather than as an event bound by history. Dismissing both diasporic and nonZionist traditions in Judaism, Levinas not only collapses Israel and Judaism, but also betrays the preontological model of the subject he progressively offers.63 This model is predicated on the primacy of the other, specifically the call of the other that cannot be willed. That call, in turn, is one of suffering. It is the respon60. Ibid., pp. 256. 61. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 93. For Levinas, Israel is understood as land and as people. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid.

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sibility to that call, which precedes the self, that is its foundation. But paradoxically, Levinass model, precisely because of his recursive rather than historically contingent understanding of suffering and responsibility, essentializes the Shoah and universalizes Judaism, ignoring both the contingencies of history and the specificities of concrete historical experience. More emphatically, Butler notes, during the years in which Levinas was writing, It is clearly wrong to argue the state of Israel only suffered persecution . . . given the massive and forcible displacement of more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948 alone, not to mention the destitution of continuing war and occupation. It is curious here that Levinas should extract persecution from its concrete historical appearances, establishing it as the timeless essence of Judaism.64 History is dynamic; identity and difference are situated in time and space. Suffering is both universal and absolutely specific to historical context and geopolit ical sites; one event does not render another a non- event . But this immediate issue of history gives way to a greater contradiction at the core of Levinass formulation of Israel. His essentialist understanding of Israel as Judaism paradoxically obfuscates the recognition of the suffering of the other on which subjectivity, according to him, is founded. The contradiction moves beyond historicism to a structural problem, a theology leading to the universalizing of Judaism. If Jews are considered elect because they carry a message of universalism, and what is universal in Levinass view is the inaugurate structuring of the subject through persecution and ethical demand, then the Jew becomes the model for preontological persecution. The problem is that the Jew is a category that belongs to a culturally constituted ontology.65 Levinas betrays his model of the subject, its contingency on the call of the other. For Butler, Levinass writing is thus both critical and shocking precisely because it illustrates the dangers of blindness to universality as a chain of historically contingent and ever-shifting particulars in which the other haunts the universal, and returns as its spectral other. The unacceptable turn occurs when this quasi-universal condition of suffering and responsibility is plucked out of history and made the inherent trait of one people over another. Levinas warns: Ethics cannot be based on exotic cultures.66 Butler replaces this essential Jewish universalism with an understanding
64. Ibid., p. 9394. Butler also insists on the disarticulation of Israel and Judaism in the preface to Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). She takes then Harvard President, now Obama Administration cabinet member, Lawrence Summers to task for accusing voices critical of the State of Israel anti-Semitic (p. xvi-xviii). 65. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 94. 66. Ibid.

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of suffering as universality as a chain of particulars.67 It does not rest on any one identity, any one referent. Butlers critique echoes Agambens call for understanding the refugee as a subject contingent upon the shifting terms of history and geopolitical [dis]placement. For the problem of historical blindness touches on the choice of who/what constitutes a subject. Levinas becomes crucial, once again. This notion of a life chosen through entwined suffering and responsibility is constitutive for those who may be considered subjectsthose to whom the privilege of humanity is attributedand those to whom it may not be bequeathed. Ethics is a function of biopolitics, of who or what is categorized as having the right to life and as such deserves ethical treatment in particular places at particular times. Agamben has noted the failure of the discourses of human rights, which presuppose the category human, precisely because of the absence of a universally agreed upon sense of who or what is human. The camp, according to the arbitrary logic of the system in question, frames and thus defines the limit dividing human and inhuman. The system is pervasive, operating between perpetrator and victim alike; it is nefariously internalized by the victim and creates a hierarchy of victims. For instance, in the concentration camps of World War II, detainees constructed their own hierarchies, in which those at the lowest end, closest to death and seemingly beyond hope, were nicknamed the muselmann.68 In the jargon of the camp, it was Der Muselmann: the Muslim.69 No one felt compassion for the Muslim. For the prisoners who collaborated, the Muslims were a source of anger and worry; for the SS, they were merely useless garbage. Everybody thought only of eliminating him, each in his own way.70 Analogously, liberators of the camps sometimes raped German women, who in that particular context had been stripped of their human rights.71 That which constitutes the human is contingent upon abstractions. There are no identities, no

67. Shockingly, with blatant racism, Levinas warns against the rise of the countless masses of the Asiatic and underdeveloped peoples who threaten a newfound authenticity. See Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 165, quoted in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p, 94. Butler mentions an as yet unpublished text entitled Prehistories of Postzionism: The Paradoxes of Jewish Universalism in which she elaborates on Levinass racism. 68. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), pp. 4186. 69. Ryn Zdzislaw and Stanslaw Klodzinki, An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod. Ein Studie uber die Erscheinung des Muselmann im Konzentraionslager, Auschwitz-Hefte, vol. 1 (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1987), pp. 89154, quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 127. 70. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 41. 71. For a discussion of American soldiers treatment of German women during the liberation, see Atina Grossmann, A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers, October 72 (Spring 1995), pp. 4363. See also David J. Levin, Taking Liberties with Liberties Taken: On the Politics of Helke Sanders BeFreier und Befreite, October 72 (Spring 1995), pp. 6477.

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signifiers bound to referents that guarantee power or powerlessness. The signifiers slide, and with them, identity. Both these examples point to the liminal characteristic of all life, suspended between its bare form and its abstracted form. Universality is here a chain of particulars, in which the perpetrator (German SS) and the victim (Jewish detainee) are bound by a common exclusion, he whose life is spectral.

Hatoum. Light Sentence. 1992.

The human is not universally guaranteed or even representable in the mimetic sense. In other words, it would be impossible to figuratively represent as human that which is not granted the privilege of the human, i.e., a birth legitimated by abstract forms making of naked life (i.e., with no rights) a form-of-life (i.e., invested with rights, above all, citizenship). To elaborate the split between the human made so through rights and life not legitimated through human rights, Agamben, following Foucaults concept of biopolitics, has argued that the concentration/work/refugee camp where bodies are distributed and dehumanized in order to constitute others as human, as subjects, is the nomos of the modern.72
72. Giorgio Agamben, The Camp as Nomos of the Modern, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 166. T. J. Demos has recently addressed this problem in his essay on the work of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri. See Demos, Means without End: Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabris Camp Campaign, October 126 (Fall 2008), pp. 6990.

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It is here that Hatoums feminist practice touches on the problem of biopolitics, of that which can and cannot have the right to subjectivity free of biological determination. Modernist tropesthe grid and the monochromeconstitutive ways of visually articulating this figuratively unrepresentable turn. They are elegantly orderly and threatening, evocative of that nomos of the modern. Hatoums Light Sentence (1992) figures universality as a form of organization of life, a schema ambiguous in its enterprise, both predicated on disavowal and dependent on the spectral terms within its own parameters. Comprised of metal-mesh lockers stacked to form a three-sided environment enveloping the viewer, a motorized light bulb slowly moves, causing the metal grid to cast shifting shadows over and through the cells. The grid appears to shift under the exigencies of the traces it simultaneously contains and cannot fully contain. Those shadows mark the grids physicality and its cells emptiness. Generated by the structure, they undermine it by recalling a precarious contingent real such as the passage of time, the conditions of light, placement in the room, and beyond that, the social, political, and ideological conditions that inform the work.