Deleuze, Palestine, and Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun

As Eyal Weizman reveals how Israel Defense Forces used Gilles Deleuze to support their illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, Deleuze’s connection with and stance on the Palestine-Israel Problem are getting attention. Recent studies show that Deleuze is personally empathetic with Palestinians and many of his concepts can help clarify Israel’s settler colonisation of Palestine. This paper provides a positive reading of Deleuze in the context of Palestinian liberation struggle by contending that Deleuze’s concepts of fabulation and a people to come are key to forming Palestinian identity. The main argument is that Palestinians resist Israel’s attempt to replace and displace them by fabulating new forms of Palestinian identity (and lives), so they exist. Fabulation through literature is crucial to bringing forth a Palestinian to come or a Palestinian-in-formation. The famous Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun is an exemplary work. It uses fabulation through revealing the molar line of binary segmentarity, the molecular line of resistance, and the line of flight to hope for an event that transforms the present situation, bringing forth a Palestinian to come as a collectivity that resists against categorisation and as a process of constitution related to the whole world

Ancient history · Art · Palestine · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy