Thoughts of Gaza Far From Gaza

The terror unfolding in Gaza looms over us all. We find ourselves unable to think, content with reciting decades-old truisms. Teacher and philosopher Soumyabrata Choudhury intensifies this disquiet. He enquires into the fantasies of nationhood that plague both Israel and Palestine.

Does the figure of the Hamas terrorist occlude the existence of a Palestinian ‘world’? What do the harrowing images of suffering children in Gaza force us to think? How does the flat world of capitalism square itself with the absolute otherness to which Gaza is consigned? What is the meaning of the Zionist claim, ‘Palestine is a land without a people’? How does the media force us to consume the catastrophe? All the emergent paranoias and fantasies are analysed.

The author

Soumyabrata Choudhury teaches at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has authored several essays on ancient Greek liturgy, the staging of Ibsen, psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, Ambedkar, Phule, Schiller and Hegel. Choudhury is the author of Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth (2013), Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme (2018) and Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Coronavirus and Shaheen Bagh, Association and Isolation (2020).

Reviews

‘This courageous book seeks to create the minimal conditions for thoughtfulness’ – Bruno Bosteels, author of The Actuality of Communism

‘Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza asks us, How do we face the test of humanity in our times?’ – Githa Hariharan, writer

‘Choudhury offers us not just a practice of thinking about Gaza but a method for thinking itself’ – Vqueeram, independent researcher