In this talk, Abu El-Haj will explore the operation of a trauma imaginary as it works to recuperate the Israeli state and its citizens as “liberal subjects.” She begins by tracing a trauma discourse that references not October 7 per se, but the originary trauma of the Holocaust as expiation for Israeli-state violence. She will then juxtapose that discourse with the self-representation of soldiers as they film and celebrate their own cruelty and acts of destruction. In so doing, Abu El-Haj sketches a configuration of an Israeli-citizen-subject who diverges in cardinal ways from the (traumatized) “shooting and crying” figure of old, and discuss how, from this perspective, we might reframe basic suppositions regarding “the genocidaire” that developed in the shadow of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington D.C. You can read more about Abu El-Haj and her accomplishments here.
This lecture is sponsored by the W. Lewis and Helen R. Abbott Memorial Lecture in the Social Sciences. The W. Lewis and Helen R. Abbott Memorial Lecture is financed by a fund that was established in honor of W. Lewis Abbott, a distinguished scholar, teacher, and social advocate who was professor of economics and sociology at Colorado College from 1920 until his death in 1949.
