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.

Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza is a clear-eyed reckoning with how dehumanisation and slaughter become normalised and institutionalised, despite the pretensions of civilisation.

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).

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In the Media:

An essay by Soumyabrata Choudhury entitled “War, Aid and Atmosphere: The ‘Compassionate Worsening’ of Gaza” which features themes from the book appeared in The Philosophical Salon.

“Books are not bombs; they are far more dangerous because they trace the creation of new worlds rather than destroy them. In that sense, this book is a dangerous book, one that asks us not just to think but to respond to the emergence of a new world of politics that resounds in the name of Gaza.”—Scroll

“Unlike the usual run of studies of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Original … will appeal to the careful and patient reader.”—EPW