The elasticity of empire: Palestine and the point of the list

Abstract

This talk examines how US empire operates as a topological formation that projects security and war power through mediated arrangements of power, mobile technologies, and blurred genres of rule that link far-flung sites in intimate and often indeterminate ways. Drawing on over a decade of research conducted in Palestine on the embedding of Washington's counterterrorism regime into monetary transactions and aid flows inbound to the Palestinians, this talk presents a different analytic of the US war state—one that realizes its destructive effects not only through spectacular modalities of violence and warfare, but increasingly so, through a quieter, temporally stretched process of constriction that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation, or what we might call “asphyxiatory violence.” Tracing the political work the terrorism designation performs on racialized life, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the governing and repression of populations within the United States, this talk, constructs a different theoretical apparatus of war and empire—one enacted through the point of the terrorism list.