UMass Boston Presents: Necrophiles for Palestine

Because Queers for Palestine is so 2023

As we were wandering through our beloved campus center, looking for source material, we were stopped in our tracks by a flyer from the Political Science department. It read:

“Antigone’s Decolonial Mourning in Palestine as Necroresistance.”

Wait… what?

You know that feeling when you understand every word individually, but together they form a sentence that sounds like your brain just stepped on a rake? Yeah, that.

Actually - full disclosure, we didn’t understand every word. “Antigone,” sure. She’s the Greek tragic heroine who defied the king to bury her brother, a symbol of moral resistance or, as they call it nowadays, decolonial vibes. Odd choice for a movement that’s usually allergic to anything “Western,” but whatever.

We’re very familiar with “decolonial,” especially since our university recently began decolonizing everything: rigor, the spirit, learning and even coloniality itself, in a rather recursive fashion.

But necroresistance? Sounds a bit morbid, no? Or maybe like a goth metal band, or strength training for corpses. So we Googled it.

Apparently, necroresistance is suicide as a political act. You know, like self-immolation in front of embassies, or blowing yourself up in a crowd to collect your frequent martyr miles and 72 virgins. (We're not judging, just noting that this concept might need a stronger PR team.)

The event features a talk by our esteemed colleague, Dr. Andres Henao Castro, whose research interests include: ancient and contemporary political theory, decolonial theory, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, critical philosophy of race, poststructuralism, settler colonial critique, and, presumably, complex sentence construction.

In a desperate attempt to understand Dr. Henao Castro and by extension, the dark pit of wokedemia, we tried to read his article on Necropolitics. Big mistake. Huge.

Somewhere between:

Mbembe introduces necropolitics to expand on Michel Foucault’s critique of power, as an alternative path for critical theory. Foucault identified a historical change in Western modernity’s technologies of power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when state power took life, rather than death-the sovereign right to kill-as its main object. Having already distinguished disciplinary from sovereign power, Foucault named this technology “biopolitics” and qualified it as invested in the government/administration of the life of the population.

and

Necropolitics has been further developed in queer and feminist theory, with their focus on the materially entangled and historically co-constituted nature of race, class, sex, disability, ethnicity, and nationality. Crucial here is the work of Jasbir Puar, who prefers the more poststructuralist, fluid language of assemblage theory to that of intersectionality, to analyze the neoliberal folding of subjects previously excluded on the basis of one social difference (i.e., the “homosexual”), into the biopolitical management of life on the condition that they align themselves with U.S. imperialism. Central to this neoliberal strategy of selective inclusion, is what Puar calls the fractioning and fractalizing of identity: “whereby subjects (the ethnic, the homonormative) orient themselves as subjects though their disassociation or disidentification from others disenfranchised in similar ways in favor of consolidating with axes of privilege.”

…our poor, STEM-poisoned brain suffered acute semantic necrosis and committed necroresistence against us. The poor thing simply shut down.

But just as we were considering pulling the emergency eye-wash station to salvage what’s left of our necroresisted cortex, we hit the real point:

Mbembe’s investigation drives him to Israel’s colonization of Palestine, which Mbembe rightly qualifies as “the most accomplished form of necropower” in its ability to integrate the biopolitical, the disciplinary, and the necropolitical.

Ah, there it is! The Mother of All Theories: the omnipotent evil Jews Israelis are always the vortex where all theories meet: Both white and non-white, both all-powerful and powerless, responsible for both Bolshevism and for rampant capitalism, both too foreign and too assimilated, hated for not having a country and then for having a country, and now - thanks to our distinguished colleague Henao Castro, they embody both Biopolitics and Necropolitics. We have come full life and death circle.

So, next time you consider sending your kids to college, ask yourself: are you investing in their future, or enrolling them in a four-year seminar called “Dead People and Why It's the Jews’ Fault”?