Collectivity in Struggle

Reviews / Votes

Recalling and invoking the artistic-political projects of Godard and Genet as mediating forces in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against superpowers and imperialism, Shaul Setter invites us to go beyond the melancholic gesture of declaring these interventions as failures. His careful engagement with the texts and with their collective revolutionary potentiality is presented as an alternative to an otherwise limited identitarian politics: liberal or radical. Setter's returns us to Genet and Godard, as well as to Palestine by reviving a mode of political engagement that may have failed to actualize in the past, but can and must still be envisioned as a historical potential that has not yet caught up with the present. -- Gil Hochberg, Columbia University This book is a unique piece of scholarship. It is interdisciplinary in a very creative manner and offers a special unique view on the year 1968 in world history. It manages to create connections where there seems to be none, resisting rigid disciplinary boundaries, putting together East and West, France and Palestine. Setter rereads Palestine from France and rereads French intellectual artistic scene from Palestine. The book establishes, reads, and interprets the relations between politics and aesthetics, writing and doing, the word and the deed, creating links between aesthetical imagination and political action. -- Raef Zreik, Tel Aviv University