Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to elaborate a peculiar form of violence based on the ability to wound slowly. It starts by exploring everyday events in a strangulated West Bank site struggling with Israel’s colonisation and settlement policies, thus painting a nuanced picture on how slowness and slow proceedings wound through unspectacular events and mundane spatialisations. Spatially manifold picture of ‘slow wounding’ is thus offered, one which not only helps in showing how ordinary spaces and unspectacular events can wound, but which also forces us to ask how wounding through slowness becomes possible in the first place. In latter regard it is shown how the power of slowness remains embedded in what consists of our fundamental exposure to a wound of living. Such exposure doesn’t merely name the woundedness of life to power, but also the woundedness of power itself. On the one hand slow wounding is enabled by the woundedness, while on the other hand it is fundamentally limited by it. While this ambiguity is shown to unfold the inherent incapacity of power to ever fully force Palestinian lives under the establishes orders of governing, most notably it unearths the way in which particular ways of wounding are complexly entwined around life’s incurable proneness to a wound – to a wound of being a living being.