Idan Zivoni/Levantinism Now
“Levantinism Now” entails a sensitive and intimate politicization of the signifier within the violently fractured Middle East of which Israel occupies a symbolic center. It means shifting from the signifier of an actual enemy toward that of a potential neighbor. No less importantly, it calls for a complex and non-defensive examination of the libidinal relations between East and West, and of the forms of proximity and distance that these relations contain.
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Ofer Nur/Eros and Peace: Israel and Palestine in Queer Times
The talk is based on my book, Eros and Peace: Israel and Palestine in Queer Times. In it, I attempt to reform current queer theory so that it can sow the seeds of friendship among Israelis and Palestinians, based on the ancient Greek notion of philoxenia (the antonym of xenophobia). I explore how the central theoretical notions of queer theory (desire, friendship vs. family, destabilizing rigid binaries such as colonizer\indigenous or aggressor\victim and the ways gender fluidity can project onto national and religious fluidity) can conceptually offer remedy to our brutalized region, and also applied to real life. I call for making queer theory applied. Currently, under the leadership of the likes of Judith Butler, queer theory welded itself since the 1990s to postcolonial theory as is most assuredly manifested in the cult of Queers for Palestine. It became a subsidiary of the most belligerent brand of postcolonial activism. I claim that queer theory lost its way and became bitter, angry and insurrectionist. Being gay is the opposite of this. In the book I have a chapter titled "The Levant is queer" (which I hope to expand into a manifesto) which claims that the Levant is queer in its nature as a counter-essentialist hybrid of east and west, breaking reified binaries, not knowing too deeply what one'a identity might be and not fussing about it that much either, let alone kill and get killed for its sake. In my book I dedicate a chapter to Jacob Israel de Haan as the first queer post-zionist.
