Yesterday at a seminar at Stanford, Jasbir Puar engaged a set of considerations that I want to think about in light of today’s reading as well as the last few weeks. Keeping in mind that these questions are only a part of what Puar was discussing and brought certain considerations to the forefront for me, they are not the only statements Puar was making in the context of current liberation struggles in Palestine. Puar introduced some of her thinking in her upcoming book, where she engages with Foucault’s biopolitics and Membe’s necropolitics. In the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine Puar sees a specific difference that she terms “the right to main.” Puar positioned Palestine as exemplary of a contemporary control society, where all movement is under surveillance and regulated to the point that in Puar’s words, “there is no plane of redemption or relief, no fantasy that the occupation will change, and no fantasy that if it did lives would change, therefore there is no ‘good life’ to aspire to.” Puar theorizing “maiming” vs killing as an act that produces a discourse of humanitarian benevolence, that helps reify narratives of liberalism surrounding Israel.

I was struck by this condition Puar articulated as a lack of a future “good life” and it invoked for me Ahmed’s thinking around happiness. For Ahmed, future happiness is not a necessary ingredient for revolutionary consciousness. If as Puar says, there is no aspiration to a good life in Palestine, what is striking to me, is that this does not equate to an apathy or lack of revolutionary movement. In Speculate This! speculation is defined as “[…] essentially always about potentiality: a reach toward those futures that are already latent in the present, those possibilities that already exist embedded in the here and now, about human and nonhuman power, which is, in effect, the ability to become different from what is present.” In the context of Palestine, the potentiality of liberation, if we take seriously Puar’s concerns around “no good life,” would fall into the category of affirmative speculation, “embracing uncertainty.” What kinds of temporal concepts are being invoked in Speculate This!? How does this relate to a question Puar’s asked yesterday? “What happens to forms of temporal attachments if they must give up the “fantasy” of temporal futurity (in context of good life)?”

While trying to consider this example, the extremity of surveillance and lack of autonomy experienced by Gazans, both Dawn and Critical Thought in the Face of Capitalist Hydra I came to mind.  In Dawn, despite the reality of being contained and under constant surveillance, the futurity and hope lay in the possibility of freedom and autonomy that may be possible once back on Earth. In the case of the EZLN, autonomy has looked like a many decade autonomous project where everything from governance, basic daily needs, education, and theorization around gender and futurity, comes from the maintenance of that autonomy. As Ahmed makes clear with her considerations of happiness, it is not possible to read revolutionary potentiality within the context of a future that is perfectly legible to all. Thinking of these in tandem with the conditions of possibility that Puar described in the context of Palestine, motivates me to further interrogate ideas around revolutionary imaginary, autonomy, and how we as a class were and weren’t articulating them around the EZLN text.