Unfortunately I will not be able to hold our discussion session today on biopolitics in Palestine as planned, due to being out indisposed. I apologize for the late notice and inconvenience.
Instead, please spend this time reading the assigned text below and completing the following task:
Carefully read through the excerpt provided and make notes on the key terms, concepts, and frameworks that the author refers to or utilizes. Consider what the author intends to convey through their use of each of these elements. How do these ideas and lenses shape the author’s analysis? Also re-read and think about how Jasbir Puar is utilizing terms such as biopolitics.
Feel free to post your thoughts and interpretations of the reading in our course blog. This will allow us to begin a written dialogue even in my absence. We can pick up an in-depth discussion when we meet again on January 15th at 11am to discuss this task and chapter 4. Please note that this is a change from our original plan; I will update the course blog accordingly.
I hope this alternative assignment provides a productive way for you to engage with the materials for today. Please let me know if you have any other questions. I look forward to being back in class next week.
Wishing you all the best.
Necropolitical Ends: Biopower and Debility Across the Palestinian Closures Regime
Israel wields the full array of biopolitical stratagems in managing the boundaries of Palestinian civic life. The archipelago of strategic barriers, checkpoints, and permit regimes constitute what Foucault terms an enclosing ‘biopower’ – one calibrating movement of populations to carve the occupied landscape into discontiguous Palestinian zones. Life within these enclaves incubates contagious risks and debilities from cramped quarters lacking medical infrastructure or clean water. Israel’s periodic blockading of nutrition, sanitation equipment, and medicinal goods cannot but weaponize the biological vitality of Gazans contained inside a besieged strip. The microbes of infants wasting without milk come to manifest both the productivity and expendability of certain ‘Othered’ bare lives.
Psychologically, the internalization of occupation emerges clearly in UN interviews documenting cases of ‘checkpoint syndrome’. Mundane passages through militarized chokepoints instill trauma and anxiety in Palestinian citizens that biometric monitoring reduces to quantifiable behavioral data, further rationalizing these encounters through a biopolitical logic. According to prevailing neoliberal thought, such internalized responsibilization marks out modern governance. Yet indefinite delays also incubate cabals of young men, baking in their abjection until properly ‘feral’ – suggesting that disorder can likewise scaffold certain agendas. Fragmented roads and lands produce social isolation and communal violence that panoptic IDF overlooks exploit, particularly during flareups used to justify further territorial incursion.
Ultimately then, this regime’s biopolitical gambit for protected majoritarian life requires the calculated debilitation of minority existence across fractal borders. Clinical language of ‘maintaining necessary pressure’ reduces millions to statistics tweaked towards optimized outcomes behind securitized perimeter walls. Between dystopian literature tropes of citizenship and exception, the gradients of distorted life stretch from gestating bodies to burning effigies – each productive of their locality in the differential biopolitical field.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (8. Januar 2024). biopolitics, compensatory task for January 8. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 8. Februar 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13jpf


After all, almost everything is ruled through biopolitical power. The aim is to reduce, to strangle a population until they resign themselves to being controlled by a state. To besiege in this way and as the text says “through a biopolitical logic” is done with a simple purpose of exhausting all hope (by eliminating outside supplies, aid, etc.) and strength in moving forward for strategic domination. Such strategies are a deadly chain reaction, as everything is precisely premeditated to reach that goal, which in this case is to make people die while benefiting the other by sucking out and taking away everything in its path and thus controlling it. Although much mention has been made of physical debilitation and disability, for me the psychological one plays a more significant role in this case. Psychological damage, due to trauma, social isolation, among others, is the most difficult for a community to recover from, since wounds that cannot be seen are the ones that take most time to heal. In short, these ideas and concepts mentioned throughout the text corroborate all the analysis previously carried out in the book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how one of them is the one who benefits from the harm of the other. I believe that biopolitics has a great impact and influence on the physical control of people and their environment, but above all it has much greater impact on the psychological.
Through reading this surprisingly short text, surprising that is, in the length I have gotten used to in Uni life so far, I have learned new and severe jargon that comes to encompass the horror of the Paletinian life under seige. The change of a word from ‘checkpoint’ to ‘chokepoint’ for example, tranlsates more of the encroachment of this happening. Reading this writing right after that of Puar, I find the use of such complex words a bit jarring in their abundance. While Puar’s work does lean into academic jargon, there still finds a fine balance of comprehensibility. While this here work was rather short I found myself reading it twice before being able to follow through trains of thought due to the wording. I find this an interesting choice juxtaposed with the search for accessible texts in our writing course. Another thought was the wonder at the use of such heavy jargon as an outlet for the anger of the writer. This could however, fully be my projection.