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Kotef, Hagar (2019) 'Violent Attachments.' Political Theory, 48 (1). pp. 4-29.

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Abstract

Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence is in conflict with (liberal) identity, and that, therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent upon mechanisms of active blindness (or denial, deferral, and other forms of dissociation). I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: violence, denial, settler colonialism, Israel/Palestine, visibility, subject formation
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Politics & International Studies
ISSN: 00905917
Copyright Statement: © The Author(s) 2019. This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE in Political Theory, available online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980019001836
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719861714
Date Deposited: 01 Jul 2019 14:29
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/31228
Related URLs: https://journal ... ub.com/home/ptx (Publisher URL)
Funders: Leverhulme Trust

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