Belonging and Its Discontents

For a long time, I have been interested in belonging: in how we are forced but also need to belong in communities, in how collective identifications form our subjective identities, in how belonging is the subject-matter of our very sense of self. I have also been interested in un-belonging, in what happens to us when we are refused or choose to refuse a collective affiliation, in the dynamic of alienation, betrayal and freedom that ensues. The paper delves into these themes by journeying through the landscape of my own difficult belonging in the land where I was born: Israel-Palestine, sunk these days in a state of catastrophic war; my experience of belonging as it is being negotiated in my own analysis, carried over the phone between Tel Aviv and New York. It is a personal-theoretical postcard from a place of existential crisis but also hope.