Thinking about the law and genocide in Palestine

This article offers a reading of Adania Shibli's 2017 novel Tafṣīl Thānawī (Minor Detail) in relation to the law and genocide in Palestine. Taking as a point of departure the reflection on language, thought, and universality in G.W.F Hegel's Philosophy of Right, this article outlines the manner in which law, in its normative languages in globality, is derivative of Hegel's subordination of language, and sociality, to Bildung (culture, formation), as Hegel elaborates these in his subject-centric and statal formulations. At the same time, through a close study of Minor Detail – a text which articulates a phenomenological poetics more than a narratively-determined historical accounting - and in relation to readings of the historical and ongoing genocide in Palestine in relation to the law, this article suggests that language, in the poetic-novelistic form it is given in Shibli, is wholly other than the terms for social understanding articulated in the sense of language, the social, and life privileged in law, and through which law is founded. If the contestation or refusal of the Zionist genocide in Gaza – exemplified in numerous legal acts and petitions as well as in mass public protests and demonstrations – draws upon a legal concept, genocide, such protest and refusal are wholly in excess of law and the world law makes. Reading Shibli alongside these contemporary events - and with the work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Noura Erakat, David Lloyd, and the legal scholar late Robert Cover – suggests that collective acts give a poetic sense of the social – an understanding of sociality which is at once anomic and poetic: a wholly other making of relation and world.