Ariella Azoulay | Brown University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ariella Azoulay

Agamben and Colonialism, 2012

The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory, 2019

"'The Human Snapshot' brought together many of today's leading thinkers to discu... more "'The Human Snapshot' brought together many of today's leading thinkers to discuss the effect of the photographic image, its distribution through new media, and its impact on human rights" -- p. 8.

Philosophy of Photography, 2010

Questo intervento ha la forma di un dialogo d'amore tra due che portano in primo piano l'... more Questo intervento ha la forma di un dialogo d'amore tra due che portano in primo piano l'esperienza da loro vissuta. Non cercano una definizione, magari aggiornata, dell'amore; non cercano di riempire di contenuti l'affermazione «l'amore è...», ma portano alla parola l'esperienza condivisa tra loro due, la quale spinge ciascuno a dire all'altra «ti amo». Si tratta di un dialogo tra due voci singolari che con-dividono un'esperienza, che la (e)scrivono. L'intento è quello, seguendo Nancy, di sganciarsi dalla metafisica dell'amore che dal Simposio in poi domina la nostra tradizione e pretende di padroneggiare l'amore, perché la pretesa di padroneggiare/insegnare intellettualmente l'amore, lo manca inevitabilmente, ne elude l'esperienza.

Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej, 2013

Prezentacja pracy wieo Arielli Azoulay, "Civil Alliance" (2012). Film w języku hebrajsk... more Prezentacja pracy wieo Arielli Azoulay, "Civil Alliance" (2012). Film w języku hebrajskim i arabskim z angielskimi napisami.

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age, 2019

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

Formats and editions of civil imagination : a Civil imagination : a political ontology of photogr... more Formats and editions of civil imagination : a Civil imagination : a political ontology of photography. 1. a Political Ontology of Photography: 2. by Ariella Azoulay; Versobooks.com Ariela Azoulay teaches political thought and visual civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of > book review-civil imagination: a political In Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University Ariella azoulay, civil imagination: a political This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions Incomplete past: a civil human rights discourse

Manchester University Press, 2017

This chapter explores the modus operandi of photographic archives as well as modes of interventio... more This chapter explores the modus operandi of photographic archives as well as modes of intervention in its operation. Based on the assumption that the event of photography as multiple, as something that may take place even before or without the operation of the camera, and even without photographs to be seen, it proposes and explores different photographic entities: untaken, inaccessible and unshowable photographs. These entities question common descriptions of silences in the archives and ‘missing’ or inexistent photographs, formerly understood as ‘holes’ in or silence of the archive. In the chapter, they are discussed as concrete presences that initiate deliberative processes.

Photography and Culture, 2015

Abstract Since the late 1980s, Miki Kratsman’s photographic work has been produced mainly in what... more Abstract Since the late 1980s, Miki Kratsman’s photographic work has been produced mainly in what are commonly called the “Occupied Territories.” As a Jewish Israeli citizen and through his work in these regions, Kratsman exposes the nonexternality of the occupation, and the implication of Israeli Jews in it through their actions and interactions with others. Readers of the newspapers where most of Kratsman’s photos have first been published can always indifferently turn the page or whiz by any photograph they encounter. Yet if they choose to pause and observe, Kratsman’s photos share the complexity of the entangled relations between Israelis and Palestinians. In this paper, Azoulay re-visits with Kratsman one single contact sheet of photos from Qabatiya that in the winter of 1988 seemed to be a miss on the part of an alert photojournalist present near a “crucial event”—a lynching that Palestinians had carried out a day earlier of a fellow Palestinian they suspected of collaborating with Israelis. Approached as an archival document, the contact is reconstructed not as a miss, but as a treasure to explore the modus operandi of the Israeli regime of occupation.

differences, 2016

When Hannah Arendt says that the purpose of a trial is to render justice and nothing else, she se... more When Hannah Arendt says that the purpose of a trial is to render justice and nothing else, she seems to take a narrow, formalist, or even positivist view of law and justice, and this, it is said by some of her critics, leads her to conclude that "justice was not done in Jerusalem" (Laqueur "Footnotes").1 She is said to have been "suspicious of the ability of testimony to provoke emotions in the audience" (Chakravarti 25) or to be the "author of offensive remarks or misconstructions" (Laqueur "Reply").2 This is why some of her many critics have said she is "heartless," "insensitive," or cold, while others speak about "a certain failure of nerve" and a text that is "baffling" and leaves one "irritated."3 If not because of a certain heartless formalism, why does Arendt insist on a criterion of "relevance" in the face of pain and focus on procedures in the face of catastrophe?4 And why insist on the formal propriety of legal proceedings when faced in the courtroom with eruptions of what Shoshana Felman calls "unintelligible trauma"? ("Ghost" 159).5 We propose that relevance and legality are doing a certain work in Arendt's text, that they are not the only criteria in play, and that, in any The man should have appeared before the Nuremberg court, a special court. There is no successor court to carry on the special court's mission. If the Germans were of the opinion that their regular courts were such successors, then they would have demanded Eichmann's extradition. As things stand, there doesn't seem to be anyone but us eager to bring a wanted criminal to trial. So we'll go ahead and do it.-Arendt The purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else.-Arendt differences

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2016

The growing literature and catalogs on photographic collaboration, participation, and collectivit... more The growing literature and catalogs on photographic collaboration, participation, and collectivity, which are part of the proliferation of artistic projects that assert collaboration as their goal, still mainly focus on photographers who initiate collaborative projects. The repertoire of photographic works by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and myself includes many such projects, but we put them side by side with projects in which, for example, the relationship between the different protagonists is less clear, the intentions behind the acts of photography are less favorable for the photographed person, or the motivation to initiate certain projects is troubling or even coercive. This article, written with the collaborative input of Ewald and Meiselas, focuses on our work's basis in the assumption that collaboration always already lies at the basis of the event of photography; collaboration is its degree zero, as photography always involves an encounter between several protagonists ...

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2015

Assuming that the BDS is the largest civil movement today claiming to change the Israeli politica... more Assuming that the BDS is the largest civil movement today claiming to change the Israeli political regime, what type of “we” does it enable? In this essay, I try to answer this question, based on the premise that the response of Jewish Israeli citizens to the crimes and abuses perpetrated by their own regime cannot be based on external solidarity. Jewish Israelis are governed alongside Palestinians, and they are subjects of the same political regime. Their citizenship is a constitutive element of a regime of differentiations and hierarchy in which Jewish Israeli citizens are the privileged group. Not being able to endorse the boycott from the outside, Jewish Israelis can—and should—participate in it; their participation turns the BDS movement's call into a campaign to redefine citizenship as co-citizenship based on the right not to be perpetrator.

Settler Colonial Studies, 2014

Between November 1947 (The UN Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (The creation of the sta... more Between November 1947 (The UN Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (The creation of the state of Israel), many Jewish and Arab communities who cared for their country intensified the negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned meticulously to the last detail, during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to prevent the rising violence in the area from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and to salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. In over 100 documented encounters – and probably many more whose records have yet to be found – they promised themselves and each other the continuation of their shared lives. In 2012 I directed a film based on archival documents depicting these events. This essay, followed by the transcript of those events, reflects upon the importance of this chapter for a potential history of Palestine, as well as on her cinematic decisions to film the movie around a map of Mandatory Palestine (from 1947) with the participation of 25 Arabs and Jews of varying ages speaking in Hebrew and in Arabic.

Critical Inquiry, 2014

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in 1948 by the then-member states of ... more The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in 1948 by the then-member states of the United Nations. In the absence of an established international apparatus of enforcement, various means were implemented in order to make the language and principles of the declaration well understood and widely known, if not enforceable. The declaration, though proclaimed as universal, could not be disseminated, internalized, and regarded as universal without extensive educational efforts promoting these particular kinds of rights.1 The document itself was carefully designed to echo the official, minimalist design of other binding agreements such as charters and other declarations (fig. 1).2 To promote the declaration, photographs of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt, a wellknown and respected figure, and pictures of anonymous people attentively reading the publicity poster for the declaration were produced together with photos of heads of state signing the document.3 The UDHR was in-

Cités, 2011

Directrice de Photo-Lexic, groupe de recherche international au Minerva Humanities Center de l&#x... more Directrice de Photo-Lexic, groupe de recherche international au Minerva Humanities Center de l'université de Tel-Aviv, Ariella Azoulay est l'auteur de: Civil Imagination: the Political Ontology of Photography (à paraître chez Verso), From Palestine to Israel: a Photographic ...