The Spectral Palestinian: Presence Before Politics

Long before October 7, 2023, Palestinians haunted the West and its political categories. In this work of political theory, John Randolph LeBlanc reads works by Raja Shehadeh, Sari Nusseibeh, and Mahmoud Darwish to track the manifold ways existing political language and norms (e.g., rule of law, human rights, international law, the nation-state) failed to capture and address the experience of a people living permanently under conditions of occupation/domination. The Spectral Palestinian: Presence before Politics finds that their periodic use of the language of ghosts and haunting signals the relationship between Palestinian experience and the ’promise’ of Western political language and its institutions. LeBlanc argues that this resulting sense of ’spectrality’ constitutes an underexplored form of Palestinian self-awareness and agency. Initially, the specter is the product of the others’ fear, that is, nearly disembodied sites of violence carrying the threat of non-being. While reading the accounts of these Palestinians’ frustrating confrontations with the apparatuses and language of Western politics, LeBlanc finds the latent possibility of Palestinians taking hold of the specter’s power. Turning the spectral on its authors, the Palestinian defies a political language that has abandoned them and rejects the accompanying stigmas by standing fast in their spaces and fully appearing in the demand for human dignity.

John Randolph LeBlanc is professor of political science at the University of Texas, Tyler and the University Honors College, USA