Brenna Bhandar – Metamorphic property: Practices of ownership in Palestine
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Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship
The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?
Panel 20: New Cartographies of Citizenship
Dr Brenna Bhandar (Queen Mary University London) – Metamorphic property: Practices of ownership in Palestine
In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Catherine Malabou refers to the transformational masks described by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Way of the Masks as a material metaphor for the recombinant nature of thought itself (pp2-3). “[R]ather than disguising a face, the masks reveal the secret connection between formal unity and articulation, between the completeness of form and the possibility of its dislocation.” One half of a mask is folded back and replaced with another, producing a potentially infinite variety of forms. Malabou engages this material metaphor in order to illustrate the force and dynamic of circulation that animates the plastic nature of thought. That is to say, the relations between different forms of thought (deconstruction, destruction, dialectics) are enlivened by the circulation of different threads and traits of each of these forms, through each other. Thought thus exhibits an inherent mobility. Forms (of bodies, of thought) are open (and vulnerable) to collapse, to contamination, to explosion. Plasticity presents an immensely powerful way of thinking about forms of knowledge and ways of being that are not so much intimately connected to one another as continually in a mobile process of re-constitution. Shifting from forms of thought to knowledge, I consider the forms of knowledge that produce property ownership, in the legal laboratory of the colonial settler context of Israel/Palestine. I reflect on how ownership, comprised of different forms of knowledge (political, economic, anthropological), different ways of being, and practices of control, use, appropriation and dispossession, and movement, exhibits a plastic quality. I conclude the paper with considering how, insofar as plasticity has the capacity to explode form, there may also lie in the recombinant nature of ownership, the capacity to reconfigure practices of ownership altogether. What if private property relations were bent out of shape, beyond recognition? What might the deconstruction and implosion of property ownership look like?
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