Paper short abstract:

The state mediates its will to hegemony through terrorizing the body but in order to deprive human beings of a common world (Arendt). Beyond using the body as proof of pain, how can we use the sensorial attention focused on terror’s will to deprive its subjects of a common world?

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes Aretxaga’s research on state violence as a place of departure for the question about the rationality of state terror, of its productive work of reproducing conditions of paranoid cycles of violence as the will to “occupy” the affective energy of its targeted subjects. I use ethnographic observations during fieldwork in Jerusalem (2015) to work through the collective meanings of torture against Palestinian citizens as they crystallize in an artistic performance of the bodymind targeted by the maddening tactic of the state apparatus. My main argument as I bring in the Palestinian act of witnessing state terror is to offer the suggestion that the use of violence by the state targets the body in its capacity to unfurl the sensorial threads that ground us in the world and so allow us to weave a world one gesture at a time. But then, I also want to suggest that art, and in particular theater here as an embodied practice of presence-in-the-world, makes possible a lucid labour of witnessing the will of the state to break the creative relation between the senses and words, between one being and another (Rancière). My focus is on the operative work of witnessing the state deploying its will to terror as we are guided by the tactic of the actor using his body not as the surface of inscription and proof of pain but as the premise to induce an intercorporeal space for learning together how to respond to terror.