No Constraint, or The Potential To Not Do

2013. Journal Publication

Trans, Vol 22 (Inhalt Issue / Stance Issue)

gta Verlag ETH Zurich

Peer-reviewed Article. Co-authored with Camillo Boano

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Frederich Nietzsche pinpointed the dialectic between a good and a bad use of competition and virility; where the bad sought the destruction of the adversary, the good meant respecting the adversary while seeking to outdo them. Israel has developed a complex system articulated at the intersection of these options. It has manufactured a series of ingenious infrastructures by constantly extending its reach, simultaneously aiming to reduce the potential of its adversary.   

This paper proposes to build on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault by introducing the notion of heterotopian infrastructures. The aim is to expose ways by which Israel’s military-urbanism has transformed social and physical networks in the Occupied Territories through a spatial reconfiguration provoked by heterotopian infrastructures. Following Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical work on the notion of ‘potentiality’, the essay proposes an analytical reading of these infrastructures that reveals how these have accelerated the separation of West Bankers from their freedom to act, and of Israel from its freedom to not act.