A Spectral Universality:

Mona Hatoums Biopolitics

of Abstraction*

JALEH MANSOOR

A delicate swath of fabric is laid in a protective vitrine, underscoring its

fragility. At first the material appears to impart nothing of itself save fine-craftedness,
its fibers woven into a network of threads interlocked in strong knots at regular
intervals, meandering at the edges. But the objects placement in a gallery at the
Museum of Modern Art imposes a set of interpretive parameters. The repeating
modules made by the fabrics material, enclosed in a double border that mimics a
frame, evoke the object so commonly encountered in that museum: the painted
grid hanging vertically on the gallery wall.
The object is a grid, and it isnt. Certain of its characteristics, such as its
horizontality, belie any status as a transcendental object of aesthetic autonomy,
and in this sense the display evokes an anthropological exhibition context, or
that of a craft museum. And it is blatantly material and tactile, exceeding a
grids opticality. Its units are not rectilinear, but are irregular ovals, reliant on
the warp and weft of the thread constituting them. The cells are not stamped
out ready-made over the material that constitutes them; rather, each is the stuff
of that very material.1 In this way the objects materiality belongs to the tactile
process of weaving. But this evocation of the craft of weaving is frustrated in
turn. The excess strands at the fabrics edge are in fact human hair, as is the grid
embroidered over the cotton support. This object is not a piece of fabric, but an
abject and precarious web of human tissue. How can the object suggest an
*
I am deeply indebted to Mona Hatoum for illuminating many points not only about her subtle and complex practice, but about the history of, and geopolitical situation on the ground of, occupied Palestine. Many thanks as well to Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Yates McKee, Judith Grant, and
Katherine Hammond.
1.
Keffieh is made of cotton and human hair. As the artist has explained in conversation, the
hair is embroidered using the appliqu technique onto cotton voile, the material constituting a traditional keffiyeh. The black frame is also characteristic of a traditional keffiyeh. Hatoum had one procured for her at a site in the Palestinian territories where they are woven and machine-embroidered.
The artists hair appliqu evokes the embroidered traditional keffiyeh; however, she continued the
embroidery past the edge, allowing the hair to spill over the supports limit.

OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 4974. 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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OCTOBER

ideated image of the possibility of disembodied puritythe gridand at the

same time present itself as a web of human waste?
Given the thin stretch of fabrics failure to add up and to supply a meaning,
and given the absence of notable material or procedural affinity with the objects
around it, curatorial themes and cultural and political discourses impute meaning
to this mute object. In 2006, the context was an exhibition of artists from the
Middle East entitled Without Boundary.2 Perhaps, then, the fabric is a veil, that symbol of Middle Eastern culture as imagined by the West. In that imaginary order,
the veil emblematizes a social practice in which the putative absence of democratic equality relegates much of the population to non-citizenship. The cloth
symbolizes the others lack and excess, its failure to have entered secular modernity, and its surfeit of cultural practices predicated on irrationality if not
barbarism.3 The materially transparent yet conceptually resistant object at the
Museum of Modern Art is embroidered by hair, the seductive material the veil is
meant to hide. In its glossy plentitude, the body erupts in its ornamental excess,
even as it slides into abjection as so much dead matter.
But references to fabric, head covering, and the Middle East only begin with
the veil. Hatoum, who began the piece in 1993coincidentally also the year of
the signing of the Oslo Accordstitled the object Keffieh (19931999) after the
headscarf, woven in a distinctive fishnet pattern, traditionally worn by Palestinian
men. With activism on behalf of Palestinians gradually increasing in the 1980s
during the first Intifada as a response to Israel's violent suppressions, the keffiyeh
begin to signify Palestinian solidarity in Europe and the West. That support grew
in the 1990s in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, which many believed to be
unjust. Hatoum talks about her Keffieh as a quiet protest, wherein the works
medium and technique of weaving and hair, universally associated with the feminine, are held in tense balance with a potent symbol of Arab resistance . . . a
symbol of struggle with a definite macho aura.4 As this referential criss-crossing
2.
Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, New York, February
26May 22, 2006. Strictly speaking, it was presented as an exhibition of artists from the Islamic world,
with Bill Viola and Mike Kelley included to emphasize diversity by questioning the use of artists origins
as the sole determining factor in the consideration of their art. See: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/83 (accessed June 8, 2010).
3.
For a discussion of the way in which the veil has come to unify a broad and heterogeneous
range of practices variously connected by disparate iterations of Islam in the eyes of the West, and has
come to symbolize those practices as regressive and oppressive, see Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the
Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). The author states: The veil was the ultimate symbol
of Islams resistance to modernity (p. 2). Scott focuses on the debates in France around lacit, roughly
translated as meaning the separation of church and state under the protection of the state, and the
problem of publicly wearing the veil, locating the irrationality of the discussion among bureaucratic
entities. Scott notes the foundational hypocrisy at the core of lacit and its claim to protect French
Republicanism; the notion of equality as universality, which demands an erasure of difference, is itself
predicated on a concrete identity, a traditional and mythical French identity (p. 13).
4.
Mona Hatoum: Images from Elsewhere, week 36, exhibition brochure (London: fig. 1, 2000), n. p.,
quoted in Fereshteh Daftari, Islamic or Not, in Without Boundary, ed. Fereshteh Daftari (New York:
MoMA, 2006), pp. 2122.

51

Mona Hatoum. Keffieh. 19931999.

All images courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, NYC.

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of ethnic and gender politics suggests, the title and the correspondence between
Keffiehs conceptualization and an event of world-historical importance do not
anchor the objects meaning.5 Rather, they speak to a peculiarly anxiety-producing referentiality, splintered by dissonance. And this suggests in turn that the
association with the modernist grid is no mere imposition on this object by its
location at the Museum of Modern Art.
As a historical form structuring the most rigorous abstract art, the grid once
offered the hope of a utopian universality. It has also been argued that the a/temporality characterizing the grid throughout the twentieth century suggested a
dystopian condition. Rosalind Krauss famously wrote in 1979 that the grid is the
means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface.6 At the same time, mapping nothing but the
surface of the painting itself, the grid is a transfer in which nothing changes
place.7 As a structure, the grid is caught in an internal stasis. That which is
repeated ad infinitum is the inability to resolve the contradictions, the dissonance
in the real on which it is founded, which it disavows, and which, in turn, generates.
The grid is a dissonance machine. This suspension, in turn, is foundational to universality and abstraction; it is universality and abstraction.
Hatoums project mediates universality-as-abstraction by rethinking its
v isual medium: t he gr id, as a chain of dissonant part icular s. Allowing
Palestinians to be insinuated into representation, Hatoums practice articulates
the perforations of Palestinian identity negatively founded in that antagonism
with the other: Palestinian versus Israeli. Identity, in her project, becomes
abstraction. The aporetic binaries characteristic of the grid make it functional
as a structure for articulating, and deferring, many other binaries.8 Keffieh is a
grid understood in its capacity to contain and suspend resolution among myriad contradictions. It is as if the two, grid and Keffieh, functioned as allegories of
one another; each articulates and suspends numerous contradictions that are
seemingly impossible to resolve in the social political real. To attempt to clear
contradiction away would be as impossible as peeling the layers of an onion in
hopes of locating a kernel.9
5.
Hatoum has stated, in conversation with the author, that she did not begin working on
Keffieh in direct response to the Oslo Accords. That urgent political event and Hatoums commencement on her piece serendipitously date to the same year.
6.
Rosalind Krauss, Grids (1979), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 12. Art-historical discourse on the grid did not end with
Krausss path-breaking essay, of course. Most recently there is Hannah Higgins The Grid Book
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). Higgins work addresses architecture, design, and urban planning and misprizes the legacy of Mondrian and the modernist grid. Hatoums project demonstrates
that Krausss model of the paradoxically dystopian grid remains singularly compelling.
7.
Ibid., p. 9.
8.
Ibid., p. 10.
9.
In the first part of The Optical Unconscious, Krauss discusses the grid as enabling the suspension of contradiction located within a sociopolitical arena. She describes an exemplary grid,

A Spectral Universality

53

Hatoum draws on modernism in order to reenact it as both a technology by

which to defer resolution and as machinery to perform the differential, yet ideologically constitutive, chain of signifiers. But she also challenges the grid by taking the
abstract trope and yoking it to a chain of referents it was to supersede, thereby dismantling its historically determined associations with transcendental universality. In
contrast to Eva Hesses psychoanalytically inflected absurdist grids or Piero
Manzonis radically materialist ones, Hatoums grids are ghostly, haunted by a spectral other. In Hatoums work, prewar utopian universalism gives way to spectral
universality. That which was putatively risen above (specificity, history, corporeality,
ideology, politics) returns to haunt that exemplary emblem of universality.
Hatoums negative dialectical use of the grid is more critical than ever at this particular historical juncture, not because Palestine is one of the most difficult knots in
world politics and not because her art addresses genocide and diaspora as a condition of the present, but because of the way her work asks us to reconsider
universality as a necessity in thinking particularity. Hatoums project performs the
relevance of abstract ion in thinking a postcolonial geopolit ical hor izon.
Abstraction, conventionally understood to be apolitical, is shown to be anything
but. This revivification of universality turns it inside out and exposes its ghosts.
In her essay Rest aging the Univer sal: Hegemony and the Limit s of
Formalism, Judith Butler revisits Hegels analysis in the Phenomenology of Spirit of
the French Revolutions Terror and its relationship to the concept of universality.
The assimilation of the particular to the universal leaves its trace, she writes, as an
inassimilable remainder that renders universality ghostly to itself.10
Historically, universality was predicated on a transcendence of particularities, among them materiality, through which identity and difference were
established. Mondrian, working to move beyond binaries, demonstrated how the
surface of inscription became temporarily aporetic, denied and affirmed until a
suspended vibrato immobilized ambivalence.11 This aporetic suspension was to
remain dynamic, always constituting itself according to the vicissitudes of each
new surface encountered. And yet specificities remained unaddressed. Mondrian,
in 1919, declared:
The truly modern is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is
Mondrians Pier and Ocean (Sea and Starry Sky) (1915), as follows: The sea and sky are a way of packaging the world as a totalized image, as a picture of completeness, as a field constituted by the logic of
its own frame. But the frame is a frame of exclusions and its field is a work of ideological construction. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 12. Looking at modernism as a discursive field allows the author to locate the repressed, for her the unconscious.
Although our projects converge, I am interested in the condition of modernisms im/possibility from
a post-colonial perspective. Ultimately, the two are inextricably linked.
10.
Judith Butler, Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and The Limits of Formalism, in
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso,
2000), p. 14.
11.
Y ve-Alain Bois, Piet Mondrian, New York City, in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1990), p. 167.

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Hatoum. Present Tense. 1996.

cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an

abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.12
The particular, he said, will disappear from art. By 1943, however, around
the time he executed the only paintings he deemed successful, New York City and
Broadway Boogie Woogie (both 194142), Mondrian had arrived at a notion of continuous dynamism as the negotiation of the particular and the universal. The
great struggle for artists is the annihilation of static equilibrium in their paintings
through continuous oppositions . . . art is the concrete expression of such vitality.13 Mondrian wanted to achieve the quality of musical Boogie-Woogie, which
he understood as a kind of continuous opposition capable of generating
dynamic rhythm. An internal struggle of incompatibilities and incommensurability would ideally demand of abstraction that it restructure itself continually.14
Despite this insistence on dynamism by the inaugurator of abstraction, the
concept soon ossified into a formula. Postwar painters influential for Mona
Hatoum, among them Manzoni, referred to abstraction as an empty semanticity.15 In Azimuth, a journal edited by Manzoni, Enrico Castellani described prewar
modernisms presence to the postwar period as a conventionalization of abstraction
and its concomitant hopes for a utopian universality.16 Castellani calls abstraction
12.
Piet Mondrian, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality (1919), in Theories of Modern Art, ed.
Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 32123.
13.
Piet Mondrian, Statement (1943), in Theories of Modern Art, pp. 36264.
14.
Ibid.
15.
See Artists Choice: Piero Manzonis For a Discovery of a Zone of Images, in Mona
Hatoum, p. 108.
16.
Enrico Castellani, Continuity and Newness (1960), in Azimuth & Azimut: 1959 (Milan:
Arnoldo Mondadori, 1984).

A Spectral Universality

55

Hatoum. Present
Tense (detail). 1996.

a formula and a vacuous end in itself.17 After World War II, abstraction was
held to be the product of a mechanical ritual, irrelevant to everyday life against
the horizon of geopolitical crisis, a universalism gone wrong.
Present Tense (1996), another grid made by Hatoum, addresses the way in
which putative adversaries share in the politically determined events of recent history. The work resulted from a month-long residency the artist did in Jerusalem in
1996, creating a number of works for Anadiel Gallery in East Jerusalem. Having
traveled from London to Jerusalem for the residency, Hatoum encountered a map
of the Oslo Accords partitioning of territory. She made a version of this map, creating a grid of 2,200 square-shaped blocks of olive-oil soap (one of the last
traditional products still being made by hand in Palestinian factories at the time),
over which she pressed tiny red beads to form the territorial divisions of land to
be returned to the Palestinian authorities.18 Hatoum says of these surfaces:
Its really a map about dividing and controlling the area. At the first
sign of trouble, Israel practices the policy of closure; they close all the
passages between the areas so that the Arabs are completely isolated
17.
Ibid.
18.
While some industrial production in Palestinian areas continues, the olive-oil soap factory in
Nablus, rare in its adherence to centuries-old methods of hand-crafting its product, was destroyed by
Israeli bombing in 2002. I thank Hatoum for this information.

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and paralyzed . . . . The Palestinians who came into the gallery recognized the smell and the material instantly. I saw the soap as a symbol of
Palestinian resistance. The map looks like hundreds of little islands
with no continuity or territorial integrity amongst them.19
The soap map not only denoted, through the configuration of the beads on
the grid, the coordinates of enclosure and isolation, it also materialized them
through the mnemonic sensorial connotations of the olive scent. Yet these signifiers
slide; they are so much foliage without a kernel. Hatoum describes the way in which
Israelis from Tel Aviv at the exhibition opening started reading a reference in the
soap to concentration camps. This couldnt have been further from my thoughts.20
Demonstrating the peripatetic movement of the signifier, the anecdote testifies to
the overlap between the shared and the restricted among two groups bound by
enmity. Both associated the soap grid with the terms of biopolitical limits; both are
exiles in a perforated space.21 The political task for each viewer would be to acknowledge this shared exile status and relinquish the violence brought to bear precisely by
a set of abstractions: identity, citizenship, and mapped territory.
Abstraction as an artistic category allows Hatoum to supplement her use of
metaphorical materials (Nablus olive soap, the keffiyeh) with a trope historically
overdetermined by Enlightenment values.22 As Butler puts it, Left discourses
have noted the use of the doctrine of universality in the service of colonialism and
imperialism. The fear is that what is named as universal is the parochial property
of dominant culture, and that universalizability is indissociable from imperial
expansion.23 That fear is entirely valid; expressions of racism and nationalism
stake legitimacy on the notion of universality. Witness the situation in France:
Joan Scott has investigated the way in which the irrational response to a very small
19.
Mona Hatoum, interview by Michael Archer, in Mona Hatoum (London: Phaidon, 1997),
pp. 2627.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Michel Foucault coined the term biopolitics in the first volume of the History of Sexuality to
describe the way in which power uses the body as its primary site of inscription to organize populations through the formation of institutions. He proceeded to define and elaborate on the term in 17
March, 1976 in Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 19751976, trans. David Macey
(New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 23963.
22.
Hatoums work could be placed in relation to artists dismantling modernisms totalizing ban
on narrative, reference, and metaphor through ambivalent referentiality and indeed spectrality:
Robert Gober and Felix Gonzales-Torres. But there are two points on which Hatoum radically differs.
First, she explicitly engages modernist tropes like the grid as a means of dismantling its universalist
economy. Second, Hatoums work takes on world-historical conflict in the context of globalization.
Hatoums project has also been categorized among post-Minimalist artists working in London in the
early 1990s, such as Rachel Whiteread, who were rethinking Minimalism. See Hal Fosters discussion of
Hatoums work in Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), pp. 63538.
23.
Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 15. Gayatri Spivaks authoritative A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1999) draws a link between Enlightenment concepts of universality and colonialist expansion.

A Spectral Universality

57

number of women in the public-school system in France wearing the hijab set off
a hysterical resuscitation of the notion of universality as the foundation of the
French Republic, which could not accommodate any manifestation of difference.24 Banning the headscarf or veil [in the name of universality] is a symbolic
gesture; for some European nations it is a way of . . . declaring entire Muslim populations to be a threat to national integrity and harmony.25 Universalism does
continue to be cited in support of the colonialist legacy upon which universality as
a concept was paradoxically founded. Those who understand themselves to be

Hatoum.
Current
Disturbance.
1996.

outside the fictional parameters of hegemony are justified in decrying the term
universality. But what might it mean to stage it?
Hatoum courageously engages abstraction-as-universalism. Precisely because
of its over-determination in the history of the Western Enlightenment, she
restages this complex otherwise, allowing the prohibited terms to pull universalism
apart from within; she precisely reverses what Krauss described as the grids mythlike capacity to cover contradiction.26 Current Disturbance (1996), for instance, is a
three-dimensional grid. Wood and wire mesh comprise 240 cage-like structures in
24.
Scott, The Politics of the Veil, p. 3.
25.
Scott, in discussion with the author, April, 2010.
26.
Hatoum is not alone in this. In the work entitled Gift (2003), which was executed in response to
American-military aerial delivery of food in boxes resembling bombs, U.S.-based Pakistani artist Alia
Hasan-Khan drew on both a Minimalist idiom of serial cubes as well as the legacy of the Surrealist objet trouv in order to rethink the legacy of Modernism and the neo-avant-garde against a post-9/11 horizon of
post-colonial violence. See Yates Mckee, Suspicious Packages, October 117 (Summer 2006), pp. 99121.

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each of which rests a lightbulb. The wires feeding each bulb hang down to the
floor, where they appear to tangle in chaotic pools but in fact converge toward a
central control panel in which a computerized dimmer device fades and lights the
bulbs at different intensities. Shadows shift the shape of the boxes, casting diagonals that cross one another at irregular intervals. The same light that assures the
grids visibility also challenges its logic. In addition to the play of shadows, the
bulbs crackle, filling the room with, by turns, a comforting purr and an unnerving
buzz. The sound of the electric current is amplified so that all the fluctuations of
the current are seen and heard simultaneously, creating a tension between the
strict regimentation of the structure and the erratic activity that takes place
within it. Hatoum says, It feels like a tenement block or a prison block where the
inmates are freaking out or rioting.
The crackling sound of the electric
current adds a sense of threat to this
work. It also feels like an electric
inst allat ion where somet hing is
going dreadfully wrong and is about
to self-destruct . . . . 27
In recent work, Hatoum continues to permute order, contingency,
and spectrality. In one such piece,
entitled Interior Landscape (2008),
strands of human hair rest on a pillow, suggesting the precariousness of
the bodyits capacity to be pulled to
pieces, to fall apart. The hair draws
the outline of the historical map of
Palest ine. While t he shape of a
country is usually that of a nationstate, here, the spectral state of a
non-state is metonymically articulated by the remnants of the frailty
Hatoum. Interior
of the body, in particular the body
Landscape. 2008.
without rights or citizenship. For the
pillow rest s on a mattressless box
springa gridmade of the preeminent symbol of the policing of bodies and
borders: barbed wire. The body, personal and political, is missing, leaving a
ghostly vestige.
In other cases, however, the grid opens onto a sense of potentiality. In
Hanging Garden (2008), a stack of burlap sacks of the kind found in war zones
becomes the matrix of fresh bright-green grass. But that metaphor of futurity and
27.

Hatoum, in discussion with the author, April 2010.

A Spectral Universality

59

growth is threatened: the stacked bags could be moved at any time, ripping the
entwined growth apart. The grid both divides and connects a chain of particulars.
Hatoum discusses the stacked bags as war architecture and says that she considers the piece to be an oblique address of the continued state of war in Iraq. The
title evokes the mythical hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders
of the Ancient World. But beyond that, sand bags, although ostensibly temporary,
are a ubiquitous sight throughout the Middle East, not only in Iraq but also in
Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, among other areas. As Hatoum states,
This work implies that [the sacks] have been around so long that plants started
growing on them. There is something hopeful in even the most inhospitable of
environments.28 Hope and precarious life are entwined.
While universality aspires to recognition and the rights of the universal, the
claims of the particular dissolve that possibility in advance. Butler argues:
The main terms of modernity are subject to an innovative reusewhat
some might call a misuseprecisely because they are spoken by those
who are not authorized in advance to make use of them. And what
emerges is a kind of political claim which, I would argue, is neither
exclusively universal nor exclusively particular; where, indeed, the particular interests that inhere in certain cultural formulations of universality are exposed, and no universal is freed from its contamination by
the particular contents from which it emerges.29
Thus, any such claims to universality exhibit the very absence of that universality
in advance. Universality/abstraction is inscribed in the material and contextual conditions it seeks to organize. It is already precarious and contingent. This statement
(published seven years after the Oslo Accords and one year after Hatoum completed
Keffieh) demands a redefinition of what the term universality has come to mean,
especially for those who experience themselves as disenfranchised.
It would be facile to attribute Hatoums exploration of abstraction to an
internalization of a colonialist logic. But it would be equally nave to argue that
she dismisses the category of universality, a concept she reveals as critically necessary in a diasporic postcolonial global contemporaneity. Hatoum performs the
precariousness of any universal while dialectically enacting universality as a
chain of particulars. Through artistic abstraction as a vehicle for the concept
of universality, Hatoum demonstrates the degree to which
[t]here is no cultural consensus on an international level about what
ought to be a claim to Universality. Thus, for the claim to work, for it to
compel consensus, and for the claim, performatively, to enact the very
28.
Ibid.
29.
Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 40. Butler addresses the Oslo Accords in Giving an
Account of Oneself (2005), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2006), and Frames of War:
When is Life Grievable? (2009).

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Universality it enunciates, it must undergo a set of translations into various rhetorical and cultural contexts.30
*
The 1948 Arab-Israeli war pushed Hatoums family out of their home in
Haifa. Hatoum describes herself as born, in 1952, into exile. Because her
Palestinian family was displaced by the formation of the Israeli state, Hatoum was
born in Lebanon. She has pointed out that identifying as Lebanese was never an
option. Hatoum was born and spent twenty-three years there, but Lebanons government very rarely issued Lebanese identity cards to Palestinian exiles. In 1975,
she was doubly exiled when, while visiting London, she found herself stranded
due to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. She had wanted to stay in England a
mere week, but found herself forced into exile.31 So she decided to go to art
school and in 1981 she received her Higher Diploma in Fine Art (HDFA) from
the Slade School of Art. Having lived and worked in London ever since, she
nonetheless distinguishes herself as Palestinian, which is notable given that she
has only been to Palestine once, in 1996, for a month-long artist residency, at
which point she created, among other works, Present Tense. Hatoum occupies the
diasporic condition of simultaneous identification and dis-identification with
the site of her cultural heritage. The artists work speaks to this condition, complicating any claim to identity by noting that its terms are contingent upon a set
of abstractions. The concreteness of location, of place, no longer obtains in
enforced diaspora.
When Hatoum emerged as an artist in the early 1980s, the terms Middle
East and woman artist were constructed in the popular imaginary as antimonies.32 Woman artist presupposed a unified category predicated on concepts
determined by modernity, such as democratic representation, while Middle
East not only linked a number of geopolitical sites, languages, and cultures, but
is/was seen as a space outside the parameters of a modernity understood as
embodying the secular values and precepts of the European Enlightenment. For
Hatoum, the referential transparency of figurative representation was inadequate,
and so were narrowly representational identity politics, bound to a single referent.
Identity politics enact stable categories that no longer existed after 1948: Palestine
and the Palestinian. How to think in terms of identity when identity, as a function
of context, histories, and practices, is exactly what is missing?
Hatoums earliest pieces address exile, the shattered relationship between
geopolitical site and identity, and the concomitant failure of the signifier
30.
Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 35.
31.
Mona Hatoum, interview by Michael Archer, in Mona Hatoum, p. 8.
32.
For a discussion of the way in which the qualifiers Middle East and woman artist (or any
female subjectivity understood to have agency) cross cancel one another, see Susan Buck-Morsss introduction to Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003).

A Spectral Universality

61

(Palestinian, Lebanese, etc.) to circumscribe the self. Hatoum describes the events
in Beiruts Chatila camp as the most shattering experience of my life. In 1982,
between the 16th and the 18th of September, the Israeli Defense Forces, having
invaded Lebanon and sealed off Beiruts Palestinian refugee camps, sat idle as their
vengeance-seeking Christian allies massacred the camps inhabitants. The death toll
was estimated to have been between 350 and 3,500. Disempowered from her vantage in England, Hatoum responded with a performance entitled The Negotiating
Table (1983), in which her body acted as a mediating surface. The artist lay on a
table with three chairs around it, wrapped in bandages inside a cellophane body
bag that also contained offal. As Guy Brett wrote: The empty chairs reduce the
worlds powerful to abstractions, so their presence is felt all the more coldly and
impersonally.33 This abstraction was underscored by the voices of world leaders
speaking on a cassette-tape recording, so many layers of mediation and delay separating them from the livesthe bodiesat stake. Negotiating Table expresses rage
combined with powerlessness, voicelessness, as though one were a ghost, already
dead in the abstract organizations of power negotiating global politics.
Hatoums practice thus intersects abstraction on the one hand and culturally assigned referents on the other to indicate the dissonant status of identity and
universality. Keffieh is, once again, exemplary in Hatoums oeuvre in this regard. A
signifier of Arab identity and, more specifically and urgently since 1948, of
Palestinian nationalist solidarity in the face of the formation of Israel and the loss
of territory, the keffiyeh is almost exclusively worn by men. Many may associate the
headdress with Yasser Arafat, whose decision to wear a keffiyeh folded in the shape
of Palestine while addressing the United Nations in 1974 garnered much media
attention. At the level of over-determination, the keffiyeh eventually came to
mean liberation in general, even for those unaffected by the Oslo Accords. For
example, the Yiddish slang term keffiyeh kinderlach refers to left-wing Jewish youth
who wear a keffiyeh as a political statement; on the other hand, the scarf has been
taken up by neo-Nazis in Europe. Contradictory categories divide into other
antagonisms. In the absence of any stable referent, abstraction becomes a means
by which to disarticulate traditional identity, and to do so in order to articulate a
new politics, that of the condition of the exile or refugee, who, by his or her very
existence, dismantles categories.
Interestingly, one of the keffiyehs first appearances in the American and
European media was on the head of a woman, Leila Khaled, a member of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The image of her wearing the
keffiyeh in the summer and fall of 1969 appeared in newspapers and on TV after
her participation in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840, en route to Athens.
Paradoxically, Khaled wore the keffiyeh as a form of hijab, the headscarf observant
Muslim women wear. She wore the scarf as a feminist gesture, as a way to connote her
equality with her male colleagues in the PFLP and to symbolize freedom from
33.

Guy Brett, Survey, in Mona Hatoum, p. 43.

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Western constructions of gender and sexuality, which were perceived as yet another
form of imperialism. In other words, the keffiyeh/scarf hybrid in this context combined with grassroots feminist movements across the culturally heterogeneous
Middle East, from Iran to Egypt. These saw the hijab as an autochthonous tactic to
oppose male scopophilia, which they associated with Western forms of sexuality and
the general cultural hegemony of European and American modernity.34
The social and political contradictions inscribed in Hatoums Keffieh thus
splinter into more antagonisms. Many Middle Eastern and Muslim women living
in the United States and Europe have decried the veil as an instantiation of masculinist sovereignty.35 As Susan Buck-Morss has succinctly articulated, Nothing,
we are told by Western hegemonic discourse, so differentiates us from them as
the lack of freedom for women in Islamist societies.36 Hatoum says she is critical
of the rigid limitations imposed on women in the name of any religion. Yet she is
boldly outspoken in her solidarity with Palestinian claims for sovereignty.
Hatoums Keffieh stages tense ambivalences at the intersection of Middle
Eastern and female subjectivity, an inflected subject position often regarded as
impossible. But it is the impossibility of this position that becomes the condition
of possibility for Hatoums oeuvre. What kind of categorical identity would feminist or Palestinian have to have such that each term would logically negate or
obviate the other? What forms of universality and particularity are set in place by
each term that render the other impossible, or fail to do so? Conversely, what
might each term share with its other? Hatoum does not, as is so often the case in
Western doxa, collapse Islams dictates with the Palestinian struggle, and she
insists on the disarticulation of the two.37
34.
For feminist interpretations of the veil, see Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A
Feminist Interpretation of Womens Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley,
1991); Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992); and Saba Mahmoods extraordinary Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Mahmood, a Pakistani woman trained as
a cultural anthropologist who had identified with secular feminism and was critical of the revival of
religious customs in Pakistan in the early 1990s, confronted this question: how to account for the
resurgence of Islam among womens groups claiming feminist goals? Her analysis of the Islamic revival
also strives to make this material speak back to the normative liberal assumptions about human
nature against which such a movement is held accountable (p. 5).
35.
Not able among them is Ar vin Darabi. See Darabi, Rage Against the Veil (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1999).
36.
See Susan Buck-Morsss introduction to Thinking Past Terror, p. 12. Buck-Morss underscores
the argument (which is also made in Ahmeds Women and Gender in Islam and in Mahmoods Politics of
Piety) that it needs to be noted, however, that far from silencing the power of women, Islamist societies highlight it, acknowledging through severe and violent restrictions that what women do is crucial
to political and social order. The argument justifying the strict codes of conduct, based on respect for
women (in contrast to Western commodification of women and their disparagement as sex objects)
has a dialectical dynamic that can lead to its own undoing (p. 12).
37.
The artist also makes the obvious point, so often overlooked in current media-driven depictions of the generalized Middle East, that not all Arabs or Palestinians are Muslim, and that the
Palestinian struggle for liberation should not be framed as a religious war.

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63

Ariella Azoulay, in her analysis of the ethical responsibility of journalistic

photography, describes woman and Palestinian as two subject positions historically sharing an oblique angle to hegemony. Azoulay argues that both Palestinians
and women are scotomized in civil rights discourses. Because Palestinians are
considered stateless, they are absented from the discourse on citizenship; because
women are considered full citizens, their susceptibility to a particular type of disaster does not necessitate a discussion of their civic status, which Azoulay describes
as fragile and subject to violence, given dominant cultures obsession with women
as objects.38 Subjectivity is not awarded to either; both are abandoned by hegemony. And each makes claims to recognition and the acquisition of rights within
the discourse of universal human rights that cannot properly circumscribe the
specificity of their difference.
For Butler, the occlusions of which Azoulay speaks generate dynamism and a
continual redefinition of universality. The emptiness of abstraction, its foundation on prohibition, renders it ghostly to itself. [Universality] is inevitably
haunted by the trace of the particular thing to which it is opposed and this takes
the form of the spectral doubling of universality, which means that particularityin this case cultural, ethnic, socio-historical specificityresurfaces and that
any transcultural notion of the universal will be spectralized and stained by the
cultural norms it purports to transcend.39 This returns us to the cultural signifiers, each making opposing claims that threaten to tear Hatoums Keffieh asunder.
And yet, this is the universal, which will be found only in the chain of particulars
themselves.40 Ultimately then, and paradoxically, Butler says, it is the absence
of any such shared content that constitutes the promise of universality. 41
Universality exists only as specter.
Keffieh is exemplary in its articulation of this ghostly claim to universality.
The surface demands that the mimicked grid acknowledge its foundation on, and
erasure of, the somatic. This draws on another piece the artist worked out during
the same years as Keffieh, entitled Recollection (1995), in which Hatoum collected
the hair from her hairbrush over many years and rolled the results into small
sculptures. She brought the resultant balls of hair into the space, allowing them to
disperse as they would, moving around on air currents often caused by human
motion through the empty hall, and collecting like dust bunnies.42 Hatoum also
had the hair respond to its architectural frame by hanging it vertically in almost
imperceptible single strands from beams in the ceiling and clumps along the horizontal axis of the floor.43 This barely tangible grid of corporeal waste both rhymed
38.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract Of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 15.
39.
Butler, Restaging the Universal, p. 24.
40.
Ibid., p. 33.
41.
Ibid., p. 31.
42.
This exploration recalls Man Rays photograph of Duchamps Large Glass, over which dust
had collected for some time, retexturing the surface.
43.
For a beautiful essay on this piece, see Catherine de Zegher, Hatoums Recollections: About
Losing and Being Lost, in Mona Hatoum, pp. 88105.

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Hatoum. Recollection. 1995.

with and undermined the strict parameters of the space. The hairs barely there
fragility formed a second architectural wrapper, literally made of part of the
artists bodyto envelope the viewer.44 That it should be the artists hair suggests an unlikely conjugation of authorthe site par excellence of the proper
name, a privileged subjectand a bodily product rendered abject object. That
tension is no lesser or greater than that between the chaos of hairs and the rigid
parameters of the modernist grid, a structure set in place both by the architectural space and another component of the installation: a tiny loom on which
human hairs are strung as warp and weft.
Hair is bodily waste that marks an important site in the determination of the
rights of life and death. Traditionally a signifier of feminine beauty, in the twentieth
44.
Hatoums work evokes yet another modernist strategy entwined with the institution: the
Duchampian readymade, which participates not only in the problem of nominalism but also in the
uneasy and abject corporeality of Duchamps late objects like Female Fig Leaf (1950) and Wedge of Chastity
(1954). This contradicts the objects evocation of the elegant and cerebral grid. Via the readymade and
the objet trouv, Hatoums practice dismantles the by now obsolete binary of abstraction and figuration,
entwining them. For a discussion of the legacy of the corporeal and abject dimension of Duchamps late
readymades, see Helen Molesworths Part Object Part Sculpture, Duchamp, and Louise Bourgeois in
Part Object Part Sculpture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Hatoum has mentioned her discomfort and surprise with British mores and what she saw as a split between body and mind
foreign to her upbringing in Lebanon when she first arrived in London. See Mona Hatoum: The Entire
World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate, 2000), p. 29.

A Spectral Universality

65

century, once cut away from its human support , it connotes dehumanizat ion, and
circulates in contexts of abjection and violence, evoking, in particular, the unthinkable
atrocities enacted on the bodies of detainees
in the camps of World War II. The Nazis sent
hair to textile factories to be used in the production of cheap fabric, and two tons of
human hair is currently on display at the
Auschwitz museum in Poland. Hatoums loom
and the spool of hair that feeds it figure the
transposition of bio-organic material to one
of the most basic forms of human technics:
fabric to shelter the bare body. Hatoums
loom evokes moment s character ist ic of
modernity: the link between rational forms of
organization emblematized by the grid and
the monstrous irrationality that is genocide.
At the same time, the hairs at the side
of
the
loom, not yet stretched over its strucHatoum. Recollection (detail). 1995.
ture, collect chaotically as a bramble of stuff
that recalls overgrown pubic hair. This slide from the orderly grid of the loom to
the tangle of fuzz recalls the long-standing clich that characterizes weaving as
the barely culturally mediated nature of female [re]production. Freud suggested
that weaving, which he called one of the only things that women may have
invented, was devised on a somatic register beneath the authorial terms of
invention as such:
Women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in
the history of civilization. There is, however, one technique that they may
have invented, that is plaiting and weaving. Nature itself would appear to
have given the model, which this achievement imitates by providing the
growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals.45
Freuds misogynist optic tautologically generates the conclusions to which he
arrives; yet he does brilliantly express the somatic register foundational to,
although obfuscated by, the sublimating operations of art and industry.
In a text written in 1976 (one year after Hatoum found herself stranded in
London), Foucault elaborates on how biopolitics as the acquisition of power over
man insofar as man is a living being . . . leads to what may be termed State control
45.
Sigmund Freud, Femininity, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, New Introductory Works on Psychoanalysis and Other Works, ed. and trans. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 132.

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of the biological.46 What Foucault notes is that life and death have never been
unmediated. Under the classical paradigm, the sovereignty over life and the sovereignty over death were asymmetrical insofar as the sovereign could not make life
happen, but he could require death. The formula would be as follows: take life or
let live. The modern paradigm enacts a more absolute penetration of life: the
power to make live and let die.47 This shift occurred over the emergence of
techniques centering on the body; Foucault lists among others the states sudden
interest in reproduction, birth-to-death ratios, fertility, and birth controlall of
them techniques to increase biopower or (and the issue of race eventually
becomes paramount) to decrease the biopower of the other. Here, Foucault raises
the Nazis Final Solution as an exemplary case of biopolitics.
The hierarchical division of gender along an axis of embodied labor implicates gender in the problem of biopoliticsthe systematic use of rape as a form of
ethnic cleansing being just one example. In The Civil Contract and Photography,
Azoulay argues that modernity did little to mitigate the status of women as mere
biological bodiesas objects. Before modernity, womens lives were organized
through an association with masculine identity via marriage, distributed along a
set of binaries structured in relationship to a notion of the sacred. Women were
mapped along a single axis, a quasi-religious purification and sanctification of
the unmarried virgin on the one hand and a quasi-political abandonment of the
defamed, permissive unmarried women on the other hand.48 These were two
opposite exceptions to the rule of marriage. Azoulay argues that modernity did little to change womens distribution in relation to this foundational paradigm. Just
as for Foucault the modern biopolitical regime compounds the old to achieve a
more thorough penetration of everyday life, modernity permutes a set of terms
shaped and institutionalized over thousands of years.49 In twentieth-century battles for the right to sovereignty over ones body, the body itself underwent a
process of secularization . . . [yet] this body came into the world without any of the
normative defenses of citizenship to regulate it . . . . 50 Under universal rights,
the contingencies of the body, deemed particular, were not introduced to the discourse of citizenship, thus abandoning it to a renaturalized vulnerability.
Modernity, based on a set of Enlightenment universalist claims disavowing the
specificities of the body, did little to address the particularities of womens lives.
Instead, the body, or bare life, continues to be the primary term defining
women, now commodified and sexually fetishized.51
Giorgio Agamben has expanded on Foucaults notion of biopolitics by argu46.
Foucault, 17 March, 1976, pp. 23940.
47.
Ibid., p. 241.
48.
Azoulay, The Civil Contract Of Photography, p. 226.
49.
Ibid., p. 227.
50.
Ibid., p. 228.
51.
For a discussion of the blind spot of sexuality and embodiment in Enlightenment thinking,
see Jacques Lacans seminal essay Kant with Sade, October 51 (Winter 1989), pp. 5575.

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67

ing that modernity ushered in a new regime of marking the body, never a neutral category to begin with, with increasing force and violence in the interest of
engineering populations, as evidenced by the ways in which historical crises were
inscribed on the body, such as the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Both
are extreme instantiations of biopolitics. It is charted along an axis between life as
mediated by forms of disciplinary control and the condemnation to death articulated in equally systematized forms. In other words, life is only ever a form of life,
understood through abstract mediation. This opens onto a discussion of the particular forms of the body motivated by historical and geopolitical context.
Artistic practices after World War II consciously and unconsciously address
issues of biopolitical violence. That artists in the 1950s in both the European and
American contexts raised the problem of the body as a foundation and hidden
support for modernist abstraction is already part of the standard narrative. Jasper
Johns canonized Target with Plaster Casts (1955) cites the body through sculptural
indices, presented alongside a privileged form of modernist opticality, the nesting
circles of the target.52
Hatoum cites Piero Manzoni as formative of her idiom, an artist who made
the intersection between corporeality and abstraction his primary project.53
Manzonis Achromes of 1959 through 1963 programmatically demonstrate the
authoritarian qualities of transcendental universal abstraction. Tropes like the
monochrome and the grid are permuted in an investigation of the limits of painting. Unlike his American counterpartswho asked how far a painting could be
pushed and still remain painting, thereby posing a purely formal inquiry
Manzoni inaugurated materialist abstraction, demonstrating that abstraction was
always embodied, implicated in a specific context, and that the universal is an
aggregate of particularity. In Manzonis work, the body is present as singular
materiality, formless in the absence of a support structure, such as the anthropomorphism provided in re-presenting the body in figurative art. In Manzonis
oeuvre, the body is present (as opposed to absent through representation);
Manzoni respects modernisms acknowledgement that the sign fails to touch its
referent. An exemplary work in this regard is Achrome with Fur (196162). One
among a series in which Manzoni affixed various materials, organic and synthetic, to
a monochromatic surface, the work addresses the dialectic of plenitude and spectrality as a response to modernism and universality. Fur exposes excess and lack as a
priori entwined. The explosion of anarchic matter shatters the artificial divide
between virtual and real space protected by the frame. Beyond the clichd dismant ling of modernist paint ing and flatness, Manzoni radicalizes that act of
52.
Johns Target references Marcel Duchamps Rotoreliefs, which form a counter narrative to
modernism. See Rosalind Krausss discussion of the embodied rhythms of the Rotoreliefs, as well as
their part-object aspects as they spin centripetally and centrifugally. See Krauss, The Optical Unconscious,
pp. 95142.
53.
See Artists Choice: Piero Manzonis For a Discovery of a Zone of Images, pp. 10810.

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disassembling. Fur exposes this act as being not simply analyticalas Frank Stella,
Carl Andre, and Donald Judd demonstratedbut an inevitable return of the
repressed: the organicized, as Manzoni called it.54 Furs humor and its unmistakably erotic import (E. E. Cummings electric fuzz and shocking fur) cannot be
contained. The fur casts shadows over the red monochrome. Those shadows insinuate the return of the embodied, the erotic, and the humorous, but also the
spectral. Shadows mitigate the plenitudinous corporeality of the piece, suggesting
vulnerability instead. Hatoum makes this precariousness of the body in relation to
universalist abstraction her very medium.
Hatoums work frames the way in which thinking the bodyinscribed by
specificity, and thus gender, ethnicity, and historynecessitates the very forms of
abstraction that disavowed corporeality in the early twentieth century. She performs the paradox that the disavowed body and that which disavowed it ,
abstraction, are a structural couple. Abstraction, formal and political, becomes a
means to demonstrate that life is only ever politically mediated. At the same
time, she investigates the limits of universality, which she exposes as an empty
placeholder always redefining itself, a chain of mutually irreconcilable particulars.
This relationship between body and system, materiality and order, opens onto the
question of borders. The artist connects her exploration of the corporeal limits
dividing inside and out to territory informing the bodys specificity. Edward Said
argues that Hatoums project articulates the condition of the exile, split between
loss (of home, of self, of continuity), and emancipatory cosmopolitanism.55 He
writes elsewhere: The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes
are always provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us in the safety of
familiar territory can also become prisons . . . exiles cross borders, break[ing] barriers of thought and experience.56 But as Ranjana Khanna has noted in her study
of Hatoum, the exile celebrated in literary modernism must be differentiated
from the refugee on the basis of a failure of agency and the right to return.57 The
enforced expulsion of the refugee enacts an imprisonment as absolute as entrapment within the enclosed boundaries of home. Enforced limitation away from
home doubly robs the subject of both extremes enjoyed by the exile: homecoming
54.
See Manzonis claim that We Want to Organicize Disintegration in Manzoni, For an
Organic Painting (1957), in The Italian Metamorphosis: 19431968, ed. Germano Celant (New York:
Rizzoli, 1994), p. 718.
55.
Edward Said, The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoums Logic of Irreconcilables, in Mona
Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land, pp. 717.
56.
Said, Reflections on Exile (1984), in Mona Hatoum, pp. 11011.
57.
Ranjana Khanna, Technologies of Belonging: Sensus Communis, Disidentification,
Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter et al. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), pp. 11132. Hannah Arendts evocation of the refugee in her essay We
Refugees (1943) published in Menorah Journal, would, for Khanna, be suspended between exile and
refugee. See Giorgio Agambens discussion of this text in Beyond Human Rights, in Means without
End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (1996; Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1517.

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and circulating in a cosmopolitan world. The condition of serving both as a negative projection site for the production of legitimate life and meaning (i.e.,
citizenship) and as a cipher marking the failure of signification, the refugees is a
subject position at the intersection of universality and particularity. Like the
woman and the Palestinian, the refugee stands simultaneously and indeterminately outside and inside the auto-generated system of meaning set by power,
guaranteeing it.
Said also does not address the degree to which the exile appears as a threat
to the very category against which s/he is negatively defined: the native. The
native finds the presence of the other both fascinating and threatening. Agamben
has noted that if the refugee represents a disquieting element in the order of the
nation state, this is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the
human and the citizen, and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the
originary fiction of sovereignty to crisis.58 The appearance of the other is both
exotically seductive and threatening because it exposes the false distinction
between birth and citizenship, between what he calls nascita and nato. Citizenship
is shown to be another form of abstraction born of modernity, founded on violence, and enacted on bodies.
Nation state means a state that gives nativity, or birth [nascita] (that is,
naked human life), the foundation of its own sovereignty . . . . The fiction that is implicit here is that birth [nascita] comes into being immediately as nation, so that there may be no difference between the two
moments. Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human being
only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition (and in fact, the presupposition that must never come to
light as such) of the citizen.59
Agamben cites the title of the 1789 text so often referenced on the question of
what constitutes a citizen (i.e., a privileged abstraction), The Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen. Agamben notes that the slide from man to citizen
betrays some ambivalence about the limit between the terms. Where does the
man end and the citizen begin? Where does life end and identity begin? As
such, the mere appearance of the refugee produces a range of responses, from
uncertainty to fear, by challenging the foundation of national identity. It questions the legitimacy of an identity predicated on territorial and discursive
boundaries. These limits emerge as utterly abstract, obfuscating the very life
that they are meant to enable.
Birth and citizenship, or life and its forms of mediation, are not merely categorical concepts. They mark shifting relationships contingent upon historical and
geopolitical contexts. The today that enables Agambens epigrammatic state58.
59.

Agamben, Beyond Human Rights, p. 21.

Ibid.

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ment, performatively inserting historical context into the interior of the text,
coincides with the 1993 Oslo Accords:
As I write this essay, 425 Palestinians expelled by the state of Israel find
themselves in a sort of no-mans land. These men certainly constitute,
according to Hannah Arendts suggestion, the vanguard of their people. But that is so not . . . in the sense that they may solve the Palestinian
question in a way as insufficient as the way in which Israel has solved the
Jewish question. Rather, the no-mans land in which they are refugees
has already started . . . to act back onto the territory of the state of Israel
by perforating it . . . . Only in a world in which the spaces of states have
been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she isonly in
such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable.60
But the responses that the artist cites to her work, specifically her frustration
with the visitors from Tel Aviv for whom the soap scent of Present Tense evoked the
camps, raises another problem: the cultural monopoly on a history of suffering,
the erasure of the other through the appropriation of its experience to ones
own. The monstrous persecution of European Jews must be kept alive in an
increasingly amnesiac culture, but it cannot be called upon to obfuscate the suffering of others throughout the history of modernity and the present. Identity
politics, which reify the attributes of one subject position, fail to account for a
broader structure of relat ions. On this point , But lers engagement with
Emmanuel Levinas on the problem of ethics and the other is germane. In her
analysis of the limited meaning of the Shoah to the present, Butler traces the
theme of persecution to Levinass 1971 reflection in Difficult Freedom: Essays on
Judaism, where he argues for the imbrication of the terms persecution and the
burden of responsibility. But, as Butler states, Levinas situates the particular
nexus of persecution and responsibility at the core of Judaism, even as the essence
of Israel.61 She quotes Levinas: the ultimate essence of Israel derives from its
innate predisposition to involuntary sacrifice, its exposure to persecution.62 For
Butler, Levinas uses the Holocaust as an ahistorical phenomenon in a recursive
model of suffering and responsibility that is allegedly essential to Jewish people
rather than as an event bound by history. Dismissing both diasporic and nonZionist traditions in Judaism, Levinas not only collapses Israel and Judaism, but
also betrays the preontological model of the subject he progressively offers.63
This model is predicated on the primacy of the other, specifically the call of the
other that cannot be willed. That call, in turn, is one of suffering. It is the respon60.
Ibid., pp. 256.
61.
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 93. For
Levinas, Israel is understood as land and as people.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid.

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sibility to that call, which precedes the self, that is its foundation. But paradoxically, Levinass model, precisely because of his recursive rather than historically
contingent understanding of suffering and responsibility, essentializes the Shoah
and universalizes Judaism, ignoring both the contingencies of history and the
specificities of concrete historical experience.
More emphatically, Butler notes, during the years in which Levinas was
writing,
It is clearly wrong to argue the state of Israel only suffered persecution . . .
given the massive and forcible displacement of more than seven hundred
thousand Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948 alone, not to
mention the destitution of continuing war and occupation. It is curious
here that Levinas should extract persecution from its concrete historical
appearances, establishing it as the timeless essence of Judaism.64
History is dynamic; identity and difference are situated in time and space.
Suffering is both universal and absolutely specific to historical context and geopolit ical sites; one event does not render another a non- event . But this
immediate issue of history gives way to a greater contradiction at the core of
Levinass formulation of Israel. His essentialist understanding of Israel as
Judaism paradoxically obfuscates the recognition of the suffering of the other
on which subjectivity, according to him, is founded. The contradiction moves
beyond historicism to a structural problem, a theology leading to the universalizing of Judaism.
If Jews are considered elect because they carry a message of universalism,
and what is universal in Levinass view is the inaugurate structuring of the
subject through persecution and ethical demand, then the Jew becomes
the model for preontological persecution. The problem is that the Jew is
a category that belongs to a culturally constituted ontology.65
Levinas betrays his model of the subject, its contingency on the call of the other. For
Butler, Levinass writing is thus both critical and shocking precisely because it illustrates the dangers of blindness to universality as a chain of historically contingent
and ever-shifting particulars in which the other haunts the universal, and returns as
its spectral other. The unacceptable turn occurs when this quasi-universal condition
of suffering and responsibility is plucked out of history and made the inherent trait
of one people over another. Levinas warns: Ethics cannot be based on exotic cultures.66 Butler replaces this essential Jewish universalism with an understanding
64.
Ibid., p. 9394. Butler also insists on the disarticulation of Israel and Judaism in the preface
to Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). She takes then Harvard
President, now Obama Administration cabinet member, Lawrence Summers to task for accusing voices
critical of the State of Israel anti-Semitic (p. xvi-xviii).
65.
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 94.
66.
Ibid.

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of suffering as universality as a chain of particulars.67 It does not rest on any one

identity, any one referent.
Butlers critique echoes Agambens call for understanding the refugee as a
subject contingent upon the shifting terms of history and geopolitical [dis]placement. For the problem of historical blindness touches on the choice of who/what
constitutes a subject. Levinas becomes crucial, once again. This notion of a life
chosen through entwined suffering and responsibility is constitutive for those who
may be considered subjectsthose to whom the privilege of humanity is attributedand those to whom it may not be bequeathed. Ethics is a function of
biopolitics, of who or what is categorized as having the right to life and as such
deserves ethical treatment in particular places at particular times.
Agamben has noted the failure of the discourses of human rights, which presuppose the category human, precisely because of the absence of a universally
agreed upon sense of who or what is human. The camp, according to the arbitrary
logic of the system in question, frames and thus defines the limit dividing human
and inhuman. The system is pervasive, operating between perpetrator and victim
alike; it is nefariously internalized by the victim and creates a hierarchy of victims.
For instance, in the concentration camps of World War II, detainees constructed
their own hierarchies, in which those at the lowest end, closest to death and seemingly beyond hope, were nicknamed the muselmann.68 In the jargon of the
camp, it was Der Muselmann: the Muslim.69
No one felt compassion for the Muslim. For the prisoners who collaborated, the Muslims were a source of anger and worry; for the SS, they
were merely useless garbage. Everybody thought only of eliminating
him, each in his own way.70
Analogously, liberators of the camps sometimes raped German women, who in
that particular context had been stripped of their human rights.71 That which constitutes the human is contingent upon abstractions. There are no identities, no

67.
Shockingly, with blatant racism, Levinas warns against the rise of the countless masses of
the Asiatic and underdeveloped peoples who threaten a newfound authenticity. See Levinas, Difficult
Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 165,
quoted in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p, 94. Butler mentions an as yet unpublished text entitled Prehistories of Postzionism: The Paradoxes of Jewish Universalism in which she elaborates on
Levinass racism.
68.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), pp. 4186.
69.
Ryn Zdzislaw and Stanslaw Klodzinki, An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod. Ein Studie uber die
Erscheinung des Muselmann im Konzentraionslager, Auschwitz-Hefte, vol. 1 (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz,
1987), pp. 89154, quoted in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 127.
70.
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 41.
71.
For a discussion of American soldiers treatment of German women during the liberation,
see Atina Grossmann, A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,
October 72 (Spring 1995), pp. 4363. See also David J. Levin, Taking Liberties with Liberties Taken:
On the Politics of Helke Sanders BeFreier und Befreite, October 72 (Spring 1995), pp. 6477.

A Spectral Universality

73

signifiers bound to referents that guarantee power or powerlessness. The signifiers

slide, and with them, identity. Both these examples point to the liminal characteristic
of all life, suspended between its bare form and its abstracted form. Universality is
here a chain of particulars, in which the perpetrator (German SS) and the victim
(Jewish detainee) are bound by a common exclusion, he whose life is spectral.

Hatoum. Light Sentence. 1992.

The human is not universally guaranteed or even representable in the mimetic

sense. In other words, it would be impossible to figuratively represent as human that
which is not granted the privilege of the human, i.e., a birth legitimated by abstract
forms making of naked life (i.e., with no rights) a form-of-life (i.e., invested with
rights, above all, citizenship). To elaborate the split between the human made so
through rights and life not legitimated through human rights, Agamben, following
Foucaults concept of biopolitics, has argued that the concentration/work/refugee
camp where bodies are distributed and dehumanized in order to constitute others as
human, as subjects, is the nomos of the modern.72
72.
Giorgio Agamben, The Camp as Nomos of the Modern, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 166. T. J. Demos has
recently addressed this problem in his essay on the work of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri. See Demos,
Means without End: Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabris Camp Campaign, October 126 (Fall 2008), pp. 6990.

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OCTOBER

It is here that Hatoums feminist practice touches on the problem of biopolitics, of that which can and cannot have the right to subjectivity free of biological
determination. Modernist tropesthe grid and the monochromeconstitutive
ways of visually articulating this figuratively unrepresentable turn. They are elegantly orderly and threatening, evocative of that nomos of the modern. Hatoums
Light Sentence (1992) figures universality as a form of organization of life, a schema
ambiguous in its enterprise, both predicated on disavowal and dependent on the
spectral terms within its own parameters. Comprised of metal-mesh lockers
stacked to form a three-sided environment enveloping the viewer, a motorized
light bulb slowly moves, causing the metal grid to cast shifting shadows over and
through the cells. The grid appears to shift under the exigencies of the traces it
simultaneously contains and cannot fully contain. Those shadows mark the grids
physicality and its cells emptiness. Generated by the structure, they undermine it
by recalling a precarious contingent real such as the passage of time, the conditions of light, placement in the room, and beyond that, the social, political, and
ideological conditions that inform the work.