Savyon Vaknin

Savyon Vaknin is an MA candidate in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch. They completed a BA in Comparative Literature and Theater and Performance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, and pursuing an MA in Gender Studies at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Their research analyzes technologies, rhetoric and rituals used by the Israeli occupation in Palestine, drawing on the analytical lens of Performance Studies.

Title of Project:

Performance of Oppression - The Gestus of Israeli Necropolitics in Palestine

Project Description:

This paper aims at developing an account of the performative dimensions of Israeli necropolitics in Palestine by employing the Brechtian notion of gestus. While much research rightfully concentrates on the performative dimensions of resistance, this approach instead illuminates the performance of oppression.

The Israeli regime routinely uses systematic forms of violence to maintain control over Palestinians, which do not necessarily involve aerial bombardment and artillery although they always operate with the threat of live fire. Mbembe's theory of necropolitics shed light on these daily routines of the Israeli occupation of Palestine: necropolitics aims at the creation of “death-worlds,” zones where colonized subjects are systematically brought to the verge of death, so to make them governable.

The death threat acquires its force through its performative composition: it is expressed by the presence of the Israeli sovereign in Palestine, a hybrid oppressor, embodied in machinery and IDF soldiers constituting together what I call a panopticon of death. This hybrid oppressor is continually staged through language, gestures, rituals, and imagery, performed by IDF soldiers.

My paper offers a reading of the Israeli performance of oppression by examining two text collections documenting IDF prose: a Hebrew-Arabic dictionaries of "useful phrases" for the usage of Israeli security forces, and a poetry anthology written by IDF soldiers during their current war on Gaza. This performance analysis is carried out by reading its actors as possessing a gestus – a Brechtian notion designating the embodiment of a set of socially characteristic attitudes. Analyzing the gestus of the Israeli occupation is a way of uncovering its inherent contradictions as a colonial rule, historicizing the performance and making social relations visible and communicable.

Areas of Academic Interest/Research:

Everyday Performativity, Performance of Oppression, Necropolitics