UC Irvine

This dissertation considers the unique place of Palestine as the locus where the universal antagonism over home is materialized in its multifold dimensions. Through the interrogation of the concepts of home, homelessness, and alienation, I attempt to reimagine the symbolic representation of Palestinian suffering over the material loss of home outside of the contemporary critical discourses concerned with the Palestine/Israel relationality. These discourses, I argue, constrict the representations of Palestinian experience to a universal political praxis that thinks settler colonial logics solely within the horizon of the nation and the entitlements of the land, foreclosing the possibility of fully investing in redefining the ontoepistemological parameters of Palestinian subjectivity. Through the interrogation I offer in this dissertation, focused in particular on the philosophical and psychoanalytic dimensions of the above concepts, the aim is to create a new literal space where it is possible to discuss the ways Israel’s material violence operates at the conjuncture between two forms of necessary destructions: one implemented on the land and entails the physical evacuation of native habitation and life, and a second implemented on the native body and entails the internalized destruction of an individual inner economy that forges upon the lost place of the mother/land.