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In Giorgio Agamben's call to profane the sacred in the most desacralized forms, the specific mechanics through which the sacred and the profane connect and become indistinctive remains undertheorized. This article, then, aims at adding a further layer of practical articulation to Agamben's notion of profanation as it was elaborated in his book Profanations. The article does so by discussing the ways Zionist subjectivities and divides are interconnected and expressed in Israeli society. To be practiced as a process of becoming, profanation, I argue, needs to be understood as a process of cultural transformation by which new forms of subjectivity are offered.

How do we contribute to the decolonisation of Palestine? In what ways can we divest from settler arrangements in the present-day? Exploring the Zionist takeover of Palestine as a settler colonial case, this book argues that in studying the elimination of native life in Palestine, the loss of Arab-Jewish shared life cannot be ignored. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, shared a life in Ottoman Palestine and in a different way during British rule. The attempt to eliminate native life involved the destruction of Arab society - its cultural hegemony and demographic superiority - but also the racial rejection of Arab-Jewish sociabilities, of shared life. Thus the settlerist process of dispossession of the Arabs was complemented with the destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure that made Arab-Jewish life a historical reality. Both operations formed Israeli polity. Can this understanding contribute to present-day Palestinian resistance and a politics of decolonisation? In this book, the authors address this question by exploring how the study of elimination of shared life can inform Arab-Jewish co-resistance as a way of defying Israel's Zionist regime. Above and beyond opposing an unacceptable state of affairs, this book engages with past and present to discuss possible futures

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Agamben and Colonialism -- I. Colonial States of Exception -- 1. Imperialism, Exceptionalism and the Contemporary World -- 2. The Management of Anomie: The State of Exception in Postcommunist Russia -- 3. The Cultural Politics of Exception -- II. Colonial Sovereignty -- 4. Indigenising Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the 'Peculiar' Status of Native Peoples -- 5. Reading Kenya's Colonial State of Emergency after Agamben -- 6. Colonial Sovereignty, Forms of Life and Liminal Beings in South Africa -- III. Biopolitics and Bare Life -- 7. Encountering Bare Life in Italian Libya and Colonial Amnesia in Agamben -- 8. Abandoning Gaza -- 9. Colonial Histories: Biopolitics and Shantytowns in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area -- IV. Method, History, Potentiality -- 10. The Paradigm of Colonialism -- 11. 'The work of men is not durable': History, Haiti and the Rights of Man -- 12. Potential Postcoloniality: Sacred Life, Profanation and the Coming Community -- Notes on Contributors -- Index