The goal of this panel is to take a fresh look at Adorno’s well-known dictum (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”) in the wake of Gaza. Although Adorno had later reaffirmed his position (“I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature”) before he eventually changed it (“Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems”), the reasons for his initial ban on writing in the wake or in the aftermath of catastrophe are worth revisiting from the prism of the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza.

For Adorno—in its witting or unwitting impulse to apprehend, explain, or even denounce genocide—writing/poetry risks rationalizing mass slaughter and foreclosing the very inward process of reckoning with extremity. In other words, by offering to represent the unrepresentable and nonsensical nature of genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing, poetry, Adorno cautions us, risks making the unthinkable thinkable. The post-Holocaust ethical misgivings about the redemptive and rationalizing impulse operative in every artistic endeavor has once again risen to the surface following the relentless and indiscriminate onslaught on Gaza.

Studying an eclectic number of Arabic poems composed before and after Gaza by canonical and noncanonical writers, this panel explores how Arab poets have confronted Adorno’s infamous ban. Mahmoud Darwish, for instance, has never ceased adapting and reiterating Adorno’s dictum: “What can poetry say in the time of catastrophe?” Darwish here conjures up the muse of impossibility of poetry (following every act of violence committed against Arab nations since the Nakba) in order to produce poetry. The panelists inquire about the formal and political implications of this paradox of impossibility and necessity of poetry after Gaza. Nouri Gana’s paper starts by laying the theoretical framework of the panel, outlining a brief genealogy of Adorno’s ban, its affirmation and eventual revision. Gana further discerns the political stakes of comparison involved in the travel of Adorno’s ban from Europe to the Arab world, its adoption and inscription by Arab poets and thinkers.

The question of writing “after” or “amidst” catastrophe becomes indissociable from questions of responsibility and solidarity with the victims of catastrophe. The fact that there exist enough poems written from amidst the genocide in Gaza to fill out an anthology is both unbearable and instructional. Does poetry still make nothing happen? Anthony Alessandrini’s paper engages with this question and maps a “poetics of refusal” in contemporary Palestinian poetry by, among others, Noor Hindi, Saleem Al-Naffar, Heba Abu Nada, and Nour al-Din Hajjaj. Alessandrini affirms that “solidarity is a feeling and a doing” that brooks no form of neutrality. Jeff’s Sacks engages in a collective thinking about “Poetry after Gaza,” to inquire into the temporality of poetic utterance in a time of genocidal obliteration. How do we think the time of genocide? Does genocide “begin” or “end”? If the reflection on genocide and the poetic in Gaza must occasion a reflection on the law, and laws, of genocide, how do we think the genocidal outside of the frame of legality, which the legal regime of genocide and its protocols also creates?

The theoretical restlessness of Sacks’ paper aims in the end to ponder whether, in the words of Edward Said, we can live through genocide and "survive the consequences humanly.” The urgency of our historical moment cannot be overstressed. The urgency is such that for Huda J. Fakhreddine it has become impossible to read the Arabic poetic tradition without centering Gaza. Gaza becomes a language, a reading, an interrogation, and a refutation of all that was before it and a compass for everything that might be after it. What good is the Arabic language if it does not dedicate itself at this moment to encompass, no matter how impossible, the magnitude of the tragedy in Gaza? And how can the Arabic literary tradition be dynamic and alive if it doesn’t rally all its voices to account for this counterpoint in history that is Gaza.

Together, these four papers will expand upon and further nuance the old/new question of writing/poetry after catastrophe. In particular, they will examine how the Arabic tradition, old and new, has long engaged with and mapped the writing of catastrophe (al-fāji‘a) in ways that recall and transcend Adorno.

Each paper will run for 12-13 min with a minimum of 15-20 min left for discussion.