EXCEPTIONAL STATES

Abstract

Mahmoud Darwish's transition from the resistance poet of Palestinian nationalism to the ‘meditative and lyrical’ writer he became in his later years has often been controversial with Darwish's readers, who have frequently seen it as a movement away from the politics that first brought him to prominence. The question, as one commentator has provocatively put it, has been: ‘Does Mahmoud Darwish have a right to produce a book of poetry solely dedicated to love?’ (Hadidi 2008: 95). This essay will focus on his poem A State of Siege, which, though written during and about the 2002 Israeli siege of the West Bank, seems at times more concerned with the possibilities for love than with politics. I first attempt to view the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, focusing particularly on the period of the second intifada, within the theoretical framework of biopolitics established by Giorgio Agamben, before then going on to explore the resonances between Darwish's poem and the Homo Sacer project in an effort to bring to the surface the ‘emancipatory possibilities’ implicit in both texts. Ultimately, I want to suggest that there is, in fact, something radically political about the act of writing love poetry in a time of siege.