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Abstract
Abstract: The point of departure for this article is the observation that materialist critique is the dominant critical practice today, rather than being subservient to idealist criticism. However, Marxist critique, I argue, has been absent from Israeli cultural critique and should be distinguished from other forms of materialist critique, in particular the materialist interpretive philosophies of surface reading and speculative realism. I argue that Marxism should be seen as these approaches' antagonist, as it refuses the primacy of objecthood, asserted in both of these other philosophies. Instead, I argue, faced with today's materialist hegemony, Marxism remains true to materiality precisely by focusing on the contradictions, self-negations, and incompletenesses of the supposedly objective world. I then offer a brief Marxist interpretation of the Israeli film Foxtrot and the TV show Our Boys . I show how a Marxist critique differs from what would be the dominant materialist interpretation of these, as reflecting on Israel/Palestine. In Our Boys , the formal representation of crowds makes them into figures for working-class threat across the Palestine/Israel divide. Foxtrot , alternately, allegorizes the process of Israeli films' autonomous meaning-making, rendering its very freedom the carrier of proletarian revolutionary possibilities. These interpretations, I suggest, are the Marxist alternative to Our Boys and Foxtrot 's hegemonic materialist reading, whose horizon — by now reified and predictable — would be the politics of Palestine/Israel.
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