The aesthetics of Jerusalem butterflies and the illusion of resistance

Abstract EN

In Sonata for Jerusalem Ghost (SJG) (2009).

Waciny Laredj, the Algerian-French novelist, engages with ono of tho most, if not the most, pivotal eases that have dominated the Arab political and sociocultural scene for more than seventy decades, namely: the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Laredj utilizes an interdisciplinary approach informed by postmodern, psychoanalytical, postcolonial, and ecological rhetoric to deal with issues pertaining to occupation, displacement, the nostalgia for the homeland, the problem of hybrid identity, and others.

Elemental ecology operates as a discursive proxy that links up the different disciplines in SJG.

Exploring the dynamics of this operation, I will underscore the role that Laredj's utilization of interdisciplinarity plays in articulating a feasible — ora potentially blurred - concept of resistance in a Palestinian context.

The different disciplines that Laredj utilizes arc anchored on postmodern predisposition and ethics.

Accordingly.

I will explore if (and how) such ethics renders the potential of ’resistance’in the novel captive to possibilities of freedom and justice defined by a postmodern and global/Wcstem rhetoric rather than by political ethics particularly germane to the Palestinian condition.

In the process, I will show if SJG is an “acstheticized politics" that ultimately generates no more than a sense of *artistic gratification" consummated in the slogan Tart pour I'art".