ABSTRACT

Drawing on research into telecommunications in the region by Helga Tawil-Souri (2013, 2015), this essay focuses on the literary, cultural and political implications of telephony in Israel-Palestine. Analysing the telephone in Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (2000) and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011), I argue that Barghouti's memoirs of exile are structured by an impossible logic where picking up the phone means not getting through. Demonstrating the ways that the lines of communication within and between communities are crossed, complicated, and often cut entirely, I point to the ways that the oppressive religious, political and geographical boundaries are not only mirrored but also significantly extended through the telecommunications infrastructure in the occupied territories. The essay reads Barghouti alongside Jacques Derrida's account of telephoning in Israel in ‘Avowing – The Impossible’ (1998). Suggesting new connecting lines between the texts, I examine how Israeli control of airspace, infrastructure, and cellular networks contribute to Eyal Weizman's (2007) model of the vertical architecture of the state – how, in effect, using the telephone for both Barghouti and Derrida recalls the Blanchotian syntagma of ‘X sans X’: calling without calling.

摘要

本文借鉴 Helga Tawil-Souri（2013 年，2015 年）对该地区电信的研究，重点关注电话在以色列-巴勒斯坦的文学、文化和政治影响。分析穆里德·巴古蒂 (Mourid Barghouti) 的《我看到了拉马拉》 (2000)中的电话，我出生在那里，我出生在这里（2011 年），我认为 Barghouti 的流亡回忆录是由一种不可能的逻辑构成的，即拿起电话意味着打不通。我展示了社区内部和社区之间的通信线路是如何交叉、复杂且经常被完全切断的，我指出了压迫性的宗教、政治和地理边界不仅反映了而且通过电信基础设施显着扩展的方式被占领土。这篇文章在“Avowing – The Impossible”（1998 年）中将 Barghouti 与 Jacques Derrida 关于在以色列打电话的描述一起阅读。在文本之间提出新的连接线，我研究了以色列对空域、基础设施和蜂窝网络的控制如何为 Eyal Weizman (2007) 的国家垂直架构模型做出贡献——如何，X sans X ': 调用而不调用。