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Subjectification in the First Palestinian

Intifada
For those who have been involved in progressive struggle, there is
very little more exciting than to watch an egalitarian movement grow.
One can see it on peoples faces. Listlessness and despair give way to
hope and a sense of direction. Solidarity replaces gossip and pettiness. People begin to believe in themselves and in one another, not
merely to survive but to thrive. The future takes on a new meaning.
Involvement in the struggle allows one to see these changes from the
inside, even if one is not necessarily a member of the struggling
group. Although I was not witness to nor involved in the struggle of
the Algerian refugees in Montral, when I later interviewed people
involved in the movement I could sense its aftereffects. The several
people I spoke with sensed that there was a life now available for
them that there would not have been without the movement. And
they recognized that it was together, in collective action, that they
had achieved the availability of that life.
One of the elements that Rancire describes as central to a democratic politics is subjectification. We saw in Chapter 1 that he defines
subjectification this way: By subjectification I mean the production
through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation
not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose
identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience.1 Subjectification is not only an ineliminable moment of a
politics of equality. In some struggles, it may be the most important
moment. Because egalitarian struggles are created by those who are
marginalized in a society, those who have been denied social and
often material resources (as well as those in solidarity with them),
they often fail or at best succeed only partially. Rancire also notes,
as we saw, that an egalitarian movement causes equality to have a
real social effect, only when it mobilizes an obligation to hear.2
Creating the obligation to hear is difficult. In the case we will focus
on here, there is a particular deafness at work that, at the moment
of this writing, seems unlikely to be cured any time soon. However,
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