Last week the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) participated in the first of three collaborative seminars to take place in various locations throughout the Middle East. Each day provided us with a different frame for entering into a series of discussions around the theme of “Returns” with our local interlocutors (whom I unfortunately cannot name personally and thank individually).

http://themarker.captain.co.il/hasen/spages/1030932.html

Prof. Sylvaine Bulle, a scholar and lecturer in political sociology at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the Universite Jean Monnet St. Etienne, has news for us: The Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank are home not only to suicide bombers, but also to ordinary people who, she claims, lead fairly normal lives. Buildings are not only demolished there by the Israeli occupation forces; they are also built and used not as shelters for terrorists, but as homes, stores and offices.

Eleven years ago, celebrating the creation of the world’s first permanent International Criminal Court, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke of “a gift of hope to future generations, and a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law.” Reflecting on the birth of the United Nations amidst the struggle against genocide, war crimes, and aggression half a century earlier,Annan noted how the idea of a world criminal court had been stillborn,strangled by the superpower rivalry of the Cold War.

In anticipation of us crossing the Jordan please find attached Alessandro Petti's account of the "border machine" between Jordan and Palestine-Israel from August 2002, much of it still applicable today.

A new movement in agriculture is taking place since the beginning of the new century with the will for some nations to farm grains overseas in the long term in order to secure sources for stable food supplies. This new large scale agriculture management can be seen as an active movement toward Neocolonialism.
Grain is an international NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge.

this text is connected to Relly's exhibition in Zochrot which we plan to visit on May 1st.

Between 1947 and 1950, the institutions of the Jewish Yishuv were transformed into the apparatus of a Jewish state. They were tasked with Judaizing the region they had conquered. They applied their

As you know, Friday March 27th will be the first joint seminar we will be having between the two PH.D programs RA and C/K.

from Of Grammatology BY Jacques Derrida (Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

The Supplement of (at) the Origin
In the last pages of the chapter "On Script," the critique, the appreciative presentation, and the
history of writing, declares the absolute exteriority of writing but describes the interiority of
the principle of writing to language.

Derrida, Jacques (1967): Of Grammatology
Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
Part II: Nature, Culture, Writing,

2.". . . That Dangerous Supplement ..."
From/Of Blindness to the Supplement
The Chain of Supplements
The Exorbitant. Question of Method

from 'Between Past and Future, six exercises in political thought', 1954
That the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant, namely, the ability to see things not only from one's own point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world these are insights that are virtually as old as articulated experience. (...) Therefore taste, insofar as it, like any other judgment, appeals to common sense, is the very opposite of private feelings. In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants.
(...) At any rate, we may remember what the Romans the first people that took culture seriously the way we do thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

The emerging landscape of "lawfare" allows military operations to remake international humanitarian law. Israel's assault on Gaza both exposes the dangers and suggests the need for a response that subjects this law to critique. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/legislative-attack

The next seminar on Friday-Saturday 27th/28th February is titled "LEXICONS" and is about “how to write a concept”; our guest is the philosopher Adi Ophir. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Ophir

When it comes to the concepts and the contributors of the DICTIONARY
OF WAR who are supposed to create concepts it seems like the project
is based on a fundamental misreading and misunderstanding on purpose.

Obviously the "concept person" vaguely relates - according to the
general outlay of the project - to the term which in "What is
Philosophy" Deleuze and Guattari have coined as "conceptual persona".

The problem, or, i am tempted to say: the premise of our project is
that we have been slightly shifting the meaning of what Deleuze and

Adi Ophir is now part of a group working on a “network encyclopaedia of political theory in the making." This work is the basis for one of the seminars he will deliver in the context of RT5 at Goldsmiths on the 27th Feb. Framing the project with the old philosophical question "what is X" ¬ (e.g., what is a state? what is power? violence, family, class etc.), the group initiates the writing of original essays on key concepts in political theory. The project is guided by a fundamental respect for the dual nature of knowledge: always on the move, always embedded.