Rostro, vulnerabilidad y consumo en "Palestina en pedazos" de Lina Meruane

Abstract

We address the text Palestina en Pedazos (2022) by the chilestinian writer, Lina Meruane, to think about how the face – therefore, the social and political constructions of meanings created by the images and discourses that predominate in the mass media and its consumption - determine the lives that are worthwhile and those that are not (Judith Butler, 2004), and specifically how they are expressed in relation to palestinian identity. We use the concept of faceness proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), who mention that the face is a politics, produced in certain places and historical moments by a social machinery of meaning, either to reinforce its significant condition or to stress it. Also, we return to the idea of ​​Judith Butler, who follows Levinas, about the concept of a face that shows “the extreme precariousness of the other.” In this text, the palestinian identity is built not only from the collective memory and the community's own traditions, but also with the impact of the conflictive view that others (mainly Israel and the United States) print on the Arab world through various socio-political devices, such as the media. Likewise, we think about some definitions that emerge from this analysis in relation to the proposal of a profile on the social network Instagram (@hamadashoo) where content is created based on aesthetic criteria of Western dissemination and consumption that draw attention to the politics of the Palestinian face and identification.