After the outbreak of the war, some of Theory and Criticism’s writers in recent years, Israelis and Palestinians, gathered on numerous occasions to discuss how to resume critical discussion during the war. At one of the meetings, we hosted philosopher and cultural researcher and member of the Ljubljana School Alenka Zupančič, a chapter of whose provocative book What Is Sex? was published in Hebrew translation in issue 56 of this journal.

In December 2023, when the brutality of the war and its devastation were already self-evident and the memory of the hostage exchange agreement still fresh, and an end to the war seemed a possibility,  Zupančič talked with us about the crises paving our times – the rise of the populist right, the climate crisis, the Russia-Ukraine war, and now also the Israel-Gaza war – and described them as a series of unresolved crises that flow into each other in a never-ending serial of crises which are making our world the stuff of nightmares. If the serial crisis is indeed a nightmare, is it possible to awaken from it? What must we know in order to unravel the psycho-political structure that entangles us? And what is the role of the dream in setting conditions for its end? Zupančič sent us her words from that meeting, which will appear in the preface of her upcoming book (Disavowal, published by Polity), and we are publishing them here in a special issue dedicated to critique of the war.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.60.2024.7985