Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting

Chapter 1 explores the impact of “haunting” as a sociopolitical force and an alternative mode of visibility, which operates within the Israeli mainstream visual field despite its dominant blinding mechanisms. The chapter focuses on the figure and image of Palestinian village ruins central in Israeli culture from as early as 1948, suggesting that their haunting expands the realm of visibility by introducing the visibility of the invisible. Informed by the work of Avery Gordon, Abraham and Torok, and Derrida, the chapter offers a new reading of several key Israeli literary works and paintings, arguing that the unresolved and ongoing historical violence associated with the forced deportation of Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba), while seemingly invisible within canonical Israeli texts, nevertheless finds its way into these texts under the sign of a growing phantasmatic and ghostly visible invisibility.