My research trajectory studies sites of subject formation, first, in contexts of incarceration and torture, and, second, in the field of surveillance technological developments. The longer arc of this trajectory implies that analog and digital sites of unfreedom offer broader political lessons.

Book project

My first book project, Carceral Subjectivity and the Exercise of Freedom, looks at Israeli prisons as sites of subject formation. It asks: What can we learn from prisoners’ transcendence over carceral subjectification toward their own counter-subjectivation—and from their failures—for the purpose of expanding freedom in darkening times? Just as Freud analyzed psychoses to better grasp the psyche, this project studies prisons to better understand politics. Following Michel Foucault’s proposition that in order to understand the question of “the subject,” scholars should look at the extreme sites of its formation, I argue that Israeli incarceration of Palestinian political prisoners is a prism through which political theorists can assess the promises and dangers of democratic participation. The central argument of my project is that, to comprehend the traps of subjectivity, we must look not only at situations of overt coercion but also at how our own volitions, actions, and relations can be used to shape who we are. Even while such comparisons are unsettling, I contend that at a time when citizens’ everyday actions involve ever-increasing forms of participation, interaction, and engagement, the study of carceral subjectivity is informative for understanding relations of power and democratic possibilities beyond prison walls.

Publications

Shai Gortler, Orchestrated life: subjectification in 1948 Israeli POW camps (forthcoming with Theory & Event)

Shai Gortler, “The Sumud within: Walid Daka’s Abolitionist Decolonization,” Contemporary Political Theory 21, no. 4 (2022): 499–521.

Shai Gortler, “Participatory Panopticon: Thomas Mott Osborne’s Prison Democracy,” Constellations 29, no. 3 (2022): 343–58.