The Citizen Crushed by the Political - An Israeli perspective, by Dr. Itzhak Benyamini
Audience: Public Format: In Person
Part of the Israel Seminar series
Tuesday, 26 May 2026, 2.15pm to 4pm
In this lecture, Dr. Itzhak Benyamini intends to present the main arguments of my latest book, "A Psycho-Political Analysis of Netanyahu's Israel - The Israeli Anxiety" which has been recently published by Routledge. He will seek to describe the contemporary collapse of the boundary between private and public in the liberal-democratic politics in the West, focusing on his personal experience as an Israeli citizen.
He argues that in Western politics, following the ancient Greek tradition, the relationship between the citizen and the political realm is dual; the political cannot claim the citizen solely to itself. The citizen, on its part, belongs to the political, but not entirely. At the same time, the pre-political, individual existence is already contained within the liberal political order. This is an aporia that should not be resolved as it stands at the root of liberal democracy.
He argues that because of the prolonged political crises in Israel, the citizens, especially the ones who object to the current right wing-religious regime, find themselves trapped within the political grip that does not leave them private space, not even a phantasmatic one. The elimination of the very possibility of existing as a citizen, consumed and at the same time sheltered within the political, is one of the indicators of the deterioration of Israeli politics into dictatorship.
Speaker(s): Dr Itzhak Benyamini
Series: Israel Seminar Series
Department: Middle East Studies (Unit)
More info:
Dr. Itzhak Benyamini teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and in the Psychotherapy Program at Tel Aviv University. His last books in English are “Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (Palgrave, 2024), and "A Psycho-Political Analysis of Netanyahu’s Israel - The Israeli Anxiety" (Routledge, 2026).