With contributions by Tal Adler/Osama Zatar, Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka, Maayan Amir/Ruti Sela, Ariella Azoulay, Yael Bartana/Sebastian Cichocki, Raji Bathish, Itzhak Benyamini, Sari Hanafi, Sandi Hilal/Alessandro Petti/Eyal Weizman, Yazan Khalili, Ohad Meromi/Joshua Simon, Norma Musih, Ingo Niermann, Noam Yuran

Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it.

Unlike previous books in the Solution series, this book invited several writers from the region to suggest specific and doable solutions for today. This is mainly since it seems absurd to present a one-man master plan for Palestine-Israel. In many senses, such master plans (whether they take a colonial, Zionist or other meta-narrative lead) have been the mold of the problem in the region for at least the last 150 years.

The idea is therefore to rethink the different antagonisms that structure our ways of resistance and compliance: to rethink Semitism and 1948, rethink identity and territory, rethink resistance and memory, rethink democracy and state, rethink Zionism and decolonization, rethink refugee and property, rethink religion and solution.

Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann. Designed by ZAK Group.

After a short period of “unbearable lightness of being,” the social gravitation begins to be felt again. In his book Joshua Simon describes and analyzes the growing weight of the technical, economic, material basis of our society. The author’s sensibility for today’s Zeitgeist is at the same time entertaining and precise.—Boris Groys

Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970, we have witnessed a move into what Joshua Simon calls an economy of neomaterialism. With this, several shifts have occurred: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject, and symbols now behave like materials.

Neomaterialism explores the meaning of the world of commodities, and reintroduces various notions of dialectical materialism into the conversation on the subjectivity and vitalism of things. Here, Simon advocates for the unreadymade, sentimental value, and the promise of the dividual as a means for a vocabulary in this new economy of meaning.

Reflecting on general intellect as labor and the subjugation of an overqualified generation to the neofeudal order of debt finance—with a particular focus on dispossession and rent economy, post-appropriation display strategies and negation, the barricade and capital’s technocratic fascisms—Neomaterialism merges traditions of epic communism with the communism that is already here.

Design by Avi Bohbot.