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ALT Darryl Li A Theory of Open Letters: Notes on the Politics of a Genre Open letters are a curious genre, especially as an attempt to engage in politics. These epistles are open in two senses: First, they are meant to circulate among and elicit engagement from some kind of public beyond any named addressees. While they may take the form of a bilateral communicative encounter between two interlocutory positions (whether they are composed of single individuals or groups is immaterial), they are intended to be “overheard” by others. ...

ALT The realm of appearance (to borrow Arendt’s phrase) or the sphere of the sensible (à la Rancière) both point to a paradox of the open letter that needs to be thought through in relation to material conditions. We are talking about a public, and hence the open letter tends to make its appearance in professions of publicity, an affliction of occupations in which value is derived through reputation produced in public circulation and indexed to individualized notions of achievement, creativity, genius, flair: the arts, academia, science, journalism, sports. Yet this individuality often exists in great tension with the open letter’s collective voice. This can make the process of crafting open letters and debating them quite tedious or even exasperating, as all manner of objections are raised to tone, structure, wording, and the like. ... Accordingly, open letters are often the product of an atypical and perhaps unusually estranged relation to one’s written expression.

ALT As for the open letter genre, what makes Palestine distinctive is not the nature or extent of atrocity to be denounced, but the misfortune of being colonized by a movement that enjoys widespread support and sympathy within the academic milieu of the United States. ... And insofar as this essay was produced largely in response to conditions in that context, it is no coincidence that Palestine is the exemplary case. (In other contexts, agreement about Palestine may be so widespread that it does not strain these fault lines.) To speak of Palestine here is often to invite and incite dispute. To speak of Palestine is to take a stance, to assume risk, to potentially join a cause or ...

ALT ... even a movement. Under these conditions, the tension between the different values invoked in open letters becomes particularly fraught, and the strains activate all the tendencies of professional deformation. Wielding an open letter in the face of genocide is the height of absurdity, and yet it is precisely this apparent triviality that renders refusals, prevarications, and attacks all the more egregious and all the more revealing. Palestine brings out the worst and the best in the open letter form, just as it brings out the worst and the best in so many of us.