While I have been writing this book, family and friends have offered practical support and encouragement. I would like to thank Claire Blencowe, Steve Bloomfield, Julian Brigstocke, Jo Carruthers, Ranji Devadason, Daniel Pablo Garay, Jack Goolden, Katie Goolden, Lorna Henry, Julie Hessey, Hester Jones, Jana Kirwan, Madhu Krishnan, Amy Laurent, Aleks Lewicki, Michael Malay, Lisa Oliver, Chris Penfold, Sian Penfold, Richard Pettigrew, Hannah Sheppard, Anthea Sperlinger, Mike Sperlinger, Rhiannon Taylor, Alice Walker, Dan Whillis, Jane Wright and Vanda Zajko. I am indebted to the staff at Number 12 café in Easton for their patience, when they were doing little business from the time that I spent there. I am especially grateful to two menschen, Sam Kirwan and Philip Shoyer.
My largest debt is to my students at Al-Quds and I hope that I have in some way repaid it in these pages. They taught me more than I can say and the book is for them.
Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces – both physical and cultural – are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine Page 15