Dwelling in Babylon: A Critical Genealogy of Exile…

Noah Brehmer is a theorist, editor, and organizer “from here” in a city that variously goes by Vilna, Vilne, and Vilnius. Together with friends he contributes to Dabartis: circulator of autonomous forms. Recent works include: The Dialectics of Exile (Alienocene Journal 2025) As if this World No Longer Existed: Three Theses on the Crisis of Political Belonging (ed. Neda Genova, Institute for Network Cultures, 2025); We Do Not Belong Here: From the Diaspora to Jalūt (Der Spekter, 2025); A Nomos of the Stateless (Blind Field Journal, 2024); The Living Communism of Friendship (Contradictions Journal, 2023). Brehmer is the editor of Paths to Autonomy (2022, Minor Compositions), and the co-editor of The Commonist Horizon (2023, Common Notions).

Lecture brief:

Jermiah, the ancient critic of Israel and early propagator of exilic politics, advised the Jewish peoples to accept the foreign lands in which they had been displaced as their own, and to “build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.” (29-4) Over the years, Jermiah’s wisdom has been circulated in an array of exilic theologies—not without critical engagement.

In his 1998 essay “Between Two Worlds,” Edward Said confronts the diasporic calling to “cultivate a new garden,” or the “looking for some other association to join” after “having lost my country with no immediate hope of regaining it”[.] Yet having learned from Adorno that “reconciliation under duress is both cowardly and inauthentic,” Said concludes: “better a lost cause than a triumphant one, more satisfying a sense of the provisional and contingent…than the proprietary solidity of permanent ownership.”

Is this compulsion toward a self-effacing fulfilment in place, as the Afro-Palestinian thinker Sophia Azeb so trenchantly retorts, “not the impulse that roots the very routes into diaspora?” The lecture will address the question of how to dwell in Babylon—in exile— through a critical genealogy of exilic forms of life. Starting with the Abrahmic tradition (Judeo-Christian-Islamic), as explicated by figures like Jacob Taubes, I will move on to a study of black formulations of errantry (Glissant) and Fugitivity (Moten); to finally arrive at Palestinian encounters. Here I address Samera Esmeir critique of eschatology; Abdaljawad Omar’s critical reappraisal of the Arendtian community in exile through the conscious (non-nomadic) pariah and Nasser Abourahme’s thinking on the refuge camp as a site of exilic remembrance.