The following quote by Giorgio Agamben continues to reverberate in my mind:
âRecently, scientists from the School of Plant Sciences at Tel Aviv University have announced that they have recorded, with special ultrasound-sensitive microphones, the screams of pain that plants emit when they are cut or when they lack water. There are no microphones in Gaza.â (Agamben, 2023)
The most advanced technologies are tested and deployed to erase the Palestinian voice. Tens of thousands of civilian deaths, infrastructural collapse, and enforced deprivation continue to be caused by Israelâs violent state apparatus.
Agambenâs quote captures not only an absurd manifestation of biopolitics but also reveals how technoscience is inherently woven with guiding images and myths. Science and technology is always influenced by what researchers find compelling and what counts as a problem worth addressing. Which objects are researched, and which are exempted? What counts, and to what end? What does research exclude? What is seen as unworthy of investigation? Which voices remain unheard? What does this reveal?
No lifeform is left alone. Â Palestinians are hyper-governed, yet abandoned by the sovereign power. Their life is included through exclusion. The absurdity of biopolitics is that plant life is captured, monitored, and turned into biological data streams, while in areas nearby, lifeforms are doomed to be worthless. They are reduced to what Agamben calls bare life: Palestinians are exempted, stripped of legal status and rights in relation to sovereign power (Agamben, 1998, 11). Palestinians exist in a permanent state of exception.
Using Agambenâs concept, this essay illustrates how the apparatus produces bare life: life that is exempted from political membership while remaining exposed to sovereign power. The permanence of the Palestinian state of exception cannot be explained by apparatuses alone. It is sustained by symbolic and mythical structures that render this condition legitimate. The broader aim of this essay is therefore to question the conventional separation of myth from (techno)science, values from facts, and images from symbols. To address technological and ethical dilemmas, we must examine how these domains interact. This raises a central question: How can we avoid treating 'myth' and 'science' or 'values' and 'facts,' as separate domains?
This essay first clarifies the concept of the apparatus and the state of exception. Second, the situation of Palestinians is examined as one of permanent exclusion. Finally, it is argued that Israelâs legitimisation emerges from a mythologised exceptionalism, demonstrating that technoscience does not negate myth but replaces and reconfigures it by relying on new symbolic imaginaries. What will become clear is that science and technology remain shaped by narratives and imaginaries that determine what is seen, what is funded, and what is protected by rearticulating it in technical form.
Apparatuses and the State of Exception
Agamben defines an apparatus as a network of elements in society that enables the exercise of power towards specific ends (Agamben, 2009, 2). It defines the human subject to make life governable. As Agamben writes, the apparatus âdesignates that in which, and through which, one realises a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being. This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification. That is to say, they must produce their subjectâ (Ibid, 11). Apparatuses necessarily produce the subjects they manage.
In biopolitical terms, to be recognised as human is to be included within an apparatus that confers identity, visibility, and legal status. Apparatuses separate humans from their zoÄ (natural lifeforms) and constitute them to the bios (political life); life that is governable (Agamben, 1998, 9). Â At the same time, apparatuses also produce bare life: life that is excluded from political membership while remaining exposed to sovereign power. Modern politics, for Agamben, begins when power decides which lives are included and which are excluded. Only in this exclusion modern politics arise (Ibid, 11).
The prison illustrates this clearly. The apparatus of the prison creates a category of delinquents; they were not delinquents prior to this process. Individuals become subjects of calculated techniques of governance only after being constituted as delinquents by the apparatus itself (Agamben, 2009, 20).
Yet, prisoners are still within the normal order, where normal criminal laws prevail (Agamben, 1998, 19). In the case of Palestinians, legal (such as martial law) and political frameworks  repeatedly frame them as security threats rather than as subjects of rights. This places them outside the normal application of law: âWe, the Palestinians, are terrorists and therefore anything they do to us is legitimate. We are treated as homo sacer â to whom the laws of the rest of humanity do not applyâ (Shehadeh, 2003, 95). In Gaza, people live outside of normal rules; they reside permanently in the state of exception. This exception becomes the rule. In other words, the exception ceases to be temporary and instead becomes a stable condition of governance (Agamben, 2009, 2).
In this condition of exception, Palestinian bodies, who are nothing more than bare life for the settler-colonial regime, are extensively used for technoscientific experiments. Maya Wind (2024, 8) has exposed Israeli universitiesâ ties to the Israeli state and its apparatuses of violence. Tel Aviv University frequently partners with the Israeli military. Consequently, the Israeli government has built a renowned weapons and security industry, including weapons, spying, phone-hacking software, and facial recognition. These technologies are then tested on Palestinians and later sold abroad as âbattle-testedâ. As Antony Loewenstein (2024, 11) puts it, âthe Palestine laboratory is a signature Israeli selling pointâ.
Mythologized Exceptionalism
As Loewenstein (2024, 15) convincingly demonstrates, Israel operates far outside accepted global norms, both in its conduct of military operations and in the way it has organised its economy around them. This section focuses on how such practices are legitimised.
The permanence of the Palestinian state of exception cannot be explained by apparatuses alone. It is sustained by symbolic and mythical structures that render this condition legitimate. Zureik et al. describe this as mythologised exceptionalism. Israel is repeatedly presented as a state without parallel: the only Jewish state, the only democratic state in its region. Zionist ideology is anchored in mythical narratives of a âchosen peopleâ and destiny. These narratives put Israel's political practices beyond normative challenge, even when they violate international law or basic human rights standards. In this sense, Israel occupies an exceptional position opposite to that of Palestinians. While Palestinians are exempted as bare life, Israel is exceptionalized as sovereign life, or the power that decides over life and death (Zureik et al., 2010, 278).
These same myths are reinforced through technoscientific practices. According to Loewenstein (2024, 15-16), Israelâs image as a successful ethnonationalist state depends on its ability to market and sell that image abroad. Many governments who purchase Israeli weapons or surveillance technologies buy into the myths about Israeli racial supremacy and seek to establish their own ethnoreligious state. Consequently, many Israeli Jews came to believe that maintaining a Jewish-majority state was necessary in order to build a world-leading weapons and technology industry (Ibid, 49).
This further demonstrates that myth and technoscience cannot be separated. Myth enables technoscience by determining what is worth knowing and what can be ignored. Mythologised exceptionalism legitimises violence and exclusion while preserving Israelâs self-image as a âdemocraticâ and âtechnologically advancedâ state. Hub Zwart and Marie Soressi (2022, 14), drawing on Jacques Lacan, similarly warn against the illusion that science and technology operate independently of myth and imagination. Rather, scientific measurement and symbolic meaning are intertwined. Separating values from facts conceals how recognition, legitimacy, and authority are produced, which this essay will address next.
The Symbolic and the Imaginary
Zwartâs and Soressiâs distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary clarifies this interaction. The symbolic is the domain of science: quantification, classification, equations, and technical language. The imaginary consists of images, narratives, archetypes, and shared worldviews through which humans make sense of the world. Science often claims authority by positioning itself as iconoclastic in the sense that it tries to replace myths and worldviews with measurement and calculation. However, as Zwart and Soressi (2022, 14) note, scientific practice remains dependent on "guiding images" that shape what researchers consider meaningful. These images influence which questions are worth asking, which problems receive attention, funding, recognition, and whose claims are considered credible.
Re-reading the opening quote by Agamben through Zwart and Soressi reveals that the separation between technoscience, or the symbolic, and the humanities, or the myths and the imaginary, presents a serious ethical risk of the creation of a divided world. On one side stands technoscience, associated with facts, signals, and objectivity. On the other hand, politics and the humanities are associated with values, images, and meaning. When this split becomes normalised, it is then easier to accept a situation in which technology is seen as capable of detecting plant pain, while human suffering is described as too complex, too subjective, or beyond the scope of scientific or technological responsibility.
This essay has shown that there is no apparatus that recognises Palestinians as subjects worth hearing. This silence is not accidental; it is produced. Technoscience, myth, and power converge to render certain lives audible and others invisible. Therefore, in ethical considerations, the separation between myth and technoscience, values and facts, must be dismantled. Otherwise, the capacity to hear suffering will remain unevenly distributed; amplified for plants, muted for humans, and justified by the very systems that claim neutrality.
Conclusion
This essay has shown that science and technology operate within apparatuses that divide people into those included and those exempted from the normal order in which life is worth living. Palestinians find themselves in a permanent state of exemption, suspended from the normal political order. The essay argued that this occurs through strategic governance techniques and the accepted myths of exceptionalism. In response to the main question, the essay showed that myth and technoscience, as well as values and facts, cannot be separated, as technoscientific choices directly come forth from myths of exceptionalism. Treating them as separate hides how technoscientific authority and legitimacy are constructed through myth and the imaginary. A critical engagement with their entanglement is therefore necessary to challenge exemption and render silenced lives audible.
References
- Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.
- Agamben, G. (2023). Il silenzio di Gaza [The Silence of Gaza]. Quodlibet. Geraadpleegd op 23 december 2025, van https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-silenzio-gaza
- Agamben, G. (2009). âWhat is an Apparatus?â and Other Essays. Stanford University Press.
- Wind, M. (2024). Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Verso Books.
- Loewenstein, A. (2024). The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. Verso Books.
- Shehadeh, R. (2003). When the birds stopped singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege. Steerforth.
- Zwart, H., & Soressi, M. (2022). Neanderthals and us: Towards a philosophy of deep history. Internationales Jahrbuch FĂźr Philosophische Anthropologie, 12(1), 7â28. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbpa-2022-0002
- Zureik, E., Lyon, D., & Abu-Laban, Y. (2010). Surveillance and control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. Routledge.
Author Bio
Zella Ludolph is a research masterâs student in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam with a strong interest in political philosophy, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics. She studied philosophy and arts and culture studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and in fine arts at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Her professional experience includes museum and cultural work, such as writing for Museum Boijmans van Beuningen on the interplay of art, technology, and society.