Both Walter Benjamin and Cedric Robinson use the term "preservation" to name the nature of European law. For Benjamin, existence names an outside to the law's preservationist nature. In Robinson, survival is the name for that outside. In this talk, I consider these terms of existence and survival, and their difference from what Robinson called "terms of order," as a way to frame the alternative that Palestine in a 19th-century context offers to us today. Beyond the colonial and settler colonial myths produced by the discourse of sacred geography, a discourse entirely predicated on the logic of preservation, I turn to the existence and survival of Palestine and Palestinians not as a way to preserve romanticism but as a way of life that continues in the present.

Lenora Hanson is an associate professor in the Department of English at New York University. Their research focuses on dispossession and enclosure beginning in the Romantic period and as it continues into the present, with particular attention to the way that rhetorical language registers the destruction of non-capitalist forms of life. They recently edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism entitled "Palestine: Romanticisms Contemporary" and published The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation(Stanford University Press, 2022).