Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis [1st ed.] 9783030567422, 9783030567439

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Freud and Said Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis Robert K. Beshara

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology

Series Editor Thomas Teo Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology publishes scholarly books that use historical and theoretical methods to critically examine the historical development and contemporary status of psychological concepts, methods, research, theories, and interventions. Books in this series are characterised by one, or a combination of, the following: (a) an emphasis on the concrete particulars of psychologists’ scientific and professional practices, together with a critical examination of the assumptions that attend their use; (b) expanding the horizon of the discipline to include more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work performed by researchers and practitioners inside and outside of the discipline, increasing the knowledge created by the psychological humanities; (c) “doing justice” to the persons, communities, marginalized and oppressed people, or to academic ideas such as science or objectivity, or to critical concepts such social justice, resistance, agency, power, and democratic research. These examinations are anchored in clear, accessible descriptions of what psychologists do and believe about their activities. All the books in the series share the aim of advancing the scientific and professional practices of psychology and psychologists, even as they offer probing and detailed questioning and critical reconstructions of these practices. The series welcomes proposals for edited and authored works, in the form of full-length monographs or Palgrave Pivots; contact [email protected] for further information. Series Editor Thomas Teo is Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada. Series Editorial Board Alex Gillespie, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Suzanne R. Kirschner, College of the Holy Cross, USA Annette Mülberger, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Lisa M. Osbeck, University of West Georgia, USA Peter Raggatt, James Cook University, Australia Alexandra Rutherford, York University, Canada

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14576

Robert K. Beshara

Freud and Said Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis

Robert K. Beshara Northern New Mexico College Española, NM, USA

Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology ISBN 978-3-030-56742-2 ISBN 978-3-030-56743-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of my grandmother Teta Aida Youssef (1927 –2018)

Preface

On May 20th, 2020, my wife and I received a direct death threat that was addressed to me personally by a David P. on Zoom chat during my moderation of Theodore Richards’s Q & A after his keynote speech. The context was a ten-day virtual conference titled The Psychology of Global Crises, of which I was one of the co-organizers. I reported the death threat to the Santa Fe Police Department and to the FBI. David P. hacked into the Zoom meeting without leaving a digital trace; he or she is clearly a professional Zoombomber. Some of my relatives and friends tried to comfort me by saying that it is probably a troll, but do trolls send direct death threats to particular individuals or do they engage in general trolling? Others told me that I must have been doing something right with my antiracist research if I am upsetting right-wingers, but that does not comfort me as a measure of my work’s success. I cannot deny the traumatic effect of this threat on my psyche; it has changed my horizon. I currently live with this implicit awareness that someone out there in the world knows where I live and wants to kill my wife and me. On May 25th, 2020, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin, a Trump-supporter who was once

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photographed wearing a “Make America White Again” red cap. Chauvin murdered Floyd by taking a knee on his neck and choking him to death. Many activists on social media juxtaposed the NFL’s, and the wider (white) public’s, ostracization of Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during the national anthem as a gesture of solidarity against police violence with the police’s lethal form of taking a knee, which seems to be more ideologically acceptable. One of Floyd’s final words were, “I can’t breathe!” These words echo the words of Eric Garner, who, in 2014, was also chocked to death by the police in New York. They are the words of countless other Black victims of police violence. The killing of George Floyd was not only a manifestation of personal violence, but also of structural violence. Without the eradication of the structural violence of racism, there can never be positive peace or social justice. For this reason, the murder of George Floyd, as a tipping point, instigated nationwide protests, on the next day, against police violence. Reading about, and seeing videos of, these protests on social media are on my mind as I write this preface. One of the central topics of my book is racialized capitalism, which is also the context for this current moment of revolt: “Colonial domination via police power inaugurated an explicitly racial capitalism in which Black, Brown and Indigenous suffering and death [serves] ruling class interests” (Correia & Wall, 2018, Location No. 177). The spectralization of anti-Black police violence is problematic on many fronts. Amateur videos of Black men being murdered by the police engage their viewers through a perverse enjoyment, which ideologically position the viewers as peeping toms and Black men as disposable. The positioning of Black men as disposable erases Black men ontologically, for living Black men are only comprehended in relation to these hyper-mediated images of dead and dying Black men. These videos, which Killer Mike characterized as “murder porn,” provide enjoyment for conservative racists (i.e., segregationists) and are also a show of force for everyone else, that is, liberals who think they are non-racists (i.e., assimilationists). It is worth mentioning here that the ongoing militarization of the police in the United States is a direct function of the training that they receive from the Israeli Defense Forces. In other words, US

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police officers are receiving a specific form of tactical training, that is, apartheid policing, which can be understood through the lens of Paul Virilio’s (1983/2008) concept of “endo-colonization.” For example, Ajamu Baraka (2020) reads the deployment of the National Guard as endo-colonization: “The U.S. government is deploying the army (that is what the national guard is) against its own citizens. Isn’t that now when someone calls for regime change if that was happening in another nation?” Apartheid policing affords a framing of police violence as structural violence: these exchanges with the Israeli military, police, and intelligence agencies reinforce American law enforcement practices of: Expanding surveillance: Including comprehensive visual monitoring in public places and online, and the heightened infiltration of social movements and entire communities; Justifying racial profiling: Marking Black and Brown people as suspect, particularly Arabs and Muslims, and refining the policies, tactics, and technologies that target communities and social movements that seek racial justice; Suppressing public protests through use of force: Treating protestors as enemy combatants and controlling media coverage of state violence. (RAIA & JVP, 2018, p. 2, emphasis in original)

Slavoj Žižek’s (2008) term for structural violence is objective violence, which for him has two dimensions: symbolic violence and systemic violence. These two dimensions can help us make sense of the widespread phenomenon of police violence, which also has two dimensions. We all experience the symbolic violence of policing through these horrific videos that are virally shared on social media, so we can also think of symbolic violence as virtual violence. However, those who are rendered sub-human, within the apparatus of racialized capitalism, are the only ones who directly experience the systemic violence of policing, which for them is actual violence. More than fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) uttered the following words, which resonate today and testify to the importance of our continuing struggle for social justice: a riot is the language of the unheard . And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has

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worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. (emphasis added)

Seventeen years ago, this is what one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld (2003), said about looting during the first year of the war; it is interesting to juxtapose his words about Iraqis to the current US opposition to endo-colonization: while no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime …Think what’s happened in our cities when we’ve had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens! But in terms of what’s going on in that country [Iraq], it is a fundamental misunderstanding to see those images over, and over, and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, “Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a plan.” That’s nonsense. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing a terrific job. Andm [sic] it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here. (emphasis added)

On May 29th 2020, this is what US president, Donald Trump, tweeted about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” (emphasis added) Trump (2020) characterized BLM protestors as “THUGS,” which according to John McWhorter “is a polite way of using the ‘N-word’” (as

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cited in Eubanks, 2020). Also, with the phrase “when the looking states, the shooting starts,” Trump (2020) was indexing Walter Headley’s (police chief of Miami) 1967 very same words, who further added during a press conference that he did not mind “being accused of police brutality” (as cited in Eubanks, 2020). BLM—the largest movement in US history (Buchanan, Bui, & Patel, 2020)—is a movement with a pluriversal dimension, particularly when we see international solidarity among Indigenous, Black, and Brown subjects. The clearest example of this is the 2015 Black Statement on Solidarity with Palestine, which is echoed by Nick Estes (2019) who writes, on behalf of the Red Nation: “Palestine is the moral barometer of Indigenous North America.” In this book, I explore the pluriversality of BLM in contrast to the provincial logic of All Lives Matter. Another context informing the writing of my book is being under lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionally impacted Indigenous, Black, and Brown folks in the US as a function of structural racism (Sequist, 2020). What is crystal clear in this political moment of revolt is the difference between freedom and liberation. For instance, many (if not most) conservatives are against physical distancing guidelines and lockdown measures claiming that they are authoritarian in nature and that perhaps COVID-19 is exaggerated (if not a hoax), but these same people who feel oppressed by guidelines that are there to keep them safe are ambivalent about the freedom of nonwhites in the face of police violence. All of this is, of course, unfolding amid the 2020 US presidential non-election, wherein the nationalist Law and Order discourse is on full display to unify Trump’s base. I say nonelection because Joe Biden does not offer a real (read: antiracist) alternative to Trump from the Democratic side when he tells his followers: “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black” (as cited in Bradner, Mucha, & Saenz, 2020). Other relevant contextual moments include: the US leaving the World Health Organization and Trump designating ANTIFA as a terrorist organization. What is the logical implication of the US State designating an anti-fascist, anarchist movement as a terrorist organization?

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Another significant aspect of this difficult period is the racialization and politicization of COVID-19 as a way of smearing China’s reputation, which, of course, results in anti-Asian racism here in the US: “1500 reports of incidents of racism, hate speech, discrimination, and physical attacks against Asians and Asian-Americans” have been documented by Human Rights Watch (2020). Calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” is similar to characterizing the 1918 flu pandemic as the “Spanish flu,” which was a function of how “wartime censors minimized reports of the illness while the Spanish press did not” (Brown, 2020). Here is how the racializing and politicizing rhetoric of COVID-19 works: The expressions “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” personify the threat. Personification is metaphorical: its purpose is to help understand something unfamiliar and abstract (i.e., the virus) by using terms that are familiar and embodied (i.e., a location, a nationality or a person). But as cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have long shown, metaphors are not just poetic tools, they are used constantly and shape our world view. The adjective “Chinese” is particularly problematic as it associates the infection with an ethnicity. Talking about group identities withan [sic] explicitly medical language is a recognized process of Othering (here and here), historically used in anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, including toward Chinese immigrants in North America. This type of language stokes anxiety, resentment, fear, and disgust toward people associated with that group. (Viala-Gaudefroy & Lindaman, 2020)

In addition to anti-Asian racism, we are witnessing a new class configuration, wherein essential workers are the new proletariat and those working from home are the new bourgeoisie. We are additionally seeing a rise in the targeting of reporters in the US, which is yet another sign for anti-democratic forces being on the rise: Across the country journalists have been targeted by police, facing arrest, detention, and violence, including being pepper sprayed and shot by rubber bullets. Journalists were targeted by police in the Ferguson protests in 2015 and during the civil rights era, and that pattern of violence and arrests continued into this weekend’s protests”. (Burns, 2020)

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Property rights over human rights (Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16) is the logic driving mythic violence under racialized capitalism. Divine violence follows the obverse logic: human rights over property rights. This is the struggle, which is unfolding before our very eyes. I write this book, as a form of scholar-activism, in this context and on the basis of these experiences, as a small contribution to the slow but inevitable actualization of social justice. Española, USA

Robert K. Beshara

Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible if it were not for the support of: Thomas Teo, Ian Parker, Hatem Bazian, MaríaConstanza Garrido Sierralta (Cony), Grace Jackson, Beth Farrow, Jo O’Neill, Zobariya Jidda, Alberto Hernandez-Lemus, Michael Kim, Tommy J. Curry, and Northern New Mexico College.

References Baraka, A. [@ajamubaraka]. (2020, May 30). Twitter [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ajamubaraka/status/1266945898384416770. Black for Palestine. (2015). Black statement of solidarity with Palestine. Retrieved from https://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html. Bradner, E., Mucha, S., & Saenz, A. (2020, May 22). Biden: ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’. CNN [Atlanta]. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/politics/ biden-charlamagne-tha-god-you-aint-black/index.html. Brown, M. (2020, March 23). Fact check: Why is the 1918 influenza virus called ‘Spanish flu’? USA Today. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/ story/news/factcheck/2020/03/23/fact-check-how-did-1918-pandemic-getname-spanish-flu/2895617001/. Buchanan, L., Bui, Q., & Patel, J. K. (2020, July 3). Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in US history. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-pro tests-crowd-size.html.

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Burns, K. (2020, May 31). Police targeted journalists covering the George Floyd protests. Vox [New York]. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identi ties/2020/5/31/21276013/police-targeted-journalists-covering-george-floydprotests. Correia, D., & Wall, T. (2018). Police: A field guide. New York, NY: Verso. Estes, N. (2019, September 7). The liberation of Palestine represents an alternative path for native nations. Retrieved from https://therednation.org/2019/ 09/07/the-liberation-of-palestine-represents-an-alternative-path-for-nativenations/. Eubanks, O. (2020, May 29). The history of the phrase ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ used by Trump. ABC News [New York]. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-phrase-looting-sta rts-shooting-starts-trump/story?id=70950935. Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). COVID-19 fueling anti-Asian racism and xenophobia worldwide. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/ 05/13/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide#. King, M. L. (1968, March 14). The other America. Retrieved from https://www. gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/. Kovel, J. (1970/1984). White racism: A psychohistory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. RAIA, & JVP. (2018). Deadly exchange: The dangerous consequences of American law enforcement trainings in Israel . Retrieved from https://deadlyexchange. org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Deadly-Exchange-Report.pdf. Rumsfeld, D. (2003, April 11). DoD news briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers. Retrieved June 29, 2020, from https://archive.defense.gov/Tra nscripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2367. Sequist, T. D. (2020). The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color. NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, 1(4). Trump, D. J. [@realDonaldTrump]. (2020, May 28). Twitter [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1266231100780744704. Viala-Gaudefroy, J., & Lindaman, D. (2020, April 21). Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’: The politics of naming. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/ donald-trumps-chinese-virus-the-politics-of-naming-136796. Virilio, P. (1983/2008). Pure war (M. Polizzotti, Trans.). S. Lotringer (Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six sideways reflections. New York, NY: Picador.

Contents

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Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border Psychology

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Beginnings

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Orientalism

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Freud and the Non-European

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Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 5.1

The semiotic square The four discourses Horizontal semiosis

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1 Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis: Critical Border Psychology

Critical psychologists draw on a number of theoretical resources (e.g., feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, etc.) in their critiques of mainstream (Euro-American) psychology. The central debate in critical psychology is whether critical psychology is providing a vision of a more ethical way of doing psychology, one that is grounded in history, philosophy, theory, qualitative methodology, etc.; or is critical psychology the negation of psychology proper? I live on both sides of the debate, but my preference on most days is for the latter position because I am a transdisciplinarian at heart—being not only a scholar-activist, but also a fine artist. In my approach, which I am calling critical border psychology (cf. Mignolo, 2007), I draw on postcolonialism/decoloniality along with Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis in an effort to imagine a pluriversal psychology grounded in liberation praxis (Beshara, 2019a); contrapuntal psychoanalysis is one such an attempt. Some of the critical psychologists who have paved the way for this kind of work include: Ian Parker (Parker & Siddiqui, 2019), Thomas Teo (2005), Tod Sloan (1996), Sunil Bhatia (2018), Erica Burman (2019), and Derek Hook (2008). © The Author(s) 2021 R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_1

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From Decolonial Psychoanalysis to Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis This book is a sequel to Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Beshara, 2019b). In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I analyzed the ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia through the lens of critical psychology, while drawing in particular on psychoanalysis and decoloniality (Mignolo, 2007) as theoretico-methodological tools. I ended Decolonial Psychoanalysis with the question of liberation praxis, which I aspire to explore further in this book through what I will be describing as contrapuntal psychoanalysis, which is a kind of psychoanalysis as liberation praxis that accounts for both (post)colonial psychoanalysis and decolonial psychoanalysis in an effort to theorize oppressor/oppressed subjectivities in order to practice liberatory subjectivities. The challenge of liberation praxis is whether it is possible to theorize and practice psychoanalysis exterior to ideology? Or, even, whether it is possible to imagine a world without psychoanalysis (Spivak, 1994)? In this book, while I will not be revisiting my analysis of the specific ideology of (counter)terrorism-Islamophobia/Islamophilia per se, I continue to be concerned, however, with the overall ideology of (post)modernity-(post)coloniality; or how the violent logic of (post)coloniality (e.g., Islamophobia/Islamophilia) fantasmatically sustains the oppressive rhetoric of (post)modern discourses (e.g., the War on Terror). Another name for this ideology is racialized capitalism, which as a modern world-system explains everything, in the case of the US, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the transatlantic slave trade to Jim Crow and New Jim Crow. Liberation praxis is the attempt to think and act exterior to racialized capitalism; contrapuntal psychoanalysis is one such attempt.

Racialized Capitalism Racialized capitalism (Cole, 2016), however, is more than a modern ideology; it is equally a colonial materiality. For this reason, I conceive

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of racialized capitalism as a dispositif , or an apparatus, in Michel Foucault’s (1980) sense of the term: “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid” (p. 194). This apparatus goes by other names, such as “racial capitalism” (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Gilmore, 2020; Kelley, 2017; Robinson, 1983) and “racist capitalism” (Desmond, 2019). For Cedric J. Robinson (1983): Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the “internal” relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present. In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency. (p. 2)

The racial axis is the central feature of racialized capitalism, which is a European modern/colonial project that can be traced back to 1492 (Dussel, 1995, p. 12). Here’s Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) explication of the racial axis in the coloniality of power: What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. (p. 533)

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In racialized capitalism, racism is certainly the most oppressive structural element of the apparatus, but it often intersects with two other axes: labor and sex. Quijano (2000) argues that the “idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before the colonization of America” (p. 533). However, Geraldine Heng (2018) asserts that England is the first racial state in premodernity with its 1290 Edict of Expulsion, which was a royal decree expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England. Colonialism and racism did undoubtedly exist in the premodern world (Heng, 2018), but the novelty of racialized capitalism, as a modern world-system, was and continues to be its accelerated global systematization of imperialism, colonialism, racism/classism/sexism, and capitalism in the name of civilization. Civilization is savage, but it projects its savagery onto the Other as a defense mechanism: The civilized white man retains an irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepressed incest. In a sense, these fantasies correspond to Freud’s life instinct. Projecting his desires onto the black man, the white man behaves as if the black man actually had them. (Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 142–143)

The signifier ‘race’ can be traced back to the Arabic word ra’s (‫)رأس‬, which means head, beginning, or origin. James Sweet (1997) even makes the following argument: “The racist ideologies of fifteenth-century Iberia grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world as far back as the eighth century” (p. 145). This is a fair critique, which will necessitate an analysis of the Aristotelian notion of natural slavery: For the slave the result was a state of social death in which all rights and sense of personhood were denied. The appearance of this form of slavery [i.e., chattel slavery] in the ancient Mediterranean has led to the dominant modern view that Greece and Rome offer the first examples in world history of what can be called genuine slave societies. (Bradley & Cartledge, 2011, p. 1)

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However, my focus is not on the premodern world, for the politicoeconomic configuration of the world today (e.g., US hegemony) is a function of the longue-durée of (Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and/or Dutch) Euro-colonialism, which began in 1492 and came to a mild halt between 1945 and 1960 with the decolonization of Asia and Africa. I cautiously use the expression “mild halt” for three reasons: (1) As Jacques Derrida argues, the Cold War has not ended (as cited in Borradori, 2003, p. 92); in fact, the War on Terror is a continuation of the Cold War by another name. (2) While classical colonialism is less frequent or visible today, neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965), humanitarian imperialism (Bricmont, 2006), coloniality (Quijano, 2000), auto-colonialism (Bulhan, 1985, p. 44), and endo-colonization (Virilio, 1983/2008) are all highly frequent and visible phenomena. (3) The majority of former franchise colonies have not truly decolonized themselves but instead are now postcolonies (cf. Mbembe, 2001) because the oppressive colonizers have been replaced by colonized sub-oppressors, which is akin to a sado-masochistic game of musical chairs. To be evenhanded, we must consider the contributions of the Islamic world (i.e., modernity’s alterity), particularly the Golden Age (800– 1258), while holding the colonial history of the Islamic Caliphates (632–1924) accountable: Popular accounts of the history of science typically show a timeline in which no major scientific advances seem to have taken place during the period between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance. In between, so we are told, Western Europe and, by extrapolation, the rest of the world, languished in the Dark Ages for a thousand years. In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain. (Al-Khalili, 2011, pp. 29–30)

Therefore, even though the Kingdom of Spain was not the first racial state, “Spain initiated modernity” (Dussel, 1995, p. 90). Quijano (2000) shows us the link between modernity and coloniality since 1492 through an analysis of the two main axes of power (race and labor):

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America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power of global vocation, and both in this way and by it became the first identity of modernity. Two historical processes associated in the production of that space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes of the new model of power. One was the codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitutive, founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest imposed. On this basis, the population of America, and later the world, was classified within the new model of power. The other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known previous structures of control of labor, slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity, together around and upon the basis of capital and the world market. (pp. 533–534)

Sex is the third axis of power in the apparatus of racialized capitalism (cf. Lugones, 2010). The subaltern are not only racialized and over-exploited, they are also violently sexualized (Curry, 2017). The most oppressed in any given society tends to be the racialized, or politicized, male. There is ample empirical evidence for this paradoxical position (that the racialized male is the most oppressed subject under patriarchy) as supported by the subordinate-male target hypothesis in social dominance theory, which “argues that group-based social hierarchy is driven by three proximal processes: aggregated individual discrimination, aggregated institutional discrimination, and behavioral asymmetry” (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, p. 39, emphasis in original). For instance, in the US, Black men suffer from the highest unemployment rate (9.1) according to the Department of Labor (2016), the highest risk (1 in 1,000) of being killed by police use of force (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019), and the highest incarceration rate (1 in 9) for those between the ages of 20 and 34 (PEW, 2008). According to Tommy J. Curry (personal communication, May 14, 2020), the oppression of racialized males “has to do with how patriarchy establishes kinship bonds to build racial hierarchy. Because it eliminates other groups of [racialized/politicized] men for sexual access to all

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women.” This suggests that racial-sexual violence against racialized, or politicized, males may have an evolutionary basis, as Jim Sidanius claims, which gets ideologically reinforced or is “simply the most historically efficacious political strategy of racial management throughout the centuries” (Curry, personal communication, May 14, 2020). Racist violence is sexualized violence, and this is a key psychoanalytic insight. As Enrique Dussel (1995) shows: The modern ego of the conquistador reveals itself as also a phallic ego. No amount of idyllic fantasizing about erotic relationships between the conqueror and the conquered can ever justify injustices such as occurred in Tlaxcala. Such erotic violence simply illustrates the colonization of the indigenous life-world. (p. 46, emphasis in original)

Curry (2017) also draws attention to the perverse sexual nature of anti-Black racist violence, which is the unconscious of racist jouissance or enjoyment (cf. Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 134–135): “racial hatred is carnal hatred … sexualized hatred”—a phallicism or process that criminalizes Black males as sexual threats like the rapist, while simultaneously constituting them as the carnal excesses and fetishes of the white libido. Racism is a complex nexus, a cognitive architecture used to invent, reimagine, and evolve the presumed political, social, economic, sexual, and psychological superiority of the white races in society, while materializing the imagined inferiority and hastening the death of inferior races. Said differently, racism is the manifestation of the social processes and concurrent logics that facilitate the death and dying of racially subjugated peoples. (p. 4, emphasis added)

This is in line with Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) thesis: “If we want to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically, not from a universal viewpoint, but as it is experienced by individual consciousnesses, considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena” (p. 138, emphasis added). Before I highlight some historico-empirical examples of racialized capitalism in the US, I would like to include another definition of racism, which complements the previous one and the ones yet

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to come: “Racism is a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferiority, politically, culturally and economically produced and reproduced for centuries by the institutions of the ‘capitalist/patriarchal westerncentric/Christian-centric modern/colonial world-system’” (Grosfoguel, Oso, & Christou, 2015, p. 636). In other words, racialized capitalism is structured upon not only a hierarchy of labor (bourgeois v. proletariat) and sex (male v. female), but also, and more importantly, a hierarchy of race (being v. nonbeing). The reason I explain the coloniality power in detail is because (post)modern psychoanalysis operates within the (post)colonial logic of racialized capitalism, wherein the analyst is the oppressor and the analysand is the oppressed, but that can change if psychoanalysis is decolonized and becomes a liberation praxis; in other words, decolonial psychoanalysis must be explicitly both antiracist and anti-capitalist (and certainly, antisexist). Fanon (1952/2008), too, was aware of, wrote about, racialized capitalism: “The black problem is not just about Blacks living among Whites, but about the black man exploited, enslaved, and despised by a colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white” (p. 178). Matthew Desmond (2019) calls racialized capitalism, in the context of the US, “racist capitalism” (p. 40) because “historians have pointed to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism” (p. 32). Desmond (2019) then cites Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman who wrote, “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism” (p. 33). Those who do not accept the reality of white privilege today are consciously or unconsciously denying how the US became the world’s largest economy since 1871 on the basis of slavery. In Desmond’s (2019) words, “Cotton was to the 19th century what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most traded commodities” (p. 33). He adds: As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North. (p. 34)

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Desmond (2019) states further, “The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers” (p. 33). Desmond is deconstructing the American dream and other related myths, such as social mobility or the idea that the US is a level playing field, wherein any person can succeed if they work hard enough. While some theorists may object to the phrase racialized capitalism as not specific enough, I would argue that this Black Marxist phrase accurately describes the theoreticopractical continuity from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism and beyond (e.g., neoliberalism), and situates all iterations of capitalism within the project of modernity/coloniality and its civilizational (i.e., dehumanizing) violence: The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. (Desmond, 2019, p. 34)

The other example of racialized capitalism that Desmond (2019) points to is the mortgage. He writes, “Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property” (p. 37). This cruel fact is worth thinking about in relation to the 2008 financial crisis, wherein many racialized homeowners lost their homes while the banks were being bailed out by the US government: African-American and Latino borrowers have been particularly hard-hit by the foreclosure crisis. Among owner-occupants, our estimates suggest that 7.9% of African Americans and 7.7% of Latinos who received loans to purchase or refinance their primary residence between 2005 and 2008 have lost their homes to foreclosure between 2007 and 2009, compared to an estimated 4.5% of non-Hispanic whites. (Bocian, Li, & Ernst, 2010, p. 8)

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Dehumanization To ground capitalism exclusively in the Industrial Revolution is to deny the colonial history of property (cf. Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 16): the theft of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of Black bodies. Emphasizing both capitalism as industrialism and the industrial worker as the site of struggle is a Eurocentric critique of modernity, which does not take into account the dehumanization experienced by non-Europeans, many of whom would not even qualify as the proletariat. For this reason, I invite us to think of oppression and violence under racialized capitalism not only in terms of exploitation or alienation, but also, and more importantly, in terms of dehumanization (of the non-European lumpenproletariat): For a population to be dehumanized they have to be perceived as a race (a natural human kind) with a unique racial essence. The racial essence is then equated with a subhuman essence, leading to the belief that they are subhuman animals. The function of dehumanization is to override inhibitions against committing acts of violence. (Smith, 2011, pp. 447– 448)

Elsewhere in the book, David Livingstone Smith (2011) writes about dehumanization as a way of thinking (cf. Teo, 2020 on subhumanism); Joel Kovel (1970/1984, p. 91) argues that the process of dehumanization (or thingification) is based upon the repulsive fantasy of dirt. Coloniality is also a way of thinking, or a fantasy, powered by “the dehumanizing impulse” (p. 15): Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking—a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable. (p. 30)

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Therefore, our liberation praxis entails thinking critically in Paulo Freire’s (1970/2018) sense of conscientização (conscientization), but the task is complicated in psychoanalysis because it becomes a question of not only critical consciousness, but also critical unconsciousness. However, given that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, this Other must be liberated in order for the subject to also be liberated. This is the radical humanist task of contrapuntal psychoanalysis. We must also wrestle with the possibility that the unconscious is ipso facto racist since it premised on the fantasy of dirt (Kovel, 1970/1984), or the metaphoric condensation of black = evil or sin: “Deep down in the European unconscious has been hollowed out an excessively black pit where the most immoral instincts and unmentionable desires slumber” (Fanon, 1952/2008, pp. 166–167). Fanon is certainly inspired by Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, but he has an even better take on it than Jung: “the collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group” (p. 165); “it is the consequence of…an impulsive cultural imposition” (p. 167). Perhaps the end of racism is also the end of the unconscious, or at least the end of racist cultures.

From Modernity/Coloniality to Transmodernity/Decoloniality My distinction between postcoloniality and decoloniality is not temporal but spatial. Postcoloniality was the moment after decolonization but it was not necessarily a decolonial moment. For this reason, I conceive of postcoloniality as still housed within the neocolonial project of racialized capitalism (cf. Bhabha, 1994, p. 9). Decoloniality, on the other hand, is exterior to coloniality, which does not automatically mean that it is outside of it. For example, even though Indigenous communities are structurally exterior to the rhetoric/logic of modernity/coloniality, they still exist within settler colonial nation-states in the Global North (e.g., the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, etc.). What of postcolonialism as opposed to postcoloniality? Walter Mignolo’s (2007) distinction between postcolonialism and decoloniality

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is an arbitrary one premised on ethnic difference (cf. Bhambra, 2014): Afro-Asian theorists (e.g., Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha) v. Latin American theorists (e.g., Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Walter Mignolo). Here is Mignolo’s (2007) statement on the key distinction between postcolonial and decolonial theorists: “The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while postcolonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy” (p. 452). According to Mignolo’s (2007) reasoning, Edward Said is merely a postcolonial critic albeit being a scholar-activist in every sense of the word. Said was both a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a member of the Palestinian National Council. Unlike Mignolo, I am concerned with the technical or theoretical difference between postcolonialism and decoloniality, which also acknowledges the difference between postcoloniality (the neocolonial period after decolonization) and postcolonialism (the critical theorization of this period in relation to colonialism). Consequently, even though Said is typically credited for being the founder of postcolonialism, I regard him as a decolonial scholar-activist on the basis of his transmodern (Dussel, 1995) praxis of cultural resistance, or of counter-ideologically delinking colonial discourses (e.g., Orientalism) from modern fantasies of exceptionalism. Egypt, for example, as a former franchise colony is the postcolonial state par excellence because the kingdom of colonial oppressors (i.e., the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the British Empire) was replaced with a republic of postcolonial sub-oppressors (i.e., the Egyptian Armed Forces). In other words, in the case of (post)modern Egypt, decolonization took place but neither decoloniality nor liberation, and as such, Egypt continues to operate within the framework of neomodern/neocolonial racialized capitalism. In this case, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is the theorizing and practicing of a decolonial (Egyptian) subjectivity vis-à-vis (or in spite of ) the apparatus of racialized capitalism. This book then is a reflexive application of contrapuntal psychoanalysis given my positionality as an Egyptian scholar-activist situated in

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the Global North on Turtle Island in proximity to twenty-three Indigenous tribes: nineteen Pueblos (Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna, Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Zuni, and Zia); three Apache tribes (the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the Mescalero Apache Tribe), and the Navajo Nation. Contrapuntal psychoanalysis not only informs my subjectivity (as a psychosocial site of political resistance and liberation ethics), but also informs the aesthesis of my critical pedagogy given that I work at a college dedicated to underserved (Hispanic and Native American) students.

Freud and Said So far I have been addressing the subtitle of the book (Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis) and not the actual title (Freud and Said). This book is not a dual biography of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Edward Said (1935–2003), for that I recommend Adam Phillips’s (2014) or Elisabeth Roudinesco’s (2016) biographies of Freud and Said’s (1999) own memoir, Out of Place. Rather, this book is about the theoretical linkages between Freud and Said, who are undoubtedly two of the most important theorists in the twentieth century, which is not merely an opinion. Their importance as theorists is corroborated by the fact that they both were on the Times Higher Education (2009) list of most cited authors of books in the humanities. In 2007 alone, Freud was cited 903 times and Said was cited 694 times. These results speak of not only their importance as theorists but also the continued practical relevance of their ideas in the twenty-first century as public intellectuals. Both Freud and Said were founders of original fields of study, the former being the inventor of psychoanalysis and the latter being the originator of postcolonialism. Both critical theorists wrote from the perspective of exilic marginality with the (explicit or implicit) awareness of being out of place: Freud being a non-European (atheist Jew) and Said being an non-American (secular Palestinian). Toward the end of his life, Freud had to flee from Austria to the UK after Vienna was annexed

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by Nazi Germany in 1938. From the beginning of his life, Said had to contend with living in exile in Egypt after the nakba (catastrophe), or the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Freud produced a powerful theory of subjectivity being divided between ego and unconscious, and Said produced an equally influential theory of the (Oriental) Other being in a dialectical relationship with the (Occidental) subject. Put together, these two theories help us explain the psychosocial distress, which manifests itself through the subject-Other dialectic in the form of clinical structures (i.e., neurosis, perversion, and psychosis) and their symptoms. In other words, Said links the repression that Freud encountered in the clinic with the oppression existing outside the clinic in society (cf. Levy, 1996), particularly in the context of imperialism and colonialism, or the apparatus of racialized capitalism. Here is Said’s (1993) distinction between imperialism and colonialism: “‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism,’ which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory” (p. 9). Freud was born and grew up in Freiberg in Mähren, the Austrian Empire (now: Pˇríbor, Czech Republic); regarding Said’s formative years, in both Palestine and Egypt as franchise colonies, there were two overlapping contexts: the Ottoman and British Empires. This emphasis on psychosocial distress and the link between repression (inside the clinic) and oppression (outside the clinic), or the personal and the political, is what contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is principally concerned with. Said had great admiration for Freud as both a theorist and a writer, and while some scholars (e.g., Barghouti, 2010; Esonwanne, 2005; Field, 2016) have addressed this connection in their essays, the topic has never been addressed in book-length form. Therefore, in highlighting the influence of Freud (and subsequently, psychoanalysis) on Said, I hope to achieve two things: (1) to decolonize Freud in order to theorize decolonial subjectivity—the kind of subjectivity at the heart of liberation praxis—and (2) to psychoanalyze Said as a means to articulate the transmodern Other—as a counterpoint to the (post)modern Other.

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It is worth adding, in this context, two more things: (1) Freud identified with the conquistadors, as is evident in this letter he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess on February 1, 1900: “I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador –an adventurer, if you want it translated–with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort” (as cited in Masson, 1985, p. 398, emphasis added); (2) Said (1999) was not just inspired by psychoanalysis, he was actually in analysis (p. 261); hence, what Jacqueline Rose (2017) terms his “psychoanalytic passion” (p. 10).

Overview In the remainder of this chapter, I will review the non-Saidian theoretical links between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism/decoloniality beginning with the contributions of Freudo-Marxists, particularly Wilhelm Reich’s (1933/1970) publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, all the way to my publication: Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b). Along the way, I will survey some of classic literatures: Octave Mannoni’s (1950/1990) Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, Frantz Fanon’s (1952/2008) Black Skin, White Masks, Albert Memmi’s (1957/1965) The Colonizer and the Colonized , and Ashis Nandy’s (1983) The Intimate Enemy among others. In Chapter 2, I will closely read Said’s (1975/1985) second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method , wherein he discusses Freud’s (1899/2010) magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams among other texts to investigate Freud’s intentions and methods not as a psychoanalyst but as a writer. For Said (1975/1985), The Interpretations of Dreams is a “text whose intention is to begin a discourse one of whose principal purposes is to the conscious avoidance of certain specific textual conventions” (p. 162). Is that Said’s way of downplaying the scientific status of psychoanalysis and elevating Freud’s contributions to the humanities? In Chapter 3, I will engage with Said’s (1978/2003) third and most influential book, Orientalism, which inaugurated postcolonialism as a field of study. In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) distinguishes between latent (unconscious) Orientalism and manifest (conscious)

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Orientalism—an important distinction, which he would not have been able to make without Freud’s categories for dream interpretation. Strangely, Freud’s name is cited three times in Orientalism, but these citations are in passing, and they are never in relation to the latent/manifest distinction. In other words, Freud is repressed in the text. Why is that? In Chapter 4, I will concentrate on Freud and the Non-European, which is Said’s (2003) final book before losing his life to leukemia. The book is a transcription of a talk Said gave at the Freud Museum London in 2001. The talk was incidentally banned (disavowed?) by the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. In the book, Said (2003) pays close attention to Freud’s (1939/1967) final book, Moses and Monotheism. The crux of the book is that identity, something which most of us strongly cling to, is based upon non-identity. This is the point that Freud makes when he argues that Moses was an Egyptian; in other words, the first Jew was a non-Jew. By extension, Said argues that Freud is a non-European—and Said a non-American? In the spirit of praxis, Said elaborates this powerful theoretical reflection in an effort to apply it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Said, Freud’s insight has the potential for helping us envision a world not divided along the lines of identity politics—something that Freud theorized but could not himself avoid. Finally, it is worth noting the obvious: that Said’s final book deals with Freud’s final book—not mentioning that both men battled cancer. What is the significance of their late styles for both psychoanalysis and postcolonialism/decoloniality? In Chapter 5, I will unpack contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. I will do this by way of the following concepts: the two Others, double-unconsciousness, and colonial difference. As liberation praxis, I will elaborate on contrapuntal psychoanalysis qua border methodology. Furthermore, contrapuntal psychoanalysis can be read along the lines of not only power/knowledge/being but also politics/aesthetics/ethics. In the concluding chapter, I will be demonstrating these features through concrete examples. Finally, I aspire to contribute to a general theory of oppression (and violence) in the context of racialized capitalism. In the next section, I will discuss the difference between ‘race,’ racialization, and racism because racism is the most salient form of oppression.

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I will argue that while ‘race’ is a social construction, racism is a material reality mediated through racialization, which is the perception of race. The perception of race is a function of our schemas, which are unconscious, because we internalize them from the culture in which we are situated. Therefore, antiracism can only be the product of an antiracist culture. Ultimately, we need a new language for talking about human difference without resorting to the problematic category of race. We are not there yet because such a long-term project entails undoing the history of modern colonialism, which may take us around five hundred years.

‘Race,’ Racialization, and Racism Throughout this book, I will heuristically use signifiers like ‘white,’ ‘Brown,’ and ‘Black’ to refer to different human groups with the awareness that ‘race’ is not only a social construction (cf. Spivak, 1987, p. 205 on strategic essentialism), but also a master category or “a fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 106). Henceforth, I will drop the use of inverted commas. Race is also a transcendent category: “something that stands above or apart from class, gender, or other axes of inequality and difference” (p. 106). Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015) add: Race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has influenced the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources, and the ideologies and practices of subordination and oppression. The concept of race as a marker of difference has permeated all forms of social relations. It is a template for the processes of marginalization that continue to shape social structures as well as collective and individual psyches. (p. 107)

Because race is “a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Omi & Winant, p. 110, emphasis in original), racism is Real, and it is for this

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reason that the concept of race, while a social construction, is still of great value in antiracist struggle. Also: “While race is a template for the subordination and oppression of different social groups, we emphasize that it is also a template for resistance to many forms of marginalization and domination” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 108). Omi and Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory comprises a constellation of concepts, which are worth unpacking: race making, racialization, racial projects, racism, and antiracism. They define race making “as a process of ‘othering’” (p. 105), which is based on any perceived distinction. They add: “Gender, class, sexuality, religion, culture, language, nationality, and age, among other perceived distinctions, are frequently evoked to justify structures of inequality, differential treatment, subordinate status, and in some cases violent conflict and war” (p. 105). I appreciate the conception of othering because it explains not only racism, but also other forms of oppression. Othering, as Omi and Winant (2015) point out, is “a global and world-historical process of ‘making up people’” (p. 106), a form of categorization premised on not only difference (us v. them), but also hierarchy (superior v. inferior). Now, we can map the coordinates of subject-positions in the apparatus of racialized capitalism (see Fig. 1.1) using the semiotic square (Greimas, 1968; cf. Kovel, 1970/1984, p. 75) and Curry’s (2017) Man-Not theory. Here is Curry’s (personal communication, June 28, 2020) response to my formalization of his theory, “the Man-Not however creates the stratification because he is outside civility. The woman-not (savage) is civilized in contact and through rape (she can produce babies for rule over the native)…he is only eliminated.” Curry (personal communication, August 7, 2020) clarifies, “even when he [the Man-Not] is raped, it serves no function besides accelerating his dehumanization and ultimate death.” Curry (personal communication, June 28, 2020) adds, “class stratification and group distinctions in civil society emerge from the distance they have from the savage. This nuances Wynter’s point in No Humans Involved.” Racial formation is “the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed ” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 109, emphasis in original). Racialization is “the extension of

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Fig. 1.1 The semiotic square

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racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (p. 111, emphasis in original). Here is the definition of the next element (i.e., racial project) in Omi and Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory: A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines. (p. 125, emphasis in original)

So what is racism according to Omi and Winant (2015)? “A racial project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significations and identities” (p. 128, emphasis in original). Conversely, antiracist projects are “those that undo or resist structures of domination based on racial significations and identities” (p. 129, emphasis in original). In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi (2016) names three subject-positions vis-à-vis the question of race: segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists. I find that these positions map perfectly onto the “trinity of ideologies that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution–conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 52). Whereas segregationists are conservatives who are consciously racist, assimilationists are liberals who are unconsciously racist, which is epitomized by the phrase: “I’m not racist, but…” Non-racism, or racial moderation, is still a form of liberal (or centrist) racism. Kendi (2016) defines radical antiracism as follows: “there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal” (p. 11, emphasis in original). Not only is race a social construction, racism is a dangerous racial project that is founded upon myths:

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Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate. (Kendi, 2016, p. 32, emphasis added)

However, undoing racist myths entails racial justice, not color blindness; in other words, radical antiracism entails both “oppositional race consciousness and racial resistance” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 131, emphasis in original). It is unfortunate that we must define a project of social justice and positive peace using a negative term (antiracism); nevertheless, antiracism is the negation of the negation, for during 468 years of Euro-colonialism racism has negated the being of the non-European, non-white, non-Christian, etc. It will perhaps take another 468 years to undo this legacy of modern colonialism. Color blindness is not tenable in the foreseeable future because it is impossible not to racialize (i.e., not to perceive race); however, it is possible to racialize and also be antiracist. Racialization will cease to exist with the collapse of racialized capitalism. As Marxist theorist Mike Cole (2016) puts it, racialization is “a process that serves ruling-class interests by dividing the working class, promoting conflict among that class – the class with least access to power and wealth – and forcing down labour costs” (pp. 1–2). Cole is on the right track; however, while Marxism provides us with the most powerful critical analysis of capitalism, the Eurocentric category of class (i.e., the white industrial worker) fails to account for those below the proletarian threshold: the non-European lumpenproletariat or underclass. The most obvious historical example is the slave; today’s equivalent, at least in the US, is the incarcerated. The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted , shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis added). The highlighted exception means that the incarcerated are the new slaves, and this colonial logic confirms Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) thesis about the state of exception being a structurally

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inherent feature of European politics, whether democracy or totalitarianism. The incarcerated, or the new slave, is the homo sacer (sacred man) “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed ” (p. 8, emphasis in original). Agamben (1998) does not address the racialization of the homo sacer, which is the limit of his analysis, but extending Curry (2017) one can characterize him as the sacred man-not. The incarcerated (e.g., the enemy combatant in Guantánamo Bay) is outside the law, an exception, and hence, he is also outside politics; therefore, he neither has the right to vote nor can he enjoy the Aristotelian bios (good life) that most of us take for granted. As a sacred man-not, the incarcerated is reduced to zo¯e (bare life). The end of racism (or any other form of oppression) depends not only on the end of racialized capitalism, but also on the end of any politics based on the state of exception. The gendering is intentional for the most oppressed in any given society tends to be the homo sacer. It is also true that man is the oppressor par excellence. Whereas in the Global North, the primary oppressor tends to be a bourgeois white man, in the Global South, the primary sub-oppressor tends to be a bourgeois Brown or Black man. Within the apparatus of racialized capitalism, patriarchy explains the sexist oppression of women, but it fails to explain the oppression of the homo sacer, who tends to be oppressed on the basis of race in the Global North and on the basis of politics in the Global South. Signifiers that have been used by the state to characterize the homo sacer include: superpredator, terrorist, enemy combatant, criminal, n-word, thug, extremist, radical, fundamentalist, etc. The homo sacer functions as a scapegoat for the state, this scapegoating ideologically interpellates civilians to support, or at least to not critically think about, the violence of the state itself, which Asaf Jalata (2013), in the case of Europe, characterizes as “colonial terrorism.” Jalata (2013) argues that European colonial terrorism against Africa occurred in two waves over a period of five hundred years: The first wave started in the late fifteenth century with merchandising some young and able-bodied Africans at gunpoint and colonizing some limited coastal islands or territories (about 10 percent of Africa). The second wave emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century and

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consolidated with the partition and colonization of the remaining 90 percent of the continent in the late nineteenth century. (p. 3)

Jalata (2013) then defines terrorism as follows, which challenges the facile understanding of modern terrorism as political violence perpetrated exclusively by non-state actors: a systematic governmental or organizational policy through which lethal violence is practiced openly or covertly to impose terror on a given population group and their institutions or symbols or their representative members to change their behavior of political resistance to domination or their behavior of domination for political and economic gains or other reasons. (p. 3, emphasis in original)

What Is Psychoanalysis? According to the co-founder, and first major theorist, of psychoanalysis: Psycho-analysis is seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in mental life which are repressed ; and everyone who forms a judgement on it is himself a human being, who possesses similar repressions and may perhaps be maintaining them with difficulty. They are therefore bound to call up the same resistance in him as in our patients; and that resistance finds it easy to disguise itself is an intellectual rejection and to bring up arguments like those which we ward off in our patients by means of the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. We often become aware in our opponents, just as we do in our patients, that their power of judgement is very noticeably influenced affectively in the sense of being diminished. The arrogance of consciousness (in rejecting dreams with such contempt, for instance) is one of the most powerful of the devices with which we are provided as a universal protection against the incursion of unconscious complexes. That is why it is so hard to convince people of the reality of the unconscious and to teach them to recognize something new which is in contradiction to their conscious knowledge. (Freud, 1909/1961, p. 41, emphasis added)

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I emphasized through italicization some of the key technical terms used by Freud in these closing remarks to his third lecture at Clark University, such as repression, resistance, consciousness, dreams, protection (i.e., defense mechanism), and the unconscious. Elsewhere he describes psychoanalysis as “the science of the unconscious” (Freud, 1923/1955, p. 251, emphasis in original) and as “a method of research” (Freud, 1927/1961, p. 36). However, Freud (1909/1961) gives the credit to Bertha Pappenheim (pseudonym: Anna O.), Joseph Breuer’s hysteric analysand, for characterizing psychoanalysis as the “talking cure” or, more jokingly, as “chimney-sweeping” (p. 8). For a succinct definition, see this encyclopedia entry from Freud (1923/1955): Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline. (p. 234)

In other words, psychoanalysis, as a science of the unconscious, is a research method that is concerned with what is repressed. As subjects of the signifier, we are divided between our egotistical wishes (what Freud terms “conscious knowledge”) and our unconscious desires (e.g., dreams), which we defensively repress in an effort to avoid the trauma of anxiety. Because we unconsciously repress our (the Other’s) desires, we develop neurotic symptoms. This brief account excludes the psychic structures of psychosis and perversion not only because they are less common in most societies when compared with neurosis, but also because my interest in psychoanalysis is more theoretico-political and less clinical. In contrast to the extremes of biological essentialism and cultural constructionism, the divided subject, or speaking being (parlêtre), is psychosocially structured, from the perspective of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, by the singular and irreducible materiality of the signifier. This question of materiality is worth emphasizing if we are serious about using psychoanalysis not only as a form of contrapuntal critique

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but also, and more importantly, as one of many tools for changing the world. Another way of restating how the divided subject is neither a human animal nor a cultured person is through the Lacanian formula: demand - need = desire. The formula is based on this statement from Écrits: “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung )” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 580, emphasis in original). Generally, governments address the biological needs and/or the cultural demands of their citizens, but a psychoanalytically-informed politics is attuned to our unconscious desires as subjects: What do we want? What is our collective fantasy? And is it enjoyable for us to be on this journey together as we traverse this fantasy? Therefore, desiring is an ethico-political question that has to do with jouissance (enjoyment); we enjoy desiring more than realizing our desires through acquiring objects. Desire is our fantasmatic relation to the objet petit a, a lost or impossible object-cause of desire that we presume is in the Other, which is “the dimension required by the fact that speech affirms itself as truth” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 712). The Other, of course, does not exist or is barred, and this is why radical political projects are important: Together we create the Other, which informs how we speak and act.

What Is Postcolonialism? In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989/2000) use the signifier ‘post-colonial’ to refer to “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (p. 2) and “all that cultural production which engages, in one way or another, with the enduring reality of colonial power (including its newer manifestations)” (p. 195). Elsewhere, they have written that postcolonialism “deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2002, p. 186). They also acknowledge “the implications involved in the signifying hyphen [i.e., post-colonial] or its absence [i.e., postcolonial]” (p. 187).

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According to them, the high theorists (Said, Bhabha, and Spivak) “insist on the hyphen to distinguish post-colonial studies as a field from colonial discourse theory per se” (p. 187, emphasis in original). Leela Gandhi (1998), on the other hand, asserts that “the unbroken term ‘postcolonialism’ is more sensitive to the long history of colonial consequences” (p. 3). For me, whereas postcolonialism “as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism” (Loomba, 1998, p. 12) is the field, (post)colonional/ity, or (post)colonization, is the object of study to be acted upon and transformed in the spirit of praxis. I include the prefix ‘post’ in parentheses to recognize that many societies today are not postcolonial, but are rather settler colonial or franchise neocolonies. Also, as Ania Loomba (1998) shows: “A country [e.g., Egypt] may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at the same time” (p. 7). In terms of postcolonial studies as “a term for a body of diverse and often contesting formulations of the cultural production of colonized people rather than a discipline or methodology per se” (p. 199, emphasis in original), Ashcroft et al. (1989/2000) acknowledge the critical debates surrounding the field (p. 194); they respond to these debates by making an analytic distinction between postcolonial societies or countries, postcolonial literature or writing, and postcolonial theory or criticism (cf. Moore-Gilbert, 1997). As Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1994) argue in their excellent reader: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, single-handedly inaugurates a new area of academic inquiry: colonial discourse, also referred to as colonial discourse theory or colonial discourse analysis” (p. 5, emphasis in original). They then situate postcolonialism within a specific intellectual tradition (to which we can add the names of Giambattista Vico, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Anouar Abdel-Malek to signal other intellectual traditions that have influenced Said’s development of postcolonialism):

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it must be pointed out that it [Orientalism] was preceded by a number of academic texts from a German intellectual tradition [e.g., Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt] which shared Said’s concerns with the historical and theoretical relations between Western economic/political global domination and Western intellectual production. (pp. 6–7)

Further, Williams and Chrisman (1994) contend that while “the era of formal colonial control is over…we have not fully transcended the colonial [which is a way of maintaining an unequal international relation of economic and political power]” (pp. 3–4). Nevertheless, the closest they come to a definition of postcolonialism is this: “Colonial discourse analysis and post-colonial critique are thus critiques of the process of production of knowledge about the Other. As such, they produce forms of knowledge themselves, but other knowledge, better knowledge” (p. 8). In his historical introduction to postcolonialism, Robert Young (2001) writes: If colonial history, particularly in the nineteenth century, was the history of the imperial appropriation of the world, the history of the twentieth century has witnessed the peoples of the world taking power and control back for themselves: Postcolonial theory is itself a product of that dialectical process. (p. 4)

For Young (2001), postcolonial theory is “a political discourse, the position from which it is enunciated (wherever literally spoken, or published) is located on the three continents of the South [i.e., Latin America, Africa, and Asia]” (p. 4). To the tricontinental, I add decolonial communities, and comrades (Dean, 2019), in the Global North, such as Indigenous peoples, the descendants of slaves, immigrants, forcibly dispersed people, political radicals, and persecuted (sexual, religious, ethnic, etc.) minorities of all kinds.

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The (Proto)Theorists of Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis Wilhelm Reich Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, who was one of the pioneers of Freudo-Marxism (cf. Balibar, 1994, pp. 177–189) and somatic psychology, but unfortunately today he is often overlooked or dismissed. Perhaps the following dramatic, and perhaps even tragic, events shed light on his dismissal: Reich was excommunicated from both the International Psychoanalytical Association (founded by Freud) and the Communist Party of Germany (co-founded by Rosa Luxemburg), and he died in prison after a crackdown on his Orgone Institute by the federal government of the US. I begin my literature review with his important book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was originally published in German in 1933—the year Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany— because it is the first psychoanalytic reading of the imperial/colonial dimensions of fascism. The third edition of the book was translated to English in 1942 and published in the US by Orgone Institute Press in 1946. The version I had access to was published in 1970 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, and it is based on a new translation from the revised German manuscript, which was co-edited by Marry Higgins and Chester Raphael. As an exemplar of the first wave of Freudo-Marxism, The Mass Psychology Fascism really stands out because in contrast to the more popular second wave (i.e., the Frankfurt School), Reich (1933/1970) underlined the interconnection between fascism and race ideology—an analysis that is clearly missing from the works of Frankfurt School critical theorists (Baum, 2015). Bruce Baum (2015) makes the case for decolonizing critical theory because in his view: “Horkheimer and Adorno [two of the Frankfurt School’s leading figures] offered no sustained analysis of anti-Black racism, colonialism, and other forms of racism” (p. 423). Decolonizing critical theory means grounding the analyses conducted by Frankfurt School researchers in a critique of racialized capitalism: “modern racism can be comprehended adequately only through a critical

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examination of modern capitalist society, and modern society itself can be adequately understood only through a critical analysis of modern racism” (Baum, 2015, p. 427, emphasis added). In contrast to the Frankfurt School’s shortcomings, Reich (1933/1970) clearly makes the following argument in the preface to the third edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism: “The racial theory is not a product of fascism. On the contrary: it is fascism that is a product of racial hatred and is its politically organized expression” (p. 16). In fact, Reich (1933/1970) dedicates the third chapter of his book to debunking “race theory.” This is not to say that every aspect of Reich’s analysis is correct, for he places too much emphasis on sex(uality) when explaining how a fascistic tendency manifests itself in the structure of one’s character. However, I shall highlight the passages, which support my thesis that Reich was ahead of his time in terms of his psychoanalytic reading of the imperialist/colonialist and racist dimensions of fascism. For example, in the following passage, Reich (1933/1970) underscores not only the politico-economic but also, and more importantly, the psychopolitical driver of German imperialism: To be sure, the economic interests of German imperialism were the immediate decisive factors, but we also have to put into proper perspective the mass psychological basis of world wars; we have to ask how the psychological structure of the masses was capable of absorbing the imperialistic ideology, to translate the imperialistic slogans into deeds that were diametrically opposed to the peaceful, politically disinterested attitude of the German population. (p. 75, emphasis in original)

He then concludes that “imperialistic ideology concretely changed the structures of the working masses to suit imperialism” (Reich, 1933/1970, p. 76, emphasis in original). In addition to writing about Nazi Germany’s nationalistic and patriarchal imperialism, Reich (1933/1970) juxtaposes, in his analysis, two forms of imperialism through ideology critique to highlight their dialectical relationship:

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The essential connection between familial and nationalistic ideology can be pursued further. Families are just as cut off from and opposed to one another as nations are. In both cases the ultimate basis for this separation and opposition is an economic one…It is for this reason that the lower middle-class man is especially accessible to imperialistic ideology. He is capable of fully identifying with the personified conception of the nation. It is in this way that familial imperialism is ideologically reproduced in national imperialism. (pp. 131–132, emphasis added)

Reich (1933/1970) develops his thesis of fascism as a product of racial hatred in the third chapter, which is titled “The Race Theory.” Reich (1933/1970) writes: “According to Hitler, humanity is to be divided into three races: the founders of civilization, the upholders of civilization, and the destroyers of civilization. Only the Aryan race is considered as the founder of civilization” (p. 158). A couple of pages later, he adds: “this idea [Hitler’s race theory] conceals the imperialist function of fascist ideology. For if the Aryans are the sole founders of civilization, then, by virtue of their divine destiny, they can lay claim to world dominion…Thus, we can see that the glorification of an imperialist war lay wholly within the compass of this ideology” (p. 160). In other words, Reich establishes that fascist ideology is comprised of an imperialist/colonialist discourse sustained by a racist fantasy, or to put it in his words: “the fascist race theory and nationalistic ideology in general have a concrete relation to the imperialistic aims of a ruling class that is attempting to solve difficulties of an economic nature” (Reich, 1933/1970, p. 163). Reich’s analysis sheds light on the authoritarian nature of racialized capitalism, which can manifest itself ideologically in more than one form, as either fascism or totalitarianism. Reich’s (1933/1970) notion of fascist ideology as patriarchal imperialism can be read as a psychosocial critique of the family’s complicity with the state against the subject: nationalistic sentiments are a direct continuation of the sentiments of the authoritarian family. But mystical feelings are also a source of nationalistic ideology. Hence, patriarchal family attitudes and a mystical frame of mind are the basic psychological elements of fascism and imperialistic nationalism in the masses. (p. 241, emphasis in original)

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Culture, in the context of capitalism, is inherently ideological because the “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx & Engels, 1845/1978, p. 172). Reich (1933/1970) adds a twist to this classical Marxian reading by framing (fascist) culture, in the context of (racialized) capitalism, as not only ideological (i.e., nationalistic, authoritarian, patriarchal, etc.), but also “imperialistic mysticism” (p. 253). Reich (1933/1970) demonstrates the inevitability of imperialism as a function of the contradictory nature of capitalism, wherein the proletariat (the 99%) continues to be in a historical class struggle with the bourgeoisie (the 1%). In capitalist societies, the proletariat constitutes the material base (i.e., the means and relations of production), whereas the bourgeoisie produces the ideological superstructure (e.g., culture, religion, family, etc.). Reich (1933/1970) shows that fascist ideology ‘resolves’ capitalism’s contradictions, in a reactionary way, through imperialism. His analysis sheds light on the humanitarian imperialist wars taking place today (e.g., the War on Terror) in the name of mystical values (e.g., freedom) promoted by neoliberal democracies in the Global North. For Reich (1933/1970), “Since fascism promised the masses of people a revolution against private capitalism and at the same time promised private capitalism salvation from the revolution, its moves could be nothing but contradictory, incomprehensible, and sterile. This also accounts to a large extent for the compulsion that drove the German state apparatus into an imperialistic war” (p. 474). The above-mentioned passages support my thesis regarding the importance of Reich’s theorization of fascism from a Freudo-Marxist perspective for contrapuntal psychoanalysis. Although I value many of the contributions of second-wave critical theorists, particularly their critique of modernity, I agree with Baum’s (2015) criticisms of the Frankfurt School regarding their silence on the question of coloniality. Perhaps the only exception is Herbert Marcuse, who concluded the following in his 1967 speech at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, which took place in London and included speakers as diverse as Stokely Carmichael, David Cooper, and R. D. Laing:

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without putting the affluent society in the framework of the Third World it [liberation from the affluent society] is not understandable. I also believe that here and now our emphasis must be on the advanced industrial societies – not forgetting to do whatever we can and in whatever way we can to support, theoretically and practically, the struggle for liberation in the neo-colonial countries which, if again they are not the final force of liberation, at least contribute their share – and it is a considerable share – to the potential weakening and disintegration of the imperialist world system. (as cited in Cooper, 1968/2015, p. 405)

While some may object to the phrase ‘the Third World’ as derogatory, I am personally in favor of it for a simple theoretical reason. The Third World for me still carries the meaning it used to carry during the Cold War era as the third term beyond the dialectic comprising the First World’s laissez-faire capitalism (represented by the US) and the Second World’s state capitalism (represented by the Soviet Union). The People’s Republic of China currently represents the Second World. In other words, the Third World signifies the non-aligned movement in the Global South, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Eurasia. Samir Amin’s (1990) concept of delinking here names the possibility of an anti-capitalist mundialización, or South-South solidarity. Furthermore, I prefer the post-developmental designation Third World over ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ countries because the latter signifies not only economic development (as measured by a nation’s GDP per capita), but also implies psychological (i.e., cognitive, moral, psychosocial) development. To put it differently, the seemingly non-racist psychoeconomic developmental model, which follows a modern logic of progress according to standards set in the Global North, ultimately infantilizes former colonies in the Global South through a neocolonial, and inherently racist, rhetoric. What of the third wave of Freudo-Marxism then vis-à-vis contrapuntal psychoanalysis? The third wave can be accurately rendered as LacanoMarxism and certainly includes the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and some of the critical theorists who are influenced by his reading of, or return to, Freud like Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek to name but two of the most prominent examples.

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In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b, p. 12), I acknowledge Lacan’s (1991/2007) reference to the “real of decolonization” (p. 34) in his Seminar XVII, which is titled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Lacan gave the seminar between 1969 and 1970 at the Paris Law Faculty in the aftermath of the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist/antiracist global protests of 1968, but the seminar was published much later in 1991 in French and then in 2007 in English. Lacan’s remark was in relation to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), which Fanon militantly supported as a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The most impressive aspect of Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourse theory in this seminar pertains to his contempt for philosophy qua the university as an extractive enterprise, which produces knowledge for the master. On the other hand, the analyst causes the desire of the hysteric, who in turn speaks truth to power and consequently is more scientific than the university. Lacan’s critique of philosophy, which I extend to psychology, echoes Marx’s (1845/1978) 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers [and psychologists] have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (p. 145, emphasis in original). Marx’s 11th thesis pertains to the question of praxis, or the marriage between theory and practice. Psychoanalysis, as the science of the unconscious, is a praxis because it entails a theory of the unconscious as articulated by Freud and Lacan, and how that theory comes to inform clinical practice. However, the question of praxis, at least for Marx, is not only a question of psychological change, but also, and more importantly, a question of socio-political revolutionary transformation. Therefore, the clinic, as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, is not a neutral space, but a psychopolitical one. Ample evidence of the psychoanalytic clinic as a psychopolitical space, in the early history of the psychoanalytic movement, is well documented by Elizabeth Ann Danto in her 2005 book Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis & Social Justice, 1918–1938. She writes: “Even among analysts who outwardly avoided politics, a practice at a free clinic implicitly reflected a civic commitment to human welfare…From 1920 until 1938, in ten cities and seven countries, the activist generation of psychoanalysts built free treatment centers” (p. 24). Danto (2005, p. 20) also shows

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that Freud was essentially a political radical since, in 1933, he donated 200 Austrian shillings (the equivalent of approximately $1407 today) to the free clinic in Vienna. I will revisit the question of praxis later on in the book in my discussion of Paulo Freire’s (1970/2018) Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its relevance for contrapuntal psychoanalysis. While Althusser’s (1970/2014) analysis of ideology in terms of interpellation or hailing is pertinent, particularly for a contrapuntal reading of racialized capitalism, his antihumanism and structural Marxism have little to offer liberation praxis. In contrast, I will argue for resurrecting Said’s critical humanism as an antidote to the moral relativism of postmodern theory. Also, Marxism and postcolonialism are not incompatible. Said, for example, was heavily influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist humanism, which in turn greatly informed his dialectical take on, and argument for, critical humanism—an unpopular stance in the postmodern academic milieu. Žižek’s misreadings of postcolonialism aside (cf. Almond, 2012), his invigorating arguments, in the Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 1989), against post-ideology and for the continued relevance of ideology critique qua fantasy have a lot to offer contrapuntal psychoanalysis. Not mentioning the applicability of his Lacano-Marxist analysis of antiSemitism in The Plague of Fantasies (Žižek, 1997) to Islamophobia and other forms of oppression today.

Octave Mannoni If Edward Said (1935–2003), Gayatri Spivak (1942–), and Homi Bhabha (1949–) are the patron saints of postcolonialism, then Octave Mannoni (1899–1989), Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), and Albert Memmi (1920–2020) are the patron saints of postcolonial psychoanalysis. Although I began my literature review with Reich, a Freudo-Marxist critical of coloniality, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (Mannoni, 1950/1990) is the first publication exemplary of postcolonial psychoanalysis. Prospero and Caliban is a problematic book, to say the least; Fanon (1952/2008) considers the book “dangerous” (p. xvii). While at times,

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Mannoni (1950/1990) comes across as critical of colonialism (e.g., the second chapter is on the colonial situation and racialism), frequently his arguments function as apologetics (Bloch, p. vii). According to Mannoni (1950/1990), the “colonial situation” is: the very instant a white man, even if he is alone, appears in the midst of a tribe, even if it is independent, so long as he is thought to be rich or powerful or merely immune to the local forces of magic, and so long as he derives from his position, even though only in his most secret self, a feeling of his own superiority. (p. 18)

Mannoni (1950/1990) interprets the colonial situation through the lens of (Adlerian/Jungian/Kleinian) psychoanalysis, which is nothing short of psychologizing colonialism (i.e., reducing colonialism to the psyches of the colonizer/colonized), for he is exclusively interested in analyzing the personalities of the European colonizer and the colonized Malagasy. His analysis leads him to a sweeping generalization that the former suffers from an “inferiority complex” while the latter is ailed by a “dependency complex.” In addition to diagnosing these pathological personality structures that supposedly lead to adult neurosis in the case of the European or infantile primitivism in the case of the non-European, Mannoni (1950/1990) is recommending a treatment: a way of doing colonialism, which is better, or more ethical, for all parties involved, but the idea of a nonviolent colonialism is, of course, paradoxical. Maurice Bloch’s new forward to Prospero and Caliban emphasizes Mannoni’s (1950/1990) ignorance regarding “the Malagasy in general” and “the causes of the [1947] revolt in particular” (p. vi), or as he puts harshly: “Mannoni disguises his ignorance of Malagasy motives only by substituting other motives deduced from [psychoanalytic] theories originating in the highly specific intellectual tradition of his own culture” (p. xix). In other words, in Prospero and Caliban, we encounter Mannoni’s unconscious projections onto the Malagasy people as opposed to a convincing empirical, or even theoretically erudite, psychoanalyticallyinformed study of colonialism in Madagascar. Bloch does not believe that Mannoni is racist; instead, he argues that his arrogance (or ignorance) “is the arrogance of the psychoanalyst…who unthinkingly comes

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to indulge in the different but no less objectionable claim to superiority that his professional knowledge apparently gives him [or her]” (p. xviii). For me, the book is a primer on how not to use psychoanalysis when it comes to interpreting colonialism. The book’s strength is its reflexivity, if we approach it as an autoethnography or “reflexive ethnography” (Bloch, p. vi, as cited in Mannoni, 1950/1990). Nonetheless, the book’s weakness is that it does not go as far as it could have gone. Mannoni (1950/1990) himself admits this much in his 1956 note: “what I regret is not so much these weaknesses in my book as the fact that I have not produced a much more openly personal study” (p. 6, emphasis added). This lack of critical reflexivity on the part of the author is characterized by Bloch as an ambiguous attitude, for Mannoni was “a Frenchman who became the head of the information services of the colony” (p. v). Not only that, Bloch suggests that Prospero and Caliban may have even informed the French administration’s colonial policy in Madagascar: “Mannoni’s ‘solution’ [a gradual and firmly guided move toward partial self-determination and a revival of the traditional Malagasy communal organic village councils, the Fokon’olona]…is exactly the one attempted by the French administration after the revolt” (p. xi, emphasis in original). Given Mannoni’s (1950/1990) own admission regarding the weaknesses of his theoretical arguments in the book (pp. 4–6), I would like to suggest that we read Prospero and Caliban as an auto-ethnographic reflection on the Malagasy Uprising of 1947 from the perspective of a European analyst-in-formation. In other words, the book says more about Mannoni himself, particularly his unconscious qua the Other’s (the French administration’s) colonial discourse. The ‘primitive,’ the ‘savage,’ the ‘backward,’ and their obverse (i.e., the ‘developed,’ the ‘civilized,’ the ‘advanced’) are signifiers in the Other’s colonial discourse, which point to the European colonizers’ unconscious fantasies vis-à-vis the non-European world. These racialist fantasies were, and continue to be, informed by Social Darwinism and psycho-economic developmental logics that spatiotemporally divide up the world in a binary and linear fashion: Europeans are here (civilized) and now (advanced), while non-Europeans are there (barbarian) and then (primitive).

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Mannoni (1950/1990) uses some of these terms in inverted commas to signal his critique or ironic distance from them, yet as Bloch remarks: “although unhappy with the term primitive Mannoni cannot do without it and merely isolates it in inverted commas” (p. ix, emphasis in original). Put differently, Mannoni (1950/1990) is still operating within a binary, Orientalist framework, wherein the Malagasy people are positioned as not only colonized subjects but also inherently inferior beings, who ontologically lack, according to him, “the democratic spirit” and “the experimental spirit” (p. 187). This Orientalist logic informs his misguided belief in a humanitarian colonialism: “There was a time when Europe was easily able to provide the sort of colonial who was capable of guiding native peoples” (p. 170). In other words, his purpose for psychologizing colonialism is to inspire prospective European colonizers to be reflexive about their independent personality and potential inferiority complex, so they can be more efficient colonizers and achieve “inter-racial harmony” (p. 171) with colonized subjects (i.e., non-Europeans). Because Mannoni (1950/1990) does not question colonialism to begin with, after all he personally benefited from it and operated within its logic, he cannot understand the revolt except as illogical or irrational, which for him means unconscious. This wild psychoanalytic misreading on his part is a result of what Philip Mason characterizes as “Mannoni’s extreme individualism” (p. 15), which blinded him from seeing the revolt as a politically motivated anticolonial event. Additionally, Mannoni’s false dichotomy between dependence and independence when it comes to personality structure could have been resolved by a notion like interdependence, which speaks to the complex positionings that we as divided subjects may occupy at any given moment in time. Also, the psychoanalytic concept of divided subjectivity, as opposed to personality, refutes Mannoni’s either/or approach to realms of the personal and the political without undermining the tense but fantasmatic relationship between the subject and the Other. Having said that, it is curious to note that Mannoni was not only closely associated with Lacan, being his analysand; Lacan was also influenced by Mannoni as Bloch writes (p. v). To be fair, Mannoni wrote Prospero and Caliban in 1948, one year before Lacan delivered his first

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major essay to the Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich, Switzerland: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. Coincidentally, this essay on Imaginary identification signals the least sophisticated, and most accessible, theoretical contribution in Lacan’s oeuvre, which spanned a period of three decades wherein each decade roughly indexed his gradual but inverse elaboration of his tripartite register theory: Real-SymbolicImaginary. When asked by the editors of the journal Race to reevaluate Prospero and Caliban, Mannoni (1966) admits that, in the aftermath of the decolonization of Asia and Africa between 1945 and 1960, a sequel to his flawed book ought to be written with the appropriate title: “the psychology of decolonisation” (p. 327, emphasis in original). Mannoni never had the chance to write this proposed sequel. Later in the article, Mannoni (1966) argues that racism, as a neurotic or pathological symptom, must “be of interest to every psycho-analyst” (p. 330). After approximately two decades since the writing of Prospero and Caliban, Mannoni (1966) is now exhibiting critical reflexivity, which is embodied in the article’s title The Decolonisation of Myself . He is even skeptical about the merits of psychologization when it comes to studying colonialism or racism; for example, he writes about “the limitations of the ‘psychological’ interpretation” vis-à-vis “the true terms of the problem” (p. 331). Further, Mannoni (1966) problematizes what he labels as the universalist solution to racism: “all men [and women] are essentially alike” (p. 331). Instead of this Imaginary solution, which is promoted ideologically by white liberals, he makes the case for an antiracist acknowledgment of Real-Symbolic differences: “the fact of the black man’s [sic] existence has come to play a conjurer’s role, revealing in the world what might otherwise never have been so clearly visible” (p. 333, emphasis in original). For Mannoni (1966), the universalist solution, which is a secularization of Christian charity, is a form of resistance to non-European ontologies and epistemologies. In this sense, Mannoni’s (1966) critical reflexivity enacts a radical humanism. For antiracism is not merely the opposite of racism, it “forms an opposition to the moral and political theories and practices of whites” (p. 334).

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Therefore, following Mannoni (1966), one can conceive of two humanist responses to colonial racism: While the liberal non-racist calls for the coexistence of races through the universalist solution, the radical antiracist rallies for the coexistence of humankind through pluriversalist solutions. The liberal humanist psychologizes, and the radical humanist psychosocializes. Universalist philosophy, Mannoni (1966) reminds us, is “nothing but a sleight-of-hand designed to ensure a quiet conscience for the white man [sic]” (p. 334). Mannoni’s (1966) argument against identity politics resonates with Mari Ruti’s (2018) case for jumping “directly from the singular to the universal by bypassing the particular [e.g., race, gender, sexuality, religion, or nationality]” (p. 45). Psychoanalytic theorists, myself included, will continue to make pluriversal claims for the foreseeable future, but perhaps the key is grounding such claims in the singularity of being; radical difference is the antidote to identity politics. Whereas Mannoni (1950/1990) analyzed colonialism from the perspective of psychoanalysis, my goal is to analyze psychoanalysis from the perspective of coloniality. Aimé Césaire (1950/2000) is not only critical of Mannoni’s (1950/1990) psychologization of colonialism, when he sardonically writes: “Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too much of barbarism. M. Mannoni has something better: psychoanalysis” (p. 59). He is also reminding his readers of the materiality of colonialism by characterizing Mannoni’s (1950/1990) “disinterested” or apolitical psychologization as ideological, that is, as a “bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex” (p. 62, emphasis in original). Césaire (1950/2000) then emphatically asks: What has become of…the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip? And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the Madagascan…And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the bloodstained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? (p. 62)

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Frantz Fanon Frantz Fanon’s masterpiece Black Skin, White Masks was published in 1952 in French, two years after the publication of Prospero and Caliban. These links are important to highlight in an effort to reconstruct the context out of which the dialogue between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism germinated. Fanon dedicates the fourth chapter in his book (The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized) to critiquing Mannoni, but the book is much more than a critique or a commentary. It is so rich and certainly ahead of its time that theorists continue to return to Black Skin, White Masks in the twenty-first century without any sense that interpretations of the text have been exhausted: Brown Skin, White Masks (Dabashi, 2011); Brown Skin, White Minds (David, 2013); Red Skin, White Masks (Coulthard, 2014); and Radical Skin, Moderate Masks (Morsi, 2017). It is worth adding that Black Skin, White Masks was Fanon’s doctoral dissertation, which was rejected by his supervisor, so Fanon quickly wrote another dissertation on a neuropsychological disorder in order to complete his medical degree (Gordon, 2015, p. 15). Black Skin, White Masks is psychosocial in its methodological scope, for throughout the text Fanon links the personal with the political, analyzing his experiences through the lens of multiple theoretical resources, such as psychoanalysis (Freud, Adler, Jung, Lacan), négritude (Césaire, Senghor), and phenomenology (Hegel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) among others. Whereas I would classify Prospero and Caliban as the foray into (post)colonial psychoanalysis, Black Skin, White Masks is the first theoretico-methodological articulation of decolonial psychoanalysis. And who else could have come up with such an innovation but “Freud’s most disputatious heir” (Said, 2003, p. 18)? Modern psychoanalysis is colonial psychoanalysis because it does not interrogate the question of colonial difference, that is, how it is located in the zone of being. In other words, colonial psychoanalysis is intimately connected to historical and/or ongoing oppressive structures; therefore, it tends to be white, Eurocentric, (secular) Christian, bourgeois, civilized, etc. Psychoanalysis is a critical innovation from within the center of the

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modern world-system (i.e., the belly of the beast). It is also an international movement, with many schisms, that has been and continues to be influential in the periphery, particularly in Latin America. Jacques Derrida (1991) characterized this “worldification” (p. 201), this move from the center to the periphery, as “geopsychoanalysis” (p. 200). Derrida (1991) deconstructs the following phrase from the International Psychoanalytic Association’s proposed Constitution of 1977: “and the rest of the world” (p. 199). This modern rhetoric of “the West and the rest” (Hall, 1992) is undergirded by a colonial logic that is not only othering (i.e., us v. them), but also oppressive (i.e., superior v. inferior). The distinction between the zones of being and nonbeing is premised on two forms of colonial difference: spatial and temporal (Mignolo, 2007). Whereas spatial colonial difference is established based on the notion of ‘barbarians’ or those who are outside the center of Euromodernity, temporal colonial difference is premised on the concept of ‘primitives’ or those who still live in a premodern past (p. 472). I will elaborate in more detail on the question of colonial difference in the final chapter, but suffice to say for now that it seems that colonial difference (i.e., being v. nonbeing) is rooted in the binary logic of European politics itself dating back all the way to Aristotle: “The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zo¯e/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (Agamben, 1998, p. 8, emphasis in original). On the other hand, postcolonial psychoanalysis is an attempt to use psychoanalysis critically vis-à-vis the question of coloniality but I locate such an analysis on the threshold between being and nonbeing because those who engage in such an analysis (e.g., Mannoni) tend to be privileged, such as the descendants of a historically oppressive group and/or actual oppressors. Oppressors who want to be in solidarity with the oppressed must follow their leadership: “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both” (Freire, 1970/2018, p. 44). Decolonial psychoanalysis, however, is a critical praxis “from the perspective of coloniality and not only from the critique of postmodernity” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). Because decolonial psychoanalysts

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(cf. Seshadri-Crooks, 1994) are conducting their analyses from the zone of nonbeing, they are able to delink the rhetoric of modernity from the logic of coloniality as far as psychoanalysis is concerned. Put differently, decolonial psychoanalysts decolonize psychoanalysis as they psychoanalyze coloniality, which is exactly what Fanon (1952/2008) does in Black Skin, White Masks. It is true that decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012), it is a praxis: a theory and a practice. Fanon elaborated his decolonial psychoanalytic theory in his writings and speeches, and he practiced decolonial psychoanalysis both as the chef de service at the Blida–Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria and as a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Fanon (1952/2008) defines the zone of nonbeing as “an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine departure can emerge” (p. xii). Another name for the zone of nonbeing is the unconscious logic of coloniality, or “the darker side of Western modernity” (Mignolo, 2011). In the apparatus of racialized capitalism, the zone of nonbeing (which is essentially nonEuropean) is the product of five centuries of Euro-colonialism. The forms of oppression that exist today (e.g., racism, classism, and sexism) are a function of this historical and ongoing legacy of colonial difference between being and nonbeing, or the West and the rest (Hall, 1992). In the zone of nonbeing, we can locate the Man-Not (Curry, 2017) and the Woman-Not, who look darker than those in the zone of being, speak a language other than English, and/or practice a religion other than Christianity. Consequently, the question of colonial difference is not only premised on skin color or race, for historically racism began as religious racism in the fifteenth century (i.e., Christian supremacy) and then mutated into scientific, or biological, racism in the nineteenth century (i.e., European, or white, supremacy). The dominant form of racism since the second half of the twentieth century has been, and continues to be, cultural racism, which is a subtle form of racism that is unconsciously informed by both religious and biological racisms. The zone of nonbeing overlaps to some extent with the Global South, or the dark nations in Vijay Prashad’s (2007) words, but the zone of nonbeing extends beyond former franchise colonies in the Global South to current settler colonies in the Global North. Given that I am based in

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Turtle Island, particularly on ceded Tewa land, namely Oghá P’o’oge, in what is now the State of New Mexico, the zone of nonbeing is the product of two specific events: the American (Stannard, 1992), or Indigenous (Smith, 2017), Holocaust and the transatlantic slave trade. “Today about 70 million Indigenous people live in the Western Hemisphere” (Smith, 2017, p. 7), 5.2 million of which live in the US according to the 2010 Census. Compare today’s Indigenous population figures to the population estimates in 1492: 75–145 million and 8–15 million, respectively (Smith, 2017). According to David Stannard (1992), “population loss among native societies routinely reached and exceeded 95 percent–a rate of decline more than sufficient to account for a pre-Columbian hemispheric population in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 and more” (p. 268). David Smith (2017) clarifies that “Stannard reached this conclusion by estimating the original Native population at approximately 100 million and by noting that this number had fallen about 95% [to 5,000,000] by the beginning of the twentieth century” (p. 12). Based on his own calculation, Smith (2017) argues, “the total number of Indigenous deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1900 appears to be about 175 million” (p. 13). However, “for the entire present-day United States from 1492 to the present…the Indigenous Holocaust in this country appears to have taken around 13 million lives” (Smith, 2017, p. 13). It is worth noting that the timeline of these population and death estimates pre-date, and overlap with, both British America (1607–1783) and the US since the Declaration of Independence (1776). Also worth considering are the leading causes of death in the Indigenous Holocaust: “microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide” (Stannard, 1992, p. xii, emphasis in original). Furthermore, it is vital to stress that the Indigenous Holocaust is not some distant historical event, but an ongoing violent reality: For the genocide in the Americas, and in other places where the world’s indigenous peoples survive, has never really ceased. As recently as 1986, the Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States observed that 40,000 people had simply “disappeared” in Guatemala during the preceding fifteen years. Another 100,000 had been

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openly murdered. That is the equivalent, in the United States, of more than 4,000,000 people slaughtered or removed under official government decree—a figure that is almost six times the number of American battle deaths in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. (Stannard, 1992, p. xiii)

The historical and ongoing violence against Indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere is crucial to highlight here in the context of the refugee crisis discourse. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, which is approximately the equivalent of the entire population of Thailand. The second event in the gruesome architecture of the zone of nonbeing is the transatlantic slave trade. Here I quote at length the editor of the 1619 Project, which is not without its critics (see Harris, 2020): In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage. (Hannah-Jones, 2019, p. 16)

The central argument of the 1619 Project is that the US was not, as common sense would have us believe, born in 1776, but actually in 1619 because enslaved Black men are the true founding fathers of the US (Hannah-Jones, 2019, p. 17), but historian Gerald Horne (2020) argues that the 1619 date is “notional” because “Africans enslaved and otherwise were present in northern Florida as early as 1565 or the area due north as early as 1526” (p. 19). In his widely-read essay, Louis

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Althusser (1970/2014) makes a distinction between ISAs or Ideological State Apparatuses (e.g., religion, education, the family, etc.) and RSAs or Repressive State Apparatuses (e.g., police violence). This is how Althusser (1970/2014) describes the function of ISAs: “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (p. 264, emphasis in original). When it comes to racialized capitalism, ISAs seem to target those in the zone of being and RSAs appear to single out those in the zone of nonbeing, which is particularly visible in the violent police response to the George Floyd protests. Therefore, “racial terrorism” (Hannah-Jones, 2019, p. 22) is the material base of the ideological superstructure of racialized capitalism. As mentioned earlier, the clearest example of the zone of nonbeing today is what Michelle Alexander (2010) calls the “New Jim Crow,” that is, mass incarceration. According to Alexander (2010): The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000. (p. 6)

Bryan Stevenson (2019), in his article for the 1619 Project, puts it this way: “We [the US] represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its imprisoned” (p. 81). Stevenson (2019) continues: “Because of mandatory sentencing and ‘three strikes’ laws, I’ve found myself representing clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. And central to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery” (p. 81). Alexander (2010) underscores the racial dimension of mass incarceration through a stark analogy, “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid” (p. 6). But why? In addition to the logic of exception, which

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I have explicated earlier, the prison population in the US is literally slave labor. Here is how Stevenson (2019) vividly describes the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is “one of America’s most violent and abusive”: Angola is immense, larger than Manhattan, covering land once occupied by slave plantations. Our clients there worked in fields under the supervision of horse-riding, shotgun-toting guards who forced them to pick crops, including cotton. Their disciplinary records show that if they refused to pick cotton — or failed to pick it fast enough — they could be punished with time in “the hole,” where food was restricted and inmates were sometimes tear-gassed . (p. 81, emphasis added)

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon chronicles his experience with not only racism, but, more importantly, internalized racism (cf. Davids, 2011; Duran & Duran, 1995). As a Martinican, Fanon grew up identifying as a Frenchman. This identification morphed into patriotism when Fanon joined, and fought with, the French army in World War II. He was even awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroism (Gordon, 2015, p. 82). This identification with Frenchness is the white mask in the title of his book, which covered his Black skin. Fanon shows how this identification with Frenchness eventually leads to internalized racism, for he was not even fully aware that he was Black until he moved to France and experienced not only being racialized but also being the object of racism. Fanon also points to the fact that Martinicans (mis)perceive, through the lens of the French white mask, the Senegalese—but not themselves—as Black because they are French, or European, and not African. For this reason, any decolonial psychoanalysis is essentially critically reflexive. In his analysis of racism, Fanon has to also decolonize his own internalized racism in order to be liberated. But it is not easy, and may even be impossible, because racism is premised on racialization (i.e., perceiving others through the lens of race), which is intimately linked to one’s cultural upbringing, that is, ideology. In the introduction, Fanon (1952/2008) states, “only a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black problem can reveal the affective disorders responsible for this network of complexes” (p. xiv). Disorder, or distress,

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under colonialism brings up the question of (ab)normality that Foucault (1961/2006) so aptly problematized in his History of Madness. From a crude psychoanalytic perspective, normality is aligned with neurosis and abnormality with psychosis or perversion. In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud (1930/1961) writes, “what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions” (p. 38, emphasis added). Freud is correct in asserting that our uneasiness (das unbehagen)—our diagnostic categories or psychical structures (i.e., neurosis, psychosis, and perversion), at least as far as psychoanalysis is concerned—is a function of European culture or ‘civilization,’ which can also be called the project of modernity/coloniality. Unfortunately, this assertion is coupled with the Eurocentric notion of the ‘primitive’ (cf. Nandy, 1983, p. 13). Perhaps, this speaks to Freud’s inferiority complex in antisemitic Vienna, for he was not critically reflexive regarding his identification with Europeanness or whiteness (cf. Bulhan, 1985, p. 55). In the conclusion to Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud (1930/1961) links civilization (i.e., European imperialist culture) with neurosis: “If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual…may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that…the whole of mankind [sic]–have become ‘neurotic’ ?” (pp. 109–110, emphasis added). That is Freud when he is critical of modernity, and this is Freud (1913/1946) when he is uncritical of coloniality, and is frankly racist, in Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between The Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics: “Although laws of avoidance no longer exist in the society of the white races of Europe and America…Many a European will see an act of high wisdom in the laws of avoidance which savage races have established” (pp. 20–21, emphasis added). Decolonizing Freud entails retaining his timeless criticality while forgoing his uncritical moments. According to Fanon (1952/2008), the inferiority complex is a double process: “First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority” (p. xv). In other words, instead of being in solidarity with the non-European Other, Freud viewed him or her from the perspective of the European, white, Christian, and bourgeois (i.e., civilized) subject. This is the oppression that Freud internalized, which

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made him feel inferior, hence, his overcompensation or his “whitening” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 27). This is not a dismissal of Freud, for he is clearly critical of modernity, but an extension of his critique to coloniality, which we have all internalized. It is for this reason that Fanon (1952/2008) writes, “an individual who loves Blacks is as ‘sick’ as someone who abhors them” (p. xii). He is pointing to the oppressive dialectic of negrophobia/negrophilia, that is, the two sides of anti-Black racism: conscious (or manifest) anti-Black racism and unconscious (or latent) anti-Black racism. I have written about this in relation to Islamophobia/Islamophilia (Beshara, 2019b), and my solution to this problem is the notion of learned ignorance. This is a kind of ignorance, which is paradoxically epistemic, and it is exemplified by the Socratic attitude of “I know that I do not know.” Put differently, I (the subject) know that I do not know the Other; therefore, I will not make dehumanizing claims, to myself or to others, that they are barbaric and/or primitive. Fanon’s (1952/2008) decolonial methodology in Black Skin, White Masks is psychosocial, or sociogenic (p. xv), but not psychological; the purpose of this sociogeny is “the disalienation of the black [or racialized/politicized] man” (p. xiv). Fanon is aware that psychologization is a reductive form of analysis, which is why he writes of the necessity of “a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities” (p. xiv). The telos of “New Humanism” (p. xi) that Fanon (1952/2008) begins the book with can also be characterized as radical, or critical, humanism (cf. Bulhan, 1985, p. 12) to be echoed later by both Freire and Said. While antihumanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism are popular notions in European critical theory today, the question of the human is not an outdated theoretico-practical one as far as the subaltern is concerned. Surely, the European humanism, which was undergirded by genocide and slavery, must be critiqued and ultimately rejected, but a new radical humanist vision is ethically and politically integral to contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. In an effort to be actional, we pose Fanon’s (1952/2008, p. 197) question: What are the fundamental values that make the world human?

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Fanon’s (1952/2008) chapter on “The Black Man and Language” is decisive for my psychoanalytic theorization of oppression qua language. Fanon (1952/2008) writes: All colonized people–in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local [i.e., Egyptian/Arab] cultural originality has been committed to the grave–position themselves in relation to the civilizing language [i.e., English]: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis [the US], the more he will have escaped the bush [or the Sahara]. The more he rejects his blackness [or brownness, in my case] and the bush [or Sahara], the whiter he will become. (pp. 2–3)

I have reflexively applied the above quote to myself because I am an Egyptian living in the US, and I am writing this book not in my native tongue (Arabic), but in English to an English-speaking audience (Other) in the US and elsewhere. Egypt, of course, was a franchise colony, between 1882 and 1956, of the British Empire, and so the English language has a specific meaning for me in the context of Egypt’s modern history. Having said that, and given my research on Islamophobia, I am always hyper-aware of the unconscious criminalization of the Arabic language in the US in the context of the War on Terror, which results in self-censorship—a function of the superego. This is undoubtedly restrictive for my being because I enjoy speaking in Arabic with my family and friends, but I would certainly get into trouble if I spoke, or if I read a book, in Arabic on an airplane; this is the racialized phenomenon of flying while Arab, Muslim, or Brown. Fanon (1952/2008) is inviting us to think about the role of language in cultural racism before that term came into existence. Cultural racism is certainly the dominant form of racism today, and it is very much informed by colonial difference. Being Egyptian and speaking in Arabic publicly in the US localizes me in the zone of nonbeing, wherein Arab culture and the Arabic language are assigned inferior status since in the Orientalist Symbolic-Imaginary matrix they are associated with Islam, Islamism, fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, radicalism, backwardness, primitivism, barbarism, etc.

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This cultural, or linguistic, dimension of racism is very important in psychoanalysis (the talking cure), wherein speech in the form of free association is central. For this reason, we need more decolonial psychoanalysts who are from Other cultures and who speak Other languages. Later on, in the book’s conclusion, I will make the argument that writing is a form of killing, and perhaps speaking and listening are forms of living? This is not an argument against literacy, which is absolutely crucial, but one about the arbitrary nature of lawmaking, in the history of Euro-colonialism, as a form of mythic violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996). Fanon (1952/2008) also writes about one’s accent as a marker for racialization: “Yes I must watch my diction because that’s how they’ll judge me” (p. 4). This is a common experience for me in the US: “Oh, you have an accent. Where are you from?” First of all, everyone has an accent, but from the perspective of whiteness, which is invisible like god’s all-seeing eye, only certain people have accents. Notice that the question about origin brings the etymology of the signifier ‘race’ full circle since that is what it actually means. I reject this comment/question, for it interpellates me as a racialized subject, who is assumed to be an outsider: “Beneath the body schema [human subject living in the US] I had created a historical-racial schema [Egyptian → Arab → Brown → Oriental Other]” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 91). In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I have written about my experience with someone telling me that I “look like a terrorist” (Beshara, 2019b, p. 2), which had the same effect on me as “Look! A Negro!” did on Fanon (1952/2008, p. 91). How does one look (or sound) like a terrorist? In the US, having an accent makes me look like an outsider, for racialization is a (mis)perception. The racializer is (mis)hearing and (mis)perceiving in order to (mis)categorize the Other in terms of race, which is inherently dehumanizing: “The eye is not only a mirror, but a correcting mirror. The eye must enable us to correct cultural mistakes” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 178, emphasis in original). Nevermind if Fanon was a psychiatrist or if I am a critical psychologist, what matters to the racializing subject is how we look and speak to them, or how we are translated into the zone of being’s grammar, hence, rendered intelligible. The alternative to this Imaginary misrecognition, which results from lack of identification, should be Symbolic alignment

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of desire, wherein we may want something similar (e.g., liberation) even if we are not the same. However, in an ideological world founded upon fantasies of identification, we must completely assimilate to the hegemonic culture and language (i.e., whiten), if we are to be recognized and accepted as, more or less, equal. But what is whiteness? According to Carl Anthony (1995): About the time that slavery was introduced, the first English settlers called themselves “Christians,” and they called the populations that they encountered “pagan,” or sometimes “savage.” As more Europeans arrived, they called themselves “English” or “Dutch” or “French.” But then came Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. A group of indentured servants and African slaves organized a rebellion in order to kick the aristocratic elements out; this was a precursor of the American Revolution. And the colonists realized that if the indentured servants ever got together with the black people and the native people, they wouldn’t have a future. That’s when the word “white” was invented as we use it. What “whiteness” did was unify all the Europeans who were coming here, people who, in Europe, would not at all be unified. Many of them spoke different languages, and many had been at war with each other for centuries. “Whiteness” was very effective in creating a sense of solidarity, especially among those who had suffered hardship. (pp. 268–269)

When Fanon (1952/2008) writes toward the end of Black Skin, White Masks, “I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass” (p. 200), I am reminded of Mourad Wahba’s (1995) thesis that there are one human civilization and many cultures. Although I am critical of the concept of freedom, since it is typically a privilege for those in the zone of being, there is a universality, or pluriversality, at work here in both Fanon’s and Wahba’s thinking, which Mari Ruti (2018) captures well with these words: freedom is not a matter of seamless sovereignty or self-mastery; and it is emphatically not linked to any attempt to dominate the world. Instead, it is an opening to self-creation, to the kind of liberation from the dictates of the big Other that facilitates the emergence of the subject’s singularity of being. This singularity, in turn, becomes the foundation for a universalist

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ethics where each singularity, ideally at least, relates to other singularities from a platform of equality and solidarity. (pp. 157–158, emphasis)

This jump from singularity to pluriversality bypasses particularity (i.e., identity politics) and allows for an identity based on politics and not vice versa (Mignolo, 2007, p. 492). In this non-identity politics of solidarity, together we struggle against racialized capitalism and we work toward a new human civilization, a “transmodern worldhood ” (Dussel, 1995, p. 26, emphasis in original), wherein modernity is delinked from coloniality and instead linked to its alterity (i.e., non-European cultures). Wahba (2006) argues that Ibn Rushd (Averroes) can function as a theoretical bridge between modernity and its alterity, particularly Islam. In an increasingly authoritarian and socially/environmentally unjust world, perhaps transmodernity (cf. “contramodernity” in Bhabha, 1994) is our only choice if we wish to survive; we desperately need a world “characterized by ecological civilization, popular democracy, and economic justice” (Dussel, 1995, p. 117). We demand, in our liberation praxis, to freely associate within and without the psychoanalytic clinic, and to seriously think about our “ecological unconscious” (Roszak, 1995, p. 14) as the more-than-human discourse of the environmental Other. In this sense, contrapuntal psychoanalysis is also ecopsychoanalysis (cf. Dodds, 2011). Fanon (1952/2008) cites passages from Germaine Guex’s (1950) The Abandonment Neurosis, which read like attachment theory. The most interesting quote includes a reference to the concept of the Other: Being “the Other” is a term I have encountered on several occasions in the language of the abandonment neurotic. To be “the Other” is to always feel in an uncomfortable position, to be on one’s guard, to be prepared to be rejected and…unconsciously do everything that’s needed to bring about the anticipated catastrophe. (Guex, as cited in Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 57)

The concept of the Other is of utmost relevance to this study, but it is not one that is easily grasped because it can mean different things depending on the area of study and theorist one pays attention to. For

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example, the concept of the Other is used in phenomenology (Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas, de Beauvoir), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and postcolonialism (Said); and it can mean another human, one’s m(O)ther, an abstract big Other (i.e., language and law), or even someone who is othered. I am particularly interested in the Lacanian and Saidian conceptions of the Other, which I will address later in my discussion of Orientalism. In perhaps the most read chapter in the book “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Fanon (1952/2008) writes: Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze. (p. 89)

In this Lacanian passage, Fanon is describing his lived experience with being objectified by the “white gaze” (p. 90), which reifies him and reduces him to his “body schema” and his “historical-racial schema” (p. 91). For this reason, Fanon thinks that ontology is impossible for racialized subjects (p. 89)—hence, his zone of nonbeing and Curry’s (2017) Man-Not. Fanon’s analysis throughout the book is far from sexist, for he hones in on the racial axis of power, wherein the white oppressor (man) is at the top of the hierarchy and the Black oppressed (ManNot) is at the bottom. Later, Fanon (1952/2008) writes, “the white man is not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master, whether real or imaginary” (p. 117). This implicitly Lacanian footnote is not surprising given Fanon’s (1952/2008) explicit references to Lacan throughout Black Skin, White Masks, such as: Once we have understood the process described by Lacan, there is no longer any doubt that the true “Other” for the white man is and remains the black man, and vice versa. For the white man, however, “the Other” is perceived as a bodily image, absolutely as the non ego, i.e., the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man we have demonstrated that the historical and economic realities must be taken into account. (p. 139)

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Fanon’s use of the Other to primarily signify whiteness is akin to Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic Other, which in the context of coloniality happens to be racist. The colonial unconscious is the discourse of the modern Other: “the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 91). One thing that is clear in the chapter is Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1946/1976) influence on Fanon, for the latter makes use of Anti-Semite and Jew to draw parallels between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism as a form of solidarity: “The Jew and I: not satisfied with racializing myself, by a happy stroke of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing closer to the Jew, my brother in misfortune” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 101). The clearest conceptual link from Sartre to Fanon is the notion of Manichaeism as a function of othering and oppression: “Anti-Semitism is thus seen to be at bottom a form of Manichaeism” (Sartre, 1946/1976, p. 28). Sartre (1946/1976) shows that, for the anti-Semite, the Jew is not only an Other, he or she is also Evil. Fanon highlights a key feature of colonial difference: Whereas the white man wants the world, the Black Man-Not is the world (p. 107). The white man thinks he is separate from the world, and so he desires everything (Gordon, 2018). Is this not the libidinal drive behind racialized capitalism with its violence against the subaltern and its destruction of the environment? This desire for everything also supports Homi Bhabha’s (1994) thesis about the ambivalence of colonial desire (cf. Young, 1995). The most touching part of the chapter is Fanon’s (1952/2008) affective response—“Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep” (p. 119, emphasis added)— to Sartre’s (1948/1976) dialectical reading of Negritude, which comes across as harsh to say the least: Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment “is not sufficient in itself and the Blacks who employ it well know it; they know that it serves to pave the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without race. Thus Negritude is dedicated to its own destruction, it is transition and not

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result, a means and not the ultimate goal. (as cited in Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 112)

Fanon’s (1952/2008) response: The dialectic that introduces necessity as a support for my freedom expels me from myself. It shatters my impulsive position. Still regarding consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in itself. I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. There’s no room for probability inside me. My black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is. It merges with itself. (p. 114, emphasis in original)

Sartre’s dialectic is premised on a false logic: that Negritude (antithesis) is merely a negation of white supremacy (thesis), when in fact Negritude is an assertion of a new humanism. Not only that, Sartre—“who remains ‘the Other’” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 116)—belittles and doubly erases a decolonial movement, which is exemplary of liberation praxis, in the name of a utopian society without race. The former is a living material culture, while the latter is a fantasy. The only resolution of the contradiction brought forth by the dialectics of racism (i.e., segregation v. assimilation) is antiracism: “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness” (Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 117). Fanon’s phenomenological account in this chapter is heartfelt, for it embodies the rhythmic attitude and poetic sensitivity of Negritude, which was co-founded by his teacher Aimé Césaire. There is so much more I can write about Black Skin, White Masks, but there are also other texts that deserve my attention. I will return to Fanon’s (1961/2004) another masterpiece, The Damned of the Earth, which is less psychoanalytic and more political, toward the end of the book to consider the question of decolonization vis-à-vis contrapuntal psychoanalysis.

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Albert Memmi Fanon is a hard act to follow, which is unfair to Albert Memmi (1920– 2020), who was a Tunisian essayist. Memmi recently passed away on May 22, 2020, in France, where he has been living in exile for fortyfour years; he was ninety-nine years old at the time of his passing. The Colonized and the Colonized is Memmi’s (1957/1965) most recognized contribution to the emerging field of post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis. In the preface to the book, Memmi (1957/1965) asks questions that shed light on his psychosocial, and to some extent phenomenological, method of studying colonialism: Does psychoanalysis win out over Marxism? Does all depend on the individual or on society? In any case, before attacking this final analysis I wanted to show all the real complexities in the lives of the colonizer and the colonized. Psychoanalysis or Marxism must not, under the pretext of having discovered the source or one of the main sources of human conduct, pre-empt all experience, all feeling, all suffering, all the byways of human behavior, and call them profit motive or Oedipus complex. (p. xiii, emphasis in original)

He then includes a critically reflexive statement about his positionality, and his privilege, as a researcher, given that he is a non-Muslim Tunisian who has internalized oppression and identified with the oppressor to a degree: My portrait of the colonized, which is very much my own, is preceded by a portrait of the colonizer. How could I have permitted myself, with all my concern about personal experience, to draw a portrait of the adversary? Here is a confession I have never made before: I know the colonizer from the inside almost as well as I know the colonized. But I must explain: I said that I was a Tunisian national. Like all other Tunisians I was treated as a second-class citizen, deprived of political rights, refused admission to most civil service departments, etc. But I was not a Moslem. In a country where so many groups, each jealous of its own physiognomy, lived side by side, this was of considerable importance. The Jewish population identified as much with the colonizers as with the colonized.

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They were undeniably “natives,” as they were then called, as near as possible to the Moslems in poverty, language, sensibilities, customs, taste in music, odors and cooking. However, unlike the Moslems, they passionately endeavored to identify themselves with the French. To them the West was the paragon of all civilization, all culture. The Jew turned his back happily on the East. He chose the French language, dressed in the Italian style and joyfully adopted every idiosyncrasy of the Europeans. (pp. xiii–xiv)

Sartre introduced both The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and The Damned of the Earth (1961), which speaks to Sartre’s solidarity with non-European theorists and his commitment to decolonization in the Third World (Tunisia and Algeria, respectively), particularly when it is against the colonial interests of his country: France. For some reason, Sartre is seen as passé among continental philosophers today (with Lewis Gordon being the most visible exception), which is unfortunate given the above-mentioned record and his decolonial publications like Anti-Semite and Jew (1946/1976) or Colonialism and Neocolonialism (1964/2001)—not mentioning his critical contributions to psychoanalysis and psychology from the perspective of existential-phenomenology and Marxism. In the introduction to The Colonizer and the Colonized , Sartre is lucid in his description of racialized capitalism, which he calls “the colonialist apparatus” (p. xxiv), wherein the colonized is dehumanized into not only a “subproletariat” (p. xxiii) but also a “subhuman” (p. xxiv): Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces–brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals–one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes

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a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, “subhumanity”. (as cited in Memmi, 1957/1965, pp. xxiv–xxv)

I would like to end this section by highlighting Memmi’s (1957/1965) notion of “colonial bilingualism” since it supports my thesis on linguistic oppression, wherein the oppressed is doubly split and, therefore, answers to two Others (i.e., the Other of the signifiers and the Other of the Law): The difference between native language [Arabic] and cultural language [English or French] is not peculiar to the colonized, but colonial bilingualism cannot be compared to just any linguistic dualism. Possession of two languages is not merely a matter of having two tools, but actually means participation in two psychical and cultural realms. Here, the two worlds symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues are in conflict; they are those of the colonizer and the colonized. (p. 107, emphasis added)

Paulo Freire Paulo Freire’s (1970/2018) Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most influential books ever published. On the cover of the fiftieth anniversary edition, one reads that over one million copies of the book have been sold. Although Freire’s goal with the book is elaborating a dialogical pedagogy of/with (and not for) the oppressed, his analysis of the dialectics of oppression is applicable beyond the classroom and, therefore, he presents us with a liberation praxis that is applicable in all facets of society, particularly the psychoanalytic clinic (cf. Gaztambide, 2019). The Brazilian educator and philosopher is clearly influenced by Marx’s critique of capitalism, his analysis of class struggle, and above all his notion of praxis from Theses on Feuerbach, but he opts for ‘oppression’ as a signifier, instead of exploitation or alienation, as way of transcending class reductionism and acknowledging phenomena such as racism and sexism that particularly affect the racialized/politicized lumpenproletariat, especially in the Global South. Freire is also influenced by liberation theology, which was a major source of inspiration

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to many psychologists and philosophers in Latin America (e.g., Ignacio Martín-Baró and Enrique Dussel). Most significantly, Freire (1970/2018) chooses to write about the praxis of liberation, as opposed to the “fear of freedom” (p. 36), since the former involves a collectivity—“the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (p. 79)—while the latter tends to be individualistic. Put differently, liberation is how the oppressed reflect on, and practice, their own freedom in spite of the oppressors’ selective application of political freedom; think, for example, of Thomas Jefferson’s self-evident truths in the US Declaration of Independence, which were in contradiction with the reality of him owning nearly two hundred slaves (Kendi, 2016, p. 105). Freire (1970/2018) also provides us with a radical humanist project grounded in “an act of love” (p. 45), wherein the oppressed lead the way toward collective liberation, for oppressors must be liberated, too, since their dehumanization of the oppressed dehumanizes them in the process as well. Revolution can sometimes imply that the oppressed, in a reversal of fortune, take the place of the oppressors, but replacing one form of oppression with another form of oppression is not liberation. Oppression results from a socially unjust hierarchical form of organization; therefore, liberation has to essentially be non-hierarchical and socially just. This is why Freire (1970/2018) writes of the teacher as a student and students as teachers as a way of resolving the teacher-student contradiction, which is inherently oppressive, for him, since it presupposes that the teacher knows but the student does not. However, students bring their life experiences to the classroom, which is subjective knowledge. It is fitting to juxtapose this above-mentioned contradiction that we find in the classroom with another one that we find in the clinic: the analyst-analysand contradiction (cf. Fromm, 1960/2013, pp. 84–85). Is it possible to theorize/practice the analyst (a) as analysand ($) and the analysand ($) as analyst (a)? Perhaps we need to reevaluate the fantasy ($ ♦ a) at the heart of the psychoanalytic clinic between the subject and the Other, particularly if it is an oppressive one. And for this we need conscientização (conscientization) of the unconscious, that is, not only critical consciousness but also critical unconsciousness.

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Freire (1970/2018) relies on psychoanalytic concepts such as internalization (p. 47) and identification (p. 46) to explain how the oppressed internalize oppression through their identification with the oppressors, which can result in them becoming “sub-oppressors” (p. 45). Freire’s thesis on the transferential relationship from the oppressed to the oppressor is certainly a development of Sándor Ferenczi’s (1933/1988) theory on the identification with the aggressor. Daniel José Gaztambide (2019), a Puerto Rican psychoanalyst, develops these theoretical linkages further; I highly recommend in particular his intellectual genealogy of the links between psychoanalysis and liberation psychology (p. 180). As far as the theoretical trajectory of post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis is concerned, Freire (1970/2018) cites Fanon and Memmi on the same page (p. 62).

Joel Kovel Joel Kovel (1936–2018) was a US psychoanalyst, who is known for founding eco-socialism. I turn now to his book, White Racism: A Psychohistory (Kovel, 1970/1984), which seems to have been forgotten. Kovel (1970/1984) defines his methodology of psychohistory “as the study of the historical function of the changing meanings of things, a theory of cultural change” (p. 6, emphasis in original). In a footnote to his definition, he clarifies the emphasis he places “on the unconscious meaningfulness of culture as a synthetic organism” (p. 6). Kovel (1970/1984) situates his study of racism in relation to culture, which for him, “is both organic –in that is presents a coherent and self-evident view of human reality–and synthetic –in that it works upon and ties together elements of experience created by human activity” (p. 4, emphasis in original). For Kovel (1970/1984), racism is “a symbolic product, a set of fantasies, but only insofar as the symbols and fantasies of racism have been themselves generated by the history of race relations and sustained by the rest of an organically related culture” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Kovel’s (1970/1984) most significant contribution, in his historicization of racism in the US, is his reduction of the apparatus of racialized capitalism to its essence: the link between race and property, as in the

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body/thing of the Black slave (p. 18). In the fourth chapter, “Fantasies of Race,” Kovel (1970/1984) begins with a substantial epigraph from Black Skin, White Masks and later on he engages with “the most powerful voice to have articulated the emerging consciousness of black peoples across the world” (i.e., Fanon), particularly regarding the “Fantasy of Blackness” (pp. 64–65). Fantasy, for Kovel (1970/1984), is “a form of knowing based upon wish and desire” (p. 47, emphasis in original). In the same chapter, Kovel (1970/1984, pp. 54–55) presents his readers with a useful typology, or three types, of racists: (1) the dominative racist “who acts out bigoted beliefs”; (2) the aversive racist “who believes in white race superiority and is more or less aware of it, but does nothing overt about it”; and (3) a less defined racist “who does not reveal racist tendencies at all–except as the unconscious persistence of what may be considered mass fantasies.” According to Kendi’s (2016) classification, the first type would be the segregationist, the third type would be the assimilationist, and the second type could go either way. In the eighth chapter, “The Psychohistory of Racism in the United States,” Kovel (1970/1984) develops the novel concept of metaracism (p. 211). Metaracists, according to Kovel (1970/1984), are “not racists– that is, they are not racially prejudiced…they acquiesce in the larger cultural order which continues the work of racism” (pp. 211–212). In other words, a metaracist is someone who claims, “I’m not racist, but…” The solution to (meta)racism is antiracism as Kendi (2016) reminds us.

Ashis Nandy Ashis Nandy (1937–present) is an Indian political psychologist. His most significant contribution to post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis is his book, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Nandy, 1983), which is partly based on his 1982 journal article The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age, and Ideology in British India. In the book, Nandy (1983) is concerned with the political psychology, as opposed to the political economy, of colonization: “the first differentia of colonialism is a state of mind in the colonizers and the colonized, a colonial consciousness which includes the sometimes unrealizable wish to make economic

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and political profits from the colonies” (p. 1, emphasis added). In other words, he finds colonization to be structurally similar to a dream, or a nightmare (cf. Kovel, 1970/1984; Manonni, 1950/1990). Drawing on Mannoni, Fanon, and Memmi among others, Nandy (1983) explicates the sexual axis of power in racialized capitalism in an effort to pinpoint how sexual difference is mapped as colonial difference onto the colonized: The homology between sexual and political dominance which Western colonialism invariably used–in Asia, Africa and Latin America–was not an accidental by-product of colonial history. It had its correlates in other situations of oppression with which the West was involved, the American experience with slavery being the best documented of them…It produced a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity. (p. 4)

According to Nandy (1983), “femininity-in-masculinity [cf. Curry’s (2017) Man-Not] was now perceived as the final negation of a man’s political identity, a pathology more dangerous than femininity itself ” (p. 8), but it also led to white men in India establishing “an unconscious homo-eroticized bonding” (p. 10) with Indian men. Nandy (1983) shows how this sexual axis in the colonial situation was a crucial political factor in “cultural co-optation” (p. 7), which he explains in terms of the Ferenczian notion, cited earlier: “identification with the aggressor” (p. 7). Next, Nandy (1983) problematizes the colonial logic of psychoeconomic development, which is still used today when we speak of developed versus developing countries; Nandy (1983) describes the infantilization of the colonized Indian in terms of the “homology between childhood and the state of being colonized” (p. 11). In this section, Nandy (1983) takes a stab at Karl Marx, particularly his 1853 article The British Rule in India, which reads as an excuse for colonialism. According to Marx, India is “a small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized” community; therefore, “whatever may have been the crime of England she was the unconscious tool of history” (as cited in Nandy, 1983,

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p. 13). For Nandy (1983), “Such a view was bound to contribute handsomely–even if inadvertently–the racist world view and ethnocentrism that underlay colonialism” (p. 13). This moment in the text crystallizes the historical and ongoing theoretical clash between Marxism and postcolonialism, such as the historical clash between Aijaz Ahmad and Edward Said or the recent clash between Slavoj Žižek and Hamid Dabashi. Another dimension of Nandy’s (1983) text that is worth highlighting is his use of Sanskrit, which is a decolonial way of writing back in an Other language. I have been attempting to build a bridge between both camps (Marxism and postcolonialism) with my emphasis on racialized capitalism, which Nandy (1983) acknowledges when he writes that colonialism is “a political economy which ensures a one-way flow of benefits, the subjects being the perpetual losers in a zero-sum game and the rulers the beneficiaries” (p. 30). In a sense, the clash is false because some (if not many or most) post-/de-colonial theorists are actually also Marxists, particularly Samir Amin and Enrique Dussel—not mentioning the Marxism of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, the latter being especially influenced by Antonio Gramsci. To the Marxists, postcolonial theorists are culturalists who are duped by ideology and are, therefore, not thinking universally through the dialectic. To the postcolonial theorists, Marxists universalize their provincialism but obscure that dimension with their emphasis on the industrial workers of the world. Sara Salem (2020), echoing Said, argues that the debate is somewhat artificial, perhaps a purely academic one, because of the lived historical reality of post-/de-colonial Marxists, particularly in the Global South. Salem shows, for instance, that the majority of proto-postcolonial theorists/practitioners (e.g., Anouar Abdel-Malek, Samir Amin, C.L.R. James, etc.) were committed Marxists, too. Similarly, Biko Agozino (2014) argues against the claim that Marxism is a Eurocentric ideology as evidenced, for example, by Marx’s hundreds of references, in his writings, to the struggles of people of African descent (p. 175).

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Hussein A. Bulhan Hussein Bulhan (1946–present) is a Somali psychologist who wrote the 1985 influential book, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. This book is an erudite contribution to not only post-/decolonial psychoanalysis, but also critical psychology, particularly liberation psychology. Bulhan (1985) begins with an intellectual biography of Fanon before unpacking the psychologies of oppression and liberation. Fanonian scholars are aware of this book, but it is surprising that critical and liberation psychologists do not really cite this work when it includes an extensive critique of “the amnesia of Euro-American psychology” (Bulhan, 1985, pp. 37–59). Not mentioning the fact that the book, which includes an entire chapter on the “psychology of liberation” (Bulhan, 1985, pp. 251–278), was published nine years before Martín-Baró’s (1994) collection of English-translated essays, Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Bulhan (1985) references the usual suspects (i.e., Mannoni, Fanon, and Memmi), but of particular interest to us is his section on Fanon and Freud, wherein one can see why Fanon is not a colonial psychoanalyst: it would be misleading to conclude from the preceding that Fanon embraced psychoanalytic theory which of course had very formative influences on his thinking. But even more misleading would be the suggestion that Freud’s and Fanon’s interests in aggression and sexuality derived from identical social and personal sources. Freud’s theorizing emerged out of a nuclear, patriarchal, and bourgeois family context and within a sexually repressive Victorian Europe. Although he challenged the Victorian mores of his day, Freud was essentially an apologist for the status quo within the bourgeois family and the larger capitalist society. (p. 71, emphasis in original)

What makes Fanon a decolonial psychoanalyst, according to Bulhan (1985), is his radical sociogenic perspective, which is akin to what today we call psychosocial studies: For him, sociogeny took a definite precedence over both ontogeny and phylogeny. The fragmenting effect of [Freud’s] ontogenetic perspective

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and the ossifying consequences of [Jung’s] phylogenetic explanations obscured a fundamental dimension of the human psyche….it was Fanon’s unwavering conviction that the fundamental cause of alienation is first socioeconomic and second the internalization of societal inequity as well as violence. To be effective and meaningful, according to Fanon, all efforts toward disalienation must therefore intervene both at the socioeconomic and the psychological level. (p. 80)

Central to Fanon’s radical sociogeny is the Marxist notion of praxis: According to this sociogenetic perspective, man’s [or woman’s] biological constitution defines a given set of advantages and limitations that is more or less constant among nationalities and races. Conscious, organized, and collective praxis defines man’s [or woman’s] ontological vocation as the subject of history. Through this praxis and because of it, he [or she] transforms nature, harnesses his [or her] environmental and biological resources, dominates others, or liberates himself [or herself ] from repressive social structures. (p. 77)

Bulhan’s (1985) is more than a commentary on Fanon, for he contributes a number of original concepts, such as “auto-colonialism” (p. 44, emphasis in original) and “psycho-praxis” (p. 275, emphasis in original). Bulhan (1985) draws a link in Fanon’s work between oppression and violence, which is something that I (Beshara, 2019b) have also addressed: according to Fanon, oppression is above all else the practice and institutionalization of violence–both crude and subtle. This pervasive violence imposes a Manichean world, corrodes basic human values, and dehumanizes all involved. The exploitation that motivates and perpetuates this violence is not only economic, but also psychological and cultural. (p. 117)

Also worth mentioning is Bulhan’s (1985) unpacking of Fanon’s five aspects of alienation (p. 188) because ultimately psychoanalysis “with the oppressed that is not about disalienation of praxis and regaining of power

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tends to produce morally entrapped and compromised objects, not liberated and creative subjects” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 276, emphasis in original). Psychopathology, from the perspective of decolonial psychoanalysis, is “the denial of liberty” (Bulhan, 1985, p. 12, emphasis in original). Bulhan (1985) argues that Fanon’s account of oppression and violence—“If freedom requires the risk of life, oppression too requires the fear of physical death” (p. 121, emphasis in original)—is grounded, to a large extent, in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and, to a lesser extent, in Mannoni’s colonizer-colonized dialectic. Also, Bulhan (1985) adds that Fanon’s reading of Hegel is influenced by Sartre’s understanding of Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel; nonetheless, Fanon had an original take on the dialectic: When Fanon focused his discussion on oppressed blacks, he directed attention not so much to the whys of oppression (as Hegel and Mannoni did) but to how the violence of oppression dehumanizes all involved. This shift from the why to the how of oppression reflected Fanon’s sense of urgency and search for the practical solution neither Hegel nor Mannoni sought. Moreover, Fanon analyzed the dynamics of oppression with the passion of a man deeply scarred by the harsh realities of the enslaved and the colonized. (Bulhan, 1985, p. 120, emphasis in original)

Homi K. Bhabha Homi Bhabha (1949–present) is one of the triumvirates of postcolonialism. Although he started writing on Fanon in the eighties, my focus here will be on his 1994 book, The Location of Culture, which is considered a major contribution to the informal field of post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis and, of course, it is also his opaque magnum opus, which is a collection of highly theoretical (read: poststructural) essays. Bhabha’s brand of postcolonial critique is equally informed by poststructuralism (Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) as it is by psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, and Fanon). Therefore, his innovative textual methodology hones in on the discursive and unconscious dimensions of colonial discourse. For this reason, there is a theoretical affinity, in terms of style, between his work and mine, but I question the universality of the notion

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of hybridity, for example, since it is premised on the specificity of British colonialism in India. For Bhabha (1994), the (post)colonial subject is hybrid because of the linguistic ambivalence afforded to him or her by the Indo-European family of languages (p. 83). I also do not see any theorization of decolonial subjectivity in his work beyond the “colonial discourse” (p. 118), or the “apparatus of colonial power” (p. 119). For example, my own theoretical formulation is based on the three substitutional metaphors in psychoanalysis (cf. Fink, 1997, p. 194): the alienation of the colonial subject as demand , the separation of the postcolonial subject as desire, and the traversing of fantasy by the decolonial subject as drive. Having said that, Bhabha’s (1994) psycho-discursive analysis of (post)colonial subjectivity is original and, as such, inaugurates its own methodology. Bhabha (1994) is wary of the progressive telos of dialectics, as a methodology, because of its developmental implications, which are typically racist. However, his opting for an “anti-dialectical ” (p. 79, emphasis in original) or a “non-dialectical” (p. 88) approach seems to flatten out the colonial experience with concepts, such as mimicry, ambivalence, inbetween, and cultural hybridity. The end result of his analysis is that it is difficult to distinguish between the colonizer and colonized—hence, his notion of the colonial subject (Bhabha, 1994, p. 108), who subsumes both. The colonial subject is a cultural hybrid that exists in the “interstitial passage between fixed identification” (p. 5). He or she is “neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides” (p. 41, emphasis in original). One can hear an echo of intersectionality in this articulation of cultural hybridity, which we are told can be “a strategy of political subversion” (p. 89). Bhabha’s (1994) Foucaultian analysis of colonial discourse and its apparatus of power/knowledge are undergirded by a Lacanian reading of colonial fantasy and its “economy of desire” (p. 98). Bhabha’s (1994) emphasis on the racial and sexual axes of power, “as modes of differentiation, realized as multiple, cross-cutting determinations, polymorphous and perverse, always demanding a specific and strategic calculation of their effects” (p. 96), in colonial discourse, as “a form of discourse crucial to the binding of a range of differences and discriminations that inform the discursive and political practices of racial and cultural

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hierarchization” (p. 96), is resonant with my conception of racialized capitalism: The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference – racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power. (p. 96)

Bhabha’s (1994) writing is at its sharpest when he is distinguishing between cultural difference and cultural diversity: “Cultural diversity is an epistemological object–culture as an object of empirical knowledge– whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable’, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification” (pp. 49–50, emphasis in original). Bhabha’s (1994) notion of cultural difference is crucial for my articulation of colonial difference (being v. nonbeing), which cannot be dialectically transcended except with a new (read: radical or critical) ontology, such as “interbeing” (Hanh, 1987/2005, p. 88). In Buddhism, the category of being includes all sentient beings, that is, human and nonhuman animals endowed with consciousness and a nervous system meaning sentient beings that can experience pain and suffering. While this relational ontology certainly raises the ethical bar and has consequences for what we eat on a daily basis, it also raises an ecological question that is central to liberation praxis: What kind of beings are oppressed? Having said that, as a critical humanist, I firmly believe in the primacy of human suffering, which is a justifiable bias within my biocentric worldview—with the awareness that the human-nonhuman dialectic reflects the logic of colonial difference. For Bhabha (1994), “The ‘language’ metaphor raises the question of cultural difference and incommensurability, not the consensual, ethnocentric notion of the pluralistic existence of cultural diversity” (p. 253). Cultural difference “unsettles the liberal ethic of tolerance and the pluralist framework of multiculturalism” (p. 254). Any culture (like any Other) is split into the objet a and the barred Other. In other words, all cultures

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include their specific partial objects, which are desired and enjoyed by subjects of that culture, and no one culture can say it all. Also, because il n’y a pas de rapport culturel (there’s no such thing as a cultural relationship), Bhabha’s (1994) point is to maintain cultural difference as a contradiction without resolving it dialectically in any way, for the “time of liberation is…a time of cultural uncertainty, and, most crucially, of significatory or representational undecidability” (p. 51). However, the question of translation, or untranslatability (cf. Homayounpour, 2019), is a relevant one, for how does one acknowledge cultural difference in an antiracist way? The migrant culture of the ‘in-between’, the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability; and in so doing, it moves the question of culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream, or the racist’s nightmare, of a ‘full transmissal of subject-matter’; and towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity that marks the identification with culture’s difference. (p. 321, emphasis added)

The translation of cultural and linguistic difference: requires these two places [i.e., the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement] be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself ’ be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 53)

In this passage, Bhabha (1994) writes about the aim, and the subject, of cultural difference: The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying position of the minority that resists totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same, the minusin-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding to does not add up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and

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knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. The subject of the discourse of cultural difference is dialogical or transferential in the style of psychoanalysis. It is constituted through the locus of the Other which suggests both that the object of identification is ambivalent, and, more significantly, that the agency of identification is never pure or holistic but always constituted in a process of substitution, displacement or projection. (pp. 232–233, emphasis in original)

Finally, Bhabha (1994) provides us with the coordinates for an international culture that can emerge from the Third Space of cultural difference: the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an inter national culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. (p. 56, emphasis in original)

Other Important Contributions to Post-/De-colonial Psychoanalysis In this section, I will overview, in sketch form, a number of key publications on post-/de-colonial psychoanalysis in an effort to quickly get to the main body chapters of my book. The first issue of the first volume of the Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society (now: Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society) was published in the spring of 1996. The journal’s founding editor was Mark Bracher, author of the 1993 book: Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change. The first two issues of the journal’s first volume, which are now hard to get, had a number of articles dealing with psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, such as The Post-colonial Unconscious (MacCannell, 1996), Post-colonialism

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and Psychoanalysis (Apollon, 1996), From Oppression to Repression, from Subjection to Subject (Levy, 1996), and The Limits of Postcolonial Theory After Said/Bhabha (Levinson, 1996). In 2009, the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture published an edited book on psychoanalysis and Islam titled, Umbr(a): Islam. In 2013, the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (volume 33, issue 3) published a special issue on Post/Coloniality and Subjectivity. In 2016, the American Psychoanalyst published a threepart Conversations on Psychoanalysis and Race. In 2018, Psychology and History (volume 20, issue 3) published a special issue on Psychoanalysis and the Middle East: Discourses and Encounters. A major publication (or point de capiton), in my genealogy of this emerging field, is Christopher Lane’s (1998) edited book, The Psychoanalysis of Race, whose first part is dedicated to psychoanalysis and postcolonialism and includes chapters from Derrida and Žižek among others. Other significant publications (i.e., books, chapters, articles) that deal with colonialism and/or racism from a psychoanalytic perspective include (and this list is by no means comprehensive): “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother ” (Spillers, 1996), Love in a Time of Hate (Hollander, 1997), The Other and Other Others (Van Zyl, 1998), Desiring Whiteness (Seshadri-Crooks, 2000), Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (Hartnack, 2001), The Melancholy of Race (Cheng, 2001), Lying on the Postcolonial Couch (Nair, 2002), Between Prospero and Caliban (De Sousa Santos, 2002), Dark Continents (Khanna, 2003), Colonial Identity and Ethnic Hatred (Clarke, 2003), The Colonization of Psychic Space (Oliver, 2004), Fanon and the Psychoanalysis of Racism (Hook, 2004), Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy, 2005), Psychohistoriography (Hickling, 2007), Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis (Greedharry, 2008), Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton (Grant, 2008), The Postcolonial Unconscious (Lazarus, 2011), Unconscious Dominions (Anderson, Jenson, & Keller, 2011), Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, and Racism (Frosh, 2013), Psychoanalysis, “Islam,” and the Other of Liberalism (Massad, 2015), Trauma and Race (George, 2016), The Arabic Freud (El Shakry, 2017), Lacan and Race (Khan, 2018), A People’s History of Psychoanalysis (Gaztambide, 2019), Žižek on Race (Zalloua, 2020), and Postcolonial Lack (Basu Thakur, 2020).

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Decolonial Psychoanalysis I developed my notion of decolonial psychoanalysis in a paper I presented in 2017 at the Islamic Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Islam conference, which was organized by the College of Psychoanalysts-UK and was held at the University of Manchester on June 26–27. I published my paper as a chapter titled, “Decolonizing Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalyzing Islamophobia” (Beshara, 2019c), which is included in Parker and Siddiqui’s (2019) edited book, Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam. In the chapter, I write that “decolonial psychoanalysis improves upon Lacanian social theory with its emphasis on liberation” (p. 102). I also position decolonial psychoanalysis vis-à-vis radicalism: “a leftist alternative to the center-right paradigm plaguing most politico-economic systems in the world today” (p. 105). But, following the modernity/coloniality research project (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451), I make a distinction between freedom/emancipation and liberation. In short, the former is an individual aspiration, while the latter is a collective one. I also associate Lacan’s (1991/2007) Discourse of the Analyst (S2 → a → $ → S1 ) with decolonial psychoanalysis by qualifying it as “a decolonized Lacanian social theory” (p. 106). Theoretically, and also in terms of political praxis, the Discourse of the Analyst is not reducible, for me, to the psychoanalytic clinic. In Fig. 1.2, I apply Lacan’s (1991/2007) four discourses from the perspective of contrapuntal psychoanalysis. The reader should note that the Master’s Discourse overlaps with the semiotic square from Fig. 1.1. Taking my cue from Bracher’s (1993) statement that the Discourse of the Analyst “offers the most effective means of achieving social change by countering the psychological and social tyranny exercised through language” (p. 68), I see the decolonial psychoanalyst as a racialized/politicized objet a who causes the desire of other racialized/politicized subjects by enacting “a de-colonial epistemic shift” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 453). The product of such a decolonial analysis would be the subjectification of the cause of liberation through “de-linking” (p. 453) from the apparatus of racialized capitalism. Liberation names the delinking process and so must eventually materialize as political power, which Dussel (1995) calls transmodernity.

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Fig. 1.2 The four discourses

In my chapter on “Decolonizing Psychoanalysis” (Beshara, 2019c), I acknowledge Derek Hook’s (2008) influence, since he wrote that “the principal factor of a postcolonial psychoanalysis [is] a commitment to the political scrutiny of colonial desire, and the multiple roles it plays the psychic life of colonial power” (p. 278, emphasis in original). However, I prefer the signifier ‘decolonial’ over ‘postcolonial’ for three reasons: (1) It is an outcome of my engagement over the last number of years with works by decolonial theorists/practitioners from Latin America, namely Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres; (2) I regard postcoloniality to be theoretically linked with coloniality and this is particularly obvious in many, if not most, postcolonial states—hence, my use of the hybrid term (post)coloniality; and (3) decoloniality is a liberation praxis, and not a mode of criticism restricted to the academy (cf. Bhambra, 2014). Having said that, many postcolonial theorists are also decolonial practitioners, so I see an overlap. Another important distinction is that the former term (postcoloniality) implies a temporality after coloniality, but

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the latter term (decoloniality) signifies an active project of decolonization and liberation, especially in the postcolonies. Stephen Sheehi’s (2018) definition of decolonial psychoanalysis is very much in alignment with my project, and so is worth quoting in full: Decolonial psychoanalysis adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how two-ness (or what really should be understood as binary identity structures) and its concomitant productive alienation and identifications are naturalized and produces subjects of coloniality. It allows us to reach beyond a Manichean condition of twoness, beyond a two-state condition to a one-state condition without exonerating ourselves from the material realities that implicate our own class and race privilege vis-à-vis White and Black America or our relation to Zionism and American global power. In fact, psychoanalytic theory and practice should make us aware of the social and psychic structures that hail us to ameliorate the tensions that arise from these compulsions and identifications, from the ways we, too, participate in histories and contemporary realities of violence, whether they are colonial-settler, racial gendered, class, or sexual. (p. 319)

After the publication of my chapter (Beshara, 2019c), I further developed the notion in my book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b), by situating it in relation to a variety of critical methodologies: Critical Border Thinking (Mignolo, 2007), Lacanian Discourse Analysis (Parker, 2005, 2010), and Žižekian Ideology Critique (1989). My goal was to name a new field (Critical Islamophobia Studies) and illustrate it through a radical qualitative research project; my argument was and is that decolonial psychoanalysis is “one theoretical resource in critical Islamophobia studies” (Beshara, 2019b, p. 4, emphasis in original). For my study, I interviewed 19 US Muslims in order to not only analyze their accounts of Islamophobia, but also, and more significantly, get a sense of how they resist Islamophobia. I concluded that US Muslims resist Islamophobia both epistemically (through critical knowledge) and ontically (by virtue of being Muslim). My textual approach was equally informed by psychoanalysis and decoloniality—hence, decolonial psychoanalysis. Decoloniality kept psychoanalytic theory in check. Before I move on to the next chapter, I would like to critically revisit some of my arguments in the book from the perspective of Black Male

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Studies (Curry, 2017, p. 225), which can easily be stretched since I am a racialized (Brown) worker, who is wholeheartedly committed to international solidarity among the damned, that is, racialized workers of the world. I consider Curry’s (2017) The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood the rosetta stone of this project the way that Orientalism (Said, 1978/2003) was the rosetta stone for Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b, p. 45). I say that because Curry woke me up from my dogmatic slumber, which was David Hume’s effect on Immanuel Kant. I want to critically revisit two arguments in particular, which are premised on a white feminist theorization of patriarchy that equates maleness with power regardless of context. Here is Curry’s (2017) rebuttal of white feminist ideology: Black maleness is, in fact, a de-gendered negation of white maleness that is feminine because of its subordinate position to white masculinity, but not female, because Black maleness lacks a specific gender coordinate that corresponds to either white maleness or white femaleness. (p. 6, emphasis in original)

Blacks, in particular, and, racialized/politicized subjects in general, exist in the zone of nonbeing; therefore, they are not gendered—this is not only a logical argument, but a historical and empirical one. For this reason, Curry (2017) theorizes the Black male as a Man-Not; by extension, the Black female can be theorized as a Woman-Not. Curry (2017) then distinguishes between gender and genre in relation to Black males: Man-Not(ness) is a term used to express the specific genre category of the Black male. Genre differs from gender by this distance Black males share with Western man a priori, and, by consequence, patriarchy. Whereas gender asserts that historical and social orders, defined by the biologic marker of sex, are in fact synonymous with the historical and sociological location of Black males, genre expresses how the register of nonbeing distorts the categories founded upon white anthropology or that of the human. Popular categories of analysis such as class, gender, and even race suppose a universal human template upon which they imprint. But

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what is the applicability of human categories on the nonhuman? (p. 6, emphasis in original)

Because Blacks, and Black males in particular, are not gendered, given the history of slavery and the commodification of the Black body, they end up becoming generic, which explains the sexual/racist violence against, or the disposability/fungibility of, Black (especially male) bodies that we continue to witness today. Curry (2017) writes: Because Black male death is made generic, non-gendered, it is thought to be ontologically irrelevant. Because it is encapsulated within the category of race and understood as the violence to which all raced bodies are subjected, Black male death fails to designate a specificity within our present theoretical/disciplinary order. The violence Black male bodies experience is thought to be summarized within the intersectional modes of the Black and the female, the Black and the transgendered, the Black and the queer/quare subject. (p. 164)

Curry (2017) is problematizing intersectionality because it occludes Black male vulnerability since the feminist assumption is that maleness qua patriarchy is inherently equated with power. This assumption, of course, erases the historical specificity of racialized males under Euro-colonialism, particularly in the Americas, as well as their current vulnerability in the face of sexual-racist violence. Therefore, context matters. For example, patriarchy in the US is linked with white and secular Christian supremacy, but in Egypt it is linked with military and secular Islamic supremacy. In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b), I made the assumption (without considering the empirical evidence) that Islamophobia must be worse for Muslim women, or even worse for Black Muslim women, because, according to intersectionality theory, oppression multiplies with every addition of othered identity categories (e.g., religion, sex, race, etc.). However, following Curry (2017), our theoretico-methodological analysis must be grounded in historical and empirical examples of how hierarchy works in any given society. Curry’s (2017) focus is the US; mine is the US in relation to the Global South. Historically, feminism was white women’s critical response

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to the oppression they experienced from white men, but Curry (2017) reminds us that white patriarchy (or what I have been calling racialized capitalism), as a violently oppressive apparatus, is a project created and operated by both white bourgeois men and women to over-exploit the material bodies of racialized subjects to the point of death. I am comfortable with using Angela Davis’s (2016) critical notion of “intersectionality of struggles” (p. 19), and I have used it throughout Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019b), for it implies a critique of mainstream intersectionality theory since her emphasis is on shared struggles and not shared identities; shared struggle is what Mignolo (2007) calls “identity based on politics” (p. 492, emphasis in original). Davis’s critique is perhaps a function of her commitment to Marxism. Another argument I want to challenge is my linking of terrorism with toxic masculinity (Beshara, 2019b, p. 34), which presumes that something is inherently wrong with the masculinity of those who are labeled ‘terrorists’ today, who according to the politico-media complex tend to be in many cases Muslim, or Brown, males. While the use of political violence against any civilian population is unethical beyond all doubt, terrorism is a politically-motivated tactic that has been used by state and non-state actors alike since the birth of modernity, and so terrorism is not inherently linked with Muslim, Arab, or Brown masculinity. Curry (2017) writes: “Black [or Brown] males are thought to be the exemplifications of white (bourgeois) masculinity’s pathological excess [surplus-jouissance?]. In other words, the toxic abnormality of a hegemonic white masculinity becomes the conceptual norm for Black [or Brown] men and boys” (p. 3). I have only made one reference to toxic, or “hegemonic” (Curry, 2017), masculinity; in the remainder of the book (Beshara, 2019b), I deconstruct the mythology of the Muslim terrorist, who is often a Brown male. Curry (2017) invented Black Male Studies because he wanted to study Black masculinity, or the experiences of Black males, on its own terms without having to resort to modern/colonial theories from the zone of being, such as feminism or psychoanalysis for that matter. The response to Curry’s (2017) critiques should not be defensive, but rather constructive: Black Female Studies. Ultimately, those in the zone of being want us divided so they can conquer us, but we (the racialized/politicized subjects

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of the world) must be in solidarity if we commonly desire liberation and decolonization. In sum, my vision of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is an inclusive one, but I do believe, following Freire (1970/2018), that for radical humanism to work (post)colonial psychoanalysts must follow the leadership of decolonial psychoanalysts; this is how we dismantle the oppression and violence of racialized capitalism together. In the concluding chapter, I will show how the Discourse of the Analyst can be horizontalized.

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2 Beginnings

I begin this chapter with Beginnings: Intention & Method , Edward Said’s (1975/1985) second book, which was overshadowed by his third and most popular book, Orientalism, published three years later in 1978. My aim with this chapter is to highlight the prevalence of Sigmund Freud throughout the text and the influence of his “disputatious radicalism” (Said 1975/1985, p. 51) on Said’s theorization of beginning as an intention and as a method. Of particular interest to Said (1975/1985) is “The Interpretation of Dreams as an inaugural text” (p. 179, emphasis in original), whose method of dream interpretation, I argue, can also be used as a method of contrapuntal interpretation as Said (1978/2003) did in Orientalism. For Said (1975/1985), “the text as a whole retains a particular beginning function” because it is “the physical location where dream-thoughts are verbally created for the purposes of analysis” (p. 179, emphasis in original). In the preface to the 1975 edition of Beginnings, Said begins by asking, “What is a beginning?” He responds, “Beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness. It is pragmatic…And it is theoretic” (p. xxi). For Said (1975/1985), beginnings are “something one does” and “something one thinks about. © The Author(s) 2021 R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_2

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The two…are always necessarily connected when language is being used” (p. xxi, emphasis added); in other words, beginning is a praxis. In the first chapter, Said (1975/1985) defines the beginning as “the first step in the intentional production of meaning ” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Said (1975/1985) adds: In language, therefore, writing or thinking about beginning is tied to writing or thinking a beginning. A verbal beginning is consequently both a creative and critical activity, just as at the moment one begins to use language in a disciplined way, the orthodox distinction between critical and creative thought begins to break down. (p. xxi, emphasis in original)

The centrality of language vis-à-vis creativity, criticality, and development in Said’s theorization of beginning resonates with a number of key psychoanalytic principles on language qua Symbolic order: (1) “the unconscious…is structured like a language” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 737); (2) “the unconscious is the Other’s discourse” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 10, emphasis in original); (3) “the Other is that foreign language we must learn to speak…it is the discourse and desires of others around us insofar as the former are internalized” (Fink 1995, p. 11); (4) “there is no metalanguage that can be spoken” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 688); (5) “the subject is the subject of the signifier” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 530); (6) to be a subject is to be split (between ego and unconscious), which is a function of being alienated within language; and (7) “a signifier [S1 ] represents a subject [$] to another signifier [S2 ]” (p. 713). Lacan was certainly influenced by structuralism, and so was Said (1975/1985) who wrote about its “radical spirit” (p. xviii), but the link between language and desire in psychoanalysis is Freud’s legacy: “sexual needs have played the biggest part in the origin and development of speech” (Freud 1920/1966, p. 206). Also, the primary technique in psychoanalysis is free association, which is a form of speech that reveals unconscious desire in the subject’s signifying chain: “Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere…interfering in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 676). The other ways

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through which a subject can encounter the unconscious are also housed in language: dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, symptoms, etc. Here are some other examples from the 1975 preface that illustrate Said’s engagement with psychoanalysis: “Even when it is repressed , the beginning is always a first from which (except on rare occasions) something follows” (p. xxii, emphasis added). According to Freud (1909/1961), we unconsciously repress ideas that are incompatible with our egos as a form of defense (p. 22); we unconsciously do this in order to reduce or eliminate the “unpleasure” (p. 22) that arises from “opposing mental forces” (p. 24). However, in the process we substitute the repressed idea with “the symptom” (p. 26). Beginnings are symptomatic. Back to Said (1975/1985): “If we assume the presence of beginnings here and there for the reflective artist, reflective critic, philosopher, political, historian, and psychoanalytic investigator, a study of beginnings can all too easily become a catalog of infinite cases” (p. xxii, emphasis added). After all, psychoanalysis would not exist as a praxis if it were not for the analysand beginning analysis. As Said (1975/1985) is distinguishing between beginning and origin, he implicitly frames beginning as jouissance (enjoyment): Beginning is basically an activity which ultimately implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment, that beginning and beginning-again are historical whereas origins are divine, that a beginning not only creates but is its own method because it has intention. In short, beginning is making or producing difference, but…difference which is the result of combining the already-familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language. (p. xxiii, emphasis in original)

Does beginning imply a return (of the repressed), hence, a failure of the ego’s defenses? Does not beginning-as-repetition (or beginningagain) signal a masochistic jouissance vis-à-vis the death drive (cf. Lacan 1966/2006, p. 53)? Is the ‘intention’ of beginning an unconscious one akin to (the Other’s) desire? What is this ‘combining’ except the “combinatory of the signifier” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 544)? Is the ‘difference’ made or produced by beginning sexual difference? Does not saying

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beginning is ‘historical’ indicate “the future anterior [subject] as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 247)? In the 1985 preface to the book, Said agreeingly quotes a reviewer’s (J. Hillis Miller) characterization of Beginnings as “uncanny criticism” (p. xvii). For Freud (1919/2003), “the uncanny [unheimlich or unhomely] is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (p. 318). Uncanny criticism is criticism that is “frightening precisely because it is unknown and unfamiliar” (p. 318). The book’s uncanniness is a “symptom” of its mode of “uncertainty” and its “hybrid” style (Said 1975/1985, p. xx). For Said (1975/1985), beginning is “secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly re-examined” which enables “the critique of domination, the re-examination of suppressed history (feminine, non-white, non European, etc.), the cross-disciplinary interest in textuality, the notion of counter-memory and archive, the analysis of traditions…, professions, disciplines, and corporations” (p. xix). Said (1975/1985) adds that “the form and representations of narrative fictions are based upon desire– authorized as well as ‘molested’ by the novelistic consciousness [and unconscious]” (p. xix, emphasis added), which is line with the fact that we live in a “a world where the Other’s desire lays down the law” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 488). Most significantly, Said (1975/1985) continues: Out of this [free?] association developed a theory of authority linking authorship, paternal property and power to each other, and this consequently has been extendable to the social history of intellectual practices, from the manipulation and control of discourse to the representation of truth and ‘the Other.’ (p. xix, emphasis added)

Beginnings marks the shift from modernism to postmodernism, which roughly parallels the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism. To clarify the difference between modernism and modernity, the former is a “cultural sphere” while the latter is a “geopolitical scheme” (cf. Hassan 2001, p. 3 on postmodernism v. postmodernity). Said (1975/1985) writes:

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One of the central points made by Beginnings is that modernism was an aesthetic and ideological phenomenon that was a response to the crisis of what could be called liation–linear, biologically grounded process, that which ties children to their parents–which produced the countercrisis within modernism of affiliation, that is, those creeds, philosophies, and visions re-assembling the world in new non-familial ways…ideologically and socially, the rise of the syndicate, political party, guild, and State, as quasi-paternal but affiliatively organized authorities, is a parallel phenomenon, even if its consequences and dimensions are a great deal more far-reaching and varied than aesthetic versions of affiliation. (p. xix, emphasis in original)

What is psychoanalysis if not the product of these modernist aesthetic and ideological phenomena of (af )filiation? What is the Other, in the Symbolic order, if not these “quasi-paternal but affiliatively organized authorities” wherein “authorship, paternal property and power” are linked? And what are we to make of this other ‘Other’ who is misrepresented in intellectual practices? The (novelistic) unconscious desire that Said (1975/1985) hinted at is a specific one, for it is the desire “to mime the life processes of generation, flourishing, and death” (p. xix, emphasis added). This is what Lacan (1973/2004) wrote about mimicry, which is certainly grounded in the Imaginary narcissism and aggressivity one experiences in/on the mirror stage: “The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled— exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare” (p. 99). Bhabha (1994) would later revisit the concept of mimicry in his account of (post)colonial subjectivity. Therefore, this other ‘Other’ is certainly an Imaginary other (another ego), but, more radically, Said (1975/1985) is also alluding to Symbolic and Real Otherness (i.e., Other, non-European, cultures and languages) as will become more explicit in both Orientalism as well as Culture and Imperialism. Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is a “constant reexperiencing of beginning and beginning-again whose force is…to stimulate self-conscious and situated activity, activity with aims non-coercive and communal” (Said 1975/1985, p. xx). It is also concerned with

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the democratization of discourse and the politicization of representation vis-à-vis unconscious truths that link the singularity of being with the pluriversality of knowledge. Liberation praxis as beginning is the opposite of totalitarianism, colonialism, or any mythical apparatus of oppression as origin. With Beginnings, Said (1975/1985) is not only concerned with how other writers begin their texts, he is also beginning a new form of writing: uncanny criticism. The shift from the classical novel to modernist forms of writing is also mirrored in Said’s style of literary criticism. According to Said (1975/1985), before World War II literary scholars had to be trained in classical philology (p. 6), which meant that they read texts in their original languages. As for today’s critic, who is an “autodidact” or a “wanderer” (p. 8), Said (1975/1985) writes: There is not much use in speculating why most people no longer regard education as adding links to a historical dynasty. We expect the student trained in literature to have a smattering of ‘humanities’–in translation– but an urgent sense of other knowledge, paraknowledge, that assumes lies naturally alongside literature and in some way bears upon it. He will know a lot about Freudian psychology. (p. 7, emphasis added)

Said (1975/1985) is noting the modernist rupture that allowed for the possibility of subjective interpretation, which is contrary to the historical dynasty established by classical philologists. Today, we do not read texts directly (if ever that was possible), we always need a theoretical lens, or paraknowledge (e.g., psychoanalysis or postcolonialism), through which we can interpret texts. In other words, “the study and the production of literature today is the study and the production of de-formation” (Said 1975/1985, p. 8). What are free associations, dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, and symptoms, but unconscious (de-)formations (cf. Lacan 1966/2006, p. 713) or Entstellung (distortions)? This de-formation is “a disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes” (1909/1961, p. 36, emphasis in original). Entstellung can also be translated as displacement or transposition, that is, “the sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 425).

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Said (1975/1985) introduces the notions of “exteriority” and “inbetweenness” to describe how: today’s writer is less comfortable with the unadorned fact of precedence…and perhaps he [or she] can no longer know what it means to stand in a direct line of descent. History and tradition seem less communicable in sequential narrative…Knowledge, therefore, is less formally embodied…Furthermore, exteriority and in-betweenness in the modern writer are the inevitable results of lacking either faith in or capacity for limited (discrete) but wholly integrated work. The modern writer often feels the urge instead to create new totalities, to cultivate random appetites, to deny forward movement altogether. (p. 9)

For Said (1975/1985), Freud is the exemplar modern writer because of how he exercised the hermeneutics of suspicion in his writings just like Marx and Nietzsche did before him; all three were critical of modernity but not of coloniality. The non-sequential, fragmented, and disintegrated narratives of modernist texts that Said (1975/1985) writes about are none other than the structure of split subjectivity itself. In psychoanalysis, the unconscious follows a different temporal logic that goes by the name Nachträglichkeit (Freud) or après-coup (Lacan). According to Lacan (1966/2006), the last word of a sentence seals the meaning of that sentence following what he labels “the retroactive effect” (p. 711). The Freudo-Lacanian notion of retroactivity or deferred action—cf. Foucault’s (1975/1977) “history of the present” (p. 31)—sheds light on the way that time and history are subjectively lived and interpreted: “What concerns psychoanalysis is not the real past sequence of events in themselves, but the way that these events exist now in memory and the way that the patient reports them” (Evans 1996, p. 209). In other words, modernist history or temporality is the languaging of the past as an unconscious commentary on the present, which is a history or a temporality exterior to tradition but in-between other contemporaneous texts. Exteriority and in-betweenness are two ways of signifying complexity or intertextuality, which are ways for describing the unconscious and its subject, who is caught in a network of signifiers. Said (1975/1985) makes a distinction between modernists writing adjacently and traditionalists

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writing in a line of descent. He argues that a chief characteristic, for Freud, has been a necessity at the beginning to see his work “as making reference, first, to other works, but also to reality and to the reader, by adjacency, not sequentially or dynastically” (p. 10). He adds: Freud’s unconscious: banned from consciousness at the outset, it exerts an influence upon dreams and everyday life by means of distortions, exaggerations, mistakes, which do not even deliver the unconscious whole; indeed, the whole of our conscious life is discontinuous with our unconscious principles of order, which in turn repeat and vary that initial rupture ad infinitum. (p. 10)

Said (1975/1985) maintains the primacy of the Symbolic, over the Imaginary, register in modern writing: “Nearly every consciously innovative major writer since Oscar Wilde has repeatedly denied (or even denounced) the mimetic ambition of writing. A text [is] a text [and not] a representation of anything else” (p. 11). He continues, “the order proceeding from beginnings…cannot be grasped adequately by any image at all” (p. 11, emphasis in original), for it is a Symbolic order that has to do with language and law. With the image falling from grace, “a work enters a realm of gentile [or secular] history” (p. 11). Said (1975/1985) calls the Symbolic order of writing: “an eccentric order of repetition” (p. 12). It is not an Imaginary (i.e., narcissistic and aggressive) order of sameness based on ego-driven images and imaginations; rather it is an unconscious order that emphasizes “the possibilities for difference within repetition” and that signifies “irregularities [or uncanniness] of varying degrees and qualities within writing as a whole” (p. 12). This eccentric order of repetition is also a source of Real jouissance (enjoyment): “the pleasure of writing” (p. 24), which is the material dimension of the letter or the signifierness of the signifier (Fink 1995, p. xiv). Beginnings, for Said (1975/1985), are intimately linked with intention (this is what I want to do) and method (this is how I am going to do it). By intention, Said (1975/1985) means:

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an appetite at the beginning intellectually to do something in a characteristic way–either consciously or unconsciously, but at any rate in a language that always (or nearly always) shows signs of the beginning intention in some form and is always engaged purposefully in the production of meaning. (p. 12, emphasis added)

Because the modern writer is a split subject, “conscious intention– when is it ever exclusively conscious?–is frequently at odds with method” (Said 1975/1985, p. 13). The modern writer is not concerned with originality, he or she acknowledges the influence of others adjacently through repetition or refutation (p. 15). Said (1975/1985) cleverly shows that: “Prophecy is a type of language around which this issue of originality perpetually lurks in many forms” (p. 22). He then concludes that the prophet, as someone obsessed with originality, is structurally alienated, which is amusing to think about in light of Freud (1920/1966) remarking that Jung used to be “merely a psycho-analyst” but now aspires to become “a prophet” (p. 334). In alienation, “the Other [as god] dominates or takes the place of the subject” (Fink 1995, p. 65). Here is what Said (1975/1985) has to say about writing vis-à-vis the Symbolic order: Every sort of writing establishes explicit [or conscious] and implicit [or unconscious] rules of pertinence for itself: certain things are admissible, certain others are not. I call these rules of pertinence authority–both in the sense of explicit law and guiding force…and in the sense of that implicit power to generate another word that will belong to the writing as a whole. (p. 16, emphasis in original)

Said (1975/1985) cites Vico’s etymology of authority: “auctor: autos: suis ipsius: propsius: property” (p. 16, emphasis in original), and we should also bear in mind related words that perhaps illuminate the different faces of the Symbolic order: author (which is homophonous with Other), authoritarian, authoritative, authorization, etc. For Said (1975/1985), “authorization is provisional,” it is “what the subject of ‘beginnings’ authorizes,” it is “what is rationally apprehensible…what is allowable” (p. 17, emphasis in original). Later, Said (1975/1985) clarifies: “authority–or the specific power of a specific act of writing–can be

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thought of as something whole and as something invented–as something inclusive and made up, if you like, for the occasion” (p. 23). In other words, nomadic authority (as opposed to anterior, or pure, authority) is secular, democratic, and critical (pp. 23–24). Beginnings are essentially unconscious: They follow “a principle of [free] association that works, in a sense, against simple consecution and chance” and they are “more a structure [that intends] than a history, but this structure cannot be immediately seen, named, or grasped” (Said 1975/1985, p. 16, emphasis in original). In view of Lacan’s (1966/2006) indexing of Freud that “a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather, to keep to the letter of the work, of a rebus—that is, of a form of writing” (p. 221), let us consider Said’s (1975/1985) structuralist account of beginning qua writing, since a study of beginnings is…mainly about the language used by anyone who begins (or talks of beginning), the intimate yet apprehensible circumstances of a beginning are verbal…the history and coherence of beginnings [is] a fact of written language…beginning is doing–intending–a whole set of particular things primarily in writing or because of writing. (p. 19, emphasis in original)

Said’s (1975/1985) section on the writerly addiction to quotation and its “unsettling effect” (p. 22) is absolutely brilliant, particularly since upon self-diagnosis I can attest that I clearly suffer from this symptom, but how does Said explain its etiology? He writes, “quotation is a constant reminder that writing is a form of displacement” (p. 22). Here we are again in psychoanalytic territory. According to Freud (1920/1966), “The first achievement of the dream-work is condensation. By that we understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated translation of it” (p. 210, emphasis in original). For Lacan (1966/2006), condensation, following Roman Jakobson, “is the superimposed structure of signifiers in which metaphor finds its field” (p. 425, emphasis added). Back to Freud (1920/1966), “The second achievement of the dream-work is displacement …Replacing something by an allusion to it” (p. 214, emphasis in original). For Lacan (1966/2006), displacement is

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“this transfer of signification that metonymy displays” (p. 425, emphasis added). Said (1975/1985) adds that quotation is “always, even when in the form of a passing allusion…a reminder that other writing serves to displace present writing, to a greater or lesser extent, from its absolute, central, proper place” (p. 22, emphasis added). In other words, quoting is a form of self-censorship that disguises, or distorts, the latent thoughts of the writer, that is, his or her unconscious desire. Furthermore, “other writing” gives “a neurotic cast to the problems of originality and sincerity” (p. 22), so perhaps quoting can also be read as a form of disalienation or separation, that is, a confrontation with the Other’s (writing) desire? Early in the book, Said (1975/1985) cautions that originality is premised on the myth of origin as “divine, mythical and privileged” (p. xix). Near the end of the first chapter, Said (1975/1985) quotes Roland Barthes: “Writing is precisely that which exceeds speech; it is a supplementary space where what is inscribed is not another unconscious…but another relationship between the speaker (or hearer) and the Unconscious” (p. 25). I feel conflicted about this argument because modernity/coloniality marks the world historical cut from speech (e.g., oral tradition) to writing, from listening to reading/seeing, and from the community to the individual. Here I am drawn to the ethic of psychoanalysis as an ethic of speaking truthfully and listening intentionally, but I am more interested in cultural therapeutics, that is, transcending the dyadic relationship toward the communal, which is one of the aims of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. Said (1975/1985) considers Freud a revolutionary alongside Copernicus and Lenin (p. 32) because beginning is a discontinuous act. Erik Erikson called Freud “the first psychoanalyst” and he argued that even though Freud changed his field (from neurology to psychoanalysis), “the idea of search is preserved” (Said 1975/1985, p. 33, emphasis added). Therefore, a beginning is not only a discontinuity, but also a transfer: “Psychoanalysis redeploys old elements, arranging them discontinuously with, yet parallel to, the traditional manner” (p. 33, emphasis in original). Said (1975/1985) adds:

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Freud’s lonely discoveries originate…a discursivity–that is, the possibility of, as well as the rule of formation for, subsequent texts…such a beginning authorizes; it constitutes an authorization for what follows from it…yet we cannot forget that authority limits as much as it enables. Certain concepts are inexpressible “according to Freud”…for instance, just as the discursivity we call Freudian…is not simply the repetition of a few ideas but the construction of thoughts, continuities, and words in a manner authorized (discursively) by Freud. (p. 34, emphasis in original)

Said (1975/1985) argues that Freud’s Moses is characterized by a construction of both creative energy as “the synthetic power presumed to bring together creative work and give it form” and “an individualized type which has some of the attributes of a person but not an existential identity” (p. 58). This is because “individuality per se fails to include transindividual experiences like economic or social development” (p. 58). For Said (1975/1985), a text is “a [discontinuous] series of subtexts or pre-texts or paratexts or surtexts…a transindividual field of dispersion” (p. 58); therefore, Freud’s authority comes from his reading of “psychological history” as a textual field of dispersion (p. 58). In reading Freud’s last book Moses and Monotheism, which is the subject of both Said’s last book and my fourth chapter, Said (1975/1985) extracts the notion of Entstellung (or distortion), which had a double meaning for Freud: “to change the appearance of something” and “to put something in another place, to displace” (p. 59). Freud compares textual distortion to murder (p. 59), which parallels an argument I will be making later in the book about writing as a form of killing . Said (1975/1985), following Freud, also makes the case that “writing is not coterminous with nature, and therefore it deforms its subjects (life, liberty, happiness) more than it forms them. Reading and writing…are particular distortions of general realties. There is violence in texts” (p. 59, emphasis added). To become a Lacanian analyst, one must go through analytical formation (as distinct from training), but contrapuntal psychoanalysis entails analytical deformation. In other words, writing is not an abstract vocation that concerns only the author or the literary critic; writing is a concrete inscription of the Symbolic order and, as such, it is always accompanied by the specter

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of law. Additionally, there is the Real jouissance of writing, for the letter kills the body. The body, alienated in language, becomes symptomatically overwritten by the signifierness of the signifier. Writing turns the enunciating subject into the subject of the statement (cf. Lacan 1966/2006, p. 650), which points to the ideology of writing: writing-as-interpellation. Writing hails, positions, and fixes subjects (and objects) in discourse. An Imaginary fantasy of immortality sustains the ideology of writing: Authors narcissistically write texts in the hope that these texts will outlive them. Does not writing as an abstract mode, which distorts reality, fit perfectly within the logic of racialized capitalism? For example, we are generally more impressed with the written representations of ‘ancient’ or ‘premodern’ cultures that we find in museums than we are with the ongoing material realities of some of these transmodern cultures, many of which are still among us. Earlier in the book, I wrote about my location, or positionality, vis-à-vis Indigenous tribes in New Mexico, for example. This ideological dimension of writing (for not all writing is ideological) is why when I mention to anyone in the US that I hail from Egypt, they immediately (i.e., unconsciously) think of the Pyramids of Giza or the Sphinx, but never of modern Egypt. Said’s explanation? Orientalism. More on that in the next chapter. In this excerpt, Said (1975/1985) explores Freud’s analogy between psychoanalysis and archeology and his radical method of construction (as opposed to interpretation): For Freud the material of mental life is analyzable through language, since only words can engage the unconscious skillfully enough for them to bear its stresses. Dreams are not simply images that tell, for rather it is the interpretation of dreams by words–the dreamer’s words, the analysts’ interpreting words–that tells about dreams. Among many other negative characteristics of the unconscious, the absence of pictures fairly describes it, according to Freud. Despite his frequent comparisons between psychoanalysis and archeology, Freud carefully distinguished material phenomena…from psychological energy. He said that mental life is apprehended by psychoanalysis from three standpoints–dynamic, economic, and topographical–each of which deliberately resists visual

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analogy. When, very late in life, Freud assessed the role of construction made by the analyst during analysis, there, too, he steered clear of pictures. (p. 64)

Freud’s distinction between material phenomena and psychological energy is nothing short of Kant’s (1781/1998, p. 347) distinction between phenomena (a world of the senses) and noumena (a world of the understanding) in philosophy, wherein there is a Real material world out there, which we do not have direct access to, and, therefore, what we call reality is our Symbolic-Imaginary representations of this inaccessible (or unconscious) Real material world. For this reason, Freud moves from interpretation to construction since the former presumes that the analyst can directly access the Real when in fact it can only be reconstructed in analysis using words. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916/2011) revisited the Kantian problem using structural linguistics, and for him, the inaccessibility of the noumenal world (and consequently, the impossibility of objectivity) was not the central issue; de Saussure (1916/2011) was more concerned with the relationship between signifiers and signifieds, or representations and concepts: “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary” (p. 232, emphasis added). Said (1975/1985) writes that Freud was not bothered by accuracy in analysis because “there can be no direct correspondence between a mental construction…and actual events” (p. 65). Condensation and displacement are effects of this lack of correspondence, and for Freud, the result of displacement was not only distortion, but also delusion (as cited in Said 1975/1985, p. 65). This problem of accuracy does not mean that anything goes because delusions: build up around a kernel of historical truth that by definition appears exclusively in verbal substitutions for the truth, or as an already repudiated experience. Words, therefore, stand at the beginning, are the beginning, of a series of substitutions. Words signify a movement away from and around the fragment. This is another way of characterizing the human capacity for language. (p. 65, emphasis in original)

To put it differently, what kind of worlds/words do we (the oppressed) want to (re)construct, which we will also enjoy? I have been intentionally

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constructing a world of words, which displaces racialized capitalism using the method of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. This world is not a utopia, or something completely new; rather, it is a linking of the best (read: socially just) ideas and practices of already existing worlds. Contrapuntal psychoanalysis then is an indexing of what works from the perspective of social ecology, which is the “subversive opposite” (Said 1975/1985, p. 75) of racialized capitalism—to use Freud’s notion of “the primal word” (p. 78) or that “signs or words in a dream [or in waking life] can mean their opposite” (p. 75). After all, “In any of the reconstructive techniques, whether history, philosophy, or personal narrative, the objective, according to Freud, is both to create alternatives to a confusing reality and to minimize the pain of experience. In other words, the project is an economic one” (Said 1975/1985, p. 94, emphasis added). PoliticalCompass.org shows us that the left-right paradigm is a onedimensional economic spectrum, which does not take into account the social axis. Using a Cartesian coordinate system, wherein x is the economic axis and y is the social axis, we can easily map four quadrants (and many nodal worlds). The two quadrants on the left are socialist, and the two quadrants on the right are capitalist, but the social axis pertains to the question of political liberty, wherein authoritarianism is at the top and libertarianism is at the bottom. I situate this project in the lower-left quadrant of the Political Compass; therefore, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is a movement toward, and an actualization of, anarcho-socialism, which is the obverse of racialized capitalism. According to Said (1975/1985), Freud’s (like Nietzsche’s) work is “radically anthropological” because he: regarded the task of accurately describing man [or woman] as fundamentally connected with three problems. One is the problem of biography as embodied in genealogical sequence…The second problem is that of language in relation to human reality…The third problem is that of dealing with man’s [or woman’s] fiction-making capabilitie s. (p. 158, emphasis added)

Said (1975/1985) shows how Nietszche prefigures Freud in his indexing of Oedipus as the one to begin “the insane [i.e., historically,

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fearfully, and perennially demanding] task of gaining knowledge” which “requires finding, first, a form of understanding that recognizes this truth [about humanity’s environmental alienation], and second, a language and a text in which to contain, express, realize, fulfill, or incarnate this knowledge” (p. 159). Nietzsche also writes about the unteachable, which, for Freud, is the unconscious. Psychoanalysis reveals that the human subject is neither natural nor cultural; rather, he or she is the desire, and failure, to transcend the antagonism between need and demand. Ironically, or masochistically, it is desiring itself (and not realizing objects of desire), which we find enjoyable. As a result of this complexity, “nature [the Other?] has to be interpreted, or read, just as man [or woman] must be read and interpreted” (Said 1975/1985, p. 160). Said (1975/1985) continues: This is a fundamental point which, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud was to make many times and in many different ways. Dreams, he says at some point, do not come into being with the intention of being understood: they simply are (and they are problematical), they unscrupulously yield to any method of granting visual representation to dream-thoughts, and their unity is simply an illusion. Therefore, like nature under the gaze of the scientist, dreams are hieroglyphics which can only be understood by schooling oneself in their peculiar mechanisms. Yet the most problematical thing about dreams is that everyone, even their interpreter, dreams them. How, then, does one separate the object of study from the object of experience–or from the experience tout court ? The relatively simple answer to this question is appealing indeed, and Freud seems not to have evaded it: first one experiences the object, then one analyzes it. (p. 160, emphasis in original)

Lacan names this object, with its “subjective distortion of reality” (Said 1975/1985, pp. 160–161): objet a. The objet a is an object-cause of desire, a part of the Other that we desire and fantasize about as something that we once had but somehow lost and/or as something that, once realized, will make us satisfied beyond imagination, which, of course, is impossible. This is the central object of study in psychoanalysis and it also the central object of experience for any human (i.e., desiring) subject. In fact, the praxis of psychoanalysis is premised on the

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analyst playing the part of the objet a for the analysand to cause their desire to speak, to free associate, to unravel how their unconscious is knotted together by a particular network of signifiers, which constitutes the subject’s symptomatic enjoyment. When it comes to dream interpretation, “Freud [too systematic a writer to deliver a slapdash text] does not choose between illusion and reality until the very end” because he “wishes his text to be the stage, the locale, where dream interpretation takes place” (Said 1975/1985, p. 161). Further, Freud’s text is ordered according to a planned dissociation, a dismemberment of image clusters (dreams) into fragments of thought…he deliberately avoids the instruments socially, culturally, and institutionally linked in the West to the practice of fiction, even as his material is…connected to that same practice. (p. 161)

Said (1975/1985) is less interested in Freud the scientist and more absorbed by Freud the writer, particularly how the latter authorizes psychoanalysis through his writing style: “Freud’s general theory of dreams and of the unconscious seems undeniably to have influenced the vocabulary of modern writing” (p. 163). This is not simply an argument about psychologization, or how psychoanalytic discourse qua the psy-complex has colonized our popular imagination even if most people confuse the unconscious with the subconscious. Rather, it is an argument about Freud’s influence as a modern writer. Said (1975/1985) argues that writing before Freud (i.e., the classical novel) was conventional; therefore, Freud begins a new, or modern, style of writing—“an amalgam of scientific and ‘traditional’ wisdom” (p. 163)— which displaces numerous conventions that were taken for granted: The Interpretation is not only an encyclopedia of dream interpretation, a theater for staging Freud’s scientific investigations: it is also a text whose intention is to begin discourse one of whose principal purposes is the conscious avoidance of certain specific textual conventions. The first of these conventions is supplementarity…A second convention is the adoption of a logic of structure and argument based on temporal and spatial

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forward movement…Third is the convention of adequacy…Fourth is the convention of finality…The fifth and final convention is that the unity, or integrity, of the text is maintained by a series of genealogical connections. (p. 162, emphasis in original)

Next, Said (1975/1985) highlights the function of the paternal metaphor—what Lacan (1966/2006) calls the “Name-of-the-Father”— in Freud’s writing: “Not only does [the role of the father] play a key role in Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus complex, but it also returns later in Freud’s historical essays, such as Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo” (p. 163, emphasis in original). It is worth noting that two roots for the signifier ‘author’ are father and creator. Said (1975/1985) adds, “There are strong echoes of paternity as well in his analyses of the superego, of culture and of religion” (p. 163). Further, Said (1975/1985) asserts that there is a structural equivalency between “Freud’s displacement and qualification in his psychology of the father’s role” and the “displacements and qualifications made in those genealogical, hierarchical, and consecutive conventions to be found in the idea of a text” (p. 163). Another name for this structural equivalency is “the killing of the father” (Lacan 1966/2006, p. 393), which is the ending of old (classical) conventions and the beginning of new (modern) conventions. In other words, by killing the father (i.e., tradition), Freud becomes the father (of psychoanalysis). The structure of a dream, of analysis, and of the Freudian text is that of the palimpsest: “sections of which remain vivid while others are almost invisible or partial” (Said 1975/1985, p. 165). There are eight German editions of The Interpretation of Dreams, for example. Said (1975/1985) points to the following sentence, Freud’s formula for the nature of dreams, to say something about the (unconscious) form of his text: “a dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (p. 166, emphasis in original). Here is Said’s (1975/1985) analysis of the Freudian text (or Freud’s unconscious) as being structured like a palimpsest:

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The typographical devices–the italics and the parentheses–used here to indicate Freud’s later changes, emphasize the proleptic as well as the recapitulatory aspects of the observation. In addition, the parentheses on the printed page represent the mechanisms of disguise and repression, not only by virtue of their presence, but also, paradoxically, by their delayed appearance. (p. 166)

In other words, The Interpretation of Dreams is a reflexive text, wherein Freud’s unconscious is hidden in plain sight, in the very form of the text itself. Across eight German editions, Freud edits, cuts, revises, rephrases, adds/removes, and censors his text on behalf of, and for, the Other. As Said (1975/1985) puts it, Freud rambles on the royal road to the unconscious (p. 164), and in this sense, the text reveals the desire of the analyst (writer/dreamer). Said (1975/1985) then shows a second textual consequence, that is, how Freud’s interpretation, in the realm of language, disrupts the dreamplot by transforming “the dream from images into words” (p. 167). Freud’s “antivisual” (p. 167) and non-sequential analytic method vis-àvis a dream’s “images and sequences, or plots” comes across as aniconic. Verbal interpretation reverse engineers the dream-work in order to get at the dream-thoughts. Furthermore, Freud’s “verbal interpretation of dreams operates at the sentence (or even phrase) level rather than at the paragraph level, even though the latter more closely parallels the overall organizational pattern of the dream” (p. 166). Echoing Lacan’s point about the logic of not-all—“a non-universal which admits of no exception” (Evans 1996, p. 222)—in Other jouissance, here is Said’s (1975/1985) definition of interpretation: “Interpretation is a field of understanding in which statements are dispersed but whose positions can be determined with regard only to certain (but not all ) other statements” (p. 169, emphasis added). And here is what he also says about how to break through tangles as “barriers to an additive sort of knowledge” (p. 169): “That which resists interpretation–the tangle of thoughts [i.e., knowledge of incest]–can be unraveled by the poet, but not without sacrificing Oedipus and, indeed, our pride and ignorance” (p. 170).

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Oedipus is “a break in the [family] sequence” just like a text is neither “the sum of its words added together” nor an author is “free of the unseemly implications of his [or her] writing” (Said 1975/1985, p. 171). The unconscious is an encounter with complexity, whose nonlinearity and multiplicity is disruptive for consciousness: “The collapse of the one into the many, of the genealogical line into a plurality of ‘unnatural’ relationship, of systematic linear analysis into a tangled skein of problems–all these leave sustained effects in consciousness” (p. 170). Freud does not merely theorize the unconscious, he embodies its complexity with his writing style. This is precisely why Said finds Freud, the modern writer, fascinating. By killing the father, or “paternal originality [or authority],” Freud (like Oedipus) is authorizing complexity as “a structure of theoretical understanding” (p. 173). Incest should not be read literally in this context, but metonymically as the intertextual, or adjacent, enjoyment of desiring, which has to do with the text being a polysexual tangle (p. 265). Or to put in Said’s (1975/1985) own words: In a material and legal way, the role of the father for a text is taken by the author, whose ideas, arguments, and conclusions are viewed as emerging sequentially in the writing, as being his offspring…Thus the text of the Interpretation can be traced back step by step to Freud’s own self-analysis and the discovery of his own Oedipus complex…Interpretation does away with, or kills, its author-father, Freud. (p. 172, emphasis in original)

What makes the praxis of psychoanalysis radical is its potential for democratic polyvocity: “Underlying the Interpretation is the analytic relationship between the dreamer and interpreter…that replaces the author’s univocity [with polyvocity]…Insofar as interpretation is concerned, then, Freud sees analysis as a joint venture that makes possible a mutual discourse” (Said 1975/1985, p. 174, emphasis in original). Said (1975/1985) adds: In the evolving discursive relationship between patient and analyst…the analyst becomes brother, interlocutor, discursive partner…Freud’s work accomplishes the institutionalization of its beginning intention, the effort to understand psychological reality as something essentially available only to interpretation, and yet available to neither direct representability (one

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cannot draw pictures of it, nor mimetically portray it in language) nor univocal statement. A beginning intention, therefore, is in constant need of reworking: it is not, like the “author” an origin to which, by virtue of precedence and unchanging being, everything can be referred for explanation. Above all, an intention in the psychoanalytic discourse is the immediate practical application of the mutuality between [humans] which ensues when a repressive central authority [e.g., the patriarchal primal horde or racialized capitalism] is removed. (p. 174)

Even though Freud was unhappy with The Interpretation of Dreams “as a written textual object” (p. 176), Said (1975/1985) argues that the text’s “lack of form” or its “indeterminacy…is necessarily congruent with a reality largely unknown (the unconscious) and always incompletely grasped by language” (p. 176); or as Lacan would put it: The Other, like the subject, is also “barred” or “incomplete” (Fink 1995, p. 195). Is psychoanalysis a Weltanschauung ? Many (if not most) psychoanalysts will answer with a resounding no even though “Freud could not but recognize that the psychoanalytic viewpoint was in fact just such an alternative available to the culture” (Said 1975/1985, p. 176). Furthermore, Freud’s “texts established not only a precedent but also a sustaining structure of language; and it was this language that determined the bounds of what was psychoanalytically possible to say” (p. 176, emphasis in original). Freud’s method of interpretation is premised on the following: “the materiality of language…further objectifies dreams, draws them out from the recesses of subjectivity, where they guard sleep, and admits them into discourse” (Said 1975/1985, p. 178). For Said (1975/1985): the images of a dream, the interpretive verbal transcription of the dream, and the attendant analysis belong to different orders of substitution. While taking different forms, each bears a trace of the unconscious [but does not so much make clear what the unconscious is as begin and continue the traces of the unconscious in language ]: the image as distortion, the transcription as pseudocontinuity or plot, the analysis as thoughts leading to a (supposed) wish. (pp. 178–179, emphasis added)

In conclusion, Freud invented a system of thought (i.e., psychoanalysis) “which no image in words could adequately represent” (p. 229),

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wherein the human is “the possibility of an alternative, or a second time” (p. 262). In the next chapter, I will show how Freud’s method of dream interpretation unconsciously influenced Said’s (1978/2003) method of contrapuntal interpretation in Orientalism. Here is Said (1975/1985) reminding us of Freud’s method: Freud’s text is a redistribution of language according to a dynamic of dissociation and association. In less abstract terms, this means that Freud takes the images of a dream and dissolves them by putting them into words, then allows these words to make associations with other words and ideas, and so on until a new form of understanding is achieved. (p. 264)

References Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. De Saussure, F. (1916/2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Evans, D. (1996). An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject: Between language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. (1975/1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Freud, S. (1899/2010). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York, NY: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1909/1961). Five lectures on psycho-analysis (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Freud, S. (1919/2003). The uncanny (D. McLintock, Trans.). London, UK: Penguin. Freud, S. (1920/1966). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Hassan, I. (2001). From postmodernism to postmodernity: The local/global context. Philosophy and Literature, 25 (1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1353/ phl.2001.0011.

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Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, J. (1966/2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1973/2004). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London, UK: Karnac. Said, E. W. (1975/1985). Beginnings: Intention and method . London, UK: Granta. Said, E. W. (1978/2003). Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin.

3 Orientalism

Orientalism is Edward Said’s (1978/2003) magnum opus; despite being his third book, it is certainly his most widely read and cited text, and, as established earlier, it is also considered the text that begins postcolonialism as a field of study. What interests me in this chapter is the fact that Sigmund Freud (who undoubtedly influenced Said) is, more or less, repressed in the text; Said makes significant use of key psychoanalytic concepts, such as latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-content without any direct engagement with Freud (1899/2010). This is strange because three years earlier, in Beginnings, Said (1975/1985) dedicated a whole section (pp. 158–182) to analyzing not only Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams but also some of his other texts: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and so on. Furthermore, Said (1975/1985) directly engages with the notions of latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream-content in Beginnings (pp. 179–180), so indisputably he is both interested in Freud and knowledgeable about psychoanalysis. Therefore, why is Freud repressed in Orientalism? I will argue that it is a function of a theoretical antagonism within the text between Foucault and Freud, wherein Said ends up siding with Foucault over Freud, © The Author(s) 2021 R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_3

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which is paradoxical because Foucault (1976/1978) rejected the “repressive hypothesis” and yet Said repressed Freud—therefore, disproving Foucault by unconsciously aligning his method with Freud’s through his use of contrapuntal interpretation. Perhaps this is why Said abandons Foucault after Orientalism, and returns to Freud toward the end of his life? Beginning-again as it were. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of my central argument, I want to unpack what Said means by Orientalism and how he goes about studying it through colonial discourse analysis, or what should, more accurately, be described as contrapuntal interpretation. I define contrapuntal interpretation as a critique of both the ideology and materiality of modernity/coloniality, or what I have been calling the apparatus of racialized capitalism, of which Orientalism is a part. Said (1978/2003) is critical of the apparatus (i.e., ideology and materiality) of Orientalism. As an ideology, Orientalism is both a discourse and a fantasy. I use the term ideology, following Žižek (1989), even though Said (1978/2003) prefers the Gramscian notion of “cultural hegemony” (p 7), wherein ruling ideas are a function of consent, and not of a dominating ruling class. My use of the term ideology is more psychoanalytic than Marxist: “In ideology, fantasy is the screen that supports discourse” (Beshara, 2019, p. 10). Said (1978/2003) writes that Orientalism “is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient” (p. 6), and this is not my argument. I am using fantasy, as a technical term from psychoanalysis (cf. Beshara, 2019, pp. 40–50), to denote two contradictory functions of fantasy-as-screen: (1) the fantasy-screen that conceals and (2) the fantasy-screen onto which one projects his or her desires. The Orient, in Orientalist fantasy, both conceals the Real Orient, which can never be represented, and is a screen onto which the following is projected from the European imagination: “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 1). This psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, particularly “sexual fantasy” (p. 190), is implicit in Said’s method of contrapuntal interpretation as this quote shows:

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the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections. (p. 8, emphasis added)

What is Orientalism? Said (1978/2003) conceptualizes Orientalism using signifiers from Foucault—“to whose work [he is] greatly indebted” (p. 23)—such as: “discourse” (p. 3), “discursive formation” (p. 23), “archive” (p. 41), and “apparatus” (p. 204). But, most significantly, Said (1978/2003) is careful to point out that Orientalism is not “just another idea” because of its “material effectiveness” (p. 23). Whereas Foucault conceived of the subject as an effect of discourse, Said has a different notion of subjectivity (cf. Pannian, 2016), a psychoanalytic one: I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism…Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author counts for very little; empirically, in the case of Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere else) I find this not to be so. (p. 23)

By Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) means three different but interrelated things (academic, imaginative, and historical/material): Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism…Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”…Orientalism [is] a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (pp. 2–3)

Said’s (1978/2003) principal argument in the book (with my Lacanian twist) is that the apparatus of Orientalism says very little about the Orient and Orientals as objets a, but it certainly reveals so much

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about the projective identifications of Orientalist subjects. Accordingly, Orientalism is: a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. (Said, 1978/2003, p. 12, emphasis in original)

Further, Said (1978/2003) makes a distinction between classical Orientalism, or “representations of the Orient before the last third of the eighteenth century” (p. 22), and modern Orientalism (p. 122), which coincides with Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition (1798–1801). Classical Orientalism can be traced back to the imaginative geography established in Ancient Greece exemplified in texts like Homer’s The Iliad , Aeschylus’s The Persians, and Euripides’s The Bacchae (Said, 1978/2003, p. 56). Here is Said’s (1978/2003) definition of imaginative geography (cf. spatial colonial difference): this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way

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of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our landbarbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.” (p. 54)

Said (1978/2003) shows that both imaginative geography along with “historical knowledge” (p. 55; cf. temporal colonial difference) Orientalize the Orient, that is, they are not only forms of discursive othering (us v. them), they are also materially oppressive and violent since they are sustained by a dehumanizing fantasy (superior being v. inferior nonbeing): Orientalism is never far from…the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures [who are presumed to be barbarian and/or primitive]. (p. 7, emphasis added)

We see this Orientalizing of the Orient in Ancient Greek imaginative geography: “Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 57), but Orientalism as an academic field can be traced back to the Church Council of Vienne in 1312 (pp. 49– 50). For this reason, I argued in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019) that while the discourse of modern Orientalism began in 1798, colonial fantasies are much older as a result of the workings of imaginative geography (spatial colonial difference) and historical knowledge (temporal colonial difference) in European culture. I traced the fantasy of Islamophobia to 1492, for example, because of the “transference from the Muslim Other to the Amerindian Other” (Beshara, 2019, p. 42). On this note, I want to add that while the pre-colonial ‘Americas’ are technically West of Europe, they are actually part of the Orient within the logic of Orientalism for two reasons: (1) After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a new, presumably faster, sea route to

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India, Christopher Columbus et al. reached the shore of Haití (Española) on December 5, 1942. Indigenous people in the Americas are still called Indians as a result of this colonial legacy. For this reason, some Indigenous people today prefer the term ‘Indian’ over ‘Native American’ because it signifies the ignorance of the colonizers. Not mentioning the racist connotation of the term ‘native’ (or natural) as the opposite of ‘cultural.’ (2) The colonial imaginative geography works in the inverse direction, too. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) shows, the phrase “Indian country” in US history and present reality is used to refer to “enemy territory” (p. 56), whether in Vietnam (p. 148) or Iraq (p. 193). Not mentioning the Navy SEAL’s use of the code name “Geronimo” for their target: Osama bin Laden (p. 56). The metonymic displacement exposes the following signifying chain, which is operating unconsciously as the logic of coloniality: ‘Indian’ (Oriental) → ‘enemy’ (outside) ∴ ‘Indigenous’ (Geronimo) → ‘terrorist’ (bin Laden). Consequently, since there is no Real Orient, the signifier ‘Orient’ does not simply refer to cultures East of Europe. The Orient signifies ‘barbarism’, according to the discourse of Orientalism; that is, ‘inferior’ non-European cultures in toto that are outside the ‘civilized’ center of Europe. Orientals then are ‘primitives’ or ‘subhumans’ who are supposedly lagging behind the temporality of European modernity (i.e., the ‘present’). Said (1978/2003) implicitly acknowledges these links, which is why he uses the signifiers ‘Oriental’ and ‘Other’ interchangeably throughout the text; the Imaginary Orient in particular is a substitute for Symbolic-Real Otherness in general: Orient(al) → Other. One of the most radical concepts introduced by Said (1978/2003) in his contrapuntal interpretation of Orientalism is that of exteriority, which is the equivalent of extimacy (extimité ) in psychoanalysis: “Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other–like a foreign body, a parasite” (Miller, 1988, p. 123). I say radical because exteriority is not outside in Agamben’s (1998) sense of politics as the division between outside (bare life) and inside (good life). Rather, it names the psychosocial reality of subjectivity, or the exteriority of the unconscious as the Other’s discourse. Put differently, the conscious interior (ego) is monological or self-referential while the exterior unconscious

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($) is dialogical or relational (cf. Pavón Cuéllar, 2010). Fantasy ($ ♦ a), as the link between the subject and the Other, is what makes exteriority possible. Orientalism, as a fantasy, can be located in the “surface” of Orientalist texts (p. 20), or their form, because the unconscious is not a function of some depth in the psyche, it is hidden in plain sight in the “fabric” of discourse (Said, 1978/2003, p. 24; cf. point de capiton in Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 681). The pop psychological notion of the subconscious is often confused with psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, a distinction that even Freud (1899/2010, p. 610) addressed; the former signifier (subconscious) implies a region below consciousness, while the latter (unconscious) literally signifies not-consciousness, a negativity. Here is Said’s (1978/2003) thick description of exteriority and its relation to the problem of representing the Real Orient: my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes….Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation: as early as Aeschylus’s play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus’s case, grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of representation in The Persians obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient. This evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style,

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figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux [for lack of something more desirable], for the poor Orient. “Sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten werden,” [They cannot represent themselves, they have to be represented] as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not “truth” but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. (pp. 20–21, emphasis in original)

In Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I have written about how “the link…between transmodern exteriority and the decolonial unconscious is extremely important as the foundation for what I have been calling decolonial psychoanalysis” (p. 62, emphasis in original). In addition to Said’s (1978/2003) notion of exteriority and Lacan’s concept of extimacy (as cited in Miller, 1988), Dussel (2002) has some important insights to contribute here regarding the exteriority of the transmodern Other: “trans”-modernity affirms “from without ” the essential components of modernity’s own excluded cultures in order to develop a new civilization for the twenty-first century. Accepting this massive exteriority to European modernity allows one to comprehend that there are cultural moments situated “outside” of modernity. (p. 224, emphasis in original)

I see a theoretical connection between psychoanalysis and postcolonialism vis-à-vis the Other. The Oriental Other is both an Imaginary other (identified in images) and a Symbolic Other (signified in words). Said’s (1978/2003) focus in his book is on the latter: textual representations of the Oriental Other. If the unconscious is the Other’s

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discourse, then the (post)colonial unconscious is the (post)modern Other’s discourse: Orientalism (Beshara, 2019, p. 64). The counterpoint to this axiom is: the decolonial unconscious is the transmodern Other’s discourse. We can then conclude that the Real Orient, or what Said (1978/2003) calls the “real thing as ‘the Orient’” (p. 21, emphasis in original), cannot be represented because the Real, or the Orient as das Ding (the Thing), “is essentially that which resists symbolization and thus resists the dialectization characteristic of the symbolic order, in which one thing can be substituted for another” (Fink, 1995, p. 92). This applies to the Real Occident, too, of course. Said’s (1978/2003) point is that the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’ are both charged (or cathected) but asymmetrical signifiers (i.e., the Orient is inferior) within the apparatus of Orientalism because Orientalist representation is premised on a signifier (Orient) representing the (Oriental) subject for another signifier (exotic, mysterious, dangerous, etc.). Representation will always fail, we know that much from Kant (1781/1998), because of that Real (unbridgeable) gap between noumena and phenomena; however, if liberation is our praxis then Orientals must represent themselves as subjects without falling into the Orientalist trap of being representatives for the Orient. This form of “cultural resistance” is precisely what Said (1993) explores in Culture and Imperialism, his sequel to Orientalism, which responds to Orientalist misrepresentations with Oriental self-representations, thereby, answering his earlier question: “how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 24)?. Furthermore, Said’s own writings precisely enact this style of cultural resistance through critical self-representation, which can also be qualified as reflexivity or positionality: where one is coming from and where one is located. One of Said’s (1994) books, Representations of the Intellectual , deals directly with the problem of representation (i.e., what to represent and how to represent it) for the dissenting secular intellectual. Sixteen years earlier, in Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) wrote about the personal/political dimension as an aspect of his contemporary reality, particularly his attempt with the book, following Gramsci, to “inventory

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the traces” of Euro-colonial culture upon him as an “Oriental subject” (p. 25), who grew up in two British colonies (Palestine and Egypt). Similarly, I hope with this book, which is an affiliative praxis, to represent myself (as a secular critic) and my dissenting ideas without being seen as a representative for where I come from (Cairo, Egypt, North Africa), where I am currently located (New Mexico, USA, North America), or anything else for that matter (critical psychology, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism). For Freud (1899/2010), the problem of representation was how the dream-work process represents latent dream-thoughts to the dreamer in the form of manifest dream-content: unconscious words → conscious images. Moving on to my thesis that Freud is repressed in Said’s (1978/2003) text Orientalism, I will illustrate my evidence for this repression and my reasoning as to why he is repressed. Said (1978/2003) cites Freud exactly three times in his book: “a Freudian Orient” (p. 22), “Freudianism” (p. 43), and “the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud” (Abdel Malek, 1963, as cited in Said, 1978, p. 97). And yet the first unit in the third chapter is titled, “Latent and Manifest Orientalism” (pp. 201–225). I have touched on this issue in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019, pp. 44–45), but I will say more here. First, let us establish Said’s (1978/2003) distinction between latent Orientalism and manifest Orientalism, which is central for an elaboration of contrapuntal interpretation: The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. (p. 206, emphasis in original)

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Said’s (1978/2003) distinction is undoubtedly based on Freud’s (1899/2010) differentiation between “latent dream-thoughts” and “manifest dream-content” in a dream. Latent dream-thoughts are the unconscious thoughts behind the images, or manifest dream-content, that we remember from a dream. For Freud (1899/2010), “a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (p. 183, emphasis in original). Freud (1899/2010) calls the process of latent dreamthoughts becoming manifest dream-content: the “dream-work” (p. 201). The reverse of the dream-work is “interpretation” (Freud, 1899/2010), which is the analysis of manifest dream-content, or the translation of images into words through free association, in order to expose the latent dream-thoughts, or the unconscious wish, that is disguised in the dream. Therefore, the method of contrapuntal interpretation, used by Said (1978/2003), analyzes manifest Orientalist-content in order to encounter latent Orientalist-thoughts. In other words, contrapuntal interpretation reveals the unconscious wish of Orientalism, which is disguised by the Orientalist-work. It should come as no surprise that Said (1978/2003) described colonial empires as “great systems of systematic repression” (p. 251). Orientalism, as an apparatus, represses the Orient and Orientals both psychoanalytically and politically, and this is precisely what Said’s (1978/2003) book shows in detail. If my thesis is not convincing enough, here is another unconscious Freudian trace in Said’s (1978/2003) text: in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence. This fact of substitution and displacement, as we must call it, clearly places on the Orientalist himself a certain pressure to reduce the Orient in his work, even after he has devoted a good deal of time to elucidating and exposing it. (pp. 208–209, emphasis added)

Said’s (1978/2003) gendering of the Orientalist as a male is neither accidental nor sexist, but actually describes the colonial (patriarchal, racist, sexist) logic of modern Orientalism, which stereotypically feminizes the Orient and Orientals:

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But there were other uses for latent Orientalism. If that group of ideas allowed one to separate Orientals from advanced, civilizing powers, and if the “classical” Orient served to justify both the Orientalist and his disregard of modern Orientals, latent Orientalism also encouraged a peculiarly (not to say invidiously) male conception of the world …The Oriental male was considered in isolation from the total community in which he lived and which many Orientalists…have viewed with something resembling contempt and fear. Orientalism itself, furthermore, was an exclusively male province; like so many professional guilds during the modern period, it viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. This is especially evident in the writing of travelers and novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing. (p. 207, emphasis added)

Therefore, we can conclude our contrapuntal interpretation with the following formula: Orientalism is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish to dominate the Orient and Orientals sexually and politically. This is the unity of academic, imaginative, and historical/material Orientalisms as an apparatus. A final question: why is Freud repressed in Orientalism (the text)? In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) represses Freud because of his strategic alliance with Foucault, who provides Said with many conceptuals tools for analyzing Orientalism as a discursive formation and, more importantly, as power/knowledge. At stake, here are two conceptions of subjectivity: the Nietzschean-Foucaultian subject of power (who is an effect of discourse) and the Freudo-Lacanian subject of desire (who is divided by language). Alongside these two conceptions of subjectivity are two formulations of law: law as productive and law as repressive, respectively. While Said (1978/2003) is clearly indebted to some of Foucault’s conceptual tools, he is unconsciously aligned with FreudoLacanian notions of subjectivity and law. I have already established Said’s (1978/2003) disagreement with Foucault regarding subjectivity, but what about law? In part two of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1976/1978) illustrates why he rejects the “repressive hypothesis” (pp. 16–49) in his “archeology of psychoanalysis” (p. 130). For Foucault

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(1976/1978), psychoanalysis is a secularized ritual of confession (p. 113), wherein sex is strategically repressed to maintain a certain power relation. In other words, for Foucault (1976/1978), the concept of sexual repression is, in fact, a form of political oppression: “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression” (p. 6). To be fair, Freud (1920/1966) is ahead of his time when he writes about: children being “polymorphously perverse” (p. 259), the distinction between “sexuality and reproduction” (p. 386), and the difference between “pleasure” and “satisfaction” (p. 388). However, he is very much a product of his time when he describes homosexuals as “perverse” (Freud, 1920/1966, p. 258). In psychoanalysis, the Name-of-the-Father, barring the mOther’s desire, lays down the law for the child, which is how he or she is subjectified—by entering into language and becoming alienated in it. In French, the Lacanian expression le nom du père implies both the ‘name’ and the ‘no’ of the father. The Name-of-the-Father signifies the prohibitive ‘no’ that establishes the “incest taboo” (Freud, 1913/1946) as a universal (superegoic) law of human subjectivity. The parameters of what we can and cannot do as children, vis-à-vis the Other, is the formation of the unconscious through repression. So while Said (1978/2003) agrees with Foucault that Orientalism, as a discursive formation, can be productive, he also shows how it can be inhibiting or repressive. It is true that Said (1978/2003) conceptualizes Orientalism, following Foucault, as a discourse or an apparatus, but he also points to its unconscious fantasmatic dimensions (e.g., latent Orientalism) vis-à-vis the Orient and Orientals. Further, for Said, Orientals are not mere effects of the discourse of Orientalism, they are subjects (like Said) who can and must represent themselves. In other words, they are subjects of desire or dislocated subjects (Said, 1993, p. 28), and not merely subjects of power. Therefore, Said’s (1978/2003) repression of Freud paradoxically affirms his affiliation with psychoanalysis. In sum, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis acknowledges the importance of theorizing (and decolonizing) power/knowledge in the apparatus of racialized capitalism as a step toward practicing (and

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prefiguring) a transmodern form of desiring/enjoyment: what I call “divine-jouissance” (Beshara, 2019, p. 61, emphasis in original). In comparing Fanon with Foucault, this is what Said (2001) had to say in 1985, seven years after the publication of Orientalism: what is present in Fanon’s work and absent in the early Foucault is the sense of active commitment. Ten years after Madness and Civilization in 1972, Foucault was involved in a television debate with Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky spoke about his own liberation ideals, notions about justice, and so forth, Foucault backed away and essentially admitted that he believed in no positive truths, ideas, or ideals. And this was not true of Fanon, whose commitments to revolutionary change, solidarity, and liberation were very powerful and appealing to such as myself. Foucault’s work was rather a matter of a quite remarkable ingenuity and acuity of philosophical perception. (p. 40, emphasis in original)

Culture and Imperialism is Said’s (1993) sequel to his Orientalism trilogy: Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), and Covering Islam (1981). Culture and Imperialism was already prefigured in Orientalism: “There is still a general essay to be written on imperialism and culture” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 24). The main criticism that Said received for Orientalism is that while he diligently deconstructed Orientalist representations of the Orient and Orientals, the self-representations of Orientals were absent from the text. Said (1993) wrote Culture and Imperialism to address this criticism: What I left out of Orientalism was that response to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World. Along with armed resistance in places as diverse as nineteenth-century Algeria, Ireland, and Indonesia, there also went considerable efforts in cultural resistance almost everywhere, the assertions of nationalist identifications, and, in the political realm, the creation of associations and parties whose common goal was self-determination and national independence. (p. xii, emphasis in original)

By culture, Said (1993) means two things:

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First of all it means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure…Second, and almost imperceptibly, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. (pp. xii–xiii)

Said’s (1993) twofold definition of culture is a nuanced development of his earlier definition in Orientalism, which is based on the Gramscian distinction between civil society and political society: “Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 7). Cultural resistance can be counter-hegemonic or decolonial, according to Said (1993) in three ways: One, of course, is the insistence on the right to see the community’s history whole, coherently, integrally. Restore the imprisoned nation to itself…The concept of the national language is central, but without the practice of a national culture–from slogans to pamphlets and newspapers, from folktales and heroes to epic poetry, novels, and drama–the language is inert; national culture organizes and sustains communal memory…it reinhabits the landscape using restored ways of life, heroes, heroines, and exploits; it formulates expressions and emotions of pride as well as defiance, which in turn form the backbone of the principal national independence parties. Local slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, prison memoirs form a counterpoint to the Western powers’ monumental histories, official discourses, and panoptic quasi-scientific viewpoint…Second is the idea that resistance, far from being merely a reaction to imperialism, is an alternative way of conceiving human history. It is particularly important to see how much this alternative reconception is based on breaking down the barriers between cultures. Certainly, as the title of a fascinating book has it, writing back to the metropolitan cultures, disrupting the European narratives of the Orient and Africa, replacing them with either a more playful or a more powerful new narrative style is a major component

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in the process…Third is a noticeable pull away from separatist nationalism toward a more integrative view of human community and human liberation. (pp. 215–216, emphasis in original)

Cultural resistance is essential in contrapuntal psychoanalysis. Contrapuntal, incidentally, is another name for transmodernity (i.e., modernity and its exterior counterpoint). According to Said (1993): By looking at the different experiences [of metropolitan and formerly colonized societies] contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility. (p. 18)

In my own words, contrapuntal psychoanalysis accounts for both the colonial psychoanalysis of Freud (cf. psychoanalysis as decolonial Judaism in Frosh, 2020) and the decolonial psychoanalysis of Fanon. It is transmodern in that it includes the best of modernity from the perspective of its exteriority (i.e., non-European cultures). Liberation does not mean the oppressed replacing the oppressors, it means the oppressed leading the way toward the actualization of a socially just world for everyone. Therefore, liberation implies decolonial psychoanalysts showing (post)colonial psychoanalysts an Other way of theorizing and practicing psychoanalysis. In the following excerpt, Said (1993) compares Fanon (the decolonial psychoanalyst) with Freud (the colonial psychoanalyst): As Freud excavated the subterranean foundations of the edifice of Western reason…so Fanon reads Western humanism by transporting the large hectoring bolus of “the Greco-Latin pedestal” bodily to the colonial wasteland, where “this artificial sentinel is turned into dust.” It cannot survive juxtaposition with its quotidian debasement by European settlers. In the subversive gestures of Fanon’s writing is a highly conscious man deliberately as well as ironically repeating the tactics of the culture he believes has oppressed him. The difference between Freud…on the one hand and Fanon’s “native intellectual” on the other is that the belated colonial thinker fixes his predecessors geographically–they are of the

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West–the better to liberate their energies from the oppressing cultural matrix that produced them. By seeing them antithetically as intrinsic to the colonial system and at the same time potentially at war with it, Fanon performs an act of closure on the empire and announces a new era. National consciousness, he says, “must now be enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words, into [real] humanism.” (pp. 268–269, emphasis in original)

References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. HellerRoazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Beshara, R. K. (2019). Decolonial psychoanalysis: Towards critical Islamophobia studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous peoples’ history of the United States for young people. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dussel, E. (2002). World-system and “trans”-modernity. Nepantla: Views from South, 3(2), 221–244. Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject: Between language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. (1976/1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1, an introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon. Freud, S. (1899/2010). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York, NY: Basic Books. Freud, S. (1913/1946). Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics (A. A. Brill, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Freud, S. (1920/1966). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Frosh, S. (2020). Psychoanalysis as decolonial Judaism. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 25 (2), 174–193. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-020-00163-8. Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, J. (1966/2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

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Miller, J. (1988). Extimité. Prose Studies, 11(3), 121–131. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01440358808586354. Pannian, P. (2016). Edward Said and the question of subjectivity. London, UK: Palgrave. Pavón Cuéllar, D. (2010). From the conscious interior to an exterior unconscious: Lacan, discourse analysis and social psychology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Said, E. W. (1975/1985). Beginnings: Intention and method . London, UK: Granta. Said, E. W. (1978/2003). Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin. Said, E. W. (1979). The question of Palestine. New York, NY: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1981). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world . New York, NY: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1994). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. New York, NY: Vintage. Said, E. W. (2001). Power, politics, and culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (G. Viswanathan, Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon. Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

4 Freud and the Non-European

Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s (1939/1967) last book, published in the year he opted for assisted dying after losing a battle with oral cancer. Freud and the Non-European is Said’s (2003) last book, which is on Moses and Monotheism, and published in the year Said lost his life to leukemia after an eleven-year struggle. Both books exemplify “late style” (Said, 2006) and are considered controversial for different reasons, but they are worthy of our attention as the final words of two great theorists and practitioners who were critical of modernity and coloniality, respectively. It is significant that Said began with Freud in 1975, repressed him in 1978, but then Freud gloriously returned in 2001. Freud and the Non-European is a transcription of Said’s 2001 talk at the Freud Museum London after he was disinvited from the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna earlier that year. Here is the reason given by Johann August Schülein, President of the Freud Society of Vienna, for canceling Said’s talk: “A lot of members of our society told us they can’t accept that we have invited an engaged Palestinian who also throws stones against Israeli soldiers” (as cited in Smith, 2001). Said’s response: “It was a pebble…There was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile © The Author(s) 2021 R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_4

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away…Freud was hounded out of Vienna because he was a Jew…Now I am hounded out because I’m a Palestinian” (as cited in Smith, 2001). Moses and Monotheism comprises three parts: the first two essays were previously published in the journal Imago, but Freud began writing the third, and final, essay under extreme circumstances, which had “sometimes contradictory and even disorganizing, destabilizing effects” (p. 28): his battle with cancer, his ambivalent relationship with the Catholic Church in Vienna as far as the practice of psychoanalysis is concerned, and the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938. Consequently, the third part of the book begins with two different prefaces: one written before March 1938 in Vienna and another written in June 1938 from London. Reading Freud’s reflexive account reminded me of my 2014 visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, which is the location of his Berggasse apartment house from 1891 to 1938. The visitor is struck by how hauntingly empty the Museum is; I particularly remember Freud’s correspondence with US Ambassador William C. Bullitt and Princess Marie Bonaparte asking them for help with securing an exit from Nazi-occupied Vienna for himself, his family, his belongings, etc. Here is Freud’s (1939/1967) account in his own words: Formerly I lived under the protection of the Catholic Church and feared that by publishing the essay I should lose that protection and that the practitioners and students of psychoanalysis in Austria would be forbidden their work. Then, suddenly, the German invasion broke in on us and Catholicism proved to be, as the Bible has it, but a “broken reed.” In the certainty of persecution–now not only because of my work, but also because of my “race”–I left, with many friends, the city which from early childhood, through seventy-eight years, had been a home to me. (pp. 69–70)

Moses and Monotheism should be considered Freud’s sequel to Totem and Taboo, for it certainly builds theoretically upon the latter: That conviction I acquired a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my book on Totem and Taboo (in 1912), and it has only become stronger since. From then on I have never doubted that religious phenomena are to

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be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of long forgotten important happenings in the primaeval history of the human family, that they owe their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their effect on [hu]mankind from the historical truth they contain. (Freud, 1939/1967, p. 71, emphasis in original)

I will try to summarize the book’s main arguments before reflecting on Said’s talk: To the well-known duality of that history–two peoples [the Neo-Egyptians and the other Jews] who fuse together to form one nation [the people of Israel], two kingdoms [Kingdom of Israel and Kingdom of Judah] into which this nation divides, two names [Aton and Jahve] for the Deity in the source of the Bible–we add two new ones: the founding of two new religions [an Egyptian one and a Jewish one], the first one ousted by the second and yet reappearing victorious, two founders of religions [Egyptian Moses and Midianite Moses], who are both called by the same name Moses and whose personalities [masterful, hot-tempered, even violent and the most patient and “meek” of all men] we have to separate from each other. And all these dualities are necessary consequences of the first: one section of the people [the Neo-Egyptians] passed through what may properly be termed a traumatic experience which the other was spared. (Freud, 1939/1967, pp. 64–65, emphasis in original)

This duality, or two-ness, which Freud repeats regarding his reconstruction of Jewish history mirrors the subject’s division between unconscious and ego. The link in Freud’s psychosocial analysis between individual psychology and mass psychology is, in his view, to be found in the connection between neurosis and religion. For Freud (1939/1967), monotheistic religions in general and Judaism in particular, can be understood through the lens of “traumatic neurosis” (p. 84), which he explains phylogenetically as an “archaic heritage” or “archaic inheritance” (p. 125). Archaic inheritance is the inheritance of “not only [thought] dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experiences of former generations” (p. 127). Freud (1939/1967) adds that:

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there exists an inheritance of memory–traces of what our forefathers experienced, quite independently of direct communication and of the influence of education…an old tradition still alive in a people, of the formation of a national character, it is such an inherited tradition, and not one carried on by word of mouth, that I have in mind. (p. 127)

Freud (1939/1967) is careful to distinguish between his notion of archaic inheritance and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious: “I do not think that much is to be gained by introducing the concept of the ‘collective’ unconscious–the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a general possession of mankind” (p. 170). Before I reconstruct Freud’s account of Moses—a figure that Freud (albeit an atheist) seems to be identified with because of his “audacity, persistence and courage” (Said, 2003, p. 15)—and his influence on not only Judaism in particular but also monotheism in general, I would like to say something about Freud’s method of (re)construction as opposed to his earlier one of interpretation. According to Freud’s (1937/1964) paper, Constructions in Analysis, the task of the analyst “is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it” (pp. 258–259, emphasis in original). He continues, “His [or her] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice” (Freud, 1937/1964, p. 259). However, there is a limit to the analogy: “for the archaeologist the reconstruction is the aim and end of his [or her] endeavours while for analysis the construction is only a preliminary labour” (Freud, 1937/1964, p. 260). What of the difference between interpretation and (re)construction? “‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his [or her] early history that he [or she] has forgotten” (Freud, 1937/1964, p. 261). Much more can be said about (re)construction, but for the sake of brevity, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939/1967) utilizes this psychoanalytic method of reconstruction in his selective reading of history to get at what he calls “the kernel of historical truth”

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(p. 14), which leads me to a second methodological distinction between “material truth” and “historical truth” (cf. Freud, 1937/1964). In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939/1967) writes, “I too should credit the believer’s solution with containing the truth; it is not, however, the material truth, but an historical truth” (p. 166, emphasis added). The believer’s solution that Freud is referring to is this: “the idea of an Only God has had this overwhelming effect on mankind because it is part of eternal truth, which, hidden for so long, has at last come to light and has swept all before it” (pp. 165–166). For Freud (1939/1967), the believer’s solution is not materially true from an atheistic viewpoint, but it is historically true in the sense that “in primeval times there was one person who must needs appear gigantic and who, raised to the status of a deity, returned to the memory of men” (p. 166). This person is the primeval father of the horde, he is the Mosaic God (i.e., Aton) and Moses himself, and he is also Freud (the father of psychoanalysis). In other words, “the father-identification” (p. 101) is historically true even if God’s existence is not materially true. Despite Freud’s (1939/1967) atheism, he chose to write his last book on the Egyptian Moses, who demanded “only belief and a life of truth and justice (Maat)” (p. 63). According to Freud (1939/1967), the Egyptian Moses was murdered and repressed by his people, who forgot that he was the original founder of “a true monotheism” (p. 61), which repeats Akhenaten’s Atenism. Freud is clearly attracted to the character of Moses and what he represents to the Jewish people. At the same time, Freud is repulsed by the Midianite Moses and Jahve (the volcano god). For Freud (1939/1967), the abstract Mosaic God, who must not be visually represented, is a “more spiritual conception of God, a single God who embraces the whole world, one as all-loving as he was all-powerful, who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice [maat]” (p. 61). First, Judaism’s aniconism clearly resonates with the emphasis on language (over images) in psychoanalysis. Second, Freud (1939/1967) makes a compelling argument for aniconism as a sign of spiritual progress: Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one that has more significance than is at first obvious. It is the prohibition against making an image

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of God, which means the compulsion to worship an invisible God. I surmise that in this point Moses had surpassed the Aton religion in strictness. Perhaps he meant to be consistent; his God was to have neither a name nor a countenance. The prohibition was perhaps a fresh precaution against magic malpractices. If this prohibition was accepted, however, it was bound to exercise a profound influence. For it signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely an instinctual renunciation [or renunciation of the drives]. (p. 144, emphasis added)

I would add that this renunciation of the drives is essential for what I have termed divine-jouissance in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019), an Other jouissance founded in Maat as historical truth and social justice. Further, I find Freud’s model of archaic inheritance qua traumatic neurosis of great import for thinking about the memory of colonial trauma, particularly genocide and slavery—and every related form of oppression and violence that these two signifiers entail. I am thinking of how “what is sacred was originally nothing but the perpetuated will of the [modern/colonial father-sons]” (Freud, 1939/1967, p. 156). Freud clarifies, and in a way seems to be echoed years later by Agamben, that “‘Sacer ’ does not only mean ‘sacred,’ blessed,’ but also something that we can only translate by ‘accursed,’ ‘worthy of disgust’” (p. 156, emphasis in original). Freud (1939/1967) is referring to “sacred prohibition” (p. 154); in other words, the contemporary question of: what is prohibited under racialized capitalism today as a function of the will of the historical and ongoing modern/colonial father-sons (i.e., the rich 1%)? The answer becomes clear when we bear in mind the movement that is sweeping across not only the US but also the world after the murder of George Floyd (a tipping point in the colonial unconscious), namely: Black Lives Matter. This movement is a response, a counter-cathexis, to the unconscious will of the modern/colonial father-sons: “Black lives do not matter.” This is the fantasy of dirt (Kovel, 1970/1984), or the violent logic of coloniality, sustaining the oppressive rhetoric of modernity: “All lives matter!” ‘All’ is, of course, a reference to those in the zone of being, that is, “the whole edifice of European humanism” (Said, 2003, p. 21).

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But what about the sub-proletariat who are disavowed from the political discourse of recognition and who are “reduced and dehumanized…to both the scientific gaze and the will of the superiors” (Said, 2003, p. 21)? In the US, we speak of Founding Fathers, they are rather a horde of brothers who symbolically murdered their primeval father (George III) through the American War of Independence. But what did they establish exactly in their capacity as founding brothers? A settler-colonial society, which is formally a democracy for the rest of their brothers (i.e., the white male bourgeoisie). Capital, particularly private property, becomes the totem, which replaces the primeval father, and on which the capitalists cannibalistically feast to this day (cf. Freud, 1913/1946). In the context of US history, private property is the equivalent of stolen land and abducted bodies. Memory traces of this colonial trauma are all over present-day society, they are most visible in statues and monuments across the US commemorating colonial settlers, conquistadors, or Confederate soldiers. With the cathexis of mass-mediated videos showing he police murdering innocent Black men and women, we witness the return of the repressed (colonial trauma) in the form of repetition (police violence), which signifies mythical-jouissance. Above all, the officer of this nation used to be an overseer of the plantation, his or her function (back then and now) was/is the protection of private property (Correia & Wall, 2018), so do Black lives matter? From the perspective of racialized capitalism, Black lives are not as valuable as commodities. When Black people emancipated themselves, they ceased being commodities (i.e., no more surplus-value), but their fetishization in the form of racialization, sexualization, and over-exploitation has not ended, hence, the surplus-jouissance of anti-Black racial-sexual violence (Curry, 2017), which I call mythical-jouissance since it is the excess of mythic violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996). Are Black people being punished for liberating themselves then? That seems to be the unconscious logic of racialized capitalism in the US. Liberation entails liberating not only the oppressed from the zone of nonbeing but also the oppressors from their dehumanizing ways, which dehumanize both the oppressed and themselves (Freire, 1970/2018). Here is an example of an unconscious memory trace, or a screenmemory as Freud (1939/1967) calls it: “impressions of a sexual and

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aggressive nature and also early injuries to the self (injuries to narcissism)” (p. 93). In the center of the Santa Fe Plaza lies a controversial phallic symbol, an obelisk, commemorating colonial trauma. This concrete example is vivid in my memory because I attended a political rally on June 18, 2020 organized by The Red Nation (a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students, and community organizers advocating Native liberation), which called for the removal of the dehumanizing obelisk. The Mayor of Santa Fe (Alan Webber) agreed to remove the obelisk and two other monuments in response to political pressure from Native activists and their non-Native comrades. However, Mr. Webber never ordered the removal of the obelisk, so activists took it upon themselves to tear it down on Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October 12, 2020). Here is the text chiseled on the obelisk: “To the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the Territory of New Mexico.” According to Daniel J. Chacón (2020), a reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican: “In the 1970s, an unidentified man wearing overalls climbed into the Plaza obelisk and chiseled the word ‘savage’ away.” In other words, the obelisk, as a memorial to colonial victory, erases in its presence colonial trauma, which is absent or repressed. However, what is repressed, according to Freud (1939/1967), is never completely forgotten, only distorted over time; a memory trace of the trauma remains latent within the unconscious: “the facts which the so-called official written history [i.e., the one written by the victors] purposely tried to suppress were in reality never lost. The knowledge of them [i.e., the facts of colonialism] survived in [Indigenous] traditions which were kept alive among the people” (p. 86). The obelisk, as a phallus of colonial victory, is dedicated to ‘heroes.’ For Freud (1939/1967), “the origin of the hero [is] him who rebels against the father [Popé, the leader of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680] and kills him in some guise or other. Here we also find the real source of the ‘tragic guilt’” (p. 111). This tragic guilt that the colonizer feels is, according to Freud (1939/1967), a form of ambivalence (p. 172) that covers up the colonizer’s hostility toward the Other [i.e., the ‘savage’ Indian]: “It [guilt] bears the characteristic of being never concluded and

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never able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reactionformations of obsessional neurosis” (p. 173). This formulation of white guilt also explains police violence against the racialized sub-proletariat, particularly Black men. The solidarity driving the oppressed to revolt against the apparatus of racialized capitalism is a function of what Freud (1939/1967) terms over-determination, which signifies complex causality as opposed to the linear causality exemplified by the psychological experiment. For Freud (1939/1967), over-determination is a function of “a significant discrepancy between the nature of our thinking apparatus and the organization of the world which we are trying to apprehend” (p. 137, emphasis added). In other words, the nature of our thinking apparatus is linear causality (or A causes B), but the world is organized in a complex fashion. Therefore, we have to think and act in nonlinear ways in order to grasp the complexity of the world, especially if we want to change it for the better using the Maatian compass of truth and justice, which is yet another definition of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis. Another term for this nonlinear praxis of solidarity among the oppressed is transversality, which is the “movement from the periphery to the periphery. From the feminist movement to the antiracist and anticolonial struggles” (Dussel, 2012, p. 54). In sum, Black Lives Matter is a transversal movement, whereas All Lives Matter is a regressive nonmovement. Regression is “reversion to an earlier [i.e., colonial] kind of mental life” (Freud, 1939/1967, p. 178). Now, I turn to Said’s (2003) talk Freud and the Non-European, which is essentially a commentary on Moses and Monotheism. Said (2003) begins by distinguishing between two uses of the term “non-European”: (1) “One, of course, is a simple designation of the world beyond Freud’s own as a Viennese-Jewish scientist, philosopher and intellectual who lived and worked his entire life in either Austria or England” (p. 13) and (2) “the culture that emerged historically in the post-World-War-Two period–that is, after the fall of the classical empires and the emergence of many newly liberated peoples and states in Africa, Asia and the Americas” (p. 17). Having made that distinction, Said is not intent on minimizing Freud’s contributions; in fact, Said (2003) emphatically says that Freud’s work “is about the Other…an Other recognizable mainly to readers

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who are well acquainted with the classics of Graeco-Roman and Hebrew Antiquity and what was later to derive from them” (p. 14). Nevertheless, Said (2003) reproaches Freud for his representation of “‘primitive’ non-European cultures” as “pretty much left behind or forgotten, like the primal horde, in the march of civilization” (pp. 14–15). The only non-European cultures that Freud took seriously, according to Said (2003), were Egypt, India, and China (pp. 13–14); also, in terms of non-European outsiders, Freud identified with Moses and Hannibal as Semitic heroes (p. 15). Said (2003) then concludes that Freud’s “Eurocentric view of culture” can be explained by the fact that his “world had not yet been touched by the globalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, that were to make many formerly unknown or repressed cultures available to metropolitan Europe” (p. 16). In other words, while Freud challenged some of the Orientalist and “dominant race theories of the time” (p. 15), he was also a product of his time. This challenge is characterized by Said (2003) as “the radicality of Freud’s work on human identity” (p. 17). Freud’s radicality, according to Said (2003), is a function of his “implicit refusal, in the end, to erect an insurmountable barrier between non-European primitives and European civilization” (p. 19). The difference between the primitive and the civilized, according to Freud (1939/1967), is a question of psycho-sexual development, which is extrapolated to cultures. This developmental logic is still with us today in the language of developed versus developing countries, which suggests a linear path of psycho-economic development from primitivism/childhood/neurosis to civilization/adulthood/normalcy (Freud, 1939/1967, p. 144). Another term for this psycho-economic developmental logic is spatiotemporal colonial difference; contrapuntal psychoanalysis must account for cultural difference without reverting to this colonial developmental logic. And here we must remember Mourad Wahba’s axiom that there is one civilization and many cultures. This axiom is implicit in Freud’s work, according to Said (2003), when he is writing about “universal behaviors as the prohibition against incest, or…the return of the repressed” (p. 20).

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In short, Das unbehagen is the universal effect of civilization, an effect experienced in all cultures, but we must delink Euro-colonialism from human civilization if we are to realize the liberatory project of transmodernity: the synthesis of the best of modernity and its alterity. How we determine our valuations of European and non-European cultural ideas and practices should be informed by the Maatian compass of truth and justice, which comprises the commons (e.g., education, healthcare, transportation, etc.), liberation (especially for those in the zone of nonbeing), and social ecology (Kadalie, 2019). Let us heed Fanon’s demand “that all human beings collaborate together in the invention of new ways to create” a new, radical or critical, humanism (Said, 2003, p. 21). With Freud and the Non-European, Said (2003) attempts to see Freud contrapuntally as a figure “whose writing travels across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art” (p. 24, emphasis in original). This methodological approach is the opposite of what is today known as cancel culture, which I regard as the cancelation of critical (border) thinking. Said never cancels the likes of Marx or Freud, for he is “always trying to understand figures from the past whom [he admires], even [he points] out how bound they were by the perspectives of their own cultural moment as far as their views of other cultures and peoples were concerned” (p. 23). In this sense, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis is the antithesis of cancel culture, which dismisses great figures on the grounds of political incorrectness (p. 23). From the perspective of contrapuntal psychoanalysis, “later history reopens and challenges what seems to have been the finality of an earlier figure of thought [e.g., Freud], bringing it into contact with cultural, political and epistemological formations [e.g., postcolonialism or decoloniality] undreamed by–albeit affiliated by historical circumstances with–its author” (Said, 2003, p. 25). In other words, “the latencies in a prior figure [e.g., Freud] or form [e.g., psychoanalysis]” can “suddenly illuminate the present” (p. 25). For instance, Stephen Frosh (2020) links psychoanalysis, which he situates within the radical Jewish tradition, with decoloniality: “psychoanalysis needs and can never escape its Jewish provocations; and in these can be found some of the energy

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with which it is possible for psychoanalysis to contribute to the ongoing struggle for a decolonized world.” Freud’s alterity, his non-Europeanness or his Jewishness, opens up the possibility for him to align his desire with that of the Egyptian Moses: a desire for Maat (truth and justice), a divine-jouissance through the renunciation of the drives. Said (2003) is in agreement with Frosh when he glowingly writes the following about Freud: Freud is a remarkable instance of a thinker for whom scientific work was, as he often said, a kind of archaeological excavation of the buried, forgotten, repressed and denied past…Freud was an explorer of the mind, of course, but also, in the philosophical sense, an overturner and a remapper of accepted or settled geographies and genealogies. He thus lends himself especially to rereading in different contexts, since his work is all about how life history offers itself by recollection, research and reflection to endless structuring and restructuring, in both the individual and the collective sense. That we, different readers from different periods of history, with different cultural backgrounds, should continue to do this in our readings of Freud strikes me as nothing less than a vindication of his work’s power to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate situations that he himself might never have dreamed of. (p. 27)

Said (2003) characterized Moses and Monotheism as a “classic example” (p. 28) of late style, but the same can be said about Freud and the NonEuropean, for both books exemplify: the intellectual trajectory conveyed by [these] late work[s] is intransigence and a sort of irascible transgressiveness, as if the author was expected to settle down into a harmonious composure, as befits a person at the end of his life, but preferred instead to be difficult, and to bristle with all sorts of new ideas and provocations. (p. 29)

While Said’s talk was canceled by the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, late style with its “alienating” effect (Said, 2003, p. 30)—in Freud and Said—was not canceled. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud returns “to the very elements of identity itself ” which are “so crucial to psychoanalysis, the very heart of the science” (Said, 2003, p. 29).

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Similarly, the question of decolonial subjectivity, for Said, is central to postcolonialism (cf. Pannian, 2016). In other words, his analysis of Freud’s last text is also a self-analysis: “I too wish to be arbitrary” (Said, 2003, p. 32). Freud, like Said, was a secular critic, who had “his own complicated and…hopelessly unresolved connection to his own Jewishness, which he seemed always to hold on to with a combination of pride and defiance” (Said, 2003, p. 31). The same can be said about Said’s Christianity, which he works through in his 1999 memoir, Out of Place. But the most interesting parallel I would like to draw here between Freud and Said was uttered by the latter in a 2000 interview with Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz Magazine: “I’m the last Jewish intellectual…The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian” (Said, 2001, p. 458; cf. Hochberg, 2006). Said’s statement, which is spoken in jest, embodies a kernel of historical truth to use Freud’s phrase: “the actual Jewishness that derives from Moses is a far from open-and-shut matter, and is in fact extremely problematic” for it constitutes “the removal of a religion’s source from its place inside the community and history of like-minded believers” (Said, 2003, p. 32). This is an argument about the instability of identity or subjectivity, which elsewhere Said (1993) terms: “exilic marginality” (p. 24) and “dislocated subjectivity” (p. 28). This instability is, of course, the splitting of subjectivity into ego and unconscious, or as Said (1999) puts it in his memoir: “She seemed to speak directly to that underground part of my identity I had long held for myself, not the ‘Ed’ or ‘Edward’ I had been assigned, but the other self I was always aware of but was unable easily or immediately to reach” (p. 284). What Said (1999) calls “that other non-Edward self ” (p. 165) is the unconscious, which is alienating: our own Otherness. Said’s (1999) phrase for this alienation is “being out of place” (p. 3). Edward (or Ed) ends up representing his ego, or the subject of the statement, but Said is the enunciating subject. Coming to terms with his alterity, as a Palestinian Arab, who always felt out of place, whether in Egypt, Lebanon, or the US, this is Said’s (1999) conclusion: “With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place” (p. 295). In psychoanalysis, Said’s conclusion embodies the

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traversing of fantasy, or what I call the decolonial subject as drive. The decolonial subject is driven by these dissonances that render him or her out of place. Instead of running away from them, he or she learns to enjoy these dissonances. This is the divine-jouissance inherent in Said’s (1999) ontology of exteriority, wherein the subaltern’s suffering is sublimated vis-à-vis not the Other but the objet a. For Said, these objets a include Palestine, Arab cultures, the Arabic language, modern literature, classical music, decolonization, liberation, etc. In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) famously wrote: “I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western antiSemitism” (p. 27). While different forms of oppression are qualitatively different, they are linked by virtue of their over-determination vis-à-vis the history of Euro-colonialism. For example, in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (2019, pp. 46–48), I show the connection between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism through the Nazi figure of the Muselmann, who is a fantasmatic composite of the conceptual Muslim and Jew. Consequently, Freud’s analysis of anti-Semitism in Moses and Monotheism is a radical feature of the text, for it provides the reader with an early, and perhaps the first, psychoanalytic reading of racist oppression (cf. Fenichel, 1940). Freud’s reading, as Said (2003) shows, is paradoxical, for he defensively makes the claim that Jews are European, or are not outsiders to Europe (i.e., Asiatics), but are rather “the remnants of Mediterranean civilization” (p. 40). At the same time, Freud (1939/1967) argues throughout the text that Moses, “who created the Jews” (p. 136), is an Egyptian. In other words, there is a tension here between Freud’s assmilianist ego (that identifies as European) and his antiracist unconscious (as the discourse of the Egyptian Moses). Said (2003) contrasts Freud’s ambivalence (i.e., Jews as European v. Jews as non-European) in Moses and Monotheism with the political tension between present-day Israel as “a quasi-European state” which holds “non-European indigenous peoples at bay” and historical Palestine as “a diverse, multiracial population of many different peoples–European and non-European” (pp. 41–42). Said (2003) adds: out of the travails of specifically European anti-Semitism, the establishment of Israel in a non-European territory consolidated Jewish identity

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politically in a state that took very specific legal and political positions effectively to seal off that identity from anything that was non-Jewish. (p. 43)

Said (2003) finds in Freud’s theorization of non-identity the possibility for a binational one-state solution: “in excavating the archeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian)” (p. 44). This is what Mignolo (2007) calls an “identity based on politics” (p. 492, emphasis in original) and not the other way around. Delinking from the modern/colonial project entails moving away from the family metaphors of the primeval father and the horde of brothers; instead of an identity politics, we need a non-identity politics. As Jodi Dean (2019) shows, the comrade is “a generic figure for the political relation between those on the same side of a political struggle” (p. 3). There is a stronger historical argument, between 610 and 1948, for Judeo-Islamic comradeship (not denying conflicts) in the face of Christian supremacy, but unfortunately it is not what we see today as evidenced by the geopolitics of sectarianism, which is a politics based on identity—an identity politics. Today’s geopolitics of sectarianism in West Asia and North Africa is, of course, not accidental but the result of the British colonial policy of divide and rule, which is most evident in the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement. I have written extensively about the phenomenon of modern terrorism in this context, and there is no need to repeat my arguments here, but its politicization today is purposely ahistorical. There is an interesting parallel between Said’s (2003) point about “Palestininan archaeology as a practice in the liberation struggle” (p. 49) and Freud’s (1939/1967) argument regarding oral tradition in its relation to “the coercion of logical thinking” (p. 130). In other words, contrapuntal archeology pays attention “to the enormously rich sedimentations of village history and oral traditions” which “changes the status of objects from dead monuments and artifacts…to remainders of an ongoing native life and living Palestinian practices of a sustainable human ecology” (p. 49).

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Conceivably, non-identity politics is inherently non-political in Agamben’s (1998) sense of the word, that is, allowing for no state of exception (i.e., no apartheid), or no distinction between good life (inside) and bare life (outside). In Israel, this distinction is literally consolidated by the Israeli West Bank barrier, which, for Arabs, is known as the Apartheid Wall. The Apartheid Wall literalizes the difference between the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing. Said’s vision of a binational one-state acknowledges national, or cultural, difference; “national culture” (Fanon, 1961/2004) is not the same as regressive nationalism with its authoritarian, particularly fascistic, tendencies. In conclusion, Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s (1939/1967) genealogy of “the non-Jewish Jew” (p. 52). We can also speak of the nonArab Arab and so on and so forth; therefore, both Freud and Said exemplify “the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community” (p. 53). Mignolo (2007) calls this epistemology “critical border thinking ” (p. 485, emphasis in original), which is “grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories…and corresponding subjectivities” (p. 493). Cosmopolitan (i.e., contrapuntal) subjectivity, for Said (2003), then is grounded in the Freudian notion of identity as non-identity: identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed…and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered–and later, perhaps, even triumphed. The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well–not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound–the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within itself. (p. 54)

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References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. HellerRoazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1921/1996). Critique of violence. In M. Bullock & M. W. Jennings (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected writings volume 1, 1913–1926 . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Beshara, R. K. (2019). Decolonial psychoanalysis: Towards critical Islamophobia studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Chacón, D. J. (2020, June 17). Santa Fe mayor calls for removal of controversial monuments, statue of Spanish conquistador. Santa Fe New Mexican. Correia, D., & Wall, T. (2018). Police: A field guide. New York, NY: Verso. Curry, T. J. (2017). The man-not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of Black manhood . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Dean, J. (2019). Comrade: An essay on political belonging. New York, NY: Verso. Dussel, E. (2012). Transmodernity and interculturality: An interpretation from the perspective of philosophy of liberation. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World , 1(3), 28–59. Fanon, F. (1961/2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press. Fenichel, O. (1940). Psychoanalysis of antisemitism. American imago, 1(2), 24– 39. Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Freud, S. (1913/1946). Totem and taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics (A. A. Brill, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Freud, S. (1937/1964). Constructions in analysis. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937– 1939): Moses and monotheism, an outline of psycho-analysis and other works (J. Strachey, Trans.). London, UK: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1939/1967). Moses and monotheism (K. Jones, Trans.). New York, IN: Vintage. Frosh, S. (2020). Psychoanalysis as decolonial Judaism. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 25 (2), 174–193. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-020-00163-8. Hochberg, G. Z. (2006). Edward said: “The last Jewish intellectual”. Social Text, 24 (2), 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-24-2_87-47. Kadalie, M. (2019). Pan-African social ecology: Speeches, conversations, and essays. Atlanta, GA: On Our Own Authority! Publishing.

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Kovel, J. (1970/1984). White racism: A psychohistory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647. Pannian, P. (2016). Edward said and the question of subjectivity. London, UK: Palgrave. Said, E. W. (1978/2003). Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin. Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York, NY: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1999). Out of place: A memoir. New York, NY: Vintage. Said, E. W. (2001). Power, politics, and culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said . G. Viswanathan (Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon. Said, E. W. (2003). Freud and the non-European. New York, NY: Verso. Said, E. W. (2006). On late style: Music and literature against the grain. New York, NY: Vintage. Smith, D. (2001, March 10). Freud museum speaking ban sparks Said fury. The Guardian, London.

5 Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis

In the first chapter, I mainly reviewed the literature on psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, and contextualized this survey within the apparatus of racialized capitalism. In the second, third, and fourth chapters, I investigated the theoretical linkages between Sigmund Freud and Edward Said as an attempt to decolonize the former and psychoanalyze the latter. Decolonizing Freud does not mean canceling him; on the contrary, it signifies using Freud’s most brilliant insights for our time by extending his critique of modernity to coloniality. Psychoanalyzing Said does not mean psychologizing him; in fact, my aim was to show the influence of psychoanalysis on Said’s work. My argument throughout the three body chapters has been that Said began with Freud, repressed him, and then Freud returned. Reading Freud and Said side by side has allowed me to theorize what I have been calling contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis, which I will say more about in this fifth and final chapter.

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9_5

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Decolonization In the first chapter, in the section on Black Skin, White Masks, I promised I would return to Fanon (1961/2004) in the conclusion to consider his thoughts on decolonization in The Damned of the Earth. Fanon (1961/2004) writes, “decolonization is always a violent event…decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of [hu]mankind by another” (p. 1). The ‘species’ being substituted is not a race, but oppressors who dehumanize the oppressed and themselves. The violence that Fanon speaks of is not “subjective violence” or the “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (Žižek, 2008, p. 1); rather, it is a “divine violence” (Benjamin, 1921/1996) against “objective violence” (Žižek, 2008). Objective violence, for Žižek (2008), includes two kinds: the “‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms” (p. 1) and “‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (p. 2). Johan Galtung’s (1969) terms for subjective and systemic violence are personal and structural violence, respectively. For Galtung (1969), personal violence is direct and its absence leads to negative peace, while structural violence (or social injustice) is indirect and its absence leads to positive peace (or social justice). Now, here is Walter Benjamin’s (1921/1996) distinction between “mythic violence” and “divine violence”: If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood . (pp. 249–250)

In other words, divine violence is a paradoxical form of nonviolent violence against systemic or structural violence, or in Fanon’s (1961/2004) words: “The violence of the colonial regime” (p. 46). A concrete example of divine violence provided by Benjamin (1921/1996) is the “revolutionary [or proletarian] general strike” (p. 239), which strikes at the systemic/structural violence of racialized capitalism in

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an effort to “found and modify legal conditions” (p. 240). Benjamin (1921/1996) contrasts the revolutionary, or proletarian, general strike with “the political strike” (p. 245): Whereas the first form of interruption of work is violent, since it causes only an external modification of labor conditions, the second, as a pure means, is nonviolent. For it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes as consummates. For this reason, the first of these undertakings is lawmaking but the second anarchistic. (p. 246, emphasis added)

Consequently, while divine violence may be nonviolent, it can actually destroy “state power” (Benjamin, 1921/1996, p. 246), but it has to do so through pure means. For Hannah Arendt (1969), the question of violence is one of justification and not of legitimacy. Violence, for her, can never be legitimate, for it is always an instrumental means to an end. What needs legitimacy is power: Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow. Violence needs justification and it can be justifiable, but its justification loses in plausibility the farther away its intended end recedes into the future. (Arendt, 1969)

Therefore, we return to Benjamin’s question of pure means, which is essential vis-à-vis decolonization. Decolonization as a divinely violent event, or as pure means, needs justification and it can be justifiable, as Arendt (1969) shows, but the end of this divine violence is anarchist power, which rests on legitimacy. For Freire (1970/2018), decolonization, or rebellion, is an act of love because its goal is humanization, or liberation, for all (i.e., the oppressed and the oppressors): Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of

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the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. (p. 56, emphasis added)

Decolonization “starts from the very first day with the basic claims of the colonized” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 1). Successful decolonization “lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out…The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women” (p. 1). The social fabric that Fanon speaks of is Freud’s (1939/1967) archaic heritage, wherein one can find memory traces of repressed material many generations back and which is reconstructed après-coup as tradition, but unlike Freud, it is sociogenic and not phylogenic. For Fanon (1961/2004): “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder.” This echoes Benjamin’s (1921/1996) point about divine violence being anarchistic. What Fanon (1961/2004) calls “the colonial situation” is an index of the hierarchical, oppressive, and violent relationship between the colonizer and the colonized (i.e., the apparatus of racialized capitalism). Therefore, decolonization: is an historical process…it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation. (p. 2)

Fanon’s (1961/2004) analysis of colonial difference should move every single reader to see why “the ontology that dehumanizes” the damned and “the epistemology that strips him [or her] down to an unregenerate essence” must be violently decolonized (Said, 1993, p. 268). For Fanon (1961/2004): Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state

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into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm…a new language and a new humanity…The ‘thing’ colonized becomes a man [or woman] through the very process of liberation. (p. 2)

Decolonization “implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 2), and the most succinct definition of decolonization is: “The last shall be first” (p. 2). I take this to mean that the oppressed must lead the way to liberation, since they know oppression firsthand and the oppressors cannot be relied on since they typically engage in “false generosity” (Freire, 1970/2018, p. 44). For this reason, Jodi Dean (2019) distinguishes between ally and comrade: “Where the ally is hierarchical, specific, and acquiescent, the comrade is egalitarian, generic, and utopian” (p. 22). According to Freire (1970/2018), it is possible for an oppressor to become a comrade; however, it necessitates not only a conversion but also “a profound rebirth” (p. 61). Freire (1970/2018) adds: “Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving, which in diverse moments reflect the structure of domination” (p. 61). Therefore, an ex-oppressor, or a descendent of oppressors, who wants to be in solidarity with the oppressed must follow their leadership. On the other hand, the oppressed must not become “sub-oppressors” (Freire, 1970/2018, p. 45) or “mimic men [or women]” (Said, 1993, p. 272). Anarchic leadership means leadership by example, that is, one informed by “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves, and their oppressors as well” (Freire, 1970/2018, p. 44). Decolonization “can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 3). This quote is the origin of the phrase popularized by Malcolm X (al-H . a¯jj M¯alik ash-Shab¯azz): “By any means necessary.” Fanon (1961/2004) adds: “The colonial context…is characterized by the dichotomy it inflicts on the world. Decolonization unifies this world by a radical decision to remove its heterogeneity, by unifying it on the grounds of nation and sometimes race” (p. 10). The dichotomy that Fanon wants removed is, of course, that of colonial difference: the zones of being and nonbeing. Once that

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dichotomy is removed (which implies a new ontology), the Wahbian axiom reveals itself to us once more: one civilization, many cultures. In other words, in our mundialización (Mignolo, 2000), we must still work through the question of cultural difference without regressing to hierarchical Manichaeanism. For Fanon (1961/2004), “The immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization and the history of despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization” (p. 15). The nation, in the cultural and not the nationalist sense, is an essential drive in decolonization, because the modern/colonial culture has to be replaced with transmodernity, which is the best of modernity and its alterity. When it comes to decolonization, “urgent decisions are needed on means and tactics, i.e., direction and organization” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 21) with the knowledge that revolutionary violence is a means to an end (anarchist power), which necessitates justification if it is to be considered pure means. As to the question of the legitimacy of this anarchist power, “Colonization or decolonization: it is simply a power struggle” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 23). Arendt (1969) does not believe that the path from revolutionary violence to anarchist power to be a straightforward one, and, to be fair, the decolonization of Asia and Africa (1945–1960) attests to her argument: Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course its end is the disappearance of power. This implies that it is not correct to say that the opposite of violence is nonviolence: to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

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Liberationist Anti-imperialist Resistance and Opposition In Culture and Imperialism, or “culture as imperialism” (p. 264, emphasis in original), Said (1993) distinguishes between “nationalist anti-imperialism” and “liberationist anti-imperialist resistance” (p. 264), which are a function of the cultural difference between nationalist independence and international liberation (p. 277). Another related division that Said (1993) underlines is the one between resistance and opposition: The ideological and cultural war against imperialism occurs in the form of resistance in the colonies, and later, as resistance spills over into Europe and the United States, in the form of opposition or dissent in the metropolis. The first phase of this dynamic produces nationalist independence movements. The second, later, and more acute phase produces liberation struggles. The basic premise of this analysis is that although the imperial divide in fact separates metropolis from peripheries, and although each cultural discourse unfolds according to different agendas, rhetorics, and images, they are in fact connected, if not always in perfect correspondence…The connection is made on the cultural level since, I have been saying, like all cultural practices the imperialist experience is an intertwined and overlapping one. Not only did the colonizers emulate as well as compete with one another, but so also did the colonized. (p. 276, emphasis added)

For Said (1993): “All nationalist cultures depend heavily on the concept of national identity, and nationalist politics is a politics of identity: Egypt for the Egyptians” (p. 267). This is the exclusive particularity of identity politics, which stands as an obstacle between the singularity of being and the pluriversality of the world. Non-identity politics, on the other hand, acknowledges the national, or cultural, but transcends both toward the socio-political: “Nationalism is not a political doctrine, it is not a program. If we really want to safeguard our countries from regression, paralysis, or collapse, we must rapidly switch from a national consciousness to a social and political consciousness” (Fanon, 1961/2004, p. 142).

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What I call non-identity politics, Said (1993) names “anti-identitarian force” (p. 274). Said’s analysis is inspired by Fanon’s emphasis on the importance of the shift from national consciousness to socio-political consciousness in The Damned of the Earth: needs based on identitarian (i.e., nationalist) consciousness must be overridden. New and general collectivities–African, Arab, Islamic–should have precedence over particularist ones, thus setting up lateral, nonnarrative connections among people whom imperialism separated into autonomous tribes, narratives, cultures…the center (capital city, official culture, appointed leader) must be deconsecrated and demystified. A new system of mobile relationships must replace the hierarchies inherited from imperialism…Liberation is consciousness of self…leading to true national self-liberation and to universalism. (Said, 1993, pp. 273–274)

Contrapuntal psychoanalysts acknowledge the contributions of “the decentring doctrines of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche” (Said, 1993, p. 266) to the culture of liberationist anti-imperialist resistance/opposition, while also being critically aware that: if European theory and Western Marxism as cultural co-efficients of liberation haven’t in the main proved themselves to be reliable allies in the resistance to imperialism–on the contrary, one may suspect that they are part of the same invidious “universalism” that connected culture with imperialism for centuries–how has the liberationist anti-imperialism tried to break this shackling unity? First, by a new integrative or contrapuntal orientation in history that sees Western and non-Western experiences as belonging together because they are connected by imperialism. Second, by an imaginative, even utopian vision which reconceives emancipatory (as opposed to confining) theory and performance. Third, by an investment neither in new authorities, doctrines, and encoded orthodoxies, nor in established institutions and causes, but in a particular sort of nomadic, migratory, and anti-narrative energy. (pp. 278–279, emphasis added)

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New Humanism Many contemporary critical theorists, following Althusser, consider themselves antihumanists and find humanism to be passé; however, this theoretical privilege seems absurd for those of us who were never considered human to begin with. Therefore, while we reject “liberal humanism” (Said, 1978/2003, p. 254) or “European bourgeois humanism” (Said, 1993, p. 316), we absolutely affirm Fanon’s (1961/2004) call for “a new humanism” (p. 178), which is a radical, critical, and revolutionary humanism that is not premised on colonial difference. For Fanon (1961/2004): This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism. This new humanism is written into the objectives and methods of the struggle. A struggle, which mobilizes every level of society, which expresses the intentions and expectations of the people, and which is not afraid to rely on their support almost entirely, will invariably triumph. The merit of this type of struggle is that it achieves the optimal conditions for cultural development and innovation. (p. 178, emphasis added)

Fanon’s new humanism “is free from the narcissistic individualism, divisiveness, and colonialist egoism of the imperialism that justified the white man’s rule” (Said, 1993, p. 269). This new humanism necessitates “an entirely new post-nationalist theoretical culture” (p. 268), for it is “in effect a trans-personal and trans-national force” (p. 269). It is a new humanism that springs from decolonization as a violent event, or as an act of love; it is “a force intended to bridge the gap between white and non-white…it is the synthesis that overcomes the reification of white man as subject, Black man as object” (p. 270). This is why decolonization entails “an epistemological revolution” (p. 271) like critical border thinking or “epistemologies of the South” (de Soussa Santos, 2016) that can counter “epistemicide, the murder of knowledge” (p. 92, emphasis in original).

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Said (1993) reminds us that liberation is a process and not a goal (p. 274); however, Fanon’s transmodern vision affords “a new nonadversarial community of awareness and anti-imperialism” (p. 274). The revolutionary humanist ethos of liberation praxis is that we must struggle to liberate humankind from modernity/coloniality, “we must all write our histories and cultures respectively in a new way; we share the same history, even though for some of us that history has enslaved” (p. 274). Said (1993) adds that “the culture of opposition and resistance suggests a theoretical alternative and a practical method for reconceiving human experience in non-imperialist terms” (p. 276). However, “How can a non- or post-imperial history be written that is not naively utopian or hopelessly pessimistic, given the continuing embroiled actuality of domination in the Third World?” (p. 280). Said (1993) locates the answer to this “methodological and meta-historical aporia” (p. 280) in the register of the poetic. For Said (1993), C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, as an example of the poetic (as opposed to the economic or the political), accomplishes a “contrapuntal, non-narrative turn” by embodying “the energies of antiimperialist liberation” (p. 281). The book, according to Said (1993), crosses “over from the provincialism of one strand of history [i.e., the French Revolution] into an apprehension of other histories [e.g., the Haitian Revolution]…it is part of what in human history can move us from the history of domination toward the actuality of liberation” (p. 281). Therefore, new humanism is contrapuntal humanism. Similarly, Freire (1970/2018) distinguishes between (radical) humanism and (liberal) humanitarianism. For Freire (1970/2018), in other words, radical humanism is the actualization of “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (p. 44); liberal humanitarianism (e.g., humanitarian imperialism), however, is false generosity: The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and

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embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization. This is why, as we affirmed earlier, the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressors. It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education. (p. 54)

Said’s (1983) critical humanism, on the other hand, is grounded in his method of “secular criticism” which “deals with local and worldly situations” and which “is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems” (p. 26). For this reason, Said (1983) champions the essay form as “the principal way in which to write criticism” (p. 26). Criticism, for Said (1983), is equal to having “critical consciousness” which means that “the intellectual’s situation is a worldy one and yet, by virtue of that worldliness itself, the intellectual’s social identity should involve something more than strengthening those aspects of the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members” (p. 24). In other words, the secular critic resists vertical filiation (i.e., identity politics) in favor of non-identity politics or “horizontal affiliation” (p. 18, emphasis in original). Said’s (1983) notion of horizontal affiliation bears resemblance to the psychoanalytic method of free association, which is also lateral in its orientation. Said (1983) writes, “The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life,’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society” (p. 20). Comradeship is a form of horizontal affiliation, which is not based on Imaginary identification, but Symbolic alignment of desire and Real enjoyment. Put differently, we are not comrades because we are the same, but because, despite our differences, we may share common interests. The paradox is that under racialized capitalism, not only is violence normalized, everything is individualized. In contrast, the subject of psychoanalysis, with its singularity of being, provides a necessary departure from both individualism and collectivism. The subject of the unconscious is a psychosocial subject who transcends the particularities of filiative identifications into a pluriversal affiliative realm. As such, solidarity is not reducible to identity politics or “the feeling that everything you do has to be either legitimated by, or has to

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pass through the filter of, your national identity, which in most instances is a complete fiction” (Said, 2001, p. 391). In his 2003 preface to Orientalism, which was written four months before his death, Said (1978/2003) defends his critical, or “genuine” (p. xxi), humanism, which, in Culture and Imperialism, he calls “contrapuntal reading” (Said, 1993, p. 66): My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose goal is a belligerent collective identity rather than understanding and intellectual exchange. I have called what I try to do “humanism,” a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. (p. xvii, emphasis in original)

Said (1978/2003) continues his defense of critical humanism in his conclusion to the preface, while contextualizing his magnum opus vis-àvis the recently launched Iraq War: Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by no means excludes power, since on the contrary what I have tried to show in my book have been the insinuations, the imbrications of power into even the most recondite of studies. And lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and, I would go as far as saying, the final, resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users

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in ways undreamed of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of orthodoxies. The worldwide protests before the war began in Iraq would not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities across the globe, informed by alternative news sources and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet. The human, and humanistic, desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the incredible strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rumsfelds, Bin Ladens, Sharons and Bushes of this world. I would like to believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom. (pp. xxii–xxiii, emphasis in original)

Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Said, 2004) is a posthumously published book, which is based on a series of lectures given by Said in 2000 at Columbia University. As is clear from the title, the book deals directly with the question of humanism “as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens” (p. 6). Here is Said’s (2004) clearest, dare I say contrapuntal, statement on his critical humanism, which certainly resonates with the project of transmodernity: it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and -language bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons from the past…and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused …the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally. (pp. 10–11, emphasis added)

In other words, for Said (2004), there is no contradiction in using a structuralist, or antihumanist, methodology (e.g., psychoanalysis or discourse analysis) in tandem with a humanistic ontology and epistemology. In fact, contrapuntal psychoanalysis, as a “methodology of the oppressed” (Sandoval, 2000), enacts this very dialectic of critical

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humanism. For Said (2004), humanism “is the achievement of form by human will and agency” (p. 15), which has the potential to become “a democratic process producing a critical and progressively freer mind” (p. 16), but “it is neither system nor impersonal force like the market or the unconscious” (p. 15). Here is what Said (2004) says about the dialectic of critical humanism, which the reader as “a central feature of all humanism” (p. 43) should contrast with contemporary identity politics and cancel culture, which affects (pro-)Palestinians more than any other group: Humanism is, to some extent, a resistance to idées reçues, and it offers opposition to every kind of cliché and unthinking language…far from humanistic effort being determined (or for that matter predetermined) by socioeconomic circumstances, is is the dialectic of opposites, of antagonism between those circumstances and the individual humanist that is of the deepest interest, and not conformity or identity. (p. 43, emphasis in original)

Critical humanism situates “critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather than in denial of, the constituent historical realities of [our world]” (Said, 2004, p. 47). For Said (2004), critical humanism is worldly, which denotes “the real historical world from whose circumstances none of us can in fact ever be separated, not even in theory” (p. 48). The grounding of critical humanism in worldliness is what enables its reflexive critical consciousness, the kind of conscientização needed in liberation praxis, which reflects on, and acts upon, the world. In essence, Said is arguing: don’t throw the baby (humanism) out with the bathwater (Eurocentrism).

Writing as a Form of Killing Writing qua law (e.g., Leyes y ordenanzas nuevamente hechas por su Majestad para la gobernación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conservación de los Indios and Encomienda) is a form of killing because it

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legitimizes colonization, genocide, slavery, mass incarceration, etc. For example, given where I live I am particularly thinking of Juan de Oñate’s 1598 expedition to what we now call New Mexico and his declaration that this land is part of Spain effective immediately. His was an act of arbitrary lawmaking (i.e., mythic violence) through writing, which disrupted the course of Indigenous history. A good example of this authorization of laws through arbitrary Royal decrees in the context of South America is captured in Werner Herzog’s (1972) Aguirre, the Wrath of God . In the film, the viewer sees how delusional decrees are arbitrarily issued and enacted. If the delusional issuing/enacting of arbitrary decrees, reminiscent of the will of the primeval father, is the foundation of law, what makes our current legal system any more legitimate? In this sense, I am in agreement with Benjamin’s (1921/1996) argument for divine violence in his Critique of Violence. The authorizing logic for these arbitrary laws was the Monarch (a sovereign representation of God on Earth), hence, why they were called Royal Decree-Laws. Paradoxically, even though we live in a Republic, which waged a Revolution against the British Monarchy, we have not transcended the formal logic of Royal Decree-Laws used in the context of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Hence, how mass incarceration in the US legally writes Blacks and other racialized bodies outside the law placing them in an oppressive/violent state of exception: the bare life of the new slave. Another example of writing as a form of killing is the Requerimiento. Dussel (1995) writes: Before battling the Indians, the conquistadores read them the requirement (requerimiento), which promised to exempt the Indians from the pains of defeat if they would merely convert to the Christian-European religion…Of course, the Indian would have been unable to grasp this proposal, since it had been read in Spanish. (p. 51, emphasis in original)

What if law is a pure formality whose function is literally to alienate and castrate the colonized subject through an incomprehensible language? The reader needs only to consider my thesis vis-à-vis this excerpt from the Spanish Requirement of 1513 (Requerimiento):

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I require that you understand carefully this proclamation, take it utterly seriously, and deliberate about it for an appropriate amount of time. I require you to recognize the church as queen and superior of the world, to acknowledge the pope in the church’s name, and to obey his majesty, the pope’s vicar, who is superior, lord, and king of these lands…. If you refuse or try to protract this process by malicious delay, I certify that with the aid of God I will wage mighty war upon you in every place and in every way…. I will seize your women and sons and sell them into slavery. I will rob you of all your goods and do to you every evil and injury in my power. (as cited in Dussel, 1995, p. 51, emphasis in original)

My thesis that writing as a form of killing is reminiscent of Lacan’s (1973/2004) “vel of alienation” (p. 211, emphasis in original), except that the colonial situation is much worse. The colonized subject is forced to choose between Being and the colonial Other’s meaning (i.e., recognizing the church as queen and superior of the world), which, of course, the colonized subject does not understand. Consequently, the result is that the colonized subject is interpellated into the zone of non-meaning, which is also a zone of nonbeing, between his or her Being and the colonial Other’s meaning. The discourse of recognition (i.e., the Other’s meaning) in racialized capitalism is sustained by the fantasy of disavowal (i.e., non-meaning qua nonbeing). The Symbolic violence of writing then is a function of its arbitrary lawmaking and law-preserving capacity. Therefore, one must pay attention to “the materiality of the signifier” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 16) vis-à-vis oppression and violence, for “the letter kills” (p. 423). In other words, I am shedding light on the Real violence of writing, the literality of its lethal/legal inscriptions. It is no surprise then that Lacan refers to his écrits (writings) as poubellications (litter-publications), and why he prefers speaking at seminars. Psychoanalysis itself is a praxis of speaking and listening (an oral tradition), which deals with the violent effects of language on the subject. If the Requerimiento is the Other’s discourse, then the unconscious is violence. Freud (1913/1946) explored the historical truth of mythic violence (i.e., its lawmaking and law-preserving functions) in his reconstruction of what a taboo is and what it does in Totem and Taboo:

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Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire to violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. (p. 48)

If we go back to the Requerimento, the taboo is premised on understanding, recognition, and acknowledgment of the colonial Other, that is, the taboo forbids misunderstanding, misrecognition, and denial. But, as I showed above, the taboo is based on the failure of communication, or of language itself. In other words, the taboo, as the legal inscription of Symbolic failure, sets up the colonized subject to fail in the face of the impossible: Real violence. This is why the colonized subject has an unconscious desire to violate the taboo and to be liberated from its oppressive violence. This structure is still in place today as Curry (2017) shows with his theory of the Man-Not; it is also evident in the US with the mass incarceration of Blacks (Alexander, 2010) as a new form of slavery and the endo-colonization of racialized communities as a function of the militarization of the police.

Freedom v. Liberation In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist (2013) argues that the Aristotelian distinction between natural slavery and political slavery is a central feature of European politics since time immemorial. The idea of a natural slave, who is outside of the political equation, is also a function of another Aristotelian differentiation (Agamben, 1998) between those who are barely living outside the polis (e.g., in ghettos or concentration camps) and those who are enjoying the good life inside the polis. Political slavery is a figurative form of slavery, which is concerned with antityrannicism. A great example of this mythical discourse is the American Revolution, which frames the political freedom realized through Republicanism as the antithesis of the tyranny of British Monarchy: “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” Natural slavery, on the other hand, is a literal form of chattel slavery, which is repressed in European political discourses about freedom as Nyquist (2013) shows. This

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is the paradox at the heart of European democracies since ancient times; for this reason, I conceptually prefer the term liberation over freedom: “Freedom” (and its Roman stepdaughter “Liberty”) so saturates hegemonic Euro-American ideologies that it is difficult to grasp that its emergence as a political ideal is contingent on numerous historical particulars, including the institution of chattel slavery. (Nyquist, 2013, p. 3)

Similarly, Mignolo (2007) distinguishes between the signifiers emancipation and liberation: While ‘emancipation’ was the concept used to argue for the freedom of a new social class, the bourgeoisie (translated into the universal term of ‘humanity’ and setting the stage to export emancipation all over the world, although Haiti presented the initial difficulties to emancipating universal claims) and was recovered in the twentieth century in Marxist discourse to argue for the ‘emancipation of the working class’ or still more recently, for the emancipating forces of the multitude, ‘liberation’ provides a larger frame that includes the racialized class that the European bourgeoisie (directly or indirectly) colonized beyond Europe (or beyond the heart of Europe, as it was the colonization of Ireland) and, thus, subsumes ‘emancipation’.). (p. 455, emphasis in original)

Following Benjamin (1921/1996), can writing be decolonized? Perhaps, it is difficult but not impossible. Maybe this is why many Indigenous cultures around the world transmitted their knowledge and wisdom both orally and ritualistically, but seldom through writing? Also, the question of writing, which is linked to developmental arguments regarding literacy, is often raised to support arguments for markers of civilizational progress, such as: whereas Europeans have philosophy, non-Europeans have religion or thought. In other words, markers of civilization are complicit in the project of modernity/coloniality given that they not only justify mythic violence legally but also theoretically— this is known as “Eurocentrism” (Amin, 1988/2009), which is “epistemic violence” (Spivak, 1988).

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So how do we decolonize writing, or delink it from its lawmaking and law-preserving functions? In other words, can writing be a form of living? Writing as a form of living , or as divine violence, would be law-destroying (Benjamin, 1921/1996), since it would be anti-developmental, contrapuntal, poetic, anarchistic, and non-narrative in both rhetoric and logic (Said, 1993). Perhaps embracing divine violence entails writing in the poetic style of oral transmissions and sacred rituals. Maybe we, as secular critics, should not shy away from spirituality as embodied, or living, thought.

From Repression to Oppression Arabic is an example of a transmodern language (langue), but it is not in any sense the transmodern language (langage). I am merely trying to provoke you to think about the repression of transmodern signifiers in the context of the War on Terror discourse vis-à-vis the phenomenon known as flying while Arab, Muslim, or Brown. Furthermore, I theorize oppression as the repression of an Other language (langue) because the repression of an Other language entails the wholesale erasure of Other speaking beings. This is my contrapuntal psychoanalytic reading of oppression. Modern language (langage) is never neutral, for it is inherently colonial as a result of the dominance of certain languages (langues) and cultures throughout history, particularly since 1492, which marks the establishment of the modern world-system of racialized capitalism. Therefore, a transmodern signifier (like shar¯ıah) is either repressed in the (post)modern unconscious, or if it is not repressed, it is appropriated meaninglessly or hysterically. Think of the following signifiers, for example: h.ij¯ab, h.ummus., or .tah.¯ına. They demonstrate appropriation through transliteration (or Romanization), wherein the (post)modern unconscious, like a whale, swallows whole these transmodern signifiers and other ones, particularly those of the exotic variety that can be commodified in service to capital. In sum, I have been critiquing the (post)modern world of words because it excludes the transmodern world of things.

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The question of colonial difference (as opposed to sexual difference) entails a reconceptualization of the two modes of jouissance explicated by Lacan (1975/1998): masculine jouissance and feminine jouissance. These two modes of jouissance are operative within the zone of being. Colonial difference constitutes two different modes of jouissance: mythical-jouissance and divine-jouissance (Beshara, 2019). Oppression is dehumanizing for both oppressors and the oppressed; therefore, if we think of freedom as the phallus, psychoanalytically-speaking, then under oppression all subjects lack this phallus of freedom, which is essentially individualistic à la political slavery. Liberation, on the other hand, implies a social praxis; hence, it does not function as the phallus but as a mode of jouissance beyond the pleasure principle of oppression. Ironically, when liberation (as a process) turns into power (as an end), oppression will become a repressed signifier and will function as the reverse phallus, that is, if the unconscious continues to be relevant. Race is a misrecognition premised on the racist disavowal of the racialized. The subject of psychoanalysis was assumed to be European, male, and heterosexual—although Freud (1920/1966) did grant that children are “polymorphously perverse” (p. 259). Freud’s (1930/1961) writings on European culture as civilization (i.e., as imperialism) attest to his Eurocentrism and the Oedipus complex, which supposedly affects only male children, speaks to the inherent sexism of psychoanalysis. Lacan (1973/2004) revised penis envy through the lens of structuralism and produced the phallus as “a symbol of the lack” (p. 103); in other words, a symbol that both males and females lack, which turns castration into an effect of entering into language. Freud’s (1920/1966) homophobia is clear from his psychosexual developmental model, wherein ‘healthy’ (read: heterosexual male) subjects resolve the Oedipus complex through identification with the father. Feminist theorists (e.g., Grosz, 1990; Mitchell, 1974/2000) have done, and continue to do, excellent work in critiquing psychoanalysis along these lines. However, my own interest lies in the postcolonial critique of psychoanalysis, which concerns the non-European subject, particularly the colonized. By “the colonized,” I mean those non-European individuals and groups who either have been historically colonized and/or are currently experiencing colonialism. Two forms of colonialism are

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salient in my mind: settler colonialism and franchise colonialism (Wolfe, 1999). Neocolonialism (Nkrumah, 1965) is certainly a third type, but, as we shall shortly see, colonialism (or coloniality) today is not only politico-economic but also psychosocial (for an overview of European imperialism see Gwynne, Klak, & Shaw, 2003).

Endo-Colonization Consequently, a fourth type of colonialism that is worth thinking about at present, particularly with the global militarization of the police, is “endo-colonization” as the colonization of “one’s own population” and the underdevelopment of “one’s own civilian economy” (Virilio, 1983/2008, p. 107). Virilio (1983/2008) sees endo-colonization as an effect of decolonization, but it is not clear whether he is for or against decolonization; perhaps, his analysis is more descriptive than evaluative: Endo-colonization: the colony has always been the model of the political State, which began in the city, spread to the nation, across the communes, and reached the stage of the French and English colonial empires. And now it backfires, which we knew the moment there was decolonization. Decolonization is not a positive sign, it’s an endo-colonial sign. If you decolonize without, you’ll colonize all the more intensely within. Colonial extensiveness is replaced by endo-colonial intensiveness. (pp. 166–167)

Virilio (1983/2008) also explains endo-decolonization as a function of “minimal politics” or the “minimum-State” (p. 110), wherein “societies have lost their capacity for self-regulation” to multinational corporations (p. 111). In other words, neoliberal capitalism leads to endo-colonization. Elsewhere, Virilio also qualifies endo-colonization in terms of totalitarianism; he writes: “Totalitarian societies [e.g., Nazi Germany] colonize their own people” (as cited in Armitacge, 1999, p. 50). The merging of globalization (under neoliberal capitalism) in tandem with totalitarianism is what Virilio terms “Globalitarianism!” (as cited in Armitacge, 1999, p. 38), which is exemplified by the Global

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War on Terror. Finally, Virilio sheds light on another dimension of endocolonization qua “endo-technological eugenicism” (as cited in Armitacge, 1999, p. 51), in the context of technological acceleration (e.g., the transplant revolution): Every time a country is being colonized, bodies are colonized. The body of the Negro, of the slave, of the deportee, of the inmate of the labour camp, is a colonized body. Thus technology colonizes the world, through globalitarianism, as we have seen earlier, but it also colonizes bodies, their attitudes and behaviours. (pp. 50–51, emphasis in original)

Decolonial Subjectification Contrapuntal psychoanalysis is a liberation praxis, which begins with a critique of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis “from the perspective of coloniality” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). This praxis entails looking at psychoanalysis as both an “imperialist discourse” and a “colonialist practice” (Said, 1993, p. 6) “from the point of view of the colonies (in the historical sense)” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 507). Elsewhere in his article Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality, Mignolo (2007) qualifies this perspective using other terms: first from Frantz Fanon like “the damnés” (p. 458) then from Enrique Dussel like “liberation and decolonization” (p. 459). Therefore, the aim of contrapuntal psychoanalysis, as a praxis inspired by Marx’s (1845/1978) 11th thesis on Feuerbach and Freire’s (1970/2018) Pedagogy of the Oppressed , is theorizing decolonial subjectification in an effort to change the world. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (1993) describes the political subject of contrapuntal psychoanalysis using phrases like “exilic marginality” (p. 24) and “dislocated subjectivity” (p. 28). Decolonial subjects are actively engaged in what Mignolo (2007), along with Aníbal Quijano and Samir Amin, call “delinking” or “a de-colonial epistemic shift” (p. 453). Decolonial subjects are also involved in what he, and Gloria Anzaldúa, conceptualize as “border thinking or border epistemology” (p. 455). Mignolo (2007) writes:

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Border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories…and corresponding subjectivities. (p. 493)

In other words, the decolonial subject is neither a (post)colonial subject nor a pre-colonial subject; for the logic of decolonial subjectivity is governed by the rhetoric of transmodern Otherness. Conversely, the (post)colonial subject is logically governed by a (post)modern rhetoric, which is still situated within the project of modernity/coloniality. As for the pre-colonial subject, she is a fantasy figure that ideologically sustains Orientalism and similar discourses.

The Two Others The concept of the big Other, or the Other with a capital O, is central to both psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, but it certainly predates both fields. Lajos Brons (2015) argues that Simone De Beauvoir can be credited for introducing this concept of the Other in 1949 with the publication of her book, The Second Sex. In her conceptualization of woman as Other, De Beauvoir (1949/2009) was indexing G. W. F. Hegel’s (1807/2018) master-slave dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel (1807/2018), the struggle between the master and the slave is not simply a struggle between two individuals or subjects, but a struggle between two historical ideas. Hegel believed that the better idea (freedom or emancipation, in this case) would eventually win because there is a dialectical (i.e., developmental or progressive) logic to history. Marx, of course, had a similar belief to that of Hegel’s but the struggle for him was not an idealist one, but a material struggle between two historical classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In psychoanalysis, the dialectic becomes one involving the subject and the Other. In decoloniality, it encompasses the colonizer and the colonized, or, in the language of liberation philosophy, it is the oppressoroppressed dialectic. The goal of psychoanalysis, if there is one, is the

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traversing of the fantasy, wherein “the subject subjectifies the cause of his or her existence (the Other’s desire: object a), and is characterized by desirousness” (Fink, 1997, p. 195, emphasis in original). The aim of decoloniality is liberation, which for Freire (1970/2018) is our historical vocation: to become “more fully human” (p. 44). Although the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was a dislocated subject, a Jewish atheist, a non-European, living in an anti-Semitic Viennese milieu, in a country (Austria) that ended up being annexed, without resistance, by Nazi Germany; psychoanalysis is a modern project, which means it is inherently governed by a colonial logic. My aim is not to throw the baby (psychoanalysis) out with the bathwater (Eurocentrism), for I am committed to many of the insights of psychoanalysis. However, the question for me is how to decolonize psychoanalysis so that it becomes a liberation praxis for everyone in the world? Therefore, contrapuntal psychoanalysis must be relevant, and applicable, for those living in both the Global South and the Global North. The Global South is a geopolitical designation that refers to transmodern cultures in the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia. But the Global South also signifies ‘outsiders within’—that is, decolonial subcultures in the Global North. In the context of the US, for example, these decolonial subcultures include Indigenous, Black, and Brown subjects. Having said that, I circle back to the notion of the Other because I am curious to find out if there is any conceptual link between the psychoanalytic Other and the decolonial Other. Lacan (1966/2006), in his return to Freud, distinguishes between the little, or Imaginary, other, that is, other egos; and the big, or Symbolic, Other as the field of speech and language. Lacan (1966/2006) writes, “The Other is, therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks along with he [or she] who hears” (p. 358). This conceptualization of the Symbolic Other as the field, or locus, of speech and language compels Lacan (1966/2006) to formulate that “the unconscious is the Other’s discourse” (p. 10, emphasis in original). Meaning that the unconscious is neither personal nor collective, but psychosocial: a “transindividual reality” (Lacan, 1966/2006, p. 214).

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Now, let us turn to the decolonial Other, who is either ignored by psychoanalysts or dismissed as Imaginary. In his magnum opus, Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) conceptualizes the Other, as an ideological fantasy figure, denoting both the Orient and the Oriental in the EuroAmerican subject’s imagination. In other words, Orientalism is not only a Symbolic discourse, but an ideology sustained by an Imaginary fantasy about the binary and hierarchical relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ To put it differently, the colonial subject’s unconscious is the modern Other’s discourse, which is Orientalism. Therefore, Said was not writing about Orientals as other egos in the imagination of colonial subjects. He was writing about Orientals and the Orient as discursive and material objects, or objets a, in the unconscious of colonial subjects. To further support my point, I will cite to you a passage from Orientalism, wherein Said (1978/2003) discusses the notion of exteriority, a central notion for my analysis of decolonial subjectivity: [M]y concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes. I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized. Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West…The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation. (pp. 20–21, emphasis added)

In Orientalism, Said (1978/2003) also writes about Orientalism as paranoiac knowledge, which is consistent with Lacan’s (1966/2006) interpretation of paranoia as Imaginary knowledge (or méconnaissance). The unconscious truth of Orientalism, its Symbolic or unknown knowledge, is concerning the Oriental Other as the repressed of the Orientalist unconscious. For example, ‘Islam’ and ‘Arab’ are repressed signifiers that constitute the non-identity of Europe, particularly vis-à-vis Al-Andalus (711–1492). It takes a lot of effort to repress close to eight centuries of non-European rule in Europe, wherein Muslims and Arabs functioned as a bridge between the ancient world and the Renaissance not only as translators of, and commentators on, ancient Greek texts but also as original contributors in the fields of philosophy and science.

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The Oriental as Other is a locus of speech, which has been systematically misrecognized in, and fantasmatically disavowed from, the discourse of Orientalism; a discourse that imaginarizes and signifierizes the Orient and Orientals. One’s desire is the desire of the Other, but which Other? The (post)modern Other or the transmodern Other? Hence, my theory of double-unconsciousness: the (post)colonial unconscious and the decolonial unconscious. Ultimately, this dialectic of oppression can be superseded by liberation as a process, but the oppressed must lead the way as Freire (1970/2018) shows. Hence, there are two general desires at work here: a desire to maintain dominance (couched in the grammar of freedom) and a desire for liberation. In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019), I focused on Arabic as an example of a transmodern language (langue), but it is not in any way the transmodern language (language). Said’s (1978/2003) notion of exteriority resembles Lacan’s (1986/1992) idea of “extimacy” from his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Lacan (1986/1992) defines extimacy as “intimate exteriority” (p. 139). Extimacy, in other words, is a psychosocial concept that names the topological structure of human subjectivity. As an effect of language, the subject is divided between a conscious interior (or ego) and an exterior unconscious. This split led Lacan to visualize the subject as a Möbius strip. However, the topological structure of decolonial subjects is further complexified by the question of cultural difference, which in the longue durée of Euro-colonialism amounts essentially to colonial difference. To further solidify what I am trying to construct here, I have linked Said’s (1978/2003) notion of exteriority and Lacan’s (1986/1992) idea of extimacy to Dussel’s (2002) concept of transmodernity. For Dussel (2002): The metacategory ‘exteriority’ can illuminate an analysis of the cultural ‘positivity’ not included by modernity, an analysis based not on postmodernity’s suppositions but rather on those of what I have called ‘trans’-modernity. That is to say, exteriority is a process that takes off, originates, and mobilizes itself from an ‘other’ place…From this ‘exteriority,’ negated and excluded by hegemonic Europe’s modern expansion,

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there are present-day cultures that predate European modernity, that have developed together with it, and that have survived until the present with enough human potential to give birth to a cultural plurality that will emerge after modernity and capitalism. These living and productive cultures, creative and in otherness [di-ferentes], are not just postmodern, since ‘postmodern’ only labels a final stage of modernity. Rather, they are cultures that have developed on a ‘trans’-modern horizon, something beyond the internal possibility of simple modernity. This ‘beyond’ (‘trans-’) indicates the take-off point from modernity’s exteriority. (p. 234, emphasis in original)

My effort so far in this section has been to build a theoretical bridge between psychoanalysis and decoloniality through the notion of exteriority. However, while the psychoanalytic Other and the decolonial Other are both Symbolic entities that are formal in essence given their discursive ontology, we are still dealing with two different Others: not a Symbolic Other versus an Imaginary other, but two different Symbolic Others, and that difference has to do with cultural, or colonial, difference, which we can conceptualize as the traumatic Real of colonialism. In his Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan (1998/2017) writes about “the Other of the Other” (p. 176), a formulation that he ends up rejecting in his Seminar VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, by writing that “[t]here is no Other of the Other” (Lacan, 2013/2019, p. 324). The second formulation is meant to make the case that like the subject, the Other is also barred because, as Lacan (1966/2006) argues in Écrits, “there is no metalanguage that can be spoken” (p. 688). However, for the purposes of my analysis, I think it is worth resurrecting Lacan’s (1998/2017) earlier formulation regarding “the Other of the Other” because while it is true that there is no metalanguage, there are Other languages and Other cultures. Resurrecting this earlier formulation will allow me to distinguish between the psychoanalytic Other, or “the Other of the law” (Lacan, 1998/2017, p. 438), and the decolonial Other, or “the Other of the signifier” (Miller, 2013, p. 4). I also designate the former as the (post)modern Other, and the latter as the transmodern Other. I have explored this notion of the two Others in my book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis, wherein

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I realized that US Muslims, as decolonial citizen-subjects, desire as US citizens according to Other of the Law, which in the context of the Islamophobia/Islamophilia fantasy is informed by the (counter)terrorism discourse (Beshara, 2019). But then, here is the interesting part, as Muslim subjects they enjoy according to the Other of the signifier, primarily Islam as a religion, or culture, and Arabic as a language. And, of course, this Other form of jouissance, or enjoyment, is essentially a counter-hegemonic form of ethico-political resistance, too. To get a better sense of Lacan’s (1998/2017) earlier formulation, here is what he writes about the Other of the Other in Formations of the Unconscious: We have defined the Other as the locus of speech. This Other is instituted and takes shape through the sole fact that the subject speaks. By virtue of this sole fact, the big Other is born as the locus of speech. That does not mean, though, that it is realized as a subject in its alterity. The Other is invoked whenever there is speech…this beyond that is articulated in the upper line of our schema is the Other of the Other …The Other of the Other is the locus in which the Other’s speech takes shape as such. (p. 450, emphasis added)

Decolonial subjects are border thinkers because they live in the intersection, or at the border, of these two Others: the Global Northern Other and the Global Southern Other. My formulation affords us a new theorization of oppression as the repression of the Other of the Other. This helps us explain the unconscious criminalization of Arabic in the US, which concerns me greatly since it is my mOther tongue. Think about the phenomenon of flying while Arab, Muslim, or Brown, which I mentioned earlier. Am I able to read or write in Arabic on a plane while flying in the US? What is racism but the rejection of an Other language, an Other culture, and consequently Other bodies? And what is the logic behind this racism? Colonial difference. Now, of course, coloniality, as a style of thought beyond the extractive material system of colonialism, is not only about physical geography (i.e., Global North v. Global South), but also about human geography because the damnés are not only from the Global South. So as

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someone that lives in New Mexico on colonized Tewa land, American Indian boarding schools, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, come to my mind immediately as instances of the systematic erasure of an Other language and culture. I am speaking of epistemicide (de Sousa Santos, 2016) here, as a form of oppression, because how can these Indigenous cultures be orally transmitted to future generations if their languages were historically erased through both psychoanalytic and political repression? I am also thinking of the timeline of white supremacy from the transatlantic slave trade to the New Jim Crow. Again, consider the ongoing criminalization of African-American culture not only through the killing and mass incarceration of Black bodies, but also through the repression of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), which happens to fare better than some of my other examples as a function of the capitalist co-option, and commodification, of hip-hop by the hegemonic music industry. So while some may argue that the appropriation of the n-word from the colonial masters is empowering to Blacks, one has to critically question, however, the context within which the n-word is being used, which, of course, is racialized capitalism. To be clear, racialized capitalism as a modern world-system is inherently linked with the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000). Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as an antiracist and anti-capitalist liberation praxis is concerned with alter-globalization, or mundialización, because although psychoanalysis is a product of a local history (Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), it tends to operate through a global design like a civilizing mission, wherein the subject is conceived to be universal in theory although in reality this universality is never applied to so-called primitive or barbarian subjects (i.e., those developmentally stuck in the past from the perspective of modernity or those living outside the Euro-American centers of power, respectively). On the contrary, contrapuntal psychoanalysis explicitly honors “the diversity and pluri-versity of the many local histories that in the past 500 hundred years (some in the past 250 or perhaps only 50 years) couldn’t avoid the contact, conflict, and complicity with the West” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 449).

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We are currently witnessing the criminalization of Latin@ cultures and the Spanish language in the context of the MAGA ideology, particularly the Build That Wall discourse. I am sure the reader has seen numerous examples in the media of white-identifying people calling the police upon seeing/hearing Brown people speaking in Spanish. This racist act, of course, negates the colonial history of the US, wherein many of these Spanish-speaking subjects are descendants of people who were living here before parts of this country were parts of this country, and were instead colonies of the Viceroyalty of New Spain before becoming territories of Mexico. The concept of the two Others affords us a contrapuntal psychoanalytic reading of oppression, or racism, as the repression of the Other of the Other.

Double-Unconsciousness Given that there are two Others, and that decolonial subjects are oppressed because they embody this double-Otherness, what then is the status of the unconscious from the perspective of contrapuntal psychoanalysis? In this section, I build upon and extend W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1903/2007) notion of “double-consciousness” which is one of the features of the decolonial subject’s “two-ness” (p. 8). The other missing feature from Du Bois’s account is, of course, double-unconsciousness. Given that there are two Others, the decolonial subject’s doubleunconsciousness is a function of the discourses generated by these two Others, namely: the discourse of (post)modernity and the discourse of transmodernity. Du Bois (1903/2007) wrote about double-consciousness not as a curse, but as a gift of “second-sight” (p. 8). Meaning that the decolonial subject is able to perceive both the colonial subject and how they are being perceived, and racialized, by this colonial subject. Fanon (1952/2008) characterized his experience with not only two-ness but three-ness: “I existed in triple. I was taking up room. I approached the Other…and the Other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, transparent and absent, vanished. Nausea” (p. 92).

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In the context of my notion of double-unconsciousness, second-sight is both a conscious and an unconscious gift when it comes to perception. Colonial subjects, on the other hand, lack this gift of second-sight, which is why many bourgeois whites continue to deny their privilege and to overlook the disadvantaged subject-positionings of oppressed groups as a function of colonialism. Furthermore, psychoanalysis, like colonial subjects, also lacks the gift of second-sight, a gift that allows decolonial subjects to be acutely aware of, for example, microaggressions or everyday racism. Naturally, the gift of second-sight is at the heart of contrapuntal psychoanalysis as a border methodology.

The Paradox of the Racism-‘Race’ Dialectic Reading Fanon’s (1952/2008) “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” made me think of the paradox of the racism-‘race’ dialectic. On the one hand, the concept of ‘race’ would not exist without the reality of racism. Racism is a product of racialization and racialization is a function of the concept of ‘race’. On the other hand, while the concept of ‘race’ is inherently problematic (i.e., racist), we cannot do without it and pretend to be colorblind. The fact of the matter is we live in a racist world, therefore, we all racialize. However, we are not all racists. So while we cannot help, but (mis)perceive other human beings through the lens of ‘race,’ which does not mean that we all think, feel, and/or act as if this other human (who is presumably different from us) is somehow inferior than us. The real question, raised by the racism-‘race’ dialectic, is how do we account for human differences without being racist? In other words, it is normal to perceive human differences, the problem is how do we make sense of these differences? That is, what schemas do we rely on for interpreting perceived human differences? This issue is complex because our schemas are largely products of our culture(s). Then the next logical question becomes: How do we change cultures of racism? This is a difficult task because it entails changing how we read, and consequently reconstruct, world history. Put differently, it is a pedagogical task at the levels of the family, the school, and the society.

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Colonial Difference Decolonial theorists write about colonial difference, which is the historical and ongoing asymmetry between the colonizer and the colonized. In Decolonial Psychoanalysis (Beshara, 2019), I tried to theorize the link between colonial difference and sexual difference. The latter is grounded in Lacan’s (1975/1998) formulas of sexuation in Seminar XX, which are premised on “the impossibility of the sexual relationship as such. Jouissance, qua sexual, is phallic–in other words, it is not related to the Other as such” (p. 9). This impossibility is typically rendered in this form: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship). But why this impossibility? Lacan (1975/1998) argues that writing (representing the unrepresentable) itself attests to the truth of his axiom: the sexual relationship cannot be written (ne peut pas s’écrire). Everything that is written stems from the fact that it will forever be impossible to write, as such, the sexual relationship. It is on that basis that there is a certain effect of discourse, which is called writing. (p. 35, emphasis in original)

For Lacan (1975/1998), sexual difference, or the difference between masculine and feminine, is neither a biological nor a cultural difference, but a logical difference in jouissance. Consequently, masculine jouissance is a phallic jouissance, while feminine jouissance is an Other jouissance. Love signifies the impossibility of the sexual relationship, and the fact that it cannot be written: “What makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love” (p. 45). Another reason why the sexual relationship is impossible is because phallic jouissance is premised on the masculine subject’s fantasy vis-à-vis a partial object of the feminine Other: “Phallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas), I would say, to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ [i.e., objet a]” (p. 7, emphasis in original). This is why Lacan (1975/1998) later qualifies phallic jouissance as “the jouissance of the idiot” (p. 81) since it is essentially masturbatory.

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Conversely, Lacan (1975/1998) links feminine jouissance not to the phallus (), as a symbol of lack or as a “signifier that has no signified” (p. 81), but to the barred Other (A): “why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?” (p. 77). Consequently, Lacan (1975/1998) writes Woman or claims “La femme n’existe pas” (Lacan, 1987, p. 41, emphasis in original): Woman has a relation to the signifier of that Other, insofar as, qua Other, it can but remain forever Other. I can only assume here that you will recall my statement that there is no Other of the Other. The Other, that is, the locus in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of the signifier comes to be inscribed, is, in its foundation, the Other in the most radical sense. That is why the signifier, with this open parenthesis, marks the Other as barred: S(A). (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 81)

My thesis is that Lacan’s (1975/1998) sexual difference applies to the zone of being, but not to those in the zone of nonbeing, that is, the damned who have been historically ungendered (Curry, 2017) or “robbed of gender” and “confined within the binary of conquest” (Curry, personal communication, August 7, 2020). Also, in Decolonial Psychoanalysis (2019), I have resuscitated the Other of the Other to distinguish between the Other of the Law and the Other of the signifiers. When Lacan (1966/2006) writes “that there is no Other of the Other” or “that there is no metalanguage that can be spoken” (p. 688), he is signifying the death of the Name-of-the-Father. However, from the perspective of coloniality, the Other of the Law is very much alive. According to Lorenzo Chiesa (2007), “the Real of the object a” (p. 122, emphasis in original) fills in the gap left by the death of the Name-of-the-Father. In my view, colonial difference is premised on what Du Bois (1903/2007) has termed “two-ness” (p. 8), the two-ness of decolonial subjects. While (post)colonial subjects are divided, decolonial subjects are doubly divided. For this reason, I conceive of two modes of jouissance (Beshara, 2019) that correspond with colonial difference: mythicaljouissance and divine-jouissance. Mythical-jouissance (which is essentially phallic) is the jouissance experienced by those in the zone of being, which perpetuates the apparatus of racialized capitalism. It is a jouissance derived from oppression and mythic violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996),

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particularly “racialized death and sexual violence against Black men” (Curry, 2017, p. 142). On the other hand, divine-jouissance characterizes the jouissance of the damned, whose source is liberation and divine violence (Benjamin, 1921/1996). Earlier, I have linked this Other jouissance with the (spiritual) renunciation of the drives to hint at the relationship between sublimation and the sublime. Mignolo frames that relationship in terms of “decolonial aesthesis” (as cited in GaztambideFernández, 2014). Spirituals, of which blues and gospel are derivatives, are the most concrete example I can think of. Curry (2017) has been crucial in my articulation of colonial difference in relation to sexual difference with his distinction between gender and genre and his conceptualization of the Man-Not, who can also be represented as Man. Therefore, we can say: il n’y a de rapport coloniale (there’s no such thing as a colonial relationship), and we can also declare: l’homme noir n’existe pas (the Black man doesn’t ex-sist). Fanon (1952/2008) acknowledges the fact of colonial difference when he writes, “Between the white man and me there is irremediably a relationship of transcendence” (p. 117). The Man-Not extends to other colonized (i.e., racialized or politicized) men; we can, naturally, also speak of the Human-Not, which includes both the Man-Not and the Woman-Not. The colonial relationship cannot be written because writing is a form of killing, and what makes up for the colonial relationship is, quite precisely, carnal hatred (Curry, 2017, p. 4). It is for this reason that I conceptualize solidarity with the oppressed, in the context of cultural difference, not in terms of love but “learned ignorance” (Beshara, 2019). My point about the primacy of colonial difference over sexual difference is echoed by Curry’s (2017) account of the distinction between gender and genre (p. 6), which was developed by Sylvia Wynter. Curry (2017) argues, from a post-feminist perspective, that Black males are actually more vulnerable to racial-sexual violence because of their Man-Notness. Curry (2017) supports his arguments with examples from history and with empirical data from the present; he writes: Because the Black male is often defined by a categorical redundancy of “him as male,” his sexual difference, his genre, is usually obscured from sight. He is thought to be like the white male because he is biologically

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male. The notion of a different historical consciousness, or development of manliness, is thought to be conceptually impossible and without historical substantiation, not because there is no actual evidence, but because the proof is imperceptible under the present categorical assortment of knowledge. This historicization of the Black male does not solidify another race/gender standpoint. In actual point of fact, there is no oppression that is “unique,” in the sense that oppression happens to only one group of people within history. The study of the Black male shows that certain kinds of violence accumulate around certain bodies, and these are the discoveries of his specificity revealed by study. Closer attention to Black males throughout history shows that patriarchy is not an insular and gender-opposing system that protects all men while subjugating all women. Patriarchy stands appositionally to femininity as a self-regenerative system (both ideologically and biologically). It depends on white womanhood to enact its domestic terrorism and global imperialism. Patriarchy depends on white femininity for its propagation. Just as “man” and his expression of masculinity have meaning within Western patriarchal logics, so, too, are the female and her feminism the representation of the wombs that birth the masculinity of this order. Patriarchy evolved to protect white womanhood because white womanhood is not only the foundation on which empire is built but also the nascence of the expendable white male surplus needed for imperial conquest. She births MAN, so the white woman is given a peculiar power under white supremacy. This reality is excluded from theory in an effort to maintain the essential category of the woman as morally good and subjectively vulnerable and in need of recognition and preference in discourse. (Curry, 2017, pp. 41–42)

In Chapter 1, I applied Algirdas Greimas’s (1968) semiotic square to distinguish between the zone of being (S) and the zone of nonbeing (~S), wherein S1 is the (white bourgois) Man and S2 is the (white bourgois) Woman. Both are, of course, raceless from the perspective of racialized capitalism. This semiotic configuration also overlaps with Lacan’s (1991/2007) Master’s Discourse, wherein S1 is a master-signifier (patriarchy) and S2 is knowledge (feminism). Curry (2017) is making the case that feminism, as a critique of patriarchy, was specifically a historical response to white supremacist patriarchy that, of course, excluded and continues to disavow racialized folks. Therefore, Curry (2017) comes to

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the conclusion that the feminist argument that Black males today are more privileged in the US because of their maleness constitutes either a denial of history or historical revisionism. Curry (2017) is a staunch critic of intersectionality theory because it assumes that Black women are more oppressed than Black men because they are both racialized and gendered; however, Curry (2017) goes to show that Black males, despite the claims of intersectionality theory, are in fact equally, if not more, oppressed than women because they are racialized, but were never gendered , hence, why they are Man-Nots (cf. Curry, 2021). National data on intimate partner and sexual violence that date back to 2010 provide empirical support for Curry’s thesis. For example, Stemple and Meyer (2014) conclude, on the basis of five federal surveys, that “a high prevalence of sexual victimization [was detected] among men—in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women” (p. 19). Going back to the semiotic square, the ~S at the bottom of the square signifies the zone of nonbeing, which includes the racialized, the politicized, the oppressed, the damnés, the subaltern, the lumpenproletariat, the colonized, etc. But in the context of Curry’s (2017) analysis, ~S specifically signifies Blackness as a zone of nonbeing. Therefore, ~S2 is the (Black lumpenproletarian) Woman-Not and ~S1 is the (Black lumpenproletarian) Man-Not. In the schema of the Master’s Discourse (Lacan, 1991/2007), ~S2 is the doubly divided subject ($) and ~S1 is the objet a (phobogenic object). Curry’s (2017) invention of Black Male Studies is a methodological attempt to think about Black masculinity from the zone of nonbeing. Sexual difference is concerned with the difference between white bourgeois masculinity and femininity in terms of enjoyment, but colonial difference sheds light on the racial-sexual violence perpetrated by subjects in the zone of being onto those in the zone of nonbeing. Both forms of analysis are important, but they are not morally equivalent if we care about liberation. I am worried about how racialized feminists (~S2 ), for example, are aligning themselves with white feminists (S2 ) when they have a more pressing common struggle with Indigenous, Black, and Brown males (~S1 ) against over-exploitation and disposability/fungibility. I read this situation highlighted by Curry (2017) as an example of a divide and rule tactic employed from the zone of being,

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which, of course, weakens our subaltern communities. The ideological campaign from the zone of being to discursively frame the zone of nonbeing as an inherently violent zone fantasmatically sutures the traumatic Real of colonial violence, which is the material basis of oppression and violence in the apparatus of racialized capitalism.

Colonial Difference as a Product of the Coloniality of Power Now, I will turn to how colonial difference is conceptualized among decolonial theorists. I begin with Quijano (2000) because his essay on the coloniality of power was the basis for later conceptions like the coloniality of knowledge and being: What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. (p. 533)

Epistemic Colonial Difference as a Product of the Coloniality of Knowledge The main theorist of epistemic colonial difference as a product of the coloniality of knowledge is Mignolo (2000), who writes: By “colonial differences” I mean, through my argument (and I should perhaps say “the colonial difference”), the classification of the planet in the modern/colonial imaginary, by enacting coloniality of power,

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an energy and a machinery to transform differences into values. If racism is the matrix that permeates every domain of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system, “Occidentalism” is the overarching metaphor around which colonial differences have been articulated and rearticulated through the changing hands in the history of capitalism…and the changing ideologies motivated by imperial conflicts. (p. 13)

Elsewhere, Mignolo (2002) adds: the starting point of knowledge and thinking must be the colonial difference, not the narrative of Western civilization or the narrative of the modern world-system. Thus transmodernity and coloniality of power highlight the epistemic colonial difference, essentially the fact that it is urgently necessary to think and produce knowledge from the colonial difference. Paradoxically, the erasure of the colonial difference implies that one recognize it and think from such an epistemic location—to think, that is, from the borders of the two macronarratives, philosophy (Western civilization) and the social sciences (modern world-system). The epistemic colonial difference cannot be erased by its recognition from the perspective of modern epistemology. On the contrary, it requires, as Bernasconi clearly saw in the case of African philosophy, that epistemic horizons open beyond Bacon’s authoritarian assertion that “there can be no others.” The consequences of this are gigantic not only for epistemology but also for ethics and politics. (p. 85)

A key distinction within epistemic colonial difference is between temporal colonial difference and spatial colonial difference: “If the temporal difference was expressed through the notion of ‘primitives’, the spatial colonial difference worked through the concept of barbarians, an idea taken from the Greek language and historical experience, but modified in the sixteenth century to refer to those who were located in an inferior space” (Mignolo, 2007, pp. 470–471, emphasis in original).

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Ontological Colonial Difference as a Product of the Coloniality of Being Nelson Maldonado-Torres is the chief theorist of ontological colonial difference as a product of the coloniality of being. His work draws on the Fanonian distinction between zones of being and nonbeing as well as Mignolo’s epistemic colonial difference. The difference between ontological and sub-ontological colonial difference, for Maldonado-Torres (2007) is the “difference between Being and what lies below Being or that which is negatively marked as dispensable as well as a target of rape and murder…In short, sub-ontological or ontological colonial difference relates to the coloniality of Being” (p. 254). Maldonado-Torres (2007) continues: For Fanon, in the colonial context, ontological colonial difference or subontological difference profoundly marks the day to day reality. If the most basic ontological question is ‘why are things rather than nothing’, the question that emerges in this context and that opens up reflection on the coloniality of Being is ‘Why go on?’ As Lewis Gordon has put it, ‘why go on?’ is a fundamental question in the existential philosophy of the African diaspora and it illuminates the plight of the wretched of the earth. Why go on? is preceded only by one expression, which becomes the first instance that [reveals] the coloniality of Being, that is, the cry. The cry, not a word but an interjection, is a call of attention to one’s own existence. The cry is the pre-theoretical expression of the question– Why go on?–which for the most part drives theoretical reflection in the peoples of the African diaspora. It is the cry that animates the birth of theory and critical thought. And the cry points to a peculiar existential condition: that of the condemned. The damné or condemned is not a ‘being there’ but a non-being…Invisibility and dehumanization are the primary expressions of the coloniality of Being. The coloniality of Being indicates those aspects that produce exception from the order of Being; it is as it were, the product of the excess of Being that in order to maintain its integrity and inhibit the interruption by what lies beyond Being produces its contrary, not nothing, but a non-human or rather an inhuman world [cf. Curry’s (2017) Man-Not]. The coloniality of Being refers not merely to the reduction of the particular to the generality of

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the concept or any given horizon of meaning, but to the violation of the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter. Such a reality, typically approximated very closely in situations of war, is transformed into an ordinary affair through the idea of race, which serves a crucial role in the naturalization of the non-ethics of war [i.e., damnation] through the practices of colonialism and (racial) slavery. The coloniality of Being is not therefore an inevitable moment or natural outcome of the dynamics of creation of meaning. Although it is always present as a possibility, it shows itself forth when the preservation of Being (in any of its determinations: national ontologies, identitarian ontologies, etc.) takes primacy over listening to the cries of those whose humanity is being denied. The coloniality of Being appears in historical projects and ideas of civilization which advance colonial projects of various kinds inspired or legitimized by the idea of race. The coloniality of Being is therefore coextensive with the production of the color-line in its different expressions and dimensions. It becomes concrete in the appearance of liminal subjects, which mark, as it were, the limit of Being, that is, the point at which Being distorts meaning and evidence to the point of dehumanization. The coloniality of Being produces the ontological colonial difference, deploying a series of fundamental existential characteristics and symbolic realities. (pp. 256–257, emphasis in original)

Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Subjectivities In this section, I would like to distinguish between three subjectivities that result from colonial difference: colonial subjectivity, postcolonial subjectivity, and decoloniality subjectivity. The first two, or (post)coloniality subjectivity, are racist; one is segregationist while the other is assimilationist. Decolonial subjectivity, on the other hand, is antiracist. Before I say more, it is crucial to demonstrate that the (post)modern ego cogito is an outcome of, first, the ego conquiro, and, second, the ego extermino. In other words, unconscious thinking is a function of unconscious conquering/exterminating. It is no surprise then that the zone of being is founded upon the conquering and

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exterminating of unthinking-nonbeings (cf. Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 245): The ego cogito, as we have seen, has a direct relationship with a protohistory of the seventeenth century, which is reflected in Descartes’s ontology, but which does not emerge from a void. The ego conquiro (I conquer) is its predecessor, as a “practical ego.” Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico in 1521 precedes The Discourse on Method (published in 1637) by more than a hundred years. (Dussel, 2013, p. 43, emphasis in original)

Ramón Grosfoguel’s (2013) innovation was elaborating a third historical ego (ego extermino) between the ego conquiro and the ego cogito as way of explaining the four genocides/epistemicides of the long sixteenth century: What links the “I conquer, therefore I am” (ego conquiro) with the idolatric, God-like “I think, [therefore] I am” (ego cogito) is the epistemic racism/sexism produced from the “I exterminate, therefore I am” (ego extermino). It is the logic of genocide/epistemicide together that mediates the “I conquer” with the epistemic racism/sexism of the “I think” as the new foundation of knowledge in the modern/colonial world. The ego extermino is the socio-historical structural condition that makes possible the link of the ego conquiro with the ego cogito. In what follows, it will be argued that the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century are the socio-historical condition of possibility for the transformation of the “I conquer, therefore I am” into the epistemic racism/sexism of the “I think, therefore I am.” These four genocides/epistemicides in the long 16th century are: 1) against Muslims and Jews in the conquest of AlAndalus in the name of “purity of blood”; 2) against indigenous peoples first in the Americas and then in Asia; 3) against African people with the captive trade and their enslavement in the Americas; 4) against women who practiced and transmitted Indo-European knowledge in Europe burned alive accused of being witches” (Grosfoguel, 2013, p. 77, emphasis in original).

The ego cogito is, of course, one of the pillars of psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s innovation was to decenter this ego by introducing the unconscious as a destabilizing force in subjectivity, but unfortunately that does

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not deny the historical evolution of the unconscious itself vis-à-vis the modern Other. Therefore, we must speak of the longue durée of the conquering/exterminating unconscious (i.e., the colonial unconscious) before we get to the postcolonial, or even decolonial, unconscious, which is partly what contrapuntal psychoanalysis does. Whereas the colonial subject is the segregationist subject as demand, who is dominated by the modern Other’s demand, the postcolonial subject is the assimilationist subject as desire, who is subjugated by the postmodern Other’s desire. The decolonial subject, however, is the antiracist subject as drive, who “subjectifies the cause of his or her existence (the [transmodern] Other’s desire: object a), and is characterized by desirousness” (Fink, 1997, p. 195, emphasis in original). Colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial subjectivities correspond to Lacan’s three substitutional metaphors: alienation, separation, and the traversing of fantasy (Fink, 1995, p. 69). After dismantling the apparatus of racialized capitalism, we can even speak of a contrapuntal (or cosmopolitan) subject beyond neurosis. While the modern Other demands the overexploitation of the planet by any means necessary and the postmodern Other desires recognition in the zone of being, the transmodern Other enjoys the praxis of liberation, which is a source of divine-jouissance.

The Decoloniality of Power/Knowledge/Being Through Border Methodology Having elaborated the different dimensions of colonial difference, how can we (the damned of the Earth) decolonize power/knowledge/being— for the coloniality of gender (see Lugones, 2010)? Mignolo (2007) suggests border methodology as a way of delinking the rhetoric of (post)modernity from the logic of (post)coloniality (p. 499), or as a machine for intellectual decolonization (Mignolo, 2000, p. 45). Mignolo (2000) writes: Engaging in border thinking is tantamount to engaging in decoloniality; that is, in thinking and doing decolonially. Why? Because the main thrust

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of border thinking is not directed toward “improving” the disciplines, but toward “using” the disciplines beyond the disciplines themselves, aiming and building a world without modernity/coloniality. Border thinking is actional. What kind of knowledge do decolonial thinkers want? We want knowledge that contributes to eliminating coloniality and improves living conditions on the planet. (pp. xvii–xviii)

According to Mignolo (2000), border methodology results in the “subalternization” of power/knowledge/being. As a method, it is part of the project of transmodernity and has political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Mignolo (2007) explains that border methodology is “the necessary critical method for the political and ethical project of filling in the gaps” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 499, emphasis in original). These gaps that need filling signify the two-ness of the decolonial subject, which is represented by the slash in modernity/coloniality, the dash in Man-Not, the strikethrough in Woman, and the line dividing being from nonbeing. I have written about two-ness in terms of double-unconsciousness and the two Others that are functions of colonial difference. Now, you have a context for a term like Eurocentrism. Conversely, contrapuntal psychoanalysis is pluriversal, or world-centric; it is a manifestation of mundialización and an example of critical border psychology. Whereas in Chapter 1, I applied the semiotic square and the Master’s Discourse to Curry’s (2017) theory of the Man-Not. With Fig. 5.1, I am demonstrating how liberation praxis can function as a horizontal semiosis.

Fig. 5.1 Horizontal semiosis

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Principles of Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis In this section, I will reflect on some of the principles of contrapuntal psychoanalysis, but I first I must acknowledge the source of inspiration: Said’s (1993) decolonial methodology of “contrapuntal reading” from Culture and Imperialism, which was meant to address the critiques of its prequel: Orientalism. Said (1993) writes that a contrapuntal reading: means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England. Moreover, like all literary texts, these are not bounded by their formal historic beginnings and endings…The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded. (pp. 66–67, emphasis added)

To slightly rephrase Said (1993), “this global, contrapuntal [psycho]analysis should be modelled not…on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble; we must take into account all sorts of spatial or geographical and rhetorical practices—inflections, limits, constraints, intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions—all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (p. 318). The first principle of contrapuntal psychoanalysis is accounting for two-ness: two subjects, two Others, double-consciousness, and double-unconsciousness. A contrapuntal psychoanalyst accounts for the (post)colonial subject and the (post)modern Other on the one hand, and the decolonial subject and the transmodern Other on the other hand. The second principle of contrapuntal psychoanalysis is accounting for not only temporality, but also spatiality. Psychoanalysis is inherently developmental (e.g., Freud’s theory of psychosexual development), and contrapuntal psychoanalysis is conversely anti-developmental. The temporal unconscious of (post)modernity/(post)coloniality is a historical unconscious, while its spatial unconscious is essentially a geopolitical unconscious. Derrida’s (1991) essay on “geopsychoanalysis” is

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a great example of a contrapuntal psychoanalytic account of the spatial/geopolitical unconscious of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The geopolitical unconscious dimension was also crucial for Said’s (1993) methodology of contrapuntal reading: Imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory. The geographical sense makes projections—imaginative, cartographic, military, economic, historical, or in a general sense cultural. It also makes possible the construction of various kinds of knowledge, all of them in one way or another dependent upon the perceived character and destiny of a particular geography. (p. 78)

The third principle of contrapuntal psychoanalysis is accounting for not only sexual difference, but also colonial difference, which entails shifting our analysis of the libidinal economy of enjoyment from phallic/Other jouissance to mythical/divine jouissance. The emphasis on colonial difference prioritizes the historical primacy of racial-sexual violence against the ungendered (Curry, 2017). To conclude, contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis ought to reveal structures of reference and attitude, webs of affiliations, connections, decisions, and collaborations (Said, 1993, p. 125). Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as a border methodology entails reading “texts from the metropolitan center and from the peripheries contrapuntally” (Said, 1993, p. 259). Contrapuntal psychoanalysis necessitates seeing “Western and non-Western experiences as belonging together because they are connected by imperialism” (Said, 1993, p. 279). In sum, contrapuntal psychoanalysis is “a global analysis, in which texts and worldly institutions are seen working together” (Said, 1993, p. 318). Contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis disrupts the global apparatus of racialized capitalism. The working class is a fantasy that covers up ‘classless’ (i.e., underclass) racialized labor: the sub-proletariat. Racialized labor is not only over-exploited, it is disposable (Evans & Giroux, 2015) and fungible (Curry, 2017). Is psychoanalysis able to come to terms with that fact or must it remain repressed in the clinic? I am not singling out psychoanalysis here, the majority of European

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critical theorists in the twentieth century and beyond are critical of modernity—for example, Zygmunt Bauman (1989) situates the Holocaust within the rhetoric of modernity with its instrumental rationality, bureaucracy, technology, etc.—but they are mute on the unconscious colonial logic which underpins modernity. The pre-modern was certainly not pre-colonial, or pre-racist for that matter, but it was certainly pre-capitalist. The distinction between mercantile capitalism and later forms of capitalism is not as important as the fact that the European colonization of the Americas inaugurated racialized capitalism as an accelerationist world-system premised on not only the exploitation of the white proletariat, but also, and more significantly, the disposability of the non-white lumpenproletariat through genocide, slavery, and other forms of oppression and violence. A term like neoliberalism names a new chapter in the history of racialized capitalism, wherein transnational corporations, as opposed to the State, are the ruling class, but the term can be distracting and confusing because it is often used instead of capitalism and is frequently mistaken with liberalism as a centrist political project. Because “the concept of the human is an ideological structure” (Smith, 2020, p. 201), humanness is determined on the basis of where one is located in the global racial-sexual hierarchy. Patriarchy names the historical phenomenon of dominant men in the zone of being (be they oppressors or sub-oppressors), but patriarchy fails to account for the “disposability and fungibility” (Curry, 2017, p. 34) of racialized males in the zone of nonbeing. Similarly, white supremacy names the phenomenon of hegemonic whites in settler-colonial societies, but not the reality of hegemonic non-whites in former franchise colonial societies (Cole, 2016). Racialization in the Global South does not function on the axis of race per se but, in the majority of cases, functions on a political axis. Politicization, which is the foundation of racialization, in a sense becomes the process of determining who is inside the polis and who is outside (Agamben, 1998); surely, anything (e.g., one’s religious affiliation or sexual orientation) can be politicized in the context of racialized capitalism. Consequently, the oppressed in the Global South tend to be either political dissidents or religious/sexual/ethnic minorities. In the majority

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of cases, the political dissident or the member of a minority group is a Man-Not (Curry, 2017), a phobogenic objet a, who causes the oppressor’s hateful desire to kill, hence, the lethality of racial-sexual oppression as mythical-jouissance. Consequently, l’homme noir (racialisé ou politisé) n’existe pas, for the colonized position cannot be fully symbolized. The paradox is that, in the apparatus of racialized capitalism, the most oppressive are likely to be men and the most oppressed are also likely to be men. This is not an argument in support of “Oppression Olympics” (Hancock, 2011), rather I am pointing to an aporia, a Real deadlock, which is a function of what Du Bois (1903/2007) called “the problem of the color-line” (p. 3) and what Grosfoguel (2013) characterizes as “the line of the human” (p. 83); in other words, it is the deadlock of ontological colonial difference. Patriarchy is not the most accurate concept for describing this paradox, but racialized capitalism is because the politicoeconomic and racial-sexual logic of contradiction (i.e., inequality) is inherent in the very hierarchical and dehumanizing structure of capitalism; and racialization (or racism), as an axis of power, is a fundamental structuring antagonism within that contradiction constituting the coloniality of power/knowledge/being. Therefore, I conceive of horizontal semiosis (see Fig. 5.1) not as the end of contradictions, but as the horizontalization of contradictions, wherein negativity (in the form of difference) is not removed but it is not there at the expense of the damned. Horizontal, or lateral, violence among the racialized class will remain a challenge that we must attend to in our liberation praxis as a result of internalized oppression and sub-oppression. Furthermore, racialized capitalism signifies how oppression works on a global scale through both over-exploitation and disposability/fungibility. For this reason, solidarity among the racialized and the politicized (or the oppressed, damned, colonized, etc.) is crucial for dismantling the apparatus. Unfortunately, radicals today are divided by liberal identity politics. For example, racialized feminists (as Women-Not) must focus on not only dismantling patriarchy and white supremacy, but also, and more importantly, racialized capitalism–the primary targets of which tend to be racialized/politicized males, for they are the most disposable/fungible group in the global racial-sexual hierarchy (Curry, 2017; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

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Patriarchy is not only sexist, it is ultimately racist misandrist (Curry, 2017). Why are racialized and/or politicized males the most dehumanized? Because they represent a politico-sexual challenge to the global ruling-class patriarchs. There is certainly an evolutionary logic to this antagonism, but it is more a function of being historically efficacious in the coloniality of power (Curry, personal communication, May 14, 2020). Consequently, liberation consists of not only a new conception of the human that is not ideological (Smith, 2020, p. 201), but also another way for societies to self-organize beyond the Aristotelian notion of politics as the distinction between bare life and the good life (Agamben, 1998), or between natural slavery and political slavery (Nyquist, 2013). The Aristotelian foundation of Euro-American politics names the underlying colonial logic of all modern societies, be they democratic or authoritarian: the state of exception (Agamben, 1998). The state of exception produced the homo sacer with his various incarnations: from the slave to the enemy combatant. The alter-global societies-tocome may be described as impossible, or anarchist, republics, wherein the fundamental law (or taboo) is no state of exception, that is, no outside/inside distinction, or no politics. It is hard to imagine such a world because it will be radically different from ours. Having said that, it is virtually unthinkable for humans not to categorize, and reduce the complexity of, the world by making distinctions between people, events, and ideas—or to perceive differences, in other words. It seems that humans have evolved, and have been enculturated, to think dualistically as a function of the nature of language itself (Nietzsche, 1887/1998). Thinking dialectically and being divided may be our inescapable destiny as human subjects, but how we account for cultural difference determines everything, particularly if we accept the Wahbian axiom of one civilization, many cultures. Accounting for cultural difference necessitates both a conscious and an unconscious reconstruction of our world history with its potentiality and actuality of oppression and its impotentiality and virtuality of liberation. So while we may never fully get there, because liberation is a process, we should move in the direction of an anarchist power informed by social and environmental justice not only for our sake but also for the sake of the planet. Radical, or critical, humanism is the kind of humanism that accounts for structures (e.g.,

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the unconscious) without reducing the subject to an effect of discourse. It is a new humanism because it transcends European humanism, which excluded a whole group of people based on the notion of race. In sum, transmodernity, as the outcome of liberation praxis and the embodiment of anarchist power, is the best (i.e., most socially and environmentally just) of modernity and its alterity, it is the actualization of pluriversality: one civilization with many cultures. In this book, I have tried to articulate contrapuntal psychoanalysis as one approach to critical border psychology.

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Index

A

B

accelerationist 194 Agamben, G. 165 alienation 10 alignment of desire 159 ambivalence 144 analysand 8 analyst 8 anarcho-socialism 103 anti-capitalist 8 antihumanism 34 antiracist 8 apparatus 3 archaic inheritance 136 archeology 101 Aristotelian 4 assimilation 55 axes of power 5

barbarism 118 bare life 163 barred Other 181 Beginnings 15 Bhabha, Homi 12, 34 Black Lives Matter 136 Black Marxist 9 border methodology 16 bourgeoisie 171 Bulhan, Hussein 64

C

cancel culture 141 capitalism 4 Césaire, Aimé 55 Christian 76 civilization 4 civilized 118

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Beshara, Freud and Said, Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56743-9

203

204

Index

classism 4 colonial difference 16 Colonialism 4 coloniality of power 3 colonial psychoanalysis 40 colonization 163 commodification 177 conceptual Muslim 144 condensation 11 conscientization 11 construction 101 contrapuntal 78 contrapuntal interpretation 110 contrapuntal psychoanalysis 1 cosmopolitan 190 (counter)terrorism 2 critical border psychology 1 Critical Border Thinking 74 critical consciousness 11 critical humanism 159 critical psychology 1 cultural difference 68 cultural resistance 12 culture 51 Culture and Imperialism 93 Curry, Tommy J. 6

D

damned 181 decoloniality 1 Decolonial Psychoanalysis Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies 2 decolonial subjectivity 14 decolonization 5 deformation 100 dehumanizing 9 delinking 12

Derrida, Jacques 5 desire 78 dialectic 55 disavowal 164 discourse 11 Discourse of the Analyst 72 displacement 118 disposability 195 divine-jouissance 142 divine violence 163 double-unconsciousness 16 dream-content 113 dream-thoughts 113 dream-work 122 Dussel, Enrique 12

E

ego 14 Egypt 14 emancipation 171 Empire 14 endo-colonization 5 enjoyment 7 Entstellung 100 epistemic violence 166 Eurocentrism 3 Euro-colonialism 5 Europe 118 exteriority 95 extimacy 118

F

Fanon, Frantz 7, 11, 15 fantasy 59 fantasy of dirt 11 feminine jouissance 181 feminism 1

Index

2008 financial crisis 9 Floyd, George 136 Foucault, Michel 3 four discourses 72 franchise colonies 5 free association 90 freedom 168 Freire, Paulo 11 Freud and the Non-European 16 Freudo-Marxism 28 Freud, Sigmund 13

Indigenous 2 inferior 118 interbeing 68 internalization 60 internalize 17 interpretation 101 The Interpretation of Dreams 15 intersectionality 76 Islamophobia 2 Israel 144

J G

genocide 2 genre 182 good life 165

jouissance 7 Judaism 134 justice 136

K H

hegemony 5 hierarchy 8 historical knowledge 117 homo sacer 196 horizontal affiliation 159 horizontal semiosis 195 humanism 34 humanitarian 5 humanitarianism 158

I

identification 60 identity politics 159 ideology 2 Imaginary 93 imaginative geography 116 imperialism 4 Indian country 118

Kovel, Joel 10

L

labor 5 Lacan, Jacques 32 language 90 latent 113 late style 131 law 163 liberation praxis 1 logic 118 lumpenproletariat 10

M

Maat 136 manifest 113 Mannoni, Octave 15 Man-Not 182

205

206

Index

masculine jouissance 168 masculinity 77 mass incarceration 165 Master’s Discourse 72 materiality 2 material reality 17 Memmi, Albert 15 memory trace 137 method 114 Mignolo, W. 1 militarization of the police 165 mirror stage 93 modern/colonial project 3 modern world-system 4 monotheism 134 mortgage 9 Moses 16 Moses and Monotheism 16 mundialización 154 mythical-jouissance 137

N

Nandy, Ashis 15 natural slavery 4 Nazi 144 Negritude 55 neocolonialism 5 neurosis 14 new humanism 197 New Mexico 101 non-European 10 non-identity politics 145 non-meaning 164

O

objet a 184 oppressed 8

oppression 10, 14 oppressor 8 Orient 117 Oriental 118 Orientalism 12 Orientalize 117 origin 91 the Other 4 Other language 167 Otherness 93 Other of the Law 181 Other of the signifiers 181 over-exploited 6

P

Palestine 14, 144 particularity 155 patriarchy 77 perverse 7 phallus 168 pluriversality 155 police violence 137 political slavery 165 politicized 6 postcolonialism 1 (post)coloniality 2 postcolonial psychoanalysis 2, 41 postcolonies 5 (post)modernity 2 (post)modern Other 14 power 72 praxis 2 premodern 4 primeval father 163 primitives 118 proletariat 171 property 10 psychoanalysis 1

Index

psychosocial 14

Q

Quijano, Aníbal 3

R

race 4 racial axis 3 racial capitalism 3 racialization 16 racialized 6 racialized capitalism 2 racial state 4 racism 4 radical 108 radical humanism 158 Real 93 recognition 190 reconstruction 133, 134 reflexive 12 Reich, Wilhelm 15 religion 133 renunciation of the drives 142 representations 102, 120 repression 122 Republic 163 Requerimiento 163 Revolution 163 Robinson, Cedric J. 3

S

Said, Edward 12 Sartre, J. 55 savage 4 secular 13 secular criticism 159

segregation 55 semiotic square 72 separation 190 settler colonial 194 Sex 6 sexism 4 sexual difference 168 sexualized 6 signifiers 102 signifying chain 118 singularity 155 slavery 4, 8 social construction 17 social mobility 9 solidarity 78 speaking beings 167 the state of exception 196 structuralism 90 subaltern 6 subhumans 118 subjectivity 14 sublimation 182 sub-oppressors 5 surplus-jouissance 137 Symbolic 93

T

Totem and Taboo 113 transatlantic slave trade 2 transmodern 12 transmodern Other 14 trauma 136 traversing of fantasy 190 truth 136 two-ness 133 two Others 16

207

208

Index

U

unconscious 7 ungendered 193

white supremacy 55 worldliness 159 writing as a form of killing 100 Writing as a form of living 167 writing is a form of killing 182

V

violence 7 Z W

Wahbian axiom 196 War on Terror 2

Žižek, Slavoj 32 zone of being 40 zone of nonbeing 42