Social Hell
Notes on the undead in the arrested time of genocide
Nadia Bou Ali
Freud remarks in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” that it is only in the face of death that life can be considered worth living. Our modern neurosis is this harbinger of death, a place where the unconscious death wish manifests itself in intensely conflictual emotions of love and hate: “Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the conception of our own death, just as much inclined to kill the stranger, and just as divided, or ambivalent towards the persons we love as was primitive man.” Freud strangely ends his contemplation on war with a battle cry, an adage for war. Quoting Latin author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's tract Dē Rē Mīlitārī (fourth or fifth century AD):
“Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you wish peace, prepare for war.
The times call for a paraphrase:
Si vis vitam, para mortem.
If you wish life, prepare for death.”
This adage reads like a war cry itself, a call for battle, a demand for preparedness awaiting a real battle. Aggressivity is here to stay, as is the unconscious’s denial of death, as an immanent infinity. Death is disavowed in the shadow of the drive, and the impotence of discourse sustains the impossible Real of the drive. Psychoanalysis tells us this, yet we remain unprepared for it. Rather than disavow the drive, repress it, we must learn that we cannot live without avowing it, that we cannot hope to live if we shall not be prepared to die. Not a heroic death for others, one that simply disavows our own mortality, but a symbolic death—an act of courage against which the unconscious is prepared to resist for eternity. I want to suggest today that the social hell of global capitalism increasingly forecloses our capacity to choose how to die. It is in the direct struggle against colonization where this choice of death is not foreclosed but becomes an imperative, yet for those elsewhere, the inferno of capital circles around these acts of courage and blinds the rest from fixing their gaze. This inferno or social hell is a hell of discourse that resists the overall transformation of structure.
This predicament is what Lacan, after Freud, deemed as the subject’s stuck-ness between two impossibilities, or two deaths: The subject is stuck between the impotence of discourse and the enjoyment that ensues from it. The subject is stuck in a social hell of enjoyment—of anxiety, delay, compulsive repetition, procrastination, and disavowal.
“I want to suggest today that the social hell of global capitalism increasingly forecloses our capacity to choose how to die.”
The labor of the agent or barred subject in discourse gives birth to enjoyment by way of disavowing the impossible truth. Lacan proposes that the “knowledge” which originates in processes of subjective identification is an imaginary knowledge that does not know itself and that is motivated by jouissance. Thanatos compels Eros: knowledge is on the side of the death drive and not instinct. In turn, discourse is structured around an entropy, a jouissance, which compares to the Jar of Danaides: a bottomless pit which churns out an endless repetition of surplus. The production of excess is implicit in the form of discourse. This excess is one that inhabits the subject in the form of an affect (i.e. it marks the body). Hence, the social hell of discourse is premised around the organization and policing of affect: mourning, grief, melancholic attachments, anxiety, fetishism…
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If Freud was militant about the choice of death after the carnage of World War I, what of our contemporary moment? Peace has become security, and a rogue state like Israel is the very model or symptom of this global stage of capital, of technogenocide as security.
After World War I, Freud warned of the cost of what he called “liv[ing] psychologically beyond our means,” a sort of psychological debt drive that is incurred through the unconscious fantasy of immortality. The main problem for Freud was that the unconscious cannot imagine its own death, that it believes in its own immortality more than in anything else. The inability of the unconscious to imagine its own death is the enabler, so to speak, the site into which war is injected, and it is also the very site of battle from which a new truth emerges for the subject. Now we can say that genocide or total extermination is a perversion of the logic of war which, in its Hobbesian sense, is a war of all against all. In genocide, the extermination is about prohibiting the victim from the ability to kill. Genocide, unlike war, is about lifting the prohibition on death, so that the fatherland may not die. The undead ancestors wage a war on the un-buried dead. This undead fatherland has to be understood as an attempt at the annulment of time, of disrupting the infinite by a denial of death. This reintroduces a ‘primitive’ ritual of undead ancestors. Akin to obsessive-compulsive neurosis, fascism is an attempt to annul time.
Marx famously quipped in the Eighteenth Brumaire that for the revolution to arrive at its own content it must “let the dead bury the dead.” Despite the multiple attempts at folding Marx into redemptive politics, and despite the ongoing presence of redemptive politics in religious form, diremption rather than redemption remains to be the concept to hold unto in the wake of Marx’s staunch critique of religion. Marx’s claim was that the only way out of the capitalist inferno is to break with its necromancy, with the cult of death that it instills. The necromancy of capital, its canalization of death and the dead permeates it as a totality: from dead labor to undead value.[1] From dead fossil fuels to undead AI’s, the killing machine does not stop enjoying. Psychoanalysis has something to add to this: what the Leviathan, the machine of death that is the body politic, has is enjoyment as power, and the undeadness of enjoyment is literally signified in the law of the state. Nevertheless, the signifier is not exhausted in enjoyment, something remains beyond the petrified images of enjoyment in the letters of the law that can be a site of resistance: an emergence of a new structure from the ossified structures of enjoyment at work in discourse.
“Fascism is the eternal recurrence of the same: a sacralization of individual lives and their transposition into another time, an arrested time for which genocide is ritual.”
The lifting of the prohibition on death, unleashed by genocide, is a reaction against this possibility of emergence. Extermination against resistance, while analysis only proceeds via resistance. Genocide is also a lifting of a prohibition on enjoyment, and it is in genocide where we precisely witness these moments of obscene enjoyment. One can recount the numerous acid grins and smirks of countless IDF soldiers, captured as images on screen, as they bomb, mutilate, and destroy. The same look one might get from an exhibitionist once they are peaked by capturing the gaze of the other. “You caught me red-handed,” and I still got away with it. On the other hand, we only need to imagine the countless soldiers manning drones from behind the screen, playing a sadistic voyeuristic game with their targets, images that just disappear in a puff of smoke, an aphanesis of doubles that are not even granted the status of subjects.
We must not return the gaze that these obscene forms of enjoyment call forth. We must resist returning this look by a gaze that refuses to give the enjoyment its surplus, its repetition compulsion. It is a war of images in as much as it is a war unto death. In other words, we must not let genocide translate yet again into a politics of redemption. Gillian Rose presciently remarked more than two decades ago that the real problem at the core of the return of fascism in new form is the re-theologizing of the holocaust through the rise of representations of fascism in the politics of commemoration and remembrance mirrored in the post-structural positing of ontologies of being, allied with a fascism of representation incarnated in the liberal civil state (the obsession with the logic of identities and so on). Rose claimed that it is the representation of fascism and the fascism of representation, allied in the liberal state, that will become the new fascism in the wake of the Holocaust.
“Fascist movements want universal law to apply so that they may have no rivals in their use of non-legitimate violence. They represent the triumph of civil society, the realm of individual need, the war of particular interests. They exploit the already partisan mediation of the instrumental universal—the epitome of what Hegel called ‘the spiritual-animal kingdom.’ This is how it is possible to anticipate that states which combine social libertarianism with political authoritarianism, whether they gave traditional class parties or not, could become susceptible to fascist movements.”
The genocide of Palestinians is symptomatic of this condition. Israel like America is rife for the coming of “the spiritual-animal kingdom.” Elvio Fachinelli, an astute analyst of fascism, argues that fascism is an attempt to annul time—“Fascism emerges from the ‘denial of the death of the fatherland’”—from the unacceptable collapse of nationalist ideals following World War I. This is why Fascism opposed the idea of a “trampled,” “damaged” nation with a “total,” statuesque, and immobile but also “exclusive and intolerant” fatherland, which punished in its “opponents . . . [its] own fantasies about killing the [fatherland].” To disguise the “irremediable disappearance” of a lost national unity, fascism had to endlessly reenact its phantom of a total communion, encapsulating it in an infinite “time of return.” Fascism is the eternal recurrence of the same: it is a sacralization of individual lives and their transposition into another time, an arrested time for which genocide is ritual. Fascism is a denial of death: it despises death, claims to defeat death, to be beyond death. Fascism employs the affirmative force of mana—it is not confined to taboo—it is testament to what Fachinelli called the fragility of the sacred, which is “partial, refracted, and displaced. In modernity: There is no eclipse of the sacred; the sacred itself is continuously at the margins of its own eclipse.”
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It is exactly here that psychoanalysis is ever-more crucial, the sacred is not something that is there in full opposition to a fragile modernity, it is rather the other way around: the sacred is repudiated or disavowed and resurfaces in unconscious mechanisms, and psychoanalysis is the field that is most equipped to note this. The unconscious cannot imagine its own death: repression results from the thrust of the drive and its compulsions, but the disavowal of death is the rejection of the reality principle—an insistence not on life and living but on choosing how to die after the exhaustion of life.
To go back to Lacan’s remark on Freud’s claim that the unconscious’s drive to never die but go on living, this affirmation results as a force, derived from the inability of the unconscious to think its own mortality. This is not inability, in so much as it is about the ability of the unconscious to disavow death:
“The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force.”
The fatality of the drive is realized in the moments of what we call, psychoanalytically, the closure of the unconscious. This is realized when there is no discourse that allows for transference, for a situation in which an enactment of the reality of the unconscious is possible; when it is possible to separate from the field of the pleasure principle, from enjoyment, and from discourse, bearing in mind here that discourse protects us from ‘total’ enjoyment; when it is possible to separate from enjoyment and be faced with the real as impossible. Genocide is a symptom of a world in which transference is increasingly difficult, whence the unconscious is disavowed everywhere from practices of therapeutics to neoliberal models of self-branding, and libertarian ways of living.
The opposite of possibility in this account is the Real as impossibility. One pathway to this is the discourse of the analyst. If we take Marx to be the first analyst, this is a discourse which can resist the very resistance of discourse, the discourse of the analyst that can resist the interpretations of discourse, as well as the fantasies of the subject that prop up their embeddedness in discourse. Psychoanalysis is at base, formatively, the analysis of the drive, one of the most speculative concepts of modernity. What is analysis anyway beyond the reconfiguration of the body in relation to the drive? Analysis is the procedure of the re-positioning of the body in relation to objects of the drive: the gaze, the voice, the phallus. And, at the limit of the analytic field of practice, there is the emergence of a new signifier, one that re-symbolizes the body and initiates the subject anew into discourse. We can think of discourse as the given condition within which the subject is thrown into enjoyment, an apparatus of enjoyment that precedes the event of speech in analysis. This transformation assumes a singular reorientation of desire in relation to objects of the drive. This is a clinical pathway—long arduous, infernal, albeit at times comical. What resists analysis is not just the analysand and the analyst, but the discourse into which speech intervenes. Discourse is resistance, and Lacan’s theory of discourse is a theory about the resistance of discourse. The resistance of discourse is infernal, because it is none other than the resistance of enjoyment. It’s important to note here that discourse is essentially collective, or it is the structure of the capture of the subject in the enjoyment of the other. Here we must ask: for whom is the voyeuristic enjoyment that characterizes our times staged? Extreme weather events as photogenic spectacles, televised genocides, farcical figures of authority…
“Genocide is a symptom of a world in which transference is increasingly difficult.”
In a moment of the first real-time televised genocide in the history of humanity (38,000 with 12,000 estimated under the rubble), when we are all watching a hell unfolding in Gaza, one cannot but think of the problem of the gaze. The gaze is an object of the drive. Who is looking at the corpses and bodies of dead Palestinians, from what gaze is all this death conceivable as necessary, in-escapable, as even bearable? From where are these images seeing us? We are seen by the images yet unable to fix our gaze, ochhi fissi, as Dante would have put it. We are unable to break with the fantasy that frames our global social hell, the inferno of capitalism. What gaze is fixed on Palestine? Is the problem that we are seeing too much as we remain well-hidden from the gaze of the moral law, the super-ego? Or is it the opposite: we are inseparable from the gaze that constructs these images of death, destitution, abjection, misery, and pain. A gaze that renders suffering enjoyable for the Other, who imagines the victims as sacrificial lambs for an insatiable desire for the immortality of the fatherland—the spectacle yet again of the undead and un-buried dead. But before we grant this mysterious Other a conspiratorial status—an undead Sadistic god of pure evil, represented by avatars—we must dwell in the anxiety that resists the conspiracy, we must also remember the acts of courage that broke the fantasy frame of Zionism. If there is an Other in this game—a representative of colonial capitalism—we must accede that it is not one that knows itself. Part of the resistance to its discourse is to not grant it a position of truth, rather it is an Other sustained by apparatuses of enjoyment, albeit ugly ones of genocide.
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The old is dying and the new cannot be born: the problem of modernity reloaded. Witnessing genocidal violence implicates the subject in an objective reality in a very peculiar way. The identification with the stain in the images of horror speaks for a desire for liberation from this violence. But why is the question of liberation from this violence then inconceivable for so many, even for theorists who understand very well the power of the gaze? The attrition of slow death that is induced by capitalist social hell, becomes in such moments a photogenic spectacle, akin to extreme weather events (if you understand the ecology of capital here) in light of the slow attrition of the planet. Perhaps it is because we suffer from a fixation on failures, repetitions of failures, failures to capture reality in its concept, translated into the Hegelian condition of too soon and too late already, always not on time. Could the blind spot then be because of an internal liberal Hegelian limit to anamorphosis, to the stain of subjectivity, forever caught up in the always already and the too late?
Notwithstanding that this condition—of the subject being implicated in the ‘cracks’ of representation—is what characterizes modernity, there seems to be a second order of implication at work in this instance of blindness to the ongoing injustice that must be adjudicated. Not all subjects seem to be implicated in the same way here, not all subjects are faithful to events or able to recognize events in the same way. Not all subjects can affirm radical freedom, in Lacanian terms (in the separation from the big Other) or in Sartrean terms (transcending the facticity of a situation).
The concept of gaze is developed by Lacan through Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533)—Holbein also was the painter of the Allegorical Portrait of Dante—in which appears an anamorphic skull in the bottom left corner of the painting. This anamorphosis, represented in the painting, is the effect of the subject being involved as an object in the very scene they are spectating. This, according to the psychoanalytic reading, happens through an experience of a cut, a sense of enjoyment emerges from recognizing an object not within the order of representation. The skull in the painting is the point at which the image sees you, takes into account your presence as a spectator. What the anamorphic gaze does in the imaginary frame of identification is that it opens an encounter with a non-specularizable Real. The status of anamorphosis in psychoanalysis is fundamental,[2] and its main function is to expose through an allegorical or metaphorical structure the ‘torsions’ involved in the very process of representation itself. The torsion produced from within the torsions of the mode of production or interpretation that representation is constituted by. Of course, anamorphosis has very serious philosophical implications. There is an “ontological necessity” of anamorphosis “the necessity of blurred vision as an inner condition of truth, of vision itself—the condition of theory as theorein.”[3] We could say that there is a constitutive anamorphosis to the gaze, a constitutive distortion of the drive, the drive as purposeful distortion.
To rehearse a few Lacanian points here: the fantasy stands in the way of the gaze, by way of exclusion of objet a, its anamorphic trace, from the specular frame. As we all know, objet a is not a specular object. The partial objects that fill the place of objet a are objects of fantasy that displace the unbearable terror of encountering the absence of the object, a process that an encounter with anamorphosis induces. If we want to be dramatic here, and at the cost of exaggeration, this is an experience of pure horror, of “absolute recoil,” that the subject encounters in the forever delayed encounter with the Real object of the drive. The so-called fundamental fantasy of different subjective formations—the neurotic, the obsessive, the hysteric—is a protection or compromise formation that allows desire to be sustained in the face of the pulverizing drive. This is the secret of discourse as well. We can imagine discourse as a net that resists the traversal of fantasy, given that the subject is stitched into discourse by fantasy.
So, to go back to the world-historical moment we are in, regarding the struggle in Palestine against oppression. What is at stake is of great proportions: hence the evident divide globally. However, there is the liberal fantasy that must be shaken to its core. My assumption is that the liberal fantasy cannot sustain the gaze, the glare of truth so to speak. That glare is unbearable, horrifying to liberals, who wish to sustain their fantasy of a possible good life under capitalism against all costs, incapsulated in a defense of modern values against premodern fundamentalist forces. As though being in solidarity with Palestine would undo all the gains of modernity.
“That glare is unbearable, horrifying to liberals, who wish to sustain their fantasy of a possible good life under capitalism against all costs.”
For those of us who can fix their gaze on the gaze—we know that we must already be in hell for us to be witnesses to this hell—we are in a fantasy structured like hell. The suffering is visible from another circle of hell than the one we are in. An easy claim to make would be to say, this is yet again the cold harsh gaze of reason, of modernity, of Enlightenment, translated into the technological war machine that is busy pulverizing bodies, buildings, streets, houses, whatever moves and can be picked up by the heat sensors of the drones. This I would rather suggest is the gaze of the colonizing liberal West impregnated with technoscience fantasies of salvation: the drone, the AI, these are the avatars of Amalek in this perverse structure. The drones incarnate the gaze, they are partial gazes travelling around, because the gaze was always already partial, it was never one to begin with. The gaze is polymorphously perverse: it creates a partial object as its own transcendental condition, conjures the appearance of objet a in the field of the visible, but only as a trace.[4] What desire is enjoying the spectatorship of genocide? The killing machine enjoys, it kills and enjoys, and it has fans in the bleachers—both liberal and fascist fans—cheering on the war against terror, the war for Western values, the war against anti-Semitism as a singular evil, the war against the bodies of the children of resistance in Gaza.
[1] William Claire Roberts in Marx’s Inferno convincingly develops the connection between Dante’s allegory of the inferno and Marx’s account of capitalist society.
[2] Mladen Dolar , Anamorphosis, S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 125-140
[3] Ibid, 126-127
[4] Lacan in Seminar XI .