Ugly Enjoyment
Affirming life, inconsolably
Nadia Bou Ali
Originally published in Arabic, this is our first piece in a rolling online issue about Palestine, born out of both the unfolding genocide in Gaza, in the aftermath of October 7th, and ongoing contentions with international emanations of the so-called “Palestine Question.” Essays will engage the colonial politics of Zionism, Palestinian resistance, perennial questions about loss and diaspora, identitarian entanglements with Islamophobia and antisemitism, and more. As contemporary interlocutors of psychoanalytic traditions, we are inheritors of the field’s ambivalence toward Israel and the politics of Zionism, inaugurated by Freud himself. But as a magazine preoccupied with the unruly mesh of psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and historical-material analysis, we are decidedly unambivalent about our steadfast solidarity with Palestine and the diasporic geographies of Palestinians beyond Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This series shares a name with the Palestinian chorus calling for freedom: “From the River to the Sea.”—The Editors
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The people of Gaza beckon forth a humanism that has to be constructed
The time when humanity can watch the genocide of a people without acting is again upon us. The genocide is happening with no restraint beyond resistance, a resistance that surely puts the machine of interpretation at work to question but does not halt it. There are no words to describe the experience of extermination and death of Palestinians today. The reason words are not adequate is because concepts are in a general state of crisis: To begin with, what are life and death? The most sophisticated engagement with these two concepts is the dialectical account that ultimately refrains from positing either as a concluded knowledge: we cannot know what life and death are, but we can contemplate their open struggle, as neither can be considered without the other.
George Canguilhem, who fought against fascism and supported the Algerian anti-colonial struggle, claimed that “life is lived in the silence of the organs.” His rationalist vitalism ought to provoke anxiety in dialecticians. Life is an activity of assimilation, a technique of living, for which pathology, disease, and sickness are a call for a revision of life, of meaning. According to this idiosyncratic account of vitalism, life is a normative activity insofar as the norm is produced via an incursion on the normative. What does it really mean to be alive? This question is posed precisely when the conditions of living are suspended; we become conscious of life not only via an unmediated immediacy, but via an error, a shortcoming, a limit that is imposed on living. Living is only thinkable when it seizes to be an object to be apprehended: life is only an object if we recognize that it is conditioned by the ability of the subject to recognize the restraints on living. Canguilhem maintained this line of thinking against fascism, and he was himself involved in the resistance against the Vichy government. In other words, fascism is not the only ideology that has claims on what it means to be alive, to be human. Moreover, being human is not a given. In this version of rationalist vitalism I am discussing here, being alive or living is a technique of living, a theoretical praxis of sorts. Praxis and theory cannot be opposed for the human subject—it is one of the most inescapable quagmires in which human consciousness is involved. The entire psychoanalytic practice is a footnote to this problématique: the battleground of the dialectic is here. Are life and death resolved by a disjunctive synthesis? Are their concepts always destined for crisis? And so on . . .
The resistance of people in Gaza today poses a serious question to all these quandaries. The children, who have been born and raised in an open-air prison for the past two decades, hugging the cadavers of their siblings or parents are a lesson in what it means to be human. They speak for the very concept of living: looking into the very eye of the death drive (here in the genocidal form of complete annihilation carried out by the Zionist state) yet holding on to words, consoling the dead lest they give up on the cause of living. There is an element in the scenes we see coming out of Gaza that we have not seen before in recent history, at least not in the same form. In fact, I would insist that it is not singular; the only singularity here is the sinister face of the ugly enjoyment of genocide. Rather, the people of Gaza beckon forth a humanism that has to be constructed. Not the feeble empty humanism of human rights discourse, which has in turn allowed for the singularity of suffering to put on its Zionist garb, but a concrete universality that looks back at the grin of ugly enjoyment and tells it: “I have a reason to live that you do not know. I don’t have a justification, I have no recourse in your normative reckonings with rules and laws, I have no recourse for your theories of justification, yet I am not your irrational form of enjoyment that partakes in the destruction of living. I am a negative value, a pathology that faces you with the very question of what it means to live, to be alive.”
Who would have thought that pathology would have such a sweet innocent face? Yes, it is in this sense that the Palestinian subject is pathological, demanding from us today, everywhere, we who are watching the unbearable sights of suffering, that we think again of the question of what it means to be alive as we cry alone before sleep in our beds, feeling a deep sense of inconsolability and the guilt of even recounting the images we have seen—guilt that we know will never go away, guilt that will haunt us for a concept. This frightening sense of despair with living that we must carry and live with, in the hope that those who have despaired so much would somehow overcome—how do we overcome all this despair? Is this not a question that every living being must ask in this moment as we are forced to spectate the very outrage of what it means to be human?
How do we continue to live after this onslaught of barbarism? How can life go on after this descent into barbarism? The barbarism of Auschwitz is doubled in the barbarism of the Zionist state. Clearly nothing has been done in the past century to prevent the repetition of genocide and the repetition of the fascist claim that life is a force, a will to live, a will to power. Life is nothing without the failures of being able to live, and only when these failures are historically and socially constituted do we really begin to make sense of what it means to be alive. The people of Palestine fighting against extermination are the very negation of life’s ugly enjoyment of itself, in its self-affirmation and disavowal of all negative value.