Fascism, Passibility, and the Unsettled Unconscious

Safia ALBAITI

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist.

—Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, 1855

What does “passibility” look like in a time of genocide and fascism? In discussing “passibility,” I refer back to this Lyotardian term, through Avgi Saketopoulou’s articulation of this as a capacity for greater risktaking and risk tolerance, the ability to relinquish “the ordinary ways in which boundaries are patrolled in everyday life” (Saketopoulou, 2023), to create a surrender to the absolute unknown in oneself, a position of untethering and a release from conservatism, so that transformation and new translations of oneself can occur. Saketopoulou describes this experience for the exigent sadist as always fleeting and temporary.

When genocide’s excess is now considered part of the rhythm of everyday reasonable violence, our ability to psychically contain becomes impossible. The air feels brittle and tense all the time. We have become accustomed now to the ways that reasonable violence grinds on, becomes transmitted to us through the algorithm, and just as easily disappears from the news cycle—a fate somehow worse than the fact itself. Reasonable violence now looks like the many ways human flesh can become hollowed out, pulverized, and turned into ash. Reasonable violence is what Israel and its Western allies can inflict on a Palestinian in the world today without the need to report on it. A mother screaming, “My six children who couldn’t fit in our tent now all fit in the palm of my hand.” A father asking about his dead six-year-old child and being handed a bag instead, “They gave me a bag that had 18 kilos of body pieces. I’m burying the pieces, and I don’t know whether some are my son Ali or not.”. The designation Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. The loss of eye and limb from an exploded pager. Those who survive will be known by their amputations.

Swedish Marxist writer Andreas Malm has called what is happening in Gaza the first “technogenocide” of the twenty-first century (Malm, 2024). He differentiates what is happening in Gaza– a high-tech genocide carried out by shipments of American weaponry powered by fossil fuels– from the Shoah, which was the last high-tech genocide powered by coal, and from more recent “low tech” genocides, in Rwanda, Bosnia and the ISIS campaign against Yazidis, which involved the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of souls but without the devastating airpower wiping out Palestinian family lines and scorching the earth. This is what led Colombian President Gustavo Petro to say, “Genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis…Why have large, carbonconsuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes, and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes”.

Hitler has already entered their homes. The excess that many of us find unbearable simply does not reach those who have the power to impose an arms embargo, order a ceasefire, or offer a future to those being killed at a rate faster than they are entering the world. The Palestinian writer Nasser Abourahme (2024) argues that Palestine is the living archive of our future and a warning of a future marked by untouchability.

During our interview for this issue, Saketopoulou asked us, as guest editors, where we came from, to situate us within a shared experience of all hailing from postcolonial nations outside the US, with varying degrees of legibility to the American reader. So I want to return to her question here as a way of articulating these degrees of legibility and, by way of asking, can we think of passibility as a feature of nation states too, and the national unconscious? Can we think more along the contours of the nation-as-body politic– to be porous, geographically and politically permeable, to be passible, touched and transgressed upon by movements and historical events, by the promiscuity of raced and classed desegregation, anti-fascism, open borders and, once in a while, revolutionary impulse? This is the question that preoccupies, confounds, haunts, and rouses every shade of Marxist, and it is the question I usually return to, out of habit, because it is pervasive, in and out of the consulting room.

As a child of the Yemeni diaspora, from a specific region whose people have a pragmatic and ambivalent relationship to land and the nation-state, I spent my childhood in my grandfather’s home in Tanzania, a country led into independence from British colonial rule by a teacher, Nyerere, whose era of passibility during the Cold War included everything from personally translating Shakespeare into Swahili to declaring Tanzania’s support for pan-African socialism, an end to apartheid in Southern Africa, and the hosting of political exiles from the ANC, FRELIMO, and the Black Panther Party. In April 1994, in what was, in hindsight, the last gasp of this openness, Tanzania opened its border to those fleeing the genocide that had begun in Rwanda, and over 100,000 Rwandan Tutsis crossed the Rusomo Bridge at the border in the span of 24 hours. Neoliberalism has changed this legacy, but living in that transitory time in the nineties gave me an understanding of the power of permeability in even the quietest countries. My mother would often recount with awe, pride, and humor the ways that my grandfather weathered the tides of post-colonial independence and nationalist repossession and confiscation to build his wealth. I have always listened to this story of mythmaking with equal parts amusement and materialist skepticism. Of course, I would think to myself, no one is just a self-made man; of course, my grandfather was one Arab beneficiary among many African others of this one-time postcolonial transfer of wealth; others worked for him, and their labor created those profits. However, what lingers more these days for me are the details of the government confiscations and petty burglaries my grandparents experienced. The story of the robber who apologized profusely to the housekeeper whose wrists he tied together as they burglarized the safe. I think now of these stories as a time when my grandparents were able to sustain the risk of being transgressed upon again and again by the new young postcolonial nation as it attempted to redistribute wealth and power to the poor and the new state bureaucrats. My grandfather did not flee to a closed-off, gated community; such was not his era. He passed away in 2020, and his home and garden in the heart of the city and its commercial district– that housed pet tortoises and garden snakes and coconut trees, and in another time before I was born, owls and flamingoes and bushbabies– were sold. I try to reflect more on the interpersonal sadomasochisms we emerged from, too; what it took for my grandfather and grandmother to decide to stay put, to face this kind of postcolonial shakeup to the ego and to their world, and let it change them and eventually, their eleven children. What has become my translation, and what remains forever beyond my grasp.

At 9 years old, I would linger around the living room, waiting to read my grandfather’s copy of The African and other newspapers that he brought home, and through my teen years, getting to know the work of syndicated journalists who brought the world in closer proximity to me. I have kept up this ritual for my whole life. I learned at a young age to believe that the world was knowable and that our relationship to politics matters, shapes lives, and reflects our agency. This feels increasingly out of place in our avaricious, dystopian present. I was brought back to these memories again watching South Africa take Israel to the International Court of Justice for crimes of genocide in Gaza last year, moved once again to see another postcolonial African country carrying the load of another colonized people, as others had done before.

However, the International Court of Justice appears more radical than it is for attempting to impose guardrails to prevent Israel from committing further acts of genocide in Gaza and for arguing that Israel cannot expect to remain untouched by the human rights standards of the past. The ICJ uses the tools of past tribunals against genocide that were built on the presupposition that fascist times would be increasingly behind us rather than the norm of the ever-grinding present. The past seems to radicalize to compensate for the impenetrable deadening present that calcifies traumatophobia.

How can we retain this capacity to recover that slippery fugitivity implanted by our ancestors, to borrow from Saketopoulou’s conceptualization of Fred Moten’s writings? Can passibility be the quality of inhabiting the histories of the momentous struggles of our nations and having that embedded, waiting to emerge, when the ego is shaken up, and the status quo becomes unbearable and impossible to restore? Perhaps we can do more to consider those libidinal elements of the sexual unconscious born from times that are alien and unassimilable to our current era. Avgi Saketopoulou describes bending the will as an act involving the breakdown of the ego and the expansion of the self. How can we internalize this logic in an age of manufactured scarcity, capitalist miserliness, cloud capital, hostile architecture, walls, checkpoints, and closed borders? Over the last ten months, we have witnessed the accelerated deadening and collapsing of language and meaning. It was crushing enough to hear “thoughts and prayers” handed out every time a mass shooting killed the promise of youth in America, an iteration of Kamala Harris’s vow to make the US “the most lethal fighting force in the world” if she is elected president. However, the asphyxiation of speech and movement that comes from defenses of Israeli fascism can be witnessed in the degradation of the commons and the sprouting of “cop cities” around the US, which partner and train with the Israeli Defense Forces around expanding policing and prisons over life-affirming social investment in schools, libraries, housing, public transit, health care, and the humanities. It is hard to argue that America isn’t dying.

The need for passibility has never been more urgent and signals we are not yet dealing with a cadaver. I think of how the abolition of slavery in the US came about through a revolution against Confederate states, which was also influenced and impregnated by the geopolitics of its time, from the struggle against slavery in Haiti to the failed revolutions of 1848 in Europe, with fugitives, freedmen and immigrant Forty-eighters joining the Union Army’s unsure march to victory in the Civil War, never at any point a majoritarian project.

The expansion of birthright citizenship in the country came not through settler colonial rule but through the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship to the formerly enslaved. That is, a struggle for liberation that does not fully arrive can nevertheless produce a lasting translation, a constitutional right increasingly considered anachronistic in a new world of golden visas and brokered golden passports while stirring up antebellum fantasies and blood libel accusations about the overrunning of borders and Haitian immigrants arriving in small towns to eat pets and contribute to the sexual ruination of America.

However, these fears betray the fact that the US habitually repeats its porous history. It was always going to be a global context that made the world look upon Emmett Till’s mutilated face at his mother’s insistence on an open casket funeral after his murder in Mississippi. White fantasies of miscegenation had been registered as the foremost preoccupation of Southern whites to the challenge of desegregation in Gunnar Myrdal’s study, An American Dilemma, in 1941, the year Emmett Till was born. But after his lynching, none could have compelled the world to look upon his destroyed face save for the will of a grieving mother and the active agitation of left-wing parties outside the United States in the 1950s. Animated by the pressures of a twentieth century shaped by the Cold War and Soviet competition, the efforts of L’Humanité, Freies Volk, and the other newspapers in France, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere contributed to the international outcry for a civil rights movement that would pry open the enclosed violent stagnant complacency of Jim Crow segregation and transform the country. Here are the ways we continue to be indebted to the practices of domestic and international overwhelm and fugitivity, both known and unknown, in foundational eras, despite attempts to domesticate or erase the sources of this legacy of freedom in the world (DuBois, 1935/1998).

The death of 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell outside the front gate of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on February 25th, 2024, and his refusal to be party to the killing machine is one stark example of exigent sadism over the last year. His acceptance of the flames burning his body, his recording of his death in solidarity with Palestinians against genocide, and his decision to echo the spirit of the Vietnam antiwar movement and join a long history of political self-immolation against war stood out as the one time in the last eleven months that someone surpassed the reason of capitalist relations and normative political dissent to attempt a new translation. Nevertheless, I find myself doubtful, wondering these days if we have exhausted these referents and if they have become mere etchings of a society of yesteryear that used to be more movable.

A new political theology of the United States is congealing, shaped by the influence of the National Conservative Movement and its intellectual figurehead, Israeli-born intellectual and Benjamin Netanyahu’s former speechwriter, Yoram Hazony, who counts among his followers the Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance. As historian Suzanne Schneider (2023) writes, the national conservative movement has been taken in by Hazony’s arguments that the US can and should “return” to the foundations of family, tribe, and Bible and define itself as a Christian nation, with a token illiberal democracy. Here, Hazony points to Israel’s success at defining itself as a Jewish nation whose raison d’etre is precisely the fact that it does not have the consent of the occupied. While none of these pronouncements are novel necessarily, Schneider points out that in his desire to align American interests with Israel’s, to build out a newer foundation of the “special relationship” that is fraying under pressure from a growing movement to end US aid to Israel, Hazony misunderstands, indeed, might be misrecognizing the contradiction inherent to AngloAmerican constitutional history; which, in the final measure, is basically an imprint of how far struggles against genocide and slavery have been able to go.

Schneider argues that Hazony borrows from Zionism’s transposition of Eastern European Volk blood-and-soil nationalism to Palestine and simply assumes the same could be said and done in the US. Here, I believe this particular distinction that Schneider points out offers a kind of differentiation of a new potentiality. Abourahme argues that political orders that have closed their moments of foundational conquest have managed to consign them to a political unconscious that is “settled,” and this distinguishes other settler colonial states from Israel today. Palestinians today have managed to pry open time by refusing to be erased in this way. But here, I want to argue against the notion that there is such a thing as a “settled” political unconscious, even in the most established and hegemonic states. It is in the very nature of the unconscious that it cannot be settled, that a crisis or turbulent period reawakens what may have temporarily appeared to be resolved. A traumatophilic psychoanalytic perspective rests on this countervailing premise. Analysts are trained to avoid colonizing the patient’s time, thoughts, and speech in the consulting room because of this dimension and this wager on the unsettled unconscious (even though many will err). That is the source of the radical potentiality behind the knowledge that, unless and until the reality of death itself, the unconscious can never be settled and “cured” but can be opened up to the intervention of many Others and draws alterity more into itself.

The further away we get from historical antecedents that bring us a life-affirming world, the more important the fugitivity of the sexual unconscious in radicalizing the past and reigniting its force on us. How can we create the capacity for this fugitivity to take hold libidinally, move more easily, and exercise a degree of passibility in ourselves, our spaces, and our countries? After Gaza, we know there is no limit now to how much we can be shaken to our core, but what are the conditions to end the death-making and enclosures of apartheid? Who fears the exigent sadism required to make that possible?

Perhaps psychoanalysis might be useful for questions of political strategy during such recognizably material stalemates. Its principle of unknowability offers another dimension of openness to the future, the injection of doubt against neat little predictions, sitting in tension with the political determinism of our present discourse. Can there be another way of seeing what Palestine teaches us, and the embodied horrors of American white supremacy and imperialist wars, so that we can better listen for the return of fugitivity and overwhelm that has operated closer to that wound and roiled the national sexual unconscious on this hemisphere and beyond?

I want to thank the other participants of the Black Reconstruction summer reading group that took place June-August 2024 for providing me with that admittedly very ego-syntonic small oasis of political depth, reflective distance, and Marxist historiography to think through the crisis of the American empire in this century and Israel’s genocide in Palestine, by engaging with DuBois’ account of America’s second revolutionary war. My gratitude to Avi, Laura, Linda and Sam for the generativity of the space.

Works Cited

Abourahme, N. (2024, Sept. 2). In tune with their time Radical Philosophy.https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/ article/in-tune-with-their-time

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998). Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Free Press.

Malm, A. (2024, April 8). The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/ the-destruction-of- palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth Petro, G. (2023, December 1). Statement of President of the Republic of Colombia, Gustavo Petro Urrego, at the COP28 High Level Segment National Statements Opening. [Speech transcript]. Presidencia de la República. https://www.presidencia.gov.co/prensa/Paginas/ President-Petro-The-unleash-of-genocide-and-barbarism-on-the-Palestinian-people-is-what-awaits-the-exodus-231201.aspx

Saketopoulou A. (2023). Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: NYU Press.

Schneider, S. (2023). Light among the Nations. Jewish Currents.https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations Sitman, M. & Adler-Bell, S. (Hosts). (2024, July 19). Yoram Hazony’s Israeli Model (w/Suzanne Schneider). [Audio podcast episode]. In Know Your Enemy. Dissent Magazine. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/ know-your-enemy-yoram-hazonys-israeli-model/

Contributor

Safia Albaiti, LMSW is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, with an interest in political psychoanalysis and spirituality in her clinical practice and poetry.