An Ode to Loss

Roula HAJJAR

“I’m scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death…we mustn’t see ourselves in their mirror, for they’re prisoners of one story, as through the story had abbreviated and ossified them…Please, father –you mustn’t become just one story…You’re dying but you’re free. Free of everything and of your story.”

—Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun

How do I find the precise words to describe a moment that has just vanished? Then again, what linguistic precision can capture the impact of two-thousand-pound bombs killing and maiming with such depravity that Gazan healthcare workers must estimate the death toll by weighing human remains in plastic bags and dividing them by an average weight by age metric? Can we get the weight by age metric for a three-year-old, please? What exact words can describe the brutality of technology that turns Palestinian bodies into the earth that fills craters 30 feet deep and 15 feet wide?

Who am I, the speaker, tasked with finding such precision? Who am I in a future already past? Who am I in noncoloniality, outside the mythosymbolic of Zionism? In the now-now, I am an Arab immigrant from Lebanon. My father was Assyrian, the son of a man who, as an infant, fled genocide in Southeast Turkey for the safety of Beirut. My mother is from the South of Lebanon. So was her mother and her mother’s mother. It was not the South of Lebanon, then. It was a part of Greater Syria, which Europeans thought to delineate differently in service of extending Mount Lebanon and constructing a modern Lebanon in the aftermath of WWI and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. It is the same land that twenty-four years ago was liberated from decades of illegal Israeli occupation. It is the place where Edward Said, a Palestinian, hurled a stone at an abandoned Israeli watchtower in 2000, an act which would place him within the collective moment of liberation, within a temporality that brings together the Intifada of the 1980s, twenty years before that moment. The alAqsa Intifada happened just as the stone was thrown. It is the land upon which the Battle of Bint Jbeil was waged in 2006, a watershed moment in the history of the Lebanese resistance that would be compared to the Battle at Dien Bien Phu. Now, this land is a battlefront in Israel’s war on Gaza, a genocide that has claimed the lives of over 40,000 Palestinians, orphaned tens of thousands of children, maimed tens of thousands more, erased universities, municipalities, libraries, archives, and cultural centers and either bombed, invaded or besieged, often more than once, almost every hospital in the Gaza Strip (Assi, 2024). Then and now, the land of my mother exists in connection with objects and places that are not “dead monuments and artifacts destined for the museum and approved historical theme parks, but a remainder of ongoing native life” (Said, 2003, p. 49). Defiant life and the “battles waged against this genocide” in Gaza and across Palestine “will eventually be recognized historically up there with the great feats of anticolonial history…with the Battle of Bint Jbeil…even if we don’t quite have the language to talk about it as such” (Abourahme, 2024, p.18).

There is a telling of history that affixes the past and its relation to the present with linguistic precision and concurrent psychic ordering, rendering the past dead, closed, and done. Also possible is a telling of history that unfastens the past from constricting representations to make space for new significations. Eng & Kazanjian (2003) took up the question of loss and the politics of mourning in an anthology of essays that engaged the relationship between the apprehension of loss, and the way such an apprehension can produce a world of remains as a world of “new representations and alternate meanings” (p. 5). The presence of the past in the present, what is lost in what remains, bears a resemblance with melancholia, an unresolved grief, a mourning without end. Eng & Kazanjian (2003) recuperate melancholia and challenge its characterization as a pathological state. They suggest that an ongoing, expansive, and flexible relationship with the past, a relationship of continued investment and preoccupation with what is lost, beyond the limitation of the fixity of completed mourning and decathexis, is key to producing “not only psychic life and subjectivity but also the domain of remains” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003, p. 4).

Avgi Saketopoulou’s work (Saketopoulou, 2023) beckons us to consider the generative potential of moving beyond fixed translations of history that the ego summons to organize and stabilize us, subjects in history. In Sexuality Beyond Consent, she brings into focus Laplanche’s theory of the infantile sexual, a force outside the aegis of the ego, fomenting escalating tensions without release, “the more and more” of experience that dips into unpleasure (Saketopoulou, 2023, p.33). It is on this treacherously intensifying ride with the infantile sexual that the subject is situated to create new translations, no more or less accurate than the translations they replace. However, the condition is that the subject surrenders to what the experience might stir in them. Saketopoulou calls “courting overwhelm” a break with a conventional approach to the trauma-informed therapy industry, one buttressed by financial, medical, and political interests prioritizing regulation and order. What is the point of it all…this treacherousness, inciting of traumatisms, and opening to pain?

Let us go back to Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, to the words spoken by Dr. Khaleel at the bedside of his father figure, Yunis, in a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Beirut. Dr. Khaleel is not a real doctor, except for a few months of medical training, and Yunis, a Palestinian resistance fighter, is in a coma. The narrative goes, “a temporary doctor in a temporary hospital in a temporary country.” Time is irrelevant, evoking exile, outsideness, an outsideness that conjures Moten’s notion of fugitivity and Glissant’s thinking of errantry. We move from the Nakba of 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel, to the Sabra and Shatila camp massacre of 1982, a joint operation between Israel and Lebanese Christian fascists, to the suffering and losses of the 1990s. “Dr.” Khaleel beseeches his beloved and dying Yunis to unfasten himself from the essentialism of one version of history, to unbind himself from one translation in order to craft a personal subjective relationship to his life, or else death. Khaleel wants Yunus to be melancholic, to be in an active and ongoing relationship with what he has lost, a libidinal investment that animates loss and its constantly changing relationship to what remains. Otherwise, a sure death awaits Yunus – a completed mourning that affixes loss, in its completed and saturated form, to a position in the past engaged only through navel-gazing nostalgia. Mourning without end, a melancholic position, is a “politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive…abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003, p. 2). That is the point of it all. There is no other way, for the alienated, for the not at home in the world – for the wretched of the earth –than to confront an eviscerating overwhelm that turns up the disquiet of their opacity, a poetic outsideness often suffered, to find a subjective relationship with symbols imposed by the victors of history.

This act of strange insurgent agency disturbs the status quo outside of the ego’s will because it opens up time for the exiled, suspended between one binding translation and another and suspended like Yunis, the revolutionary fighter, in his coma. From Freud to Laplanche, Saketopoulou (2023) explains how a Lanplanchean conceptualization of the infantile sexual moved past what she calls Freud’s “taming” of the infantile sexual, a turn away from speaking of a sexual tension that is escalatory and involves unpleasure, toward mature sexuality that concludes with discharge and dissipation, thus underemphasizing the fragmenting and disordering potential of the sexual drive (p.71).

How does this vector continue forward to capture and be captured by Saketopoulou? Is Saketopoulou giving us theory that is itself a force unfastening us to one telling of dominant history, a force that, in its openness to unruliness and multiplicity, is a theory with decolonial potential that incites the type of reconfiguration it speaks of? Is Saketopoulou saying something to psychoanalysis, both students and teachers, about the ethics of theorymaking at this moment? Saketopoulou often cites the exigency of this moment as driving the need for a change of theoretical course. Exigency is a knock on the door by subjects whom psychoanalysis has not taken in, not allowed itself to be affected by, not allowed itself to loosen up and change in response to – where a response would be mutually transformative for the body of theory and its subject. To open oneself up to overwhelm and the discomfort of being yanked away from a steadying dominant taxonomy of things so that one may be acted on by the external, surrendering to being affected in ways one was not prepared to be, is an ethics of theory making.

Surrendering to experience is to be receptive to the effect of the external acting on us, a state Saketopoulou, borrowing from Lyotard, calls “passibility” (p. 60). A few years prior to Lyotard’s (1988/1991) passibilité, Said (1983) used the term worldliness, “of being in the world and of the world,” “enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society.” Sheehi (2023) finds this worldliness similar to what Glissant (1997) would later call “mondialité” a “being in relations.” Both worldliness and mondialité situate the individual in history and politics, a person within a structure of material asymmetries they continue to unmask and reconfigure. It is in this space that theory and its affective baggage swirl together, inseparable from one another. I find worldliness and mondialité forerunners of passibility. To receive experience and be touched by experience, one must be in some relation with people, places, objects, and values. This is not the relationality of the relational turn in psychoanalysis, nor the relationality that instrumentalizes repair with the insidious aim of quelling insurgent agency and safeguarding incumbent power relations. This is a relationality of being in the world with others as it is, in the material reality of it – “a shared and co-created asymmetrical world of exploitation, violence, and genocide as it is happening now in Gaza, and also, creativity, beauty and defiance” (Sheehi, 2024). At the core of this relationality is an acceptance of risk that, at any moment, the allocentric subject might be touched by an external other that can never be fully grasped or seized (Saketopoulou, 2023). This point is especially salient in the time of genocidal colonial war and anticolonial liberation movements. Anticolonial movements create opportunities for political passibility by overturning relations of force, a challenge to the colonial order, where order is maintained through a machinery of non-reciprocity, separation, and untouchability. This inoculation against passibility has made settler colonialism vulnerable to the colonized’s passibility as a matter of their reality, their worldliness – millions of people are interpellated in the genocide in Gaza because they have been touched by settler colonial genocide, and they recognize themselves in it.

Abourahme (2024) argues that the “most primary organizing logic in colonial order is separation.” He details that this separation is physical, spacial, ontological, and psycho-affective, an enforced distance between subject and object. Abourahme connects this argument to Mbembe’s work on necropolitics by calling this a separation between the living body and the “bodythings” around it (Mbembe, p. 46). Here, colonial domination is a logic of unconditional non-reciprocity, a penetrating violence into native society, while colonial life remains untouched by the native other in return. “Its essence is not simply that it is raw and arbitrary, but untouchable. This is how it dehumanizes, because it refuses any kind of mutuality at the very point of intimacy, precisely where it intrudes deepest into bodily integrity” (Abourahme, 2024, p. 17). It is important to specify that we are beyond the point of mutuality in the way we are beyond the psychoanalytic confines of the relational school. We already live in a world past this possibility. A state of mutuality is a futurepast. We are, instead, coming up against the incommensurable between the genocidal violence of Zionism and the Palestinian body. These are irreconcilable tensions that call for reconfiguration.

To put Saketopoulou in conversation with Abourahme would be to find Zionism, the ideological engine of Israel’s brand of settler colonialism, devoted to a fixity, a closed system that has not, and cannot, make itself passible to the native other because it is premised on a power relation that operates along a logic of untouchability. The anticolonial liberation movement requires our passibility; it is a movement that wants to affect, to touch the other, even if, especially if, the other is affected to the point of truly encountering the discomfort of feeling threatened. For example, the Palestine solidarity movement that remains emergent on college campuses in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza has been brutally clamped down on by university administrators, elected officials, and law enforcement because these stakeholders have found it to be threatening and hostile. Long Chu (2023) contends that opposing this crackdown on pro-Palestine speech by instrumentalizing liberal rhetoric about the sanctity of free speech is irrelevant and futile. The point is not to support pro-Palestine speech by dismissing its potential to make an individual feel threatened or afraid but by witnessing that it could generate fear and, in doing so, affect or touch the listener who is threatened. I am back at the image of Said in the South of Lebanon. His body is an arrow. Said with the rock realized Said with theory just as Glissant found that “thought in reality” acted on the opacity and imaginary of peoples, so that “in them thought risks becoming realized” (Sheehi, 2024). The risk is in permitting oneself to be subjected to the other, to the threat posed by the other, keeping in mind that the extent to which the listener is threatened may have something to do with dominance within their social location, a dominance that is unsettled by another translation. In this instance, another translation involves two subjects touched by one another, a colonizing subject surrendering to the disquiet of encountering their brutality, and a colonized subject taking into their possession and rearticulating aspects of oneself “given by the socius itself constructed by and through white supremacy” that may have been part of the colonized subject’s very subjectivation (Saketopoulou, 2023, p.118). I believe this rearticulation of terms of subjectivation is what Abourahme (2024) is alluding to when he calls this current moment the “time of initiative/Zaman al-Mubadara” for the Palestinian anticolonial liberation movement (p. 15). In Gaza, in Palestine, and across the world, this movement – through willful ingenuity and defiant melancholy – demands, even imposes, a relationality where the colonizer is touched and affected by the native, a relationality that “opens up time” and gives the colonized subject the ability “to set its rhythm and tempos” (Abourahme, 2024. p. 16). Of course, all at a tremendous and devastating cost.

For those who have lost, melancholy and passibility forge alternative paths forward that hold the density of our loss, the force of our drive, and the promise of our investments. Melancholy has been my companion for many weeks and months. However, I did not know how to call it such. I would call it heartbreak. Stubbornness. Agitation. Rumination. Qahr. A fantasy of driving from my favorite beach in Sūr down a coastal highway to Akka, where I would meet a friend and decide if I wanted to drive back for an hour or stay the night A vigorous headshake to rid my mind of such indulgence. On better days, I watched all I had lost mercifully recede only to redound with a cold and piercing force, like a wave I briefly turned my back on, catching me by surprise. I am stuck, I thought. I am haunted by Gaza. I lay in bed at 2 a.m. looking at pictures of the Haditha Massacre, the cold-blooded slaughter of twenty-four Iraqis by U.S. Marines almost twenty years ago— a couple of years after the liberation of the South and Said’s photo. The pictures had been hidden for nearly two decades and had just been made public because of several lawsuits against the U.S. military. I see the lifeless bodies of a mother and her child together in bed—their last sleep. There are numbers on their backs—the work of a red Sharpie. I do not understand. I feel it again. I am haunted by Gaza. Palestine. “Melancholy people are [only] witness/accomplices of the signifier’s flimsiness” (Kristeva, 1989, p. 20). In its flimsiness, the signifier expands beyond its lost referent to take on endless representations, endless new translations and meanings, and “new social and political consequences” (Eng & Kazanjian, 2001, p. 5), like the subject beyond their limit. Palestine is the wound of the melancholic political subject seeking emancipation, retranslating, and reconfiguring the materials of their subjectivation. Everywhere we are, we are fixed in place by materials of late liberalism and late fascism. This liberatory moment is our unbinding. Palestine is everywhere. Palestine is the flimsy signifier.

References

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

Eng, D. & Kazanjian, D. (2002). Loss: The politics of mourning. University of California Press.

Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of relation. The University of Michigan Press.

Khoury, E. (2006). Gate of the sun. Archipelago Books. Kristeva, J. (1989). Black sun: Depression and melancholia. Columbia University Press.

Long Chu, A. (2023, December 22). The free-speech debate is a trap. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/free-speech-debate-free-palestine.html

Said, E. (1983). The world, the text, and the critic. Harvard University Press.

Said, E. (2014). Freud and the non-european. Verso Books Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia. New York University Press.

Sheehi, S. (2024, January 24). Theory as stone. Social Text Online. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/theoryas-stone/

Contributor

Roula Hajjar, LMSW is a postgraduate psychotherapist at the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, and a candidate in analytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute.