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- [00:00]
A
Good evening.
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B
Well, I think we'll start. Welcome to this event at Psychoanalysis at lse. I have to inform you before we start that this event will be recorded and made into a podcast and put on the LSE website. I think that's something to do with your rights, although I don't know what you'll do about it. If you don't want to be, just don't say anything. If you don't want to be on the podcast, keep quiet. Now, I want to begin by saying a few words about psychoanalysis at lse just before I introduce our two guests this evening. Psychoanalysis at LSE is something that we have got going in the last two years where we've brought together a number of important thinkers to talk about what we think are the big issues of the age. In other words, to talk about what's happening in the relationship between individuals and collectivities and the way in which sexual identities, family networks, ideas about self and society are changing and changing very dramatically. So tonight we are going to take up some of those issues and talk about matters to do with nothing, nationalism, with violence, with the politics of hatred. But we are also going to address this wonderful new book by Professor Jacqueline Rose, the Last Resistance. And I hope you've all seen. I'm just going to lift it up for you. Go and buy one immediately.
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A
Here you are.
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B
This is what it looks like. You'll see it in the LSE bookshop. This new work by Professor Rose, who is the professor of English at Queen Mary and is a very well known scholar for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is, I have no hesitation in saying, one of the few genuine public intellectuals in the UK at the moment. And you will read her work regularly in the London Review of Books and in other places where they take a thinking seriously. And it's a very great pleasure to welcome her here to the lse. Her new book, which Professor Stephen Frosch from the University of Birkbeck will talk about. Professor Frosch is a professor of psychology. He is also pro vice master at Birkbeck. He's written extensively on the relationship between psychoanalysis and social thought, on psychoanalysis and politics. He has also written, as Professor Rose has, on issues to do with Zionism and issues to do with hatred. So we're going to begin the evening by Stephen introducing Jacqueline's book for you and saying a few words about it. And then we are going to enter into a conversation amongst the the three of us about what we think is important and the idea of that conversation is to stimulate thoughts in all of you. And then we will open up the floor and you will tell us your thoughts, bearing in mind that if you don't want to be on the podcast, don't tell us your thoughts. Okay, so.
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C
Because privately.
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B
Or tell us privately afterwards. Yeah. Okay. So I think we should let everyone come in and sit down, and then we're a reasonably small number. We're hoping that this event will be an opportunity for quite intimate discussion, even though we're in quite a big, echoey space. So, Stephen, could I welcome you and ask you to tell us something about Jacqueline's book?
- [03:51]
A
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Henrietta. I was explaining to Jacqueline before that I read the book for a second time preparing for this evening and was really moved by it and decided I would write some notes for myself in preparation for the evening, and ended up writing a kind of letter to Jacqueline about it which describes some of the themes of the book and which tries to ask a few questions that derive from these themes. And so what I'm going to do is actually read this letter, and it probably take about five minutes to go through, and we'll use this as the beginnings, at least, of the conversation. So I'm just going to change the beginning, so it says. Dear Jacqueline. Dear Jacqueline, I think this is a particularly important book in a long series of significant works by you, arising out of a lecture originally given here at the lse, which provides the title and also one of the abiding themes of the book. It seems to me to draw together a number of threads that have characterized your work and to create something that is especially moving and difficult, what you refer to as the interval of reflection, that is one of your objects of study. So before we start the conversation, I wanted to highlight a few of these threads, both to orient people who might not yet have read the book, and also to open up some areas that we might discuss. Like most strong work, the Last Resistance is a deeply engaged piece of writing with a constant movement across psychoanalysis, politics, and the personal. The personal is drawn on to explore political and intellectual concerns. For instance, your memorializing pieces on two people whose lives and work were deeply entwined with your own, Edward Said and your own sister Gillian. And conversely, your political and literary work is fueled by deeply felt ethical and personal concerns, as in your probing of Zionism and your teaching, referred to a few times in the book on Israeli, Palestinian and South African literature. This is rooted in a mode of Jewish identity politics that is searching and deliberately equivocal in the sense of being open and fractured, rather than as perhaps as characteristic of the nationalisms that you experience, rather than fixed and certain. Your openness is, I think, an intentional strategy for questioning and disturbing for insisting on what you refer to as an interval of reflection. This interval is technically between impulse and.
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B
Act.
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A
As the moment in which identification and thoughtfulness can occur, in which it becomes possible to imagine a position outside your own. On the whole, the identification you're looking for is with another person's pain. In Said's remarkable phrase about Israelis and Palestinians, which you quote and worry over, he says, we cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering. There is suffering and injustice enough for everyone. I take this to be one of the epigraphs of the book, the that an interval for reflection is not only the space between impulse and act, but it's also one of the conditions for being human, or perhaps a grounding of human ethics. There is suffering and injustice enough for anyone. Everyone writes Said, and you say elsewhere that the important thing is to enter into the pain of the other. Passing on pain, you write, would be the political opposite of entering the pain of the other. I wonder if you agree that a major theme running through the book is how difficult it is to do this, entering into how pain gets acted out upon to and through the other, how it routinely gets passed on, and how unremittingly, in your view, this can be seen in your main political concern, what's being done to the Palestinians? I want to stay for a moment with this issue of the interval of reform. Much of this book is an investigation of a certain kind of committed fiction writing. Indeed, the two pillars of the book are fiction and psychoanalysis, each used in its own way to pursue something which might in other places be called truth. But here is presented as a kind of rigorous and relentless thinking through in the case of fiction, what's important is its power to produce troubling identification that overcome one of the types of resistance with which you deal the resistance of the mind to understanding what might be the position or experience or possibility of the repudiated other. In the context, for instance, of Arnold Zweig's surprised, uneasy, and profoundly disturbing fictional reconstruction of a murderous moment in Zionist history, you identify as one of your preoccupations the power of fiction to make reader as well as writer enter pathways they had never in their wildest dreams intended to tread. But why put ourselves to such trouble? Why allow fiction to trouble us so, as it does in much of the Work that you quote from Coetzee to Suite Francaise, you write taking the offensive. But why, I would ask, if we need to understand the worst as well, well as the best of history, would you want to stop the mind from running away with itself? Literary analysis and psychoanalysis are brought together here in what is an exquisitely ethical move to avoid passing on pain. To avoid passing on pain, we have an obligation to let the mind run away with itself, to think things through to the end, even if this means being the subject of a process opprobrium, because, for example, one tries to understand suicide bombers. This is not the same, I think, in your writing, as a liberal position, that everyone can and should be understood, that there are always identifiable reasons, even classic psychoanalytic reasons, for actions. You note that sometimes burrowing into the psyche of the enemy is a form of evasive action designed to blind you to the responsibility for their dilemma that is staring you in the face. The difficulty of this situation is immense. The interval of reflection doubles back on itself, and ethics becomes something that can be found only in the process of pursuing thought to its end, of doubling and redoubling its painful reflexivity. You say we need to find a language that will allow us to recognize why, in a world of rampant inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. But what might that language be, if it's not to be one of self effacement or blame or liberal empathy? Psychoanalysis, this is the last bit of this letter, is right at the center of this interval. Like fiction, what it promotes is not in any meaningful sense self knowledge, but a kind of unself imaginative capacity. Freud, you know, did not believe in the ideals of the mass, in reality, you quote, our fellow citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they have never risen as high as we believed. Psychoanalysis in this book is not treated as a technical therapeutic discipline, though the technicalities of resistance and displacement have their resonance. It's rather the possibilities of fantasy that you emphasize, with fantasy here being, in your words from a previous book, Thicker Than Water. The thickness of fantasy in the Last Resistance refers, I think, to the specifically Freudian, though perhaps also Jewish, deployment of a self lacerating rationalism. There is nothing so unrelenting as psychoanalytic thought when it's turned on the motives of human action, one's own and that of nations. Especially when what it finds is that the supposed evil out there is, is found within, in the subject, in the mass, in the social order that passes it on. Hence the doubleness of resistance at Its purest and apparently most political. Its resistance to oppression, then its resistance to the other, then also resistance to knowledge, now a regressive and defensive act in this hard place in which there's so little space to turn, how can the former mode of resistance, resistance overcome the latter? That is, what are the political possibilities of resistance understood in its full psychoanalytic doubleness? And finally, a note on the Jewish element in this. The full reference to the interval of reflection is in your description of the book as a celebration of Jewish thought as it lays claim to the interval of reflection. And most of the writers with whom you concern yourself were Jewish, several of them, including your sister, writing on Jewish issues, including Zionism. What exactly, I wonder here, makes this Jewish thought? And do you think the interval of reflection is intrinsic to it? And if so, is there a kind of betrayal or loss at the moment in which the interval is denied? The book seems to me to move between particularism and universalism. With the latter, your preference you'd know to pass, apparently, was approval. How Marcel Liebman dedicates his memoir to Jews and non Jews fighting against Nazism. But the former, the particularism, is implicit in the reference to Jewish thought and to your own concentration on the topics you have chosen. Or is thought only truly Jewish when it's ethically universalist? And if so, is that to demand of it the impossible?
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C
Well, I think we can all go home now.
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B
Right.
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C
I don't think I've ever had such a lyrical and really moving response to anything I've written, so I'm quite overcome by that. And it's going to be hard to proceed in the sense of picking out the difficult points for discussion. So we're really going to be relying on you, I think, a lot, as well as Henrietta and Stephen. So first of all, just thank you really genuinely for that. And maybe just try and pick up one or two things that you said. I mean, the first thing I want to say is, first of all, how pleased I am to be here. And it really matters to me that I gave the lecture that's the beginning of this book here, not just in this room, but here at the lse, at a time when I think the program for the place of psychoanalysis at the LSE was really just in its very, very opening stages. And it was a wonderful conference called Flesh and Psychoanalysis, Politics and Resistance. And I did talk about a novel by the writer Arnold Zweig, which was central to his communication and correspondence with Freud. And in it was called Van Hoyten Goes Home. It was a very strange novel about a political murder in Israel of a Zionist. And it had originally been thought that this man had been assassinated because he was a homosexual by Arabs. And it turned out that he'd actually been assassinated by right wing Zionists because he had become a critic of Zionism. And Arnold Zweig says, this could have been the end of the plan for me. But in fact the flaw, the flaw in my original plan became the basis of my creativity in writing the book. And it was part of his need to acknowledge that violence and mayhem could be at the heart of a liberatory, self emancipatory movement of national security, self determination. Which is of course, how Zionism liked to think of itself. So it was a psychedelic move of exposing violence where it should not have been. Now, the reason why I'm saying this to you is because it was very important to me here to talk about fiction. So this is in a way a plug. Not for me, I hope, but for fiction. Because it is my understanding that at the lse, which is the institution, one of the institutions in London that I respect most for its range, the people it has involved in its work and the possibilities of teaching. I think I'm right in thinking that fiction plays an even smaller role than psychoanalysis. Right. And what I would like to see, and this is a job application, what I would like to see is fiction being seen as central to the way that we consider, conceive of political and national identities and central to the ways in which we give ourselves the tools for understanding how they can be more interesting, more precarious, less rigid than the dominant forms of national identification imposed on most people in their political lives. So I was very interested in the fact that Stephen picked this out, but also that you said that one of the things I was trying to do was not be involved was, well, I think in a kind of identity politics. I noticed you said that I was involved in a kind of Jewish. A kind of Jewish identity politics. Well, if someone like Gayatri Spivak was here, of course she'd say everything hangs on the kind of. Right. Everything hangs on that. So I'm very grateful to you for saying it wasn't exactly your phrase, but identity politics, sort of. It seemed to me that you were saying, because the point about identity politics is that it knows what its identity is and it sees that as a foundation for political life. Whereas if I'm involved in identity politics at all, it's one that knows that identity is precarious and endlessly modulated and not Fixed because it doesn't seem to me possible to oppose the rigidities of national and nationalist identifications. Another rigid identity. And I'll just say this, which is Edward Said is indeed one of the crucial interlocutors for this book. And as I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, his struggle was for justice for the Palestinian people. And we may want to pause today given what is happening in Gaza as we speak. And the electricity was cut off yesterday, I believe, and the situation is deteriorating by the minute. And he would have had much to say about that. But he was also a theorist and great lover of music. And he believed one of his central concepts was the notion of the contrapuntal. I say music that is slightly dissonant and slightly at odds with itself. And it's my understanding of his work that he supported the struggle for Palestinian national self determination, certainly as a response to the injustice that had been committed against the Palestinians and continues to be committed to this day. But he wanted to be a form of national identity that would modulate itself thus. Say, that would not be too rigid. That would be, if you'll allow me, slightly insane qualification. Would be musical in a way that, say, it would know what it had to ask for, for, but it would be wary of what it was likely to be if it just simply went on asking for that or if it believed its whole identity to be summed up in the nature of that political demand. And I think that was a form of precarious political project that you need both sides of. Someone like Daniel Barenboyn will say, you cannot understand, IBMA said, without the music, you just can't get it. And somebody else will say, you can't understand Ibiza without his struggle for justice for the Palestinians. And I think it's something about getting those two things on the same page, which is part of my desire to get people in this room to read more fiction. Okay, so I'll just stop there for the moment as a response to Stephen, because I very much want to hear what Henrietta has to say. And thank you again.
- [19:58]
B
Right, well, I'm not going to read a letter because I haven't written a letter to Jacqueline. But I obviously have to go home after this event and write one immediately. But let me start with a small question, which is that what I'm interested in is the multiple ways in which we're national subjects. Not to close that down too much. And that's what I understand you to be saying about the importance of literature. So the question is, is Literature, the only space for us in which we can see that multiply constituted subject negotiating the terrain of self and of relation with others. I mean, students here, for example, they may not be reading much literature, but they probably are going to the cinema. And you just mentioned said so. I just wondered if you wanted to say whether you felt there was something particular about the nature of writing and representation in that regard, or whether you think that the argument you make for literature could be as persuasively made for. For the performing arts, for music, for cinema.
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C
Well, this is a very complex question. I certainly think it can be made for the performing arts and for cinema up to a point. And I'll say where I think that point ends in the sense that I've just recently been looking at the work of Esther Sharo Geltz, the Israeli artist who lives in Paris, who I'm hoping to try and write some. Something about, who does work on Testimony. But she does it in a very, very strange way by having sort of like six represent, no, 60 representations of different voices, all punctuating and pausing at the same time, and close ups of their bodies and faces so that you really have to get close to them in ways you don't get close to people unless you're going to hit them or have sex with them. Right. And it's very, very disorienting about the relationship between. Between an observer and a body. And it's very, very disorienting about the relationship between voice, testimony, memory and history. And it's quite brilliant. So I'm just telling you that because I happen to be thinking about it at the moment, and I think it is an example. I mean, she takes people, she does projects, for example, where she just stops people and asks them to tell their stories, and they tell them in a way which is this is who I am. They're immigrants, for example, in Stock Stockholm. This is who I am. This is why I'm here. And this is what I. This is the story I would like to be told about me. But it makes you hyper conscious of what it means to tell a story. And because they're all in relationship to each other and to you, it's not simply this is who I am, it's sort of breaking up under the pressure of the forms of representation she brings to bear on it. So certainly you can do it in other forms, and of course you can do it in cinema. However, it depends on which cinema we're talking about. And I'm always minded of Brecht's fundamental reproach against Cinema, which is that the spectator always sees what the camera is showing them. You can't stop the film. You can't go back and read that section again. You can if you watch it on a Steenbeck. Right. But that's an unusual and slightly perverse activity. But you don't have what you have with your literature, which is when you're reading it, you pause, you forget, you go back, you pick it up, you put it down. And I think it's very, very hard in cinema to do the level of complexity of identification that I think is possible in fiction. My example in the book, of course, is Kurzer's Elizabeth Costello. I don't know how many of you read J.M. kurtzer. I mean, I think he's an absolute South African writer. I think he's absolutely extreme, extraordinary. And I had the privilege of being at a conference with him in Amsterdam on evil. And he said he would only speak if he could give a fictional rendering of a woman arriving at a conference on evil. And he was going to read her paper. You can imagine him standing there, a man reading a paper in the voice of a woman. And the paper is about. Let me just fill this in very quickly. It's about a woman, woman who has decided there are limits to which fiction should not go in the representation of evil because it makes it too tempting. And the book she uses is something called, like, I think, the Bitter Hours of von Stauffenberg, which is a book about the would be assassins of Hitler and their execution. She gets there and discovers the author is sitting in the audience. So you've got to imagine CA reading this lecture as if he was Elizabeth Costello to an audience in which the. The author, of course, is not sitting because it's all made up and so on. And the argument is that you must not have certain representations of evil because you're going to be seduced by them and they're too dangerous. Now, the brilliance of Cozer, of course, is that his argument only works if you identify with Elizabeth Costello. And one of the things she does in the course of explaining why certain representations of evil are too dangerous is tell the story, story of her own sexual molestation as a young woman. So in order to be convinced by her argument, you have to enter into an experience which she classifies as obscene. So to understand why certain things shouldn't be represented, you have to enter into an evil representation. And I think what Kurtzer is saying is, on the one hand, there's a limit. We don't want to Go there. It's too much. But on the other hand, he's saying we have no choice. And there is actually no limit to our own, what he calls temptation by evil. Now, the complexity of that, where it's not just showing you that you could be a bad person, it's showing the attraction of it and how fiction turns on involuntary identifications, where you become a character that maybe is the last person in the world you would identify with. I do think fiction is very, very powerful at doing that. Having said that, I haven't seen the Coen Brothers latest film, and I expect that's also very powerful at doing that because they are so extraordinary. So I would say it's not particularly fiction, or it could be any form of literary representation up to a point. But, and I'll just say this and then I'll stop. Jacques Lacan said the only people who could really understand psychoanalysis were literature students and people who wrote literature, because, he said, only people who study literature are not phased by the fact that one word can mean more than one thing at the same time and indeed might contradict itself. Indeed, they take great pleasure. In fact, that's probably why we become literary students. You take great pleasure in the fact that a work can carry two completely contrary meanings and holding that ambiguity in place at the same time.
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B
Right.
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C
Whereas if you're on one of the positivistic sciences, you don't. However, two other points. Amartya Sen, who is not, because he loves Tagore. Amartya Sen writes about multiple identities as part of political theory. You write about multiple identities as parts of anthropology. So in a sense, you should be answering your question.
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B
Aha. Well, that's maybe why I asked it.
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A
Can I ask if that's the specificity of literature? What do you think is the. What do you think is the specificity of psychoanalysis in this?
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C
Well, the specificity of psychoanalysis is that it believes we are spoken by the unconscious. Right. And that we are divided, internally divided subjects, and we are internally unstable, and that there are possibilities in our unconscious minds that we would prefer not even sometimes to dream of. And this does relate to your work, Henrietta, because in your most recent book, the Subject of Anthropology, where you talk about a possible link between the psychantic subject and the anthropological subject, you have a phrase which I felt you wrote for me, where you say you have to see that subjects both identify with and resist subject positions. Now, I would never use, by the way, the expression subject positions, because I feel if you're a subject, you're never in position, right? So I can't bear that. I think it's an oxymoron for me, that expression, but identify and resist with I loved, right? Because I think it is the specificity of psychoanalysis that something about your identity is always on the lookout for other possibilities and always radically distrustful of its greatest points of certainty. So, for example, Mustafa Safwan, a wonderful Egyptian psychiatrist who lives in Paris, who I had the privilege of translating a few years ago, said, to the extent that someone asserts that they are heterosexual at the level of their conscious life, you can be sure the opposite is being said in the unconscious. So one of the things I say to my students when teaching Freud is that if I asked you in this room now to divide up on one side of the room all the men and one side of the room all the women, you would all know what to do, right? It says nothing about your sexual identity or your dream life that you know what to do if I ask you to do that. But you'll be glad to know I'm not going to ask you to do that. So what psychoanalysis says is that everybody knows whether they're a man or a woman, but the unconscious knows better. I say the unconscious knows that that's a myth, that it's a fantasy, that it's a dream, and that it's a lie. I would go further. So I would say what psychoanalysis brings to this, this is an even more radical destabilization of identity at the level of psychic and sexual life. That's why I like it so much, I guess.
- [29:15]
A
Yet, as we know, that's a particular kind of psycho. That is a particular kind of psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis in many of its manifestations takes precisely the kind of normative, conservative mode of. Of thinking as well as practice that the line you've just taken opposes. Just as I suppose you could say, fiction can do that too. Fiction can ameliorate and take you away from thinking things through. And psychoanalysis in its. I mean, it's instructive in the book, for instance, that when you are a very sophisticated writer about psychoanalysis, and we know that you know an enormous amount of psychoanalysis in these different forms. But in the book, when looking for the kind of disruptive psychoanalysis that's needed for the argument about resistance, you have to go only to Freud. There's one or two references to Winnicott, maybe one to Bolas, but it's Freud who is the recurring psychoanalyst in it. Virtually no post Freudian thought at all. So I Suppose my query about this is about whether there's an idealization of psychoanalysis that takes place amongst some of us. I mean, I share a lot of it. It's not criticism. It's a question about whether there's an idealization of psychoanalysis that becomes necessary if you want to hold on to psychoanalysis as a potentially critical practice in this political sphere.
- [30:35]
C
Well, you raise a very important issue which in the book I translated of Mustafa Safwan, which called Jacques Lacan the question of the training of psychoanalysts. He argues that there's been a real sort of dilemma in psychedelic training and the creation of analysts, where in the. This is a long story which I'm not going to bore you with, but basically, in the version of training that won out in the sort of International Psychiatric association, there was a very, very rigid conception of what training should be. And that version of training, for Lacan, had stopped certain key questions about how you transmit knowledge and the central psychonetic tenet, which is you can't transmit it simply because we're haunted and we're rebellious subjects. So the idea you become like your analyst is a kind of nonsense, in a way. Those crucial questions have been somewhat sidelined.
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B
So.
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C
So there is a very difficult question here about what it means to become a psychoanalyst and what forms of identification with certain schools of thought that training imposes on you. However, having said that, it depends on how individual analysts read the corpus. So in this book, I talk about Freud, you're right, much more than I talk about anybody else. But I have written about and indeed translated Lacan, who I think was extremely radical. And if you take someone like Winnicott or take someone like Melanie Klein, there are ways of reading them which go against the orthodoxy of what they have been allowed, partly institutionally, to become. So to take someone like Melanie Klein, there is a way of reading her, which is paranoid schizoid position, and then depressive position. And the depressive position position also involves a certain genital normativity. There's no question there's a way of reading her like that. There's also a way of reading her, and I know that somebody like Daniel Pick, who teaches psychoanalysis at Birkbeck and is also a practiced psychoanalyst, would insist on this. There's another way of reading her, which is that none of those positions are ever acquired, nor can they ever assume to be. And it is not the task of analysis to convince you you have a plan, a stable identity. I mean, interesting. We were having a discussion Last week, because I. This is a plug. I run a forum with Daniel Pick called Psychotic History and Political Life, where we precisely try and engage these questions of what psychoanalys could say about politics and what it says about itself. And he's very, very concerned to insist that there's a normative reading of Klein and there's one which is much. He's not arguing for it as radical right. He's not interested and that. But he's arguing for it as something that knows the precariousness of even its most developmental and normative moments. So I think it's very hard to generalize, and I'm surprised you generalize as confidently as you do, actually, Stephen, that in most psychedelic practices become normative. I would want you to say more who you're talking about, because that's not been my experience. It's not been experience of most of the people I know. But you're right, you have to see who writing in what way and what's being done with what they've written, and what does it mean to create a tradition and a legacy. That's when things, I think, get very, very tricky.
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B
Okay, so could we go back for a moment, then, to the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics and what might be, in some sense, the limits or the historical specificity of any form of analysis that might come out of psychoanalysis in its relation towards politics. Now, if we agree that certain aspects of desire and identification trouble the world, that there are problems about those identifications, the question we might want to ask is it the case historically that it's always the same aspects of desire and identification that trouble the world, or is there some process that's actively changing? So, for example, to put it in another way, when we now talk about nationalism, it's quite often that people say, well, nationalism in its extreme form is a problem about the relationship of self to other. It's a problem about, via. Through that, the problem about a relationship of self to self. Now, in that we are making essentially a kind of universal claim, a universal claim which we would have difficulty, perhaps, in other contexts maintaining through historical change. And I have in mind in the book the way in which you talk about Freud's struggle with these questions in the shadow of the. Well, I suppose in the shadow, in the looming presence of what would be the shadow which happened after he died of the Second World War. And the question now is, is that kind of struggle that he had then with certain aspects of desire and identification the same one that we have now when you Write about Freud and Apple Graham and the Iraq war, for example.
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C
Ok, That's a wonderful question. And if I could have had a fantasy about the question Henrietta would ask me, that would have been it.
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B
Right.
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C
So I'm very, very grateful for that. I think it's very tricky and I don't have a simple answer to it. I become more and more struck by how much Freud is a child of his time. And I say in the beginning of the long essay on Freud that in a way the whole of his life was shadowed by this rising threat. Because in 1897, I think it was. You'll correct me, Stephen, because you're the expert on this. Liger was confirmed as the anti Semitic mayor of Vienna, having been refused three times. And it was sort of like a histor historic moment when it was very clear that the emancipatory tide of the world was being brought to a halt and the forces of the night were in relatively short period of time going to be marching on the streets. Now, to that extent, I do think Freud is the child of a rise in anti Semitism, but. But it's very, very. And steep. Stephen's written about this better than anybody else, I might say. It's very important to qualify that immediately because it is not anti Semitism as eternal hostility towards the Jews.
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B
Right.
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C
That concept of eternal hostility towards the Jews is the one that Hannah Arendt says is so dangerous and has been espoused by Zionism and is being used as we speak to justify violence against the Palestinians. You have to be very specific about what you mean. And I think Arendt is our best thinker on this. And I'd be interested to know what you think about this, because she says, you know, do not take flight into a myth of eternal antisemitism, even when it's hideously confirmed or appears to be by history. What is at stake is the construction of the stateless person consequent on the First World War in relationship to a very specific concept of nationalism, a very specific form of nationalism which was German romantic nationalism based on an idea of ethnicity, faith, land, blood, descent. Now, for me, the exchange between Freud and Zweigon, it's not just because I'm trying to plug the book with which the book opens is so graphic because it's as if these two men are struggling with that concept of nationalism. You know, Freud hates sort of nationalism illusions. And he sees that as the thing that Jews have suffered from. Zwei goes to Palestine in search of a new national identity. He hates what he sees in Palestine, he leaves at the point, or he makes the decision to leave at a moment when he's on a Paoli Zion left wing demonstration about the Arab riots and he turns around to somebody in the crowd and they refuse to reply to him in Germany, because guess what, you have to speak Hebrew because it's a new nation that's being constructed with a new language. And he says, as if they didn't all speak Yiddish at home. And he is fundamentally disenchanted by the rigidity of national identity that's forming around him. So for me, and I'll get to the second part of your question in a second. For me, what Freud. The fact that Freud is taking apart identity at the moment when it's solidifying in various parts of the world in this way says a lot about how psychoanalysis, critique of identity is bound up with resurgent nationalism of a very specific kind. Now, is it the same in Abu Ghraib? Well, I want to say in some ways, of course it's worse insofar as that what we have in Abu Ghraib is not just the violence of humiliating forms of nationalit, but we also have, sorry, the sadomasochistic pleasure and the exhibitionism that is attached to that. However, I would want to say that is a little bit the same as something we've seen before. One of the texts I teach on my course on Palestine, Israel and fiction is incredible short story, the Prisoner, I don't know if any of you know it, which was written in 1949, that's to say the year after the Nakba or War of Independence, depending on what you want to call it. And in it, the Israeli soldiers move in on an idyllic pastoral biblical landscape and seize an Arab shepherd and they're going to send him to torture and interrogation and they start humiliating him. And one of the members of the IDF or whatever it was, then start taking pictures of the whole scene and. And it makes you shudder because it is like Abu Ghraib. So I don't know the answer to the question, but it does seem to me that there's a certain configuration of a kind of rampant self congratulatory nationalism that tips over into not just blindness towards the other, but the necessary dehumanizing and humiliation of the other. And Aya Del Sarraj, whose work, I'm sure you know, he runs the mental health project in Gaza, has said that the violence of the second Intifada can be explained by the fact that these are the sons of the fathers they saw humiliated in the first one, it was worse now, right? The second intifada, it's not really happening at the moment, but it was more violent. And he says that is directly because these are the children of the sons who saw their fathers humiliated in the first. So something of that structure of national identity and humiliation. I think Freud is seeing the genesis of it, in a way, and predicts it will be catastrophic. He doesn't want. He supports the Zionist project of a Hebrew university in Jerusalem, and he talks about the upbuilding of the land. But he's very wary, as I discussed and as you discuss, terribly wary of the whole Zionist. He calls it fanaticism. Something about the emergence of that and some of its worst psychosexual aspects, I feel are still. Still with us. Because, of course, the history is still with us. I mean, you know, Israel, Palestine. That problem, how should we put it, has not been resolved. It was created. It was created 10 years after Freud dies. He sees it's coming and it's still with us, which is why, you know, why we had all the events. We had to mark 40 years of the occupation. 40 years. Something stuck, right? Something is seriously stuck. So I would say there is a sameness there. But that doesn't answer what I think is your more radical question about historical change in your work, which would be not just historical change, presumably would also be going somewhere other than the West.
- [42:14]
B
But, I mean, what's troubling me at the moment a little bit is that when we're talking about nationalism, we are doing so through an exploration of, of its most extreme manifestations, the parts of it which we absolutely can't come to terms with and want to disavow ourselves, so that when we do that, we forget something about it, which is that there are other aspects of nationalism which are about the reservoir of positive values that people have called on in different times and different places to create imaginatively the communities which have given them sustenance and hope and continuity. In other words, instead of being a sort of theory of death, it becomes a way of life. Now, when you look at the different ways in which that is done at different moments, then you have to look, of course, at different mechanisms for identification. And very crucially, for a social scientist, you would not only have to look at different mechanisms for identification, but very specific context in which that identification takes place and to trace out in each case exactly how they work. In a sense, that move, that move that we would make in the social sciences would be very akin to the kind of move that would be made in Literature, it's that multiplicity, the multiple ways in which you can be a national subject, not all of which you understand at every moment and in every context. And I think one wouldn't want to lose, you know, I'm going to come on to the electricity being cut off in a second, so I'm going to get nasty very shortly. But I'm going on a positive detour for a moment. We have to somehow recuperate positive aspects of building communities and relations with each, with each other.
- [44:05]
C
Well, I agree with you. And of course, quite a long time ago now, Linda Colley wrote her book Nation no Britains. It's called Britain, not Nation, Britons in which she talked about the emancipatory and liberal concept of British identity. Somewhat against the grain of contemporary thought, let it be said. And one of the wonderful things about working on Zionism is actually, and something I love to do with the students is just to spend a few weeks at the beginning discovering how multifaceted it was. Right. So Theodore Herzl, who was the founder of political Zionism, most famous for Der Judenstadt which was 1897, I think he also in 1902 wrote a novel called Altnoiland which is a utopia. I mean it's a utopia. It was hated by a lot of people. It didn't have enough Jewish content. In fact, it's hard to Japan Jewish at all, except insofar as it starts in the salon of Vienna with disaffected upper middle class Viennese Jewry who are mainly self loathing Jews as far as I can tell. I mean he could be accused of anti Semitism. He has been, of course. But when he gets to Palestine he creates this community where it doesn't matter whether you're Jewish or not. And there is no ownership of land, there is no state, there's no ownership of property and the sacred sites are under international protection. Well, I wish, you know, I mean students read this and they think, oh my good, what went wrong? Right? But he does have a notion of a form of nationalism which would be we want a state for the Jewish people. But that would allow for the precisely the recognition of the forms of plural identification that you're suggesting. And again, just probably because I've just been to India, I've been reading Amartya Sen and he has this wonderful chapter in Violence and Identity where he just lists the 15 different forms of allegiance that anybody can have as an identity from, you know, homosexual, you know, homosexual, Jewish, vegetarian, you know, female. This isn't me by the way. Because you're starting to wonder. But you know, that, you know, sort of interested in arts and crafts. I mean, it's very funny because he lists them so much that in the end they all sort of dissolve into nothing. But he's. He is making the argument, I think, for multiple forms of allegiance as a more flexible way of creating forms of connection between people. What I want to say when I read him is that he believes in reason too much. I say he believes in the notion of secular multiple identities based on a concept of reason, which then bypasses the fossilizing of identity. So my question back to you is when you've negotiated all these specific, various and changing identities, I guess what I'm interested in is the point where they freeze, where one takes precedence and then what you do with that.
- [46:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, the point where they do freeze, but I think that they don't freeze all at the same point historically. And. And that for social scientists, what we need to know is why they freeze at a particular time, in a particular way, under a particular set of circumstances. And actually, even getting the data to do that is horrendously difficult. But perhaps we could go back now to just briefly, before I let Stephen come back in, to something about the relationship between the kind of questions we've been talking about around identification and the actual context of lives lived. That is the sort of materiality of circumstances. And that's very pressing, of course, because, as you say, the electricity just has been turned off in Gaza, and so all the schools and hospitals and so on are failing now in this way. We would talk about it in the social sciences. We'd say we would need to put together the. The injustices of recognition with the injustices of distribution and see how those two things go together and in the particular way which they reinforce each other under particular kinds of state regimes of power and state institutions. But there's a kind of difficulty there. And I think that difficulty is revealed in your essay on suicide bombers, which is a very challenging essay, and I know that people have talked to you a lot about it, but that is because when one looks to try to understand why do people become suicide bombers, of course there are a set of explanations about the material circumstances they find themselves in, about the instability of the environment, about the immiseration, about the lack of recognition. And then there are a series of arguments about the personal histories of the individual who become suicide bombers and how those personal histories intersect with those larger set of political economy or that larger set of Political economy. And yet when we've done all of that, we still don't know why people become suicide bombers.
- [49:07]
C
Well, that's wonderful. And I couldn't agree with you more. There's something very. When I was working on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and reading the chapter on the perpetrators, and they're adamant, first of all, they apologize for having such a chapter, because it looks as if you understand someone, you're exonerating them, which of course is nonsense, but they have to apologize. And then they say it's not sadism. To which Gillian Slover's novel Red Dust is a brilliant riposte, by the way. It's not sadism, and it's not sort of individual pathology. And it's not any of these things. In fact, it's nothing to do. It's to do with group identification. They are fierce about this. It's compliance, identity identification. They give a kind of group psychological reading of why people become perpetrators under apartheid or became perpetrators. And then they say, but this explanation doesn't work. It's absolutely wonderful to read it. It's as if there's something that disappears through the gaps. In fact, what is clear is they can't explain it. So I think what you've just said is terribly important, and I think Derrida would move in on what you just said at the speed of light, because what you've described is a theoretical supplement, if you like, something which cannot be pinned down to a specific cause. Working on the suicide bombers to give the women a personal history. I only realized when I was writing about it was to insult them, because it was to say you are not the agents of your own political history. You've done this because you were told you'd meet your fixer in heaven, or because you've been betrayed as a woman and you're never going to have any children. And there is a crucial distinction. I mean, I may be corrected here, between suicide and martyrdom. And if you start making it a personal history, you've turned them into suicides, and therefore you've robbed them of their political activity as martyrs. So it becomes a very, very vexed question as to which set of explanations you want to use. No, there's no final explanation as to why somebody does it. And I think that's a. I find, you see, for me, that's a source of comfort, that there's something that can't be found, finally explained. If you're a social scientist, I guess that's very annoying. But that's the difference between being a Literary person and being a social scientist, I mean, it's when Freud thinks he can explain everything that he nearly always gets it wrong. I mean, it's terrible. He thought he really knew that Dora was in love with her K, and he really pushed her to acknowledge that she was. You know, she'd repressed her heterosexual desire for this man, and she wasn't. She was in love with his wife. So, you know, whenever he was surest, he. He was wrong. And when he says, I don't think I know, then something starts to shimmer on the page and there's more possibilities of the kind you've been talking about earlier. When you don't know, then there's an opening up of options, I would say. Stephen. Stephen.
- [51:40]
A
Well, I think that's so interesting about the material that you can't talk about, but I'd like to pick up a couple of other strands. I really would like to go back to the notion of resistance, which gives the title to the book, and the different harmonics there are in the way in which you use it. And I don't think I can put this together, so I'm hoping you might. On the one hand, there is this resistance to oppression, and you describe instances of that in the book, and you're very interested and you're very interested in the way in which this appears in literature. And on the other hand, there is the psychoanalytic rendering of resistance, which you are perhaps even more interested in the way in which we examine how, as one gets closer to what might be experienced as a troubling truth, one flies away from it, finds a way, and sometimes even knowing something more can be a way of resisting the knowledge of that thing, which is part of my understanding, as I understand it, at least part of that notion of how you might understand the. What you call the embrace of the enemy, the suicide bomber, as a way of not understanding it, as a way of resisting real understanding of it. So I suppose my question to you is still about what is the relationship between these different modes of resistance, the political resistance to oppression and the kind of resistance, psychoanalytic resistance to truth?
- [53:09]
C
Well, Marcel Liebmann is someone who appears in the book, and it is the chapter which describes resistance in its most familiar sense. Because he was part of the Resistance, or rather he was close to people who were part of the Resistance. He was a young boy when his brother was taken off by the Nazis, and he's very, very fierce about saying the people who were the strongest resistance resisters were the Communists and the Bund and The left Zionists. And it's very, very important that their history has been written out of the Zionist narrative of, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto. So as Edith Zertal puts out, Marek Edelman, who believes that the Holocaust entitled the Jews to nothing or didn't redeem anything in the future, is hardly ever spoken about. But he was absolute central in the Warsaw Ghetto. I think a very good example of what you're talking about, or a way of linking the two links back to something else that was central to your letter, if I may refer to it as a letter. It was a letter which is that the Holocaust has become part of Israeli national identity. I think it's uncontroversial to say that, and it's become a way of justifying and giving a certain rationale to the violence of state. That's maybe a little bit more controversial to say. But the point at which the Holocaust becomes a national identity, the actual pain of what had happened, I would argue, and others like Edith Zertal and Sidra Israhi, Israeli right, have argued the pain of what's happened is actually being forgotten. Because what happens is that the horrors of the Holocaust become swept up into a form of resistance, I want to call it, of the psychedelic kind. That is, we will put this on as a garment to explain and justify our position in the world, but as a way of resisting the awfulness and the degradation and shame of what happens. So I think that's an example of where resistance then transmutes itself into a political identity. Psychoanalytic resistance transmutes itself into political identity. But I think Marcel Liebmann is also brilliant because for him, it is a plea for not letting the past dictate the future of the children of Israel or anywhere else in the world. And for him, resistance of the radical kind depends on not fossilizing your identity in the psycholytic sense. So I would really want to suggest there's a kind of relationship of inverse twinning between the two. If you break down the resistance in the mind, you are more likely to free yourself from the struggle for political justice. Or put it like this. That's what I like to think, whether that theoretically works as neatly as others.
- [56:12]
B
Now, we've been talking for an hour. It seems like actually just a couple of minutes. But anyway, maybe, certainly to me, perhaps hope so to you. Perhaps we should open up to the audience and have some. Now, there are microphones, roving microphones, so all you have to do is stick your hand up if you'd like to ask a question. Yeah, Here comes. Now, I think. I think the microphone person is looking at microphone. Hang on. Is it working? That's right. There we go. There's another one coming from the other side. That's it. Hello. Thank you very much. All three of you. You need to speak up and speak clearly. Okay. And authoritatively. Okay. We're not going to be able to hear you, so speak up. Very intimidated, actually. Thank you, obviously, for the profound, interesting talks. My question is regarding the last point that Declan raised about the psychoanalytic kind of subversion of one's own misery or one's own suffering onto, like, other people. Is the same thing happening in Iraq, do you think? And the second strand of my question is, how do you think we could explain. And that's to all three of you and whoever finds it most appropriate to answer. How could we explain national and international religious sectarian violence, especially with regards to what's happening in Iraq? You know, Pakistanis and Saudis and Sudanese people are deployed in Iraq to kill certain religious factions in the name of some sort of religious nationalism whereby this specific faction has to govern and rule, and that faction cannot have any say whatsoever. Thank you. Want to have a go at that?
- [58:05]
C
No, I'd like you to. Okay.
- [58:12]
B
Well, I mean, if I think what. I think this harks back in part to what I was talking about earlier when I was talking about the historical specificity that particular forms of identification have taken and the particular deployment of nationalism in certain kinds of contexts, because I think that what is happening in Iraq is a very specific kind of deployment of a certain set of identifications, a certain kind of claim about the relation of power to the world. Right. And I don't think that that kind of claim has necessarily taken that form in previous historical moments. Okay? So I think we need to understand what's happening in Iraq in a very specific kind of way. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't universal aspects to it, which is the point that Jacqueline was making in reply to me. That is, in the way in which there is a necessity. Always that fantasy is a relational thing. It sets up the relation between self and others, or between the individual and the collective, or between one collective and another, collective collectivity. But I think that what is important is to set those kinds of deployments of anxieties and fears and so on in the context of specific forms of American imperialism and the supporters of American imperialism. And exactly the same way that I would say that the specific forms of religiosity that we see in the world today have very Important connections, of course, to the form in which religiosity has taken in the past, perhaps even to periods of the medieval periods. But the particular form that they take, the historical form that they take, is the thing that differentiates them. So we have to, in a way, find a way of putting this question of how psychoanalysts can be used into the specific kind of historical context, because unless we do that, we don't understand what is important about that specific historical context.
- [60:24]
C
Well, I would want to agree with that and I want to just add two things. One is this is just a reference, really. Karen Armstrong's the Battle for God, I don't know if you've read it, is a wonderful book about the three great fundamentalisms, Protestant, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalisms. And the point of her book is obviously, quite simply just to say Islam is not the origin of fundamentalism. And in fact, she points out that fundamentalism begins with a set of pamphlets and America in the 1930s, which have a very, very specific provenance and history. So I would want to agree with that and to say that you do need. And her argument is also the fundamentalism is the flip side of secular modernity, which thought it could wipe faith off the face of the earth. So I think you have to look very specifically, for example, at the USSR and what has been done to religion in communist countries and so on. And the problem of trying to Freud was the worst, by the way. His book was called the Future of an Illusion. He just thought it was an illusion and in the future it would be dispelled. So he should have known better. He knows that you don't dispel things just because they're an illusion. In fact, you hold onto them all the more so he should have known better than to write that book, as far as I'm concerned. However, I would want to add another thing which is I think what you're describing is also at once specific in the ways that Henriette has been saying. But there's a dimension to it, it which I got involved with in the piece on evil in the book when I was reading Atta's document. As you probably know, Atta was the person who flew the first plane into the twin tower. And the belief in one's own transcendence, I found. And that the act you are carrying out guarantees your transcendence. I found it very, very helpful to read Christopher Bolas essay on the structure Structure of evil. He's a psychoanalyst and about how a certain form of violent action is legitimated by the attempt to transcend the possibility of your own death. And recently again because I was in India, I was reading Martha Nussbaum on the Gujarat riots. I don't know if you've read her article on them and the particular forms of violence against women, which were horrific and I won't repeat them here. And she makes a very similar point about something to do with the point at which an identification becomes about transcending your own death. It then gives you license to kill others. I don't understand it completely and I perfectly willing to concur with Henrietta that it's probably very historically specific in the form we see it now. But I think it's a kind of psychic logic that needs to be unpacked alongside the specific critique of imperialism and historical specificity that she's quite.
- [63:05]
B
Or that you've called for.
- [63:08]
A
Only tiny thing to add, which is just about the way in which psychoanalysis can add something to this political drain as well. And I suppose just building slightly on Jacqueline's point then to think about both the relationship of fundamentalism to secularism, which I think is a really key one that gets neglected in popular discourse on fundamentalism, but also the psychoanalytic notions of investment and identification which have just been drawn on by Jacqueline, particularly identification there, where I think the placing of some kind of mode of psychic life into a kind of shell which gives it shape and which stores up the potentially shores up the potentially fragile identity is a kind of really important area of looking at how individuals become immersed in fundamentalism.
- [64:03]
B
Right now we have a question here at the front and question here. So we need more mics please. Guys.
- [64:17]
A
In the discussion you had before about the minds and motivations of suicide bomber, whether it's from the point of view of martyrdom or to injure or to.
- [64:32]
C
I'm also can't understand the psychology recently.
- [64:38]
A
If you've seen the documentary done on.
- [64:43]
C
Moss imam preaching violence or something. Or recently the denigration of Ken Livingston.
- [64:52]
A
In another documentary by the chap who has got a intense motivation of denigrating Islam or Muslims or whatever the case may be. I remember the Ken Livingston supported.
- [65:15]
C
A priest or imam coming from Saudi Arabia or Egypt. And I think the animosity of the.
- [65:23]
A
Chair who writes in the New Statesman and who made two documentaries seems to be extremely intense.
- [65:31]
C
And the policy exchange paper I when it came to came to me right.
- [65:40]
A
In the beginning I thought most politically driven.
- [65:44]
C
It was financed by some anti Muslim.
- [65:51]
A
Agency as such.
- [65:53]
B
And I like to know what is the motivation there instead of generating the.
- [65:58]
A
Amity There are, of course, all community have some defects of milk. But instead of creating an amity between the different nationality, different groups, this motivation.
- [66:15]
C
Is beyond my understanding. Well, I think you're saying something very profound about the hounding of Ken Livingstone, apart from anything else, and the way that kind of the gutter press, can we call it a certain gutter press? Although I didn't see the documentary, I'm sure it wasn't that. But nonetheless, he has become the sort of hate valve for a willingness to communicate beyond the barriers of communication that are being policed by the culture Now. I think what he said, by the way, about the journalist as a concentration camp guard was deeply offensive, so I'm not supporting him on that at all. But I think something about who you can and can't talk to goes to the heart of what we've been discussing this evening. Because it's as if the very process of a verbal exchange involves either an identification or a contamination. And it's as if what the popular culture is doing is trying to police the boundaries very rigidly of what is communicable and what should and shouldn't be understood. And I think that's what you're talking about. And I think we need to be very, very wary of it indeed.
- [67:24]
B
But I also think there's another part of it which is something which Freud alluded to and he talked about the narcissism of minor differences. It's about the way in which when the Greeks and Turks in Cyprus were asked why they were fighting each other, you know, they said, well, because we smoke different kinds of cigarettes, right? And there is a sense in which the. The need to create that difference between communities has now become urgent. Right. As if those differences have to be forced all the time. So people are not the motivation you're looking for. You're asking, say, well, why don't, you know, why don't people push in a different direction? And I think now we're in a situation where people are seeking to drive those divisions and they drive them more the more they feel connected to each other. And that's the paradox of it in a certain way. And I think that's particularly the case with the relationship between the Christian and the Muslim faith, which of course, in many of their precepts are actually remarkably close to each other.
- [68:33]
C
Of course, that's what Edward Said was doing at the end of his life, and he says it was his most important work. And it's still going on with Barenboim and the West East Divan which is to get musicians in a room together from Israel and the surrounding Arab countries, and they play music, and then they also have seminars. They have to talk about it. I mean, it's not just, let's make music together. It's a very complex endeavor.
- [68:56]
B
Now, there was a question here, and there's one there and one there. So we'll go in that order, if that's okay.
- [69:02]
C
Yeah. I was just wondering to what extent, coming back to the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, to what extent you understand it almost as an epistemological device or methodological device insofar as it breaks up the policing of boundaries and spaces that.
- [69:19]
B
Cannot be talked about.
- [69:20]
C
One of the key sentences in the.
- [69:22]
B
Question of Zion is when you write.
- [69:24]
C
Let'S do what psychoanalysis does to escape this.
- [69:26]
B
You are either with it or against.
- [69:28]
C
It and accept it as a symptom.
- [69:30]
B
Which I think is an interesting approach.
- [69:32]
C
To kind of open up a new space, to work through the many shades.
- [69:36]
B
There are and look at what it is. So I was wondering to what extent you understand psychoanalysis not as putting a nation on the couch, but as an epistemological device.
- [69:47]
C
Well, I haven't thought of it like that, but I. Okay, okay. Well, the question was whether I'm using psycho, if I've got you right, as a kind of epistemological device for. For thinking differently. Right. And for opening up what I think is the interval of reflection in the sense that Stephen described it, but much more specifically, just to fill in, this lady was referring to a moment in a book I wrote on Zionism where I say, you're either for Zionism or Tom Paulin, in a famous statement, said, you're either for Zionism, you're against it, and that's the end of the story. And I quoting a wonderful Russian former school, Victor Shlovsky, who said at the time of the Russian Revolution, there is no third path, and that is the one we're going to take.
- [70:27]
B
Right.
- [70:28]
C
And I just found that incredibly suggestive because I don't want to. I mean, when people say I'm an anti Zionist, I get very, very strong, strongly angry because, well, not too angry. But I'm a critic of Zionists. I'm not anti Zionist. I can't be anti Zionist because Uri Avneri is a Zionist and David Grossman is a Zionist and Martin Boover and Hannah Arendt were to some extent. So to call myself an anti Zionist would be meaningless. So what I was trying to do was open up to a space where you can Be critical at the same. You can be critical of Zionism at the same time as entering into an understanding of the basic project, which is actually very difficult to do. And what we're often talking about is alternatives. So, for example, you're not meant to talk about the suffering of the Jewish people and their treatment of the Palestinians in the same breath. You're meant to either acknowledge one or acknowledge the other. They're not sort of meant to be on the same page. And I'm interested in a world in which you can get these incompatibles on the same page and then see what happens to the way people think about their identities and what they're doing with them. And I do think this has real political resonances, not just epistemological. So in last week's Haaretz, Doran Rosenbrom, who's one of my favorite colonists, had a wonderful column where he took something that Livni had said when Bush was in Israel last week, which is, to be a Jewish woman is to dream about the Holocaust, to tell your children about the Holocaust, to think about the Holocaust. And he just took it apart syntactically. And his argument was, what does it mean to say that this is what it means to be Jewish? What has happened to identity when you do that? And what is then licensed by way of cutting off electricity as a consequence? So, for me, these questions of how you see yourself psychically and what then you do politically are absolutely inseparable. So, yes, it is. I think you put it beautifully, but I hope it can go a bit further than that. I like to think it has further effects.
- [72:23]
B
That gentleman there, please.
- [72:28]
A
Good evening. I was interested in what Jacqueline Rose said earlier about Freud and his possibly misplaced certainty. In answering the question just now also.
- [72:41]
C
You referred to a situation and you found something suggestive.
- [72:46]
A
And I wanted to know what it.
- [72:48]
C
Is.
- [72:51]
A
If you can find some marker of when you find an argument or an opinion suggestive or worthy of the accolade of certainty. In fact, I want to know what it is about your book that I.
- [73:06]
C
Might find persuasive, or whether you think.
- [73:08]
A
There'S a role for persuasion.
- [73:13]
B
In what.
- [73:13]
C
It is you profess to be doing in your book.
- [73:17]
B
Wow.
- [73:18]
C
Well, I'm going to ask Stephen to read his letter again, but. Well, that's a very challenge. Should I say challenging question, Because I think what you're saying is that. And this, of course, is true, if this is what you're saying, that there's been a lot of talk about destabilizing of identity and precarious forms of knowledge and breaking down the rigidity of certain forms of national self knowing and the violence that ensues. But I speak as if I'm very certain about what I'm talking about right now. Well, as somebody once said a long time ago when I was listening, said, you know, the way I speak is my symptom. You know, I'm very lucky I've turned it into a professional identity. You know, I'm lucky that I, that I got a job. But you know, that's just the way I speak. So there's an element of huge conviction there. In fact, to be slightly less trivial, in fact, that wasn't trivial. To relate back to Stephen's letter. It is something to do with what I like to think is the passage between, between theory and ethics. And it is probably bound up more and more with some sense of being Jewish in some strange way that Freud was certainly onto. And therefore I think the points where I become most certain, I hope aren't just forms of theoretical certainty for which I genuinely apologize because it's oppressive, but are also to do with the recognition of the lights going out and feeling implicated as a Jewish woman in that story. Okay, so somewhere more and more what I'm trying to do in my writing is link those four forms of self acknowledgement and accountability to ways of trying to understand the world. And that's the best I can say in response to your question.
- [74:55]
B
Okay, now we had a question here.
- [74:59]
A
Thank you.
- [75:00]
C
Is that on?
- [75:01]
A
Good. I've been sort of a pained observer, I think, of Palestinian situation since the late 70s, really.
- [75:09]
C
And in every way there situation, situation has got worse. I think the land is less, the dignity is so. Can you speak a bit closer to the mic?
- [75:19]
A
The land is less, the dignity is destroyed. And Edward Said a long time ago.
- [75:26]
C
Said that Palestine is a country of.
- [75:29]
B
Words and that Palestinians are waiters. And that still remains the case, doesn't it? But there isn't a Palestinian Palestine and it remains a country of words.
- [75:40]
A
And I think one of the things which is very difficult for me to contain over the years is a sense of anger and outrage.
- [75:46]
C
Because.
- [75:50]
A
Let me catch my train of thought here. I think one of the things is.
- [75:54]
C
That there's been a kind of a.
- [75:57]
A
Semiotic conquest as well as a military conquest of Palestine.
- [76:01]
B
And that's very difficult to, to resist, isn't it?
- [76:04]
C
When very powerful nations collude with the.
- [76:08]
A
Oppression of another nation.
- [76:10]
C
Okay, well I think the other thing.
- [76:13]
A
To say really is about this idea of the suicide bomber. There's A lovely sort of phrase that.
- [76:20]
C
The philosopher Ian Hacking uses, the making.
- [76:25]
A
Up of people to describe particular types of people.
- [76:29]
B
To my mind, it's a wrong question to sort of be fascinated with what.
- [76:35]
A
Makes up suicide bombers, because why not ask the question what makes up a tank driver or somebody who drives a bulldozer and doesn't even see the victim? I think we're only fascinated because we want to project the anger onto some.
- [76:52]
B
Abject person that we dislike. The violence of conventional warfare destroys many more people than suicide bombers have done.
- [77:03]
A
So anyway, I'll leave you there.
- [77:05]
C
One of the things I say in my piece is that we really have. Thank you for that, by the way. We really have to ask why it is seen as ethically superior to drop bombs on Dresden from a height than to commit an act of suicide. We have to ask why one is seen as ethically preferable to the other. Makes no sense whatsoever. The bomb dropped on Dresden kills many more people. Right. So there is something that needs explaining. And I do say at the end, we have to ask why we're turning these people into case studies. So I couldn't agree with you more about the need to understand the tank bomber. And in the Question of Zion book, I try and I try, in a sense, the last chapter's attempt to understand what I call the militarization of suffering, what has produced a kind of rationale for a certain kind of always justified violent activity in relationship to the Palestinians. I disagree, however, that it's been a semiotic victory completely. I partly agree with you in this sense. Yitzhak Law, who I think is one of the most brilliant Israeli commentators on the scene, has said, the language of the state, we all imbibe the language of the state. There is no other discourse. So to that extent, he would agree with you that there is a kind of stuff, semiotic victory. But one of the things that happens on the Palestine, Israel course that I'm involved in is we read Emil Habibi, we read Mahmoud Darweesh, we read Anton Shammas, we read Syed Kashra and so on. They say the writing coming out of Palestine is extraordinary and incredibly radical and subversive and exciting and so on. And the films, well, the obvious film I'm sure you've seen is the paradise now, which indeed goes into the mind of two suicide bombers. So I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be too down, I don't want to be too negative. I totally agree with the situation. It's a catastrophe. But, you know, People like Ghada Kami and Carmen Abulsi. Carmen Abulsi's incredible project in the last few years to actually collate the voices of all the Palestinians in the diaspora and produce the Civitas project, which is just a documentation of all their voices. So, you know, what Edward Syed always used to say was that it may not. It's not just words. It is the affirmation of an identity in the teeth of the most incredible attempts to erase it completely. And we can take a little bit of hope, I think, from that persistence, that resistance, we might say, to go back to Stevens. So, yeah, I agree with you up to a point, but I don't want to be quite as depressed as you are. You know what I mean?
- [79:29]
B
All right, there's a question over here.
- [79:37]
C
I want to try and encourage you to put back together your fractured and broken subject, as alluring as it is, because the possibilities of that subject are. You've depicted them really beautifully. But what I wanted to ask was whether there isn't something to recommend the put together subject or the strong subject, insofar as the one thing that I think I wish someone had said to Muhammad Atta or Mohamed Sadiq Khan or any of the children in his classroom would be that. So I had said to who I didn't hear, Mohamed Sadiq Khan would be to believe in the possibility of effecting change in the world by living in it rather than dying in it. And there are certain, perhaps certain beliefs and principles that are unimpeachable and that shouldn't be broken, certain beliefs perhaps, that shouldn't allow other positions. And I wonder whether the broken and fractured subject, as beautiful as it is, might also need some strong, impregnable beliefs, a kind of will. Whether we need to cultivate that too. Well, it's a brilliant question, and you've asked me it before, more or less, because Shahid has been part of this discussion group with Daniel Pick, and when we've been talking, say, about Judith Butler's appeal for the melancholic subject, I think you've said, if you don't mind me quoting you back at yourself, that this notion of the melancholic subject is a problem if we're talking about political self affirmation in the face of injustice. This was an argument that went on in feminism throughout the 70s and 80s, which was the demand for an assertive ego on the part of women. And then the critique that, you know, as Virginia Woolf said, if you join the procession of the men, you will go to war which is to say the last thing we want is for women to have egos like men.
- [81:32]
B
Please.
- [81:32]
C
No. So there's a real problem here about when there is an immiserating, deprived, unequal subject. What does it mean to say have that subject be fragmented, when actually what they need is to affirm themselves? So I agree with you totally. But I would want to say there's affirmation. And affirmation, I say the humiliation of somebody who feels that their community is being abjected by the dominant culture needs to therefore affirm themselves. There's a way of affirming themselves as an identity. And this is what I think Edward Said was talking about, which demands justice and recognition, but without fossilizing into a culture of death. So I think your question is the question in a way which is. And it relates back. So this is a perfect moment in a way for us to draw to a conclusion, Henrietta's point about what could be a form of national identity that would be positive in its sense, sense of enablement of a subject in history without fossilizing into what you've just called a culture of death. I think that is the million dollar question. You know, it's the million dollar question. It's not been answered. And it's so central to Jewish history, if you like, because the Jews were a persecuted people. You don't need me to say that. And they wanted national self determination. So what went wrong? Right. That's not a desire I want to critique. And the book does indeed end with a tribute to my sister's thought, Gillian Rose, where she said over and over again that forget there's no outside of power. We're all in power, we're all implicated in it. So what could be an ethical form of holding on to power? And that was the question Israel began with. And it has failed its own question drastically. But it's the question. So I agree with you.
- [83:18]
B
All right. Well, all I would say about that. Oh, hang on. We have another question here.
- [83:26]
C
I'd just like you, if possible, to continue on that thought to what you know about Israel.
- [83:32]
B
You put the microphone next to your.
- [83:34]
C
Microphone next to me.
- [83:34]
A
Yeah.
- [83:35]
C
Okay. The Jews being people as we know, and being Jewish as well, of great self, possibly self knowledge and reflection and.
- [83:48]
B
So on, and what we know about.
- [83:49]
C
Psychoanalysis in the Jews, why is it it's gone so badly wrong? And what. This is the second part. What do you suggest could be done to try and raise the consciousness of Israeli people to what's been going on? I mean, I know very well that the Israelis are totally blind to the plight of the Palestinians. Well, many, many of them, they are linkered and they don't want to know the Palestinians, they don't want to know what they're going through. And they talk about the Arabs and that's it. And I wondered if you have any positive ideas that you might tell us about. Now, international pressure, I mean, that sounds like a very, very naive answer to a very complex question. I think unless there's international pressure on Israel, nothing's going to change that. Say, unless their way of seeing themselves transforms itself, nothing is going to change. And that's why I think it is an ideological as well as a political question. And I was talking to Abby Shlame about why, and this is just an anecdote, by the way, why when you enter into this field, you get hostility of a kind that you get in no other field. And people also lie about you. This is what I'm very intrigued by. They really lie about what you're saying. It's fascinating in a way, but I won't bore you with it. And Abish Lane says something because he's been the target of a lot of criticism and hostility for writing the Iron Wall, for goodness sake. And he said it's because it really is a political issue. If you criticize Israel, you are seen by Israel as damaging its image in the world, which will lead to a shift in its position. And that's why if I can plug independent Jewish voices, which I'm proud to be part of and you're part of too, that's why we feel we like to think what we're doing is quite important because what we're trying to say, it's okay to be Jewish and be critical. And that may damage the image of Israel for now, but not in the name of a long term future for Israel and certainly not in the name of the continuing possibilities of an ethical way of being Jewish. So I think it is a struggle over words. To go back to your point about Palestinian being a nation of words. It's a struggle over words. But you know, I wouldn't be a literary person if I didn't think the struggle over words mattered. And I really think it does.
- [85:57]
B
Right. Well, we've come to just after 8 o', clock, which is actually the end of our allotted time. And I think that Jacqueline has nicely brought us back to the point where we began. So perhaps we will stop there. I would just like to thank both Stephen Frosh and Jacqueline Rose for coming to the LSE tonight and of talking to us about these very important matters. And I would like to urge you to go and buy a copy of Jacqueline's book and come to the next event of Psychoanalysts at lse.
- [86:28]
C
Thank you very much.