Philosophizing with Open Graves (2024)

Philosophizing with Open Graves

 

Published online, March 2024

This is not a political analysis; to claim so would be fallacious. Nor is it a philosophical proposition. It is a text in echo, in association with the effects of a philosophical proposition, from the psychoanalytic experience, on the fly (with the risks that entails).

 

What Speaking Means

The reactions provoked by a very short excerpt from Judith Butler’s speech on March 3, 2024, in Pantin, compel us to examine the entirety of this public event, available online and, further, to go beyond what we did not think we could manage to think before hearing it, regarding the buzz that erupted in its wake, and, more seriously, regarding some threads of a meticulous elaboration arising in the face of current warfare in the hope of peace.

My initial reaction to this excerpt, too situated, too affected, was as follows: how can the most widely read philosopher in the world take such a risk of going too far, too strong? And taking with her all the others engaged in their attempt to think… I was, and not just a little, incensed by the effects subsequent to this intervention, against the speaker herself. Very angry and indignant. Something excessive had occurred, and there was only a delocalized place for it. Angry at her too, like the uncontrollable effect of an internal tension seeking relief. Then, addressing my recriminations to a sister in struggle, thought opened up to re-examine each thread, go back months, decades, and resume the work, hoping to be demanding enough: to identify the project of this Pantin event, to interpret the incriminated excessiveness with its causes, to consider what cannot be considered without enduring some painful internal distortions.

 

On March 3, a public meeting took place, aiming for a high-flying exercise, from my point of view: philosophizing with open graves. The unspeakable horror of the current situation in the Middle East demands it, in the face of recent history, without disavowing the lessons of more distant episodes so decisive for the lives of the peoples of this region, thus condemned to suffer from being a center of the present political world, the fratricidal heart of a large part of humanity.

 

A tombeau ouvert — in the singular —, as a common French expression, denotes the excessive speed of an action that endangers life (driving a car with the pedal to the metal and defying death).

A tombeaux ouverts — here in the plural —, can be invented from the entanglement of massacres, killings, criminal armed actions by the forces involved, for 70 years and particularly today, and tomorrow still… The open graves are those of lives sacrificed on October 7, those of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, all inhabited by the ghosts of History.

 

Thus, like any public address, this was an authentic risk-taking, a proposition of ideational articulations that must support our efforts of reflection. The signifying chain highlighted by Judith Butler in her statement underscored the following signifiers: Zionism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, Shoah, instrumentalization, self-defense, resistance, feminisms. The underlying enunciation claimed a wish for peace, free from state political arrangements, grappling with the horror of the ongoing conflict.

The crucial point, on March 3, 2024, of Judith Butler’s propositions is not the one retained in the excerpt disseminated since that date to argue against her, personally, for an offense of opinion. It is therefore appropriate, before assessing the incriminated moment, to listen carefully to her entire intervention, and particularly the beginning of this meeting rather than its end, which captures attention.

Thus, the crucial point of this speech is not its supposed conclusion, as is usually the case with daily political analyses concerning a question whose obscurity should be dissolved by marking it with a conclusive rhetoric. Here, I believe, on the contrary, a more analytical than comprehensive proposition was attempted, at the risk of failure, consciously, to avoid the unconscious error of an overly convenient cover-up designed to conceal what one does not want to see or know. I will explain.

 

Cancel, Postpone, Displace

This meeting on March 3 suffered, first, an initial cancellation to prevent risks of public disorder, compounded by threats against individuals, and also against the cultural venue initially planned to host it (Le Cirque Électrique), at the moment when the Paris City Hall succeeded in preventing it. This impediment became the implacable source of its inevitable relaunch, its persistence, and its displacement. They were not going to remain silent without pursuing further the difficult intellectual endeavor — thinking the horror of war in its actuality — which we are all summoned to confront, and which this event, conceived more than two years ago, well before October 7, 2023, aimed to tackle head-on.

 

But any cancellation, especially one followed by a displacement, is not without consequence for the intellectual questions — and thus, psychic objects — concerned and the economies in which they are embedded.

Nor does it fail to highlight the underlying, mechanical maneuver of this imposed impediment against the initial project of elaboration aimed at clarifying thought through the use of condensations, metaphors, and constraints placed on language, its motifs, and its representations, as is the goal of the intended intellectual effort.

This also brings to mind, in passing, the well-known distinction among Lacanian psychoanalysts between metaphor and metonymy, and thus between condensation and displacement (based on Lacan’s proposition).

Forced into displacement, this speech suffered from an attempt to prevent the liberation of desire at work behind the object that represents it. It was further prevented from opening up to metaphor its aim of analyzing represented desires where they evade (in opinions, in actions), and substituting all conceivable possibilities (including the worst), which alone are competent by the force of substitutions — the only processes that language makes available to us to answer the question of meaning — to further our understanding of these historical events.

 

The cancellation having partially failed in its attempt at total rejection, like a determined foreclosure (as if that were possible, but foreclosure is not a conscious action), resulted in a displacement that simultaneously hinders and compromises the proper conduct of the philosophical work invited to take place in full light, and its reception beyond its initial circle among the general public and more particularly in public opinion.

To be precise, it resulted in a disavowal that first affects the words of those who were to utter them that day (December 2023), and secondly shakes the discourse that falters on all sides (since March 3, 2024). We see the effects, affect becomes argument to relieve psychic conflict, emotions demand to be legitimized, it escalates.

The session finally held on March 3, 2024, was thus traversed and modified by the effects of displacement tinged with cancellation. And what was prevented, refused, always returns, and when this return occurs in another place and at the same time (this time decided by October 7, which punctuates the course of history more than others), it testifies to a rejection through disavowal, and exposes in its return to pure horror, to its expression, to the unfolding of shadows finding illustration in the representations of words and things thus charged with accomplishing the reparation capable of compensating for the initial illegitimate harm. Thus, disavowal yields when it arises (knowledge refused in its return) to the Imaginary, and thus to reality and the body, in the forms of excess or overflow. Not that Judith Butler was delusional, but the constraint imposed on the subjects present may have encouraged acts of speech as salvific breakthroughs, as we encounter them in ordinary clinical expression.

Perhaps this is heard in what Judith Butler said, accompanied by her comment, with the air of having committed an act (see the video) at the moment of: “I’m going to be in trouble for saying that, tomorrow…”? In excess, then, as repudiated knowledge makes itself known on its return, amplified by a crash, with the insolence of simultaneity that characterizes it — psychoanalytic experience practices these processes daily.

 

Taking Horror Seriously

That hatred has been and remains a dark vein, nourishing antisemitic acts as individual and collective claims can assert — notably those of October 7, 2023, and others — must not prevent the delicate penetration of the effort to think into the meanders of horror, to discern every nuance, all the useful corners for the openings necessary for our understandings, even in the face of the impossible and the unbearable, which we must nevertheless try to modify in its texture to extract some particles useful for the progress of our mental articulations, and thus for our conceivable progress towards peace.

At Hannah Arendt’s invitation, we looked Eichmann in the eye, and we eventually moved beyond the horror of her now undeniable interpretation of the banality of evil. To do so, it was necessary to grasp the dimensions of a fascist ideology’s grip on an individual’s free will, and to question ourselves in return to envision what had no face.

 

What is the point of operating in this way? It is central: not to offer disavowal as a substitute for sacrifice on the altar of segregation. Such was, from my point of view, the endeavor of Judith Butler’s discourse.

We know that this compromise (feeding segregation through disavowal) runs the risk of a simultaneous return of disavowed knowledge to the Imaginary, and thus to reality and to bodies, in flesh and blood, where the refused Real manifests itself at the threshold of the disemboweled Symbolic: what October 7 relates to, just as it was with the series of crimes perpetrated during the Parisian attacks known as Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan in 2015 (terraces, streets, shops). Not in their political or even historical structuring, but psychic, unconscious. For these, I have been able to put forward the interpretation of a process of disavowal breaking down at the moment of its lifting, devoid of the elaborations necessary for the processing of the knowledge concerned, crystallized in the torment of the displacements I encountered in the late 1990s at La Cité de La Muette in Drancy, Seine Saint-Denis (while I was working as a street educator), a reliquary of the disavowals of the Shoah and the Algerian War, as far as France is concerned. .

For those recently arrived and currently ongoing (crimes) concerning current events, the effort to be made is therefore equivalent to dream-work: to condense to keep alive the possibility of senseless creations useful for untangling the blows dealt to meaning by autonomous imaginary maneuvers to defend us from the unbearable, the unthinkable, and the unspeakable of the real. We must dream horror, and not of horror, to clarify our common sky.

 

A Matter of Words, Words to Be Made

Resistance or armed reaction? Perhaps therein lies what clutters our semantic imaginaries and our History. To speak of resistance, in France as elsewhere, invokes a history more singular than common. This always tears understanding apart.

If Judith Butler had said “armed reaction,” it would have been softer on everyone’s ears — from all sides.

But that would have missed the salvific defiance that must be adopted as we try to untangle what can never be fully untangled. For a remainder will be felt as much as it presides from the outset over our attempts at clarification. We all have to deal with (this remainder), to sort out the imbroglio of facts, to border the abyss of subjective gaping too embodied in wars always illustrating the overflow imposed by the pulsional charge (in its death dimension). There is no need to make a fuss or a failed cabal against anyone. This remainder belongs to no one, but it unconsciously stirs us all. It is the worst, just as the worst is central for every being, and even more so for every subject.

 

The video of the March 3 event shows this very well. Judith Butler proposes a simple, and perfectly non-conflictual thing: if it is possible to qualify the acts committed on October 7 as “terrorist,” or “antisemitic,” then it must also be possible to qualify them as “resistance,” even to the exclusion of the two previous qualifications at the moment of opening the discursive field, otherwise the semantic and signifying concealment would portend a perilous defensive disavowal for the future, on the day it is lifted.

It is not a demanding or judicial qualification, nor even sociological or political, but, from my point of view, a performative action on the signifiers themselves, as Judith Butler, a rhetorician among other things, has long invited us to follow her philosophical practice in this mode.

Who still wants — or still needs, to get close to the star, rub shoulders with her, or pay her off as an inquisitor — to be surprised by Judith Butler and pretend to be an idiot in the face of her perhaps ultimately too pedagogical proposition, for ears folded by pain and dread?

 

If the term “revolutionary peace” (as the title of this event) can suggest its ambiguity, it is because one must be able to adopt the so diversely involved viewpoints: October 7 is 1 — terrorist for the Israeli state and populations, 2 — antisemitic for all Jews affected by it or for any combatant/terrorist at work recognizing their fanatic motivation, 3 — resistant for anyone who discerns in it, with or without measure, the nature of an action expressing in horror a movement of reaction against oppression, an uprising (colonization, segregation), in a context of war.

But ambiguity is, for psychoanalysts in particular who frequent it assiduously, a delicate potentiality to handle as dangerously as nitroglycerin, whose public use exposes the philosopher to the discourse’s stopping points to date (Annie Ernaux, in supporting Judith Butler, was able to specify that it was not yet time for her to speak of armed resistance), without prejudging their future displacements under the effects of useful semantic pressures not for the support of a predetermined political project (so present in the minds convinced of the political solution to be exported as intellectual imperialists), but for our most universal possible (and thus multiple) exploration of the phenomena present. This is why I say that Judith Butler’s intervention was, to date, more analytical than comprehensive, which undoubtedly drew her closer to the unbearable fault lines that may seem to reinforce or justify the acting out, whose every motive, including the most unbearable, must nevertheless be gathered.

It was not a question, I believe, on March 3, 2024, of saying what should have been done to prevent October 7, 2023, from happening, nor of advancing what should be done to make things better there, but of emphasizing the rupture in its details where the reasons that should not be disavowed, at the risk of their subsequent aggravation, are hidden. The Palestinian and Israeli, Muslim and Jewish populations will only invent sustainable solutions by making them germinate, not on open graves, but in fractured words and thoughts representing acts to be transformed by the work of thought. Perhaps we can hold ourselves to the demand that is already theirs.

 

Psychic and Political Disavowal

Wherever violence is exercised, however explicable or legitimate it may be, it compels philosophical and analytical effort to follow step by step the paths opened by its shards, in pools of blood, to encourage, to implant there the potentiality of a path to peace — such was, I believe, the broader project of this public discussion.

Behind the guns, thoughts here attempt to inseminate what will, possibly and without guarantee, inoculate the virus of transformation into the very energetic heart of horror to carry it towards horizons of reconstruction, of invention as much awaited as necessary. This has been done, for once, at the risk and cost of following the path of criminal munitions — those of offensives, defenses, and resistances — so as not to disregard our determined, unconscious involvement, so as not to add a disavowal to the disavowal under the high patronage of its political as well as psychoanalytic formulation, now well known in France under Macron’s presidency: and at the same time (The lifting of a disavowal occurs in time and in another place. It differs from the return of the repressed occurring in the same place at another time. This is also the mark of perverse disavowal).

 

So everything is open, like the graves (without burials for many of them), and that is unbearable. Since bodies are accumulating, we can sustain our desire for peace without recoiling from our own personal implications, in the depths of our intimate thoughts, where they conspire and compromise themselves through pain and despair.

 

At the risk of failure to avoid error, this is what I heard during this speech. Like an invitation not to be content with a simple opinion, or even a judgment. To try to carry the work of thought further. May the displacement mentioned above be followed by the opportunity for our inner displacement, our personal disturbance first, to prevent the intensification of the segregations concerned. To support the failure to circumscribe the common error of affected amalgamation. An assumed failure that suffered from the aforementioned displacement to the point of expressing a horror that deserves to be spoken to exist and finally be processed.

 

As in analysis, in psychoanalytic cure, here is demonstrated the expected crossing of the phantasmatic veil, behind which the Empire of silence, overwhelmed by our memories, rises like a cathedral, for one as for all, individual or collective, unconscious or pre-sensed: we weep at the very place of our subjective destitution.

Hardened by the efficiencies in the disjunction of the death drive, since we know something about them, let us move towards the clarification of the darkest underpinnings involved in this fratricidal conflict. For what will not be heard will only reappear in our realities, whether we share opinions, references, methods, or styles.

 

Not to leave the ambiguity of the risk incurred by life under the action at open grave of October 7 and what follows in Gaza since that date in particular, and to philosophize with open graves without closing our eyes to the rubble of a piece of land burying without shrouds the bodies of populations killed, massacred, captured.