Saïd and the Ghosts of Empire (Radicalization): On Segregation and its Relationship with Denial (2017)

Saïd and the Ghosts of Empire (Radicalization): On Segregation and its Relationship with Denial

Carnets de l’École de psychanalyse Sigmund Freud, n°105, 2017, p. 47-63.

This article aims to study the relationship between the process of segregation and that of denial in the advent of the fetish (in times of radicalization). We will begin with the study of a clinical situation brought back to our memory by the attacks of January 7, 8, and 9, 2015. Saïd, a descendant of a “subject” of the French colonial Empire, and the son and grandson of French combatants from Algeria, lived in the Cité de la Muette: the former Drancy camp, infamous since the Second World War. The attacks perpetrated in Paris during those days brought into alignment places and histories through which the Shoah, the Algerian War, and Jihadism resonate. We can read these through Freud and his propositions on denial in order to grasp the underlying cultural stakes.

Keywords:

radicalization, segregation, denial, foreclosure, fetishism, Seine Saint-Denis.

Abstract:

This article aims to study the relationship between the processes of segregation and the denial of the advent of the fetish. We will start from the study of a clinical situation that the attacks on 7, 8 and 9 January 2015 brought to our remembrance. Said, descendant of a “subject” of the French colonial empire, son and grandson of French fighters in Algeria, lived in the city of La Muette: former Drancy camp notorious since World War II. The attacks in Paris these days have brought online places and stories which resonate through the Holocaust, the War of Algeria, and Jihadism; we read Freud and his proposals on denial to grasp the underlying cultural issue.

Keywords:

radicalization, segregation, denial, foreclosure, fetish, Seine Saint-Denis.

Introduction

Historical psychic exclusions sometimes correspond to the discriminations produced by public policies. Some of these are linked to denials inherited from past generations that reappear in others as a truth returning, with the brilliance of the passage to the act. The psychic and social exclusions that interest us here are not reducible to the processes of discrimination. We can think of them in terms of segregations, to move beyond this level of discrimination and glimpse the more complex implications, notably unconscious ones, which lead to the establishment and maintenance of these segregative processes—the promoters and seats of the discriminations observed at first glance. This is to consider what relations these segregations maintain with psychic defenses such as denial: for which we will argue that they do not operate primarily from foreclosure alone, to which we generally link them. It is because segregated zones seem to constitute true fetishes, encompassing those who inhabit them. This will allow us to describe the initially refused negative psychic experiences that denial processes at a given time, and which ultimately precipitate in fine into morbid acts, at a time when subjects attempt to extract themselves from these zones of assignment—social, psychic, subjective, political, or spiritual—and to subjectivize them. A rowdy emancipation forced by history, which releases previously enclosed drive energy, immediately recycled into sacrifices (of self/others) giving representation to forgotten past experiences, as we shall propose an interpretation.

Return of the Repressed

The attacks that occurred on January 7, 8, and 9, 2015, in Paris had, and will have, consequences that are still unthought of, nor observed to date in their variety. One of these, through the confusion and torment arising from this period, manifested itself in clinical work: the absence or sudden disappearance of certain words heard before that month of January 2015, those of people who had become “radicalized” and who had sometimes spoken of their paths during a few interviews. They were certainly not patients who had come to consult for this reason—which, moreover, was not one, nor did it become one over the course of the sessions. Those I met, and whom I had not apprehended through the prism that these recent events and their consequences now impose upon us, had presented with various symptoms. These young people, who were not all candidates for Jihad, had all experienced a progressive “radicalization” and presented some traits of what we currently designate by this term. Events had marked dates in their lives; some were known to them, others remained unconscious, which we did not have the time to explore.

From an eruption to a distant recovery, on the path of the denials of reality that urban segregations represent as fetishes, all those invited today to remain silent have not said everything. It is certain that today, nothing of what was said will be said again for a long time, not until the shadow of suspicion and the threat—of imprisonment for glorifying terrorism, for example—dissipate, if that ever happens in the future. It is therefore impossible to speak of those who have stopped speaking, and who spoke under the cover of anonymity. They were not dangerous madmen, but it would have been preferable for them to continue speaking, for we could have continued to hear and construct with them destinies for their torments other than those walled up in the silence of radical thought—that which imprisons and can lead to radical passages to the act.

Ghosts, however, can make themselves heard long after speech has ceased. Those haunting Saïd came back to my mind on the morning of the third day of the events, Friday, January 9, 2015, when I suddenly realized that I knew the “Kouachi Brothers.” Not them personally, but all those who, like those two, were the younger brothers of the older ones with whom I had worked previously as a street educator—with intravenous drug users. They were twenty years old in the year 2000. They were the younger brothers of those benefiting from our syringe exchange and social support programs. They hated their older brothers: those “dirty junkies” they swore they would never become, destined as they were for another immigrant fate, they said. The memory of Saïd, the one I met—bearing the same first name as one of the two brothers who became famous—returned to me like an arrow. And with it, the memory of the younger ones all around, idle and desperate before their dead-end future that we knew neither how to disprove nor mitigate through our “social action.” Those ones came to get condoms from the minibus, while the older ones were supplied with sterile equipment. Two generations, two epidemics: that of heroin-AIDS on one side, that of cannabis-despair on the other. The older brothers sometimes died of overdose or illness; the younger ones were dying of hopelessness.

Drancy the Mute

In June 2000, I began working in the streets of four towns in the Seine Saint-Denis department: Le Blanc-Mesnil, Bobigny, Stains, and Drancy. Running a syringe exchange program, “low-threshold” reception, and temporary housing, we moved around in a converted minibus, or on foot with backpacks when we weren’t welcoming “users” in our dilapidated premises. The team members, including Salem and Omar who were from these localities, introduced me to places I did not know or had not imagined, such as the Côte de la Muette in Drancy. Thus began the final year of my training as a Special Education Teacher, moving from Brittany to Paris.

The construction of the Côte de la Muette began in Drancy in 1931, driven by public policies of the time aimed at improving urbanization. In 1935, after some difficulties, this Low-Income Housing (HLM) emerged from the ground: the 1,250 planned units were not all completed, the intended school was not built, and soon the Second World War would transform this place into an internment camp, starting in September 1939 with the first communist detainees whose party had just been banned (Wieviorka & al. 2012: 17). The estate became Front Stalag 111, following a requisition upon the arrival of German troops in Paris on June 14, 1940. I was completely unaware of this prehistory of the estate before its concentration camp fame made the name of the town of Drancy a signifier of the horror of the history of deportations to “the camps,” the history of the extermination of the Jews, the history of France.

Of all this past, I apparently knew nothing before visiting this place. Nor had I imagined it. I would have shown pragmatism, however, by deducing that the German occupation army could not have built such places in so little time, made them functional, and that consequently they had been built previously. Teachers had indeed shown us in school an impressive photograph of the main buildings, seen from the sky, in the shape of a horseshoe. What did I retain besides this rectangular layout resembling a prison, an enclave? Nothing, or almost nothing. I memorized this information as is; I integrated it in its state, without thinking about it. The more complex elaboration, which did not occur psychically at the time, allowed an imaginary veil to settle—that of the taught horror of Nazi destructive power, without further details or circumstances, but linked to a painful affect. The imaginary and the horror of the real at stake in this history became linked; the agalma remained quiet until experience woke it from my personal history. It reopened a path toward the previously fixed horror. That which reappeared from the real, from which a sort of expulsion and setting aside had partially kept it at a distance, thanks to this imaginary memory of the fetishized photo of my memory.

From the first days of working in this territory unknown to me, we went to Drancy. I remember that upon hearing the name of this town, I thought to myself: “Drancy? … the war camp?”. A colleague said to me: “You’ll see, it’s a really ugly neighborhood… I don’t know how anyone can live in there.” In my mind, without understanding all the nuances or grasping all the knowledge involved in this exchange, I brought two ideas together: Drancy-the-camp and living-in-there. We arrived at the entrance to the estate—the former entrance to the camp—and we naturally came across the commemorative wagon planted there, a wagon similar to those used for deportations in the past. A wagon, all doors closed, like a representation of the deaths of those deported to Eastern Europe via the stations of the towns of Le Bourget and Bobigny, from this Drancy estate by bus. Death-in-there, in the wagon, in the Drancy-camp, death-in-the-Cité-de-la-Muette. I couldn’t believe I was seeing this. Thinking of those who had not returned, I asked my colleagues: “Where are we? — Why, in Drancy of course… we are at La Muette! — I know well that we are at La Muette, but tell me where we are. This wagon… all this here…? — Oh yes. You recognize it? It’s here, yes! It’s where they put the Jews during the war… Terrible, isn’t it?!”… We eventually left that small space in the middle of the estate’s large esplanade. I was troubled. Incapable of thinking about what was brewing in my mind, a bit foolish before the collusion of ideas, disturbed by the unpleasant stirrings I felt.

We never spoke of it again during the four years of working together, daily, and regularly in this zone of our territory as street workers, where we had to meet drug users, where we had to meet people in difficulty to talk to them. We remained silent; we repressed.

Memory Before One’s Eyes

Saïd, a Muslim of Algerian origin, was living in Seine Saint-Denis in the late 1990s-2000s when I met him. His paternal grandfather had served in the French Army during the Second World War, and his father with the colonial force during the Algerian War. Shortly after Algeria’s independence, his family, taken in at the last minute on French territory in the Hexagon, had been housed in Drancy, in the former imprisonment camp rehabilitated into social housing. His great-grandfather had been, in his time, a subject of the French colonial Empire. At the foot of all this history, Saïd said in the year 2000 that if he weren’t dying of AIDS, he would have become a terrorist to take revenge on the French of the past.

After the disappearance of several of his brothers through overdoses or road accidents, Saïd had looked after his mother, forced to accompany the woman who mourned the death of her husband and was herself suffering from incurable cancer. After she passed away, her apartment was occupied by her son Saïd, who opened his door to us that day. The cramped nature of the housing and its dilapidated state reinforced the lugubrious character of this estate that occupied my mind. And when I moved toward the bedroom window, I could admire the plunging view of the Shoah wagon.

Memory before one’s eyes, but not a word to say it, not a thought to translate this subjective, unbearable position of guardian-witness enslaved to the processing of historical memories. Just as in Sabrina Van Tassel’s film released years later, The Mute City, the inhabitants already seemed to lack the possibility of speaking. There even seemed to be only the apparent ignorance of what we would call facts, or memories if they were not so covered over by this large-scale operation of denial that struck, quite obviously, this place and these people, and the rest of us beyond. Only the sharpness of the cleavage was apparent and legible. Unlike the inhabitants of the estate, and like the director of this film, “I thought that nothing of this history existed anymore.” I was therefore stunned by this strange flashback. By what means had we arrived at this idea-belief for some, half-blindness for others? How had these symptoms been constituted in the face of the imposing edifice standing like a fetish? How could I qualify this setting aside doubled by a covering tinged with denial, yet nevertheless crossed by the partial recognition of things?

A posteriori, is this a case of denial strictly speaking, or is it through the mode of foreclosure that this segregative process operates? The rendering of this unconscious maneuver, in symptomatic realizations, informs us on this point. But how are we to interpret them?

Shortly after September 11, 2001, and the attacks perpetrated in the United States, Saïd killed himself by a deliberate overdose; world history had acted as an interpretation of his personal history, relieving him of the historical ballast of which he had been made the bearer and which had prevented him from passing to the act until then. What do we better appreciate of this gesture if we think either that truth returns from the real, or that fetishistic identification is also illustrated by the destruction of the object?

The Ambivalence of Segregation

Segregated populations are those kept apart, relegated to the peripheries, to subaltern zones (neighborhoods or entire countries), for ethnic or social reasons, as segregation is defined in the humanities and social sciences. In this vein, Véronique de Rudder brings segregation and discrimination closer together by highlighting that these two terms are “in everyday language, neighboring notions, sometimes even used for one another. […] To discriminate is to distinguish, to differentiate, that is, to hold as distinct or different and, consequently, to treat distinctly or differently. The operation of discrimination can be mental (intellectual faculty) or material (concrete practice). The cut is, by definition, less abstract in segregation: to segregate is, etymologically, to separate from the flock, to establish a physical, spatial distance between a part (one or more elements) and the rest of the group.” (De Rudder 1995: 11)

More interestingly still, she adds: “The two terms thus refer explicitly to a principle of disjunction: the separation occurs on what was or could be joined, that is, considered together, as a whole. This point must be emphasized, for it implicitly means that despite discourses tending to show the ‘obviousness’ of the distinction, it is never totally taken for granted. To disjoin and continue to do so, one must justify, since indeed, there exists a more general referent that would legitimize inclusion, unitary treatment.” (De Rudder 1995: 11). Here, recognition and rejection coexist in an articulation that easily evokes the primary function of the fetish, that which confers its ambivalence, making it admit and reject a thing in concert in relation to the experience of the loss of the prior unified state: “It (the fetish) remains the sign of triumph over the threat of castration and protection against it […]” (Freud 1994: 117). An ambivalence that resonates in the fate reserved for the fetish: “Tenderness and hostility in the treatment of the fetish, which are parallel to the denial and recognition of castration, are mixed in various cases in unequal doses, so that either one or the other thing becomes more clearly recognizable.” (Freud 1994: 130-131)

The Advent of the Fetish

To think that the history of Drancy was in history and not in reality, until coming face to face with it while having always had it in memory; to live within these walls and not be apparently disturbed by the history of this place; to wake up every morning, see the wagon, and find it banal; to decide to have migrant populations live there to promote a public policy: all these actions are made possible by psychic forms of negation. But is it a matter of verleugnung or verneinung?

The political and historical construction of the Cité de la Muette as it exists today proceeds, in my view, from a fetishization of the place (and by capillarity of the people who occupy it), whose historical existence marked by loss would be just as much recognized—bejahung—as concealed—verneinung—when its current use seems to mask or cause the defeats it embodies to be forgotten. Thus thought, it is not only a matter of appreciating repression and its return. For this maneuver, qualifiable at first glance as verneinung, does not settle for softening the source of a discontent by negativing it. It repackages at the same time the experience consigned to oblivion: that of loss and its narcissistic effects. A (de)negation complicit with a repression that supports it in return—are these not the conditions conducive to the advent of the fetish? Is this not the mark of a nuance in the defensive process that we can note, and which allows us to qualify the situation studied as denial rather than negation or repression? In doing so, we can follow Freud on the characteristics of this process: “If one wants to separate more strictly in it the fate of the representation from that of the affect, […]. […] Now the situation considered shows on the contrary that the perception has remained and that a very energetic action has been undertaken to maintain its denial.” (Freud 1994: 127)

The perspective of a rejection, verwerfung, is set aside for the time being; we will return to it later.

Here, the fetish, as Freud proposed, ensures a kind of coherence compensating for the splitting of the ego generated by the process of defense against the unbearable. A splitting that Freud discusses in relation to the fate reserved for reality in psychosis, assigning it however the specificity of a more radical absence: “that which conforms to reality.” (Freud 1994: 130). The Cité de la Muette, at once recognized and denied, performs this function on behalf of our historical Ego, battered by its past. But an interpretation established so quickly must open onto further developments.

Let us rather observe the relationship that each person, and by extension the collective, maintains with this place, in our memories and in our practices. Rare are the inhabitants of Drancy who concern themselves with it, and they are undoubtedly the worst placed now to consider the history of their place of residence. Discreetly, a few rare press articles (Dufresne 1997) have related for thirty years the hazards of maintaining this large social housing estate that has become obsolete. The association for the memory of the Drancy camp is little supported and enjoys a very small audience in the public space. The lack of interest in this neighborhood is overwhelming. It took a foreign photographer, William Betsch, in the early 2000s, to be moved by the inscriptions left by prisoners, still present in the cellars, for them to be protected, at the last minute, before being concealed and destroyed by the basement rehabilitation work planned by the manager.

In 2004, the estate narrowly missed being classified and integrated into a museum project. The inhabitants were moved and protested. Commemoration actions also encounter external hostility; the wagon has been desecrated several times, covered in graffiti and extremist slogans. For from Drancy and its internment camp, the Cité de la Muette has also become a symbol of the fall of the French colonial empire, and of the Algerian War in particular. Algerians colonized and mistreated by France were housed within the walls that had welcomed, before them, the Communists and French Jews of the Second World War. Irony or unconscious logic? Long before it could be thought of in the history of the Second World War and its memories, La Muette had become the symbol of other histories, and other pieces of the history of France. Wounds and ruptures accumulated and tied themselves together in an infinite imbroglio justifying both respect and detestation for this place of history, place of life, and place of death.

These considerations on historical processes do not immediately appear as the remnants of the experience of castration and sexual difference, as they might take shape in the history of the century, and which would argue our thesis on the fetish and denial. However, let us note that the political and social, ethnic or cultural dominations of the segregations considered cannot be enumerated in a closed list too quickly, for fear of omitting the so-called sexual ones that underlie them. For the supremacy, acquired or retaken, of victorious belligerents often neighbors the phallic authority of a symbolic, and sometimes genital, superiority finally exercised over submitted opponents (as we are also reminded by acts of torture, in times of war, inflicted on the genital sphere). Is there not, then, some similarity to be seen between the advent of the fetish for the fetishist and the fetishization of an object—such as La Muette and its people—for the historical Ego of the Nation?

The divisive history of sexual difference and castration pushes one to recognize in the other the loss inflicted or received, and one’s own, through identifications. Are those to whom reparation or memory is offered (the Jews, the Algerians) not forever alienated to the status of the future representation of the loss inflicted, of which they would figure the destiny, thus distinguished from that of the affect? Not “scotomized” and, in the same way that Freud proposes, associated with the fate of negative perception, namely: “preserved, but also abandoned; in the conflict between the weight of the unwanted perception and the force of the counter-wish, (where) a compromise has been reached, such as is only possible under the dominance of unconscious laws of thought—that of primary processes.” (Freud 1994: 127). The affect being treated, as Freud indicates, by verdrängung, remains ready to return when the denial is suspended by the revelation—catharsis, working-through—of past history, as I experienced it when entering the site for the very first time. One process coexists with the other: here verdrängung with verleugnung.

Verleugnung versus verwerfung

Let us return to those who sparked this memory, the Kouachi brothers. Publicly released information traced, after the fact, the portrait of a difficult childhood, materially poor and affectively traumatic (early death of the mother, placements, etc.). The ruptures of the social bond were numerous in their paths, as were the instances of being set aside, made up of affective and academic hazards. Simultaneously “followed” and “reported” by child protection systems, these two brothers, like many others, were segregated: both admitted as being integrated or needing to be, and as dissidents, included and excluded, recognized but without attributes. Not simply rejected, nor only pushed away. Rather, a kind of paradoxical injunction that “social action” induces despite its intentions and goals: those who are helped are marked by this help, distinguished from the others among whom they are assigned to be these special cases. In this double movement, we recognize the mark of the places of segregation defined by Rudder, which we are tempted to apply to those who can take on its trappings and integrate it on a subjective level. We also recognize the double process of fetishization which recognizes and repels, celebrates and denounces the cause and proof of loss. Geographically, the enclaves of segregation are not necessarily at the periphery, but can just as well be “maintained” in the heart of cities, surrounded by other more accepted, more proper places. This is the case with the “open scenes” of “drug markets,” such as the Stalingrad district in Paris was at the time of the Kouachi brothers’ childhood, where they lived between the Rotonde and the Rue d’Aubervilliers. This was the case for Saïd and his family at La Muette, rescued and welcomed in a place yet so violently marked by the reverse of hospitality. Segregation would translate, in this extension, a certain form of exclusion that is not content with being discrimination—which is only a surface indicator—applicable both to places and to people. A paradox of the judgment of recognition articulated with the setting aside as a judgment of attribution.

If they themselves—the Kouachi brothers—can be thought of in this way, of what were they the agents during these events, in terms of psychic processes? Not on the level of their subjective functioning, but on a collective scale, as we received and attempt to elaborate the consequences and psychic effects of the acts they committed. Do we consider what they produced as a return from the real, of an exiled content, as expected from foreclosure, or do we think of these effects as the mark of a passage to the act aimed at the destruction of the fetish? What do we learn, with them, of collective history, without too quickly excluding the terrifying initiative of which they were the actors toward the limbos of non-sense? Did they pass into acts the representation of the segregation of which they were made, or did they vectorize the return of a foreclosed element?

The January attacks were qualified as acts of a properly unqualifiable violence, of a break radical enough to spark other immediate acts in response, even before reflection on these events could begin. This is indeed what was said by those gathered at the Place de la République in Paris on the evening of Wednesday, January 7, in a collective impulse: “Something had to be done, so I came, without even thinking about it. No question of staying and doing nothing.”

The intensity was also envisioned as a global, planetary catastrophe, as the international mobilization embodied the following Sunday, during a street march gathering dozens of heads of state from around the world. The massive reaction echoed, almost logically, the massiveness of the acts perpetrated. The power of the impact was such that the madness of the killings orchestrated by these three men was apprehended only as signs of madness, unreason, of the beyond-the-thinkable. Everyone, moreover, still struggles today to explain these gestures that cannot be explained, as if this very real impossibility—of the real—mechanically prevented thought along with it. This collusion was and remains contagious, inhibition flattering the action by which the impossible-to-say of the real at stake seems to prevent any shaping or imaginarization whatsoever.

In this vein, the “Kouachi Brothers” and their effects would resemble the occurrence of foreclosed content, the only process capable of breaking the quietude of reality with such violence, like a real assaulting the imaginary and the symbolic, depriving reason of sense-giving explanations. It would be tempting to interpret the reception of these events from this angle. This would confine the acts in question, as well as their authors, to the silence of the stunned and bruised incomprehension of a staggered public opinion. But would it not rather be that we have to appreciate a denial that gives way, and releases with it the edge of the act hitherto suspended, putting an end to the diplomatic ambivalence of the fetish, by resolving castration through its effectuation in reality, by the advent of its representation in reality? Alongside the real, then, but not without engaging it.

“There, a certainly significant piece of reality had thus been denied by the ego, just as in the fetishist the unpleasant fact of the woman’s castration. I also began to sense that analogous incidents in childhood life are by no means rare, and could hold myself convinced of error in my way of characterizing neurosis and psychosis. […] to the child, that could be permitted which in the adult necessarily had to be sanctioned by grave damage.” (Freud 1994: 129).

On the morning of the third day of the attacks, I remembered. The trace reappeared. I picked up my phone the following week, several times. From colleagues to neighbors, until reaching one of the former educators of the two Kouachi brothers, two months later. Memory re-turned, that of Saïd of La Muette, that of the history of the Second World War, that of the Algerian War. We talked about everything except that. About the neighborhoods, yes. About the people, of course. But about the two brothers, impossible. They had joined the real from which their acts precipitated. Perhaps we, the others, took advantage of their disappearance to foreclose something linked to the motives of represented castration?

The rejected knowledge returned to the imaginary; it found representation in reality. The Kouachi brothers were traversed by it in a way that led them to presentify this loss of the past denial, at the limits of the unrepresentability of the underlying cleavage that had agitated them.

In the effects felt at the time of the events, nothing came from the abysses to make us mad or hallucinate us from an unknown territory, such that we would not have found a trace of it. Nothing resembled that return from the real that the rejection of verwerfung characterizes. On the contrary, everything returned by giving meaning to the events, as if it were finding its place again, a place left vacant by decree, administratively isolated from the course of history by the segregative process. Everything returned as the knowledge rejected by verleugnung reappears. But to what perishing fetish did those two bind themselves? And what did this fetish undergo for the act to impose itself upon its defense to represent the loss, the cleavage?

Conclusion

The Kouachi brothers embarked on an unthinkable path of madness. Must we consider them psychotic in order to understand, or rely as readily as has been done on foreclosure to grasp the implacable nature of the rejection of which they would be the agents? No. The appearances of the attack, however violent, cannot be taken at face value as evidence of the processes at work. Rather, we must try to read what is unfolding behind the psychic associations that sometimes emerge in the wake of these events, and which give us access to unconscious knowledge. We must reckon with the fragments of History that the unconscious diverts and distorts in order to keep them far from the stakes of political reality. We have suggested that places that embody processes of segregation may therefore, no doubt, carry within them the secrets of past disavowals, whose fetishization illustrates the fate reserved for the excluded and for their place. Mistreated and paradoxically reified, the segregated are nonetheless sexual objects, as they are destined for drive satisfaction. Reduced to nothing or elevated to the heights of memory (commemorated or prevented), the segregated remind us that, in response to the losses inflicted, we offer ourselves to bear the marks of an intensified castration. Perhaps this is an attempt to think an “after.” What appears in the guise of a fundamental rejection, whether constitutive or consequential, deserves to be studied with the nuance Freud indicates between Verleugnung and Verneinung, for the status of historical elements is assessed through the traces left in the destinies of representations and affects. The nature of exclusion does not signify only an externality, but also, often, the expatriation of intimate memory. In this movement, if the repressed affect can return, the representation and its figurations are repelled more violently, according to Freud’s indications; they carry violence and reappear with the air of a return of disavowal—into the imaginary—that confounds us. Saïd and the Kouachi brothers, having become, in different ways, figures of these representations excluded from History, also found themselves excluded from history as such until their very disappearance, by their own hand. We were able to observe that, through the suspension of the persistent link between the negative experience called castration—loss and defeat—inscribed in subjects’ biographies, and the motives for this rejected castration, the fetish, together with the revelation of the unconscious motives that ground it, releases the most violent drive impulses at the source of castration, of loss. One question remains that we can now formulate: does segregation as a process ground what we today designate as radicalization, by making it possible? Do these two processes mark disavowals capable of erecting certain fetishes as a covering-over of losses inflicted and losses lived? For Saïd, September 11, 2001 undid the housing estate of his Algerian refugee family, which had held the status of representation and place of identification. For the Kouachi brothers, it was through the attack on the divine representation—also identificatory—that the breach opened. All, when the day came, found themselves no longer needing to remain as a remainder of the loss pending in the fetish that had come into being, so as to have nothing left to do but embody it —that loss—and represent it, in flesh and blood.

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