We asked Zahi Zalloua and Benjamin Davis to comment on each other’s work. This essay is the final installment of the series. You can read the previous essay here.
As I edited this essay, a response to Zahi Zalloua’s generative reading of my recent book Another Humanity, I thought about what Aijaz Ahmad says, in his book In Theory, about Edward Said’s critique of Marxism. “I disagree with him so fundamentally on issues… of theory,” Ahmad writes, “that our respective understandings of the world… are simply irreconcilable” (In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 159).
One point of Zalloua and my exchange in Political Theology is to consider precisely how our understandings could be reconciled, and it has been a great pleasure to have this conversation with Zalloua. I am grateful for the opportunity.
I bring up this chapter of In Theory because I feel about Zalloua and his courageous work what Ahmad writes about Said next, namely, that despite our theoretical differences, I must also take into account “my sense of solidarity with his beleaguered location in the midst of imperial America” (160). Ahmad goes on:
For Edward Said is not only a cultural critic, he is also a Palestinian. Much that is
splendid in his work is connected with the fact that he has tried to do honour to that origin; and he has done so against all odds, to the full extent of his capacity, by stepping outside the boundaries of his academic discipline and original intellectual formation, under no compulsion of profession or fame, in no pursuit of personal gain – in fact, at frightening risk to himself… Said has decided to live with such risks, and much honour – a very rare kind of honour – attaches to that decision. How, then, does one register one’s many disagreements from within this solidarity? (160)
Our readers might not know the personal costs that have come with Zalloua’s recent scholarship, but they have been significant. The “frightening risk” has gotten to the point that colleagues sometimes ask me if I am sure I want to continue collaborating with Zalloua, given my lack of tenure and the potential for guilt by association. But there is only one response. Indeed, the great joy of intellectual life, as Said noted in his last interview, is precisely the conversations you enter from disagreements, which are all the more important if they are situated “from within this solidarity.” So to begin, I want to recognize Zalloua’s “honor” in our time when many scholars call for a politics of refusal and parrhesia without maintaining very much of either.
That said, I feel I can now begin my response.
Following the publication of Neil Roberts’ 2015 book Freedom as Marronage, a renewed dialogue emerged on the relationship between the zone of non-being and the sociogenic principle in the work of Frantz Fanon. Others had been writing about this relationship for some time— Sylvia Wynter comes to mind—and Roberts’ book brought new questions to the dialogue.
Gary Wilder, who read Aimé Césaire as a pragmatist in his own 2015 book Freedom Time, responded to Roberts’ book and drew our attention to the fact that in societies based on enslavement, “[n]o stable sphere outside of domination existed” because “survival depended on relations and transactions with sectors of that broader [enslaving] society”; marronage thus “entailed experiments in self-determination as well as inescapable negotiations, accommodations, and compromises.”
In this essay, I will follow Wilder to read Fanon for experiments and negotiations. Specifically, I will suggest that, as part of attending to ontological negations, Fanon ultimately calls for constructive social experiments. While these experiments are conditioned by colonial power and thus can be understood as negotiations (there is no pure “outside” or “exteriority”), these experiments also work toward collectiveself-determination, whether that of a nation or universally for humanity.
I stress collective self-determination because I have been struck by how students—usually in direct proportionality to how prestigious the university is where this discussion is occurring—have been reading Fanon’s call for liberation as meaning primarily the psychological or new-age spiritual liberation of each individual, bourgeois student, as opposed to understanding that Fanon is discussing ethical, political, and ultimately human relationships.
In What Fanon Said, Lewis Gordon elaborates upon the importance of relationality in Black Skin, White Masks, describing “the resulting schema” of anti-Black racism as “one of location below, in the zone of nonbeing… such that blacks, in their effort to rise out of the zone of nonbeing, struggle to achieve Otherness (to get into Self-Other relations); it is a struggle to be in a position, in effect, for the ethical to emerge, for ethics and morality, proper, are relationships between human beings or in terms of demands placed on living in a human world.”
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon also right away calls our attention to sociogeny, meaning what Gordon summarizes as “the social world, the intersubjective world of culture, history, language, and economics. “In that world,” Gordon continues, “it is the human who brings such forces into existence.”
Read from this existentialist and humanist perspective, the zone of nonbeing is a consequence of the social world. For that reason, as Zalloua noted, Another Humanity—as a humanist book— sought cultural, historical, and economic interventions.
Zalloua is further correct, I admit, that my humanist focus does not sufficiently attend to “the psychoanalytical register,” which he argues needs to be engaged in order to inform an effective decolonial politics. As a supplement to my humanist proposal, Zalloua suggests a “symbolic suicide,” meaning to “kill the settler within,” or what George Yancy calls “un-suturing” from whiteness.
Zalloua’s own words deserve careful examination:
Psychoanalysis casts decolonizing the mind in a more radical light. It addresses the enemy; it confronts the Zionist settler with a fundamental choice: Reiterate your whiteness and keep committing (slow or accelerated) genocide (and thus fulfil the project of colonial modernity in West Asia—that is, the elimination of the Indigenous Palestinians) or kill the settler within (as with dreadful whiteness, settlerism is not your destiny).
Although I should perhaps leave the explanation to the clinicians, let me try to say why I remain open to, but rather hesitant toward, the psychoanalytical “supplement.”
The difference in our positions revolves around what it means to “reiterate… whiteness” or to “kill the settler within.” Although there is a clear relationship between libidinal attachments and political reality, I want to read “whiteness” in the most concrete possible terms. I would speak less of an internal killing and more of an external, or social, transformation.
Stuart Hall, who was an original reader of Freud, teaches that the psychoanalytical register, like any other register, does not come with guarantees; Hall stressed that in theorizing culture, any conceptual mobilization encounters an existing terrain and must negotiate it.
Hall’s claim that there are no guarantees in politics remains a gentle, humorous voice in my head, reminding me that there is no timeless, placeless intervention, but only partial attempts, essays, experiments, and negotiations in some here and some now. This means that conducting political work in any way—whether through empathy, negation, legal work, or the psychoanalytical register—is only a temporary, provisional, and context-dependent mode of conduct. It is this strategic method, and not some winning argument, that could ultimately reconcile Zalloua’s and my philosophical temperaments; both approaches are needed, with different emphases at different times and in different places. The question is how helpful the psychoanalytical register can be in the contexts and moments Zalloua and I are discussing.
The predominant cultural terrain in settler societies today is a therapeutic one, in which the psychoanalytical vocabulary has been weaponized in terms that often serve to shore up the neoliberal and colonial subject. While Lacan’s anti-adaptational project, which Zalloua follows via Žižek, intervened into ego psychology and normalization, in the West the psychoanalytic vocabulary has become folded into a project of normalizing technocratic rule.
Speaking to “the midst of imperial America” today requires an honest examination of the vocabulary that predominates even in activist spaces, and this examination itself requires considering the misreading and conflation of the psychoanalytical register with the therapeutic ether that surrounds us. Although it is based on a misreading, this is a fair response because such a conflation almost always happens when the psychoanalytical register is invoked in conversations in activist spaces—even if, again, it was precisely into this problematic that Lacan was making his radical intervention.
The controversial Jungian psychologist James Hillmann described American discourse well, surveying California in the early 1990s with a description that still holds today:
There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to the real issues. Why are the intelligent people—at least among the white middle class—so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy!… Therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world. Yet therapy goes on blindly believing that it’s curing the outer world by making people better (We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse, 5).
My worry is that the sociogenic reality of most settler countries today is one that focuses on optimizing the inner soul in a way that avoids, instead of connects to, the outer soul. Canada, Australia, the United States, and famously Argentina, have very high rates of therapists per capita. In other words, the psychoanalytical register is very much the register of settler life.
It is not only that I worry that supplementing decolonial politics with a psychoanalytical vocabulary could backfire. It is that the psychoanalytical register is already integrated into settler life and serves to deflect much materialist criticism.
I am very close here to the old-fashioned Marxist position that material conditions determine consciousness, not the other way around, so the first and most important change is to those conditions; this change is arguably more important than the inner work, which can paradoxically work against the social change, as we have seen in recent years.
The right-wing version of this focus on the psyche, the soul or spirit in Greek, stresses how one should have an “inner life” in a way that tends to avoid and relegate political action. Much of today’s psychology (today’s story about the soul) that wants to position itself on the left emphasizes self-care and safety in a way that is perhaps more dangerous because more insidious; it still wants to hold on to a claim to radical political action from that position of safety.
One of the lessons of politics in solidarity with Palestine has been to demonstrate the foundational need for risk and material sacrifice, with the first disavowal perhaps being that of safety. This is the necessary corrective because “the colonizing self,” in Hagar Kotef’s phrase, is formed through learning “to embrace the terms through which she injures others because they constitute her socially” (The Colonizing Self, 50).
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If I over-emphasize the historical and the cultural and maintain an unfair conflation between the psychoanalytic and the therapeutic, it is because I have seen how calls for psychological change, including refusing or “killing” whiteness, tend to stay at the level of inner work, at the level of “working on myself,” as people say. This is the twenty-first century therapeutic reality of the settler who is publicly “trying to get better” but not divesting of wealth, land, or status that form the basis of what Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness.
In recent years, we have witnessed myriad instances where someone chose not to speak about Palestine and found a way to hide behind the psychoanalytical register. Many people have noted their anxiety and trauma in this time of political repression; many fewer pronounce “Palestine” publicly. By “pronounce Palestine,” I mean not only what Said meant by the phrase in The Politics of Dispossession, but I also mean to invoke the idea of Palestine as “a paradigm” that elucidates various contexts of racism and colonial violence, as Sherene Seikaly has suggested.
Anyone who has attended an anti-racism workshop has seen how people can claim that they are trying to move “beyond whiteness” while not addressing, as Cheryl Harris stressed, that whiteness in an anti-Black settler context is fundamentally about materiality: it is about property, title, respect in courts, and rights, as well as police enforcement of that property and those rights—and all of that, not ontological magic or psychological health, gives settlers their status, so one cannot simply depart from the status without departing from what grounds it. In other words, we are not talking about attending a graduate seminar, a therapy session, or an anti-racism workshop and driving the Subaru home. We are talking about a form of life that most of us are financially invested in.
It is arguably precisely here where the psychoanalytical register is so valuable—isn’t resistance, denial, and disavowal what we are talking about?
But there might equally be a cost to keeping critical theory at the level of motives and drives without also addressing material investments. In many academic spaces of theory, discussions tend to stay at the level of the psychoanalytical without offering a path of political transformation. What I am seeking is theory or research that illuminates this connection between inner and outer world and outlines this transformative path.
In my view, the vocabulary that best shows the contradictions of liberal life is not the existing psychoanalytical register of competing traumas, anxieties, fantasies, gazes, and drives, as well as (in the therapeutic register) victims and safeties—including those of white students who feel their “civil rights” have been violated by lessons on race while their parents dismantle voting rights, seen in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. It the materialist vocabulary that we have largely lost.
There is at least one key advantage of the materialist register in regard to the contemporary discourse: the psychoanalytical register allows for competing claims to victimhood, but materialist analysis disallows it—one side has clearly profited in terms of wealth and property.
Here again I would give priority to financial investments over libidinal ones, although of course there is a relationship between them. But you very rarely see research into political economy in today’s academic work that claims to be decolonial; it is a line that has largely faded away with Eric Williams, Claudia Jones, and Samir Amin.
If we reverse the supplement Zalloua calls for, performing a forensic accounting of liberals in addition to the archaeology of the mind, I am sure the results would be profoundly revealing. It would include how even we professors calling for more attention to psychic attachments have retirement accounts tied up in arms corporations, private prisons, and child labor. I would be thrilled if 2% of all the recent jargon-laden critical theory started from this reality and offered a different material path, instead of coining new terms with the hope getting tenure.
Why were we trained to write with such obscurity, even about political subjects? And whose interests does that style serve? Is there a way to explain the insights from psychoanalysis that would inform decisions in activist spaces in regard to non-reformist reforms as well as personal and institutional investments? Is legibility really on the side of anti-intellectual reformers who stabilize unjust systems, and so an assimilation into an oppressive norm? Could legible arguments and paths also be a way of building power in community?
These are the questions Edward Said stressed in his late work: How accessible is this style? How public is this argument? What is the material demand being made, and on whom?
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As I hope is clear, I am not rejecting the importance of the psychanalytical register. Following Stuart Hall, thinking about negotiations strategically is not a method that discards any vocabulary or style absolutely. I am in interested in inquiry that could connect the psychoanalytical register to the realities of political economy. This is one of the oldest connections in Western philosophy, the link between the psyche and the polis, with Plato’s Socrates constantly stressing the need for inner and outer alignment.
In this respect, much important recent work has emphasized the relationship between psychoanalysis and a politics of liberation, such as Robert Beshara’s 2019 Decolonial Psychoanalysis, Lewis Gordon’s 2025 essay “Psychoanalysis as a decolonial practice,” Verso’s 2026 re-publication of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, and Lara Sheehi’s forthcoming book From the Clinic to the Streets. It is also not lost on me that our most nuanced readers of both texts and the social world, such as Jacqueline Rose, are great students of the psychoanalytic tradition. I am learning from all of this work.
In my view, we need more political and ethical theory that makes this connection—concretely, publicly, and accessibly—between the soul and the social. Perhaps one take-away from this dialogue with Zalloua is that it has highlighted the need for more research that could strategically combine—that is, practically reconcile—the differences in contemporary critical theory that Zalloua and my positions represent, especially given that we have predictably doubled down on our own arguments.
The political question becomes: In settler contexts where the psychoanalytical register often serves “moves to innocence” and offers another form of self-optimization, what is the psychological practice, the practice that explains the movement of the soul, that opens onto a more liberated future for being(s) on earth?
Responding to resonant questions, contemporary critical theory that draws on psychoanalysis excels at descriptions and explanations, especially in regard to the internal divisions, mediations, and contradictions we all have; in its current academic iteration, it hesitates to additionally perform the political work of making legible demands on power and building power in a way that offers collective paths of action. Fanon did both.
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Zalloua reads my argument to say, with Fanon in Wretched, “Another humanity must feed a program of disorder, whose ambition is nothing short of transforming the order of the colonial world.” I have been writing in a way that seeks and essays this transformation in Another Humanity and Choose Your Bearing before it; at the same time, I have never thought that the decolonial result would be one of “disorder.”
Yes, we who protest and speak out about Palestine are called disorderly, among other things—many of them much worse and carrying serious legal consequences. But at the risk of losing some of my abolitionist friends here, I want to re-claim order.
Something it appears Zalloua and I agree on is that the kind of soul-work required for the decolonial politics we need will be much more demanding than permissive. It will involve a heightened sense of personal and political responsibility. It will involve sacrificing some personal freedoms for collective freedom, as Jodi Dean argued in Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. It might involve what Kersuze Simeon-Jones has called “sobriety” in action.
(I say this, of course, Zahi, wishing we were back in Martinique drinking rum.)
To speak truth to power for a long time, without spiraling such that others have to spend much time taking care of you (thus taking many of us out of the struggle), requires a certain centeredness, a kind of spiritual health. Simone Weil wrote in 1941, “If our present suffering ever does lead to a moral reorientation, it will not be accomplished by slogans, but in silence and moral solitude, through pain, misery, terror, in the deepest part of each spirit” (“The Responsibilities of Literature,”154).
While I have come to disagree with the individualism of this passage, the “moral solitude” Weil describes, I maintain that these lines serve as a corrective to our neoliberal ethos. The painful work required for what Zalloua calls “symbolic suicide” is just that: painful, terrifying. It is the opposite of self-optimization and resilience. Why give up any status, when doing so might mean losing one’s job, when it means being smeared by one’s place of employment—called arrogant, “not a team player,” someone who thinks they are better than everyone else, and so on? Why give up any status when it feels like I can barely hold on with rent, health insurance and medication payments, a few visits each year to see family, who now live all over the world after fleeing from wars?
But such a sacrifice might be the only healthy option in a colonial world; it would be an act, to a lesser degree than the witnessing of Aaron Bushnell, that nevertheless recognizes a relational truth more fundamental that what is praised as valuable in a violent society.
Fanon noted as a therapist, as Gordon highlights, that “clients were suffering because they were healthy.”
“What was unhealthy,” Gordon summarizes, “was the set of mechanisms, the technologies of misrepresentation, and the atmosphere of violence that produced in them a sense of futility. They needed to learn what they could do” (“Psychoanalysis as a decolonial practice,” 481).
Different from neoliberal calls for innovation and efficiency, this practice of becoming a different kind of human we could call, with Fanon at the end of Wretched, a life-affirming “invention.”
Prestigious legal minds might say decolonial invention is a departure from law and order, but I want to say that to do so successfully would show remarkably psychological health in colonial times, in pathological times, and I want to call this health a kind of ordering of the soul and ultimately a re-ordering of political life, with Plato and Weil in mind.
How can we empower each other to take on this re-orientation, a new ordering? Isn’t this where political friendship matters profoundly for political transformation? And could this friendship, by taking away some of the solitude, also assuage some of the pain, misery, and terror of spiritual transformation?
Isn’t this new, relational ordering why Fanon can be read as a profoundly constructive philosopher?
Zalloua leaves us with a thoroughly negative vocabulary: un-suture, de-Zionize, sacrifice, suicide, disorder. I want to emphasize an equally reconstructive Fanon: the Fanon who cared for the psyche of a patient, the Fanon who calls for an invention that elevates humanity to a new health, “to a different level than that which Europe has shown it” (The Wretched of the Earth, 315).
The most horrible crime of coloniality, Fanon stresses at the end of Wretched, was committed not in a place but in “the heart of man.” It “consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity.” Isn’t that “tearing apart” and “crumbling away” the real program of disorder?
The task Fanon leaves us with, on my reading, is a constructive one: not just avoiding imitation of Europe and so departing from whiteness, but also a re-orientation and re-ordering of our psychological and social lives. This constructive work, learning what we can do together, is the collective task that lies ahead.
I would like to thank Eric Aldieri and Andrew Tyler Johnson for their critical comments on this essay, which were in both cases more eloquent than my essay.
