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In Puerto Rico, cheap labor and generous tax breaks—since 2017, more than $100 billion worth—have made US-based pharmaceutical firms the biggest economic players in town. Drug manufacturers have brought in tens of thousands of jobs, albeit with a tax-break price tag of more than $1 million each. But a new report by the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy and advocacy group Hedge Clippers suggests that Big Pharma’s footprint on the island has come with other serious costs: illegal dumping of toxic waste, pollution and depletion of groundwater, and violations of other vital Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The report, released Tuesday, paints a disturbing picture, holding US pharmaceutical corporations at least partially responsible for Puerto Rico’s disproportionately high rates of asthma and cancer. The sum of its findings: a pattern of environmental racism resulting in more than a dozen Big Pharma–related Superfund sites, with the complicity of federal and local authorities.

Puerto Rico is home to some 500 EPA-designated, toxin-packed Superfund sites, half of which were “active” as of July, meaning they pose an ongoing risk to the surrounding communities and ecosystems. Eighteen of its active sites are on the EPA’s “national priorities list,” which tracks areas most likely to release harmful compounds; of those, 15 are linked to the pharmaceutical industry. And Superfund sites don’t include every area where industries have improperly disposed of hazardous waste—just the most serious health and environmental threats.

In Puerto Rico, our elected officials have told us for decades that a job in the pharmaceutical industry can be a source of stability and decent wages. But for many Puerto Ricans working for Big Pharma, that’s a fantasy.

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest sectors of Puerto Rico’s economy, and that’s not by chance. The Puerto Rican government gives pharmaceutical companies major tax breaks to keep them on the archipelago, arguing that the pharmaceutical companies will create jobs and enrich communities.

In Puerto Rico, cheap labor and generous tax breaks—since 2017, more than $100 billion worth—have made US-based pharmaceutical firms the biggest economic players in town. Drug manufacturers have brought in tens of thousands of jobs, albeit with a tax-break price tag of more than $1 million each. But a new report by the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy and advocacy group Hedge Clippers suggests that Big Pharma’s footprint on the island has come with other serious costs: illegal dumping of toxic waste, pollution and depletion of groundwater, and violations of other vital Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The report, released Tuesday, paints a disturbing picture, holding US pharmaceutical corporations at least partially responsible for Puerto Rico’s disproportionately high rates of asthma and cancer. The sum of its findings: a pattern of environmental racism resulting in more than a dozen Big Pharma–related Superfund sites, with the complicity of federal and local authorities.

Puerto Rico is home to some 500 EPA-designated, toxin-packed Superfund sites, half of which were “active” as of July, meaning they pose an ongoing risk to the surrounding communities and ecosystems. Eighteen of its active sites are on the EPA’s “national priorities list,” which tracks areas most likely to release harmful compounds; of those, 15 are linked to the pharmaceutical industry. And Superfund sites don’t include every area where industries have improperly disposed of hazardous waste—just the most serious health and environmental threats.

What is GCR and why is it important? Taken literally, a global catastrophe can be any event that is in some way catastrophic across the globe. This suggests a rather low threshold for what counts as a global catastrophe. An event causing just one death on each continent (say, from a jet-setting assassin) could rate as a global catastrophe, because surely these deaths would be catastrophic for the deceased and their loved ones. However, in common usage, a global catastrophe would be catastrophic for a significant portion of the globe. Minimum thresholds have variously been set around ten thousand to ten million deaths or $10 billion to $10 trillion in damages (Bostrom and C´irkovic´ 2008), or death of one quarter of the human population (Atkinson 1999; Hempsell 2004). Others have emphasized catastrophes that cause longterm declines in the trajectory of human civilization (Beckstead 2013) that human civilization does not recover from (Maher and Baum 2013), that drastically reduce humanity’s potential for future achievements (Bostrom 2002a, using the term “existential risk”), or that result in human extinction (Matheny 2007; Posner 2004). A common theme across all these treatments of GCR is that some catastrophes are vastly more important than others. Carl Sagan was perhaps the first to recognize this, in his commentary on nuclear winter (Sagan 1983). Without nuclear winter, a global nuclear war might kill several hundred million people. This is obviously a major catastrophe, but humanity would presumably carry on. However, with nuclear winter, per Sagan, humanity could go extinct. The loss would be not just an additional four billion or so deaths, but the loss of all future generations. To paraphrase Sagan, the loss would be billions and billions of lives, or even more. Sagan estimated 500 trillion lives, assuming humanity would continue for ten million more years, which he cited as typical for a successful species. Sagan’s 500 trillion number may even be an underestimate. The analysis here takes an adventurous turn, hinging on the evolution of the human species and the long-term fate of the universe. On these long time scales, the descendants of contemporary humans may no longer be recognizably “human.” The issue then is whether the descendants are still worth caring about, whatever they are. If they are, then it begs the question of how many of them there will be. Barring major global catastrophe, Earth will remain habitable for about one billion more years until the Sun gets too warm and large. The rest of the Solar System, Milky Way galaxy, universe, and (if it exists) the multiverse will remain habitable for a lot longer than that (Adams and Laughlin 1997), should our descendants gain the capacity to migrate there. An open question in astronomy is whether it is possible for the descendants of humanity to continue living for an infinite length of time or instead merely an astronomically large but finite length of time (see e.g. C´irkovic´ 2002; Kaku 2005). Either way, the stakes with global catastrophes could be much larger than the loss of 500 trillion lives. Debates about the infinite versus the merely astronomical are of theoretical interest (Bossert et al. 2007; Ng 1991), but they have limited practical significance. This can be seen when evaluating GCRs from a standard risk-equals-probability-times-magnitude framework. Using Sagan’s 500 trillion lives estimate, it follows that reducing the probability of global catastrophe by a mere one-in-500-trillion chance is of the same significance as saving one human life. Phrased differently, society should try 500 trillion times harder to prevent a global catastrophe than it should to save a person’s life. Or, preventing one million deaths is equivalent to a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. This suggests society should make extremely large investment in GCR reduction, at the expense of virtually all other objectives. Judge and legal scholar Richard Posner made a similar point in monetary terms (Posner 2004). Posner used $50,000 as the value of a statistical human life (VSL) and 12 billion humans as the total loss of life (double the 2004 world population); he describes both figures as significant underestimates. Multiplying them gives $600 trillion as an underestimate of the value of preventing global catastrophe. For comparison, the United States government typically uses a VSL of around $1–10 million (Robinson 2007). Multiplying a $10 million VSL with 500 trillion lives gives $5×1021 as the value of preventing global catastrophe. But even using “just” $600 trillion, society should be willing to spend at least that much to prevent a global catastrophe, which converts to being willing to spend at least $1 million for a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. Thus, while reasonable disagreement exists on how large a VSL to use and how much to count future generations, even low-end positions suggest vast resource allocations should be redirected to reducing GCR. This conclusion is only strengthened when considering the astronomical size of the stakes, but the same point holds either way. The bottom line is that, as long as something along the lines of the standard risk-equals-probability-times-magnitude framework is being used, then even tiny GCR reductions merit significant effort. This point holds especially strongly for risks of catastrophes that would cause permanent harm to global human civilization. The discussion thus far has assumed that all human lives are valued equally. This assumption is not universally held. People often value some people more than others, favoring themselves, their family and friends, their compatriots, their generation, or others whom they identify with. Great debates rage on across moral philosophy, economics, and other fields about how much people should value others who are distant in space, time, or social relation, as well as the unborn members of future generations. This debate is crucial for all valuations of risk, including GCR. Indeed, if each of us only cares about our immediate selves, then global catastrophes may not be especially important, and we probably have better things to do with our time than worry about them. While everyone has the right to their own views and feelings, we find that the strongest arguments are for the widely held position that all human lives should be valued equally. This position is succinctly stated in the United States Declaration of Independence, updated in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Philosophers speak of an agent-neutral, objective “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) or a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971) in which each person considers what is best for society irrespective of which member of society they happen to be. Such a perspective suggests valuing everyone equally, regardless of who they are or where or when they live. This in turn suggests a very high value for reducing GCR, or a high degree of priority for GCR reduction effort

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides cash benefits to nearly 8 million individuals with limited means and limited ability to work. Applicants must meet strict medical criteria to qualify, although no work history is required (unlike with Social Security Disability Insurance). Unfortunately, SSI has many long-running problems, including the fact that many recipients remain in poverty despite the support. While recent bipartisan efforts would help recipients by raising the program’s severe asset limits, the proposed legislation does not address another major problem: stingy benefit levels.

A primary reason SSI recipients are in poverty is that the largest benefit is below the federal poverty level. Increasing the maximum SSI benefit amount to the federal poverty level would theoretically solve the problem; it’s been proposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and is popular with voters. Every recipient would be at the annual poverty line, or higher when combining the raised benefit levels with their other income, if any. Yet even with the increased benefit sizes, normal income volatility would continue causing problems month to month. Recipients could experience temporary, episodic poverty spells because of how SSI payments are determined.

To learn if that is true for the disability programs, I analyzed data over time from a long-running survey of adults older than age 50 called the Health and Retirement Study. The survey included information on disabilities and finances for tens of thousands of people from across the country and was linked to disability benefit records from the Social Security Administration. As the disability programs primarily serve those in their working years, I only looked at people who hadn’t yet hit the full retirement age.

The data showed that the share of people with substantial work-limiting disabilities who received Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income benefits or both rose from 32% in 1998 to 47% in 2016, which was the last year the data was available. This is just a little above the average among 27 high-income countries I compared the data with.

The United States has continuously used Puerto Rico for various military and private economic purposes during the more than one hundred years of its second colonization.' 5 Nevertheless, in spite of United States citizenship, and because of our social construction as a single non-white race, 6 all Puerto Ricans (on the island or in the United States "proper") are considered too inassimilable 17 to become fully "American."' 8 Moreover, the Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, in spite of their United States citizenship, are deprived of full participation in the U.S. political process. The island Puerto Ricans lack a congressional delegation and are not allowed to vote in presidential elections.' 9 This lack of political participation and power within the federal government-which I label a "democratic deficit"--leaves the residents of the island relegated to a political and economic underclass within the United States. This article primarily focuses on the plight of the Puerto Ricans on the island because, in addition to their flawed social construction by the United States and lack of national political power, they are also legally constructed as second-class citizens. In defining the legal rights of Puerto Ricans, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that territorial citizens are entitled to fewer constitutional protections than U.S. citizens residing in any of the fifty states.2 0 The racist and essentialist 2 1 social construction of the Puerto Ricans as inassimilable, the denial of legal rights by the courts, along with the democratic deficit which deprives those Puerto Ricans presently living on the island of participation in national elections, constitute the obstacles to full participation within United States society or to the establishment of their own independent sovereignty.

For all Puerto Ricans, but perhaps especially persons with chronic conditions, the consequences of the collapse of the island’s health care system contributed to an ongoing fragility that has been long rooted in colonial governance, economic extraction, and bureaucratic mismanagement (Bonilla, 2020). In practical terms, post-hurricane journalistic and scholarly reports told of the historic scope of the collapse of the Puerto Rican health care system, which included: 1) all 69 hospitals left without electricity (Zorrilla, 2017); 2) drug shortages and bureaucratic barriers to dispatching medications to patients (Thomas & Kaplan, 2017); 3) major hospitals unable to operate for extended periods (Michaud & Kates, 2017); 4) patients with common chronic illnesses (e.g., renal disease, cancer, HIV/AIDS, drug addiction) unable to access services for weeks (Alcorn, 2017), resulting in many of the country’s approximately 4,645 estimated deaths attributed to Hurricane María (Kishore et al., 2018).1 The impact of this catastrophe on morbidity, mortality, adherence to treatments, and medical complications for individuals living with chronic conditions is only beginning to be documented (Abbasi, 2018; Michaud & Kates, 2017; Roman, 2018). Social scientists and scholars in allied fields have been quick to emphasize that the crisis of María did not emerge sui generis from this singular “natural” event. Rather, the storm’s devastating impacts have accelerated a decades-long series of neoliberal policy reforms and dehumanizing colonial governance strategies that privatized critical infrastructure and weakened social safety nets (García-López, 2018; Garriga-López, 2020). One of the means through which these governing logics are manifested is through the formation of bureaucratic institutions that are the interface between the public and forms of government assistance, which become visible ethnographically through federal, municipal, and local procedures, forms, applications, the proliferation of low- and mid-level technocrats, and “approval processes.” As anthropological scholarship on “red tape” and the quotidian practices of aid bureaucracies demonstrates, the provision of “aid” alone may not function to alleviate suffering among the most vulnerable. Indeed, in his classic ethnography of “red tape,” Akhil Gupta (2012) attributes the persistence of poverty in India despite the proliferation of poverty alleviation programs to the corruption and fundamental arbitrariness of these programs, offering a corrective to the presumption of a benevolent or merely benign aid bureaucracy. Indeed, he argues that poverty alleviation programs reproduce structural violence through the arbitrary nature of their effects, trapping individuals in endless transactions that ultimately reproduce the mortal levels of inequality they presumably are designed to address (see also Auyero, 2012).

A theoretical honesty, attended by a certain uneasiness, is evident in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s admission that the subaltern who resolutely resists incorporation by dominant state-forms or hegemonic cultures is ‘an ideal figure. No actual member of the subaltern class would resemble what I imagine here’ (Chakrabarty 2002: 36). The subaltern represents for Chakrabarty a utopian ideal that can be made to pose a challenge to ‘our thought systems, with all their aspirations to grasp things in their totality . . . [all those] languages of the state, of citizenship, of wholes and totalities, the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism.’ The subaltern stands for ‘a utopian line that may well designate the limit of how we [academics] are trained to think’ (36). Such a questioning of hegemonic thought, I wish to argue, may well find its most convincing and, at the same time, problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern. Readers familiar with the writings of subaltern studies historians or with literary portrayals of subalterns may recall how the death of a subaltern often provides the occasion for a meditation on subalternity as a critical alternative to dominant regimes of power. We see this close link between death and a critical opening of thought, for example, in such works as Ranajit Guha’s essay ‘Chandra’s Death’, an illuminating rereading of fragmentary legal depositions on a ‘criminal’ case of abortion, Gayatri Spivak’s classic analysis of reactions to Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide, Arundhati Roy’s moving account in The God of Small Things of the untouchable Velutha’s brutal murder at the hands of the police, and, to round off the list, Amitav Ghosh’s description in The Hungry Tide of the death of the fisherman Fokir during a storm.

In all these examples, the subaltern’s death appears to enable a questioning of the limits of hegemonic thought and to secure a utopian opening into another mode of life. Subaltern utopianism paradoxically seems to require the subaltern’s death; the subaltern has to die in order to serve as an irreducible idea. In death, the subaltern is perfected as a concept so pure no living referent can contradict or complicate it. As in utopian thinking, it is the subaltern’s non-existence that ensures the possibility of its conceptualization as a critical alternative to existing hegemonies. ‘A loss of existence’, according to Michel de Certeau, ‘is the condition for immortality in poetry’ (de Certeau 1988: 324). Similarly, the subaltern’s death can be seen as enabling a kind of ideological or political immortality, since the subaltern’s role both as a symbol of resistance to the dominant power and as the utopian promise of an alternative lifeworld finds its final affirmation and guarantee in death.

I could be wrong about the short-term dangers, and the stakes are incredibly high. But in the end we’re left with the same old question: what tactics will actually work to secure a better world?

In a sharp, sober piece about the meaning of left-wing political violence in the 1970s, Tim Barker writes “If you can’t acknowledge radical violence, radicals are reduced to mere victims of repression, rather than political actors who made definite tactical choices under given political circumstances.” The problem, as Barker goes on to imply, is those tactical choices: in today’s America they will essentially never break on the side of armed opposition against the state. The government knows everything about you, I’m sorry to say, your movements and your associations and the books you read and the things you buy and what you’re saying to the people you communicate with. That’s simply on the level of information, before we even get to the state’s incredible capacity to inflict violence. Look, the world has changed. The relative military capacity of regular people compared to establishment governments has changed, especially in fully developed, technology-enabled countries like the United States. The Czar had his armies, yes, but the Czar’s armies depended on manpower above and beyond everything else. The fighting was still mostly different groups of people with rifles shooting at each other. If tomorrow you could rally as many people as the Bolsheviks had at their revolutionary peak, you’re still left in a world of F-15s, drones, and cluster bombs. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that establishment governments in the developed world can rely on the numbing agents of capitalist luxuries and the American dream to damper revolutionary enthusiasm even among the many millions who have been marginalized and impoverished. This just isn’t 1950s Cuba, guys. It’s just not. In a very real way, modern technology effectively lowers the odds of armed political revolution in a country like the United States to zero, and so much the worse for us. This isn’t fatalism. It doesn’t mean there’s no hope. It means that there is little alternative to organization, to changing minds through committed political action and using the available nonviolent means to create change: a concert of grassroots organizing, labor tactics, and partisan politics. Those things aren’t exactly likely to work, either, but they’re a hell of a lot more plausible than us dweebs taking the Pentagon. Bernie Sanders isn’t really a socialist, but he’s a social democrat that moves the conversation to the left, and if people are dedicated and committed to organizing, the local, state, and national candidates he inspires will move it further to the left still. You got any better suggestions? Listen, commie nerds. My people. I love you guys. I really do. And I want to build a better world. Not incrementally, either, but with the kind of sweeping and transformative change that is required to fix a world of such deep injustice. But seriously: none of us are ever going to take to the barricades. And it’s a good thing, too, because we’d probably find a way to shoot in the wrong direction. I can’t dribble a basketball without falling down. American socialism is largely made up of bookish dreamers. I love those people but they’re not for fighting. And even if you have a particular talent for combat, you’re looking at fighting the combined forces of Google, Goldman Sachs, and the defense industry. Violence is hard. Soldiering is hard. In an era of the NSA and military robots, it’s really, really hard. “Should we condone revolutionary violence?” is dorm room, pass-the-bong conversation fodder, of precisely the moral and intellectual weight of “should we torture a guy if we know there’s a bomb and we know he knows where it is and we know we can stop it if we do?” It’s built on absurd hypotheticals, propped up by the power of anxious machismo, and undertaken to no practical political end. It’s understandable. I get it, I really do. But it’s got nothing to do with us. The only way forward is the grubby, unsexy work of building coalitions and asking people to climb on board.

There are strong links between the theoretical meanderings described above and intellectuals’ response to an event like the Gulf War. The ’no comment’ approach was perhaps the most widespread in keeping with an indifferent critical climate, but for those who put their oar in, agnosticism was the order of the day. Baudrillard, for example, in his infamous article ’The Reality Gulf’ (1991a) written on the eve of hostilities, claimed that the war would not in fact take place. By this he meant that the media had created a ’hyper real scenario’ of fallacious commentary, empty predictions and reports of threats and counterthreats that were staged for the media in the first place. In Baudrillard’s opinion, the only real ’strategic cite is the TV screen from which we are daily bombarded’. There is no other reality; images and their referents are interchangeable. As a result we have on our hands, under the auspices of the UN as an ’extended contraceptive’, a ’Safe War’ (like safe sex) - ’a form of war which means never having to face up to war’ (1991a: 25).

Baudrillard’s piece as a description of the way the media worked during the crisis holds some validity,&dquo; but to go from there and suggest that taking any position on such an event by attempting to demystify the media ’simulacrum’ is simply mistaken - in effect just one more illusory exercise - is absurd to say the least. Baudrillard’s second article published in Liberation (1991b) entitled ’La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu’ (’The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’) goes even further in this direction. Baudrillard is willing to concede that in the event mass destruction did take place, but he goes on to argue that we must not be deceived into taking a moral stand on such an issue, but must instead engage in a sort of postmodern oneupmanship and reject all evidence so as to be ’more virtual than the events themselves’ (trans. in Norris, 1992: 194).

So does Baudrillard really support terrorism? Do we? Once again playing the devil's hand, he seduces us to play the avenging angel by taking a moral stand. But suppose we take the Nietzschean turn, with Baudrillard, and view the issue in aesthetic terms: can moral goodness not still succeed in being beautiful if it avoids making metaphysical claims? When morality is conceived in aesthetic terms, it loses its guarantee of universality, but not its symbolic force. And yet by forcing Good on the world, the U.S. only forces Evil to gain strength. "Terrorism," Baudrillard tells us, "is immoral," but it is a

response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. . . . In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by declining to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence. (Simulacra 15)

The argument that any clinical psychoanalytic practice must have a profound regard for the importance of the actual social link should not be taken lightly. The clinical question from the Kleinian perspective is how the analyst can effectively call attention to the operation of unconscious phantasy in the present interactions between analysand and analyst, not simply call attention to it as a timeless given underlying all psychic life. The latter is purely academic. The former is the work of clinical psychoanalysis. Something similar is necessary if Kleinian theory were to be successfully deployed in an account of social expressions of racism. The general presence of certain unconscious mechanisms would be purely academic. The historically specific expressions of those mechanisms in their unique cultural moment would be the only effective way to conduct a cultural analysis that respects the rigor of clinical practice. The moment in its specificity is all. This would include the analysis of racism. There is not one racism to be considered, but the particular racisms of the historical moment and their particular psychic functions.

The questions that Blanchot raises with respect to death's possibilities only multiply as one addresses works of literature that equate commodification with death. In Beatty's novel, the difficulties of that risky proposition are nowhere more apparent than in the novel's evocation of suicide as a national poetics. Frustrated simultaneously by the absence of viable political alternatives for black Americans and his own inability to slip the noose of commodification, Gunnar inadvertendy posits black suicide as an option. This prospect comes about at Boston University where Gunnar serves double duty as poet and basketball celebrity. After being asked to give a speech at a divestment rally, Gunnar laments, "today's black leadership isn't worth shit." These "telegenic negroes not willing to die. Back in the old days, if someone spoke up against the white man, he or she was willing to die" (200). Retooling one of Martin Luther King's civil rights era maxims, Gunnar pronounces, "I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die" (200). In this articulation Gunnar acknowledges the impossibility of reviving the modes of bodily sacrifice that civil rights activists forged, and begins to articulate suicide as an alternative. Gunnar eventually proposes to consolidate human agency and autonomy by determining his own death. He articulates this logic in a conversation with his friend Psycho Loco who sees suicide as "taking the easy way out" (226). Viewing America's treatment of black men as inevitably lethal, Gunnar retorts, "Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). To take away the nation's capacity to issue death is thus to reclaim the autonomy of the subject by rendering morbidity a possession that can be reclaimed. It is this very instrumental notion of death that might lead readers to interpret the novel as one that holds a lingering nostalgia for the wholeness of civil rights activism or black nationalism. The text elaborates this interpretive prospect when blacks across the nation become utterly seduced by the idea of national suicide. Gunnar's speech inspires a black nationalist named Dexter Waverly to abandon his superficial rhetoric and kill himself in protest against Boston University's financial support of a corrupt African leader. The fact that this suicide actually forces the university to rescind its financial commitment to the African nation seems to confirm the instrumental use of death and makes Gunnar a national celebrity. Reports "of black people killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States" soon emerge in the national media (201). Additionally, at Gunnar's request, masses of people begin forwarding him their suicide poems. In a world in which all blackness has been thoroughly commodified Gunnar recommends a poetics and politics that seeks to reassert black national agency by rewriting death as a possibility. Or to frame this challenge to commodification somewhat differently, black suicide offers an intriguing twist on Baudrillard's vision of agency within capital. In his formulation, late capital achieves its hegemony through a symbolic substitution of labor for death. The "equivalence of wages and labour power presupposes the death of the worker," for a "man must die to become labour power. He converts this death into a wage" (Symbolic 39). In this sense, then, the wage labor system is always a curious commutation of an execution that capital itself has already performed. Capital's "gift" is the sleight of hand whereby it induces the worker's symbolic death by making him a wage earner and then allows that worker the "gift" of buying his own resurrection through labor. This is the unilateral nature of the gift that sustains capital's dominance. But if "domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without countergift . . . then the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death" (Symbolic 36-37; original italics). Following a parallel logic, national suicide in Beatty's novel draws its power from its simulation of capital's own unilateral gift, the production of black death as that which refuses exchange. Despite the allure of death's possibility, the novel ultimately negates this gambit. Gunnar consistently refuses his role as the messianic leader of the masses. His rise to eminence brings increased surveillance by the police and almost constant media scrutiny. After returning to Hillside, the scopophilia becomes so acute that Gunnar and his pregnant wife leave their apartment to take up residence at the La Ciénega Motor Lodge and Laundromat. In his exile, he hopes that he can find a more authentic mode of expression. He subsequently founds the Bacchanalian MiseryFest, an open-mike poetry session that takes place under the "simple but effective" stage lighting provided by orbiting LAPD helicopters (219). While the events do allow for a communal experience of artistic expression - "neighborhood players read poetry, held car shows, sang, danced" - the political and aesthetic integrity of the events seem compromised by their very spectacular nature (219). One night, in commemoration of Nick Scoby's suicide, Gunnar reads a poem and stages an act of self-mutilation that underscores the limits of death as a paradigm of symbolic resistance. The poem articulates the model of suicide as resistance that asserts death as a unilateral gift. The piece submits that the most potent effects of slave rebellion lie not in the effects of infanticide on the "consciousness / of a murderous parent" but "in the slave owner's anguished cries / upon discovering / his property permanently damaged." After the master "calculates his losses / fore casts the impact on this year's crop," he "will notice the textual eyes of murder/ suicide / read 'caveat emptor' / let the buyer beware" (222). In one sense, this seems a perfect allegory for death as that which refuses exchange; the poem thus reads as a Baudrillardian offensive against capitalism. But Gunnar's subsequent mutilation of himself - his cutting off of his own finger - complicates this politics considerably: "I reeled for a moment, then meticulously wrapped the speckled red and-white handkerchief around the severed finger, exactly as I'd seen Robert Mitchum do in some American yakuza movie. Staring at the space where my finger used to be, I held my hand high above my head" (223). His audience of "distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy. The more I tried to deny my ascendency, the more beloved I became" (223). The spectacle of mutilation must be seen as the enactment of the masochism that underwrites the poem's strategy of resistance. Both depend on a vulgar display of black self-mutilation. Gunnar's cynical response also confirms the ultimate bankruptcy of these strategies. Prisoner of both the police and the media at the moment in which he is most resistant to the system, his rebellion is being recycled as part of the dominant order's simulative strategies. He cannot imagine a form of agency without deriving it from a Hollywood film. In this respect, the reclamation of death as a radical subversion of capital is itself vulnerable to the social order that the strategy seeks to challenge. In short-circuiting the Utopian potential of revolt, the novel foregrounds the absoluteness of the system's dominance, the inescapability of its atomizing effects. The core contradiction of Beatty's novel, then, does not reside in a vexed nostalgia for coherent community, but in the fact that the text draws euphorically on the abstractions of commodification while foregrounding its insinuation into every sphere of contemporary African American life. By refusing an equation between death and political agency the novel not only works contrary to Baudrillard's Marxism but also in contradistinction to a seminal current in black cultural theory. Influential works by Sharon Holland and Paul Gilroy imagine that dwelling among and even "resurrecting" the dead serves as both a means to confirm the agency of the individual subject and the racial com munity. Holland's reading of Morrison's Beloved construes the novel as a labor to resurrect "the 'ghost' of slavery in order to let the dead speak to the living, in order to allow silence to manifest itself in language" (40). By opening up the possibility of communion between the dead child and the living black subjects in the novel, Beloved brings "about the repair of the psychic damage of slavery and serves as an antidote to the beleaguered status of black women in contemporary America" (52). The dead thus make possible a series of reversals, from silence to speech, from damaged to recovered, and from beleaguered to unburdened. Along the same lines, Gilroy's account of transatlantic performances that commemorate the dead also serve to consolidate at once the subjectivity of the black performer and a racial community as such. As he phrases it, the "turn towards death" also "points to the ways in which black cultural forms have hosted and even cultivated a dynamic rap port with the presence of death and suffering" (198). Gilroy interprets musical forms like the blues and jazz as "mnemonic" devices that "preserve and cultivate . . . the distinctive rapport with the presence of death which derives from slavery ..." (198, 203). Cultural practices thereby facilitate the reproduction of the death and negativity that attended the African's bondage in New World slavery. It is in this remembrance that Gilroy locates the grounds for a black "racial counterculture" and thus political agency (200). By contrast, in Beatty's work death provides no Utopian opposition against late capitalism. Even as Beatty evokes the legacy of death in slavery, he insists that the fantasy of black agency must also be subject to the limits of late capitalist hegemony. The result of the strategy is that it insists on the primacy of the problematic that attends contemporary political economy. This approach contains an implicit charge that insisting on the Utopian possibility of the slave's death is in some sense to evade the quandaries of contemporary political economy. An ambivalence about the achievement of agency through death surfaces in James's Negrophobia in very different terms. A passage featuring a character named Talking Dreads develops a scenario that parallels James's evocation of Voodoo. Whereas Maid fails to use Voodoo effectively because she does not understand the power of simulation to reproduce every act of resistance as part of itself, Talking Dreads overcomes that liability. This being from another planet appears to Bubbles Brazil at times as a "disembodied, dreadlocked head" and at others as an "empty white linen suit" (123). He recounts the story of how he was used by a Scottish female author as the inspiration for a text with the title Ul' Black Zambo. Of course, the title and authorial biography point to Helen Bannerman's notoriously racist chil dren's story Uttle Black Sambo. Therefore, when readers learn that UV Black Zambo is a text based on its author's inability to see Talking Dreads as anything but the racist caricatures in her imagination, the novel implicates Bannerman's text in the same process of misrecognition. Moreover, as the linguistic blend of "zombie" and "Sambo" in the title suggests, the text of Uly Black Zambo can be read as a represen tation in which James's investment in Voodoo and the commodity converge. That is, the orthographic changes invoking Voodoo zombies also underscore the text's play with the dead signifiers of racial representation. The text recodes the commodified blackness in Bannerman's original text in order to produce a simulation that takes the original to task. The strategy is evident in the first lines of the simulated text. IiP Black Zambo was a little nigger boy. Or Pickaninny. Or jigaboo. Or any number of names we have for little colored children - shine, smoke, snowball, dinge, dust, inky, egg plant, and chocolate moonpie. And since IiT Black Zambo lived with his mammy in a one room hut made of mud and leaves near a croc-infested swamp in the Jungle, we can call him 'gator bait, too. (124-25) The incongruity between the dulcet rhetoric of the children's tale and the crude abjection of Zambo in this stockpiling of racial epithets places the concealed vio lence of Bannerman's text at the forefront of its simulation. And in this way occu pying the dead form of the commodity allows Negrophobia to make the kind of instrumental counter to racism that James imagines as "subverting the perversion." Still, despite James's claim regarding Voodoo, it is Bannerman's commodified repre sentation that allows him to make such a maneuver. The invocation of Voodoo mystifies a set of social relations that have more to do with capital than Haitian reli gion as such. Moreover, the rebellion that Talking Dreads engages in is more accu rately described as simulation than Voodoo. This becomes all the more apparent when he shows Bubbles a secret project to defeat white racism. It involves a simu lated town called Garvey's Corner in which all of the citizens appear to be white Americans but are in fact blacks "trained to look, act and think white" (139). These simulated whites are reproduced to "undermine all the rights and freedoms American society has to offer the white race without the slightest detection" (139). In a sense then, the tactic here is to undermine white supremacy by becoming as adept in simulation as the dominant culture. Ever consistent in its disintegrative aesthetic, however, the novel upsets the utopia that Talking Dreads endorses. In a parallel episode the narrative focuses on the Zombie Master, a self-styled "revolutionary" character. He aims to overthrow white supremacy by building an army of zombies out of the bodies of dead celebrities. JFK and Elvis are among the corpses that he reconstructs in his laboratory. The chief manifestation of the white supremacy that the Zombie Master aims to destroy is Walt Disney. In a brilliant parody of white supremacist ideology, Walt Disney uses all of his mass-culture resources to foment the rage of white Americans and thereby destroy the black race. Giving a speech modeled on the Gettysburg Address, he asks the white Nation to embrace his enduring nativist creed: "Hang the nigger and burn the Jew!" (99). The Zombie Master counters this nationalist plot when he sends hordes of his zombies in to destroy Walt Disney and his theme park, the Disney Magic Mall. As the assault on the park unfolds, the Zombie Master and his favorite Zombie, Elvis, discover Disney asleep in his sub basement casket. Zombie Master begins to drive "the stake into Walt's heart" when he realizes that Disney is literally a robot and therefore "a puppet in his own mad design!" (111). The scene anatomizes a chief problem with investing in the radical insurgency of the dead. A political battle between simulations could turn out to be just that, an empty symbolic endeavor with no consequential stakes. The culture of simulation may have the effect of rendering even symbolic gestures of resistance obsolete; it is this dystopian possibility that the radical visions of Talking Dreads and Baudrillard fail to address. For both James and Beatty then, the tensions between the aesthetic possibilities of simulated blackness and the fraught prospects of political agency in a world inundated by simulation pose the problem of black postmodernity in terms that exceed the discourse of crisis. One cannot read these texts exclusively as indexes of a crisis in belonging, for they begin with the premise that whatever made older forms of communion possible now only exists as spectral reproduction. And if there is no returning to the past, then these are novels inordinately concerned with the cartography of the present. They probe the possibilities and limits of literature and politics within late capitalism. While they traffic in the recombination made available by simulated blackness, they are also shrewdly aware that these same mechanisms install new forms of racial domination. The timely genius of the novels is that they are neither seduced entirely by the prospect of a radically recoding simulation in the manner of poststructuralists like Baudrillard and Foster, nor held prisoner by Blanchot's suggestion that death makes available only a set of dubious performative operations. Employing the archive of dead signifiers that produce racial difference as mediating terms between death's erasure and possibility, these texts insist on our reconsideration of existing frameworks for reading contemporary black culture. Indeed, the refusal to invest in a politics of authenticity militates against the persistent critical desire to find racial affirmation in black art. It is this longing that shapes the ongoing controversies surrounding not only Darius James but also die visual art of Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker.10 Critics take issue with this work because in their minds it reproduces the denigrating minstrel representations of the past. What such commentaries have not addressed is how the art itself challenges the very foundations of this critique by undermining the concept of a Utopian black expressive culture that transcends or inverts capital. As I have argued, a useful alternative to indicting the work for its complicity in racist representation is to interpret it as an aesthetic tendency that both grapples with the difficulties posed by late capitalist political economy and formalizes its own ideological implication in the contra dictions produced by that system. To wish that this art were like that of another time is to evade a present not adequately examined and perhaps to refuse the potentially unreal future of race.

The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All the tragedies of the political project of emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation ± as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals and abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers `a world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern human-kind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59 Cohen's political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities' are always `imagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now, this is not only non- sense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always `imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other firrm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded `understand- ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active racists as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another, psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the claimed radicalism of psycho- analysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere.

Stephen Frosh, Department of Psychosocial Studies, School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, Birkbeck College, London, UK. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, “Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism” 2013, Vol. 33, No. 3, 141–154

This article explores the prospects for a psychological contribution to postcolonial thought through the mediation of psychoanalysis. It does not attempt to deconstruct or historicize postcolonialism itself, at least to any significant extent, further than to state the need for a postcolonial theory of the subject that incorporates an understanding of affective and “subjective” issues—precisely the area with which psychoanalysis is primarily concerned. The positioning of psychoanalysis as a progressive, critical approach is not, however, a particularly secure one. The central difficulty is the way psychoanalysis has frequently aligned itself with conformist and even “repressive” tendencies that reproduce colonial and at times racist tropes, often in the context of psychological individualism, but sometimes in an explicitly political manner (Jacoby, 1983; Frosh, 1999). This is despite the existence of a contrary urge in psychoanalysis, especially reflected in the “critical theory” tradition that made use of it in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Marcuse, 1955) but also in the work of several followers of Lacan (Stavrakakis, 2007) and some British social reformists (Rustin, 1991). The tendency of American ego psychology to give prominence to “adaptationist” perspectives has been widely noted and has been criticized both by political radicals (e.g., Jacoby, 1975, 1983) and by Lacanians (cf. Roudinesco, 1990, p. 175: “According to [Lacan] such a psychological science had been affected by the ideals of the society in which it was produced”). The adoption of a strong antihomosexual bias by orthodox mid-20th century psychoanalysts has had particularly damaging consequences for the practice and reputation of psychoanalysis as a whole, even though recent attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis and queer theory are beginning to bear fruit (Frosh, 2006; Campbell, 2000). Psychoanalytic assumptions about the nature of a civilized mind will be briefly discussed below; but overt forms of racism, notably antisemitism, have also on occasions been evident in its institutional practices (Frosh, 2005, 2012). Most relevantly, colonialism is a deeply problematic issue for psychoanalysis, because it is engrained in much psychoanalytic thinking and terminology, and this has effects on contemporary theory and practice in ways that are not always recognized. For example, as discussed further below, psychoanalysts often draw on the language of the “primitive” to refer to unreasoning elements of people’s psychic lives. Thus, a notion that someone might be evincing a “primitive fantasy of destruction” is a very familiar one, but what is not acknowledged is that this terminology not only has its roots in a colonial opposition between primitive and civilized, but it also reproduces this division “unconsciously” when it is used. This is to say, the terminology is full of associations that position some ideas as civilized and some as primitive, reinforcing a developmental scheme that is heavily inflected by assumptions about the relationship between seemingly irrational and rational thought processes— and in particular who might “own” them. The history of this stretches back to the beginnings of psychoanalysis, reflecting the colonial and racist (including antisemitic) assumptions prevalent in the Europe out of which psychoanalysis arose. Freud deployed the idea that the thinking of what he called “savages” was not only contrasted to “civilized” mentality, but also revealed the origins of mental life both for the culture as a whole (the contemporary savage being a throwback to the precursors of modern “man”) and for the individual (the savage mind being like that of a child). For example, at the beginning of Totem and Taboo, subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, he wrote, There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development. (Freud, 1913, pp. 1) The repetitive first person plural pronoun is notable here: “we believe,” “we do,” “we regard,” “our view,” “we describe,” “us,” “our own development”. The savage is the other, the not “us”; though as will be outlined briefly below, there is quite a degree of subtlety in what this might mean. Freud also was explicit about how “savages” share attributes with children, both in terms of how they think, and how they are thought about by “we adults”. “It seems to me quite possible,” he wrote (p. 99), “that the same may be true of our attitude toward the psychology of those races that have remained at the animistic level as is true of our attitude toward the mental life of children, which we adults no longer understand and whose fullness and delicacy of feeling we have in consequence so greatly underestimated”. The adoption of a binary between savage and civilized is not perhaps intrinsically racist and colonialist, but the assumption that the latter always displaces the former and, more importantly, that the terms can be applied to different people, is. In Freud’s thought, savage societies hold to various types of irrational thinking (concreteness, mystical attitudes to death, etc.), processes reviewed throughout Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913) and explicitly linked with children in more “civilized” societies. For instance, in writing of wish fulfillment (p. 84), Freud commented, If children and primitive men find play and imitative representation enough for them, that is not a sign of their being unassuming in our sense or of their resignedly accepting their actual impotence. It is the easily understandable result of the paramount virtue they ascribe to their wishes, of the will that is associated with those wishes and of the methods by which those wishes operate. These ways of thinking make them “primitive” in the developmental sense that they should normatively be overcome by more advanced modes of being—a theme also taken up in the analysis of religion in The Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927). Although Freud himself does not press for political action that does this— he was interested rather in how science might overcome superstition—the general approach is consistent with the justification of colonialism and even slavery on the grounds of the inherent inferiority of the primitive. There is another subtle turn here, however, that is specific to Freud and the early history of psychoanalysis, relating to the intense antisemitism of Freud’s time. Gilman (1993) showed how deeply rooted antisemitism was in the beliefs of many Europeans, markedly so in the Viennese among whom psychoanalysis grew up, and how widespread were ideas such as that Jews were castrated (hence, feminine), that they were “oriental” and maybe even “black,” and that they were primitive in the religious sense (Christianity having displaced Judaism) but also psychologically, socially, and racially. Gilman suggested that Freud, consciously or unconsciously, constructed some of the most conspicuously radical elements of his theory in response to this. For instance, Gilman argued that the trope that Jewish men are castrated through circumcision is replaced in psychoanalysis by the idea that the castration complex is universal, so that all people— including the most gentile—follow a model set by the Jews. This Freudian impulse to disarm antisemitism by positioning the Jews as the truly civilized people (which was mirrored in the idea that as nationalism took hold in Europe at the end of the 19th century, the Jews might be the only “true Europeans” oriented toward a transnational comity) results in a shifting of the “other” of European society away from the Jew and toward the “savage,” that is, the colonized, Black “primitive” of slavery and the European imagination. This theoretical move attempts to relieve Jews from the opprobrium of primitivity (unsuccessfully, as was demonstrated unequivocally just a few years later) by passing it onto the colonized other. There is always a danger with summary accounts such as this one, that the history it sketches simplistically reduces a tension-filled and ambiguous process to a linear narrative. It is certainly the case, for example, that psychoanalysis was from the start full of impulses that challenged and subverted the assumptions of the societies in which it found itself. Indeed, this is one reason for the mixture of explosive embrace and resistance that characterized the response to psychoanalysis: On the one hand, it fuelled enormous shifts in self-perception, artistic creativity and even political and economic thought (not confined to outspoken radicals— see, e.g., John Maynard Keynes’, 1919, 1936, post-World War 1 use of Freudian ideas to argue for the importance of emotional factors in economics). In many respects, it is precisely in the tension between what Toril Moi (1989, p. 197) called, in relation to the attitude of psychoanalysis to femininity, Freud’s “colonizing impulse” and its contrary acceptance of “the logic of another scene”—the specific expressiveness of unconscious life—that the creativity of psychoanalysis inheres. Nevertheless, consideration of the rootedness of much psychoanalytic thought in colonial assumptions is important not merely to sweep away the ideological detritus, but also to identify where the investments of psychoanalysis can provide leverage for understanding the place of psychosocial theory in the postcolonial project. A further example of the “detritus” might be found in some work by Celia Brickman (2003), which offers an extensive account of how the language of primitivity infects psychoanalysis. Like Gilman, she notes how Freud’s “universalizing reconfigurations” (p. 165) turn the despised Jewish body into the model for humanity as a whole. From the perspective of postcolonialism, however, this move, which is subversive in relation to antisemitism, is “made at considerable expense,” because “the modalities of inferiority previously ascribed to the Jews did not simply disappear but were ambivalently displaced onto a series of abjected others: primitives, women and homosexuals”. Brickman elaborated on how the assimilation of the Jewish other to Europeanism positions psychoanalysis as a colonialist discipline and incorporates racism into its fabric of argumentation. Categorized as a member of a primitive race, Freud repudiated primitivity, locating himself and his work within European civilization, with both its scientific and colonizing enterprises, and replacing the opposition of Aryan/Jew with the opposition of civilized/primitive (p. 167). In relation to psychoanalytic practice, primitive usually means either or both of fundamental and irrational. A primitive impulse is never a rational one; it always arises unmediated from the unconscious and hence has not been worked over by the secondary processes of thought. The sleight of hand then is to link this kind of primitivity with the irrationality of the colonized other and then to make rationality itself the marker of civilized human society— or even of what it means to be human at all. After all, when one loses one’s power of reason, one ceases to be able to function as human at least to the degree that equal citizenship is at risk. In the colonial context, this justifies colonization: irrational primitives cannot be trusted to run their own affairs; the civilized European is justifiably superior, for everyone’s good. Commenting on Freud’s anthropological speculation, Brickman (2003) noted how the psyche comes to be envisaged as a representation of colonialism and hence how Freud explicitly parallels the structure of the mind with that of (colonial) society: [By] correlating the progression of narcissism, the oedipal stage, and maturity with animism (savagery), religion (barbarianism), and science (civilisation), Totem and Taboo transposed the racial assumptions of the cultural evolutionary scale onto the modern psyche . . . The psychoanalytically conceived norm of mature subjectivity was, by virtue of the correlation of libidinal development with the cultural evolutionary scale, a rationalism whose unstated color was white, just as its unstated gender was male. (p. 72) Even though these Freudian assumptions are mainly unstated, the terminology and the conceptual baggage of the savage” and the barbarian remained with psychoanalysis for some time and is still lying only just-dormant in those references to “primitive feelings” that often can be found in clinical psychoanalytic discussions. A certain mode of rationality is given priority here, which is attached to masculine “reason” as it has developed over the period of industrial modernity (Frosh, 1994). That which falls short of it—the “unreason” attributed to women, children, and primitive cultures—is derogated and made subject to reason’s imperialism. This is not, of course, to imply that one should fully affirm unreason as a simple alternative to colonial reason; it is rather to claim that the reason– unreason opposition is itself rooted in a colonial mentality that supports it and narrows the range of what is culturally validated. In a similar vein, Neil Altman (2000, p. 591) commented, “When Freud the ego psychologist said, ‘Where id was, there ego shall be,’ he defined the goals of psychoanalysis in terms reminiscent of the colonial mentality. In this sense, the structure of racism is built into structural psychoanalytic theory, particularly in its ego-psychological form”. This claim is itself resonant of the critique of ego psychology mentioned earlier. The argument runs that because this form of psychoanalysis assumes reason to be superior to unreason, its concurrent assumption that unreason is characteristic of “primitives” means that it is promoting a colonizing process (reason trumping unreason; civilized displacing primitive) that is embedded in a racist paradigm. As an instructive aside, it is perhaps worth noting that ego psychology itself has a complex set of origins, one of which regularly gets lost when its notions of adaptation are pronounced solely conformist and colonialist. The occlusion here is of the personal history of most of the postSecond World War American ego psychologists as migrants or refugees from Nazi Europe. Their concerns were indeed to find creative ways to adapt to a new society; in addition, they were exercised by the explosion of irrationality that had overwhelmed their lost homelands, and their impulse to find ways to fend this off and protect future societies from its recurrence was perhaps understandable.

The rejection of positivism which is a central element of recent critiques of mainstream IR has tended to extend to rejection of the notion and possibility of science itself. Science, often written in quotation marks ‘science’, is seen as inherently part of the project of Enlightenment-modernity, a mode of technical instrumental knowledge which is necessarily a means of control and domination of both society and nature 22 . An important component of the critique of the positivist orthodoxy is exposure of its coincidence with the interests of the powerful. Dominant ideas and methods which rest on claims of value-free scientificity and neutrality are shown to mask or legitimise the interests of the powerful and the exercise of power and domination. The very claim to be able to produce value-free, neutral scientific truth is rejected in a world of inherently conflicting interests. Instead, the ‘illusion of objectivism must be replaced with the recognition that knowledge is always constituted in reflection of interests’ (Ashley 1981: 207).

There are two kinds of conflation which are embedded within this critical stance. The first conflates the contents of natural scientific knowledge with the uses to which it is put in society. Much scientific knowledge, in both natural and social sciences, has indeed been produced by and in the explicit interests of the powerful, an integral part of the construction and maintenance of unequal and oppressive social orders, and the administration of accumulation and imperialism. But it is important not to conflate the contents of knowledge with its social conditions of production and use. When scientific knowledge is developed for and utilised in the service of oppression or commercial profit as opposed to the increased satisfaction of human needs, the oppression results from social forces, not from the cognitive properties of scientific knowledge 23:

Charlotte, “Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics,” European Journal of International Relations XX(X) 1–24]

To be clear, this move is not intended to deny the intimate links between discourse and subjectivity. The earlier foray into Lacanian thought served precisely to underline the centrality of discourse to both the making and subsequent analysis of the subject. But by the same token it also drew out what is required to wield the discourse approach effectively in IR. Indeed Lacan’s analysis emphasizes the sheer complexity of the dynamics of a highly individual phenomenon (identity), and consequently the difficulties in taking this level as the starting point for analysing all other levels at which identity is politically at play.13 As the discipline that positions itself at the highest level of analysis (the supranational), IR cannot maintain its focus at the level where some of the finer debates around subjectivity take place (see for example, Butler, 1997). The issue here is one of disciplinary specificity, or, in other words, equipping IR for what it wants to do; and the solution proposed is one of suspension or bracketing. To restate this important point differently, at the individual level, subjectivities and subject-positions remain coextensive. The distinction between subject-positions and subjectivities becomes operative once the analysis shifts beyond the individual level. This distinction thus offers a theoretically cogent way of studying identity while bracketing some of its more unwieldy dimensions that may, moreover, not be pertinent at the levels at which IR casts its focus. It renders the discourse approach operative for IR, because it makes it possible to study state identities, without having to presume that states have feelings, or indeed enter into questions of how much exactly are they like people, or what kind of selves do they possess. What the discourse approach analyses, then, is the ways in which actors — crucially, whether individuals or states — define themselves by stepping into a particular subject-position carved out by a discourse. In taking on the ‘I/we’ of that discourse, actors’ identities are produced in a very specific way. In doing so, they are establishing themselves as the subjects of particular discourses, such as the anti-whaling discourse, and thereby marking themselves as ‘anti-whalers’. How, then, do discursive subject-positions differ from Wendt’s (1999: 227–229) role identities, where the actor is similarly seen as stepping into institutionalized roles (such as professor and student)? The crucial difference is that the concept of subject-position does not harbour any assumption about any primordial self supporting these roles. Importantly, this is not to say that the self does not exist — that the professor or student have no selves — but simply that the concept is not relevant to the analysis of the discursive construction of identity, especially when taken to the interstate level.

Matthew and Geoff, Žižek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 182-185]

Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of Žižek’s political Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra- extremism of Žižek’s political position might reflect his untenable attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate – which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacan’s notion of traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people’s subjective structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands’ voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity. The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world. The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social object are ultimately identical. Option (b), Žižek’s option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose ‘traversal of the fantasy’ is immediately identical with his transformation of the socio- political system or Other. Hence, according to Žižek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this Other using psychoanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Žižek’s resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objective) Symbolic Order. This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subject–object, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. Žižek’s decisive political- theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive problem is to equate any political change worth the name with the total change of the subject–object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of change that can only mean equating politics with violent regime change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial government, as Žižek now frankly avows (IDLC 412–19). We have seen that the ultra- political form of Žižek’s criticism of everyone else, the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him – even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because Žižek’s model of politics proper is modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total transformation of a subject’s entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be? We have seen that Žižek equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime’s ‘inherent transgressions’: at once subjects’ habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime’s myths of origin and of identity. If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete ‘traversal’ – in Hegel’s terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation – of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8). But can the political theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And if they do not – for Žižek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?

Given that racism works at an unconscious level, it follows, in Cohen's¶ view, that strategies to challenge it at a conscious level are doomed to¶ failure. They are bound to fail precisely because they are rational and¶ fail to appreciate that the power of racism lies in the fact that it is¶ unconscious. To deinstitutionalise racism `will not in itself abolish¶ the power of the racist imagination' which will continue to flourish¶ through the media of popular culture long after its state forms have¶ withered away.42 `All the evidence to date', Cohen writes elsewhere,¶ `shows that the racist imagination is not accessible to rationalist¶ pedagogies, and almost effortlessly resists their impact'. What is all¶ this evidence? Certainly it is neither presented nor cited.43 Rustin,¶ too, claims that classroom teaching can have the effect of `increasing¶ kinds of defensive organisation'. But he cites no evidence - other¶ than referring to Cohen's work - and seems to believe that all `antiracism'¶ in education is a matter of seeking to change attitudes, rather¶ than opening up new ways of looking at the world.44¶ In Cohen's schema, then, racism is taken out of society and material¶ reality and lodged very firmly in the minds, the unconscious minds, of¶ individual subjects. Although in his 1988 article, `The perversions of¶ inheritance', he distanced himself from a position that afforded¶ absolute autonomy to the ideological, and thus ran the risk, as he¶ acknowledged, of `substituting changes in personal attitude or societal¶ values for structural reforms', this is, in fact, where he has ended up.¶ As his work has developed, there is less and less sense of any¶ political project of anti-racism and an almost exclusive concentration¶ on dealing with the beliefs and attitudes of racists. Ideology has¶ become all.¶ In placing racism in the unconscious, Cohen is very much in line¶ with the most orthodox of psychoanalysis which claims to find¶ `inside' individuals (whatever that might mean - the notion of an `internal¶ world' is always taken for granted and never really put into question)¶ what actually belongs in society, in what psychoanalysis calls¶ `the external world'. Indeed, one of the earliest Marxist critiques of¶ Freud's theories made precisely this point, accusing Freud of rendering¶ individual what was irredeemably social.45 In the same vein, and particularly¶ germane to the present discussion, the refusal of psychoanalysis¶ to acknowledge social and political reality, to see what is in front of it, is¶ exemplified in the following story.¶ Like many analysts of her time, Melanie Klein, in whose tradition¶ Cohen writes, engaged in the quite unethical and inappropriate practice¶ of analysing her own children. She began her son Erich's analysis in¶ Budapest in 1920 when he was 5 and continued it when she separated¶ from her husband and moved to Berlin. There, Erich developed a¶ phobia about going outside. Klein `explained' to Erich that his anxiety¶ was due to his fantasies about having sexual intercourse with his¶ mother. Erich told his mother of a street that was particularly frightening¶ to him because it was filled with young `toughs' who tormented him.¶ Klein ignored this and, recalling that the street was filled with large¶ trees, interpreted these as phalluses and evidence of his continued¶ desire for his mother and of his fear of castration as a punishment.¶ Years later, Erich's elder brother Hans, also an analysand of his¶ mother, told Erich that the youths had, in fact, been an anti-Semitic¶ gang that routinely attacked Jewish children. Erich had never been¶ told by his mother that he was Jewish. As the historian of psychotherapy¶ Philip Cushman comments: `It is difficult to know what is¶ more remarkable in this incident with Erich: Klein's dismissal of, her¶ almost phobic denial of, the ``external'' social realm, or her remarkable¶ self-centredness.' 46 Klein, in other words, placed in the mind of her son¶ that which fully belonged in the material world. Objective reality¶ became a `state of mind'. Exactly the same criticism can be levelled¶ at Cohen's placing of racism inside the unconscious minds of individuals.¶ It is indeed ironic that, with postmodernists such as Cohen,¶ we should be witnessing a return to a past - albeit at a more sophisticated¶ level of `discourse' - when, according to the liberal race relations¶ paradigm, racism did not really exist, only racial prejudice, something¶ that was individual and psychological.¶ The question of method¶ Cohen's work unavoidably raises the question of the status of psychoanalysis¶ as a social or political theory, as distinct from a clinical one.¶ Can psychoanalysis, in other words, apply to the social world of groups, institutions, nations, states and cultures in the way that it does,¶ or at least may do, to individuals? Certainly there is now a considerable¶ body of literature and a plethora of academic courses, and so on, claiming¶ that psychoanalysis is a social theory. And, of course, in popular¶ discourse, it is now a commonplace to hear of nations and societies¶ spoken of in personalised ways. Thus `truth commissions' and the¶ like, which have become so common in the past decade in countries¶ which have undergone turbulent change, are seen as forms of national¶ therapy or catharsis, even if this is far from being their purpose. Nevertheless,¶ the question remains: does it make sense, as Michael Ignatieff¶ puts it, to speak of nations having psyches the way that individuals do?¶ `Can a nation's past make people ill as we know repressed memories¶ sometimes make individuals ill? . . . Can we speak of nations ``working¶ through'' a civil war or an atrocity as we speak of individuals working¶ through a traumatic memory or event?' 47¶ The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to social institutions¶ is that there can be no testing of the claims made. If someone says,¶ for instance, that nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to¶ replace the body of the mother one has lost, or that the popular¶ appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of our earliest¶ relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved? The¶ pioneers of psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, all derived their¶ ideas in the context of their work with individual patients and their¶ ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic¶ encounter where the validity of an interpretation, for example, is a¶ matter for dialogue between therapist and patient. Outside of the consulting¶ room, there can be no such verification process, and the further¶ one moves from the individual patient, the less purchase psychoanalytic¶ ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything¶ and everything can be true, psychoanalytically speaking. But if everything¶ is true, then nothing can be false and therefore nothing can be¶ true.¶ An example of Cohen's method is to be found in his 1993 working¶ paper, `Home rules', subtitled `Some reflections on racism and nationalism¶ in everyday life'. Here Cohen talks about taking a `particular line¶ of thought for a walk'. While there is nothing wrong with taking a line¶ of thought for a walk, such an exercise is not necessarily the same as¶ thinking. One of the problems with Cohen's approach is that a kind¶ of free association, mixed with deconstruction, leads not to analysis,¶ not even to psychoanalysis, but to... well, just more free association,¶ an endless, indeed one might say pointless, play on words. This¶ approach may well throw up some interesting associations along the¶ way, connections one had never thought of but it is not to be confused¶ with political analysis. In `Home rules', anything and everything to do¶ with `home' can and does find a place here and, as I indicated above, even the popular film Home Alone is pressed into service as a story¶ about `racial' invasion.¶ Cohen's method also relies to no little extent on various caricatures.¶ There is the parody of an undifferentiated anti-racism which is always¶ crude and simplistic in its explanations, always dogmatic and authoritarian¶ in its prescriptions. `It is no longer possible', Cohen claims at one¶ point, `to call a spade a spade . . . because the level of connotations,¶ which is always open to multiple associations, including racist ones,¶ has been shut down ``By Order''.' 48 No one would deny that much¶ that is called anti-racism has been ill-considered or counter-productive¶ or simple-minded, but to suggest that this is the whole story - and this is¶ the picture one gets from Cohen's account - appears simply bad faith.¶ Nor does one get any sense from his account that some forms of antiracism¶ have been subjected to the most rigorous critique - from other¶ anti-racists, notably in this journal. So, too, there is the distorted depiction¶ of teachers bearing the anti-racist message. In Cohen's world, they¶ are always middle class, relying on a `deficit model' of working-class¶ culture, and engaged in a `civilising mission', believing themselves to¶ be `the bringers of reason and tolerance to those gripped by unreason,¶ prejudice and ignorance'.49 Doubtless such attitudes exist, but Cohen's¶ depiction is so one-dimensional; it has no room for complexity or¶ difference. If it did, he could not take up the position that he does, of¶ the one who really knows. It is also a position that takes Cohen on¶ to dangerous ground in which, at times at least, it seems as though¶ all authority is bad (in the language of Foucault, it is tutelary and¶ constitutes surveillance) and all resistance to authority good, or at¶ least understandable.50¶ Racism without history¶ Not only is racism psychologised and individualised. It also becomes¶ something that is universal. Cohen's colleague Rustin makes this¶ clear in the article cited earlier,51 while Cohen himself states that¶ `Every language and culture, in so far as it is able, privileges its own¶ practices, using them to define its own origins, and defend its own¶ boundaries. Every form of ethnicity, if it has the means, is ethnocentric.¶ The key word is if.'52 (There is a dangerous slippage here in that¶ `ethnocentrism' is not the same as racism and, while it may turn into¶ it, it need not and frequently does not.) What is not explained by¶ either Cohen or Rustin is why some individuals or some groups are¶ `more' racist or less racist than others. Racism is thus completely¶ removed from history, but what is also not explained in this regard is¶ why it is more or less virulent at particular times and in particular¶ places. A psychoanalytic account like Cohen's simply cannot account¶ for such twentieth-century events as the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1914 or the destruction of the Jews, or indeed anything¶ else. `To deny racism its history', Cohen had written in 1988, `is to¶ surrender to a kind of fatalism.'53 Yet that is precisely the position¶ he has come to occupy.¶ The question is not whether or not racism operates at an unconscious¶ level. There is clearly too much evidence to deny this. The question¶ is, rather, how important is this unconscious working? Should it¶ be, can it be, the focus of anti-racist strategy? For Cohen, however,¶ the unconscious has become all; nothing else really matters. Here we¶ have reached the site of a psychoanalytic determinism - a curious inversion¶ of the crude materialism that Cohen would rightly distance himself¶ from. It is a determinism which holds that we are not at all rational¶ thinking beings, but that we are driven all the time by forces beyond¶ our control. Our attachment to a belief or an ideal, our cultural preferences,¶ all these are to be explained by some supposed psychoanalytic¶ interpretation. There is no hope, then, except in the form of psychoanalytic¶ or psychotherapeutic treatment and it is this which Cohen¶ seeks to offer through his cultural studies approach.